Shared Vulnerability in Language Practice

Hi all,

unfortunately I don't find the time or the room this week to write a really substantial piece, but I've been thinking of Michaela's last question quite a lot, and would like to propose one more example of how shared vulnerability can unfold productively in an ethical encounter.

Just to remind you, Michaela's post ended as follows:
Because both Butler and Ettinger underpin vulnerability in these ‘account matrices’, I am trying to think of concrete examples where shared vulnerabilities unfold productively (for survival, recognition). Marie’s political artworks example begins to make this question more tangible for me, though I’m wondering if anyone else has any thoughts.

The following example is related to my own experience when I arrived in Amsterdam 5 years ago. I was namely thinking that learning a language in the country itself (i.e. learning a language as a foreign language) involves a process of shared vulnerability and might well enfold productively, as the learning aims at a better understanding of the others—although I am also aware of the limitations that language can bring about.Couldn't a classroom then operate as a borderspace in which people necessarily meet in a shared (linguistic) vulnerability?
For having been in the situation myself, I remember being caught in the distress of being somehow dispossessed of my own language (French) through the process of learning the language of others, however not yet being able to fully communicate, neither in Dutch, nor in English. The feeling of re-becoming a very young child overtook me more than once, and dialogues with other students at that time proved that we all knew this feeling all too well.
Although this is but one short example, I'd like to try to discuss later on how language acquisition classes intrinsically bear the problematic of language community and national identity as they necessarily deal with language in a setting where the excess of language becomes 'hearable'/visible at all time (through the multiple represented languages—all being dispossessed). In my view, there is a lot in there that reflects what Butler suggests in her approach to ethical encounter, vulnerability, and impossibility/illusion of language community.


A broader discussion on this theme has been replaced by a more urgent close reading of the triangular concepts of “politics, ethics and responsibilities”.