Inhabiting the margins: for a pedagogy of vulnerability and alliance

Abstract

At the eco-technological crossroads, the human appears as a field of forces in which vulnerability and power are generated through the friction between powers, institutions and lives. To think this field requires a reversal of perspective: not from subject to the conditions, but from the conditions to the subject. Subjectivation is the outcome of an assemblage of expectations and obligations, possibilities and interdictions (Butler, 2005). It is within this assemblage that the lines of marginality are traced. Becoming the negro of the world, brutalism and necropolitics (Mbembe 2016, 2022, 2023, 2024a) reveal how modernity has produced a cartography of marginality that is not contingent but structural, generated as much by colonial legacies as by the accelerations of capitalism and ecological degradation. The figures who inhabit the margins are not the remnants of an order hesitant to integrate them, but laboratories of counter-conducts from which to interrogate idea of education and redesign forms of coexistence. From these premises, the essay aims to show that educating for emancipation and freedom entails not the claim to equality, but a pedagogical project grounded in the acknowledgment of a shared vulnerability that binds humans and nonhumans within the horizon of a common terrestriality (Mbembe, 2024b).