Knife, Aesthetics of the Wounded: Vulnerability and Beyond

This paper attempts to read Salman Rushdie’ Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder (2024), as a representative text for the newly emerging, dynamic, interdisciplinary field of Vulnerability Studies and analyze the different interacting vulnerabilities found therein. Theoretical concepts such as Michel Foucault’s heterotopia, Derrida’s hostipitality, Giddens’s fateful moments, Judith Butler’s ungrievable lives and Elaine Scarry’s meditations on pain and imagination have been utilized to achieve the desired end. Recalling Butler, this paper also seeks to show how vulnerability is not synonymous with passivity, is not the opposite of resistance but one that actively sources the practice of resistance.