Semánticas históricas de la vulnerabilidad

Abstract

Vulnerability is one of the major terms involved in the advent of a new, more compassionate, collective sensibility towards social phenomena. Mobilizing the notion of ideal type, this paper analyzes using a comparative heuristic perspective, four major historical semantics of vulnerability (excluded, moral, proactive and performative). Each one of them might be understood as the result of the intersection of two major factors: the ethical or moral sense that is given (or not) to vulnerability, and the political function assigned (or not) to it. Additionally, this article argues that grasping the reasons of the primacy of one or another of these semantics and the forms they take in different periods or societies, allows a different understanding of the issue of vulnerability in contemporary world.

Keywords

• Semantics (Thesaurus); vulnerability
• victims
• ideal type (Author).