Being in the care of philosophy: thinking about Rachel Corrie
New Formations - ISSN 0950-2378
Volume 2010 Number 70
Being in the care of philosophy: thinking about Rachel Corrie
Shahidha K. Bari pages -
Abstract
This essay examines the letters of Rachel Corrie, the American activist who was struck and killed by a Caterpillar D9R armoured bulldozer, steered by an Israeli Defence Force vehicle operator in March 2003, as she attempted to prevent the demolition of a Palestinian home in the city of Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip. The article firstly considers how Corrie articulates in her writing a responsible conception of ‘care’ that recognises the contingency of human beings, and secondly, measures Corrie’s account against the Heideggerian conception of care that arises from existential ontology. Although these versions of ‘care’ are incommensurate, the article proposes that the unequal and sometimes dangerous political conditions of human being poses a challenge to any existentially universal account of ‘being’, and that Heideggerian philosophy after Heidegger concerns itself with this difficulty. The intimacy of Corrie’s writing presents the full force of this challenge and exposes the limits of philosophy. The article proposes that the idea of existential security is tethered to the conditions of political security in a way that continues to test Heideggerian philosophy.
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To cite this article
Shahidha K. Bari (2010) Being in the care of philosophy: thinking about Rachel Corrie, New Formations, 2010(70), -