Wounded Subjectivity and the Ethics of Non-innocence: Vulnerability, Structural Complicity, and Fragile Agency

Rooting its approach to the wounded subjectivity and ethics of non-innocence in the inescapability of harm, vulnerability and structural implication, the article draws on the work of Veena Das, Judith Butler, Adriana Cavarero, Paul Ricœur, Jean-Luc Nancy, Iris Marion Young, Bernard Williams and others to support a model of wounded subjectivity as an interdependent, non-innocent mode of selfhood produced by vulnerability, dependence, openness, exposure and entanglement with the lives of others, rather than a deviance from autonomy. The article argues that subjects are not complicit in the ordinary reproduction of structural harm through conscious wrongdoing, but rather through participation in institutional, economic, and social production processes that sustain life while distributing injury unevenly. Another condition theorized is non-innocence, or moral exposure: subjects who cannot purify or discharge moral responsibility for the situation. Against resignation and redemptive moralism, it offers an ethics without purity, grounded in vigilance, responsiveness and a future-oriented collective responsibility to reduce harm. Developing a conception of fragile agency and situating a wounded subjectivity as political anthropology, it refigures ethical and political life around the central ideas of co-existence, collective implication and the fragile work of sustaining shared life within damaged worlds.