Fabienne Brugère

University of Paris 8

From Care Ethics to Care Politics in the Neoliberal Moment?

6 February 2024, 17h00 (Lisbon Time — GMT+0)

Sala Mattos Romão (Room C201.J – Department of Philosophy)

School of Arts and Humanities – University of Lisbon

Abstract

Care can be defined in different ways. In English, it refers first and foremost to the banality of “take care”, which is equivalent to “au revoir” or “à bientôt” in French. From the point of view of the activities themselves, we can take care of a child both “to take care of” and “to care about”. We care for a child, we look after him, we are concerned about him. Care begins with interpersonal relationships that seem to combine dispositions and activities, through an anchoring in ordinary life. But, understood as an ethics and then a politics, it becomes institutional, confronted with national and global crises of care: for example, the crisis of the welfare state (Urban Ward, 2020) which empties collective solidarity of its meaning, and the crisis of migrant reception in Western countries, which turns precarious foreigners into unofficial care workers (Hamington, 2010; Morgan, 2020). How can we characterize this transition from banal interpersonal relations to an ethics and a politics at a time when capitalism has taken on the face of the “neoliberal” moment (Foucault, 1979)? How is it possible to combine an ethics and a politics, a care for the self and a care for others (Foucault, 1984; Benhabib, 2004)?