Abstract
Grounded in the experience of the ontological fragility of the body, vulnerability – a key notion of contemporary philosophical debate – marks the starting point of philosophical enquiries, such as Judith Butler’s, striving to elaborate an original a-normativity manifesting itself in the disruptive forms that let the body appear as a surplus of meaning, such as ectasis, grief, and political subversion. However, all these conceptions imply a kenotic anthropology, where the meaning of human experience consists in the human’s own loss. Its ethical equivalent is the (not necessarily shared) reciprocity of such loss. This amount to a vision of the “woundâ€, from which vulnerability originates, always as cutting from the outside to the inside, as an opening that means a loss, and denies the authentically relational dimension of mutual recognition. Ancient figures of vulnerability agree to this meaning of the wound, too. On the contrary, the episode of the disbelief of the apostle Thomas shows an opposite perspective, where the wound is a cutting from the inside to the outside: an opening that means whole-ness, and allows the manifestation of the meaning of the human as absolute positivity while not denying its full vulnerability, and, in doing so, without making a claim neither to sovereignty nor to violence. Such positive meaning of vulnerability as “opening as wholenessâ€, in turn, manifests itself at the ethical level as an anthropology of irrevocable dedication to the other, where the latter is recognized as s/he is, while being actively taken care of
