Introduction to the dossier: Poetics of Vulnerability in Contemporary Literature

Abstract

In recent years, the concept of vulnerability has acquired an inescapable centrality in contemporary thought. Far from referring only to individual fragility or to a pathological condition of the body, the notion has been redefined in multiple fields - political philosophy, ethics, gender studies, decolonial thought, literary criticism - as a category that allows us to think about the ways in which the subject is exposed to the other, to the environment and to power regimes. In this sense, vulnerability is not only a state to be overcome or a mere condition of unprotection, but a form of existence marked by interdependence, exposure to harm and the possibility of agency from the precarious.
This dossier starts from the premise that thinking about vulnerability in literature does not imply reducing it to an aesthetics of suffering or to an essentialist victimology. On the contrary, it implies investigating how literary language produces, stresses or destabilizes the ways in which bodies, subjectivities and communities experience and elaborate their exposure to harm, their precariousness, their mourning or their resistance. In this gesture, vulnerability becomes a critical category capable of articulating the tensions between subjectivity and structure, affect and politics, writing and body.