The Politics of Sacred Vulnerability: Reading Martha Fineman with Meister Eckhart

ABSTRACT Martha Fineman’s analysis of universal vulnerability evokes deep theological and spiritual resonances. By reading Fineman’s work through the lens of an Eckhartian theological anthropology, this article develops an account of vulnerability as a mode of human flourishing. By disrupting the intuitive definition of vulnerability by contrast with invulnerability, this Eckhartian reading moves beyond Fineman by re-articulating the category of vulnerability in positive ontological terms and metaphysically re-locating it in relation to God’s act of self-communication. Whereas Fineman proposes a form of ‘responsive solidarity’, the Eckhartian approach situates responsiveness within an antecedent receptivity to vulnerability as that which locates the subject within dynamics of gift-exchange that are animated by gratitude. Eckhart presents us with a set of spiritual strategies and practices through which vulnerability can be lived in mutuality as resilience rather than precarity, a mode of inhabiting the world that allows vulnerability to be turned against experiences of dispossession.