What might it mean to undergo violation, to insist upon _not_ resolving grief and staunching vulberability too quickly through a turn to violence, and to practice, as an experiment in living otherwise, nonviolence in an emphatically nonreciprocal response? What might it mean to make an ethic from the region of the uwilled? It might mean that one does not foreclose upon that primary exposure to the Other, that one does not try to transform the unwilled into the willed, but, rather, to take the very unbearability of exposure as a sign, the reminder, of a common vulberability, a common physicality and risk. It delineates a physical vulnerability from which we cannot slip away, which we cannot finally resolve in the name of the subject, but which can provide a way to understand that none of us is fully bounded, utterly separate, but, rather, we are in our skins, given over, in each other’s hands, at each other’s mercy. This is a situation we do not choose. It forms the horizon of choice, and it grounds our responsibility. We did not create it, and therefore it is what we must heed.
-Judtih Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself
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