Abstract
In Precarious Life, Judith Butler explores vulnerability as foundational to human relational subjectivity. By arguing for embodied selfhood as more than individual ownership, Butler does not suggest that we lack agency or that we should not lay claim to bodily rights. Rather, she insists that such ontological indebtedness to others is the potential for rethinking ethics, whereby the body's invariably social dimension – what we might call its intimate relationality with others – demands a recognition of how any bodily claims about the self or one's identity are always claims for and about others. Furthermore, such embodied sociality requires a response-ability (Oliver 2001): a response to others that recognises this ontological indebtedness and in so doing does not violate the bond that makes self and other possible. This is an ethics where harm to others is a violation of the very thing that makes life possible, and thus represents an attempt to think through how bodily violence might be avoided on both an individual and collective level.