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Abstract
The Book of Form and Emptiness constructs a hallucinatory auditory world, triggered by a traumatic event of a family member's death. Drawing on phenomenological paradigms and psychopathology, further deepened by Ruth Ozeki's grounding in Sōtō Zen Buddhism, this article analyzes the intentional structure of the protagonist Benny Oh's hallucinatory experience by examining the dynamic between the subject that perceives and the objects that are perceived, as revealed in his gradual shift from resisting to embracing auditory hallucinations. This analysis argues that the subjective link between embodied vulnerability and the belief in pain informs one's understanding of impermanence, and, thus, subjectivity and the world. Under this circumstance, Ozeki reconstructs subjectivity through compassionate intersubjective relations, while challenging the epistemological dominance of neoliberal rationality about mental illness.
Introduction
American literature has witnessed a growing engagement with the concept of vulnerability to represent "the anxiety and psychological terror that spread across the Western world after 9/11," "a kind of global confusion and disorientation in the early 21st century" (Yang 8).1 Vulnerability, as zeitgeist-a contemporary "spirit of the time," carries a foundational meaning with broad extensibility, demonstrating interdisciplinary potential in and beyond philosophy, ethics, and social policy. The term vulnerability per se has a long historical origin in the history of thought, which traces back to ancient Greece. In 2006, Bryan S. Turner, in Vulnerability and Human Rights, elevated the notion of vulnerability to an anthropocentric ontological level by defining vulnerability as a universal condition of human existence and providing a systematic exposition (Jiang, "The Vulnerable Subject" 38). This universal condition of human is typically perceived as "a susceptibility to be harmed or wounded" (Boublil, "The Ethics" 185) because etymologically, vulnerability derives from the Latin vulnus, meaning "wound." Hence, the interaction between contemporary literature and this concept in the dimension of harm exposes the limitations of "the disembodied Cartesian subject" (Wolfe 36) in accounting for diffuse and systemic crises, resonating with the collective emotional state since the new century.
However, this negative harm-centered interpretation has been increasingly challenged and expanded particularly by posthumanist thought which underscores the openness and mutual relatedness inherent in vulnerability. The necessity of openness or exposure for vulnerability persists irrespective of anthropocentric or postanthropocentric ontological commitments. As contemporary phenomenological scholar Elodie Boublil expresses, vulnerability...