Care, interdependence, vulnerability and struggles for life: a new political-philosophical scenario

Abstract

In recent decades, a number of concerns and struggles have emerged that claim care as an engine for transformation. Alongside the concept of "care", other ideas such as "defence of life", "interdependence" and "vulnerability" have emerged. From a political perspective they emerge, according to the author, as a force linked to an alternative understanding of "life": one that responds to the dynamics of contemporary expropriation, privatisation and colonisation, both in the way it does so - proposing another way of thinking and of bodily and organic relations - and in its content - shaping a socio-economic agenda that imposes limits and reorganises priorities. This force can be understood in dialogue with the multiple social and economic contradictions of neoliberalism in its current phase. What is the deep meaning of this impulse? Where does it come from and what is its history? What challenges does it impose on contemporary societies? With the intention of tracing these questions, the author proposes a situated historical genealogy of the concept of "care" that allows us to understand its origins, meanings and political pretensions, in order to, subsequently, better grasp the meaning of the struggles for life that dispute the hegemonic conception of the world and of the human.