HOW CAN WE TALK ABOUT LOVE, how can we tell love stories in a contemporary situation characterized by precarity, vulnerability, and a persistent sense of crisis? A situation in which senses of the self and of its relation to its environment have become radically uncertain, fractured, and tenuous? In the past decade, “precarity” and “vulnerability” have become key concepts through which the humanities and social sciences address changing conditions of life and work in the present age, including the increase in non-permanent forms of work, casual labor, unpredictable life stories, erratic career patterns, and a lack of material and psychological welfare. While “precarity” is most often associated with economic risk and social disenfranchisement, “vulnerability” commonly describes risks resulting from environmental and climate change, although the two terms are also sometimes used interchangeably.

From a philosophical perspective, “precarity” and “vulnerability” can also express a more general sense that the position of humans in this world is tenuous, that we are not masters of the world but are vulnerable to disease and death. It is in this sense that the two terms are introduced in Judith Butler's collection of essays Precarious Life (2004), one of the earliest works of cultural theory to engage with precarity and vulnerability on a conceptual level. Originally written in the wake of the 9/11 attacks and intended as a critique of the ways in which some lives have become more precarious than others in the ensuing wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, Butler's essays have wide-ranging consequences for a philosophy of the subject. They propose a concept of the self that is not autonomous and self-determined but fundamentally dependent on others, not a disembodied inner sense of self but one embodied and embedded in an intersubjective web of relations.

In this chapter, I draw on Butler's subject philosophy to analyze three recent German novels which explore the narrative and aesthetic consequences of precarity and vulnerability in the context of love stories. Thomas Melle's 3000 Euro (2014), Feridun Zaimoglu's Isabel (2014), and Julia Wolf's Alles ist jetzt (Everything is Now, 2013) present us with protagonists on the social margins whose lives are coming apart, who are radically dependent on others.