Vulnerability, Freedom, and Political Transformation

by Laura McMahon

On January 9, 1961 in Athens, Georgia, 19-year-old Charlayne Hunter-Gault and 19-year-old Hamilton Holmes became the first African American students to enroll at the University of Georgia after a two-year administrative and legal battle. This occasion was not welcomed peacefully by many of their prospective white classmates: Hunter-Gault’s and Holmes’s enrolment was met by a protest of nearly 100 white students, which quickly escalated into a riot of nearly 2,000 white students, local residents, and members of the Ku Klux Klan. Although state police compelled Hunter-Gault and Holmes to withdraw as a result of this race riot, the two students were soon after re-enrolled by legal mandate and graduated in 1963.  Hunter-Gault went on to become a journalist and foreign correspondent for National Public Radio, and Holmes went on to become an orthopedic physician. Today, the University of Georgia enrolls 7.6% Black or African American students and employs 12.6% black or African American faculty.

Jason Stanley identifies a number of features of fascist politics, including the belief in a mythic past, the belief in the natural superiority of the dominant group, and the sense of victimization that goes hand-in-hand with challenges to the dominant group’s historical privilege. With these features in mind, we can see on the part of the white Southerners who rioted in response to Hunter-Gault’s and Holmes’ enrolment at the University of Georgia a fascistic desire to secure their own (mythologized) white identity and power in the face of civil rights advances for black Southerners. This attempt to secure and wall off their own separate and superior identity might, superficially, look like an expression of the freedom of white Southerners to protect their own sovereign identity. Indeed, white Southerners appealed to “states’ rights” in order to oppose challenges to Jim Crow, insisting on freedom from the external constraints of federal power and on their sovereign power to enact their choices in the world.  This logic is alive and well in more recent events in the American South, such as the “unite the right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia in 2018. It is also alive and well in the desire for security and exclusion powerfully symbolized in Donald Trump’s fantasy of a border wall between the US and Mexico, and other such Medieval assertions of sovereign and impenetrable national borders (as studied compellingly by Wendy Brown). 

American Civil Rights historian Robert Cohen argued that what happened when Hunter-Gault and Holmes enrolled at the University of Georgia in 1961 was not so much that the University of Georgia was de-segregated, as that it was freed.  Calvin Trillin wrote in the New Yorker:

Under Jim Crow, Cohen said, Georgia could never have attracted enough professors of distinction to become a first-rate university.  How many prominent musicians and artists were going to visit a campus that had, for instance, withdrawn an invitation to Dave Brubeck when it turned out that his combo included a black bass player?…desegregation had freed a place like the University of Georgia to be part of the United States.

With this argument, Cohen points us to a much richer understanding of freedom than that rooted in the Manichean logic of an “us” versus “them.”  This vision of freedom is rooted not in a devotion to securing what one already has—or believes oneself to have—from external threat, but in an openness to our own expansion, enrichment, and growth in exposure to and dialogue with others.

A conception of freedom rooted in walling oneself off from the rest of the world so as to act with impunity is an impoverished conception of freedom, in no small part because it presumes that the self or political community exist to begin with as separate, bounded entities, which subsequently come to enact their will upon the world.  Phenomenology, existentialism, and feminist object relations theory challenge this vision of separate, bounded selfhood and the impoverished visions of freedom that follow from it. Philosophical and psychoanalytic resources help us to explore the ambiguous and dynamic boundaries between self and other, allowing us to articulate a vision of liberatory political transformation that does justice to our inherent vulnerability—rather than to our misguided desires for security—as selves and communities.

“Vulnerability” comes from the Latin vulnus, or wound, and bears connotations of harm and destruction.  However, feminist philosophers have emphasized vulnerability as a positive power rather than a negative detriment. Judith Butler speaks to the manners in which we can be “undone” as selves by grief and loss, a capacity that is inseparable from the initial openness to love that is the prerequisite of any experience of loss. Bryan Turner defines vulnerability as “the capacity to be open to wounding and to be open to the world”: vulnerability is the positive power to be touched and shaped by others at the heart of our “own” identity. Learning to live well with our vulnerability is fundamental to the genuine development of our freedom. Freedom turns out to be not a matter of walling oneself off in a futile attempt to preserve what one imagines one has, but a matter of exposure leading to personal transformation and political flourishing. 

The power of vulnerability is on full display on the part of infants and small children.  Holding the newborn son of some close friends recently, I was at once moved by the tiny Sai’s exquisite fragility and impressed with his irresistible power to command, simply by existing, the care and loving devotion of the large adults moving about him (a “paradox” nicely observed by George Kunz and an issue taken up in feminist care ethics). This power to command care is not the power of a bounded, sovereign subject, but precisely the power of a vulnerable, embodied exposure to the world that is not yet a “self” properly so-called, but that requires the care of others in order to become a separate self. The process of establishing one’s boundaries as separate self is inherently ambiguous on both a physical and an existential level. Physically, from womb to weaning it is to varying degrees impossible to clearly separate where the body of the mother ends and that of the child begins (as phenomenological psychologist Eva Simms recounts vividly in her description of nursing her infant daughter), such that growing up requires a gradual physical dissolution of what Maurice Merleau-Ponty calls the “intercorporeal” relationship between mother or primary caregiver and infant. Existentially, the young child must gradually accomplish a lived sense of herself as a separate self, a process that—as Kym Maclaren argues—requires recognition of the reality and worth of her perspective on the part of her intimate caregivers.  As feminist object relations theorist  Nancy Chodorow argues, when this process of differentiation goes well it involves not the assertion of an absolute difference between self and other, but a gradual disentanglement of self and other that allows for a lived sense of the self as inherently in relation to others.  This process is never ultimately complete—a reality to which, for example, adult experiences of love give testament—and living well requires that we be able to navigate rather than deny the permanent tension between relatedness and separateness at the heart of our identities, with all of the challenges and risks that this tension entails.

Our vulnerability—our “capacity to be open to wounding and to be open to the world”—is evident in our social and political lives, too.  My greatest pleasure as a teacher of philosophy, for example, is in witnessing the interests and capacities of students’ of diverse backgrounds expand and deepen through sustained philosophical study. Students’ general and approximate approaches to phenomena, such as of freedom, become more specific and subtle through the study and discussion of philosophers such as Simone de Beauvoir and Hannah Arendt, effecting a transformation in students’ perspectives on freedom, action, and responsibility in their own lives and the world around them. The initially foreign terms of a philosophical text become the students’ own, transforming what it is possible for them to think, say, and write.  More generally, our developed identities and agencies are vulnerably exposed to the linguistic, religious, aesthetic, scientific, and intellectual inheritances at play in our social worlds. We can have a hand in shaping these inheritances for the future only thanks to first having been initiated or “thrown” into them. 

The same is true of our cultural and political identities. Uma Narayan argues that cultures are not natural givens but dynamic historical and political formations that develop in complex relation to one another. The dynamism of the boundaries between selves and between cultural and political communities is not a diminishment of freedom, but a very condition of its flourishing. John Dewey observes that all social and political groups hold some interest in common and engage in some form of interaction and cooperative engagement with other groups. In some cases the interests that hold the group together are relatively few in number, and serve to isolate and oppose them to other groups.  The white Southerners rioting against the desegregation of the University of Georgia constitute a group of this sort: their common interests are rooted in an advancement of their supposed superior identity rooted in a mythical past, and this common interest actively serves to isolate them from and oppose them to interactions with other groups.  In other situations, groups hold a diversity of interests in common and enjoy varied and free interactions with other groups.  It is in this sense that we can understand the weight of Cohen’s point that the desegregation of the University of Georgia was paramount to its being freed.  As in situations of learning, our perspectives are expanded and enriched and our capacities for thinking and action developed not by hanging on to what we already have as isolated groups, but by opening ourselves to influences that we cannot control or master in advance. 

We can see another powerful example of the manner in which freedom goes hand-in-hand with a group’s vulnerable transformation in dialogue with influences that it cannot control or master in advance in a different political situation: an episode from the 1954-1962 Algerian War of Independence against French colonialism. As Amie Leigh Zimmer discusses in the last post in this series, in the decades leading up to the Algerian Revolution French colonialists saw native Algerian culture as monolithically oppressive to women, and were particularly preoccupied with the practices of veiling women—a practice that Alia Al-Saji argues came to stand as a metonymic symbol of women’s oppression generally.  Initially, Algerians largely opposed French pressure to unveil women and to more generally transform gender relations upon the model of “emancipated” European culture—a reaction that, as Frantz Fanon was a reaction more to French paternalism and hypocrisy than to an opposition to modern values as such. On September 30, 1956, 21-year-old Zohra Drif-Bitat, 20-year-old Djamila Bouhired, and Samia Lakhdari (age unknown)—members of the Front de Libération Nationale (FLN)—crossed the checkpoint between the Arab quarter and the European quarter of Algiers, dressed in European styles for a day at the beach but bearing bombs to be planted in popular colonial cafés and bars.  These bombs killed twelve and injured 50 French Algerians, a militant action carried out in retaliation for the French military’s killing of 70 Muslim Algerians some months earlier and instrumental in the eventual victory of the FLN against French colonial rule. Historian Natalya Vince points out that these women revolutionaries played upon French stereotypes to the advantage of the Revolution, exploiting the French assumption that Algerian women dressed in European clothes were leaving behind their traditional, oppressive culture and assimilating to “emancipated” modern values. Ironically, as John Russon argues, Algerian gender relations were transformed in positive and interesting ways thanks to women and men fighting alongside one another against colonial oppression—but not in the ways expected or hoped for by the French. 

In this bloody episode, we find a much richer—and a much more morally difficult—understanding of freedom at play than we do in the violent opposition of the white Southerners to desegregation. Insofar as it was successful in its revolutionary efforts, Algerian nationalism did not appeal to a mythical past in order to nurture a sense of its own superiority, but rather took up resources from its own complex cultural heritage and from French colonialism in surprising, creative, and self-determining manners. To call this political transformation “self-determining” is not to envision freedom as the absence of external constraint or the sovereign assertion of will, but to recognize that the subject of freedom—from the individual to the political community—is what it is only in ongoing interaction with others. Our freedom consists in crucial respects of letting our historical situations speak through us, giving birth to who we are in new and surprising ways.

Arendt writes: “if [we] wish to be free, it is precisely sovereignty [we] must renounce.”  The political transformations at work in the desegregation of the American South or in the Algerian anti-colonial movement are liberating both for those who have been oppressed and rendered disproportionately vulnerable to harm and for those whose power and privilege have been challenged. Desegregation and decolonization allow for freedom beyond that of the powerful to protect what they have and to do what they like. In the richer sense of Dewey’s two traits of democracy, they both open up possibilities for diverse points of encounter with other groups in the larger world, and allow for the enrichment of the shared interests of all groups involved.  If thanks to desegregation the American South was enabled to become part of the United States, then this United States is not an established identity rooted in a mystified past, but—like any self or political community—an identity in dynamic emergence in ongoing, vulnerable dialogue with others.

Laura McMahon is Assistant Professor in the Departments of History & Philosophy and Women’s & Gender Studies at Eastern Michigan University, where she teaches courses in 19^th– and 20^th-Continental Philosophy, Social & Political Philosophy, and Feminist Philosophy.  She is currently working on a book developing resources in Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology for understanding the nature of political transformation.