UC San Diego

This thesis attends to vulnerability as both essential and contingent; a quality that is universal yet inheres in bodies as result of relations - the weave of worlds. Navigation, structured by the drive to certain forms of relationality, is both product and producer in the cartographic becoming of being. Despite careful steerage, we may consider the possibility that resonance enables one to be 'taken up' into forms of relationality aside from will. The moment when worlds collapse into bodies; the weight of sadness, the glimpse which cannot be shaken. Drawing from fieldwork with chronically homeless and recently housed individuals in Boston, I hope to elucidate how vulnerability is manifest in bodies as a quality derived from the relativity of component parts, or from those exteriorities to which one may be proximate. Vulnerability is therefore a measure of 'exposure' - a state of being 'open to'. The orientation and degree of this openness may be pre-determined by prior forms of relations which configure the realm of potential, in turn constituting the horizons of being and the routes we navigate. Resonance carries forth, structuring the forms we attend to, feeding desires or re- fashioning them in light of new attentions. Thus, this thesis hopes to demonstrate how vulnerability, as a state of being brought into relation with that which is exterior, is a necessary foundation of all being; the nature of this vulnerability is shaped by the paths we travel