Of Animacy Reading Group
Debility, Capacity, Disability #4
ONLINE EVENT
15 Mar 2022, 7–8.30pm
ONLINE EVENT
15 Mar 2022, 7–8.30pm
Of Animacy Reading Group convenes online for four monthly gatherings to discuss Jasbir Puar’s book The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability. Each session focuses on one chapter.
The Right to Maim examines the enmeshed social, political, economic and environmental conditions, which debilitate bodies, whilst denying access to care and therefore to what is often understood as ‘good health’. Puar introduces here the notion of slow death – the toll that the ‘ordinary work of living on’ can take under the draining and debilitating conditions of Western neoliberalism.
Pointing to the ways in which capitalism connects ‘wellness’ to our capacity to labour – and prioritises the maximisation of this capacity above necessary life-sustaining care – she argues that in specific contexts debility is a norm rather than an exception, and disability justice must be seen as fundamentally intersectional and incompatible with capitalism and colonialism.
Under discussion:
Jasbir Puar, Chapter 4: ‘"Will Not Let Die": Debilitation and Inhuman Biopolitics in Palestine', The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability (Duke University Press, 2017)
Further reading:
Jasbir Puar, 'Postscript: Treatment without Checkpoints', The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability (Duke University Press, 2017)
For access to the text and further information on the reading group, please email nella[at]nellaaarne.art.
Reading the selected text in advance is recommended but not necessary. Printed copies will be available at the gathering and excerpts of the text will be read together to support open discussion.
Of Animacy meets online every month and is always open to all.
Convened by curator Nella Aarne, Of Animacy Reading Group thinks through feminist engagements with human and non-human agents in the material world, spanning philosophy and science. The texts and discussions meander through a multiplicity of concepts and ways of thinking, developing into a vibrant web of ideas – the shape and character of which will organically unfold over time. Of Animacy fosters learning through open discussion in a democratic space, with an aim to recognise vital alliances for our daily life and political thought.
