It is indeed a quiet harsh act to let go of some articles and notes from an intellectual work that stays in progress in the mind of its own author so to say unfinished. If I wanted to I might have asked for more time but finally I decided that this beginning of reflection cannot be concluded now. Not only the quantity of questions that arose in the process of writing but also the rhythm of life itself gave birth to a moment of thought that stays firmly in Freiburg while the author is now moving again and starting a new season of himself.
I was also thinking this morning that to say when a work begins and when it is done is to create things artificially. As a famous song written by Spiral Tribe says: “Your mind stops the party but you can’t stop the future.” So in the future I am sure that I will not stop thinking about the discussions I suggest in this blog. At the same time these discussions did not begin in the seminar: I have carried these questions within me for a long time. The seminar in which this blog takes place has nevertheless allowed me to think about them more deeply and with new tools. For example the concept of care which by the way cannot be reduced to only a concept but is itself a practice. The academic context in which this blog was created is now ending and the thinking can develop outside it as both a new beginning a resumption and a continuation.
This incompleteness is not just due to a lack of time, but developed throughout the blog’s writing, as an original product of the writing itself, and especially through my own contradictions that finally became more and more conscious during the last weeks and months. I first felt a strong doubt about my legitimacy to write about a subject which involved surely a necessity of mine: a felt necessity to see political and ethical questions differently through a different perspective.
To recognize that we are all both care receivers and care givers is a “game changer”. It strongly erases the boundary between the personal and the political, which remains even within formal political groups and activism. It allows us to be more aware of the conditions in which power, emotional work and well-being are distributed, produced and received in society: conditions which are of course not good enough.
Despite that and otherwise, I felt that my own position made it hard to write about an ethics and a politics whose first and primary concern is and must be the ones, the subaltern, who are the real care workforce in society, namely women and more especially (black) women of the proletariat. I did not want to endorse the point of view “from nowhere” but at the same time wanted a theory that is not just partial or unilateral: this led to an impossible contradiction.
The “solution” I found was to firmly recognize that I speak only from my own point of view, with my own particular insights that can eventually be interesting, but are also strongly biased. To want to reduce all bias, the will to go beyond all real contradictions, reintroduces the partiality of theory over reality. Why resolve in theory what remains unresolved, chaotic and partial in materiality? The division of society into classes, groups and interests, and finally the existence of oppression, are objective and lived by a majority of people: this is something that theory cannot erase, but rather must show both in its content and in its form.
Finally, all this unclearness contributed to producing this unfinished work, which ironically represents better the tendency of a thinking that rejects especially what I call in it “the (male) proprietarian subjectivity”, with its tendency towards pure and reified formal perfection. At the same time, I have to recognize that the inverted epistemic privilege of the concerned is not pure at all, and can contain the same partiality, while revealing some insights that remain in the shadows for the dominant gaze.
The seminar, with its participatory framework, was then a place to confront our views and try to find a better understanding that does not stay within the realm of one particular view and experience, but begins with experiences and tries to create a collective brain and a more collective, integrated theory: that is at least the spirit in which I participated. It resembles a lot the approach of popular education: beginning with experience and collectively producing knowledge about what is lived in a given situation.
Also, the texts helped me to think more about these problems, especially Walker’s and Tronto’s texts. The recurrent debate among the participants of the seminar about the legitimacy or illegitimacy of the “theoretical-juridical model” and the « communicative-expressive » model has shaped many of my concerns. In a sense, my blog is also an attempt to bring these two views together into one. I don’t know if what I explain (just behind and throughout the blog) is satisfying, but at least it is an attempt to do so.
I also felt a contradiction between the form in which I wrote it, a form that felt too abstract and intellectual, and the sensible content that I was promoting. It seems now that the content must find its own form, and the form its own content, but the condition for that consists in a constant experiment both in everyday life and in the expression of thought, which have to be closely linked: to find a sensible way of writing a sensible life. I have to find the tone, which means experimenting not only with theoretical writing, but also with more poetry, journaling, empirical inquiry, novels and so on.
This goes beyond the project of this blog, while at the same time continuing its thematic on another terrain. But it is sure that, without this blog’s moment, the possibility of creating a real program of research would never have appeared to me. I still lack a view of its full extent, but it surely goes far beyond this particular semester’s work. The new idea is to create a new personal blog for a new year and continue the thinking by other means. This is, after all, a more caring practice: to let things develop at their own rhythm.
What exactly is the thematic, the core problem and the temporary result of the blog called “The Care Workbench”? I had a strong desire to theorize. Its core problem was to elaborate theoretically the concept of care and its link with praxis, desire and need. At first I came from a more phenomenological point of view, which involved questions about embodied subjectivity. At the same time I was discovering more of all this German and French philosophy, and my bedside book was Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s The Visible and the Invisible.
But I wasn’t satisfied and rewrote my articles several times, again and again. For entire weeks I engaged with this dissatisfaction. Then I realized that it is not only through the body and the chiasm with which Merleau-Ponty described embodiment that I could go beyond my doubt. The body and the chiasm are important indeed when we take into account that we are not an abstract subjectivity which possesses its own body, but that we are this body, through which we feel the world with our senses and intervene in the world even before thinking. But when we describe the body as this engagement with the world, we reintroduce sensibility as activity: this is the category of “praxis”. I then understood that this is the category from the Manuscripts of 1844 which is still relevant for care ethics and politics. The main idea is that everything is a praxis: this is our human condition.
We are always doing, interacting with the world, engaging with it and with others. So we can then redefine care as a quality of each individual praxis, but also of personal relations, institutions and finally society as a whole, considering them as the result of social practices. The new criterion of judgment is then whether praxis is qualitative (caring) or non-qualitative (uncaring praxis) as an “objective” social praxis, while the point of view remains this active sensibility as a “subjective” engagement with social practices: need and desire, which can be satisfied through more careful attention from the community. When these wishes and needs cannot actually be satisfied within an unequal distribution of care, I call the need for care, when it becomes political and conscious, radical, in the same way as Agnes Heller defined radical need.
My motivation behind this was to find elements of a personal ethic that I could endorse in everyday life, despite finally finding only a negative one. What care is, in its radicality, is not something that we can represent positively as having a value without contradiction, but rather the expression of the real lack of a caring community. The need for the concept itself is purely negative, critical and useful to point out the distance between a desire for a society in which the sensibility of everyone can flourish and the actual conditions in which the insensibility of those who are raised for and possess positions of power is inversely proportional to that of those who are in situations of vulnerability: this is precisely the kind of people who create the wealth that consists in taking care of others.
This description is almost economical, and enlarges the concept of class and interests, with concerns about the production of subjectivities shaped by their position in social structures. So an ethic cannot, in this situation, be only about being kind. We have to be kind, of course, but it is better to say that we have to create alliances and fight against oppression, and that is the final word of ethics: to do (or not do) whatever we can, considering our objective position in society, to promote a movement of liberation, by the subaltern, for the subaltern. It is also obvious that this movement itself must now be even more reflexive and think about the conditions of the distribution of care, so that the well-being of everyone is not only a goal, but also an ordinary everyday result of attention and solidarity.
To reverse the perspective is then to go from local practices to global change. It is also, first, to not try to liberate others in a colonialist way, for example by producing theories and then pretending that these theories have a role to play. If they can help one or two people, or even only oneself, this is already enough, but a new movement against oppression needs far more than theoretical tools. Secondly, it needs everyone to recognize their own needs and wishes, which can become a collective weapon when commoned through discussion and then organization, and can even be revealed through it. Thirdly, it is to fight for these needs, considering that it is a collective fight for ourselves, for what we feel cannot be satisfied in this society: it is about taking ourselves as immediate people of need and practices. Then, it is to be available for others, without being invasive or erased, simply showing availability.
Maybe after all, I learned something. To allow myself to say less and listen more, to allow a space for others to speak and an ear to listen, may be some acts of better interest than the only act of writing alone in my room. And it is in this state of mind that I can maybe be a better writer, human being and activist. As Alice Walker said: “What makes a really great writer, what makes a really great person, and what makes a really great rebel? Someone who listens. Someone who listens more than he or she talks. Someone who goes to find where the silence is and tries to understand why the silence is there.” This is what I have only started to learn through this blog and the seminar. So this blog, nor this preface, has the role of presenting a complete ethic, but only of saying something about its firm condition, which involves careful praxis, critique and global change at every level: personal and global.
Now I search for something that is no longer only a theory, but involves a new way of practicing, even in writing. I don’t know how much time will be needed to do so, but I feel quite excited about it in the end. So I leave this blog, to paraphrase Marx, who said the same about The German Ideology, “to the gnawing criticism of the mice” (and of this particular kind of mice whose activity is precisely to scroll) … while waiting for better and more developed works.
Hamburg, 1st September 2026