Precarity, precariousness, and vulnerability

Abstract

This review examines precarity through two foci. First, I focus on related terms of the lumpenproletariat and informal economy, each of which have left their mark on the notion of precarity as a bounded historical condition, and its related notion of the precariat, a sociological category of those who find themselves subject to intermittent casual forms of labor. I explore the ways in which these terms offer pictures of politics and the state that are inherited by the term precarity, understood as the predicament of those who live at the juncture of unstable contract labor and a loss of state provisioning. I then turn to the second pole of precarity to chart a tension between asserting a common condition of ontological precarity and the impulse to describe the various ways in which vulnerability appears within forms of life.