<p>In a historical present marked by the ascendance of neo-authoritarianisms across the world, we bear witness to a renewed politics of hatred and violence and the heightening of the vulnerability of life. In this context, vulnerability has either been weaponised to justify violent forms of government or critically mobilised to stake a claim for justice, thereby becoming the object of political dispute. Against this backdrop, I explore this neo-authoritarian moment as one that enacts a political aesthetics of cruelty. This political aesthetics, I argue, points to the political capture of a death drive, that is, an inclination to destruction which has made itself available to social mobilisation through the normalisation of murderous hatred and political violence pivoting around the idealisation of sovereignty. In this vein, I examine vulnerability as a concept that foregrounds the relational character of our existence while illuminating the psychic register of relationality that challenges the drive to sovereign mastery and the sovereign self. Ultimately, I ask whether, and under what terms, those instances that invoke the relational dimension of bodily vulnerability can indeed challenge this political aesthetics of cruelty, and what kind of hope they may open.</p>