Book Review: The Virtues of Vulnerability: Humility, Autonomy, and Citizen-Subjectivity, by Sara Rushing

• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/00905917211064307
• Published date: 01 October 2022
• Date: 01 October 2022
• Subject Matter: Book Reviews

Book Reviews 825

5. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York:

Random House, 1977 [1975]).

6. Corinne LaJoie, “Review - Anaesthetics of existence: Essays on experience at the

edge, by Cressida J. Heyes,” Contemporary Political Theory (2020): 1–4. https://

doi.org/10.1057/s41296-020-00441-1.

7. Lauren Guilmette, “Critically Anxious,” Puncta: A Journal of Critical

Phenomenology 3, no. 2 (2020): 23–26.

8. Cressida J. Heyes, “The Short and the Long of It: A Political Phenomenology of

Pandemic Time.” Philosophy Today 64, no. 4 (2020): 859–863.

The Virtues of Vulnerability: Humility, Autonomy, and Citizen-Subjectivity, by Sara

Rushing. New York: Oxford University Press, 2021. xv + 202 pages.

Reviewed by: Ann K. Heffernan, Department of Political Science, University of

Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA

DOI: 10.1177/00905917211064307

“The body has long posed a problem for Western thought” (1). So begins Sara

Rushing’s timely book, The Virtues of Vulnerability: Humility, Autonomy,

and Citizen-Subjectivity. “The locus of need and dependence,” the body, she

continues, is also “the source of our loss of control” (1). To the extent that

Western thought has engaged with the body, then, it is often with an eye

toward its management and containment. Challenging this view, recent schol-

arship has seen the body—and, in particular, experiences of bodily vulnera-

bility—as a possible resource for politics, capable of bridging seemingly

irreconcilable differences in political orientation and belief. “Each of us,”

writes Judith Butler, “is constituted politically in part by virtue of the social

vulnerability of our bodies.”1 Acknowledgment of this ontological condition,

she argues further, assumes an ethical dimension, implicating us in the lives

and well-being of others.

This turn toward vulnerability is not without its critics—many of whom,

like Alyson Cole, Bonnie Honig, and Ella Myers, remain unconvinced of its

ability to inspire an adequate political response. When confronted by vulner-

ability—in ourselves or in others—it is just as likely that we will react not by

1. Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Power of Mourning and Violence (New York:

Verso, 2020), 20.