reAdIng AgAInst mAstery 23Vulnerability brings to the fore subjectivities that are shaped by the inti-
mate awareness of relations of dependency. Dwelling on how the attacks on
the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001, exposed
America’s own vulnerability in relation to the “outside” world, Butler theo-
rizes vulnerability as a mode of resisting ongoing cycles of violence and ret-
ribution. The sociopolitical response of America at this moment revealed a
particular and particularly American subject, one that sought to “maintain
its mastery through the systematic destruction of its multilateral relations,
its ties to the international community” (Butler 2004, 41). Instantiated at
the national level, this subject “seeks to reconstitute its imagined wholeness,
but only at the price of denying its own vulnerability, its dependency, its
exposure, where it exploits those very features in others, thereby making
those features ‘other to’ itself ” (41). Urging us to move away from this dia-
lectical formulation of identity, Butler pressures a thinking of dependency
that can produce alternative forms of subjective being and collectivity that
do not remain hinged to a politics of vengeance against and disempower-
ment of others.
Although in this text Butler is committed to a thinking of human re-
lations in particular, her work exceeds the human realm since it reveals a
mode of praxis in which the subject recognizes that every aspect of itself
is dependent on everybody and everything around it. Even while the dis-
course of modernity has disavowed this vital dependency through its desire
to render the human master of everything, the fragility of the human in
the wake and anticipation of so many intercultural and ecological catastro-
phes can no longer afford to pretend that it is not dependent materially,
bodily, and psychically on others, both human and nonhuman. Reading
as a practice of unmasterful vulnerability can challenge the very founda-
tions of being human that make possible everyday life in the “globalized”
world, opening up other modes of performing humanity that can become
habitual. The practice of vulnerable reading can move us “beyond” mastery,
not in the sense of exceeding it but in the sense of surviving it in order to
envision being otherwise in and for the world. By reading literature vulner-
ably—with a willingness toward undoing the very logic that constitutes our
own subjectivities—postcolonial literary texts can open us to other earthly
relations and assemblages.
While I devote considerable energy to a critical reading of how mas-