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Estelle Ferrarese is one of the leading figures of the contemporary French reception of Critical Theory and this book offers a renewal of the thinking of Theodor W. Adorno. Ferrarese develops our thinking about the social conditions of caring for others, while arguing for an understanding of morality that is materialist and political - always-already political. Taking the social philosopher Theodor W. Adorno as a point of departure, she questions this social philosophy by submitting it to ideas deriving from theories of care. She thinks through the mechanisms of the social fragility of caring for others, the moral gesture it enjoins, as well as its political stakes. In the end, Ferrarese shows that the capitalist form of life, strained by a generalised indifference, produces a compartmentalised attention to others, one limited to very particular tasks and domains and attributed to women

Introduction -- Part 1. The vulnerable and the geometer : contemporary uses of the concept of vulnerability in the social sciences -- 1.1. Vulnerable cities, territories, populations and individuals : risk -- 1.2. The risk of poverty -- 1.3. Vulnerability as doubly filtered by the social sciences and philosophy -- Part 2. Contemporary moral philosophy : three models of vulnerability and three accompanying problems -- 2.1. Three competing models of vulnerability -- 2.2. The problem of the political -- Part 3. Vulnerability according to critical theory : recognition and normative expectations -- 3.1. Exercise of archaeology : the Mängelwesen -- 3.2. Vulnerability to misrecognition : an example of exposure to injury -- 3.3. Outline of a reconstructed notion of vulnerability -- Part 4. Perspectives : thinking vulnerability and the political through together -- 4.1. The political as sphere of deliberation -- 4.2. The political and political subjectivity -- 4.3. The political as common.

Note on the translation -- Abbreviations -- Introduction: why unite Marx and Foucault, and how? -- 1 The Marx/Foucault difference: discipline and governtality : Disciplinary society/class society: surveillance and punishment : Foucault's discovery of a new social order -- Disciplines and class relations -- Analogical table Foucault/Marx. Civil society against class state: the College de France lectures of 1977-79 : Praise versus critique of the political economy? -- The Foucauldian grand narrative and theneoliberal question -- Foucault's grand tableau: civil society and the arts of governing -- 2 Property-power and knowledge-power : Foucault explores the "pole" that Marx left in a grey zone : Foucault discerns knowledge-power alongside proprietor-power -- Why Marx's theory is missing a "pole." Foucault, theoretician of the knowledge-power of "competent-elites" : "The history of truth:" the true, the just and the authentic -- The truths of government -- Refounding the Marxian project to admit Foucault. Foucault, historian and critic of "copmetent-elites" : The historical conditions of modern "biopolitics" -- The Foucauldian critique of knowledge-power: a politics -- 3 Marxian structuralism and Foucauldian nominalism? : Micro-relations of power and macro-relationships of class : The Foucauldian concept of power and the marxian concept of class -- The micro-macrological articulation of class -- The micro-macrological articulation of the state. Apparatuses of power versus class structures : Foucault: strategies in relation to "apparatuses of power" -- Marx: strategies in relation to "class structures." Shortcomings and relevance of Marx and Foucault : Class, sex, race: a Foucauldian triptych? -- War as an "analyser of society" -- "Structure" or "system?" Foucault, Habermas and others -- 4 Marx's "capitalism" and Foucault's "liberalism" : The historical productivity of "capitalism" : The political contradiction of capitalism -- The productive contradictions of capitalism. The history of "liberalism" : "Discipline" as productive of utility-docility -- Liberalism as productive of utility-freedom -- Liberalism as relation beetween governors and the governed -- "Governmentality" as against self-government. Elements of conclusion: a strategy from below : Marx's strategies -- Foucault's strategies -- Provocation and interpellation -- Strategy and hegemony -- The dispersed order of strategy from below -- Beyond class horizons -- References -- Index.