Notes 

Cf. Helene Thomas,
The Vulnerable. Democracies against the Poor, Bellecombe-en-Bauges, éditions du Croquant, Collection « TERRA », 2010, 256 p: http://www.reseau-terra.eu/article933.html

Cf. Hélène Thomas, "Vulnerability, frailty, resilience, aso. About the uses and the translation of woolly notions in Social sciences and medicine", January 2008:  http://www.reseau-terra.eu/article697.html, 

 

Since the beginning of the 1980s, democracies and international organizations have modified their approach of disadvantaged populations, reassessing two centuries and more of development and the implementation of progressist ideas of social promotion and access to citizenship. The notion of vulnerability is the cornerstone of this change. Henceforth, war has been declared not against poverty but against the poor, enrolled in this fight against themselves. They are the targets of vigilant scholarly attention, solicitude of experts and continued surveillance by public actors and are no longer treated as unfortunate or badly integrated citizens but as incapable adults and minorities dangerous to themselves and others. This book proposes a social history of vulnerability as concept and as category and instrument of national and international public policies and an analysis of its psychic and social effects on those who see themselves thus categorized and treated accordingly.

 

The theoretical perspective articulates an archeological and sociohistorical approach of the social and colonial State with that of the psychiatry of war and exile and finally of the clinical psychoanalysis of the phantom. It also draws from the anthropological studies coming from Postcolonial and Cultural studies, particularly from works dealing with the process of subjection and incorporated form of control as much in several practices as in colonial administrative and scientific knowledge. The analysis is initially focused on the European treatment of the poor and their situation has been enlarged to the study of forms and effects on the vulnerable of the bad faith of experts and actors as well as the detached, indeed even diverted, gaze of the scholars, notably the theoreticians of equity and development. These processes of negation or denial of the objective condition of subordination of the most disadvantaged are comparable to those observed by a number of historians and anthropologists of independence movements with regard to forms of knowledgeable, public and ordinary perceptions of the subaltern during decolonization and in the metropolitan territories of former empires.

 

 The books attempts to describe the birth and circulation of the intellectual and operational category of vulnerability which is an effect of dominant European and masculine tendencies, intellectually and politically speaking, and envisage how this category engages with those it stemmed from: exclusion. The analysis revolves around the modalities of international, public and scholarly construction of this category and the statutory and symbolic effects of its usage with regard to poor populations. I retrace the basis of this conceptual and taxonomic revolution. An archeology of terms allows us to understand how they gained currency in public discourses since the end of the last century. Then I study the instruments of this new government of the poor which deprives them partially of the exercise of their human rights and fundamental liberties. How did this replacement of equality by equity, of liberty by dignity, of fraternity by responsibility occur? On what fundamental legal and political principles which are contradictory but nevertheless reconciled in a new social theory does it rely on? In fine, the book highlights the effects of desubjectivation of these emergency provisions on the existence of the vulnerable who have been assigned the role of victims. Their treatment that combines a close protection and a remote control rests on the individualization and psychologization of their condition and makes them the recipients of beneficial interventions that are sometimes covered by the media  and sometimes invisible.

 

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"Depuis le début des années 1980, les démocraties et les organisations internationales ont modifié leur approche des populations défavorisées, revenant sur plus de deux siècles de développement et de mise en œuvre des idées progressistes de promotion sociale et d’accès à la citoyenneté. La notion de vulnérabilité est la pierre angulaire de ce changement. Désormais la guerre est déclarée non plus à la pauvreté mais aux pauvres, enrôlés dans ce combat contre eux-mêmes. Ils font l’objet de la vigilance des savants, de la sollicitude des experts et d’une surveillance continue des acteurs publics et ne sont plus traités comme des citoyens malheureux ou mal intégrés mais comme des incapables. Cet ouvrage revient d’abord sur les fondements de cette révolution conceptuelle. Une archéologie des termes permet de comprendre comment ils se sont généralisés dans les discours publics depuis la fin du dernier millénaire. Puis il étudie les instruments de ce nouveau gouvernement des pauvres qui les coupe de l’exercice de leurs droits humains et de leurs libertés fondamentales.

Comment ce remplacement de l’égalité par l’équité, de la liberté par la dignité, de la fraternité par la responsabilité s’est-il opéré ? Sur quels principes juridiques fondamentaux et politiques contradictoires, néanmoins conciliés dans une nouvelle théorie sociale, s’appuie-t-il ? Enfin le livre met en lumière les effets de ces dispositifs d’urgence permanente sur l’existence des vulnérablesassignés au rôle de victimes. Leur traitement qui combine protection rapprochée et contrôle à distance repose sur l’individualisation et la psychologisation de leur condition et en fait tantôt des martyrs médiatisés tantôt des cibles discrètes d’interventions bienfaisantes condamnées à la désubjectivation et au silence".