When vulnerability becomes power (Potentia)

Abstract

This text discusses the concept of vulnerability in which are based several Brazilian public policies. Present in many of our researches, the effects that the use of the notion of vulnerability can have on the professional practices carried out in this public context demarcate investigative frontiers that we propose here to reflection. Based on ideas of the philosophy of difference, it examines the risk that our actions conceal moral practices, relationships of tutorage and lack of subjectivation that can be present in the day-by-day and uncritical use of this notion. In this case, we can contribute to the incapacitation of the people with whom we work. The Nietzschean understanding about life as a Will to Power and the Spinoza's Deleuzian reading about power (potentia) are explored to associate these understandings with the notion of fragile health understood in these authors as an extension of inventive perspectives. We conclude that care work can exploit a certain power present in vulnerability, both in the sense of reinforcing life, enhancing movements in the populations in which it takes place; and also in the opposite direction.