Social security reconstructs the Other through the binary of needy and dependent – that advances an ethics of care that reinstates a neoliberal hierarchy of responsibility.

This line of thought involves conceptualizing citizens as embodied, as fleshly, in a more encompassing way than existing vocabularies like trust and care. As mentioned earlier, the subject of trust theory is decidedly disembodied, marking a serious limitation in its scope and usefulness. Notably, second generation care ethicists put embodiment on the political agenda, but they dealt only with quite specific aspects of embodiment – typically those to do with bodily maintenance and nurturance, such as elder care and child care (Beasley and Bacchi, 2005; Bacchi and Beasley, 2005). Yet, caring practices are only one part of the complex and interweaving layers of interconnection that characterize contemporary social relations. Visions of ethical community require, in our view, a more expansive conception of embodied intersubjectivity. We are precisely looking for a better way of gripping together the corporeal and the sociopolitical – of grasping simultaneously the sociality of flesh and the physicality of social life.

Insisting upon our common and collective intersubjective embodiment marks a different ethical moment. It shifts the focus from those constituted as dependent to human embodied interconnection. The challenge theoretically is to maintain this insight and not to lapse into versions of sociality that construct some groups as needy and dependent while ‘independent’ others attend to their ‘needs’.

Rosalyn Diprose’s concept of ‘corporeal generosity’ in our view fleshes out both embodiment and sociality and their simultaneity more than most. Diprose intends to avoid the typical meaning of vocabularies of altruism as a moral quality held by individuals (2002: 4). Moreover, Diprose’s account of beneficence rests on a reworking of Levinas’ concern with a foundational ethical relation. The self/citizen is produced precisely by the other’s alterity. For Diprose this ‘primordial’ relation of generosity – of connection between self and other – is not volitional, abstract or moral (as it often is in the trust and care literatures) but involves ‘an ontology of corporeal intersubjectivity’. Importantly, unlike Levinas, she claims to reconfigure generosity as a political intervention (Diprose, 2002: 14). All the same, we suggest that Diprose’s notion of ‘corporeal generosity’ is inclined, along with feminist care ethics and indeed other feminist theorizing of the body, to revert to embodiment as vulnerability and to reinstate the asymmetrical vision of sociality which lies at the heart of the Levinasinflected ontological requirement towards altruism. Not surprisingly perhaps, the chosen exemplar for Diprose’s corporeal generosity is the requirement for the Australian white community to show generosity towards those who are marginalized, towards Indigenous Australians (2002: 164–6).

We stress that this concern with corporeal justice is a considerable advance on the neo-liberal ethos of atomistic individualism. Yet, as Borgerson has noted (2001), Levinas-inflected ‘proximity ethics’ resolves into an uncompromising, non-negotiable relation of responsibility between Self and Other that cannot deal with possible dangers of self-sacrifice or of being the object of sacrifice. Diprose goes along with Levinas in heralding the inescapable responsibility for others as a pre-existing condition of being human. She too places this self/other relationship beyond the realm of social practice and creativity, outside of history. This limits the capacity of such an ethics to take account of social hierarchy, and presents corporeal interconnection primarily in relation to vulnerability, undercutting recognition that interconnection understood in this way may be suffocating and subordinating and may reiterate self-abnegation for both those conceived as vulnerable and their helplessly responsible, generous ‘helpers’.