Miri Rozmarin

This study theorizes vulnerability as a dual affective relation between subjects and their surroundings. I argue that an account of the affective aspects of vulnerability can respond to two challenges related to theories of vulnerability. The first challenge is to offer a critique of vulnerability as an effect of harmful social formations while not assuming an account of vulnerable subjects as living lessened lives. The second challenge is to provide an improved understanding regarding how vulnerability may operate as an available affective resource for political subjects. Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy, I assert that vulnerability is a dual affective relation. As an aspect of social precarity, vulnerability is the affective pattern that stems from affective encounters with power formations, which limit and hinder life. However, I assert that vulnerability is also an affective response that marks the micro vital connections of bodies as they allow transformation and creativity to surpass the limits of stable subject positions. This duality of vulnerability yields political significance as an affective navigating tool for political subjects.

The question of individual agency lies at the heart of any political and social theory aiming to analyse the social conditions that shape reality. Drawing mainly on the works of Luce Irigaray, Judith Butler, Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze, this book endeavours to provide an account of agency as a mode of life in which social transformation and personal transformation meet and influence one another.&ltBR> The book describes the shortcomings of associating agency with resisting social norms or institutions, arguing that agency, as a way of life, is a dynamic of self-creation inspired by a horizon of well-being. As part of this new account of agency the book re-evaluates several key concepts, thus far under-theorized in poststructural theory. First, it addresses the question of how we might understand well-being within a post-modern framework. Second, it presents a notion of 'desire to be', designating the motivational force that drives people to act in order to create a different world. And finally, it addresses the question of how a life of transformative political practices might constitute a sense of identity, both individual and collective.