Solidarity of Vulnerability
ELI5
Because no one can fully understand their own inner life — not through any personal failing but just because that's how being human works — we can recognize the same hidden complexity in everyone else, and that shared "not-knowing-ourselves" is a reason to be gentle and responsible toward one another.
Definition
The "solidarity of vulnerability" names an ethical disposition that arises directly from the psychoanalytic discovery of the split subject. Because repression, the unconscious, and the constitutive opacity of desire mean that no subject is fully transparent to itself — that self-knowledge is structurally incomplete rather than merely contingently incomplete — this shared condition of self-opacity becomes the ground for a specific form of ethical relation. The concept holds that genuine solidarity is not founded on shared interests, shared identity, or sympathetic identification with another's conscious experience, but on the recognition that every other subject is, like oneself, partially incomprehensible to themselves. This incomprehensibility is not a defect to be overcome but a structural feature of subjecthood as such, inseparable from what Lacan theorizes as the splitting of the subject by the signifier.
The concept simultaneously functions as a critique of therapeutic ideologies — particularly the injunction to "live in the now" — that treat the past as something to be released or managed. Ruti's argument in mari-ruti-the-call-of-character-living-a-life-worth-living-columbia-university-p is that such ideologies are ethically insufficient precisely because they suppress the unconscious dimension: they treat the subject as more transparent and self-mastering than it structurally can be. A genuine ethics of the subject must instead acknowledge that unconsciously motivated behavior returns via repetition and that accountability for such behavior cannot be dissolved by willful presence. Solidarity of vulnerability is thus the social and intersubjective corollary of this ethical demand: what binds subjects together is not wholeness but shared constitutive incompleteness.
Place in the corpus
Within mari-ruti-the-call-of-character-living-a-life-worth-living-columbia-university-p, the concept sits at the intersection of the Ethics of Psychoanalysis and the structural account of the subject given by Splitting, Repression, and Repetition. It is an extension of the Ethics of Psychoanalysis insofar as it takes that framework's insistence on holding the subject responsible for the unconscious — even for what is beyond conscious control — and draws from it an intersubjective ethical conclusion: if I am answerable for my unconscious, and if my unconscious is structurally inaccessible to me, then the same logic holds for every other subject. The solidarity in question is not an identification in the imaginary sense (not a mirroring of another's ego), but rather a recognition grounded in the shared structure of self-opacity that Repression and Splitting entail.
The concept also relates directly to Singularity, but as its ethical complement rather than its opposite. Singularity in the Lacanian corpus names the irreducible particularity of each subject's relation to desire, the Thing, and the sinthome. Solidarity of vulnerability does not dissolve this singularity into a homogeneous collective; rather, it is precisely the singularity of each subject's self-opacity — the idiosyncratic way each person's unconscious operates — that grounds the solidarity. The shared condition is structural incompleteness, not shared content. In this way, the concept also resonates with the logic of Repetition: because each subject is constitutively caught in the circuit of the missed encounter, perpetually circling what cannot be reached, this structural repetition-in-failure is recognizable as universal, yielding the "solidarity" dimension of the formulation.
Key formulations
The Call of Character: Living a Life Worth Living (p.109)
It should lead to a kind of solidarity of vulnerability whereby we understand that in the same way that we are partially incomprehensible to ourselves, others are also incomprehensible to themselves.
The phrase "partially incomprehensible to ourselves" does the heaviest theoretical work: it precisely names the structural condition of the split subject — not a temporary ignorance but a constitutive opacity — and the symmetry constructed by "in the same way… others are also" converts that individual structural condition into the basis for an intersubjective ethics, making self-opacity the common ground of solidarity rather than a private limitation.