Encountering Ability on the Relational Nature of Human Performance 900432321X, 9789004323216

Table of contents :
Encountering Ability: On the Relational Nature of (Human) Performance
Copyright
Dedication
Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction: The Signification of Ability
One: Metaphysics of Ability: The Nature of Performance
1. The Conceptual Environment of Ability
2. Culture, Nature, and Correlative Thinking
3. The Enigma of Generalized Ability
4. Matters of Articulation: Competence,
Performativity, and Imperativity
5. The (Dis)engagement of Signification
with Ethos
6. Internal Difference and Recursivity in Terms and Concepts
Two: On the Origin of (Human) Ability: Language, Possibility, and Ethics
1. Signification as Human Dis/ease
2. Concomitant Potentiality and Impotentiality in Language
3. Biopolitical Articulation and the Production of Ableism
4. The Reflexive Ability of the Post/human
5. Alterity and Ethics in the Encounter of Ability
Three: The Nightmare of Health: Approaching Disability
1. Woundedness as the Disarticulation of
Dis/ability
2. Imagination and Trauma: Signifying the Reality of Ability
3. The Trace of Ability and the Ethics of Disability Studies
4. The Distress of (Studying) Psychic Ability
5. Language Performing the Disability of Ability
6. Blessing and Curse in the Ethics (of Ethics) of Dis/ability
Four: Dis/ability in Black and White: The Relationality of Political Ability
1. Approaching the Naturalization of Political Access
2. The Articulation of Whiteness in Liberal Modernity
3. The Im/possibility of Blackness in the Signification of Subjectivity
4. Awakening to Woundedness: The Trauma of History
5. Engaging Ethics by the Trace of the Color Line
Five: Ability as Response and Irresponsibility: Dialogue and Struggle
1. Response and Irresponsibility in the Context of Interrogation
2. Improvisation as Gesture toward the Ability of Ability
3. Blackness as Engagement of Vocativity
4. Tracing Vocativity in Poetics and Politics
Six: Denatured Criticism: Ethics, Violence, Improvisation between Levinas and Baraka
1. Prelude
2. Theme
3. Fugue
4. Dance
5. Coda
Seven: Encountering Dis/ability in the Work of Marguerite Duras
1. Writing as Opening and Dis/articulation
2. Approaching Differential Ontology by “Everything at Once”
3. The Work and the World: The Performative Space of Ensemble
Notes
Works Cited
About the Author
Index

Citation preview

Encountering Ability

Value Inquiry Book Series Founding Editor Robert Ginsberg Executive Editor Leonidas Donskis

VOLUME 294

Philosophy, Literature, and Politics Edited by Leonidas Donskis J.D. Mininger

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/plp

Encountering Ability On the Relational Nature of (Human) Performance By

Scott DeShong

LEIDEN | BOSTON

Cover illustration: iStock The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available online at http://catalog.loc.gov LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2016946266

Want or need Open Access? Brill Open offers you the choice to make your research freely accessible online in exchange for a publication charge. Review your various options on brill.com/brill-open. Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and download: brill.com/brill-typeface. issn 0929-8436 isbn 978-90-04-32321-6 (paperback) isbn 978-90-04-32653-8 (e-book) Copyright 2016 by Koninklijke Brill nv, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill nv incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Hes & De Graaf, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Rodopi and Hotei Publishing. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill nv provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, ma 01923, usa. Fees are subject to change. This book is printed on acid-free paper and produced in a sustainable manner.

For my parents: Paul Hale DeShong Dolores Lucille (Bogema) DeShong

But most to see with reasonable eyes Of what the mind, of what the soul is made, And what it is so terrible that breaks On us asleep, or waking in disease, Until we seem to mark and hear at hand Dead men whose bones earth bosomed long ago. Lucretius, De Rerum Natura, trans. William Ellery Leonard

So much of love does not yet exist. Lisa Robertson, Occasional Work and Seven Walks from the Office for Soft Architecture

CONTENTS Acknowledgements

xi

Introduction: The Signification of Ability ONE

Metaphysics of Ability: The Nature of Performance 1. The Conceptual Environment of Ability 2. Culture, Nature, and Correlative Thinking 3. The Enigma of Generalized Ability 4. Matters of Articulation: Competence, Performativity, and Imperativity 5. The (Dis)engagement of Signification with Ethos 6. Internal Difference and Recursivity in Terms and Concepts

TWO

On the Origin of (Human) Ability: Language, Possibility, and Ethics 1. Signification as Human Dis/ease 2. Concomitant Potentiality and Impotentiality in Language 3. Biopolitical Articulation and the Production of Ableism 4. The Reflexive Ability of the Post/human 5. Alterity and Ethics in the Encounter of Ability

THREE

The Nightmare of Health: Approaching Disability 1. Woundedness as the Disarticulation of Dis/ability 2. Imagination and Trauma: Signifying the Reality of Ability 3. The Trace of Ability and the Ethics of Disability Studies 4. The Distress of (Studying) Psychic Ability 5. Language Performing the Disability of Ability

1 11 11 14 17 23 27 32 37 37 43 48 51 57 65 65 71 78 82 87

viii 6. Blessing and Curse in the Ethics (of Ethics) of Dis/ability FOUR

Dis/ability in Black and White: The Relationality of Political Ability 1. Approaching the Naturalization of Political Access 2. The Articulation of Whiteness in Liberal Modernity 3. The Im/possibility of Blackness in the Signification of Subjectivity 4. Awakening to Woundedness: The Trauma of History 5. Engaging Ethics by the Trace of the Color Line

FIVE

Ability as Response and Irresponsibility: Dialogue and Struggle 1. Response and Irresponsibility in the Context of Interrogation 2. Improvisation as Gesture toward the Ability of Ability 3. Blackness as Engagement of Vocativity 4. Tracing Vocativity in Poetics and Politics

SIX

Denatured Criticism: Ethics, Violence, Improvisation between Levinas and Baraka 1. Prelude 2. Theme 3. Fugue 4. Dance 5. Coda

SEVEN

Encountering Dis/ability in the Work of Marguerite Duras 1. Writing as Opening and Dis/articulation 2. Approaching Differential Ontology by “Everything at Once”

92 95 95 99 105 111 115 123 123 128 134 139 145 145 145 147 152 159 161 161 164

ix 3. The Work and the World: The Performative Space of Ensemble

169

Notes

173

Works Cited

183

About the Author

203

Index

205

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS For their help and advice in preparing this book for publication, I thank Eric van Broekhuizen, J. D. Mininger, Vincent Luizzi, Leonidas Donskis, Elizabeth Boepple, and Graham Hart. I owe thanks to many other people for help in ways they know and do not know, among whom are Anne Flammang, Bernice Hausman, Susan Huard, Martin Kreiswirth, Fred Moten, Reingard Nethersole, James Peltz, Herman Rapaport, Faye Ringel, Helen Tartar, Peter Vanderveen, and David Zukowski. A version of part of chapter 3 previously appeared as “The Nightmare of Health: Metaphysics and Ethics in the Signification of Disability,” symplokƝ, 15:1–2 (2007), pp. 268–86, published by the University of Nebraska Press.

INTRODUCTION: THE SIGNIFICATION OF ABILITY The notion of ability can appear opaque, or otherwise vague or unclear, when it emerges not only in quotidian thought and language, but also in critical discourse. Instead of attempting to solve the problems with confronting this notion, I take them as given as I focus on the question of signifying ability, which thereby becomes a focus on signification per se, involving the signification of ability and also the ability of signification. To approach ability is to approach what is expressed, often with admitted difficulty, in various terms and by various discourses. Ability is commonly addressed in terms of power, for example, in writing that ranges from ancient mythological and religious texts to modern treatises on political enfranchisement and the distribution of economic means. I approach the concerns raised in such texts, among other issues, through a language that emphasizes ability because of the value in putting this term at the center of my approach, largely for the way the language integrates a set of issues that includes language, power, ethics, politics, and aesthetics. In particular, an emphasis on ability foregrounds key questions about the nature, limit, and conceptual viability of the human—to include the notion of health—which involves questioning the notions of limit, nature, and health and the possibility of expressing such notions.1 When criticism explicitly addresses ability, as occurs in disability studies, often it involves a critique of a lack of questioning, a critique of a tendency to accept the ontology of ability, what in Gilles Deleuze’s terms (which he adapts from Martin Heidegger) is an acceptance of norms as if they were grounded, an acceptance of ability as having normalized existence (Deleuze, 1994, p. 272). Beginning with fundamental ontology in the vein of Heidegger, I develop the questioning of ability by reference to the differential ontology of Deleuze, with support from the thinking of Giorgio Agamben and Emmanuel Levinas. For all four of these philosophers, as for many scholars in disability studies, the importance of signification is central. To emphasize the insufficient questioning of ability is to emphasize that considering ability involves considering signification and vice versa, thereby broaching an interrogation of how signification can take place, an interrogation of the ability of signification; the interrogation involves encountering what Levinas refers to as the “signifyingness of signification” (1998, p. 100). For Heidegger, Agamben, and Deleuze as well as Levinas, focusing on language means engaging the signification of possibility and the possibility of signification, an engagement of the recursive and relational character of language, which entails a formula I express (among other ways) as the ability of ability. Many scholars in disability studies—a field I draw upon, while not locating my work within it—analyze normalizations or idealizations that

2

ENCOUNTERING ABILITY

emerge from expressions of ability, often focusing on specific contexts where inability or disability becomes articulated. Making a generalization, I find the field of disability studies to have developed an inherent interrogation of ability, which is a critical approach not just to the signification of ability but to signification per se and possibility per se. Such a fundamental critique of ability tends to undermine articulations of ability and disability, in a movement that some people working in disability studies would resist (in resistance that does not necessarily undermine a broad attribution of such a movement to the multidisciplinary field). As Petra Kuppers and James Overboe write, introducing an issue on Deleuze of the Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies, “While some scholars find great depth and richness in work that denaturalizes language and bodily experience, some find it too far removed from everyday life” (2009, p. 217). Such denaturalizing work has brought to the field what Robert McRuer—adapting terminology from Judith Butler (1990)—refers to as “ability trouble,” whereby a critique of the nature or foundation of ability’s signification disrupts the critique’s ability of articulating social, political, and ethical concerns (2006, p. 10). I pursue this “trouble,” toward what Tom Shakespeare and Nicholas Watson call “an alternative ontology of [ability, inability, and] disability, which has implications not just for disability studies, but for the broader ways in which sociologists and philosophers conceive of the body” (2001, p. 26). I pursue an interrogation of signification and possibility themselves, and notions of subjectivity and the human, as well as the possibility of politics and ethics, while considering what these notions and possibilities have to do with each other. With a primary focus on ability, I intend to move from a concern, such as that expressed in disability studies, with articulations of health and ability, through a more fundamental concern with the signification of limit and possibility, to an engagement with the signification of possibility and vice versa. Developed mainly from the ideas of Deleuze and Levinas, this is an engagement with the denaturalized and denaturalizing ability of ability. It is a fundamental critique that becomes a critique of foundations, not just interrogating a specific ontology, but approaching the question of ontology per se. The concern with signification leads me to discuss ability in terms of relation—as a matter of response—in terms of signification in a context of what calls for expression, which following Levinas I treat as a context of engaging alterity. Levinas’s thinking develops a primacy of relationality, leading me to interrogate the ontology by which articulations of ability occur, as they occur by a calling into articulation that involves what Maurice Merleau-Ponty refers to as “imperativity” (1968, 1976). The primacy of relationality, for Levinas, may disrupt a sense of unitary ontology, and perhaps emerge as irruptive of ontology per se, as the relationality in signification puts in question any expression of reality, leading me to follow Levinas’s language toward considering ability otherwise than ontologically (in allusion to his Otherwise than Being, 1998). Deleuze develops a priority of differentiality, particularly as he

Introduction

3

examines the history of Western thought concerning the univocity of Being, an examination he conducts mainly through a discussion of Heidegger (Deleuze, 1994, pp. 35–69). For Deleuze, primary differentiality is material, while it involves the emphasis on becoming over being that Friedrich Nietzsche finds in Heraclitus (Nietzsche, 2005, p. 167; Deleuze, 2006, pp. 22–29). I consider the signification of becoming and the becoming of signification in terms of what Deleuze (drawing on the thought of Henri Bergson) calls “virtuality,” which is not immaterial and does merely refer to reality outside itself, but which is “fully real” even as it is a becoming in and of signification (Deleuze, 1994, p. 208). Ability may appear proper to what Levinas calls the “I can” and “at home” of the naturalized human subject (1969, p. 37). Levinas helps put ability in a context of encounter, where it is never possessed by a subject and is not a matter of a subject’s habit or accustomed capability, but instead exceeds subjectivity, raising the question of “the subjectivity of the subject” (1998, p. 14). Interrogating ability through the thought of Levinas entails his notion of the accusative, a shift from active subjectivity to responding and responsibility and what I refer to as a vocative linguistic context. As response to alterity, ability emerges not as teleological, not in response to a known or knowable other, and not in the formation of the naturalized human, let alone the normalized: ability emerges “outside the subject,” to use Levinas’s terms (1993b), and outside any articulation of nature, particularly human nature. I draw on the thinking of Agamben and Deleuze as well as Levinas—and that of Michel Foucault and Butler, and also the psychoanalytical theory of Jacques Lacan— to interrogate the naturalization of ability in terms of subjectivity and the human, naturalization that occurs through the articulation of ability, subjectivity, the human, and nature itself. As I follow Levinas in framing ability in a context of alterity, I raise his primary concern, which is ethics. His placement of significatory relationality prior to being is key to his positioning of ethics as first philosophy, prior to ontology. An alternative (while perhaps similar or complementary) approach to ethics comes from Deleuze, who emphasizes a priority of openness in relations, such that first philosophy in his work (however it might be named) emerges with relationality entailed, where differentiation is emphatic for becoming, always prior to any possible conception of being; as he emphasizes in his study of Benedict de Spinoza, Deleuze finds the ethical inextricable from the ontological (Deleuze, 1988). I draw metaethical considerations from both Deleuze and Levinas, as neither develops a practical ethics. For Deleuze, there is no transcendental good by which to refer questions of ethics; for Levinas, what transcends is an absolute Otherness that is inaccessible except insofar as, in the relational emergence of signification, it is possible to glimpse a withdrawing trace of what would have been an encounter with the Other.

4

ENCOUNTERING ABILITY

Thus my engagement of ethics involves the problems with signification that are involved in encountering the notion of ability, entailing disruption of expressions of nature or reality. They are problems of how articulations emerge and are maintained by various imperatives, imperatives that often appear inherent in social, cultural, and political contexts. As indicated by the title of chapter 1, “Metaphysics of Ability,” I approach problems of signification as problems of metaphysics, although it may seem appropriate to use an alternative term—for instance “biosemiosis”—to avoid privileging a (Western) philosophical tradition, and/or to follow a shift in some quarters toward replacing physics with biology as the foundational science, while recognizing the emphasis on concretization in “new materialism” and “new vitalism” and also engaging with speculative realism and object-oriented ontology.2 Still, the legacy of linguistic and political thought developed in terms of metaphysics remains profoundly influential for criticism, especially as such thought concerns the relationality and recursivity of signification. The interrogation of ability remains a struggle with articulations of what is real, with what Heidegger considers in his approach to the Greek word physis, a key term in the history of engaging thought and language in the Western world that involves a confluence of implications it takes a variety of English words to express, including nature, reality, being, essence, encounter, possibility, power, and indeed ability. Levinas writes that “as critique precedes dogmatism, metaphysics precedes ontology” (1969, p. 43), and I follow the implication— found also in Deleuze and Heidegger—that metaphysics is not a foundational discourse, but the priority of interrogation for discourse: it involves a questioning of the signification of signification, questioning entailed by ethics, politics, disability, and the other specific discourses I focus on in the following chapters.3 I embrace the rethinking of materiality, agency, categorization, and other critical functions that takes place through shifting away from the language of metaphysics, yet I continue the emphasis on interrogating the significatory implications of metaphysics that such shifting does not avoid. My first two chapters cover much of the foregoing material in greater detail, focusing on the key figures I have mentioned (except Lacan, whose work I take up in chapter 3) and setting up the discussions of the chapters that follow. Chapter 1 begins with basic questioning, to establish some dimensions of the notion of ability before advancing gradually to problems I frame in terms of the sociocultural framework of ability, the phenomenology of ability, and the signification of ability, building terminology that carries through the subsequent chapters. I develop largely phenomenological phrasing that helps coordinate language, ethics, politics, and aesthetics while producing a critique of the naturalization of the human, emphasizing the enigmatically circular process of naturalization inherent in signification. The focus on naturalization leads into the reflexive, recursive, counter-foundational formulations of the ability of ability, the signification of signification, and the nature of nature, as I approach a notion of performativity that exceeds articulation and naturaliza-

Introduction

5

tion. Such formulations ally with my effort to push or bend the terms of various discourses (and those of specific thinkers) as I tend toward moments of fissility by which, logically and terminologically, some discourses begin to conflate. As it focuses on denaturalization, chapter 1 addresses the humanness of the human while considering the relationship between signification and the human; chapter 2 more fully develops these matters. Conceived of as linguistic and internally divided, entailing inherent self-critique, the human as such undermines its foundation, so what exceeds or supersedes the human is integral to human ability, ability emerging as naturalization that is simultaneously the denaturalization of such ability and as performativity that exceeds any articulation of competence. The posthuman arises already with any notion of human origin, as is developed in the work of N. Katherine Hayles (1999), Neil Badmington (2003), and Ivan Callus and Stefan Herbrechter (2007). 4 Hayles writes that (post)human signification, or “significance,” emerges as a “system” that can “instantiate metaphors for [a larger and unknowable] complexity” that is “unthinkable in itself” (p. 286), such that in its definitional signification of itself and its world, humanity is always inconsistent with itself, its defining capability being ability that is inability. Chapter 2 develops its approach to human signification by beginning with Agamben’s consideration of potentiality and actuality in Aristotle’s thinking and moving through Agamben’s discussion of Heidegger’s treatment of the human in terms of “the open.” My discussion involves Agamben’s and Deleuze’s readings of the concomitant potentiality and impotentiality legible in the eponymous character of Herman Melville’s “Bartleby.” Also in chapter 2, I frame the emergence of ableism in terms of biopolitics—“ableism” being a term I adopt outside its function in disability discourse—and I discuss the possibility of ethical response, drawing mainly on the work of Agamben and Levinas. In chapters 3 through 5, I approach ability using language pertaining to several discourses—the most important one continuing to be the discourse concerning signification itself—to examine the relevance of the notion of ability for the various discourses. I mean to avoid deploying metaphor and analogy throughout, however impossible it is to remain faithful to such an intention. Attempting to work against metaphoricity, I continue to focus on the difficulty, indeed the internal impossibility, that a consideration of signification brings to the question of ability. For approaching all that ability involves, I wish to accomplish for ability something similar to what Susan Sontag intends for cancer and other illness: “Not to confer meaning, which is the traditional purpose of literary endeavor, but to deprive something of meaning” (1990, p. 102). In ways related to maintaining the focus on signification, each of the three chapters negotiates the difficulty of considering ethics in terms of the material the chapter addresses. Chapter 3 turns specifically to the study of disability, to develop the interrogation of ability in a way that illuminates implications for disability stud-

6

ENCOUNTERING ABILITY

ies. I examine more fully the movement beyond a dialectic between ability and disability and into ramifications of writing “dis/ability” and other terms with a virgule, which gestures toward what is entailed by signification while it escapes signification. From chapter 1 on, indeed, the interpenetration and recursion entailed by the virgule are endemic to the encounter of ability and inability and disability. Sharon Snyder, Brenda Jo Brueggemann, and Rosemarie GarlandThomson consider disability “a fundamental human experience” and “the ubiquitous unspoken topic of contemporary culture” (2002b, p. 2), which is accurately stated but oblique, as the reverse is more significant: ability is the predominant topic they refer to, a topic not only difficult to recognize and to speak, but perhaps a topic that is unspeakable. The study of disability tends generally to suggest this reversal, while often explicitly reversing the way sociocultural articulations appear to work, such as when disability critiques seek to expose reification. The theoretical study of disability largely concerns the assumption of ability, focusing on ableist assumptions that emerge constantly, by which behaviors and conditions appear as if they were real or natural. Confronting discourses about defective eyes or legs, for example, or about mental or emotional affliction—features that putatively cause one’s inability to see or walk or cope—disability critiques tend to show that in articulations of ability, seeing, walking, and coping are themselves being defined and thus emerge as at best interpretations of the supposed psychosomatic realities, realities revealed to emerge posterior to the always ad hoc, if naturalized and thereby powerful, interpretive terms. Insofar as the study of disability becomes itself caught up in such a reversal, such study becomes defined according to what it does: not primarily concerned with the body or the mind, nor with defined impairments, but instead with the discourse of the possible and the sociocultural context and ramifications of such discourse. Considering ability primary in physical, psychological, and political terms is to seek questions of ability prior to those of articulation, prior to questions of social or cultural construction, or ethos—prior to what, drawing on Lacan, I refer to as the sociocultural imaginary. As I discuss the conditions of articulation of identity in chapter 4, the problem of signification emerges prior to articulation, prior to the point at which constructions can be taken as such. Focusing on Enlightenment thinking, I consider political ability as political signification prior to identity, prior to epistemology, before the articulation of the human; what is articulated as identity can always be read as a matter of ability. An approach to the signification of ability will express any articulation of personal or social advantage in terms of ableism. The interrogation of ability involves a discourse by which to consider the emergence of liberty as expressed for variously articulated moments of identity, a discourse that may derive from the specific language of such moments—for example, the language of race, sexuality, or economic opportunity—as well as articulations of the human and humanity. A discourse engaging ability becomes a

Introduction

7

means of approaching the instability of identity, as the instability of identity opens an approach to the relational and responsive context of the interrogation of ability. Among the discourses by which I engage ability is the literary and philosophical language of doubled or recursive selves or souls, involving the double voiced, heteronomic disruption of any potentially totalized soul or subject, such as the liberal subject often characterized in terms of whiteness, the American instantiation of which I discuss by drawing on Toni Morrison and Ralph Ellison. An attention to doubling emphasizes the dialogism of ability in a vocative context, where voice exceeds not only position but language, as ability exceeds sayability. That W. E. B. DuBois developed such dialogism while focusing on race in a United States context leads me, in chapter 4, to engage terms of race as a way of interrogating ability, in DuBois’s case involving the question of political ability. I do not invoke discourses of race and ability that comment on one another, and I do not apply questions of ability to the issue of race; the discourse on race is a discourse by which the interrogation of ability takes place. Chapter 4’s engagement of doubled consciousness and redoubled memory, approached through discourse on race, is essential for my engagement of ability in terms of political subjectivity. The development of political ability leads me to address political and other dimensions of response and irresponsibility in chapter 5. The approach to signification in terms of response makes this chapter an alternative beginning for a consideration of ability, perhaps a place for some readers to turn early in the process of navigating the book (the subsequent, final chapters also help frame the earlier material, and other parts of the book also inexplicitly cross-refer). I engage ability through a consideration of dialogism and improvisation, improvisation as response that exceeds contexts of identity and linguistic, musical, and liturgical grammar—as an expressive exceeding of the ableism of identification and established organization. When Amiri Baraka, Fred Moten, and Nathaniel Mackey each discuss such improvisational excess as a matter of blackness—as I extend a black/white dynamic developed in chapter 4 from the work of Morrison, Ellison, DuBois, and Homi K. Bhabha—the language of race engages ability other than ableism, ability as relation and response outside any ontology of racial articulation. Through chapters 4 and 5, blackness emerges not only as unsignified and unsignifiable, but moreover as un/signification (and ir/responsibility) as such: as a moment in (human) signification toward which resistance to dominant sociopolitical articulation can gesture, albeit a moment that emerges otherwise than actually (in terms of Agamben’s treatment of potentiality versus actuality). Also in chapter 5, I engage linguistic ability through a discourse on cursing—having raised the topic in chapter 3, with reference to Agamben’s work and to the psychic and religious dimensions of cursing—by which cursing is language beside itself, involving vocativity disruptive of other grammatical cases (observations I develop by drawing on

8

ENCOUNTERING ABILITY

Levinas and Catherine Pickstock). For example, abusive and abused language can emerge as oppressed or of the oppressed, of the “othered,” a term Mackey uses in theorizing language as a violent response to oppression, a response he articulates in a racial context (1992). At the outset of chapter 6, I state my intent in the chapter to perform a critical engagement that largely cannot succeed, setting up an attempt at what I refer to as concomitant ability and inability. The chapter continues the discussion of Baraka from chapter 5 and relates his work with that of Levinas, while also developing chapter 5’s emphases on improvisation (especially in jazz), political activism, and religiosity. Posed as a piece of Western music that includes improvisation, the discussion begins by invoking the terms of ethics, considered part of philosophy and the domain of Levinas, although later the discussion undermines the appropriateness of assuming such a framework. The chapter then attempts to carry out its engagement of Levinas and Baraka, yet the effort runs into difficulty at various turns and—by the end of the middle section—becomes muddled or maddened, in a psychic and logical fugue. The subsequent section develops the idea of a field or ensemble in which the discourses of Baraka and Levinas dwell in more or less mutual opposition to assimilation, or logos, or philosophy: in a relational context by which their proximity might be maintained, while no essence or identity of either discourse is articulated. The chapter considers various implications of the encounter, addressing questions of violence and passivity and the operation of the gift. The final chapter, number 7, turns from performative to more conventional criticism, approaching dynamics of control and abandon by addressing the film and theatrical works of Marguerite Duras’s “India cycle.” I discuss how authorial intentions and techniques exceed themselves, as they move in the direction of what Duras calls “writing”—in resonance with what Jacques Derrida refers to as “arche-writing” (1976)—a notion through which I focus on questions of signification central to the previous chapters. In the “writing” of these plays and films, voice-overs and voice-offs take up narrative and authorial valence in ways that open a work to what exceeds it. Diegesis becomes overwhelmed by a surfeit of referentiality from within and without the putative space of stage or screen. In commentary that undermines itself as well as the development of authority in the works, Duras locates the work of art variously in the spectator’s “‘internal reading’ voice” (1976a, p. 49), the “echo chamber” of the work, and the “darkroom” of aesthetic production (Duras and Gauthier, 1987, p. 140). A flooding between world and work occurs, as the never-complete work becomes a “failed project” (Duras et al., 1987, p. 16). A simultaneity of possibility and impossibility in signification traverses the work, gesturing toward a fundamentality of non-foundation. Authorial techniques and abilities surrender their control, and moreover they participate in a broader surrender of technique per se and ability per se, which becomes technical, authorial, and ultimately significatory inability in the moment of abil-

Introduction

9

ity—a moment by which Duras’s work is capable of its impotentiality, to recall Agamben’s readings of Melville and Aristotle (1999g). As I address various discourses across the chapters, the interrogation of ability may seem a discourse foundational for other ones, yet it remains a discourse of non-foundation, and thus it is not so much a discourse as an opening onto a field in which various discourses participate. Discourses such as those of disability, blackness in a United States context, and Levinasian ethics are self-interrogational as they engage the excess and inter- (and intra-) relationality of signification that the interrogation of ability entails. The term “dis/ability” approaches the interrogativity, the simultaneous possibility and impossibility of ability, which is the im/possibility involved in the various discourses that I discuss and which (I hope) are nevertheless able to voice themselves in my text. While not of my coinage, dis/ability is my term for what emerges when one pursues the question of ability through discourses of margin and center regarding putative (human) performativity, in/articulable performativity. The virgule helps express the point that, to draw again from Levinas, what can be apprehended of ability is only a sense of its trace.5 There is much one could say regarding ability that I do not, and I will not attempt the impossible task of tying up loose ends. Toward closing the introduction, I wish only to discuss my use of “we” and its related cases across the chapters. Whereas the collective “we” is a staple of philosophical discourse, I expect my text to work against some implications of such discourse. I note that for literary theory, which engages its ability partly by emphasizing the inexplicit, pronouns and positions come voiced as personae. Levinas writes that “the collectivity in which I say ‘you’ or ‘we’ is not a plural of the ‘I.’. . . We are the same and the other” (1969, p. 39). Reading such supposedly plural pronouns in my text, readers might encounter a certain dispossession, as the writing begins to develop a redefinitional pressure on such terms. A critique of naturalization often requires one to see terms becoming defined as they emerge, instead of thinking of how they are deployed, such that the logic of predication is reversed from the way it might otherwise be conceived—as I have discussed above concerning the functioning of disability criticism—involving a reconception of linguistic cause and effect and a recognition of linguistic prosthesis. For example, in the common remark that a particular trait “makes us human,” we can read desire for a category covered by the term “human” that involves the postulated trait: the remark is legible as not an observation of how things stand, but as an attempted definition, as the speaker expresses a desire that the term of focus involve the trait she or he has in mind. The phrase “God is good,” rather than observing and indicating an attribute of an existing entity called “God,” instead conceives and expresses a desired attribute—in this case, a broad attribute of “goodness” in the speaker’s world—and refers to it in such a way that it becomes definitional for the term, producing a conception of an entity thereby named God in which the attribute is claimed to inhere (whether or not personification is involved).

10

ENCOUNTERING ABILITY

From Eternity to Here, a popular book about physics by Sean Carroll, provides another example and (in a separate instance) an explanation of this definitional process. Carroll writes, “It’s perfectly obvious that there are no paradoxes in the real world; the interesting question is how Nature manages to avoid them” (2010, p. 392, n. 83). Various terms are being defined in the context of this sentence, one of which is “Nature,” which here signifies that aspect of the “real world” by which paradoxes do not occur, Nature (or nature) being the term whereby (according to physics) we name the principle of the absence of paradoxes, while also agency arises for nature in the attribution of an ability to “manage.” Following Carroll, we become interested not only in physical and mathematical interrelationships and realities, but also social and linguistic ones. He also comments on how the notion of time, in reference to the physical world, attaches to aspects of change, having no literal reference (and having been superseded in physics by spacetime); in physics and otherwise (as Heidegger addresses in Being and Time, 1962), “time” is being defined in every instance of its use, or its meaning is derived from each use. Carroll observes, “Concepts like ‘time’ are not handed to us unambiguously by the outside world but are invented by human beings trying to make sense of the universe” (2010, p. 19; this applies also for terms that indicate positions in space). Indeed, the invention is always under way, although it tends to go unrecognized, the moment of signification being forgotten, as Heidegger says the fundamental question of Being is forgotten in the mundane approach to ways of being, or as Levinas depicts the “saying” of language as being lost in the articulation of “the said” (Levinas, 1998, pp. 5–7). Encounters of confluent predicative function are basic in language acquisition, and indeed in the development of any linguistic sign, although an imperative of competence tends to articulate and fix terms as one gains linguistic ability, or rather as one gains access to linguistic ableism. Thus toward becoming more critically adept, while also overcoming critical facility toward a trace of what exceeds it, we begin the following chapter by focusing on basics.

One METAPHYSICS OF ABILITY: THE NATURE OF PERFORMANCE 1. The Conceptual Environment of Ability Ability may seem simple when a reference to it is specific: for instance, when focusing on an individual by asking whether one is able to see, read, sleep, breathe (perhaps on one’s own), speak, fly a jet, or run a four-minute mile, and even in more complex cases such as asking whether one can write, think, love, relax, receive (or give) pleasure, make $500,000 per year, or govern. Answering such queries, however, involves recognizing whether an act—or state of being, or experience—has been or could be completed or accomplished, which is to say known and perhaps measured, in some cases concerning a goal or some other thing that is accessed. These terms are posed without much or any modification; we are not yet asking, for example, whether something is done well or badly. Still, we find that any expression of ability requires contextualization and qualification. As early as Aristotle, in extant writing in the Western world, it appears necessary to explicate context when considering ability, such as in Aristotle’s Metaphysics: “what is capable is capable of something at some time and in some way, and whatever other qualifications must be added in the definition” (1984, sec. 1048a). It seems ability requires qualification and context to be comprehensible—that it must be in some way determinable, if not yet categorized, so that we may consider it real. To take an ostensibly simple case, we could ask what it means to say one can walk. We might describe some people as walking regularly or whenever they wish, and others as never walking or being unable to walk to accomplish particular ends, yet there are cases where one does not quite walk, or walks with difficulty, or is unable to accomplish what she or he might desire by walking. When we refer to an ability to walk, we usually mean something like walking well, without help and without difficulty, or without excessive difficulty, and walking that permits various ends to be accomplished. We have both an expectation of minimal ability and a vague maximum, such that an expression of the ability to walk means ability to do what is typically referred to as normal walking. It does not mean walking indefinitely, or up and over a mountain: as with many cases of ability, the parameters of access can be fairly easy to meet. A wide range of gaits may be accommodated in a conception of walking, although at the edges of the range, some kinds of bipedal mobility may appear too eccentric to be included, or

12

ENCOUNTERING ABILITY

the amount of time one can spend walking or the distance covered is too little. We might insinuate the marginality by saying someone cannot really walk. Whether the edges of the range shift or are disagreed upon, a principle of centering the range is at work in determining what it means to say one is able to walk. We tend to think much as Boethius does in The Consolation of Philosophy, when in discussing ability as power and emphasizing the example of walking, he focuses on “natural” walking—more or less centralized, or ideal, or what we might consider metaphysical walking (1962, sec. IV.2). Even in focusing on cases where we derive ability empirically from past action that we find ourselves comfortable determining, deriving conceptions from what comes handy or zuhanden in Martin Heidegger’s terminology (1962, p. 98), we will discover a considerably qualified, contextualized notion of what constitutes the act.1 From such cases—for example, from the observation that a person has always accomplished whatever she or he has needed and desired to do by walking—arriving at a statement of ability involves a prediction based on the accomplishment of the act, assuming extension of the qualified context across time. To speak of one’s ability, we must conceive a subject and a world that continue to be engaged such that the subject continues to accomplish the act, or at least it continues to be possible that the subject will accomplish it. This means assuming continuity in the world, assuming a continuing possibility of the act’s occurring in the world, while placing the emphasis of possibility on the subject’s accomplishment. Commonly, ability is assumed to inhere in the subject and not primarily in the world; the assumption is essential to what is known as the medical model of disability. We are compelled to develop a concept of walking that depends on framing the act in a world, to use a term Heidegger considers for the way, especially in modernity, we engage any thing or idea (1977). When recognizing the frame, we find we are observing not only the act, but also the world in which it takes place and that constitutes the qualified context. We posit the empirical act of walking, and what it means to walk in the world, and also what the world is that the conception of walking in it makes. By thinking of walking in a world, we make the world, developing the world and conferring reality on it by thinking it. There is the world we make by walking in it, to the extent we can walk—a proprioceptive world, to use the terminology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1968)—and the world made by thinking about what walking is, and there is walking, which also, insofar as we can talk about it or have an idea of the ability to do it, is walking made by our thinking of it. We also make any walking subject, in whom the ability to walk inheres, in a reflexive making, by which our subjectivity consists as something that thinks and makes, whether we consider any moment of subjectivity to function individually or socially. The thinking supports the medical model insofar as thought finds an act the property of a subject, in whom the narrowing, or averaging or abstracting, from the range of acts of possible mobility becomes focused into a predominant conception of the ability to walk. We may be

Metaphysics of Ability

13

more concerned with the subject than the ability, and more concerned with access than ability per se, such that perhaps through a conception that focuses on the subject, the consideration of ability primarily emphasizes access to an order of the world. In any case, as we conceive of qualification and context, positing a world, we situate a subject by reference to which we express the possibility of an ability’s engagement in a world. As we address other examples of what one may be able to do, we similarly find that contexts need to be developed and qualifications made, and that abstractions tend to be performed. Perhaps thinking about any case of ability will compel us to relate the context of a subject to an averaged or normalized notion of the act, experience, or state of being as we make an assumption that the ability—not to mention its context or performing subject—is real. Not always, however, do we or can we refer to an accomplished act in conceiving of an ability. Making a certain amount of money on a particular transaction might not have a prior basis, nor might breaking a running speed record, among things we may be confident about their ability to take place. Even notions of abilities that have occurred will engage us in evaluation and are often based on imagination and interpretation—for example, having loved, maintained personal hygiene, managed one’s money well, or thought clearly. These depend on what interpretive framework we use and must be subject to interpretation. Indeed, much of what we consider abilities cannot be determined by empirical reference. As we think or talk about walking, the dimensions of this act—like those of any ability—become and remain matters of possibility, not quite actuality, or to use Gilles Deleuze’s term, they are virtual, which he prefers to “possible” as he intends by “virtual” to indicate what is “fully real” (1994, pp. 208, 211). Insofar as thinking aggregates and abstracts, it may be difficult not to assume a trans-subjective category for walking, and perhaps difficult thereby not to generalize walking, as well as the subject and some characteristics of the world, into something transcendental. The process of abstraction involves, at least to an extent and perhaps inevitably, forgetting the contextual and contingent aspect, the processual nature, of the emergence in thinking of what we recognize—what we name, represent, or signify—as walking, let alone involving a lack of recognition that the process of abstraction takes place. Recognizing the role of thought in the development of the world turns us to phenomenology, as the critical moment of philosophy, mainly a legacy of Immanuel Kant. It is a moment by which thinking recognizes its implication in what it encounters as reality, if not necessarily recognizing the social and cultural location of what may otherwise seem to be individualized subjective thinking, nor fully engaging how thinking centers and privileges itself amidst the process of encounter.

14

ENCOUNTERING ABILITY 2. Culture, Nature, and Correlative Thinking

Work in the social sciences often considers the shape of the world in the context of a subject’s ability, as the world and the subject appear constructed, in a model of determinative influence: abilities entail acts, experiences, or states of being in a context of world and subject by which the ability is the product of a sociality that appears to subtend the subject. Differing from a perspective by which ability would inhere in the subject, ability in this view—if not necessarily an act itself—appears to inhere primarily in the world. A social model of disability operates with such assumptions, by which a critique develops of how certain abilities, typically expressed in terms of access, become normalized and desired. Largely developed in Great Britain beginning in the 1960s (the term “social model” being established later by Mike Oliver, 1983), this model involves a critique to counteract the prevailing medical model whereby a normalized set of human parameters had come to determine what in the subject is deficient, abnormal, defective, and requiring correction—a model considered to have stigmatized disability by treating it according to medical precepts and methodology. Social approaches to ability tend to develop a particular notion of the subject, as does the implication of subjective autonomy inherent in the medical model (although the two approaches are not necessarily incompatible). The social model emphasizes that thinking of the subject as autonomously responsible, with ability as its property, has emerged through a specific historical development in the Western world. A third perspective (for the sake of additional contrast, not to imply a complete set of models or to distinguish the third fully from either of the other two) is what we could call a religious view, in which ability is the property of the divine, whether this means the divine is immanent in world, act, and subject or transcendent and perhaps conferring ability on the subject. In the case of any of these three views, a generalization of ability, a notion of ability per se, emerges from a mode of thinking about possible ability that produces a reality of ability as not only an articulation regarding specific events or beings. In each approach to the question of the subject in the world, we find a gathering of specific abilities under generalization, such that the generalization develops notions of humanity, or human nature, that entail—perhaps more in the religious view, less in the sociological— notions of different, or deviant, or unnatural human behaviors, experiences, or states of being. Thus for each perspective on ability, there is naturalization of human ability, involving relationships between subject and world, besides the development of any normalized categories of particular abilities. The largely sociological configuration of the nature of ability, as property of the world, provides an example of how to think beyond the normalization of ability and thereby beyond the development of categories or standards of abilities. As happens when we view categories of antisocial behavior as proper to the social environment instead of (or instead of exclusively) the

Metaphysics of Ability

15

individual, we can view other categories of what can be accomplished or experienced as categories proper to a social or cultural context. This configuration exposes the naturalization of individuality as particular to the social context in which it occurs, while also historically localizing and thereby denaturing the moralizing tendencies of certain versions of the religious view, such as ones that locate culpability in the individual and thereby insinuate personal responsibility for indicated deviance, deformity, or impairment. A sociological perspective shows not only supposedly moral activity, but also concepts of physical and mental ability, developing in social and cultural contexts: categorical notions of mobility, perception, hygiene, and other articulations of ability develop amid social and linguistic interaction. For example, much more than a numerical preponderance of those who see over those who are considered blind is involved in the conception of seeing as both normal and natural. There is a sociocultural privileging of particular ways of operating visually in the world, ways of gaining access to what is valued in a society. Various discourses, practices, and modes of thought—such as scientific and medical language and practice in the Western world, as Georges Canguilhem discusses (1989)—powerfully influence normalizations of various aspects and instances of ability, in a trend of normalization that involves an emphasis on the responsibility of the subject for itself. Across his work, Michel Foucault performs a critique of such normalization, as does Judith Butler, perhaps most influentially in Gender Trouble (1990), which Robert McRuer draws on in developing the term “ability trouble” (2006, p. 10) in his discussion of resistance to normalizations of ability (resistance McRuer discusses in terms of “noncompliance,” pp. 103–45).2 Approaching a given instance of social or cultural articulation, social critique can identify normalization whereby a subtensive naturalization takes place; the critique locates idealization or ideology that those who accept the normalization take as an ontological basis. We recognize that naturalization involves a claim of the natural, a claim put forth in language that under interrogation proves complicit in the creation of the natural, the complicity thereby undermining the claim. Any claim regarding nature will abstract the essence it seeks to establish, abstracting an essence from observations of behavior, states, and experience—abstracting, for instance, an articulation of material from materiality. Naturalization usually involves an appeal to commonality or generality, as in developing a category of the human, or at least an appeal to some sense of being, such as individual being like the human subject, framing a reality of subjective ability. In naturalization, the interanimate making that emerges amid thought and reality is reduced in a claim that thought has accessed and identified reality; insofar as we invoke such a claim, we fail to observe the context in which each emerges as contingent and in contingent relation with the other. In phenomenology since Kant, Quentin Meillassoux observes, thinking can recognize its role in the process of encountering and making, while still not grasping the extent to which the recognition—as ac-

16

ENCOUNTERING ABILITY

cess to the process of access and making—remains complicit in privileging the world, object, and subject as they are expressed in the process and in privileging its role in their expression. There is privileging, and exclusion, by which we do not recognize that the articulation between thought and reality is all we are accessing and indeed all we are claiming to access (2009, p. 5). Such limited recognition involves what Meillassoux calls “correlationism,” “the correlation between thinking and being” (2009, p. 5). The limitation centers on what Walter Benjamin refers to as “technology,” “mastery not of nature but mastery of the relation between nature and humanity” (1996, p. 487). As a reduction of encounter, correlationism eclipses the contingency of thought and world. A sense of such contingency emphasizes that the engagement or framing of the world, as Heidegger observes, occurs in a context of incommensurability, where any engagement between thought and world involves moments of relationality that we cannot claim to be fully accomplished.3 Moments of access, becoming claims of access, obscure the relationality per se of relating. To unbind thinking from naturalization would mean disarticulating relations between (or among) thought and objects, and decoupling relation from necessity, toward opening relation beyond correlation and moving toward a fissuring within relation—a fissuring we can consider insofar as we recognize relationality to be internally relational, involving a recursivity of relationality that we may term the relationality of relation (a notion I draw primarily from the work of Emmanuel Levinas, particularly Otherwise than Being, 1998). Deleuze seeks to overcome correlationist privileging by engaging the recursive relation of access itself, the internal relationality of accessing to accessing and accessibility (1994). He thereby engages the contingency and processuality of access between thinking and world and emphasizes the implications of such contingency for the development of reality in thinking, which includes the thinking of ability and the ability of thinking. By such engagement, any moment of correlation becomes legible as also a moment of discorrelation. Emphasizing the relationality of relations amid subjects, objects, and activity, Deleuze and Meillassoux develop what we might consider a materialist or vitalist approach to access, or a practice of object-oriented ontology; they develop an approach that decenters not just the thinking subject, but moreover various assumptions concerning a centrality of thinking, language, and the human. Put broadly, social critique reveals that naturalization not only involves a basis for the truth of normalizations, where they occur, but also produces an assumed reality to which thinking is correlated, producing a basis not only for the results of thinking, but also for thinking itself that takes place in a sociocultural instance. The critique denatures the correlation by which thinking and reality are naturalized. The critique of naturalization extends to the social approach itself, insofar as the approach requires thinking by the basic assumptions of the approach, by which thinking becomes articulated in terms of the social—assumptions Tom Shakespeare and Nicholas Watson engage as they

Metaphysics of Ability

17

question the efficacy, for disability studies, of the social model of disability (2001). Applying denaturalization to sociological denaturing, we turn from an emphasis on the constitution of ability in sociocultural terms and toward considering ability—any specific ability and ability in general—as emerging with the contingent thought of it, with the thought of the act and of the world and the subject, without sociocultural determination as a basis (or even undetermined or non-determining society or culture). While neither the divine nor the subject emerges as the origin or proper locus and reality of what we think of as ability, neither does the social or cultural serve as a basis for access to the reality of ability. 3. The Enigma of Generalized Ability As normalization comes under critique in the social model of disability, specific kinds of ability are revealed to have become emphasized or privileged in sociocultural contexts, according to historically produced articulation. Walking, for example, becomes normalized as a certain kind of practice, inherent in the subject but also in the world, as various aspects of the world and the subject—such as ways of, and expectations concerning, one’s engagement of others in public spaces—are recognized as normal, through processes of qualification and centering. Without this normalization, according to the critique, it would be difficult for a sense of non-normality or abnormality to arise. Without deviations from normalized or idealized abilities, which typically means deviation from modes of access and thus from features thought to inhere in the world, there could be no conception of inability or disability. There would be no impairment because there would be nothing by which to relate it, but only differentiality, as is insinuated by terminology emphasizing people who are “differently abled,” perhaps the most salient contemporary example being the articulation of Deaf culture as having a modality different from that of hearing culture. The expression of how well one can walk becomes less meaningful; how well one can move, more generally, might be the more germane matter, or just how one moves, focusing on means without any consideration of quality or facility, and moreover no assumed correspondence between what different subjects can access. Without any norm or naturalization having been developed, and moreover in resistance to developing categories of ability, any discussion of impairment would become much different from the way it emerges within categorical thinking, so that “inability” and “disability” become terms that do not make sense, as non-naturalized ability does not entail opposing articulation. One might desire a movement, act, experience, state of being, or other ability that one could not achieve, hence developing a category of impairment regarding a specific articulation of access or ability, yet without naturalizations of subject and world, the locus of impairment in the subject or world would be difficult to pursue.

18

ENCOUNTERING ABILITY

While questioning how specific kinds of ability could emerge without naturalization, we are considering what it means to encounter such an idea or entity as ability in general. We question our ability to confront ability, questioning the ability of ability to be, to take place, or to function, considering whether we can grasp a reality of ability and thereby inability or disability. We move toward a field where the recognition and signification of ability are not centered or stable. Applying the correlationist critique to all naturalization, and the possibility of naturalization, undermines contexts or foundations for comprehending ability, as any possible relation to ability involves primary differentiality and interanimate relationality. We find difference to be primary, consisting with sameness and logically preceding naturalizations of sameness or unity. We approach ability differentially and encounter the differentiality of ability, approaching an undetermined range of performativity between world and subject, performativity that permeates world and subject, without principles of centering or limit, without categorization. This approach may appear radically empirical, to use a term from William James that is often applied to Deleuze’s thought. In his analysis of repetition, drawing on Friedrich Nietzsche’s treatment of eternal return (1968), Deleuze writes, “difference must be articulation and connection in itself; it must relate different to different without any mediation whatsoever. . . . There must be a differentiation of difference, an in-itself which is like a differenciator”: that is, there must be differentiation internal to difference, by which difference is different from itself while never collapsing into “resemblance, identity, analogy, or opposition” (Deleuze, 1994, p. 117). Deleuze develops the difference of difference, the relation and relationality of difference amidst itself, through a consideration of the difference between specific beings and the possibility or virtuality of Being as such or in general—considering, that is, what Heidegger refers to as ontological difference. In the postscript to “What Is Metaphysics?” Heidegger expresses such difference relationally, distinguishing (in terms of how they are disclosed) what specifically “is” from “that which never and nowhere ‘is’” (1970, p. 353), addressing the latter (Being) as involving “Nothing,” which “is more original than the Not and negation” (p. 331). Deleuze develops his approach to ontology by emphasizing this relationality that Heidegger finds pre-originary both to beings and negation. Deleuze refers to Being, which he prefers to express as (non)Being, as “the differenciator of difference” and “the being of questions,” as he focuses on the “between” of ontological difference—“not ‘between’ in the ordinary sense of the word,” but what Deleuze takes from Heidegger’s thought as “the [two]Fold, Zweifalt,” which is “constitutive of Being and of the manner in which Being constitutes being, in the double movement of ‘clearing’ and ‘veiling’” (1994, pp. 65–66, citing Heidegger, 1973). The primary relationality of relationality—primary differentiality amidst Being, what Deleuze calls “stubborn differenciation” (p. 65)—for

Metaphysics of Ability

19

Deleuze as for Heidegger emerges as a foundation that is not a foundation, a basis for ontology that is not a basis, a (non)foundation of reality. In the introduction to a journal issue engaging the thought of Deleuze with disability studies, Petra Kuppers and James Overboe write that Deleuze’s “work de-naturalizes language and bodily experience” in ways that open to conceptual, experiential, and terminological indeterminacy (2009, p. 217). Opening to difference privileges performativity over any abstraction or articulation of performance, privileging performativity over comprehended meaning, which includes privileging differentiation over any assumption of (subjective) identity and functioning. In terms borrowed from Canguilhem’s analysis of biology (1989), denaturalization permits us conceptually to privilege error over systematic or normal functioning, privileging adaptation over normalization and undermining any basis for deviation, privileging differentiation over assumptions of totalizing order in the world. What we might consider accessed by any subject will occur as it occurs, strictly or radically empirically, the category of the accessible not preexisting any ability that finds and makes whatever emerges as access. Desire may articulate an approach to access, yet in any case access will not emerge from a categorical implication that one subject’s ability is like another’s or from assumptions concerning the order of the world. In this vein, we can attempt to consider ability without abstraction, as emerging in a world not taken as a context of conditioning by abstractions of what is performed: a world not entailed by the abstraction we typically understand ability (and specific abilities) to have become. It is a world not entailed by abstraction that, as Heidegger depicts one mode of access, is vorhanden, present at hand theoretically, involving assumptions of function in a determined and determining world. We recognize the incomprehensibility of denatured ability—as Deleuze, drawing from the Ethics of Benedict de Spinoza (1996), considers how bodily (and other) capability “surpasses the knowledge we have of it” (1988, p. 18). Most discourse about ability does not resemble language that foregrounds ability’s enigmaticity. Expressed desire for access almost always responds to naturalizations already articulated and assumed in a society or culture, desire in turn producing calls for accommodation so that a broader range of subjects may attain what are referred to as mobility, perception, and other abilities—so that they may attain access, circularly, to what are perceived to be more or less stable norms. As stairs are devices that permit some people access to upper floors of some buildings, elevators are installed to give a broader range of people access to those same floors (although there is a politics of public inaccessibility for some floors of even public buildings). As written signs permit access and facility in various contexts, so Braille signs and campaigns for literacy or English language facility in the United States are intended (according to various agendas) to organize similar access. Public policy and funding for infrastructure, technology, and health care play key roles in the development of access. We could say what is normalized is ac-

20

ENCOUNTERING ABILITY

cess—that which permits—involving, as these examples indicate, a modalizing or standardization of desire. Such articulation of desire, and of putative human nature, is at work in the accommodation of the mobilities and perceptibilities that become recognized in the deployment of various aspects of infrastructure and technology. This accommodation represents what some theorists consider the more recent social power of normalization, distinct from the older power of idealization, conscripting subjects through infrastructure, technology, law, policy, custom, and other sociocultural aspects into practices of imaginarily natural human behavior and experience.4 We can read the ideals of a culture through its infrastructure and technology, and its other features, in terms of ability. For example, walking is difficult in parts of many cities, and some suburban and rural areas, where roads exist but walkways do not or where roads are not suitable for walking or light transportation. Similarly, in some buildings, including some with only a half-dozen or so floors, it is not possible to walk up or down stairs, except in officially declared emergencies, without setting off alarms and perhaps risking arrest. Besides favoring walking over wheelchair use—as represented in the lack of curb cuts or of elevators in many places—modern societies often appear to favor motor transportation, long-distance transportation, and easy transportation over exertion, as Rebecca Solnit observes in Wanderlust: A History of Walking (2001). We might observe a fast culture, a lazy culture, and an insensitive culture. The culture and society appear to produce a certain kind of subjective ability, in a certain kind of world with certain possible abilities. The infrastructure and technology represent the deployment of resources by which powers that have accumulated, however we might theorize those powers, organize and thereby naturalize (and idealize) the possibilities of subjective being, action, and experience. Such development of material conditions is a key part of the production of ableism: the standardization of nominally human ability and the centering of the notion of the able, in addition to which is the development in discursive and imagistic contexts of perspectives by which biases, prejudices, and modes of treatment respond, perpetuate, and help establish standards. As centering assumptions drive the allocation of resources to establish accommodation, accessibility emerges according to the effectively assumed ability of achieving certain states, acts, and experiences, resulting in a naturalizing teleology and transcendentalization of ability. This is not to posit determinism—not to deny the possibility of improvisation with infrastructure, technology, and other sociocultural features that might involve chance, accident, or whim. Still, what is articulated as accessible is symptomatic of broader standardization concerning what is natural to the human, toward articulating the human per se as a matter of ability. As both Foucault and Butler emphasize, when articulations of human ability abstract a legible range of performance, inevitably some performance is excluded. Whether unrecognized or entirely unperceived, some act, experi-

Metaphysics of Ability

21

ence, or being will fall outside the concept of human nature. As in the case of seeing, certain modes and aspects of performance gain privilege, often—if not necessarily—based on perceptions of preponderant performances, resulting in ideologies of ability that relegate various performances to the margins or beyond, centralizing what McRuer refers to as “compulsory” normalized ability (2006, pp. 1–32).5 Thus the process of centering is illusory, as the putative averaging or normalizing is not the mathematically based process it may seem. Frameworks of naturalized ability become composed according to abstractions—always idealized, while often spoken of and derived in terms of norms—that normalize what serves particular purposes (the marketing of cars, medicines, beverages, or cigarettes, for example) or that reflect dominant groups (racial or sexual, and so on, although not necessarily the numerically dominant) and which also are based on fears and prejudices. Facial and other bodily aesthetics, for example, play roles in normalization: observations of ugliness and deformity, however they gain articulation, may entail revulsion that drives the establishment of putatively neutral and thereby naturalizing standards of appearance and form. Perceptions of difficulty, often irrefutable difficulty, play key roles in developing marginalizations of performance. For example, the mobility of one without legs inevitably will be considered marginal where the use of legs is ubiquitous, use that achieves particular kinds of access. The ability to drive cars and facility with telecommunication devices are alternative examples of the ableist centering of performance. Issues of aid develop in societies as perceptions of need arise, based on what emerges as valued in a particular society. Where some people appear to require more help from others who need less help to gain access to what is valued (the valuation itself emerging in the process), there develops a centralization of the perceived abilities of those who appear more subjectively adept at gaining access. Thus the centering or privileging of certain abilities often appears functional and practical, besides being difficult to challenge as inappropriate. This is not to say that any specific centering or marginalization of performability is natural, nor to imply that naturalization is itself natural, as the reverse (which is thus recursive) is the case. However apparently based on the body and on physical context, the naturalization of ability occurs according to the peculiarities of sociocultural context and is articulated in the thought and language of the context. Without naturalizing a social approach to ability, we can observe that the articulation of ability as social takes place through naturalization in a social context. The power of naturalization in the emergence of ableism and in discourse concerning ability may be most legible when we focus on cases of difficulty in which a lack seems the salient feature. Whereas deafness is often assumed to involve difficulty, Deaf culture observes no impairment, instead recognizing an entirely different mode of apprehension—an entirely different phenomenological sensory complex—from that of people who hear using what is commonly considered a normal apparatus of tissue and neurology (see

22

ENCOUNTERING ABILITY

especially the notion of Deaf Gain, Bauman and Murray, 2014). An assumed centrality of hearing, however, has created not only biases regarding the deaf in most cultures, but typically allocations of resources for technology that create access for those who hear in ways that exclude those who do not—for example, producing telephones and other devices the deaf cannot use. This may appear an allocation of resources for the benefit of the preponderant population, yet it is also a case where a naturalization of performed ability excludes a broader range of performativity. If naturalization did not privilege an articulated range of ability, the world and the subject would emerge much differently: if instead, thinking opened to a range of nonspecific performance, such that the indeterminate range was reflected in the sociocultural practices and allocations of effort that develop infrastructure and technology and effect attitudes—if, that is, an infinite range could be reflected in practices that replaced those that currently perpetuate a restricted understanding of ability in terms of relations among subject, performance, and world. The salience of the issue of resources emphasizes that for most people in the developed world today, pervasive extra-bodily resources support not only sociocultural interaction, but physical living. Before considering such resources as communication and mobility devices and their ancillary systems— roads, satellites, and the like—we have clothing, medicines, sanitation equipment, and other materials that are basic not just for enhancing life but largely for making life possible in anything like the way we understand it. With very few exceptions, all people depend on accommodation even at a physical level, let alone at the level of sociocultural interaction. Such accommodation—a practically universal application of prosthesis, as the social model of disability has emphasized (Davis, 2002a, pp. 30–31)—becomes part of the sociocultural language of human ability, language that not only marks central versus marginal modes of subjective ability, but also creates what is accessed, articulating a world that can be accessed through performance. The language of idealized and normal human performance involves the semiotics of such thoroughgoing prosthesis, so that we must think about human nature with recognition of a language of prosthesis (and recognition of language as prosthetic). This is language that naturalizes ability in terms of economics, besides other aspects of existence, as Leslie Fiedler notes concerning the advancement of prosthesis through technology. Fiedler considers the emergence of a society in which resources are allocated according to who can afford to pay for bodily and psychic modification, embryo selection and design, and other technology, such that a logic of capital will determine how resources become distributed, resulting in “supernormality” whereby “the poor . . . will be our sole remaining Freaks” (1996, p. 155).

Metaphysics of Ability

23

4. Matters of Articulation: Competence, Performativity, and Imperativity We have focused almost entirely on physical ability, the articulation of which has become more complicated in the past two centuries not merely because of the ubiquity of prosthesis, but because of the kinds of labor and skill required for thriving in modern societies. Arguably, ranges of mental and emotional performance and related matters of access are more complex to consider than are physical ones, as are the idealization and normalization of psychic ability and human psychic nature (idealization I resist by largely avoiding “psychological” and “mental,” terms that presuppose unity and coherence). Criminal, moral, and ethical ability all primarily involve consideration of psychic ability and entail complex questions of access. Considering the psychic raises the problem of distinguishing it from somatic ability, as emerges for example in the context of literacy and its attendant prostheses, not to mention linguistic facility more broadly, a matter of performance of and within language. In any thinking of the human subject, we encounter ways in which psychic (which is to say psychosomatic) performance undergoes organization into central and marginal ability, and some performance is excluded, in general ways and in terms of particular contexts. The term “competence” is often applied generally to psychic ability, although it also functions for physical ability and can be roughly synonymous with “ability” in general uses. A difference between “competence” and “ability” occurs in typical usage at a high level of generality, where often we refer to a person as physically “able,” using “competent” mainly for specific physical abilities, whereas we refer more generally to mental “competence,” albeit usually concerning a category of ability, such as broad intellectual competence assumed to underpin an ability to understand rules, legal charges, or moral precepts. Competence typically refers to contexts with assumed standards of ability, usually standards implying skill, as the term implies the existence of the psychosomatic subject, the putatively individual yet also sociocultural subject. Subjective linguistic competence is expressly a case in which psychosomatic ability is naturalized, where standardization governs which performances count as recognizable. We may consider the competence of a person’s visual literacy, his or her ability to recognize images and critique their presentation, as well as literacy more generally conceived (not necessarily requiring sight), and we may consider linguistic competence broadly, as facility with meaning in language—whether spoken or in other signs—as opposed to ability to make or apprehend sounds or signals we might not recognize as appropriate to linguistic meaning.6 To depict linguistic performance and competence simply, performance is the instantiation of linguistic competence. Applied to an individual’s verbal ability, competence refers to his or her fitness to the task of achieving meaning through performance. Put more broadly, or metaphysically, competence refers to the organization of language, organization to which performances of

24

ENCOUNTERING ABILITY

language must adhere if meaning is to occur. The concept of linguistic competence restricts the range of vocal or other signifying performance to what counts as meaningful language. Competence is the developed centrality of naturalized meaning, and thus the ableism of signification. Subcategories of linguistic competence include specific professional contexts, as well as levels of competence involving literacy, vocabulary, and pronunciation related to facility at one’s educational level or in one’s ethnic context or social or economic class. Such matters can be involved in the extent to which competence, as ability, is instrumental in creating access to social privilege: linguistic competence and literacy can serve as sociocultural competence, language being that by which access is at once created, articulated, and accomplished. Contexts of competence in language develop the subject, performance, and world in which what is achieved in a performance can take place. Linguistic theory involving the paired notions of competence and performance has suffered criticism on several counts, including criticism of the difficulty the theory encounters in handling performance. The field of linguistics has been generally criticized for a transcendentalism by which meaning— roughly, competence—seems inferred from linguistic performance, while performance seems uncontained and problematic concerning adherence to any rules of competence (Robinson, 1994). This critique notes that performance exceeds the naturalization that would take place under the terms of competence, as we have considered performance to exceed naturalizations of human ability and human nature. The notion of competence involves an idealizing, normalizing, centralizing operation that governs a naturalized arrangement of subject, performance, and world. We may adopt the term “competence” to specify the imperative of a broadly sociocultural process by which performance, or ability, is articulated and thereby regulated, while we note that articulation is essential to the sociocultural as such. Moreover, we may consider this process to articulate the human as a matter of naturalized ability, articulating human nature in language and indeed as language, which involves the ability of language to perform itself, albeit in a nature that is paradoxically denatured and denaturalizing, as Deleuze discusses in The Logic of Sense (1990b) and as the next chapter considers in detail. Toward regulating the infinite performativity of language, the concept of competence posits the health of language—health in this conception being essentially mathematical wholeness, as totality or completeness (besides the implication of health as “hailing” or calling)—extending to the health of ability in language and of ability generally. The idea of competence instantiates an attempted management of performativity, performativity that otherwise would have no standard, or even legible articulation, but (to echo Canguilhem) would necessarily involve irregularity, error, and illness—that is, involving what appears as error when we look at performativity according to a logic of competence. Insofar as we can think from the contrary perspective of performativity, error as such will disappear, along with any sense of

Metaphysics of Ability

25

brokenness or a lack of health or wholeness: we avoid what Anna Mollow calls “the abjection of illness” (2004). As Deleuze observes (1990b), language, broadly conceived, is that by which subject, world, and performance can emerge at all—not just competent language, but all that language, or signification, can imply. Language includes the unregulated rhetoric of performance, the legible or illegible signification of the indeterminate range of performance. To the extent that competence governs performance, performance in context becomes articulated on the terms of competence, with particular terms in particular contexts of competence and terms that govern the articulation of world and subject in relationships within the context. Insofar as subjectivity emerges within the articulation of social context, and as particular kinds of subjectivity emerge within the articulating structures of specific sociocultural contexts, subjectivity adheres to the terms of ability that are articulated in a context as the possibilities of competence in a society. Competence as government of rhetoric is government of articulations of possible performance, which involves articulations of performance as well as subject and world, in a partitioning of context that delineates specific and general relationships among the parts. In The Psychic Life of Power (1997b), Butler delineates how, as subjectivity takes up performance as rhetorical linguistic competence, it takes up the socioculturally articulated terms of competence. The competence of the subject is competence as if imposed on the subject, as the being of the subject in the context of competence is taken up on terms in which sociocultural rhetoric assigns relationships among subject, performance, and world. A subject may desire competence, and a subject may desire performance not on terms of competence, and there may emerge desire that involves performance not articulated as proper to subjectivity, yet insofar as subjectivity participates in the rhetorical linguistic context of a particular society, it is compelled to do so on the terms of competence within that context. There may be ways to resist the terms, although resistance will tend to be articulated as competent, and competence could change, the range of competence being perhaps affected as the aggregate of performances shifts and thereby changes the field of competence (developments in technology may appear to alter competence, although the alterations may be superficial). Nevertheless, competence as articulated ability governs the sociolinguistic rhetorical possibility to which a subject is compelled to adhere.7 Merleau-Ponty, in a critique of phenomenology since Kant, discusses in particular the engagement of the physical body with the world, writing of the “imperativity” of the world, which compels performance to occur (1968, 1976). Imperativity involves the emergence of requirement, the necessity in the world of fitness for tasks; competence articulates compulsion or imperativity in a sociocultural context. The body emerges in terms of competence that depend on sociolinguistic imperativity, much as according to Louis Althusser (drawing on Jacques Lacan), the subject is interpellated, hailed socio-

26

ENCOUNTERING ABILITY

linguistically into being (Althusser, 1971, p. 174). Merleau-Ponty notes the competent body’s emergence from the indeterminately performative “flesh,” referring to flesh as that which “there is no name in traditional philosophy to designate” (1968, pp. 139–40). Flesh is what Hortense J. Spillers refers to as the “zero degree” of living “tissue” (1987, pp. 67–68), which might be considered the site of pain or other experience, yet which lacks articulation as body, lacking management in terms of the discourse of a society or culture, even as we might consider the flesh social. Lynda Hart, in developing a phenomenology of the subjective disabling and enabling that occurs through sexual performativity (including abuse), writes that “‘flesh’ is that phantasmatic ‘object’ of our desires, as well as our longings for and resistances to merging distinctions between the real and the phantasmatic. . . . The ‘flesh’ is a place toward which we reach that always exceeds our grasp, that indeed must elude us for it is the site beyond (or before) the ‘body’ that permits us to keep making reality even as our desire disavows it” (1998, p. 10).8 Imperativity as power or ability inherent in competence applies for sociocultural contexts in which subjectivity occurs, as well as linguistic contexts where an imperativity of competence in meaning emerges—imperativity driving the tendency of naturalization in language and in thinking about language, compelling ability toward articulation in ableism, toward what Deleuze refers to as “the requirements of representation” (1994, p. 262). We have observed that articulability itself is naturalized, and naturalizing, the idea of the sayable intrinsic to the imperativity that drives linguistic competence. Insofar as sociocultural context is linguistic context, the imperativity for sociocultural competence is intrinsic to the imperativity of the articulation of social subjectivity and performance in terms of the context. Linguistic imperativity inheres in the competence on whose terms the subject, performance, and world of a sociocultural context become articulated. This is not to imply a causal relationship between competence and imperativity, nor any foundation in competence for sociality or vice versa, nor a relationship between performance and competence by which either produces or preexists the other. Competence does not arise from tendencies in performance, nor does it dictate performance, but both of these possibilities remain unarticulated, themselves outside the grasp we have associated with the naturalization inherent in the idea of competence, while each of these narratives of the possibility of production by itself entails naturalization. Nor does any of the terms “world,” “subject,” or “performance” precede any other or itself have natural existence, a point related to Diana Coole and Samantha Frost’s observation, concerning complexity theory, that articulation naturalizes “boundaries [and] distinctions between bodies, objects, and contexts” (2010, p. 16). Coole and Frost emphasize a need to blur such boundaries and distinctions, in a shift from the articulated ontology of materialism to a phenomenology of the relationality amid which materiality emerges—a blurring of and in the context of flesh that is related to the emphasis on contingency by which

Metaphysics of Ability

27

thought and reality can become discorrelated, according to the thinking of Meillassoux. Among the implications of such a shift, which disturbs any privileging of life attributed to thought and thinking, is what Elaine Scarry refers to as “part of the work of creating”: “to deprive the external world of the privilege of being inanimate” (1985, p. 285). We can think of world, subject, or performance as developed in contexts of sociolinguistic performance where an imperativity inherent in competence obtains, yet without a narrative or other structure by which to express origins, foundations, or any other naturalization of control or order. 5. The (Dis)engagement of Signification with Ethos A sociolinguistic context develops internal naturalizations through rhetoric by which subjectivities, and indeed all terms of culture, can be articulated. Among the significant rhetorical moments of culture occurs the notion of character, which includes implications of moral or ethical competence and other psychic and psychosomatic features. The modern concept of human character derives from the evolution of the Greek ethos, used by Aristotle in Rhetoric to express the aspect of rhetoric by which a speaker’s moral standing develops (Aristotle also includes these implications in Poetics, for drama and thus what we now call literary character). Character as ethos is legible in sociocultural terms, in terms of what members of a society come to recognize as the society’s standards. Ethos in this sense is dependent on the more basic meaning of habit or custom, reflecting habituated and thereby established modes of comportment in a society. Susan C. Jarratt and Nedra Reynolds note that the meanings of two Greek terms are commonly conflated in modern considerations of ethos: êthos, which bears the more commonly recognized meaning of habit or custom, and êthea, which refers to the place one inhabits (1994). The implication of habituation, as a space of embodiment, emphasizes the articulation of embodied and embodying ableism in ethos. For Aristotle and as reflected in the modern notion of character, the range of subjective performance is constrained by what is legible in naturalized sociocultural terms, according to which one’s performance can be understood. Character entails the ability to be or act as a member of a society, standing as the ableism of the participant in a society. The legibility of character depends on judgment of one’s competence as a member and reflects an imperative of belonging, such as McRuer discusses in terms of compulsion and which Fiona Kumari Campbell observes as a function of ethos in the formation of ableism (Campbell, 2009, p. 6). Articulating the quality of character involves judgments of competence in terms of what is socially valued, making bad character either a lack of competence for doing good in social terms or an ability to do ill, while also—in the classical sense and some versions of the modern—bad character may involve deficiency, perhaps weakness that allows ill influences to lead one astray.

28

ENCOUNTERING ABILITY

The English word “character,” in referring also to a legible mark (with an etymology running through Greek and Latin) emphasizes a sense of generality as it indicates naturalized sociocultural legibility. That “character” can translate ethos is reflected in the common usage which refers to good character without a modifier, as is expressed in the idea of building one’s character. We also continue to use “ethos” in a way that reflects its root in habit or custom, although we often use it in ways that imply not merely custom in general, but sociocultural rules or customs with an inherent tendency toward the good. This inflection of ethos brings it close to ethics, emphasizing thought and practice intended toward the good. As these uses of “ethos” and “character” refer to articulations of the sociocultural, they also refer to the good insofar as on social terms, maintenance of the social per se is understood as good: character becomes articulation of sociocultural competence in perpetuating the ethos. Ethos, in turn, refers to the articulation of competence at the sociocultural level, an individual’s character or ethos being an articulation of his or her ability to participate according to habit or custom that maintains the sociocultural context. The terms refer to a regulation of performance that focuses on what is naturalized to be good. The performing subject as a matter of character is articulated in terms of naturalized moral or ethical competence, such articulation serving an ableism of the ethical. The sociolinguistic articulation of subjectivity, in a cultural context that involves a discourse on character, entails the imperativity of what is naturalized as ethical competence. Circularly, imperativity in culture makes rhetorical subjective performance legible in the context of a culture’s naturalization of ethical ability, a naturalization that tends, more broadly, to articulate natural human ethical ability. As we extend Merleau-Ponty’s notion of imperativity beyond the physical to psychic, sociocultural, and linguistic contexts, we find the notion playing a role in the naturalization of various aspects of those contexts and in a tendency to unify them under a teleological context of the ethical. Of Merleau-Ponty’s imperativity, Alphonso Lingis writes, “That the body contract competence is imperative categorically” (1994, p. 21; see also 1998), expressing for Merleau-Ponty’s psychosomatic phenomenology the terms of Kant’s ethical principle of practical reason. As the body becomes body—that is, as it comes into comprehensibility—it does so according to terms of representational competence and in response to physical imperativity. An imperative of competent signification is entailed in there being a body that is legible (or alternatively “defensible,” as Ed Cohen writes in reflecting on the discourse of biological immunity, 2009), which the flesh, for MerleauPonty, is not. Similarly, the subject emerges as psychically and characterologically legible in a sociocultural context, where its articulation in terms of an imperativity of ethos is inherent. Following Merleau-Ponty—to continue our emphasis on signification within context or framing that follows from Heidegger—Lingis explains that the body and subject perceive the world with

Metaphysics of Ability

29

the world, not merely on the world’s terms but with the world itself as the (howbeit correlational) organ of perception, so the emergences of body and subject occur in such perception, in this perceptive and proprioceptive context that is thus the locus of the signification of ability (Merleau-Ponty, 1968, 1976; Lingis, 1994, p. 13). When articulation emerges, articulability per se becomes the origin of articulated performance, subject, and world, including whatever distinctions emerge between them and whatever properties are attributed to each. An imperativity in signification is inherent in articulation whereby competence emerges in social, somatic, and ethical terms that yield the body and the subject, whereby body and subject emerge and whereby flesh and indeterminate ability and performativity remain unarticulated. The ethical, articulated from an imperative toward the good, emerges as what serves the maintenance of subjects and world and their interrelationships. Thus ethics would maintain language, or signification, and maintain competence, and perhaps imperativity: it seems the ethical imperative’s emphasis is to maintain the imperative. To express a categorical imperative for ability as psychosomatic, sociolinguistic, and ethical competence would be to express Kant’s imperative principle so that the naturalization of human ability is naturalized as the principle of the good. Viewed in a phenomenological context where the imperativity of competence persists, ability appears caught up in a teleology of body, mind, and culture for thinking, a teleology by which human nature must become articulated. Imperativity need not be thought of as exhausted in the imperative of competence or of articulation, however; the imperativity of signification need not be exhausted in the imperative to articulate. Lingis refers to “enigmatic” imperativity, imperativity by which we may recognize “forces and powers that are other than those of praktognostic competence” (1994, pp. 24–25). To link imperativity with articulation is to begin determining and naturalizing imperativity itself, besides ability, performativity, and language; in Deleuze’s terms, it is to begin “allowing representation to conquer the obscure” (1994, p. 262). Such thinking leads to naturalizing ethics, and the good, as well as naturalizing social and cultural contexts (specific contexts and contextualization in general). Lingis implies that not even the imperatives inherent in a specific society or culture will be fully determinable, let alone consistent, or ever entirely articulated, let alone complete. As what Raymond Williams calls “structures of feeling,” sociocultural currents with variegated imperativity, we can read the articulations of culture, and thus of psychosomatic ability, emerging in excess of and thus potentially at odds with any project of legibility (1977). By a perspective that includes what is enigmatic in signification, competence that could approach the origin, reality, or truth of a text—of any signification—remains an inevitable but impossible goal. The broad imperativity of signification requires such contradictory impossibility. Engaging ethos and subjective character, then, can involve a struggle not to accede to

30

ENCOUNTERING ABILITY

the terms of competence, but instead to work with such terms to maintain awareness of what is enigmatic in performance. This is perhaps to resist understanding or knowing competence, or perhaps to grasp competence in a defined context and work beyond it, improvisationally. Perhaps it is to resist any knowing or understanding, as for example John Cage discusses (drawing on his Zen practice) in terms of artistic composition (2011). Carrie Noland raises a sense of performativity that “can generate” what is “not-yet-marked, not-yet-meaningful” as she develops a notion of “gesture” from scholarship in the field of dance, thereby indicating what is enigmatic in imperativity (2009, pp. 5, 16–17). As an alternative term for interpretation or encounter, “gesture” applies to movement among various aspects of encounter—amid aspects of subject, performance, and world. Noland refers to John A. Lucy’s conception of “linguistic terms available to a cultural group [that] inflect the apprehension of, but do not construct, a material given” (p. 13; Lucy, 1997). She focuses on kinesthesia while developing a critical approach to mediation concerning experience and signification, drawing on MerleauPonty to emphasize what exceeds the articulation of ethos. Noland notes how gesture emerges in a “recursive loop” structure, by which the gesturality of gesture becomes a paradoxical foundation that unfounds experience and signification (p. 213). Of gesturality as such, Giorgio Agamben notes that it “is always the gesture of being at a loss in language,” emphasizing its enigmatic mediation and reference and its staging amid the interpretive environment (1999d, p. 78); the origin and location of gesture remain in question, not clearly inherent in subject, object, or performance. Levinas addresses the elusiveness of the gesturality of one subject’s facing another, as he considers the gesture of facing an enigmatic but essential significatory moment in his nondeterminative ethics (1992b, p. 83). In recognizing oneself as a subject, one might avoid grasping what could be perceived as one’s ability, or power, to avoid taking up ability on its apparent terms of competence and to avoid accepting any entailed assumptions about relationships between performance, subject, and world. One would try to be aware of the phenomenological context of engaging the world with or through the world, and try thereby to discern the gaps, enigmas, and discontinuities in the world, which also involves awareness of the uncertain or enigmatic moments in any apparent constitution of one’s subjectivity in the emergence of what seems one’s power or competence regarding any moment of performance. In the phenomenological terminology of Heidegger and Jacques Derrida, this would be to put one’s ability, one’s subjectivity, and the world under erasure; it would be to interrogate and potentially undermine what is expressed in “I can,” as Levinas emphasizes (1969, p. 46). One might engage in what Gerald L. Bruns, drawing on the thought of Foucault (and Nietzsche, Georges Bataille, and Maurice Blanchot), discusses as “desubjectivation” (Bruns, 2011, pp. 47–60; Foucault, 2000, p. 241).

Metaphysics of Ability

31

Such an interrogative approach seeks to undermine the epistemology of ability that competence as naturalization would establish. Knowability and naturalization of ability imply a certain translatability of performance, a means of adequating performances such that we might recognize what they are and thereby express the general existence of ability. For example, we might articulate auditory performance in comparison with enhanced touch for the deaf, to establish a broader concept of sensory ability. This is not to state any terms of normalization whereby either hearing or touch (to loosely name the two compared abilities) would be viewed as standard. Still, a context of translatability must arise for the comparison to be stated at all, a context in which competence—as translatability, here—will govern the terms, in an instantiation of idealized ability, competence emerging as what Deleuze calls “a third term as the centre of a comparison between two supposedly different terms,” whereby differences and difference per se appear “object[s] of representation” (1994, p. 65). This space of translation is a posited center of ability, a space of its nature and presence, where the range of performativity, under terms of competence, would be translatable. As an abstract and ideal center, however, it is empty. As Augusto Ponzio writes, while translation is always in process—across all levels of conception, including psycho- and biosemiosis (by which the signification of ability traverses material and immaterial life)— a primacy of alterity in the world, the (contradictorily) fundamental primacy of relationality in the relationality of all encountering, keeps translation from being accomplished (2003). Competence may appear the totalizing ontology of ability, claiming to be the discourse of ability’s metaphysics, expressing the ontology where the recirculations of naturalization take place. Besides the imperativity of competence, however, we encounter the enigmatic imperativity of signification, an imperative to articulate that also involves the enigmatic imperative toward what exceeds articulation, which is an imperative to disarticulate, so that the articulation of any subjective or other ability involves the ability’s disarticulation. Such disarticulation not merely and not necessarily undermines the power of expressed ability—for such force may well persist—but potentially opens the signification of ability to signification otherwise, in another context, another configuration of world and subject, or another performance altogether, in any case enigmatic. Against the apparent articulability of competence, the saying of ability becomes the erasure of ability, and the saying requires its own erasure. As we recognize ability to be performative in particularity, where difference may be primary, articulating the ontology of ability becomes untenable, or unstable, or—to return to Deleuze’s reading of Heidegger’s fundamental ontology—we are involved with differential ontology. Such ontology begins with differentiation across all levels, where relationality emerges with any moment of essence or being (to draw again broadly on the thinking of Levinas). A foundation entailing difference and relationality, which is thus a

32

ENCOUNTERING ABILITY

foundation that erases itself and foundationality per se, involves phenomenology and ontology on the same level. Signification from any possible origin must be differential with itself, as possibility per se must be, the recognition of which can disrupt the emergence of correlation. Thus the articulation of possibility is impossible, as is the articulation of articulability, and thereby any approach to the possibility or enabling of ability. 6. Internal Difference and Recursivity in Terms and Concepts Agamben depicts language as that area where capability itself, “the luminous spiral of the possible,” emerges, or more accurately can emerge, “on the threshold between Being and non-Being, between sensible and intelligible, between word and thing” (1999b, p. 257). In and as a gap, language is where “To be able is neither to posit nor negate,” where ability can be possible without the ableism of competent articulation, or any articulation—without a dominant imperative of actualization (p. 257). By language—in saying that entails unsaying, articulation that entails disarticulation, ability that entails inability—we confront the naturalizations or centering assumptions involved in the ability of language, the various adequations involved in making ability present: we confront the ability of any saying to say what it says, as we confront the ability of any ability to emerge. Sayability without unsayability produces what Levinas calls “the said,” a resting with the apparent presence of determinability, to the detriment of the restless interanimation of sayability and unsayability that he refers to as “saying” (1998, pp. 5–7), a resting in what Deleuze considers the subjection of difference to representation (1994, p. 262). We can think of saying as the incompetent performativity of ability, including the ability of language: as the persistent moment of non-presence (which is not absence) of ability. We cannot speak or think of ability without ableism; we cannot effectively follow Campbell’s desire to “refuse the notion of able(ness)” (2009, p. 3), although we might move in the direction of what throughout Contours of Ableism she refers to as ontological reframing. An approach to ability may involve a trace of unsayability and performativity that we violate or betray, as we must do in the inevitable articulation of our saying (“betray” being Levinas’s term, 1998, pp. 6–7, as is “trace,” 1986). We could use “ability” under erasure, striking through the word, as Heidegger does for being, al though Deleuze (to avoid a misunderstanding of Heidegger) prefers the non-negating formulation of “parenthesizing the (non) of non-Being” (Deleuze, 1994, p. 66), which would yield “(in)ability” or “(dis)ability.” We should emphasize the internal relationality of signification, the recursivity emergent in what Levinas calls the “signifyingness of signification” (1998, p. 100), traced in the bivalent genitivity of such formulations as the relationality of relation, the fundamentality of foundation, the nature of nature, and the ability of ability. Graphically, we may begin with “inability” or “disability,”

Metaphysics of Ability

33

which would articulate opposition to and thereby support the ontology of naturalized ableism, then place a virgule between the negating prefix and the root, writing “in/ability” or “dis/ability.” The virgule entails recursion and involves Deleuze’s parenthetical (non)negation, invoking “the differenciator” and thereby “the importance of that which separates as much as of that which unites” (1994, p. 65). In its concomitant binding and dividing, the virgule raises various implications—as discussed by several scholars of disability, for example Myrdene Anderson and Floyd Merrell (2001)—among which is the denaturing of ability. A non/term such as “dis/ability” can indicate a disabling of ability, simultaneously proposing the term’s possibility and negating it, invoking a focus on the virgule that we can apply to other terms—such as im/possibility— while raising with “dis-” a division or rending that the more strictly negating “in-” does not carry. The conditions of ability are always also the conditions of inability, for the notion of ability and for the articulability of the notion. The relation between performance and competence emerges at the virgule, as do being and nothing, presence and absence, nature and the unnatural, the human and the inhuman, thought and what Foucault calls the “unthought” (1973, pp. 322–28). Without using the virgule, Campbell addresses the relation between thought and the unthought (by reference to Foucault) when she discusses disability as the unthought supplement in the development of what she considers the ableist legislation of liberal society (2005; Campbell expands on these ideas in Contours of Ableism, 2009). The virgule is necessary, however, for engaging the unthought with thinking in a way that does not become determinative of both: it marks the presence, which does not come without absence, of discorrelation. As the virgule binds terms while separating them, it suggests relationships other than what the terms would make present, as “relations are always external to their terms,” to cite Daniel W. Smith’s expression of “the empiricist principle that pervades Deleuze’s philosophy” (1997, p. xxiii). The virgule thus marks the non/foundational emergence of differentiality. Marking the alterity in alterity, this mark gestures toward the non-presence in signification of what Levinas refers to as the trace, the trace that evades but constitutes signification and which signification nevertheless manages, if ever so slightly, to indicate (1986). “Dis/ability” evokes a certain stammering dis/articulation of signification, as the ability of language to signify involves concomitant inability, the stammering an instance of ability troubled in the relation between performance and competence. This stammer is heard or otherwise received as neither fully articulate nor coherent, so any attribution of mind or body would fail to conceive of either as present, or all there. Perhaps it is a cry, not quite speech, and thus not quite human, an event of the flesh, and not quite pertaining to the nature of language or communication. Whatever it could mean, it would be nothing certain, although this does not keep us from finding it somewhat comprehensible. The locus of comprehensibility and the possibility

34

ENCOUNTERING ABILITY

of response, the impulse or imperative to respond, are also uncertain. It is unclear whether this sound (if that is what it is) would emerge from an attributable voice, and to whom or what it might be addressed, or who receives it and how. In Madness and Civilization, Foucault similarly suggests—in terms of psychic ability, while implicating any quotidian or critical approach to ability—that language which does not separate madness from reason entails a stammer: “the constitution of madness as a mental illness, at the end of the eighteenth century . . . thrusts into oblivion all those stammered, imperfect words without fixed syntax in which the exchange between madness and reason was made” (1965, p. x). The mark of dis/articulation that traverses this cry, or sound, or text— this mark through or over a mark—shares dis/articulation with im/possibility, as dis/ability and these other terms signify Levinas’s “signifyingness of signification.” As the mark reflects and raises the bivalent genitive “of,” engaged terms turn upon each other, and any term’s belonging to itself expresses internal recursion. The virgule is a mark that de/natures signification, representation, or language: it indicates that nature can only emerge in language, where yet nature can never emerge, the same being true for the human, as for the true, and for being. We can have our “praktognostic competence,” to use Lingis’s term, yet not without enigma, enigma all the more significant for claims concerning signification: claims of nature, competence, presence, truth, and the human. As such claims and terms signify ability and the ability to signify, their ableism emerges insofar as they cover, neglect, ignore, or banish the enigmatic implications of the virgule without which they could never emerge. The imperativity by which ability emerges always involves what is enigmatic, as alterity emerges in differential relationality to any moment of singularity, identity, or presence: we have no (signified) ability without its other. Dis/ability marks the im/possibility of signification and the signification of im/possibility, marking through the ableism of (human) nature and (human) being. Engaging ability as signification should keep the discourse of ability from being taken as metaphoric, which is important for examining various ways that articulations of human nature and being emerge. “Performance” and “competence,” for example, are terms I do not use metaphorically. While they may seem to have shifted in my thinking from their meaning in linguistics, my development of them, always as terms of signification, involves what they already imply. As psychosomatic ability is a matter of signification, considering such ability through these terms is not metaphoric or analogical, although someone might read it in such ways. Thought of as an analogy, this must be more than one, an analogy that enigmatically uses literally applicable terms. The terms “performance” and “competence” in a linguistic sense derive, if arguably, from the context of ability, so returning the terms to that context, in the sociolinguistic signification by which we have theorized psychosomatic ability to emerge, is not simply metaphoric but a metaphor of metaphor, and a

Metaphysics of Ability

35

two-way metaphor, and an example of language and ability as coextensive. An insistence that this is a metaphorical use of terms will undermine itself by leading to an indeterminacy of metaphoricity. As I do not read the use in linguistics of the terms of ability as itself metaphorical, it is not strictly metaphorical to think of an ableism of language or of signification. Moreover, it is not metaphorical to think of philosophical, theoretical, ideological, or political ableism—as later chapters do—unless we consider language and thought in a simply metaphoric relationship, let alone to consider sociocultural contexts as metaphorically representable in language. These points, which may appear obvious, are important for asserting the thoroughgoing sociocultural signification of the discourse of ability, by which no document of culture—roughly to echo Walter Benjamin—is not also an articulation of ability (1989, p. 257). Thus it is not just metaphoric to describe, for example, ableism as the colonization of ability. Simply put, insofar as we focus on the sociocultural signification of ability, we read various instances of sociocultural expression in terms of the signification of ability. Without this explanation, even a discussion of the discourse concerning disability and psychosomatic ableism could be subject to misinterpretation as metaphoric. Having begun by interrogating ability to open the notion and to position “ability” as a term for undetermined, imperative thriving—if that somewhat captures the accomplishment, and if I have been at all successful in pursuing the interrogation—this chapter has developed a critique of the metaphysics of ability. In the instances of sociocultural signification that I read, we approach the ableism that emerges through signification in various contexts, emerging where the naturalization of (nominally human) performance takes place. Articulations of competence are naturalizations of able humanity, involving an ontology of the human. The metaphysics of ability underlies, and is fostered and developed by, a metaphysics of the sociocultural, which produces metaphysical articulations of subjectivity and various socioculturally articulated categories of subjective ability. Such categories may be expressed in various terms, many of which—concerning such matters as gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, intelligence, mobility, morality, and criminality—are commonly critiqued in studies of historical and contemporary culture. Such critiques often focus on how dominance and exclusion or oppression, centrality and marginalization, and other dynamics emerge relevant to the terms’ articulations. Privileging entailed by the dynamics depends on naturalization in the relevant discourse, emerging in an articulation of ontology that a particular critique usually seeks to undermine. Typically, such critique involves undermining metaphysical assumptions that naturalize subjectivity in sociocultural terms. As Campbell’s work emphasizes, contemporary sociocultural, postcolonial, transnational, and other instances of critique tend to work largely by interrogating the metaphysical privileging of signified sociocultural terms, toward undermining the ableism that produces the privileging.

36

ENCOUNTERING ABILITY

In sum, when I discuss various moments of sociocultural signification in terms of ability, ableism, dis/ability, and the like, I intend to be neither metaphorical nor excessively abstract, but rather (following Deleuze) to pursue a kind of radical empiricism. For example, the signification of race in the United States, on which chapter 4 focuses, is a case where these terms apply as literally as any other analytical terms, especially once we recognize that race itself, let alone figural terms such as “black” and “white,” involves the same kinds of referential problems we find endemic to the terminology of ability. “Black” and “white” involve obviously metaphysical characterizations based in naturalizations of human ability, as is clear in the intentions of many people who vocally take one or the other term to apply to themselves. The implications of reading whiteness as competence and blackness as performativity lead to exploration of the enigmatic interanimation of all four terms in an interrogation of the ableist context of subjectivity in the United States. The variegated dis/ability signified by Queer sexuality suggests another approach to ableist naturalization of the human. Also, as we have begun developing throughout and will turn to specifically in chapter 3, we may interrogate work in disability studies that performs explicit critiques of sociocultural ableism, to consider that work’s involvement with signification in the naturalization of human ability. In preparation for that discussion, chapter 2 further explores the question of ability in terms of the human, approaching the signification of human ability and ability’s signification as human, which includes considering the human per se as a locus of signifying ability.

Two ON THE ORIGIN OF (HUMAN) ABILITY: LANGUAGE, POSSIBILITY, AND ETHICS 1. Signification as Human Dis/ease The previous chapter has considered ability as a matter of signification, finding that the signification of ability is made problematic by the ability itself of signification. This perspective emphasizes a recursive differentiality in thinking, whereby a fundamental, which is to say non/foundational, relationality of relationality emerges in the engagement of signification, destabilizing the reality of ability and signification. We have developed this internal differentiality from the thought of Gilles Deleuze and Emmanuel Levinas, mainly, having set up the discussion with reference to the work of Martin Heidegger, and connected it with the speculative realism of Quentin Meillassoux. Among the various naturalizations of categories and concepts that internal differentiality disturbs is the notion of the human, which arguably is the central term upon which critical denaturalization can focus and which moreover is a notion that, by various critics and in various ways, has been conceived of as denaturalized and denaturalizing. Key to such denaturalization is the conception of the human as significatory, so that an interrogation of the naturalization of the human may concentrate on the problematic of differentiality in signification. The human emerges as a matter of ability, a matter of the signification of ability and the ability of signification: indeed, we can read the ability of signification as human and the ability of the human—ability that is the human—as significatory. This chapter examines signification and ability by engaging them in the context of the relationship between denaturalization and the ability of the human, with a focus on the question of whether denaturalization is endemic to ability that can be expressed as human—an expression, I must note, that in using and examining I do not restrict in genetic or other specifically biological terms. We begin with relevant thought of Giorgio Agamben (who also avoids such biological distinctions), in which he engages both Heidegger and Deleuze. In his extended discussion of the oath in The Sacrament of Language, Agamben addresses the extent to which the ability of language is integral to anthropogenesis: The oath is . . . the anthropogenetic operator by means of which the living being, who has discovered itself speaking, has decided to be responsible for his [sic] words and, devoting himself to the logos, to constitute

38

ENCOUNTERING ABILITY himself as “the living being who has language.” In order for something like an oath to be able to take place, it is necessary, in fact, to be able above all to distinguish, and to articulate together in some way, life and language, actions and words—and this is precisely what the animal, for which language is still an integral part of its vital practice, cannot do. The first promise . . . is produced by means of this division, in which man, opposing his language to his actions, can put himself at stake in language, can promise himself to the logos. (2010, p. 69)

In a context of distinctions between language and speaker and language and referent, as well as temporal distinctions, the oath—following a being’s decision to be “responsible” and to be devoted “to the logos”—attempts to bind “the speaker to his speech and, at the same time, words to reality” (p. 34). Agamben finds that the oath concerns “the very consistency of human language and the very nature of humans as ‘speaking animals,’” as it attempts “to stem . . . a weakness pertaining to language itself,” a relational weakness in “the capacity of words themselves to refer to things and the ability of men to make profession of their condition as speaking beings” (2010, p. 8). The struggle between the capability and incapacity of language that arises in the oath—struggle within language and the struggle of the human as integrally engaged in language, attempting to possess language—remains incomplete. It is “always under way, because Homo sapiens never stops becoming man, has perhaps not yet finished entering language and swearing to his nature as a speaking being,” never entirely achieving the responsibility and devotion that the anthropogenetic decision, following the discovery of linguisticality, would establish (Agamben, 2010, p. 11). This includes becoming a “writing” being, in the sense that Jacques Derrida finds writing to be the function of language. This functioning involves what Anna Mollow, drawing on Derrida to define language as not dependent on the ability of speech, calls “the mediated and substitutive qualities of all signifying systems” (Mollow, 2004), qualities that entail the recursive relationality internal to relation. It is functioning by which both language and linguistic being are in themselves and for each other always prosthetic, supplementary, from language’s emergence as originary technology (as Heidegger recognizes, 1977). That is, what Derrida calls writing (or “arche-writing”) is the constitutive functioning of linguistic signification, which neither speech as such nor any putatively recent technology has altered (1976). As it involves the relationality of relation, while it signifies itself, language is incomplete and inconsistent from its origin, in its inception as language wherever emergent, for Agamben (since he does not specify historical or geographical origins). He writes that “the co-originarity of the performative structure and the denotative structure” of language entails, “in such a way that they cannot perfectly coincide,” both “names and discourse, truth and lie, oath and perjury, bene-diction and male-diction, existence and non-

On the Origin of (Human) Ability

39

existence of the world, being and nothingness” (2010, p. 56). Agamben quotes Claude Lévi-Strauss to emphasize the “indeterminate value of signification” and the “relationship of non-equivalence . . . between signifier and signified” (Lévi-Strauss, 1987, pp. 55–56; Agamben, 2010, p. 15) that arise most notably in mythic language and that demonstrate “a malady of language, the ‘opaque shadow’ that language casts on thought and that permanently impedes the welding together of signification and consciousness, language and thought” (Agamben, 2010, p. 67). This malady is intrinsic to how, “for the speaking man, the universe suddenly became meaningful” (p. 66)— intrinsic to the moment when “meaning” emerges to constitute, in linguisticality, the im/possibly definitional moment of the human. The human is fundamentally incomplete—or in/complete—insofar as the incompleteness raised by the emergence of signification is definitional of the human. Agamben observes that “in the course of discussing the inevitable disconnection between signifier and signified, Lévi-Strauss . . . takes up and develops in a new way the theory of Max Müller, who saw in mythology a sort of ‘disease’ of consciousness caused by language” (2010, p. 15).1 Agamben continues, According to Müller, the origin of mythological and religious concepts is to be found in the influence that language, in which paronyms, polysemy, and ambiguity of every kind are necessarily present, exercises on thought. Mythology, he writes, “is in fact the dark shadow which language throws upon thought, and which can never disappear till language becomes entirely commensurate with thought, which it never will.” (2010, p. 15; Müller, 2013, pp. 353–54) For Lévi-Strauss, the being who seeks meaning can never overcome the incommensurability, the shadowing of thought (insofar as language and the signified content of thought are considered separate) by inability that emerges with language’s relational ability. Language originarily and permanently involves internal and referential separation and discontinuity that in their emergence—in use, or contemplation, or any other conceivable being or becoming of language—involve inability, incapacity that is inextricable from and necessary to language’s capacity or ability. (Human) language emerges not only with, but as, the inevitably dis/abled and im/possible relation with its own reality, the reality of thought or consciousness, and indeed any reality otherwise conceived. In The Open: Man and Animal, Agamben discusses the linguistic nature of the human as he approaches “the open”—alternatively “clearing” or “undisconcealed”—the figure by which, following Heidegger, he engages thought, language, and the human. The open involves a metaphysical “operation” that is a “grasping” or comprehension of the relational binding of a being to its world, an operation by which the human “suspends” its “animality”

40

ENCOUNTERING ABILITY

(Agamben, 2004, pp. 79–80). Human being can relate to its relation, separating the notion of relationality from the function of relation, by signification; alternatively put, (human) signification is this relating to relation. Moreover, as Agamben observes, by the human’s linguistic engagement of (its) being— by the “fundamental” operation of ontology—“being,” for the human, “is always already traversed by the nothing” (p. 79–80). A gap between signification and itself emerges: by “human” language, the living being and its linguistic approach to being become traversed by the (non)negation of non/Being that Deleuze, in his treatment of Heidegger, refers to as “differenciation” (1994, p. 65; Heidegger, 1970). Agamben paraphrases Alexandre Kojève, who in his reading of G. W. F. Hegel finds the human “a field of dialectical tensions always already cut by internal caesurae,” a field that “through the action of negation . . . is capable of mastering” and “destroying” its “animality”; in this respect, as Agamben quotes directly, “man is a fatal disease of the animal” (Agamben, 2004, p. 12; Kojève, 1979, pp. 436–37, 554).2 Considered to emerge originarily with the dis/ability of language and the human— dis/ability that, to borrow Heidegger’s description of (non)Being, is “more original than the Not and negation” (1970, p. 331)—this fundamental “disease” is constitutive of the human, and the animal: it is constitutive of the difference between them and their juncture, difference and juncture that emerge with the internally differential relationality of the figure of the open. We may address two key moments of a recursive, reflexive notion of the human as engaged with the ability and inability of signification. The first concerns the ability of language, ability considered proper to the human, human nature, and nature per se. Language as human involves the ability to grasp and control or alternatively abandon. It involves how and what the human conceives, governs, produces, and eschews, corresponding with Aristotle’s assertion that what constitutes the human is its use of politics (1984, sec. 1253a), as the political entails linguistic and relational ability, which in the case of “modern man” becomes biopolitical management—the case of the modern human who, for Michel Foucault as for Agamben, “is an animal whose politics places his existence as a living being in question” (Foucault, 1990, p. 143, albeit management Agamben traces from the beginning of Western politics, 2004, p. 80). The second moment concerns the human as an object of this apprehension: the human as conceived, conceived as specifically human ability, which is thus ability that through the ability of language is taken to be human. Together the two moments involve the way human ability conceives itself, how it perpetuates and attempts to grasp itself, so that such recursivity emerges as itself the human. The human emerges as ability that identifies and constitutes ability, as the province of language engages the province of language, language for Agamben being “what must necessarily presuppose itself” (1999c, p. 41), involving internal relationality that is characterized by recursion.

On the Origin of (Human) Ability

41

Agamben is concerned with both moments and their mutual engagement. The first moment he considers a question specifically of the open, which in The Open he addresses through Heidegger’s consideration of the figure, as developed in Parmenides (1992) and The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics (1995). For Heidegger, following from the phenomenology of Immanuel Kant, the question of the open is a question of the human, which for Heidegger is a question of thought and language, taken together. As both Heidegger and Agamben put figuratively, humans can “see,” which is particular to expressible thought; this reflective “seeing” defines the human (Agamben, 2004, pp. 58–59, 68; Heidegger, 1992, p. 160; 1995, pp. 143–44). A comment by James Elkins in The Object Stares Back on literal seeing (with the passive voice and a nebulous plural) applies also to such figural seeing: “vision is forever incomplete and uncontrollable because it is used to shape our sense of what we are” (1996, p. 238). In “On Potentiality,” Agamben draws from Aristotle’s De Anima to develop human being in terms of the capability of literal seeing, albeit seeing that we reflexively “feel”: in Agamben’s paraphrase of Aristotle, “we feel ourselves seeing,” as the ability of seeing separates us from “ourselves” (Agamben, 1999e, p. 180; Aristotle, 1984, sec. 425b). Significant for Agamben is Aristotle’s observation that not only can we see light and feel we see it, but we feel the lack of light—as “we see darkness”—so the “colors” of the “principle of sight” are “light and darkness, actuality and potentiality, presence and privation” (1999e, pp. 180–81). What characterizes human “sight” is “the potential not to see, the possibility of privation” (p. 181). In Heidegger’s and Agamben’s figure of sight as thought and language, Aristotle’s example of vision becomes a depiction of how human ability involves recognition of and reflection on inability, on its own inability—attention to the signification of ability and reflection on such signification. As the first moment engages the second and the issue of reflection becomes one of reflexivity, their engagement makes possible the operation in thought and language of what Agamben calls the “anthropological machine” that constitutes and controls the human as object. While he has developed his treatment of such constitution and control more fully in other texts—mainly Homo Sacer (1998) and its sequels—in The Open Agamben focuses on the historical emergence in the West of this mechanism of correlating language with the human, a sociocultural mechanism with the (at least implicitly) political purpose of producing and justifying human exceptionality (2004, pp. 36– 38). As depicted by Agamben, this articulatory mechanism overwhelms the relational recursivity of language by the naturalizing presupposition—which the mechanism occludes, that is, in its production of light and clarity—that language is a possession of the human that can be used to determine human being. As a signifying operation, itself indeterminately referential, the anthropological machine nevertheless articulates and totalizes human and animal life, producing what Meillassoux calls correlationism (2009, p. 5), operating

42

ENCOUNTERING ABILITY

with what Walter Benjamin calls a mastery proper to technology (1996, p. 487). Operating in/competently, the machine nevertheless produces ostensible biopolitical competence, producing a putatively competent, naturalized exceptionality, by occluding the incompetence entailed in its circular presupposition of humanity. The anthropological machine suppresses the weakness and dispossession of the significatory recursivity of its engagement with the human, as it suppresses the relational recursivity of signification, suppressing an engagement with the non/foundationality of the signification that the machine itself, insofar as it can recognize language as language, associates with humanity. Agamben traces the notion of reflexive linguistic humanity through various instances of Western thought, considering how the human emerges as naturalization that entails denaturalization and vice versa. For example, addressing the attempt to place the human in a taxonomy with other animals, he paraphrases Carolus Linnaeus’s notion that the human “has no specific identity other than the ability to recognize [it]self,” which means it must be able to “recognize itself as human to be human” (Agamben, 2004, p. 26). As Agamben draws from Linnaeus, the ability involves recognition that what is recognized is not quite itself, or a sense that the recognition is of something not grasped, not really what is sought—something enigmatic, recognized in a moment of signification that itself is enigmatic. It is recognition unable to be achieved, insofar as the signifying human is “the animal that is only if it recognizes that it is not” (Agamben, 2004, p. 27). In the writing of Thomas Aquinas, Agamben finds the observation that humans have “needed [animals] in order to draw from their nature an experimental knowledge,” so that humans “might give [each] a name that designated [its] nature” (quoted in Agamben, 2004, p. 22). Noting this naming of nature, this moment of ability in the production of the natural, Agamben finds that “the cognitive experiment at issue in this [production of the] difference [between human and animal] ultimately concerns the nature of man—or, more precisely, the production and definition of this nature” (p. 22). The nature of the human entails knowledge, recognition, act, thought, expression—in short, ability that is the constitutive moment of nature, the making of human nature and nature itself. As “nature” that claims to name itself and its products as natural, in reference that refers to itself and its referring as if they were not in the apparatus of reference, putative human nature (de)naturalizes both the apparatus and itself as objects insofar as it presupposes the referentiality. Even as it recognizes the dynamic of negation in self-definition, this moment of (dis)identification occludes recognition of the reference as significatory ability that is inability, signification that in coming to pass involves its not coming to pass and thereby gestures toward the non/foundational relationality of signification.3 Agamben’s critique of human exceptionality in Western thought leads through the foundation of the human in language to a recognition of

On the Origin of (Human) Ability

43

non/foundation in signification, signification pertinent to what, following the differential ontology Deleuze expresses while considering Heidegger’s treatment of ontological difference, we may call the non/human. We find its linguistic and thinking ability (which from here on, for the most part, I will represent more simply as linguistic or significatory ability) to emerge not only as denatured, but as that which denaturalizes, or de/naturalizes. The primary, non/foundational relationality of signification, the recursivity of what Levinas calls the “signifyingness of signification” (1998, p. 100), raises a virgule that de/couples correlations between thought and object and between thought and its access to thinking—between (human) thinking and reality (including the reality of thought)—denaturing, at least potentially, signification and the human and any correlativity that emerges or persists between them. 2. Concomitant Potentiality and Impotentiality in Language Across various works, informed largely by his reading of Aristotle, Agamben develops an approach to the performance of nominally human language, and thus human ability, as he discusses the relationship between potentiality and actuality. In “Bartleby, or on Contingency,” his essay on Herman Melville’s story (1986), Agamben notes that “for Aristotle, all potential to be or do something is always also potential not to be or not to do . . . , without which potentiality would always already have passed into actuality and would be indistinguishable from it” (1999b, p. 245). As he paraphrases Aristotle in “On Potentiality,” “to be potential means: to be one’s own lack, to be in relation to one’s own incapacity. Beings that exist in the mode of potentiality are capable of their own impotentiality; and only in this way do they become potential” (Agamben, 1999e, pp. 181–82; Aristotle, 1984, sec. 1046a). Agamben emphasizes that “human beings, insofar as they know and produce, are those beings who, more than any other, exist in the mode of potentiality. Every human power is adynamia, impotentiality; every human potentiality is in relation to its own privation” (1999e, p. 182).4 In the essay on “Bartleby,” Agamben writes that “potentiality, insofar as it can be or not be, is by definition withdrawn from both truth conditions and . . . the principle of contradiction” (1999b, p. 261). As “a being that can both be and not be” and do or not do, potentiality is itself potential (p. 261). In “On Potentiality,” Agamben interprets Aristotle’s Metaphysics as follows: “if a potentiality to not-be originally belongs to all potentiality, then there is truly potentiality only where the potentiality to not-be does not lag behind actuality but passes fully into it as such” (1999e, p. 183), amid multiple and perhaps conflicting potentialities. In any emergence of a potential as potential in the world, in the context of acts in the world, the impotential “preserves itself as such” (p. 183).5 Put in other terms, (human) inability is preserved when ability “truly” emerges, as actually ability, real ability: human ability, or per-

44

ENCOUNTERING ABILITY

formativity, that is able to be is also able to not be, the ability of human ability entailing both ability and inability. Insofar as ability persists as ability, it consists with inability, as impotentiality is consistent in and with potentiality. Agamben finds performative (im)potentiality in the apparent refusal of action and willing expressed by the eponymous character of “Bartleby,” in Bartleby’s reiterated variations on the phrase “I [would] prefer not to.” The phrase “keeps possibility suspended between occurrence and nonoccurrence, between the capacity to be and the capacity not to be” (Agamben, 1999b, p. 267). Bartleby dwells in a world (represented mainly by the attorney, Bartleby’s employer, who is the first-person narrator) where a logic of competent production and reproduction conscripts people in mechanical actualization. It is a world of what Robert McRuer calls “compulsory” modes of ability (2006), where options of not doing are proscribed, as conscription (mainly because it goes unperceived) becomes more repressive than restriction (see Agamben, 2011). Bartleby’s response is to evade the assumed dominance of articulated act over possibility—of ableism over ability—as well as the conjunction of ability with subjective inclination. Taking the shape of a paradoxical “formula of potentiality,” Bartleby’s phrase “destroys all possibility of constructing a relation between being able and willing,” Agamben writes (1999b, p. 255). By the phrase, Bartleby does not refuse to act, not expressing will or inclination and not subordinating ability to articulations of action, but instead states “no more than” a preference—instantiating a “suspension,” which Agamben observes is “the technical term with which the Skeptics denoted their most characteristic experience” (p. 256). Bartleby is able or “capable,” therefore, “in pure potentiality, to bear the ‘no more than’ beyond Being and Nothing, fully experiencing the impotent possibility that exceeds both” (p. 259), while the narrating attorney, with his assumptions concerning actualized ability and its linkage to the will of the subject, cannot recognize such in/capability. Deleuze observes that the formula, by which “Bartleby does not refuse, [but] simply rejects a nonpreferred,” is “devastating because it eliminates the preferable just as mercilessly as any nonpreferred” (1997a, p. 71), by raising the suspended differentiality of im/potentiality. Drawing on Mathieu Lindon’s reading of “Bartleby,” Deleuze writes that “the formula ‘disconnects’ words and things, words and actions, but also speech acts and words—it severs language from all reference,” as it signifies the indeterminate signifyingness of language, which remains opaque to the attorney (Deleuze, 1997a, pp. 73–74; Lindon, 1978, p. 22). The disruptive performativity of the formula, as Agamben observes in citing this passage from Deleuze (Agamben, 1999b, p. 255), arises from agrammaticality, by which the phrase gestures toward both incompleteness and excess while emphasizing the ir/referentiality of language and thought that Agamben draws from Lévi-Strauss. Deleuze finds that the formula, like psychosis, “brings into play a procedure that treats an ordinary language, a standard language, in a manner that makes it ‘render’ an original

On the Origin of (Human) Ability

45

and unknown language, which would perhaps be a projection of God’s language, and would carry off language as a whole” (1997a, p. 72). The agrammaticality involves in/competence, “driftings, deviations, de-taxes and sur-taxes (as opposed to the standard syntax)” (p. 72) by which—as he observes in another essay—with “disequilibrium or bifurcation” emergent in the “system” of language, “the language itself will begin to vibrate and stutter” (1997c, p. 108). Agamben writes that the formula “opens a zone of indistinction . . . between the potential to be (or do) and the potential not to be (or do),” noting that the phrase is incomplete, ending in the middle of an infinitive, and that “the final ‘to’ that ends Bartleby’s phrase has an anaphoric character, for it does not refer directly to a segment of reality but, rather, to a preceding term from which it draws its only meaning,” and that it turns “back toward the phrase itself—an absolute anaphora . . . no longer referring either to a real object or to an anaphorized term: I would prefer not to prefer not to . . .” (1999b, p. 255). The redoubling and recursivity of anaphora raise Aristotle’s treatment of the thinking of thinking, by which “the mind is in a sense potential . . . and is then capable of thinking itself” (1984, sec. 429b). Approaching this passage, Agamben writes that “the thinking of thinking is first of all a potential to think (and not to think) that is turned back upon itself, potentia potentiae,” and thus he expresses, for thought, the anaphoric formula of the ability of ability (Agamben, 1999f, p. 216). In the thinking of thinking, “pure actuality, that is, the actuality of an act, is pure potentiality, that is, the potentiality of a potentiality” (p. 216). While characteristic of human thought, the enigmatic ability of such thinking remains unrecognizable and apparently inaccessible to the attorney, as it becomes occluded in biopolitical (modern) life. In Bartleby, Agamben observes this performative “thought thinking itself, which is a kind of mean between thinking nothing and thinking something, between potentiality and actuality” (1999b, pp. 250–51). For Agamben, “the mind,” as the locus of thinking and linguistic potentiality of potentiality or ability, is “not a thing but a being of pure potentiality”: “the potentiality of thought, which in itself is nothing, allows for the act of intelligence to take place” (p. 245). It is such potentiality—or im/potentiality—that in The Open Agamben discusses in terms of ability by which the human “suspends” its “animality” and “opens a ‘free and empty’ zone” where “being is always already traversed by the nothing” (2004, pp. 79–80). Drawing on Heidegger, primarily The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics (1995), Agamben develops a view of animal life in terms of the animal’s relation to its disinhibitor—what in the animal’s environment Agamben (drawing from Jacob von Uexküll) refers to as “carr[ying] . . . significance” (Agamben, 2004, p. 42) for the animal such that the animal’s relation to the disinhibitor is one of binding or “captivation,” a term Agamben takes from Heidegger (1995, p. 52) and which we may relate to Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s notion of imperativity (1968, 1976). Interpreting Heidegger, Agamben defines Dasein—the spatiotemporal being-there that

46

ENCOUNTERING ABILITY

Heidegger conceives the human to be—as “simply an animal that has learned to become bored; it has awakened from its own captivation to its own captivation. [The] awakening of the living being to its own being-captivated, this anxious and resolute opening to a not-open, is the human” (Agamben, 2004, p. 70; Heidegger, 1995). The human (simply) signifies significance, in signification by which potentiality and impotentiality emerge engaged with each other. In signification, the relationality as such of relation (to the world and to language itself) raises the im/potentiality of relation with and separation from captivation by the world. To reach this point, Agamben follows Heidegger by engaging two key moments of “profound boredom,” which for Agamben “appears as the metaphysical operator” for anthropogenesis (Agamben, 2004, p. 68). The first moment is “being left empty,” being “open to a closedness,” which is as near as the human comes to animal captivation. Both the bored human and the captivated animal are “totally delivered over to something that obstinately refuses itself,” the human because it is “bound” or “compelled” by whatever is boring (2004, pp. 64–65). In the second moment, the object’s refusal signifies or “points to,” in Heidegger’s words, “the possibilities that Dasein could have, but which lie inactive” (1995, pp. 140–41). The human becomes human in the moment of signification where what it “could have done or experienced—that is to say, its possibilities . . . now stand before Dasein in their absolute indifference, both present and perfectly inaccessible at the same time” (Agamben, 2004, p. 66). The second moment is “being-held-insuspense” (p. 66), which involves “the appearing of an undisconcealed as such” (p. 68), the signification of unaccomplished or incomplete signification, by which the in/completeness of the signifyingness of signification is salient. Quoting Heidegger, Agamben observes that “the wonder ‘that beings are’ is nothing but the grasping of the ‘essential disruption’ that occurs in the living being from its being exposed in a nonrevelation,” by signification that does not resolve in relational referentiality (Agamben, 2004, p. 68; Heidegger, 1995, p. 273). The second moment “does not open onto a further, wider, and brighter space, achieved beyond the limits of the animal environment, and unrelated to it; on the contrary, it is opened only by means of a suspension and a deactivation of the animal relation with the disinhibitor. . . . [such that] whoever looks in the open sees only a closing, only a not-seeing” (Agamben, 2004, p. 68). When this “deactivation of single, specific, factical possibilities” occurs—when there occurs “a being able not to”—then being “able to” begins, for the human (Agamben, 2004, p. 67). The deactivation of specific possibilities signifies or “makes manifest . . . what generally makes pure possibility possible” (p. 66). The second moment entails “the very origin of potentiality—and with it, of Dasein, that is, the being which exists in the form of potentiality-for-being,” which as “a potentiality or originary possibilitization constitutively has the form of a potential-not-to,” the form “of an im-

On the Origin of (Human) Ability

47

potentiality” (p. 67). As Agamben reads Aristotle, and this reading informs his approach to Heidegger (which informs his reading of Aristotle as well), signified and significatory impotentiality as inability are constitutive of human ability, ability in which impotentiality or inability is preserved, even as the entailed in/constitutivity tends to go unrecognized. The human, as a matter of “seeing,” of thought and language, is distinguished not by its ability and inability—by decidability between these terms—but by a relationship between ability and inability in which they consist together, in which they are co-extensively signified as such and in which they constitute (human) signification. It is a relationship of co-implication that gestures toward the operation of the virgule, toward im/potentiality or in/ability, or alternatively dis/ability. It involves what Eleanor Kaufman calls “the pivotal ‘or,’ which is . . . the contagious marker of oscillation and indeterminacy,” as she addresses the immobility, or better im/mobility, of Bartleby in her reading of Agamben’s and Deleuze’s discussions of Melville’s story (Kaufman, 2012, p. 144). In The Sacrament of Language, Agamben cites Lévi-Strauss’s theorization of “the fundamental inadequation between signifier and signified, which constitutes ‘the disability of every finite thought’” (Agamben, 2010, p. 69; Lévi-Strauss, 1987, p. 63). As we can express this internal problematic of language as dis/ability, we can use the virgule to mark as dis/ease what Agamben, following Müller and Lévi-Strauss, finds language bringing to consciousness (Agamben, 2010, p. 15). In any ease of language, there is what comes fluently to the tongue—handily or zuhanden, to use Heidegger’s term (1962, p. 98)—as linguistic ability inevitably produces ableism, while the relational potentiality of language, subtending the appearance of having overcome the inadequation of signification, preserves inability. The virgule emerges with the recursion, within the ease and ability of language, of ability’s ability or potentiality’s potentiality, which is the potentiality of language. At the same time, insofar as potentiality is itself a matter of thought and language, of the anaphoric recursion and incompleteness in what Heidegger considers seeing, the recursion is (im)potentiality as such. This is to consider the ability of ability as signification, and both (for Heidegger and for Agamben) as human, or non/human—as life that exists in a mode of thinking of thinking, potentiality of potentiality, the significatory life of life as im/potentiality or dis/ability. Drawing on Foucault, Agamben writes that “something like a human language was in fact only able to be produced in the moment in which the living being, who found itself co-originarily exposed to the possibility of both truth and lie, committed itself to respond with its life for its words,” although in a commitment that can never be fully accomplished (2010, p. 69; Foucault, 1990, p. 143). As the human is the being that would “put his very nature at stake in language,” it is “the living being whose language places his life in question” (Agamben, 2010, pp. 68–69). Human “life” emerges with an engagement of words, indeed as such an engagement, as response, in the origi-

48

ENCOUNTERING ABILITY

nary and continuing moment of exposure to the possibility of “both truth and lie,” which is to say possibility (as im/possibility) per se. The human engages the possibility or (Deleuzian) virtuality of discrepancy and division in its engagement of the im/potential relationality of language, while by language, possibility itself emerges as exposed: possibility as separation per se, internal to itself, possibility as such being possibility as separation from possibility— or potentiality or ability—from itself. The originary moment of the ability of language is the moment when the ability of language’s ability emerges, as the possibility of the separation of the possible from itself, possibility emergent with and as the virgule and anaphora by which being, nothing, and the suspension of their difference are able to emerge. The (in)division between truth and lie in the moment of non-revelatory exposure is not just this particular division, but in/divisibility per se, the emergence of discontinuity as originary to being as signified and to signification as such: non-contradictory relational in/divisibility emerges as Levinas’s signifyingness of signification. It is not just that by signification something can exist that also does not, nor that something may be precisely in that it is not—it is not just such non-contradiction as the significatory emergence of possibility or potentiality—but moreover, in the originary moment of signification we encounter the possibility of possibility, the un/truth that possibility itself is possible, recursive, im/possible. Impotentiality and potentiality emerge together at this unlocatable origin, as im/potentiality, as the exposure, the moment in which response and exposure are not separable but engaged as an im/potential dynamic that is the “life” that emerges in and as language, emerging dis/constituted by the ability of ability, the openness of the open. This self-problematizing, inter-relational significatory moment marks in/differentially the origin of the (human) open. 3. Biopolitical Articulation and the Production of Ableism As signification tends to come too easily, even (perhaps especially) critical discourse risks the ease by which thinking and signification appear to be fluent. Noting language’s denatured, denaturing nature—gesturing toward the de/naturalization by which language engages nature and thereby constitutes itself and becomes the emergence of the human—we can seem competently to overcome the performativity of our (human) writing and speaking. This is a problem of ease generally in language, of handiness or Zuhandenheit for Heidegger. Moreover, it is a problem of modernity, which, as Zygmunt Bauman writes, has “specialized in making zuhanden things into vorhanden,” in adopting the theoretical pragmatism Heidegger calls vorhanden to underwrite the fluency (Bauman, 2009, p. 2). An imperativity for what Agamben calls the Western “anthropological machine” continues, toward naturalizing the human even in the name of denaturalization, tending toward humanism or ableism even as it gestures toward the dis/ability of language. Ableism, arising in ar-

On the Origin of (Human) Ability

49

ticulation, results from language’s ability, involving desire to accomplish stable and reliable meaning, a result of the situation in which nevertheless, in a context of im/possibility, articulation’s possibility entails its impossibility. By the sociocultural mechanism Agamben discusses, “the production of man through the opposition man/animal, human/inhuman” is always already and fluently occurring (2004, p. 37). Having presupposed the linguistic “decision” between the human and the animal, being itself incapable of producing human exceptionality, the anthropological machine’s competence can produce “neither an animal life nor a human life, but only a life that is separated and excluded from itself—only a bare life” (p. 38). As a result, Agamben writes, “the truly human being who should occur [in the zone of exception] is only the place of a ceaselessly updated decision,” a space where life is minimally designated (p. 38). Insofar as the ability of (human) language emerges with articulation itself presupposed—in the ableism of Western (bio)politics—the de/naturing, un/truly human ability of ability is elsewhere. Potentiality is managed into expressed actuality under a technology of will and action, which articulates ability and inability without the anaphoric indistinction between the possible and the impossible and between potentiality and actuality. The ability of ability of the “truly human being,” non/foundational dis/ability, cannot be articulated as such in the terms of ableist or mechanical competence. In “On Potentiality” as in The Open, Agamben finds particular to the human “the experience of the potentiality-not-to-act”—his example again being the experience of boredom—which exemplifies the capability “of good and evil,” a capability that “is not simply to be capable of doing this or that good or bad action,” but to have the “potentiality for darkness” that is “also the potentiality for light” (1999e, p. 181). Such in/capability of binding amid division becomes overwhelmed in the mechanics of Western politics, a politics Agamben says from “its origin . . . is also biopolitics” (2004, p. 80). In not seeing the (dis)unity of actuality and impotentiality, but only actuality to which the potential and the impotential are simply and separately opposed and subordinated, the subject in relation to such a mechanism becomes caught in and productive of a humanist ethical ableism. It is not the vexing, doubt, or failure of vision but instead clarity—a sense of decidability between the “darkness” and “light”—that emerges as malignant, as “radical evil” in Agamben’s terms (1999e, p. 181). Bauman summarizes Heidegger, “good lighting is the true blindness” (2009, p. 2). As the good becomes articulated under an imperative for vision, we lose the enigmatic imperativity of in/visibility, of dis/ability or in/ability. Reification of a division between good and evil as strict opposition, instead of a reflexive and differential context, with a concomitant technological management of division, binds good and evil into a system where they are instruments in biopolitical articulation—or such instrumentation looms, at least, as Agamben derives broadly from Heidegger, in one possible scenario

50

ENCOUNTERING ABILITY

for “posthistorical man” as a result of the anthropological machine’s production of minimal “life” (Agamben, 2004, p. 80). This management is closed to the humanity of the human, for Agamben, being closed to the “awakening of the living being to its own being-captivated,” closed to the “anxious and resolute opening to a not-open” that constitutes the human (2004, p. 70). Without the preservation of im/potentiality that Agamben draws from Aristotle, there arises in modernity the technocratic evil of putative “depoliticization” that emerges as modern biopolitics (p. 76), after the anthropological machine has completed the work of “man’s becoming historical” and is now “idling” (p. 80). Agamben’s reference to “truly human being” which should, but does not emerge, does not indicate human being articulated as such, not an essence of the human, but instead humanity as the dis/ability or dis/ease of signification that could suspend itself, that would not of necessity turn to the fluent, ableist mechanism that articulates and thus produces and controls bare life. His expression of “true” humanity does not schematically divide animal and human life—not, like the anthropological machine, producing them through a decision that in its functioning of exclusion and inclusion creates the zone of exception that yields life that would be fully managed, or in Foucault’s term “disciplined.” Agamben means to value humanity, which we might designate better by another term (such as humaneness, or perhaps goodness or ethics) that would help depict the “free and conscious political subject” which in Homo Sacer he despairs of having not yet existed (1998, p. 128). In The Open, Agamben emphasizes the value of such humanity with the specter of its absence, writing of the production of bare life in terms of “the HegeloKojèvian idea of the end of history” in which “man has now reached his historical telos and, [insofar as humanity] has become animal again, there is nothing left but the depoliticization of human societies . . . or the taking on of biological life itself as the supreme political (or rather impolitical) task” (2004, p. 76). This is a task by which we arrive at a competently articulated and articulating human that, “from Heidegger’s perspective, no longer has the form of keeping itself open to the undisconcealed of the animal, but seeks rather to open and secure the not-open in every domain, and thus closes itself to its own openness, forgets its humanitas, and makes being its specific disinhibitor” (p. 77). At this end of history, “the difference [between man and animal] vanishes and the two terms collapse upon each other—as seems to be happening today—[so] the difference between being and the nothing, licit and illicit, divine and demonic also fades away, and in its place something appears for which we seem to lack even a name” (p. 22). Agamben writes here of a moment where competence becomes central for human ability, where the performativity of ability is betrayed in ableism that claims openness in pursuit of openness, or ability without inability, ability blind to its closedness and which, thus as ableism, is closed. We find a closed seeing unaware of occlusion, seeing that takes itself for open and sees

On the Origin of (Human) Ability

51

only openness where there is only the closed, never recognizing either as such. Where “the total humanization of the animal coincides with the total animalization of man,” nature and humanity must vanish or be forgotten, as this new articulated humanity becomes entirely, competently productive of naturalization and identification (2004, p. 77). Nature and humanity become articulated in a mechanics or technics by which a supremacy of will, action, and being absorbs the problematic, indeterminate separation and differentiation and im/potential seeing of seeing and ability of ability that (human) language makes im/possible. At length in Homo Sacer, Agamben writes of the emergence of such totalization in modern politics, in which “life and politics—originally divided . . . begin to become one,” to become biopolitics that produces and governs the only life that exists in its articulation, bare life (1998, p. 148). As Agamben in Homo Sacer considers the concentration camp paradigmatic of such politics, in The Open he considers whether “concentration and extermination camps are . . . an experiment [in the distinguishing between human and animal], an extreme and monstrous attempt to decide between the human and the inhuman” (2004, p. 22). 4. The Reflexive Ability of the Post/human It is a necessarily open question whether the open has yet existed—whether the linguistic human, as the “anxious and resolute opening to a not-open” of which Agamben despairs (2004, p. 70), has ever “truly” emerged with the putative origination of language. The opening or openness of the open, the reflexive im/potentiality and indeterminate separation in the seeing of seeing, preclude definitive nomination of what is or is not human. The human, by the approach we have been pursuing—as it “exists in the form of potentiality-forbeing” (Agamben, 2004, p. 67)—is that which cannot itself be, so that we must keep “to be” under erasure concerning the human, or continue using the virgule to mark the non/human: non/- or (non)humanity being what perhaps par excellence cannot have the attribute of being. As language, or seeing, is potentiality or ability that is separate from and discontinuous with itself, the human is such opening of opening and opening to opening: that which is other to itself, or that suffers itself. It is ability that is other than it is and is not what it is, and that operates otherwise than it does and does not operate as it does. Always already other than itself, it moves otherwise than itself—to borrow the adverbial emphasis of Levinas—not exactly beyond (a term that implies schematic extension), but into a beyond or afterward that we could equally consider already prior, a destination of separation. The posthuman is human, and vice versa, as N. Katherine Hayles develops in How We Became Posthuman (1999), and it is so from the origin of the open—or the (pre)origin that is the open—from the emergence of the reflexive, indeterminate signifying that is language. Perhaps not yet having truly existed, the human is always post-, and the posthuman is nothing but the human.

52

ENCOUNTERING ABILITY

Hayles recognizes the necessity of reflexivity for conceptions of the (post)human and locates the reflexivity in various aspects of signification, ranging from mathematics to art—referring to Kurt Gödel and M. C. Escher, for example, in these two cases borrowing from Douglas R. Hofstadter’s work (Hofstadter, 1980)—while observing a long development of Western thought about reflexivity concerning the human, from Aristotle forward. As she interrogates the origin and function of the notion of the posthuman, Hayles finds the reflexivity of signification necessary for both the human and the posthuman as they emerge together and remain inseparable, so that the posthuman consists once the human emerges. When she considers nonbiological aspects of the posthuman, she refers also to the human: “even a biologically unaltered Homo sapiens counts as posthuman. The defining characteristics involve the construction of subjectivity, not the presence of nonbiological components” or biological components, Homo sapiens gaining definition through the second term, (linguistic) sapience per se, sapient capacity (1999, p. 4). Hayles defines reflexivity as “the movement whereby that which has been used to generate a system is made, through a changed perspective, to become part of the system it generates” (1999, p. 8). We have noted that the “seeing” or signification that originates the system “human” incorporates its own movement into the system that thereby functions otherwise than how, by any attempted conceptualization, the system as system operates, so that the movement of signification disintegrates (or dis/integrates) any signification of the system as such. Reflexivity always operates on another level than any apparent “seeing,” the reflexivity of reflexivity always in play. The construction or constitution of the reflexively linguistic subject is always dis/constitutive: the human subject emerges as that which constructs construction’s constructiveness, particularly its own. Psychoanalysis has addressed the separation and reflexivity of the human, which for the moment we may put in terms of subjectivity (anticipating a consideration of Levinas’s focus on human “accusativity,” among other linguistic inflections). As a definitional moment for the human, reflexivity disrupts the humanist conception of the subject as possessing a biological organism, obviating any effort to distance posthumanism from the human in the interest of avoiding humanist or biopolitical dualism. Observing that the subject proves reflexive whether it is conceived in humanist terms or as informational and cybernetic, Hayles develops a critique by which she hopes to “keep disembodiment from being rewritten, once again, into prevailing concepts of subjectivity,” a critique by which we might “put back into the picture the flesh that continues to be erased in contemporary discussions about cybernetic subjects” (1999, p. 5). She refers to the schizoanalysis developed in Anti-Oedipus by Deleuze and Félix Guattari (1990) as an example of critique that foregrounds reflexivity: their development of the “body without organs” dissociates both subject and body towards an emphasis on the flesh and a potential overcoming of the ableist, biopoliti-

On the Origin of (Human) Ability

53

cal sovereignty of the humanist subject (a development Sharon V. Betcher adopts for her non-transcendental Christian “politics of disablement,” 2007, pp. xi, 19–22). Expressing a field of life not contained by the articulation of subjectivity, individuality, the human, or human nature, nor the organic—or even expressed in terms that distinguish the living from the dead—Deleuze emphasizes such a fleshy “‘vitalism’ or a conception of life as a non-organic power” (1990a, p. 5; trans. Daniel W. Smith, 1997, p. xiii), alternatively emphasizing virtuality over articulation (1994, p. 211). 6 In Homo Sacer, Agamben confronts biopolitics by casting the bare life that results from the anthropological mechanism in the role of a “protagonist” (1998, p. 8) which, drawing on Heidegger, he narrates toward an uncontained “unity” that is Dasein, “the inseparable unity of Being and ways of Being,” toward the dis/unity Deleuze terms (non)Being (Agamben, 1998, p. 153; Heidegger, 1959; Deleuze, 1994, p. 66). This “unity” for Agamben, “which itself has the form of an irrevocable decision, withdraws from every external decision and appears as an indissoluble cohesion in which it is impossible to isolate something like a bare life” (1998, p. 153). Agamben works, in this aspect of Homo Sacer, to avoid a formulation of life from the perspective of biopolitical power, or ableist ability, and thereby to evade the production of nature and the human that takes place through a politics of reductive competence. He develops the unity of what emerges as a vitalist protagonism that, rather than being “the correlate of sovereign power, turns into an existence over which power no longer seems to have any hold” (p. 153). As humanity that endemically exceeds the human, this may be an existence whose performativity can remain recursively engaged with inability or impotentiality, entailing im/potential vitality over which no power of decision could articulate what is living and what is dead. As thought in the West has arrived at a biopolitical “end of history,” however, Agamben notes that “until a new and coherent ontology of potentiality . . . has replaced the ontology founded on the primacy of actuality and its relation to potentiality, a political theory freed from the aporias of sovereignty remains unthinkable” (1998, p. 44). The biopolitical subject is unable to think a politics freed from the subject’s inability to see its own seeing in a way not governed by a relation between the actual and the potential in which the actual holds a position of primacy. As power or potential becomes articulated only in terms of actuality, in/ability is subsumed under ableism. In such a context, Melville’s Bartleby serves for Agamben as a possible specific protagonist, as Bartleby “calls into question . . . [the] supremacy of the will over potentiality” (1999b, p. 254) by maintaining “a preference and a potentiality that no longer function to assure the supremacy of Being over Nothing but exist, without reason, in the indifference between Being and Nothing” (p. 259). When in Bartleby we read “thought thinking itself . . . [which] thinks a pure potentiality (to think and not to think),” (im)potentiality itself tends to appear the pro-

54

ENCOUNTERING ABILITY

tagonist (pp. 250–51). “Emancipating itself from Being and non-Being alike,” Agamben notes, “potentiality thus creates its own ontology” (p. 259). Near the end of “On Potentiality,” Agamben refers to “the originary figure of potentiality, which we may now define with [Aristotle’s] own words as the potential not to be” (Agamben, 1999e, p. 182; Aristotle, 1984, sec. 1050b). This reading of Aristotle’s expression of the human in terms of impotentiality leads Agamben to prescribe, at the end of The Open, that we “show the central emptiness, the hiatus that—within man—separates man and animal” and that, contingently and improvisationally, we “risk ourselves in this emptiness” (2004, p. 92), risking “ourselves” for ourselves, risking humanity for humanity, ability for the sake of ability, health for the sake of health. We can read the emptiness or hiatus marked by the virgule, the mark that traverses while it constitutes signification, marking the possibility that is the impossibility, the potentiality that is impotentiality, of articulation, expression, thought, and health. This area of indifference, the indifference Agamben observes for Bartleby, indifference to the actualizing world that makes demands of Bartleby, is an expanse of im/potentiality, of the markedness that traverses signification as such, the markedness or signifyingness of thought or “seeing” as such. Signification here is inseparable from unsignifiability, as (human) ability is inseparable from inability, in a zone where the ability or nature of the human constitutes itself and undermines its constitutiveness. For Agamben at the end of The Open, the hiatus, the recursive “suspension of the suspension, Shabbat of both animal and man,” involves the “unsavable survival” of what “is no longer human,” yet “cannot be called animal either,” and which “remains serenely in relation with its own proper nature . . . as a zone of nonknowledge,” where it is let be “outside of being” (2004, pp. 90–92). In terms of ability that is always also inability, or in/ability and im/potentiality, this zone—variously of indifference, nonknowledge, or other possible terms (Shannon Walters suggests “unruly rhetoric,” 2014)—remains legible as a matter of what Agamben, following Aristotle, develops as the problematic being of the human with a linguistic origin. As might occur in the “desubjectivation” Gerald L. Bruns derives from Foucault, or in the various processes of linguistic, musical, and other performance developed by John Cage— whereby audience, performer, performance, and world become indistinct—we may engage this problematic being as such, encountering the hiatus to address the problem as a problem, in its insolubility (Bruns, 2011, pp. 47–60; Foucault, 2000, p. 241; Cage, 2011). As a matter of reflexive signification, the (post)human persists in a condition that in Language and Death Agamben refers to as the poverty of (human) nature and identity (1991, p. 96), a poverty of being, of knowability, of possibility, of integrity or wholeness that entails necessary ignorance, impotence, incompleteness, and illness in a mode of existing otherwise than being, again to use terminology from Levinas (1998). The existential field named by

On the Origin of (Human) Ability

55

“human” is where being outside or otherwise than being may come to pass, which occurs insofar as it is “let be” by ability that entails inability. Agamben writes, What is potential is capable (endekhetai), Aristotle says, both of being and of not being. Dekhomai means “I welcome, receive, admit.” The potential welcomes non-Being, and this welcoming of non-Being is potentiality, fundamental passivity. It is passive potentiality, but not a passive potentiality that undergoes something other than itself; rather, it undergoes and suffers its own non-Being. (1999e, p. 182; Aristotle, 1984, sec. 1050b) Positing that the “unity” and “cohesion” of Dasein exceed the biopolitical reduction of bare life by virtue of such life’s im/potentiality, by potentiality engaged in privation and dispossession that still is its “own,” Agamben invokes the im/possibility of significatory humanity and humaneness. To bring in various threads of Levinas’s thinking, bare life as (post)human protagonist may exceed its otherwise biopolitical articulation by an openness toward an infinity in signification, toward the trace of alterity in the signification of signification. Emphasizing the poverty, passivity, and weakness of the linguistic human undermines the biopolitical totalization that is ableism, what is articulated as an ease of ability that is oblivious to the disease and inability by which it is constituted. Biopolitical ableism dreams health, in denial of the nightmare of dis/ease by which health from its origin is disrupted—in denial of the excess of wholeness (the wholeness of wholeness) that disrupts any articulation of the whole, the excess of the always incomplete process of healing or making whole that can only persist in the disease by which the process is constituted. This appears to phrase health in largely mathematical terms, as biopolitics entails; an alternative would be to engage the more inchoate flow depicted in the other etymological sense of “health,” as “hailing” or calling out—by which one is recognized as “hale”—in a disruptive hailing that comes from outside any articulated boundary of an entity. As emerges in Levinas’s various depictions of facing others, an approach to the humane and humanity must be one of restlessness, an approach by which we may recognize nature, knowledge, health, and ease as concomitant with the totalizing production of bare life. Discussing Deleuze’s view of the excessiveness and discontinuity of unity, with reference to Bertrand Russell’s paradox, Daniel W. Smith writes that for Deleuze, unity or wholeness is itself “what prevents each set from closing in on itself, forcing it to extend itself into a larger set, to infinity. The Whole, in other words, is the Open, because it is its nature to constantly produce or create the new” (1997, p. xxiii). The human as open is the not-whole or un/whole, the un/healthy as such, what is signified indeterminately in being hailed or called. Its cohesion is the

56

ENCOUNTERING ABILITY

holding together of openness as such, its unity the uniting of differentiation, its wholeness not inclusion but non-exclusion (a term I adopt mainly from Fred Moten, 2003), each of which pair is not only at odds with itself but with the others—as differential ontology entails—by which sameness is engaged with difference even in itself, as imagined inclusiveness is always irrupted. Agamben’s concern with biopolitics, like Levinas’s approach to ethics, leads beyond a focus on the suppression by one ontology of alternative ontologies. As chapter 1 emphasizes (noting in particular the epistemological untranslatability concerning deafness), my project here is not specifically multicultural; as chapter 4 discusses (citing Jared Sexton’s work, mainly), multiculturalism and multiracialism can arise in contexts where exclusion persists, even helping to maintain exclusion amid a drive toward essentially undifferentiated unity. Beyond recognizing how multiple and conflicting categories of ability emerge in cultures and engage each other across cultures, and beyond finding any transcategorical or cross-cultural pluralism of abilities, we may pursue an incomprehensible notion of ability that, while it is a matter of signification, language might engage but never make present—a notion that is not conceptually apportioned in terms of any sociocultural context of subject, performance, and world. It is ability not understood to be, ability without the ability to be, which would already be expressed as competence, already determined and thus determining of performance, in recognition of only a fragment of imperativity. The entailed priority of difference exceeds the dynamics of inclusion and exclusion Agamben attributes to the anthropological machine, dynamics that create a zone that excludes the excessiveness of differentiation. Agamben echoes Levinas with the phrase “fundamental passivity” when considering dekhomai, the capability of potentiality, expressing passivity that for Levinas proliferates in humanity, perhaps paradoxically, without reservation—contrary to repose, ease, knowledge, or totality—the cohesion of life being inextricable from the incoherent, infinite excess that the existential field of the human involves (Levinas, 1998, pp. 113–14). Following Kojève’s remarks (although not exactly his larger intentions, which with Hegel remain more determinate of the human and the animal than Agamben intends to be), we find that the “fatal disease of the animal” is the disease of exceeding the animal in the production of the apparent difference “man and animal.” This is dis/ease or dis/ability of thought and language that, as their nightmare, both produces and undermines life expressed or dreamed as healthy and human, in a production and an undermining that save and destroy themselves and the nature of the human at every moment of expression. It is dis/ability as the dis/unity of the human, the in/competence of humanity, the critical im/possibility of the open. The human is that which has the ability, as Agamben suggests, at once to suffer itself as what is other than itself and vice versa.

On the Origin of (Human) Ability

57

5. Alterity and Ethics in the Encounter of Ability Chapter 1 observes how ethics can depend on a specific ethos, how ethos and the good become ontologically positioned, and how the ethical involves a teleology of sociocultural articulation. To think of ethics is to think already of the articulated good, of ethos as a context of inter-related (human) life in which the good may dwell or take place. To focus on ethos is already to have abstracted, to assume the nature of ethos, toward submitting the good to ontology whereby ethics tends toward a totalizing pragmatism. Alternatively, we may approach the ethical through a priority of difference, asking how we might think the ethical otherwise than ontologically, as Levinas develops most fully in Otherwise than Being (1998). John D. Caputo criticizes Levinas for using the term “ethics,” insofar as “ethics . . . is philosophy,” which for Caputo necessarily depends on a first philosophy of ontology, so that ethos must be established and articulated, entailing utility or calculability, before ethical engagement (1993, p. 14). However, following Levinas and Deleuze, we may take a metaethical approach in which we think of ethos as a significatory context where goodness emerges in a way that need not mean either ethos or the good can be articulated fully, a context where “the heteronomic structure of obligation” is salient (Caputo, 1993, p. 14). Ethos and goodness may remain amid Raymond Williams’s “structures of feeling” (1977), amid the indeterminable, impossible-to-articulate nature of sociocultural and thus socioethical contexts, “prenatural” in Levinas’s wording (1998, p. 68). Thinking of performativity that exceeds competence emphasizes the non-exclusivity involved in ethics, opening ethos in general and in particular to otherness. We can follow Plato’s dictum that there is no ethics if there is no good beyond being, noting that while ethos is, it can be under erasure, as we pursue a sense of the ethical that involves goodness, or something like it, that emerges otherwise than being. Reading Agamben’s work and drawing on the differential ontology of Deleuze, we have been moving toward the approach to ontology that emerges in Levinas’s thinking, by which Levinas seeks to displace ontology from its position of first philosophy, putting ethics in a fundamental position. Levinas writes that “ontology as first philosophy is a philosophy of power”; Linda Bolton observes that such a foundation in ontology results in a philosophy whereby (ableist) power takes priority over justice (Levinas, 1969, p. 46; Bolton, 2004, p. 11). Consistently focusing on signification, Levinas prompts us to consider relationality as primordial with being, placing difference and separation amid any fundamental sense of existence, much as Deleuze, in his engagement with Heidegger, attributes differentiality to ontology itself, to the ontology of ontology. With his interpretation of Friedrich Nietzsche’s eternal return, Deleuze undermines any notion of the same as such, and identity as such (Deleuze, 1994, pp. 90–91, 125–26; Nietzsche, 1968). Nothing emerges or re-emerges as itself or indeed exists as such, identity being im/possible and

58

ENCOUNTERING ABILITY

being being im/possible—or, to use Deleuze’s terms, we encounter fundamental differenciated virtuality, which is “fully real” (Deleuze, 1994, p. 208). Thinking of reality as ontological becomes paradoxical, ontology being paradoxical, reality emerging as Jacques Lacan depicts the psychoanalytical real: in Slavoj Žižek’s rendering of Lacan, “The Real is . . . both the hard, impenetrable kernel resisting symbolization and a pure chimerical entity which has in itself no ontological consistency” (Žižek, 1989, p. 169). As potentiality “creates its own ontology,” the im/potentiality of human life and encounter that Agamben derives from Aristotle is originary, im/potentiality consisting with actuality, potentiality and impotentiality dwelling together with actuality in the world (Agamben, 1999b, p. 259). Always involving the im/potential, signified being—thus as becoming—is always already internally relational, involving the possibility of possibility, or the ability of ability, which, while a matter of signification, is entirely real: differentiality in the being or becoming of being is non/foundational for ontology. The differentiality of being for being is non/foundational for the differentiality of, or within, any conceived and thus signified instance of being or essence. Deleuze emphasizes the reality of differential relationality in his preference of “virtual” over the tentativeness of “possible” for expressing the reality of becoming (1994, p. 211). In Deleuze’s radical empiricism—an empiricism of material signification—the anaphoric recursivity in the virtuality of the virtual leads from an essentialist bias for ontology toward a reality of differentiality, leading into relational implications by which difference is originary to being. This is to emphasize not just differences among beings, but differentiality as originary to ontology, to any notion of what more properly, following Deleuze, we can term non/Being (1994, p. 66). A primacy of recursivity means a leveling among being and appearance and signifier and signified, involving a phenomenologically inflected prevalence of relationality for ontology. For Deleuze as for Levinas, thinking of any moment of essence, existence, or experience means an emphasis on encountering. Deleuze and Levinas both are concerned with how we begin thinking, as thereby we engage in signification. Beginning with a relational context means beginning where relations are primary, and thus the dimensions and dynamics that for Levinas are integral to ethics are always already in play. We begin by engaging a context of performance, where any instance of being is one of becoming, and always already response, response to what exceeds any conception of context, where the imperativity of the context exceeds comprehension and is thus enigmatic. Influenced by Benedict de Spinoza’s Ethics (1996), Deleuze resists the transcendental in ethics, focusing instead on empirical becoming where any being, and being in general, is always exceeded by a relationality within contextualization, contextualization that itself is exceeded: relationality exceeds relationality, such that reality per se is fundamentally relational and contextual, inter- and intra-differentiational. Thus Deleuze resists general notions of good and evil as transcendental simplifications, so that for him, a general

On the Origin of (Human) Ability

59

sense of the ethical means avoiding any impedance against the performative in the context of excessive, enigmatic relationality. Foregrounding dynamics of encounter amid a context of becoming, Deleuze presents what we could call a (meta)ethics of virtuality, or im/potentiality, emphasizing the preservation of performative relationality. A being, as an instance of becoming, receives its essence or becoming as it is expressed in its context, its environment of encounter, as its substance is predicated in a performative context where it receives its becoming performatively. A human subject, for example, receives its speaking and becoming being—to draw on Agamben’s conception of linguistic “man”—as it performs in the context of (enigmatically) reflexive language, where it remains dynamic to the extent that it is in/competent, engaged in the ability of its ability, as Agamben and Deleuze observe in Bartleby’s im/potentiality or virtuality. The entailed ethics for Agamben involves the “letting be” of being’s dis/integral significatory im/potentiality, in “passive potentiality” capable “both of being and of not being,” which can “welcome, receive, admit” (1999e, p. 182). For Agamben, “The decisive element that confers on human language its peculiar virtue is not in the tool itself but in the place it leaves to the speaker . . . in the ethical relation that is established between the speaker and his language” (2010, p. 71). To take such a place involves responsiveness much like Meister Eckhart depicts for becoming in response to the (enigmatically divine) world: response to differential and enigmatic imperativity in the performative context, where the moment of becoming engages performatively and improvisationally in the becoming of its context (1941, pp. 106–107). Levinas emphasizes response and receptivity for the subject in ethics by shifting from a terminology of subjectivity to an emphasis on the accusative case. According to this perspective, for performance to approach ethics it must take place without appropriation by the subject. As ethics emerges linguistically, for Levinas, so that ethical performance is response to and in signification, ethics does not involve an “I” who acts but an accused who is pointed out and thereby responds to an other—who responds to otherness as such, to the Other (French Autrui), to other people, in life as not possessed but shared.7 The Other as a matter of performativity, perhaps of the flesh, “surpasses its idea” (Levinas, 1969, p. 49), signifying an obligation prior to what Bolton paraphrases as the subject’s “sense of linguistic expression and representation” (Bolton, 2004, p. 7; Levinas, 1969, p. 51). As Dan Leshem notes, Levinas’s approach to ethics “evacuates the space of action and ability, the here and the now, allowing it to be occupied by the other” (2005, p. 159). Levinas’s critique of ethical subjectivity, echoed by Agamben, involves a passivity in the ethical—termed “radical” passivity by Thomas Carl Wall (1999)—in contrast with which any mastery of action would be competence that raises an emphasis on the power of articulated ontology over the indeterminate performativity of ethics. The subject, for Levinas, cannot be patient, and thus cannot be good: subjectivity is where “‘I think’ comes down to ‘I

60

ENCOUNTERING ABILITY

can’” (1969, p. 46), where thinking begins with power’s actualization. Bolton notes that for Levinas, subjective ability is power that “constitutes freedom precisely as if the Other were yet another entity in the world that is open to possession,” open to subjective mastery whose logical end is nothing short of license for murder (2004, p. 11). As conceiving ability otherwise than ontologically opens ability to a politics of non-exclusion, resistance to the naturalization of ability becomes resistance to competence, setting up a critical engagement with and vigilance toward the inevitable emergence of naturalized competence. It is impossible—or im/possible—to avoid or effectively to resist nature, or being, in thought and language, so that much of the time we must perpetuate the ableism of conceiving the nature of ability, conceiving ability as psychosomatic and sociocultural competence as we negotiate significatory non-equivalence, the malady of language, in our linguistic dis/ease. As we have observed in the emergence of Agamben’s “anthropological machine,” an imperativity of articulation for language raises such a conceiving of nature. There is an imperative of thinking ability and of thinking and saying at all, which as it undoes conceptions nevertheless drives us into them, impelling us into articulation. Indeed, any sense of a world, as psycho-socio-somatic engagement, entails the imperativity of engagement with signification, entailing the imperative of engaging ontologically and otherwise. Such is the im/possibility of truth in language: neither ontology nor otherness internal to it is possible without its dis/articulated opposite, while each is entirely other and renders the other impossible. We might imagine slipping into the pure and repressive truth of signified primary ontology, or on the other hand into a liberated, fluid and performative alternative, while such imagining takes place on the terms of the virgule that joins and separates the prefix from the root of im/possible. For Levinas, ethics is im/possible, as Jeffrey Dudiak discusses in detail while emphasizing that “discourse itself” is im/possible (Dudiak, 2001, p. xiv). To say ethical relations are im/possible involves noting that the positions of subject, (ethical) performance, and world are never pragmatically articulable, that ethics cannot be naturalized in significations of subject and act. It is in linguistic terms that character as competent moral subjectivity does not maintain centrality. The competence of the subject—the “I can” as an ableist articulation of the ethical—loses power over the ethical as ethical ability (like all ability) becomes unmoored from any articulated structure of competence that anchors power in the naturalized subject. The ability of saying “I” becomes troubled in the significatory confrontation of the ethical insofar as there emerges what Wall refers to as “the uncanny ‘ability’ to think [a] rapport” with “the sheer possibility of relation in general,” the “‘ability’ to think that which always comes” in encounter, the “ability” to think “the motley” (1999, p. 162). This is dis/ability, both of the speaking or writing subject and the language—language internally foreign, for Deleuze (1997d, p. 5)—in an imperative context where, to draw again from Agamben, the “human being is

On the Origin of (Human) Ability

61

that living being that, in order to speak, must say ‘I,’ must ‘take the word,’ assume it and make it his own” (2010, p. 71). What Wall can only ironically name “ability” emerges where, as he draws from Levinas, “Any particular politic or ethic is a point of contact with an absolute milieu empty of all determinacy” (Wall, 1999, p. 162). Like the space of “indifference” in which Agamben finds Bartleby (1999b, p. 259) and the “central emptiness” that in The Open he suggests we “risk ourselves in” (2004, p. 92), this area is all we have for approaching the im/possibility of ethics. To the extent that we can follow Bartleby, we might approach what Agamben calls “a point of indifference between potentiality and impotentiality,” partaking in “a decreation in which what happened and what did not happen are returned to their originary unity in the mind of God, while what could have not been but was becomes indistinguishable from what could have been but was not” (1999b, p. 270). This locus of ethical and ontological im/possibility, the place where the speaking/writing being engages the ethicality and existence of itself as linguistic—where the linguisticality of language is the ethicality of ethics (while each of the terms also engages the other)—is a locus that involves the reflexivity of language and linguistic performativity that Agamben expresses for the “speaker” of “human language” (2010, p. 71). As Agamben’s consideration of language leads toward a conception of the priority of relation, it supports a conception of ethics as first philosophy. We have noted how in his work, the moment of anthropogenesis occurs in language’s otherness to itself, performative self-referentiality by which the indeterminacy of denotation from its origin not only involves reference to things but referentiality within language, which thus is always language about language, signification about signification and of signification, ability of ability or what from Lévi-Strauss we have developed as the dis/ability of anthropolinguisticality. Agamben notes that there is always a “double possibility inscribed in the logos, in the experience by means of which the living being has been constituted as speaking being”: the simultaneous im/possibility of “correspondence between the signifier and the signified” and “a void and a gap” that remains “between the semiotic and the semantic.” He observes that “religion and law technicalize this anthropogenic experience . . . separating and opposing point by point truth and lie, true name and false name, efficacious formula and incorrect formula,” tending to obscure the fundamental non/foundation or internal im/possible relationality for all signification (2010, pp. 69–70). Although Agamben considers philosophy a field where such technicalization comes under critique, we may consider the field to have performed such technicalization in conceiving ontology as first philosophy, such that relation is submitted to ontology. We may emphasize that the originary moment of language, the foundational moment of the human, is relationality, which includes the relationality of relationality Lévi-Strauss raises, the signifyingness of signification of Levinas, emergent from “original or pre-original

62

ENCOUNTERING ABILITY

saying” with its “intrigue of responsibility” (Levinas, 1998, pp. 5–6). Following Levinas, we find the originary moment of anthropolinguisticality to be relationality as such amid difference, in a fundamentality that involves itself differentially so that it must be termed non/foundational for thought and language, and thus for philosophy, unless philosophy enforces a foundation of ontology. The primordial relationality of ethics as first philosophy, for Levinas—as reflexive, always the relation of relation—is prim/ordial, dis/ordering as the order of order, its ability being dis/ability, as the locus of an originary virgule, involving recursivity and binding amid division. A primordiality of relation in linguistic anthropogenetic ability—which, as Agamben notes, is “always under way” and not simply a temporal genesis (2010, p. 11)—places interaction first, without necessarily any prevalence of care, yet there is the possibility, or im/possibility, of such prevalence. Originating with language, or rather as language, there emerges an internal differentiality, an intra- and inter-relationality, which involves the im/possibility of attention between moments or elements of relation, of encounter. While a priority of relation could as well involve allergy or contempt as solicitude or empathy, for Levinas the priority shifts attention to that moment for living beings of their interaction or inter-attention, in what he calls “the inter-human order” (1988, pp. 164–65)—an area of what Chris Beasley and Carol Bacchi call “social flesh,” a term that “highlights human embodied interdependence” (2012, p. 107). Caputo refers to this moment as “obligation” to remove it from the domain of philosophy, renaming Levinas’s ethics with that term and thus placing Levinas’s work in what Caputo suggests is a religious dimension (1993, p. 14, a dimension toward which Betcher draws Beasley and Bacchi’s thinking: Betcher, 2014, p. 7). For Deleuze, the moment is aesthetic: particularly in “Literature and Life,” he emphasizes literature as a locus of engagement of differentiality in virtuality, where there emerges the situational good of instances of difference that encounter each other (1997d). The moment entails the “hiatus” or “central emptiness” in language that Agamben recommends we “risk ourselves in,” “outside of being,” where any instance of significatory being may suffer with and for the other (2004, p. 92), thereby connecting Agamben’s thinking with Levinas’s notion of “substitution” or “one-for-the-other” (Levinas, 1998, p. 100). To the extent that we locate here a sense of care, or at least attention, it would be inter-relational attention emergent originally with language and as language, and therein an originary moment of what has been called the human. Not substantive, nor quite predicative, it appears modal, a way of relationality, adverbial; alternatively, it takes the vocative linguistic case, in a hailing, if indeterminately, among instances of originary (human) expression. The ethical restlessness in Levinas’s work entails such an “inter-human” moment of differential engagement, in which the risk Agamben writes of involves being shadowed by the “trace of the Other,” the always escaping trace in signification (Levinas, 1986).8 The “dark shadow” falling over language that Lévi-Strauss derives

On the Origin of (Human) Ability

63

from Müller, which Agamben emphasizes as a “malady” of language, emerges as language’s dis/ease, its non/fluency, a relational con/fluence or in/fluence amid flow as well as stagnation or brackishness (which itself, in extending the metaphor, involves teeming life of another order). In the interactivity of language, instances suffer each other and themselves in performativity, becoming exposed to one another in the primordial exposure of interaction—in what Levinas refers to as the “nakedness and destitution of the expression as such,” the “exposure, defencelessness, vulnerability itself” of the facing of the face (1992b, p. 83), exposure and interaction that bear the enigmatic imperativity of the originary, always-becoming context of indeterminate significatory encounter. This theorization is not to abstract an ethics of human language, but to follow the empiricism of Deleuze, in a critique of the ableism of ethics, a critique of the submission of the good to a regime of power and actualization in articulated ontology. Situating ethics in a context of linguistic im/possibility means dislodging from ethics any simple possibility of ethical and subjective competence, while undermining the possibility of positing the good as transcendent. Ethics as ability caught up in signification becomes engaged as we have engaged ability above and in the previous chapter, where the competent mind or body and the performing flesh (to reiterate Merleau-Ponty’s distinction) are in different ways im/possible, while ability yet comes to pass, without being mastered or captured, in the traces of its performative signification. Such ethical dis/ability is not yet articulated, and never exactly human, let alone establishing intentionality, yet it is performed always and by every living being who, in Agamben’s terms, “speaks.” Through this chapter’s discussion of linguistic, perhaps intrinsically ethical performativity we may consider human, the focus remains a critique of the signification of ability. Signified ability might seem logically posterior to the continuing ability in and of living, and dying, yet all we have of ability is what we have in signification. As language provides the inevitable, impossible, and only approach to its objects, the linguistic conditions of possibility for approach are also the conditions of impossibility, thus im/possibility. In the ability of signification and the signification of ability, which (differentially) are each other, ability is thus response, receiving its becoming, which is its meaning, as its relationality. Like all terms, ability and goodness are received from their contexts, in the passive voice, as all substantiation emerges in the context of modes of performative predicativity. The critique of ability as signification and vice versa emphasizes a definitional process whereby instances of being are ones of becoming received from a performative environment. This is an empiricist understanding by which every term in language is legible according to how context produces it, as what appears to be (subjectively) said is always (accusatively) becoming said. It is thus that ethical and any other ability emerges with inability as dis/ability, the latter being the term for an always (enigmatically) inter-relational expression whereby, with the ability

64

ENCOUNTERING ABILITY

of ability in mind, we are never able to rest with any position of competently thematized ability or inability (“thematization” being a key term in Levinas’s thought for congealed identity that an emphasis on responsiveness may resist). As the next chapter explores, much work in the multidisciplinary field of disability studies tends to produce something like a discipline, albeit one of internal division and reflexivity in which we find salient the recursive, differential activity of the virgule. A kind of discipline of disability studies emerges as itself dis/ability, perhaps unruly or un/disciplined, emerging as signification of dis/ability and vice versa by which we encounter a trace that leads toward the recursive, denatured and denaturing non/foundation of the ability of ability. There comes a call or vocation from work in the field, an imperative voicing that resonates from the perpetual origin of language and thus of the (post)human, by which “we” and other instances of relational being are hailed into enigmatic non/holism, in un/health, hailed into attention to difference as such. We may consider this the ethics of disability studies, perhaps discovering a way to consider disability studies as ethics: as a manifestation of a non/foundational first philosophy that we might refer to as the ethics of ethics.

Three THE NIGHTMARE OF HEALTH: APPROACHING DISABILITY 1. Woundedness as the Disarticulation of Dis/ability If, as in the previous chapters, we consider human ability to be denaturing nature, de/naturalizing and de/naturalized, it becomes difficult to understand what (human) “disability” could be. We question what the study of disability can involve, insofar as its discourse moves beyond an understanding of disability that reifies ability and reproduces ableism by helping constitute categorical human ability. As Peggy Phelan recognizes, expressions of disability, such as the categorical phrase “people with disabilities,” help develop an ontology of central, standardized human ability insofar as they submit performance to articulations of competence already established in the sociocultural, if not necessarily biopolitical, imagination (2005, p. 322). Robert McRuer writes, “there is (literally) no way of articulating the very word ‘disability’ in the absence of ‘ability’—and, indeed, in the absence of the mastery” entailed in what he refers to as “compulsory able-bodiedness” (2006, p. 141). To avoid participating in such sociocultural articulation of ability, any study of disability has to consider the im/possibility of the signification of ability, finding articulation to emerge in a context of imperatives both to articulate and disarticulate, while undermining the naturalization of the sociocultural as the origin of articulation. We may pursue such study toward overcoming the ontology of ability inherent in the articulation of ontology, toward post/human denaturing in the heart of naturalization. Perceived and expressed inability and disability produce the articulated able insofar as they oppositionally signify the competent: comparatively, disability helps make performance legible in terms of competence, which is achieved in cases expressed as able and not in cases of recognized disabilities. Mainly according to the medical model that has prevailed since the Enlightenment in the Western world, “disability” usually has indicated problems of access, inherent for some subjects, that are of an order other than problems considered too general, pertaining to most or all subjects, or idiosyncratic, pertaining only to one individual in a society. Pre-Enlightenment, supposed difficulty, strangeness, and deformity aided in the development of centralized ideals or norms, irrespective of whether “normal” or a term sharing its root was available to indicate the centering. In roughly the past two centuries, a systematic classification of impairments in relation to standardized ability has developed the center, the center being a function of the articulation of the

66

ENCOUNTERING ABILITY

marginal—being the (anxious) space of spectatorial normativity, as Carrie Sandahl and Philip Auslander observe (2005b, p. 2). When a critical focus on inability and disability emphasizes marginality upon which the center depends, it aims to undermine the claim of center for the articulated able. For example, to develop their concept of “narrative prosthesis,” David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder derive the emergence of the able from literary and other narratives, in which “disability inaugurates the act of interpretation” whereby normative dimensions of the world become articulated, prosthetically sociocultural dimensions (2000, p. 6).1 Reinterpretation may decenter normality, as in considering the deaf to have ability different from hearing, countering social and medical articulations by which lack, difficulty, and other aspects of putative disability are marginalized. As chapter 1 observes, such interpretation denies a central space of human being, where any instance of becoming would be translatable with another, and instead emphasizes empirical singularities not governed by a transcendent, normalizing category of ability. An arguably more aggressive and complex engagement of marginalization occurs in explicitly claiming disability, often raised by its advocates with reference to Simi Linton’s Claiming Disability (1998). As rhetorical claiming, it counters what it reveals to be the rhetorical positioning of ableism, positioning based on the articulation of claims for competent ability, such that the conflicting claims emphasize a struggle over the center, so claims of ability prove not to have natural access to centrality. Moreover, claiming disability performs denaturalization, destabilizing centrality itself, not merely operating otherwise than normally but otherwise than naturally, emerging as discourse on and gesture toward the problems of possibility or potentiality discussed in chapter 2. Besides being a decentering sociopolitical strategy, operating like claims of queerness, the claiming reflects on itself with a critique of political positioning, involving self-erasure: it emphasizes, as Linton writes, that the disabled “need a new name” (2005, p. 522). When, as she suggests, it engages performance that evades reference to any standard of competence—any class or comparison of ease or difficulty, comfort or pain—the claiming resists adequation of any act, experience, or state of being, as it gestures toward performativity that exceeds the possibility of articulation. Its gesturing functions much as Carrie Noland considers gesturality to operate, involving indeterminate and reversible access between culture and the organic body, both of which are rendered material and imaginary, both belonging ambivalently to nature and culture (2009). The claiming disrupts the articulation of disability and inability by engaging the disarticulation of ability that is endemic to ability, disrupting the metaphysics of subject and world by which the ontology of (human) abilities is framed. As it seizes and ironizes negation that would oppositionally establish articulation, the claiming disarticulates the articulation and engages articulability per se. It insinuates a preference not to claim, similar to the non-preference of Bartleby in Herman Melville’s eponymous story (1986). We read a gesture toward the

The Nightmare of Health

67

experience of potentiality, toward an excess of signification that overwhelms imperatives of articulation and thus signifies otherwise than socioculturally. Claiming disability bears an inflection of radical difference, a gesture toward the unnatural priority of ability to any conception of competence and toward a denatured notion of humanity, toward the in/completeness of the human as in/human. The claiming is response not simply to the articulation of ableism but moreover to the alterity traced in ability, to the differentiality of the im/possible signification of ability and ability of signification. For claiming disability, the apparently absent virgule marks disability anyway, marking the non/presence of ability and inability, moving beyond a dialectical struggle of margin and center, beyond questions of whether disability produces ability and whether a dialectic reinscribes the tendency of disability to constitute the able: we read in the claiming an expression of dis/ability. The claiming not just involves the virgule but emphasizes it, emphasizing the de/naturalization of the human, which is to say the performative signification of signification. Emphasizing the de/negation in and of dis/ability, the claiming puts under erasure any entailed terminology, indicating recursion that marks the im/possibility of any articulation of ability or disability. The claiming involves a predicative becoming that disrupts articulations of identity and substantive being. Thus no claim of dis/ability can be achieved; there can be no comprehension of dis/articulated performance. Such gestured-toward performance is a matter of what James Overboe refers to as “impersonal life” (2009), claimed or affirmed on the phenomenological terms of im/possible signification. Overboe draws on Gilles Deleuze’s philosophy of immanence (and on Giorgio Agamben’s reading of Deleuze) in writing that “an ‘impersonal’ existence on a plane of immanence is not dependent on reaching the level of personhood or the self; singularities and alterities in their existence express life” (Overboe, 2009, p. 253; Deleuze, 2001; Agamben, 1999a). Claiming disability is less act than response, than passion, being claimed by im/possible performativity, accusative instead of subjective. The claiming undermines and erases the subjectivity by which an ableist ordering of subject, world, and performance would be maintained. Without (necessarily) raising victimhood, claiming disability raises performativity without competent subjectivity, in a context where a grasp or claim constitutive of subjective power does not emerge, a context without the subordination of performance to a dominance of subjectivity over and against the world. It is not to take up the (Western) narrative of one’s life as something one does something with, by which living is reduced to subjectivity and ability reduced typically to articulable action. To emphasize im/potentiality in the claiming is to focus on not simple passivity but action that is inaction, and the act of inaction—the possibility of impossibility, potentiality that preserves impotentiality, preserving a differentiality from itself. In his consideration of Bartleby’s (im)potentiality, Agamben writes that “if potentiality were always

68

ENCOUNTERING ABILITY

only the potential to do or be something, we would never experience it as such; it would exist only in the actuality in which it is realized,” or only as competence that conscripts performance (1999b, p. 250). Insofar as the claiming is invoked as a matter of experience, we can take a radically empiricist approach to the performativity of experience, experience of im/potentiality that undermines any dominance of action or actuality, any articulation of a simply oppositional experience of ability or disability. The critical claiming of dis/ability inhabits and performs the “formula” for disconnection that Agamben and Deleuze (following Mathieu Lindon) find expressed by Bartleby, a formula that “‘disconnects’ words and things, words and actions, but also speech acts and words—it severs language from all reference” (Deleuze, 1997a, pp. 73–74). As it performs in/competently, the claiming signifies the excess in and of signification. The im/potentiality of claiming dis/ability can, to reiterate the remarks of Deleuze, “‘render’ an original and unknown language, which would perhaps be a projection of God’s language, and would carry off language as a whole” (1997a, p. 72), such that “the language itself will begin to vibrate and stutter” (1997c, p. 108). The dis/articulation in the claiming disrupts ableist articulation by reference to the unknowability of language, its un/knowability, by reference to originary, nominally human in/articulability and un/knowability, which involve the originary im/possibility of what the claiming thus raises as the im/possible. The reality of language and the human, and any instance of signification or human becoming, emerge in response to the imperativity of an enigmatic performative context—that is, in a differential and inter-relational ontology, such as we have observed from Deleuze’s engagement with the thought of Martin Heidegger (Deleuze, 1994, pp. 64–66). Insofar as we read it as dis/ability, the claiming makes any instance of expressed ability, inability, or disability un/knowable through the referentiality of claiming; a strong reading finds such claiming in documents of disability studies where such claiming is not explicit. As McRuer observes (2006), the moment of claiming in disability studies—a theoretical moment by which the discourse takes up a performative “crip” position—functions like the claiming of queerness in Queer theory, “Queer” being a notion David Halperin notes is used “not as a positivity but as a positionality” (Halperin, 1995, p. 66). McRuer writes, “crip theory would resist delimiting the kinds of bodies and abilities that are acceptable or that will bring about change” (2006, p. 31). 2 This is resistance that, like the claiming of queerness—which engages in a queering of the human (which, following chapter 2, is a redundant expression) —does not simply indicate specific differentiation, but points toward an im/possibly foundational differentiality. Concerning both queerness and disability, the claiming raises the queer virgule of the signification of (in/human) signification, gesturing toward the excess and indeterminacy of signification. Claiming performs what McRuer refers to as “noncompliance” (2006, pp. 103–45), an example of which is the non/response by which Bartleby

The Nightmare of Health

69

evades delimitation in performing something similar to what Halperin refers to as positionality. As Agamben observes, Bartleby’s noncompliance achieves “suspension,” the “most characteristic experience” of the Skeptics, as Bartleby does not refuse, but instead states “no more than” a preference (1999b, p. 256), in non/compliance whereby he is “fully experiencing the impotent possibility that exceeds both [Being and Nothing]” (p. 259). McRuer focuses on similar non-preference by Gary Fisher, which is complex—involving Fisher’s expressions of sexuality, race, HIV status, and other aspects of his subjectivity (including complexities of interaction between Fisher and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, the co-editor with him of his writings)—focusing on non/claiming by which Fisher achieves what McRuer (in part quoting Fisher) calls “a victory against ‘all things medical’ and rehabilitative” (McRuer, 2006, p. 136; Fisher, 1996, p. 267). McRuer finds that Fisher gestures toward an exceeding of ontological articulations of sexuality, ability, and health. Entering the topic of health, McRuer’s discussion places non/preference in a biopolitical context, corresponding with Lennard J. Davis’s observation that disability studies has taken up a “dismodernist” emphasis that forms a critique of modern tendencies of normalization, and moreover naturalization, of life. Davis is critical of the “universalization” of naturalized notions such as a standard notion of health—universalization that involves what should seem strange, what Georges Canguilhem identifies as strange: the odd, anomalous marginalization of such pervasive aspects of life as illness, pain, difficulty, and error (Canguilhem, 1989). For Davis, at the heart of disability studies is a critique of the signification by which human nature emerges as centered on universalized notions of subjective health, wholeness or perfection, and integrity (2002a, pp. 29–32). Davis proposes we think of a universal “woundedness,” implying we would decenter the ontology of health.3 This is not to think all life tends to fall into illness or error, in a falling away from health that would involve naturalizing a relationship between health and illness that reinforces the centrality of health. It is to place error per se primary, not error or illness articulated in any specific way but non-articulated error, as fundamental differentiality. What is universalized is disunity or disintegration, perhaps better termed omniversal or multiversal, although better still, such terms emerge under erasure, the universalizing not denaturing but de/naturing: not to naturalize the unnatural and vice versa, but to engage the notion of nature itself. Casting woundedness as primary emphasizes the differentiality in and of the wound—or the woundedness in and of differentiality, neither term determining the other—prior to any ontology of subject, world, and performance. Woundedness or trauma obtains before wounding or event, before the origin of any context or agency of infliction, even as “wound” bears implications of violation. Before nature, there is woundedness, before origin, or instead, since we have no access to such primary and excessive woundedness, as nature emerges it emerges wounded, emerging in de/naturing whereby the nature that must be recognized and ex-

70

ENCOUNTERING ABILITY

pressed nevertheless cannot be. Thus woundedness or trauma exceeds and precedes, or belongs to, the emergence of signification and the emergence of health and ability. Primordial woundedness of the possibility of health belongs to the im/possibility of the signification of health. Crip discourse such as claiming disability gestures toward such primordial woundedness, toward the non/foundation of the possibility of health—toward the dis/ability of signification, which de/natures the possibility of health. Deleuze finds the writer of literary texts working in this direction, as she or he “possesses an irresistible and delicate health that stems from what he [sic] has seen and heard of things too big for him, too strong for him, suffocating things whose passage exhausts him, while nonetheless giving him the becomings that a dominant and substantial health would render impossible” (1997d, p. 3). Writing literature “appears as an enterprise of health” in which the author engages “the world [as] the set of symptoms whose illness merges with man” (p. 3), a point that resonates with N. Katherine Hayles’s observation of the human as a “system” that can “instantiate metaphors” for a “complexity” that is “unthinkable in itself” (1999, p. 286). The entailed un/health or dis/ability is inhuman as it is human, thus in/human, so that writing it or claiming it, like claiming queerness, as a claiming of inhumanity gestures toward the in/human. A key aspect of Davis’s dismodernism is the point, essentially postmodernist and basically psychoanalytical, that the subject is always incomplete, riven or wounded insofar as we consider its health or its wholeness. A dismodernist claiming of disability is a claiming of incompleteness toward in/completeness, raising the im/possibility of completeness. Like Bartleby’s non-preference, the claiming moves toward im/potentiality, being a nonpreference of health that raises non/preference, whereby potentiality brings impotentiality into a biopolitical context that would reduce the performativity of potentiality to a simple actuality of subjective human health. The claiming seeks not health as wholeness, nor as soundness—as in a ringing call or hailing, to haleness—but seeks instead an improvisational call, a tentative or in/complete response and responding, like the ir/responsibility of Bartleby. The claiming involves non/preference that may appear immobile, but which maintains openness to the flow and becoming of potentiality. In this respect, the claiming of woundedness can avoid being a claim of victimhood (a problem of identity politics that Davis notes, 2002a, p. 5). Davis writes that it is too glib to say simply “we are all disabled” without the expansion “we are all disabled by injustice and oppression of various kinds” (2002a, pp. 31–32).4 Various socioculturally articulated forces inflict the bodies and subjectivities implied by “we” and “all,” inflicting “our” taking up of body and subject (and their assumed coextension) such that all socioculturally signified ability is oppressively regulated from its articulation. The more significant point is that, in embodiment itself and subjectivity itself, the possibility of health and ability entails an imperative of non-foreclosure that

The Nightmare of Health

71

places difference before articulation, so embodiment and subjectivity can only emerge entailed by illness. Health as (socioculturally) articulated is always oppressive, while in the context of signifiability, health is im/possible. 2. Imagination and Trauma: Signifying the Reality of Ability We never can grasp or conceive of what Maurice Merleau-Ponty calls the “flesh” (1968, pp. 139–40), nor can we ever speak fully or purely, yet as the body must inevitably emerge, it emerges with trauma and in trauma, as does the logos—the word, the logic, the organization of body and psyche, the physiological and the psychological. As the universalization of woundedness means imagining all bodies and psyches as fragmented, insufficient, or disabled primarily, it means thinking insufficiency and fragmentation as primary to the emergence of body or psyche. Primary woundedness disrupts naturalization, so we cannot imagine the natures of body and psyche without the broken signification by which we can imagine at all, signification traced by alterity that denatures health, that opens health to its internal strangeness. Still, insofar as we assume the individuality of a human subject, there obtains a notion of health that inevitably works to instantiate integrity and completeness. For approaching the implications of health, the work of Jacques Lacan has served many critics, including some in disability studies—for example Davis, Rod Michalko, and Dan Goodley—with its analysis of the emergence of subjectivity in Western societies. Since Lacan generalizes psychoanalysis (see, for example, his ridicule of “so-called culturalism,” 1991b, p. 147), his thought also serves for considering the integrity and completeness of the human. Lacan’s theorization of the “mirror stage” in human development is central to his analysis of the subject: it is the stage where the illusory integrity of the subject and body emerge (1977c). Lacan discusses this stage as a moment of misrecognition or mistaken assumption of the subject’s coherence as a singular, first-person performing being. At this moment the subject is articulated, put together, which entails the illusion of its coherence as an articulating being, its apparent ability to produce meaning. The nature of subjective ability, including linguistic ability, depends on the assumption of integration, an erroneous reduction that is naturalized. Sociocultural aspects of subjective ability depend on, while not themselves constituting, this moment, as they are articulated moments of competence; the possibility of subjective competence is specifically emergent in the mirror stage. We could think of the mirror stage as where the imperativity of competence emerges and where this imperativity is misrecognized as all imperativity, obliterating enigmatic imperatives—where signification’s possibility appears in a light that obliterates impossibility. The mirror stage is where totalization and ontology emerge, as infinity becomes unthinkable, the thinkable emerging as the unthinkable remains unthought (to draw on Emmanuel

72

ENCOUNTERING ABILITY

Levinas’s dyad of totality and infinity, based on his sense of infinite alterity as endemic for any origin of logic or expressed reality). This is also where articulability that makes signification im/possible emerges, whereby the approach to the infinite can arise. While in the mirror stage, there emerges the basis of naturalizations of ability and the human, it is where im/possible ability itself emerges. The illusion of the subject and its possibility is inaugural for the im/possibility of performance and of exceeding subjectivity through signification. Thinking through questions of health and integrity involves focusing on what Lacan refers to as the subjective imaginary, what is imagined of the subject and how the subject imagines, which is established in the mirror stage. Specifics of sociocultural articulation arise in the imaginary, including naturalizations of subjectivity, upon which we can focus a critique. An ideology of independence and self-creation, for example, appears to be misrecognition that is perhaps specific to a Western-world imaginary. What Davis refers to as the normalization of ability developed through and beyond the nineteenth century seems a function of the scientific imaginary, in a depiction that, emphasizing the mirror stage, implies the idealization inherent in processes of normalization, as the unencumbered body and the lucid psyche become naturalized and totalized as whole and healthy.5 A related critique locates an ideology of subjective human possibility in a United States cultural imaginary, resulting from the articulation of a world in which the subject’s desires and accomplishments seem unlimited. As the sociocultural context supposedly permits anyone to do anything she or he can desire, imagine, and work toward, any inability becomes a deficiency or defect in the subject. Such ideologies of ability entail psychic and somatic ableisms through articulations of health and ability (as Agamben observes, 2011). A disability critique of the putatively integral subject finds the human subject a function of an imaginary whereby naturalized positions and relations of subject, world, and performance appear stable and where health is a structure of competences articulated among the images of such positions and relations.6 If, following McRuer’s crip theory, we read dis/ability in claiming that is at least implicit for much work in disability studies, we may generalize the study of disability as engaged in a critique of its own imaginary and of the terms and emphases it employs. As McRuer’s remarks on articulating disability imply (2006, p. 141), disability studies runs the risk of reinscribing ableism and moreover risks producing a broader ableism—an imaginary and natural ableist space that supposedly would not exclude any (dis)ability— since there is no way to engage ability without engaging it through signification. In Lacanian terms, there is no engagement without reference to the symbolic order and the imaginary, in either of which ability can only be articulated as ableism: either in an order of social relations similar to what we have considered in terms of linguistic competence or in an imaginary where ability emerges as the natural attribute of an integrally embodied subject. En-

The Nightmare of Health

73

gaging ability without naturalizing it in articulations of world, performance, and subject involves attention to what Lacan calls the real, which in various contexts (drawing on Sigmund Freud) he discusses in terms of the uncanny and the Thing. The real for Lacan never emerges per se, but only at the “seam” where it meets the symbolic and the seam (not considered the same seam) where it meets the imaginary. As chapter 2 observes, considering the Lacanian real—“both the hard, impenetrable kernel resisting symbolization and a pure chimerical entity which has in itself no ontological consistency”— can become disruptive for ontology (Žižek, 1989, p. 169). 7 Two opposing perspectives arise concerning the relationship between the imaginary and the real; in each, one of the two moments fulfills the other, emerging as the other’s truth. In one perspective, that of ableism, the socioculturally articulated nature signified in imagination completes or supplements inarticulate, performing real ability, producing an idealism of body and psyche. Alternatively, the reality of ability appears a corrective to the process of imaginary misrecognition that yields the prevailing sociocultural naturalization. In the ableist perspective, performance appears to fulfill articulations of competence, becoming captured in imagined wholeness, expressed perhaps in terms of the picture of health. The reality of health and ability seems fulfilled as it is supplemented in articulation, as nature gains being through its capture in imagination. Reality as ability appears exhausted in totalizing comprehension, with nature emerging in naturalization. A disability critique that engages centering and marginality will recognize the naturalization that takes place in this supplementation, leading us to think the opposite, by which the real emerges as the truth of the imaginary. Considering the real as non-articulated excess is to see the imaginary as the dis/articulating supplement in which there occurs a failure to signify ability. Supplementation, always more than supposed completion—as in/completion— extends yet also substitutes: it is a response of fulfillment that also replaces and occludes or obliterates what it ostensibly articulates. The naturalizing imaginary, where sociocultural articulation occurs, becomes a prosthesis of the real—to reiterate Mitchell and Snyder’s term for narrative function (2000)—and ableism becomes the prosthesis of ability, yet this is supplemental prosthesis (to put it redundantly) whereby a merger of supplementation into putative completion results in forgetting the full dimensions of the fleshy reality it appears to have overcome, forgetting the reality or nature it articulates (I draw here on Jacques Derrida’s discussion of supplementation in Of Grammatology, 1976, pp. 141–64). The body as articulated in the mirror stage, as an imaginary unity, emerges as an imagistic substitute for the inarticulate flesh, which we may associate (while not equating it) with the real. The image is an extension, an extrapolation of what becomes obliterated as the image substitutes for flesh. Unity as image and concept inheres in the emergence of the body, in ontology, in flesh’s becoming comprehensible and thus legible in terms of sociocultural-

74

ENCOUNTERING ABILITY

ly articulated competence. As this imaginary unity extends and extrapolates beyond flesh into metaphysical embodiment, toward biopolitical embodiment, there emerge the unity of the subject, the coextension of subject and body, and a metaphysics of relations among subject, performance, and world, as well as a unity of human being. The articulation involves a metaphysics of signification broadly, including image and language, developing the totality of the embodied subject and the subject’s power, ability, and intention. Subjectivity as first-person singular, in the ableism of language, requires the consolidation of the subject in image. Lacan uses “automaton” and “statue” in discussing the image of the body in the mirror, emphasizing the artifice inherent in subjective embodiment (1977c, pp. 2–3). The wholeness and discreteness of the image entail the artifice, the determination and determinability, of the embodied subject and its acts and experiences. Wholeness and discreteness are inherent in the extension and extrapolation of the performative flesh, in ability’s articulation, in the ableism of signification whereby ability accedes to terms of competence. Articulation is the emergence of artifice, the emergence of being in language, the supplement of reality or nature. Engaged as it is im/possibly with the real, never escaping while never capturing the real in its naturalizing, articulation develops the automation of subject, performance, and world, in the ableist metaphysics that is the prosthesis of ability. In such metaphysics, the imperativity of competence as socioculturally articulated creates a context in which access emerges, access to competence. Access becomes articulated as means and ends, as means of access are literally articulated toward the ends expressed. Goals of mobility or reading, for example, as well as such activities considered ends in themselves, arise along with aids and tools for accomplishing the ends. Walking and seeing may seem obviously natural, yet insofar as they become or accomplish any accessible ends, their performance is articulated, naturalized as means. As they exist in terms of signification, walking and seeing, let alone literacy, are not natural, and in terms of access, they cannot be recognized as performative except insofar as their performance is naturalized by articulation into relations of subject and world that entail competence. Literacy, in the broad sense of ability to interpret—to receive and respond in a context of exchange—avoids naturalization only insofar as ends of interpretation are not articulated in terms of competence, of what the performance of receipt and response accesses (avoiding what Brenda Jo Brueggemann calls the “violence of literacy,” regarding education of the deaf, 2001, p. 130). Walking, seeing, and other instances of ability become comprised into unities, acts appropriate to discrete and whole subjects, as these acts apply to subjective negotiation of the sociocultural context. Unified by articulations of access, the acts themselves are automatic; they are artificial and metaphysical. They are acts glimpsed as unified in the mirror of the imaginary, performances discrete and whole caught in the imagining and imaginary glance that entails competence.

The Nightmare of Health

75

Following Lacan’s theory of the mirror, we find that the unifying glimpse that naturalizes imaginary competence, a glance that never grasps yet never escapes ability, is the ontological supplementation of ability, ability’s prosthesis (as supplementation is the literal meaning of this Greek term). As ability, nature, life, and reality are notions for what articulation cannot capture, prosthesis is thoroughgoing: walking, seeing, speaking, even breathing (to include breath thought of as spirit) are prosthetic, insofar as they are recognized in articulation. Their integration into subjectivity is prosthetic, as is subjectivity itself, the human, and also unity itself, which becomes imposed on itself as it is articulated, in supplementarity that undermines the articulation (as chapter 2 notes with reference to Russell’s paradox for set theory, by which the whole must include itself in excess of itself). As an imaginary unity, the body is prosthetic, the prosthesis of flesh, as the subject is part of the prosthesis of otherwise illegible, dis/articulated performativity, and the human is prosthesis of a certain set of observations concerning life in the world. Recognizing the prosthesis of wholeness itself casts health as prosthetic, as it is in the imaginary extension of integral ability into the act, state, and experience of the subject. We must read Marshall McLuhan’s observation (1964) that culture is prosthetic more broadly than in reference to modern culture, extending as Heidegger recognizes (1977) to the prosthesis (technology, in Heidegger’s terminology) that is language. In every dimension— infrastructure, technology, law, indeed all practices and articulations (Davis, 2002a, pp. 30–31)—we discover a thoroughly prosthetic culture, supplementing a nature that is the real and therefore im/possible basis of the prosthesis. To reiterate, taking this critical approach to the relationship between the imaginary and the real involves viewing the real as the truth or the beyond of the imaginary and considering flesh otherwise than or beyond the imaginary body. Reality overwhelms articulation, in an alternative dynamic of supplementation—of extension that involves an obliterating substitution—much as the imaginary operates in supplementing the real. The focus on the real raises a supplementary interrogation of the reality of the real, involving not simple obliteration but ob/literation. Moreover, the im/possible approach to reality or nature repeats supplementation, in compulsion toward grasping the trauma of im/possibility (recalling Freud’s depiction in Beyond the Pleasure Principle of the repetition compulsion, in terms of a drive toward the impossible confrontation of reality, 1961). Addressing dis/ability by recourse to a real beyond the sociocultural imaginary means not only confronting the repressive closure of articulated ability, but engaging the impossibility of arriving beyond that closure, as the dream of ability or health is always haunted by the inassimilable reality of ability, of health beyond health, of a reality by which ability appurtenant to the dead is not distinguished by an articulation of living. Insofar as the study of disability focuses on reality that would putatively correct imaginary articulation, such study is vexed by the required engagement of what exceeds signification from within signification—by the imperative to

76

ENCOUNTERING ABILITY

im/possible naturalization that emerges at the heart of the engagement with ability. Saying the reverse might be equally accurate, or more so: the study of disability, as an engagement of ability, is discourse that emphasizes the vexed engagement of its terms, where ableism and ability constantly emerge and require constant erasure, in impossible evasion of the fictive imaginary by which the discourse survives and in impossible fidelity to the real without which the discourse would not survive. The object of disability studies becomes such study’s engagement with the im/possible reality of health, a reality or nature in excess of the language by which it comes into being (the genitive “of” between reality and health is emphatically bivalent). Interrogating ability involves incessant questioning of the relationship between nature and culture where, in naturalization, nature only emerges as culture negates it and culture only emerges in the signification of nature. Such engagement of the necessary interanimation of signification with unsignifiability is obsessive, and must be obsessive, and involves an oneiric dimension, a dream of ability—the imaginary ableism of undetermined ability—that the vigilance in obsession needs to be able to thwart. At the heart of disability studies is the traumatic im/possibility of any articulation of reality. Dis/ability engages its nightmare, in which health is im/possible.8 We have considered all discourse to be dis/abled. Dis/abled emphatically, self-dis/abling, the study of disability engages its im/possible truth, engaging health exceeding health, discourse exceeding discourse, signification exceeding signification. Disability studies involves discourse that im/possibly grasps its prosthesis, its extension of itself, supplementing its supplementation, erasing its means and ends im/possibly by concomitantly achieving and failing at grasping itself. Perhaps belaboring the circularity, difficulty, and impossibility of the discourse of disability, this is to emphasize the problematic of attempting to engage what Lacan refers to as the seam where discourse, tending to emerge in prosthesis as a conflation or union of the imaginary and the symbolic, meets the real. As Donna Brody observes, Lacan discusses the real both as seam and what the seam connects; and as seam, it both separates and joins. Brody notes, “The real is a navel or fault line between itself and the symbolic” (1998, pp. 57–58). Lacan’s terms both grasp and fail to grasp the real, not to mention other problems of comprehensibility. In English, there arise implications (including synesthesia) for “seam” and its homophones: “seem” implies illusion and simultaneous inclusion and exclusion, whereas a second pun, “seme,” alludes to the Greek sema, the root of “semantic.” Distinctions that appear to mean something turn out not to, and to mean too much, and to appear yet disappear, and to blur. A seam is distinct but also overlapping, nonspecific, and, like a seam of ore, oozing and excessive, tending to muddle what it marks. Also, a near pun, seam and same, is germane (“same” and “seem” being related etymologically), as it relates seeming the same to being the same,

The Nightmare of Health

77

presenting an interanimation of difference and sameness that raises the primordiality of difference for any ontology of identity, raising non/Being in differential ontology by which there is no such matter as (simple) sameness (to recall Deleuze’s discussion of Heidegger). Referring to the real as a seam marking itself would appear to put reality outside comprehension, so any claim to grasp it would be simply false. However, as seam it becomes something to grasp, a line, if not really a line or not just a line, that discourse reaches toward. In the reach (or the performativity naturalized with the word “reach”) emerges access itself, the possibility of the seam, of the line that marks at least the edge of what is real. Thus the seam— as the real—must be entailed in articulation, in the prosthesis of articulation, which it cannot be: the seam is in/accessible, is indeed in/accessibility per se. What Lacan refers to as the traumatic encounter with the real is the trauma of encountering im/possibility, not merely an encounter with reality but an encounter with inassimilability at the heart of discourse and imagination, or with such inassimilability as itself what is real. We can avoid neither the alterity of reality nor the power of imagination, as both emerge in and as discourse. Just as no (biopolitical) dream of imaginary ableism avoids the performativity and indeterminacy of ability and health, no critical focus on ability or health avoids the prosthetic dreaming. Disability wakes in the traumatic recognition of not only the im/possibility of ability, but the plain impossibility of avoiding ability. What Agamben refers to as contingency, in his essay on Melville’s “Bartleby,” involves encountering the ability of ability, the im/possibility of ability. Agamben notes that contingency as such is intolerable, in its implications for ontology, referring specifically to Gottfried Leibniz’s inability to tolerate contingency (Agamben, 1999b, p. 270). Emerging as a result of Bartleby’s non/preference, his dis/ability, contingency signifies primordial differentiality, a nightmare interrupting a dream of ontology. Not merely accidental or a property of the order of the world, Bartleby’s non/preferring or non/claiming is a kind of “will” for Agamben. It is an orientation, in a context of encounter, whose definition Agamben adopts from Duns Scotus, for whom “will” refers “not to decision but to the experience of the constitutive and irreducible co-belonging of capacity to and capacity not to” (Agamben, 1999b, p. 262). Agamben casts the encountering of contingency—the encounter that is contingency, that gestures toward im/potentiality, the im/possible ability of ability—as an orientation toward “decreation,” or better de/creation, by which “the actual world is led back to its right not to be; all possible worlds are led back to their right to existence” (p. 271). With a will to prefer not to claim disability (to put it one of various possible ways), critical discourse on disability becomes discourse by which the encountering of contingency moves toward de/creation of the world, toward a place of im/possible performance. In gaining a discourse with the power to critique ableism, a disability critique encounters the im/possibility of engaging the power, encountering the

78

ENCOUNTERING ABILITY

dis/ability of naturalization that the discourse entails. As we can recognize the imaginary articulation of sociocultural ableism (in ableist infrastructure and technology, for example) and could express the supplementarity of this articulation as disrupted by the im/possibility of the reality it must be engaged with—while the difficulty of clarifying such an expression is daunting—there remains the greater difficulty of engaging the problematic of ability, engaging the question of reality in a way that challenges ableism without naturalizing an equally established articulation of ability. Disability critique often addresses what Michel Foucault refers to as heterotopia (1998), non-place or excess of place reflected in the sociocultural imaginary, non-place caught as not apprehensible in the glimpse that would assemble imaginary truth, or potentiality not caught in the seeing that would compose and impose actuality. Insofar as they emerge in the mirror, those subjects who are socioculturally articulated as disabled emerge not as comprehensible, but as exceeding identifiability and signifiability, as dis/abled; in Fiona Kumari Campbell’s terms, they are “unimaginable,” “unspeakable,” “unthought” (2009, pp. 11, 13). What cannot be captured is the “hybridity” of putative subjectivity, of which Carolyn Tyjewski writes (2006, p. 107) and which under scrutiny expands, as Davis suggests, to include all nominally human subjects. Such reflection on what does not belong to articulation, what is not put together in and does not belong to the actualizing mirror, shifts the perspective to a critical view of signification and the gaze, to impossibility, to not only the inassimilability of heterotopia but to the instability of the possibility of reflection. Thus emerges im/possibility, as critique finds itself caught in the dis/ability of criticism. For disability studies, not only do blessings and curses become indistinguishable, but the indistinguishability requires preservation amidst its negotiation: the woundedness at the heart of disability studies is indistinguishable from the health of disability studies. Disability critique approaches matters of error, difficulty, and trauma, yet more importantly it refigures them, putting error before or coeval with correctness, difficulty with competence, trauma with integrity, and decreation with creation in a privileging by which difference is not absorbed in unifying ontology. Re-privileging undermines privilege as truth undermines truth, signification undermines signification, and health and ability undermine health and ability. Not the woundedness, nor its emphasis, is the primary trauma, but the indistinguishability between woundedness and health. Thinking the health of dis/ability is to think its trauma, and vice versa. Itself traumatic, itself trauma, the study of disability engages trauma, and engages by trauma, opening up to trauma. 3. The Trace of Ability and the Ethics of Disability Studies We have been discussing ability, while associating ability with the real, as a matter of alterity, not just otherness to a subject or to subjectivity, nor to a particular sociocultural articulation or sociocultural articulation per se, but

The Nightmare of Health

79

otherness to or amidst ontology, the thinking of being. Levinas refers to such non/foundational alterity in terms of what is Other, using the proper noun, which in English appears the same as Lacan’s proper noun for otherness, although we must take care not to blur the complex ways the two handle otherness (noting for example that in the original French, whereas Levinas’s term is Autrui, Lacan’s is Autre). Indeed, we should keep in mind a tension or discord between the two figures as their ideas come into relation, proceeding always at risk of simply exploiting their continuing differentiality (in chapter 6, I address the problem of assimilating discourses between two figures). 9 For Levinas as for Lacan, the Other is never articulated, and neither is the subject, which Levinas refers to as a “null-site,” where subjective ability appears to come to pass (1998, pp. 17–18). The expression “Other” for Levinas involves relationality, not exactly beyond ontology—which would expand the logic of being, as if spatially—but otherwise than ontological, expressed in terms of otherness. Not contained in terms of subject or world, relationality emerges as dis/articulated performativity. Never simply itself even when expressed as the differentiality per se of alterity, relationality involves the relationality of relationality. Emerging otherwise than in articulation, recursively relational performativity is a matter of dis/articulating signification. We have noted that according to Levinas, language is where relation comes to pass. He finds alterity, the fundamental or radical alterity involved in facing the Other, a matter of signification. He uses “trace” in discussing the engagement of the Other in language: the trace pertains to the im/possibility in and of language, pertaining to the “very signifyingness of signification” (1998, p. 100). Without conflating terms, we may consider the trace in some ways as we have considered the seam of the real, insofar as the trace involves signification’s necessary yet impossible real object, or signification’s im/possible heart. The trace is of the Other—it is not and does not represent the Other—and is not itself signified, yet signification never evades it. By the trace, or the shadow of the trace, signification comes to pass otherwise than ontologically, as alterity constantly traverses signification. Hence Levinas’s references to “wakefulness” and “insomnia” as sensitivity to the trace and his emphasis on the accusative case in response to language, the undermining of subjectivity in responsiveness to the trace (2001, pp. 61–64; 1998, pp. 105– 106). Any subjective positioning over and against the world gives way, as does competence. When Levinas writes of substitution, the “one-for-theother” of relationality prior to subjective positioning or performance (1998, p. 100), he depicts the trauma of alterity in signification as exposure to and response concerning the trace of the Other, as becoming “hostage” and “persecuted” in the encounter (p. 110–12). Considered in the language of im/possible alterity, ability emerges in signification as performance associated with the trace, performance whereby relations of subject and world are decentered. However, subjectivity is not obliterated, nor is articulated ability—or instead, they are as they are not, be-

80

ENCOUNTERING ABILITY

ing ob/literated. Levinas’s “waking,” in part, is response in the subject to the illusion of subjectivity, response to the imaginary ableism of subjective power and linguistic meaning. To wake is to interrupt sleep that prosthesis can involve, and to disrupt competence, the sleep of ability. It is to wake in illness, to what emerges through the thinking of Levinas as sick and suffering subjectivity, entailed by im/possible health other than wholeness or haleness (related to the “task . . . to stay awake” that Friedrich Nietzsche notes in the preface of Beyond Good and Evil, 1965, p. xii). Waking in and to subjectivity that cannot be subjectivity is waking in thinking, being called to thinking, in Heidegger’s terms (2002), yet thinking whose ability is coextensively inability, as chapter 2 considers the thinking of thinking. E. M. Cioran writes (among other relevant remarks on illness, to include his essay “On Sickness,” 1970), “As long as one believes in philosophy, one is healthy; sickness begins when one starts to think” (1995, p. 42). We might phrase the trauma of ability as the trauma of not being dead, or as other than being dead or undead, or not knowing which to prefer (or perhaps being alive otherwise than biopolitically). In signification there arises traumatic awakening to the trace of the alterity of ability, and the trace of the alterity of health, which are dis/integral to the study of disability. (All the genitives here are bivalent, yet with the valences conflating.) Ability as alterity is dis/articulated; what commands, accuses, and thus overcomes the subject is dis/ability, the nonbeing of ability as non-articulated, non-empowered, im/potential ability. Levinas emphasizes the command of the Other as that of the exposed, of “exposure” or “nakedness” itself, not any articulated victimization but the “radical passivity” (Wall, 1999) of victimhood and suffering, thus prefiguring Davis’s notion of universal woundedness (which Georges Bataille prefigures also, as he implies a priority of illness for life—noting, for instance, “the open wound that is my life,” 1988, p. 90). Levinas expresses exposure and passivity in terms of the face, not an articulated face and not the face as imagined, but the facing of the face, its vulnerability (1992b, p. 83). This command of the face involves its unassimilated ability, which thus entails radical inability, radical disintegration and passivity as the commanding, alterior non/power of inarticulate un/health. As radical and enigmatic imperativity, this command is im/possible, the power of the non-empowered by which there persists what Levinas refers to as the “inter-human order,” where subjectivity is recognized as posterior to accusativity: it is an order where power and performativity lie prior to subject/world articulation (1988, pp. 164–65). As Michalko observes in writing about disability studies, Levinas helps locate suffering socially, as the imperative property of the community (2002, pp. 96–103), with an emphasis on community in terms of Gemeinschaft as opposed to Gesellschaft, to use German concepts that in English may be translated as respectively “community” and “society.” Gemeinschaft entails belonging, by which members are understood as bound together—usually in terms of blood kinship, but more broadly

The Nightmare of Health

81

put in inter-human facing, to use Levinas’s terms—whereas Gesellschaft represents a system in which members are related more or less technically, arguably a context that tends toward biopolitics. We might imagine Gesellschaft to be more liberal concerning the acceptance of differences, perhaps less dependent on traditions than Gemeinschaft, although in Gemeinschaft, which begins with an assumption of belonging and which might be considered a context of non-articulating sociality, what belongs cannot be considered foreign but must be involved, with whatever difficulty, in the community’s encounter of itself. In the inter-human, Levinas refers to a dis/articulate relational order of unavoidable connection, one in which goodness may come to pass, the indeterminate goodness of unassimilated ability found in the vulnerability of the dis/articulated face. Discussing the study of disability in terms of Levinas’s inter-human order not only suggests an ethics of disability studies, but moreover proffers disability studies as ethics, an ethics of (self-)disruption or de/creation. This is to emphasize a dis/location of goodness in or as inassimilable ability, ability otherwise than being, ability as an im/possible name for the dis/articulated order Levinas refers to as inter-human. It is to suggest that the term “human” for Levinas, in its reference not simply to life broadly, reflects not humanism or the naturalization of the human, but something like “ability”: the im/possibly entire range of performativity, perhaps hoped-for performativity, entailing meaning, if indeterminate meaning, dis/articulability. Whether or not this is too generous regarding Levinas’s intentions, I mean to open his terms beyond any restriction of species and any implication of naturalized humanity (see Llewelyn, 1991, and Derrida and Nancy, 1991). Also, the resonances of divinity in Levinas’s work, in direct references to the divine and implicated in his approach to the human, entail the imperativity of inassimilable ability. This is to consider the divine otherwise than ontologically and, in terms of ability, as involving dis/ability—as im/possible, uncanny, and traumatic, tracing all signification. More than a theoretical focus, dis/ability is the task of disability studies, a traumatic task and the task of trauma, a waking to and in the trauma of dis/ability. Insofar as it is the focus of an ethics, such ethics works against ethical ableism, as we recognize the dis/ability of ethics and the ethical dis/ability of subjectivity, the radical accusativity prior to any ontology of subjectivity or performance. As task and never accomplishment, dis/ability of and as ethics means, to cite Suzanne Barnard regarding Levinas’s work, substitution as not “knowing the Other, but of standing in for the Other” (2002, p. 180). Without any mastery of exchange, this is a stepping in, taking up an inexplicable burden, the taking up neither sayable nor unsayable, im/possibility being the burden’s main freight. It is a burden in and of signification, the weight entailed in approaching the trace, a burden or task such as we might consider for engaging the seam of the real (in an applied psychoanalytical context or otherwise).

82

ENCOUNTERING ABILITY

Levinas writes of ethics as entailing expenditure without reservation (1986, pp. 349–50). Without any determination of resource allocation, ability emerges without control, as reality unreserved, in the signification of ethics as the im/possible signification of ability and ability of signification. Dis/ability involves a claim of need generally, of right and of justice without reserve—of no special rights, attention given not only to the loudest or otherwise predominant cry, but the slightest cry and the cry of silence. The stammering cry of dis/ability, as a burden taken up, tasks us im/possibly, as a “sick word,” to cite Augusto Ponzio regarding the work of Maurice Blanchot, “whose sickness is the health of words” (Ponzio, 1997, p. 325; Blanchot, 1981, p. 23). Monique Plaza uses the figure of the cry in addressing “meaning coming from somewhere else,” a proliferation of intrusions that “are heterogeneous to the familiar functioning of psychic life; they have the strength of a devastating cry . . . [that] destroys the obvious truths . . . [and raises] questions such as who am I and who is the Other” (Plaza, 1986, p. 77; trans. Thiher, 1999, pp. 322–23). Such broken and breaking, excessive and non/compliant signification awakens subject and world, as performatively awakening itself, to ceaseless de/creation, in fleshiness that disrupts embodiment and health that disrupts itself. As the heart of ethics, this signification of signification disrupts ethos with an emphasis on relationality internal to relation. The relationality that is community, the foundation of ethics, emerges as the relationality of relationality, primordial differentiality by which ethics can be engaged as the ethics of ethics. Such signification works in and as dis/abled ethics, or alternatively as the ethics of dis/ability. 4. The Distress of (Studying) Psychic Ability While claiming disability can emphasize the recursive signification of dis/ability, terms such as “able-bodied,” “non-disabled,” and even “body” may continue to inscribe some version of normality, if not necessarily naturalization or biopolitical regulation, in disability studies discourse. Sharon Snyder and David Mitchell note, however, that such terms may be retained so they might be “demystified,” leading to “the disabled body’s reintroduction as the more appropriate paradigm for a mutable humanity” (2001, p. 386). In the interest of not taking theory too far from activism, as Mairian Corker and Tom Shakespeare discuss (2002b, p. 13), such usage retains much of what is given in normalizing sociocultural articulation, with recognition of how difficult it is for notions of subjectivity and humanity to be “fashioned anew out of whole cloth,” to adopt Snyder and Mitchell’s remarks regarding “the disabled body” (2001, p. 385). This is recognition that ableist imperativity is likely to overwhelm approaches that would try more radically to denature articulation, that would attempt to give the disabled “a new name,” in Linton’s words (2005, p. 522), and perhaps rename and reconceive all subjects, all humanity, or more radically all vitality, in recognition of the dis/articulated performativi-

The Nightmare of Health

83

ty Overboe refers to as “impersonal life” (2009). Noting the difficulty of implementing a Deleuzian perspective in theory and in practice—of working from a radically empirical philosophy of immanence—Overboe observes a restraint or moderacy, not to say conservatism, of the theoretical approach of much work in disability studies (p. 253). We may read moderacy in a predominant tendency to focus on bodily or physical disability that is evident in any survey of anthologies or other books in disability studies, where typically a single essay or chapter provides a specific focus on psychic disability, usually termed mental illness or disability. Goodley observes this tendency, in an essay that applies the thinking of Deleuze and Félix Guattari to disability studies (2009). He is encouraged by various “re-assertions” of the psychic in recent disability studies (p. 257), as a focus on the problematic nature of the psychic—which Deleuze and Guattari emphasize across their work—is essential for any consideration of the individual subject. Noting the unity, coherence, and individualism that “psychological” and “mental” tend to imply, Goodley supports using “psychic” for this aspect of the study of ability. Discussions of the unable or disabled body usually involve psychosomatic, particularly psychosocial concerns, although the psychic dimensions per se typically are not addressed as matters of ability and disability. Some work, such as that of Rose Galvin (2003), emphasizes how sentience and sensibility exceed conceptions of body as form, placing the body in a discourse of signification that entails psychosomatic ability and disability. For focusing specifically on psychic ability, to consider it psychosomatic is not necessarily to inscribe the psychic in bodily or individualized articulation. Much writing with such a focus, however, tends to articulate the body (as opposed to what Merleau-Ponty calls the flesh) as the locus of ability, so that a critique of ableism stops short of a thoroughgoing critique of naturalized subjectivity, perhaps strategically stopping short of undermining agency that the critique intends to gain as empowerment for individuals who have been socially articulated as marginal. Thus what Galvin calls “the paradox of disability culture” (2003), where the critique that must be expressed from the margin conflicts with a necessity to cease identifying a marginal position—a paradox integral to claiming disability—emerges emphatically concerning the psychic. The paradox, as we have discussed, involves embracing indeterminate health and ability, health without wholeness or full vigor, ability without articulation, life not articulated in terms of its lack or opposite. It involves engaging the de/naturing or im/possibility in signification that emerges in the signifyingness of the discourse of ability. Whereas a disability critique must disarticulate the body from sociocultural and other significatory limitations—from the ontology of health—such disarticulation of the psyche requires engaging articulations of subjectivity that critical and quotidian thought tends emphatically, repetitively, and compulsively to put in place. The notion of bodily ability arrives with

84

ENCOUNTERING ABILITY

the body and thus its contextual world assumed (having been produced biopolitically, for Agamben, as a result of what he calls the anthropological machine), a body that might then be unthought. When thought encounters the notion of psychic ability, it tends to begin by posing delimiting questions (which may involve a perpetuation of biopolitical imperatives). As thinking of psychic ability engages the problem of ability, the focus itself on psychic ability immediately raises the im/possibility of ableism. The question of psychic ability engages articulation itself, the putting together of psychic ability, ability as inherent to the nature of the subject. Coherence, if not yet competence, is posed at the outset; the question of psychic ability begins shaping the psychic as coherent, even if it shapes performativity not yet naturalized (in the mere questioning), not yet organized into subject, world, and performance nor articulated in terms of access. The infinity or anomie of the open question of psychic ability appears responsible for coherence’s emerging with the incipience of the questioning, requiring conception— the conception of experience, states of being, and action—as definitional of the psychic. The psychic becomes thinkable as, for one thing, thinking ability, as conceiving or as mind, and embodied (thereby individualized) mind, and specified emotion. Competence tends to emerge subsequently, as these various objects appear too amorphous to sustain questioning otherwise (the amorphousness perhaps influenced by a dualist view whereby the psyche or soul is immaterial). Competence emerges when the performance of psychic ability becomes articulated, competence as the specification (albeit in abstraction) of ability and access. In Writing and Madness (1985), Shoshana Felman emphasizes that we are unable to think the psychic without the imperatives by which it becomes articulated, without what forms a naturalized context of psychic performance. Mind, emotion, thought, and other general and more specific aspects of the psychic become articulated socioculturally, as do distinctions between the psychic and the social and the psychic and the somatic. As chapter 1 discusses, sociocultural articulations of the good distinguish and express ability, as cultures are defined by practices that articulate world, subject, and performance in terms of ethos. While sociocultural idealization and normalization may pertain to bodily ability in unconscious or ideological ways, the regulation and shaping of psychic ability take place explicitly and deliberately in social terms. As the psyche is the focus of efforts toward improving or overcoming a lack or deficiency in competence, the individual psyche becomes the locus of ability to benefit oneself and others, and to do harm, thus being the locus of one’s skills for sustenance or survival and for success otherwise defined. There are extensive efforts to manage education and child development toward expressed ideals of psychic functioning and behavior, evincing recognition of an interpenetration of subject, world, and performance even when the emphasis for development falls on the individually embedded psychic subject. Various laws express what is forbidden and what is obligated in

The Nightmare of Health

85

ways that prescribe and shape behavior, thinking, and emotion. In some cases legibly and others less so, as Foucault and Judith Butler have demonstrated (to recall chapter 1), societies regulate sexual thought and feeling and other matters of behavior, including political behavior, as occurs for instance in the “clear and present danger” Supreme Court ruling that purportedly would regulate the thoughts of potential soldiers in the United States. By various means of sociocultural articulation—means that may become ends—psychic performativity may become indistinguishable from competence that serves ethos. Regarding the articulation of psychic ability and impairment, it becomes clearer than in the case of articulations concerning the body that often, instead of impairment, what is marginal is difference per se—what is unsightly or otherwise objectionable, sometimes claimed to be offensive or (often gratuitously) labeled as hazardous. In Western societies in particular, as Foucault has discussed regarding various discourses, the category of the deviant becomes explicitly and thoroughly articulated, for example through determined subcategories of criminality and insanity. As culture articulates itself through psychic ability—manipulating itself through prosthesis—it articulates what is other to or outside the interests of culture and psyche, such as danger without and ill health within, articulating what becomes regulated as Mary Douglas has described in terms of pollution and taboo (1991). A discourse of inclusiveness can coincide with such regulation, whereby all ability is welcomed that does no harm to the expressed inclusive whole or ethos. This will be a discourse of limited and limiting health, typically biopolitical and in any case entirely different from a discourse of non-exclusion that would keep difference primary, that would open to undetermined health and ability, inarticulate and unregulated ability, and thereby the im/possibility of ability. It appears that an imperativity in culture addresses psychic ability explicitly to pin it down, to articulate such ability, to manage what would otherwise be its amorphousness and danger, to bring it into actuality, to comprise it under competence, all toward determining its possibility, toward setting a mode or context of possibility, in terms of ability as access to what is valued in a culture or society. The study of disability itself may tend to acquire ethos and impose it in the moment of articulating psychic ability, notwithstanding whether such study attempts or accomplishes a distinction between its ethos and that of any particular society. As it moves toward emphasizing dis/ability, however, disability studies cannot help but de/nature psychic ability and psychic health, as well as the ethos, goodness, and ethics of psychic health. De/naturing occurs insofar as difference is recognized and moreover emphasized, insofar as the study of disability can remain true to an ethos entailing multiple imperativity, including enigmatic imperativity—an ethos reflecting, however im/possibly, a primacy of differential relationality. Such an ethos involves the imperativity of attending to distress as a signal factor of disability, entailing the significatory context of the distress of distress. Distress is the main term for depicting psychic illness, naming a mat-

86

ENCOUNTERING ABILITY

ter not usually appurtenant to ability per se, as Anne Wilson and Peter Beresford have discussed, but appurtenant instead to suffering (2002). Pain can be an inextricable factor in instances of articulated physical disability, being in some cases the cause of disability—often concerning problems of mobility, for example—and moreover can expand throughout subjective experience, beyond any specific perceptive or proprioceptive location. Still, in many cases pain or discomfort is characterized as an undesirable presence, while not a factor in ability, particularly because its presence is so idiosyncratically attitudinal and it is not necessarily symptomatic. On a relative scale, a person who is nominally healthy and functional may measurably experience quotidian discomfort on a level higher than that of someone with a demonstrably articulated illness or dysfunction; this point is basic to the social model of disability, which agrees here with the medical model (medical practice in general having tended, historically, to marginalize considerations of pain). In psychosomatic existence, however, suffering is integral to the psyche, involving a phenomenological moment we cannot bracket. Literally, distress is constraint, a matter of limitation, thus a matter of performativity’s suffering under various aspects of constraint, such as under sociocultural or otherwise conceived articulation, to include circularity in the articulation of illness. Engaging the im/possibility of articulability, as it is imperative for a disability critique of psychic articulation to do, reveals distress in signification—a “rupture in logos,” as Allen Thiher puts it (1999, p. 160)—the distress of the ability of ability, the nightmare of health and ability. The nightmare is the engagement of limit, as health always struggles with health beyond health, health being an ideal struggling with its implicit selfexceeding as well as an exceeding that struggles with a horizon of health that is yet beyond. A way of theorizing psychosomatic suffering as distress is to consider it the experience of performativity that exceeds various kinds of competence, in various ways. Psychic distress entails the engagement of im/possible performativity, performativity as signified and signification as performativity, performativity that thwarts articulation but which cannot emerge other than in terms of articulation. Beyond simple constraint in subjectivity, such distress emerges in a world where articulation is unavoidable, where performativity thwarts articulation but itself is thwarted by the imperativity of articulation—a world in which ability thwarts ability. Theorized thus, the psychic as engagement of signification becomes the trauma of dis/ability as such, and thus the non/paradigm of dis/ability, the non/foundation of ability and possibility. Thought is called into psychic existence by multiple and conflicting imperativity, hence the appeal of the imaginary, prosthetic competence of subjective ableism—even for critical thought—which emerges as habit and comfort. Drawn to the imperative of psychic ableism, one may wish to become one and remain one, coherently and competently, seeking to evade the insomniac, accusatory nightmare of ability that in the pursuit of psychic health we are compelled to wake to, afflicted as

The Nightmare of Health

87

we are by the multiple imperativity in the signification of signification, signification that operates in the Unconscious (which is “structured like a language” for Lacan, 1998). To continue in psychoanalytic terms, insofar as we exist as differentiated singular beings, we must wake to ability in and as distress as what we are, distress—or dis/stress—being the non/foundation of psychic being. Insofar as it focuses on differentiation and attends to a claim of dis/ability, the study of disability persists in such distress. 5. Language Performing the Disability of Ability As we think a traumatic health otherwise than healthy, we think such health through signification otherwise than articulate and signification or experience otherwise than action between subject and subject or subject and world. We engage distressed and distressing linguistic psychosomaticity, which entails yet exceeds such matters as who or what speaks, what is spoken, where responding occurs, and whether sayability is possible. Insofar as a primacy of difference for disability studies involves an ethos of the critique of ethos, while involving signification as the exceeding of signification, a disability critique will not possess its language nor recognize any possession of language, but instead leave language to otherness, language being a matter of what Lacan (referring again to language as proper to the Unconscious) calls “the discourse of the Other” (1977a, p. 172), or alternatively what Deleuze calls “original and unknown” and perhaps divine expression that “would carry off language as a whole” (1997a, p. 72). In the language of dis/ability, the language of im/possible health—in/competent language theorized as im/proper to psychosomatic ability—is the stammering of necessarily irremediable illness, involving indistinguishability between blessing and curse, indistinguishability appurtenant to a trace not assimilable to its origin, a trace of (but not traceable to) the Other. To dwell on psychic competence in language, competence that would constitute the signified and the signifying that is the psychic, would be to avoid the trace, or the seam, or the mark that joins and divides the dis/ability of thought, of signification, and thus of psychic ability. Much language may sound seamless, in the prosthetic imaginary of articulated ethos, spoken by a conversational subject who thereby appears to have character. A metaphysics of subjective linguistic ability may emerge in apparent presence, transparent and inclusive, as discourse by which one could master contingency, emerging as vorhanden, in Heidegger’s terminology (1962, pp. 95–107). Language can and inevitably will enable a dream of completeness and consistency, intimating an imaginary ontology where all seems sayable, or where sayability is all, in a totality of ableist performance. The enabling occurs in “saying” itself, to use Levinas’s term, where there occurs the ability of signification and in which lies im/possibility, entailing the inevitability that the differential and

88

ENCOUNTERING ABILITY

im/potential saying once articulated becomes the ontological “said,” the dream or sleep of competence of language and subjectivity (1998, pp. 5–7). As the trace of alterity emerges with the saying, the impossibility of psychic coherence emerges with the voicing of its possibility. The dis/ability of language as psyche and psyche as language arises as waking, waking as the dis/ability of the ableist, biopolitical dream, where only dis/ease or madness is able to keep awake, where the only waking is waking in madness. Thiher writes that feminist literature in particular develops such waking, as resistance to gender domination, involving “a mode of discourse that intentionally wants to be madness” (1999, p. 165). He notes the discourse of madness especially in the work of Marguerite Duras (pp. 302–308). Duras, on whom I focus in chapter 7, raises the issue of gendered dis/ability in suggesting that only women are “mad” enough to “write completely,” to “carry on outside the conversation of the life they live,” like “madmen” (Duras and Gauthier, 1987, p. 31).10 Perhaps any instance of language may entail such waking, and any instance entail sleep; in attending to dis/ability, we try to avoid determining or foreclosing specific utterances or kinds of utterance. We may still consider just how in language waking might emerge, as we pursue how primary otherness disrupts the psycholinguistic conversational and subjective imaginary. Perhaps most relevant is the category of proscribed language: language that has been identified as disruptive, taboo, or otherwise objectionable, or which appears intended to disrupt. We can consider involuntary language, such as coprolalia (associated with Tourette Syndrome) as well as swearing, cursing, and language otherwise described to impute to the user more or less deliberate violation of ethos, limit, or order. Such language is often associated with psychic and/or linguistic weakness or incapacity, sometimes stigmatized in terms of ethnicity or social class and often attributed to mental or emotional illness or instability. Disruptive language can entail disruption of language, exemplifying signification’s disruption of signification, foreignness internal to signification; this is to emphasize meaningful language, let alone vocalization that would only arguably be considered linguistic. Approaching proscribed language is typically approaching violence or aggression in language, involving the locus of violation and violence and the attribution of intention and violence in linguistic performance (which chapters 5 and 6 consider), thereby involving how these are features of the psychic in the context of subject and world. Robert Veltman finds that modern profane cursing draws on archaic ritual structures whose sociocultural sense is lost, structures that invoke the divine and cannot adequately be expressed in modern terms of speaking subject, performed language, and represented world (1998; see also Assmann, 1992). As Kate E. Brown and Howard L. Kushner write, modern cursing is spoken “from the position of the forgotten in the voice of prophecy and repetition” (2001, p. 556) as it develops its “quasi-magical and singular capacity to of-

The Nightmare of Health

89

fend” (p. 550). What structure we can derive from ancient cursing blurs language with world and with the divine as immanent in the world, so the divine seems one with the language, even while foreign to it, or one seems a property of the other. In this structure, the language of the curse takes agency, so that the human speaker, in addition to the intended object, acquires an accusative position. The speaker thus appears self-accusative in any view of cursing that recognizes the presence of a discrete speaker (p. 548). Besides cursing, Veltman describes all contemporary expletive and invective language as vernacular versions of ritual swearing, arising from archaic language that explicitly depends on invoking the Other, invoking in language that which exceeds language. He argues that the archaic model underlies modern obscene swearing, which involves words used not metaphorically but obliquely—bodily, scatological, sexual, divine—in a blurring of registers that thwarts referentiality, often deliberately, yet in which the speaker still acquires an accusative position and the language itself entails a position of power. The blurring between cursing, swearing, obscenity, profanity, and other proscribed language is reflected in shifting injunctions and legal actions, so that in the United States, for example, blasphemous speech has become hardly litigable, whereas racist language is more likely to be censured or prosecuted (while explicit sexual language remains proscribed). Agamben observes, however, that taboo language does not necessarily derive from “the magico-religious sphere” (2010, p. 43). Focusing on cursing as derived from the context of the oath, Agamben argues that “magic, religion, and law . . . result from the oath as its fragments,” from a moment when the curse, injecting ambiguity into the deployment of the oath, “sanctions . . . the loosening of the correspondence between words and things” (pp. 42–43), thereby disrupting the intention for language “to distinguish, and to articulate together in some way, life and language, actions and words” (p. 69). The curse, and the broader expletive and invective language Veltman associates with it, invokes the trace or the seam of differential excess that disrupts (human) meaning as such, in the moment of meaning’s possibility and in the moment of desire for meaning. By the curse, “the connection that unites language and the world is broken,” Agamben writes, one result of which is that “the name of God, which expressed and guaranteed this connection based in blessing, becomes the name of the curse, that is, of a word that has broken its truthful relation to things” (p. 42). Insofar as we attribute intent for obscene and otherwise disruptive language, intent for the performance of disruption, it appears intent directed at competence from within competence, meaning directed against the possibility of meaning, and thus meaning exceeding meaning. Cursing, swearing, and other disruptive language requires competence in the sociocultural linguistic context, fluency in the specifics of ethos and sayability, what Foucault would refer to as the disciplinary dimensions of the sociocultural context. Both language and its speaker or provenance are involved in what James Berger calls

90

ENCOUNTERING ABILITY

“the dys-/disarticulate,” a “figure for the outside of language figured in language,” a figure that “is thrust away from and drawn back toward the social order” (2014, p. 2). As Brown and Kushner note, drawing on the work of Gilles de la Tourette, the disruptive language of even those who utter it impulsively and apparently without control emerges in the specific language and cultural context of the speaker, in one’s original tongue when she or he knows more than one language: “Cursing is a fundamental linguistic accomplishment, evidence of a speaker’s origin” (2001, p. 537). That is, while exceeding the subject, proscribed or disruptive language nevertheless engages the context of imperative competence. In this respect, we can read obscenity in Bartleby’s expression of non/preference. His in/expressiveness raises what is not to be said—that what he is being asked to do would conscript (human) performativity to competent, mechanical (re)production—and thus he reveals the obscenity of the conscriptive social context. This (in)expression emerges with full competence in the language of his world, such that by Bartleby, the world speaks its biopolitical obscenity. Bartleby is a competent subject in the moment of expressing his in/competence as the larger in/competence of the world and its language. As both Agamben and Deleuze observe, his expression de/creates the context. Douglas details how what is dangerous or otherwise objectionable for a culture must be expressible in the culture’s terms, in the context whereby such categories as the obscene and the blasphemous emerge (1991). The categories indicate what the ethos in its self-definition must articulate yet exclude, an outside that must and must not be expressible—for example, what law courts considering obscenity cases must express as the inexpressible. What Douglas develops as the dynamic of the obscene shares a structure with the dynamic of cursing, with the invocation of power typically framed as divine. As the curse expresses power that may not or cannot be expressed, it patently engages what is proscribed, leading to cultural injunctions regarding oaths and curses. At root, what linguistic proscription seeks to banish is dis/ability. In cursing and obscenity, there emerge dynamics of in/expressibility, involving not only the problematic of what a specific ethos holds inexpressible but moreover the inexpressibility of competence per se—entailing the unarticulated competence of competence, its alterity to itself—which belongs to the emergence, within language, of unsayability. As Agamben details, mainly in The Sacrament of Language and the essay on “Bartleby,” the power of proscribed or foul language involves not only sociocultural interdiction but a crisis of signification, as such language patently and latently involves excess in and of signification, where linguistic ability emphasizes linguistic inability. Obscenity in the etymological sense of bad augury is proscribed in part to prohibit the saying of disruptive and potentially false or misleading ill omens, but the proscription moreover prohibits language by which good augury cannot be distinguished from bad. Cursing and swearing emerge as glossolalia, a speaking in contradictory tongues or a madness of language, exemplary of

The Nightmare of Health

91

language’s endemic distress and dis/ability. The power of cursing emerges insofar as alterity to linguistic power, which is endemic to linguistic power, is traced in expression, and the ability of expression disrupts itself, along with the ableism of competent fluency. The ableism of language, which becomes explicit as linguistic proscription, would enforce healthy language, language as if liberated from its internal alterity. As the dream or the imaginary of signification, such ableism does not develop through historical progression, but—as chapter 2 examines, drawing largely on Agamben—is incipient with signification, arising from an imperative to connect thoughts and words and things. A moment of domestication or civilization, ableism emerges with language, yet the dream of liberating wholeness arrives with language’s emergence in im/possibility or im/potentiality, emerging with the supplemental imperative of waking to enigmatic non/holism. Alterity emerges simultaneously with completeness and accomplishment, traversing the whole, as difference and sameness emerge together in the moment where the dream of wholeness must foreclose its other, the way the body forecloses flesh. As the im/possible exclusion of alterity (which itself is alterity) is originary with language, it is inaccurate to consider, as Veltman implies, recent kinds of obscenity to be secularized forms of divine cursing. What might seem the greater force of archaic or modern explicitly profane cursing is attributable to its more patent engagement of the inexpressible, in its invocation of the exalted and foreign category of the divine—that is, a more emphatic disruption of linguistic ability by the ability of unsaying. Sexual, scatological, and other swearing equally explicitly carries such force insofar as the language overtly disrupts the body of competence with the trace of performative, improvisatory linguistic flesh, with the trace of significatory dis/ability. When Antonin Artaud (1958) critiques the domesticity of art, language, and culture, for him it is problematic that culture, in its sleep (perhaps culture per se as sleep), seems equally untroubled by the sacred and the animal, the fleshy and the divine, as the performative in/human seems absent (absent indeed where there prevails the competent sleep of biopolitics). David B. Morris emphasizes the problem while discussing obscenity in the work of Henry Miller, citing Miller’s argument (1964) that obscenity and profanity engage us in fear of what is “half formed” (Morris, 1993, p. 203), what perhaps because of its intimate foreignness—its “extimacy,” to draw on Lacan—cannot be fully formed (Lacan, 1992, p. 139; also see Jacques-Alain Miller, 1988). Morris writes that the power of all language categorized as objectionable, and which is therefore interdicted so that it will not cause trouble, inheres in its engagement with “what it is that truly threatens us” (p. 210, although he does not develop the threat in terms of the im/possibility of expression). The disruption underlying profane and obscene language, not only proper to proscribed expression, is disruption and distress endemic to language as psyche and psyche as language, from the incipience of language through what might

92

ENCOUNTERING ABILITY

be considered its highest development. Cursing and obscenity wake language from the dream of health by reference to the health of health and from the dream of ability by reference to ability itself, along with waking from preferability to the preference of preference and from apparent liberty to the liberty of liberty. The waking always entails disruption, and intent to disrupt, while neither the waking nor the intent is ever coherent or fixed in the linguistic subject, but consists with the dis/tress endemic to significatory psychic ability. 6. Blessing and Curse in the Ethics (of Ethics) of Dis/ability Insofar as it wakes language to dis/ability—where primary relational differentiality underpins and blurs the profane and the obscene, thereby blurring the divine, transcendent, animal, and material in performative alterity—the curse wakes us to the excess of what may be determined as good, including health, freedom, ability, and goodness itself. The language of blessing, as it engages the inexpressible, also entails such im/possible excess and dis/stress of signification. Agamben observes that both cursing and blessing arise “from the division of the experience of speech that was in question in the oath” (2010, p. 44). Blessing wounds the blessed and wounds its language (blessing with bleeding, etymologically, consecrating with blood): it wounds blessing through the primary woundedness of language, the dis/abling excess of alterity that blessing as wounding, like cursing, must engage, as Jean-Louis Chrétien in “The Wounded Word” (2000) recognizes in prayer (following the tradition whereby woundedness or brokenness is a locus of illumination). An indistinguishability between blessing and curse reaches back through ancient mythology, emerging explicitly, for example, in Sophocles’s treatment of the Oedipus myth. Agamben’s consideration of the oath helps us recognize that for cursing and blessing, the primary trauma is that of engaging the ability of ability, engaging what Levinas calls the signifyingness of signification, where signification involves what he calls “unrightness itself” (Levinas, 1986, p. 355). Levinas refers to the engagement of signification and the trace in terms of “liturgy,” as we have noted concerning his depiction of ethics: engagement as gratuitous donation, giving without reservation, even “at a loss” (p. 350). As an engagement of excess, engaging the signifyingness of signification emphasizes an excess of and exceeding of agency, where the giver and the giving are overwhelmed, exceeding their capability. Cursing shares such liturgical dis/ability with blessing and prayer as the dis/ability of the linguistic gift of the “sick word,” spoken in desire of the health of “the health of words” (Ponzio, 1997, p. 325). Such a word can emerge only in stammering, as in the cry of dis/ability, which is also the cry of the prophetic (and of theory as well, the theory of the theory of signification). In such donation without reservation, intention and desire inhere in performance without being attributable to subjective agency. In the terms of

The Nightmare of Health

93

speech act theory, language emerges in cursing and in blessing as act instead of or overwhelming meaning, where performance becomes the focus, and subject and world recede. As Brown and Kushner note in referring to the excessive signification in cursing, the language “happens to” the subject, displacing subjectivity, or alternatively subjectivity exceeds itself, the subjectivity of subjectivity becoming indeterminate from accusativity, from subjectivity’s own and other alterity (2001, p. 539). The donation occurs outside present time, disrupting contemporaneous and linear temporality, overwhelming attempts to actualize ability in a living present (as might be articulated to exclude a category of the dead, the divine, or the eternal). In cursing and blessing, language emerges as desire of the Other, where the expression of the “I” must emerge and respond accusatively, Levinas notes, as “here I am, answering for everything and for everyone” (1998, p. 114). The intent or desire of excess, and the desire to exceed, belong to language, not possessed by a subject or proper to an articulated ethos. Brown and Kushner argue that in the Oxford English Dictionary’s definition of “curse,” the explanation that the divine curse may variously be authorized for persons and the deity implies an “indeterminacy of the relationship between voice and deity” (2001, p. 562, n. 46). Levinas writes that any context of engaging the Other involves the vocative case, otherwise than simply communicative, expression occurring outside articulated relationships (Levinas, 1990, p. 7; Robbins, 1999, p. 11). In such language where the inexpressible not only haunts but merges with expression, where there emerges dis/ability not only of a subject but of subjectivity per se and of what calls the subject into existence, we find the dis/ability not only of specific intent or desire, including desire to disrupt and disable, but of intention itself, however and wherever intention is thought to occur. There emerges the dis/ability of Otherness, the Otherness of Otherness, the dis/ability of alterity proper, which Levinas expresses with the im/possible non-expression of the trace. To think of the ability of ability, the im/possibility of the signification of ability and the ability of signification, entails consideration of divinity under erasure and goodness differentiated, good that is good and good that is not. 11 As chapter 2 observes, when recognized in terms of the dynamics of signification, the notion of ability emphasizes non/fluency, where the flow and becoming of signification are engaged in the relationality of relation. Attention to ability is attention to con/fluence, to interpretation and reception in the differential significatory context of expression, response, and the suspension of both. David Patterson approaches the indeterminacy of expression and response—engaging us with ir/response and ir/responsibility, such as that of Bartleby—when he writes, “The organ by which we hear is the tongue” (1998, p. 100). The recursive virgule of relationality that emerges in signification brings implications of risk to encounter, risk that, as Levinas notes, is key to the ethical (1998, p. 120). It is ob/scene risk by which good and ill can emerge as indeterminate, a context of ethical im/potentiality—what Agamben,

94

ENCOUNTERING ABILITY

drawing from Aristotle, emphasizes as dekhomai, a welcoming potentiality that “undergoes and suffers its own non-Being” and that involves “potentiality for darkness” that is “also the potentiality for light” (1999e, p. 182, p 181; Aristotle, 1984, sec. 1050b). Ethics appears an inter-relational significatory field of encounter, a field in which “we” non/- and con/fluently receive and express relations that are ir/responsible, inter/relational, un/welcoming, and thereby un/healthy. Blessing and curse are cases of signification’s im/possible expression and of the im/possibility of subjectivity, cases of the emergence of accusativity and vocativity in performativity’s disruption of act and world. As the study of disability moves prior to the question of the subject, to the question of psychic ability, and thereby to the question of psyche as language and language as psyche, it engages the linguistic ability of linguistic ability as the im/possibility of the psychic. Such im/possibility entails psychic and fleshy trauma toward which Davis gestures with primary and universal woundedness, trauma in which health and integrity emerge as traced and amid which imagination is crossed by the uncanny seam of the real. As the cry of dis/ability emerges in psyche and language, it emerges as flesh disrupting body, in the breath of the curse, the edge of breath in language and as language—emerging in the impulse and expiration of language, flesh and spirit tracing anterior and interior otherness and Otherness, the extimacy of interior/exterior engagement (to reiterate Lacan’s term, which chapter 4 addresses). The ethics of disability studies emerges in questioning of ability that occurs thus, toward the sayability of the im/possible health of psyche and flesh and psyche as flesh. It is ethics as the ethics of ethics, the imperativity of the enigmatic and otherwise imperative of saying the im/possible, of engaging the excess of health and goodness. Through an approach to the im/possible signification of health and ability, the study of disability may address the prosthesis of and in signification, the de/naturing of signification. Through the interrogation emergent in the ability of language and the language of ability, disability studies may approach the metaphysics of ability for all sociocultural implications of ability. Other than ability, inability, and disability, there emerges dis/ability that will not cease posing as question. The inherent charge of disability studies, then—perhaps inherent to the methodology of an implicit discipline that ranges across this interdisciplinary field—is to pursue relentlessly an encounter of the questioning of ability.

Four DIS/ABILITY IN BLACK AND WHITE: THE RELATIONALITY OF POLITICAL ABILITY 1. Approaching the Naturalization of Political Access The foregoing chapters, while considering the signification of ability and inability in sociocultural terms, discuss how sociocultural articulation tends to naturalize, regulate, and conscript ability in the production of ableism, as such articulation envisages, while never grasping, the reality of ability. To reiterate Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s term, an imperativity in the sociocultural imaginary draws signification toward the articulation of ability, toward articulating a context of competence—the reductive actualization of the potentiality of performance—which includes determinations of access to competence. Claiming queerness and claiming disability are strategies that, insofar as they exceed articulations of identity, can gesture toward potentiality and impotentiality in the signification of political terms, gesturing toward performance not captured by prevailing articulations of identity, competence, and access. Such claiming might raise the seam of the real (to use Jacques Lacan’s term), related to the virgule in dis/ability that traverses what otherwise appears the wholeness of sociocultural imagination and that leads to a primacy of relationality, by which ontology is fundamentally differentiated. Queerness and disability, or more properly dis/ability, are terms we may use to engage dynamics of sociocultural signification by which matters of access emerge and become problematic. They are terms we may use in addressing political signification. This chapter approaches political ability as it has arisen in modern, postEnlightenment democracy, particularly in the United States, by focusing on how such ability is signified in terms of race, specifically in terms of blackness and whiteness. We begin by asking what white and black mean, as the words refer putatively to human life, referring to performance recognized and thereby validated as human and entailing related conceptions of subject and world. The words begin as metaphors, in references to skin color where they are not even approximate—instead articulating only contrast—and in the extension of contrast into various aspects of human being. While we cannot avoid the metaphoricity, we may try to approach referentiality as much as possible without recourse to metaphor, engaging the dynamics of reference to interrogate the terms so that even when the function of metaphor emerges, we might think beyond the metaphoricity, and beyond specific metaphoricity to the general referentiality of language, the broader problem of disconnection between words and things.

96

ENCOUNTERING ABILITY

Race is metaphoric at root insofar as (whether intentionally or not) its discourse refers to physical or biological attributes, attributes that cannot be categorized as a discourse on race would purport to do. Biological science has undermined such categorization, particularly with recent developments in genetics.1 Even with such referential disconnection recognized, metaphoric racial language can persist, including such figures as synecdoche, which emerges in references to the black body, and personification, typical in references to white power and privilege. Like all sociocultural articulations, terms of race are naturalized in their contexts, making it difficult to think without them as well as difficult to attempt political change while using them. Figures of articulation are essential to political language, which struggles fundamentally to grasp categories of people and express relationships among the categories. The figures are aspects of language that works to articulate moments of political ability, moments that when they are expressed tend to emphasize what Giorgio Agamben (drawing on Aristotle) refers to as actuality (1999e). Such articulatory moments emphasize the actual over the potential, emphasizing competence over a sense of uncaptured performativity. The language of race involves articulations of performance concerning subject and world, entailing implications for subjective competence as performativity becomes articulated for a given ethos. Only in a context of sociopolitical articulation can the signification of race emerge, as Michael Omi and Howard Winant have discussed (1986). Race emerges in response to imperatives of articulation—imperatives that call race into articulation, in the first place, and other imperatives that continue racial articulation, such as toward redress for racism inherent in the prior articulation. Racial terms, such as black and white, do refer, and not simply abstractly, for they refer to people insofar as, according to sociolinguistic context, people accept and confer indicators of personal race (while conferral and acceptance may not occur concomitantly). Conferral and acceptance of racial indication occur not just within but as part of the context of performance, performance articulated amid expressions of subjective access to the possibility of competence. Racism is ableism by which articulations of race determine access to wealth, goods, activity, experience, states of being, and selfdetermination, access that appears enabled by power, subjectivity, and citizenship as socioculturally articulated in racial terms. Expressions of race reflect what Charles W. Mills calls “contingently deep reality that structures our particular social universe, having a social objectivity and causal significance that arise out of our particular history” (1998, p. 48). Barbara J. Fields and Karen E. Fields refer to the terminological development of race and racial attributes as “racecraft” (2012), alluding to the various kinds of deception implied by uses of the term “witchcraft.” Recognizing that such development is fictive, Mills emphasizes a “social metaphysics” that naturalizes racial ontology—what he calls “intersubjectively” constructed reality—as language both produces and reflects dynamics of race

Dis/ability in Black and White

97

and ethnicity in a sociocultural context. Racial attributes and categories vary according to specific contexts, yet by their expression, social structure gains substance, appearing to pre-exist and subtend articulations of attributes and relationships. Mills’s chapter of Blackness Visible on the metaphysics of race considers in detail the ways racial and ethnic identifications emerge in the United States, involving the articulation of attributes such as skin color, heritage, habits, and other putative individual and categorical features whose invocation comes to indicate race (1998, pp. 41–66). Racial articulation develops naturalizations concerning human being and human ability. Fiona Kumari Campbell writes that terms of race impose “a constitutional divide between perfected naturalised humanity and the aberrant, the unthinkable, quasi-human hybrid and therefore non-human”; establishing centrality, which is to say ableism, they are terms “a concept of difference” would not be possible without (2009, p. 6). Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet refer to racial articulation as a “binary machine [that] is an important component in apparatuses of power,” producing in culture a “white wall/black hole system” by which “even the divergences of deviancy will be measured according to the degree of binary choice” (1987, p. 21). 2 In Slavery and Social Death, Orlando Patterson develops a dyad of white and black that entails “total power” and “total powerlessness,” emphasizing dynamics of power or ability that occur in sociocultural articulation (1982, pp. 1–2). Patterson focuses on a modern political context informed by chattel slavery, drawing on G. W. F. Hegel’s master/slave dialectic and casting the dyadic moments in “symbolic” terms, noting that “all human relationships are structured and defined by the relative power of the interacting persons” (pp. 1–2). The entailed dynamic of centering and marginality involves, as Jared Sexton notes, “both the construction of a putatively pure racial identity (i.e., the myth of whiteness) and the inevitable disruption of that racial identity through the intermixture of otherness” (2008, p. 19), the latter involving what Sexton calls “the categorical sprawl of blackness” (p. 6). David Theo Goldberg writes that “racial definition and its attendant forms of racist articulation emerge only with the institution of modernity,” only in terms of “the principal formative developments in [liberalist Western] modernity’s self-understanding and expression” (1993, p. 1). In the United States, and indeed across the modern Western world, explicit and implicit distinctions have been drawn historically between subjects who have access to putatively full political ability and those who are variously restricted, distinctions expressed in terms of gender and other articulations as well as in terms of race.3 Such distinctions persist as, in the development of liberal democracies, expressions of possible ability have developed the ideal of unlimited access for the actualization of one’s abilities, typically with just the stipulation that one not harm or encroach upon others in such actualization (albeit a stipulation difficult to define, enforce, and keep from being overbearing). In this post-Enlightenment context, across his work Michel Foucault has located

98

ENCOUNTERING ABILITY

the development of normativity in the naturalization of human ability, normality emerging to be the gist of ableism as competence becomes articulated in modern societies. When emergent amid normalization in a democratic context, the naturalization of the human involves an idealization of human being as having both essentially unlimited potential and the right to unhindered liberty for developing that potential, a right of access to ability without limit. In The Moment of Racial Sight, Irene Tucker observes that in the Enlightenment, a notion of human universality emerges concomitantly with a recognition of how inequality is marked by race. Emphasizing the thought of Immanuel Kant, she notes that a metaphysics of the human, by which the human being acquires a universal right to access its potentiality, corresponds with an emergent awareness of the arbitrariness of linguistic signification, including the signification of human type (2012, p. 12). Tucker writes, “that the signs and significance of bodily difference are arbitrary generates the aspiration to a political equality measured by the interchangeability of citizensubjects” (p. 3). The normal in this political context becomes not simply a standard, but a putative truth of human being, a naturalization expressed as a humanist truth. This truth has a metaphysical dimensionality, indicating a transcendent space of liberty and possibility, a space of inexpressibly competent human ability. The liberal notion of access emerges, equal subjective access to ability, what Carrie Sandahl and Philip Auslander consider a space of health and normality, albeit thus also a space of spectatorship over disability and other alterity (2005b, p. 2). Human normality appears to be unrestricted performativity that becomes assumed subjectivity, citizenship, and power articulated as access to physical, psychic, and political ability. Liberal political ability emerges in what Lacan calls the imaginary, where it appears unmarked, or blank, as it exceeds its own articulation, imagined to subtend the imaginary articulating context. It is ability not distinguished by multiplicity except insofar as the multiplicity is itself unmarked, invoking univocity, an interchangeability or translatability of performativity, by which multiplicity belongs to a naturalized universality of human ability. What one may do, be, or accomplish appears unmarked, as performance seems unrestricted, tending not to be articulated in terms of specific competence. Multiplicity will be abstract, as Sexton observes in expressions of multiculturalism, where difference is expressed in ways amenable to the naturalization of the human as indeterminable in its universality (2008). Expressions of equality amid such universality will subordinate difference, foreclosing the dynamic whereby, as Deleuze notes, for any consideration of difference in itself, differentiality and sameness must consist otherwise than as articulated (1994, p. 262). A transcendental ideal of universal whiteness, expressed as itself outside articulation, corresponds with the expression of equality, an expression of what never comes to pass but remains transcendent of its imaginary context. Martin Heidegger writes, “The equal or identical always moves toward the absence of difference, so that everything

Dis/ability in Black and White

99

may be reduced to a common denominator” (1971, p. 218).4 In Lacanian terms, the unified human mind, body, and spirit as imaginary, imagined as white, appears disengaged from the seam where the image would meet the differentiated fleshiness of the real, of what with Mills we might consider “contingently” real; idealized whiteness emerges as symbolic. What becomes articulated as political ability in the liberal sociocultural imaginary—white ability, involving the aspiration of equality—emerges as a pure positivity or caricature of ability, entailing a claim of pure potentiality, as political ability becomes articulated as privilege, privilege ideally accorded all citizen subjects. Expressed as privilege, thus in terms of access, political ability gains dimensions as marked oppositions emerge: as the non-privileged, such as the raced and the disabled, emerge marked as such—that is, simply indicated and also marked as non-privileged—and thus privilege gains specific, ableist articulation. An empiricist critique can focus on instances where the oppositional categories are marked—marked otherwise than arbitrarily, in sociocultural articulation—bringing the human naturalization in liberal idealism to face its others, so privilege loses its transcendental character as the blank, open, humanist space of liberty. Such a critique moves toward awakening Western liberalism from an imaginary dream by exposing the reduction of signification to articulation and emphasizing the resulting simplistic transcendentalism. Moreover, in attending to the markedness of what is other to the blankness, we address the fundamental ontological relationality of (human) signification; posing the question of the ability of political ability, we move toward Deleuze’s differential ontology. The markedness of what is other to the liberated subject gestures toward the im/possibility of such liberation, as the conditions of signifying political ability correspond with the impossibility of doing so. The markedness of markedness is radically empirical, to reiterate William James’s term: markedness gestures toward the unsayable seam or seam of unsayability in signification, the seam that traverses the imaginary liberal claim of the transcendental nature of the human, so that by critically engaging markedness, we approach the human as de/natured, in/human. We find the putative subject attaining its ability otherwise than in liberty, its political ability emerging as il/liberal and dis/abled. 2. The Articulation of Whiteness in Liberal Modernity When privilege begins to acquire dimensions and becomes ableism, it appears literally ableism where the oppositional term is disability, and it is literally ableism whenever what is oppositionally marked concerns access to ability, as occurs for expressly political terms such as those of race. Where nonEuropean ancestry marks the dimensions, privilege is articulated as white, although the articulation is different from the blankness of privilege itself— the liberally open subjectivity, often expressed as European privilege, that we have noted above and that most theorists of whiteness focus on. The associa-

100

ENCOUNTERING ABILITY

tion of Enlightenment thought with Europe implies no logically necessary link between the blankness of privilege that is theorized concerning Enlightenment liberalism and any depiction of the relatively light skin of Europeans. It is metaphoric and expressly ableist to use “white” in identifying Europeans, since the skin color is secondary, the primary reference of whiteness being to the transcendent blankness of the liberal subject: the metaphoricity refers skin to the blankness of the liberal subject, not vice versa. However one might read the metaphoricity of whiteness, it is clear that the implications of whiteness as political ability in the United States and the rest of the Western world exceed specific articulations, and oppositional articulations, of race, ethnicity, and origin. Work in various fields has emphasized whiteness as a term for the unmarked, the unmarkable, for unmarkability. To express human whiteness is typically to express privilege, privilege as ability inarticulable, beyond articulation in specific political or historical terms, rendering whiteness ahistorical and unsignifiable. As various approaches have addressed, ranging from cultural and sociological studies to work in biology and philosophy, there is no entity we can accurately refer to as a white person; whiteness as such is never affiliated. Specific accounts of privilege pin down details of ableism and disengage from the infinite possibility the expression of whiteness entails. Historical or political articulation of any act or attribute of a particular person or category of people consigns the act or attribute to patent ableism, marking privilege and thus limiting it from the open ability of whiteness as privilege. Whereas subjectivity in the Enlightenment is white, as the openness of subjective ability and agency, the subject is im/possible—only glimpsed in the mirror of the imaginary—subjectivity being impossible to instantiate, although by an imperativity inherent in the articulation essential to socioculturality, nevertheless the subject is compelled into presence, or interpellated, to use Louis Althusser’s term (1971, p. 174). There can be no white subjects, even while the subject must be white, as whiteness is uninstantiable, unsubstantiable, always transcendent of history, politics, and language. We encounter a metaphysics of whiteness and of subjectivity where we engage whiteness as subjectivity and subjectivity as whiteness (while they are not identical, regardless of whether the discourse on either appears to match that of the other).5 Metaphysical discourse underpins the politics of race, a metaphysics of politics being inherent in the idealization and empowerment of subjectivity. Cheryl I. Harris explains how historically in the United States, through the 1964 Civil Rights Act and continuing in more recent immigration and security policies, whiteness has become developed as property, rather than as an attribute: as an acquirement, yet as “a right, not a thing,” and therein “characterized as metaphysical, not physical” (1992–1993, p. 1725). Harris shows how through various legal means, the category of the white becomes developed in terms of access to right and privilege, in a development that nevertheless does not determine the nature or limits of whiteness. As it becomes clear in various

Dis/ability in Black and White

101

ways what marks the non-white, whiteness remains an accessed property whose nature and identity are never articulated. People pose or repose in whiteness, even consciously gaining access and privilege based on claiming it as a property. Typically, however, the individual does not question whiteness or even recognize it, recognizing only that she or he is not what is not white, the lack of self-acknowledgement demonstrating what Harryette Mullen calls being “adeptly white,” albeit adeptness as pretense that will expose itself insofar as any recognition of another’s non-whiteness takes place (1994, p. 77). In Agamben’s Aristotelian terminology, a claim of whiteness will articulate whiteness in actuality, disengaging the articulation from the potentiality of whiteness as unlimited subjective liberty. Claimed whiteness is pseudowhiteness, as all claims of an unlimited metaphysical property must be false; the conscious or unconscious claimant is marked, not free in the unmarkedness whiteness entails. Often, affect attached to a claim marks the claimant, as can be legible even in an unvoiced claim amid uncritical acceptance, such as a glance or other behavior regarding another person one perceives to be marked with non-whiteness. Once a claim to whiteness is in the least legible, such as by the slightest evidence of one’s differentiation from the non-white, the abstract and pure liberatory privilege no longer obtains; as property, whiteness could only be held if the holding were absolutely unrecognized. Transcending every articulation of whiteness, the nature of whiteness is beyond the means of naturalization, as Ian F. Haney López implies in his discussion of the legal and otherwise sociocultural development of race, emphasizing as Harris does that whiteness for the United States remains a neutral and escaping category from the first immigration laws (Haney López, 1996). Whiteness must escape signification altogether, always escaping into an empty metaphysical center, never itself, and thus never any (impossible) claimant, having the slightest attribute to be translated. The notion of individualistic American white subjectivity exemplifies the absent, evaporative quality of whiteness, whiteness without any attempt to claim white heritage, whiteness lacking reference to whiteness—without the kind of claim that occurs for Anglo-Saxon Englishness, for instance. Images in twentieth-century film and advertising of the self-sufficient and omnipotent white American male invoke such transcendental whiteness, the image emphatically a sign, the body of the hero an icon of the inexhaustible, unmarked ability and possibility of privilege and whiteness (Magill, 2004). Oppositional configurations that indicate whiteness in the United States, such as the “racial cross-dressing” and other practices Eric Lott discusses as constituting whiteness through the engagement of pleasure marked other than white (1993), exemplify how whiteness emerges imagistically in United States culture as other than and elsewhere from any moment in which it appears expressed. Ralph Waldo Emerson emphasizes that whiteness always escapes specific articulations of the white, such as in the chapter “Race” in English Traits, where he develops the ineffability of whiteness (1876). When in his Journals

102

ENCOUNTERING ABILITY

he seeks to portray the elusive whiteness that becomes what he considers specifically American freedom—writing that “it is the light complexion, the blue eyes, that come: the black eyes, the black drop, the Europe of Europe is left”—Emerson expresses the dynamic of darker otherness that continues to linger for any attempted articulation of the white (1909, vol. VIII, p. 226). The escape that is whiteness involves escape beyond contingency, toward a promise of performativity beyond articulation. Such escape toward arrival that is always deferred is im/possible, and tragic, im/possibility perhaps being essential to tragedy. An example of a racially expressed American tragedy of im/possibility occurs in The Birth of a Nation, where a woman marked as white, fleeing a black pursuer in fear of being impregnated and thereby having her supposed whiteness compromised, leaps to her death to preserve an idealized purity. At the cliff, the woman’s life, which in the film maintains the condition of being possibly white, must be sacrificed as she faces the impossibility of such whiteness’s continuing articulation. Being adeptly white is a condition of passing as white, attempted or otherwise incompletely accomplished whiteness, which is to say incomplete subjectivity. Whereas the liberated political subject as such must have the inexhaustible and unmarked privilege whiteness entails, no process of subjectivity can ever effect a passing to such liberation. Pamela Caughie writes that “all subjectivity is passing,” implying both that one must pass as a subject regardless of racial or other marking and that subjectivity is never fully accomplished, but is always a passing toward and never an arrival or crossing beyond, the signification of subjectivity always being incomplete, or in/complete (1999, p. 2). Kathleen Pfeiffer considers American individualism in a similar way, as an ideal that one must pass to or toward. She uses race passing as a model that extends to all engagements of individuality, including individualism thought to pertain to a people (2003, p. 151). Thus the im/possibility of whiteness haunts what emerges as always tentative subjectivity: the simultaneous possibility and impossibility of whiteness as political ability, as privilege, as the health of political subjectivity, whiteness beyond articulation, even as expressed whiteness emerges in the imaginary as simply articulated subjective wholeness and possibility. The imaginary emergence is central to the ableism of supposedly accessible whiteness as political non-ethnicity. To dwell amid such articulation is to persist in the sleep of whiteness, a dream of imaginary white competence as fulfillment of politics and subjectivity. The dream entails not waking to the whiteness of whiteness, the openness of its openness, which strikes through imagined whiteness as the wholeness and health of the health of whiteness, as the ability of white ability, of whiteness as ability. The whiteness of whiteness, the signification of the signification of whiteness, involves an excess of subjectivity and articulation, an exceeding of signification and any determination of the subject as subjective in the context of a world. Entailing such ex-

Dis/ability in Black and White

103

cess, whiteness invokes im/possibility for political considerations of action, experience, and states of being. Appearing utterly abstract, the archetypal abstraction of the human, whiteness haunts subjectivity as flesh does, at a seam, but at the seam where the imaginary meets Lacan’s symbolic order, the order or law that regulates social relations. A matter of right and privilege, whiteness as symbolic raises the possibility of absolute competence, even while whiteness is imagined to be undetermined: at the seam where absolute law meets the expression of imaginarily limitless freedom, Enlightenment whiteness invokes im/possibility. The impossible translatability in whiteness belongs to the symbolic order, the ideal of equality being a matter of whiteness, or totalization in the language of Emmanuel Levinas (1969; see also 1998, p. 53), or a subsumption of difference for Deleuze (1994, pp. 65–66). Concerning the flesh, which we have associated with the real, the ideal of whiteness evokes im/possibility in terms of difference that emerges prior to any possibly articulated freedom or any idealized law of equality. At the seam where the notion of universal whiteness engages indeterminate flesh, the differentiality of flesh engages the transcending sameness that is equality, in a context of attempted signification of what cannot be signified. Lacan names “ignorance” this seam or “junction” in signification where flesh would be made symbol (1991a, p. 271). Approaching the signification of human life in terms of sameness that would be articulated by whiteness in terms of equality, we engage the inexhaustible with the inarticulable and encounter sameness that is infinitely multiplicitous in its differentiation.6 Despite the inherent abstraction of the ability of whiteness, the effects of expressed, ableist whiteness are ubiquitous and tangible. They emerge in the physical environment and on people whose suffering we are likely to resist considering unsignifiable, as Wai-chee Dimock (1989) and Anthony Bogues (2004) have discussed concerning the economic disruption and environmental devastation wrought by what Thomas Jefferson calls the “Empire of Liberty” (1781). Whereas the ability of flesh is illegible, only to be engaged in terms of seam—or regarding what Levinas refers to as trace—the ableism that passes for the ability of whiteness, detached from the contradiction of the differentiated sameness of ability, passes for political reality, becoming legible as imperialist reality, especially in what Foucault and Agamben consider biopolitical modernity. Putative whiteness must pass for itself, as liberty must pass for itself, passing in the ableism of an articulated reality and passing toward im/possible and contradictory ability. The discourse on whiteness as race is a discourse on whiteness as political ability and on the relationship between this discourse and the im/possible discourse of ability itself—the discourse of the ability of signification, of the im/possible signification of signification. Along proliferating seams, whiteness must pass for itself in discourse that signifies this passing, whiteness passing in discursive reification that involves passing im/possibly toward the truth of its ability.

104

ENCOUNTERING ABILITY

By some instances of articulation—some expressions of passing— whiteness might appear extended by ability, by the acquirement of ability, by increased access to the world. As technological enhancements become supposed extensions of subjective functioning—in Donna J. Haraway’s conception of the cyborg, for example (1991)—the political ability of such subjectivity becomes articulated toward Enlightenment liberty, toward the idealization of whiteness, as Campbell discusses (2009, pp. 45–76). Technology here is not marking but attempted unmarking, prosthesis attempting to vanish into a discourse of competence. Itself prosthesis, such discourse swallows prosthesis, as the cyborg adapts the ableism of sociocultural articulation while, like all subjectivity, being caught up in passing. Although technological improvisation may play a role in changing articulated ability, the ability of ability of subjectivity, the ability of whiteness, still haunts the articulation. In any event, the dynamics of marked and unmarked political ability are unlikely to change even in articulation—in any near future, that is—in terms of ethnicity, sexuality, social class, and other cases of marking. From a disability studies perspective, as Emily Russell observes (2011, p. 4), the im/possible goal of attaining ability is a matter of passing, where ableism involves the articulation of a necessarily incomplete or truncated notion of health that becomes the intersubjective ontology of human ability, an ontology that includes, for example, such normalized aspects as walking and sight. Ableism involves what Jeffrey A. Brune and Daniel J. Wilson, discussing passing in contexts of disability, call “structural forces that shape notions of disability” (2013, p. 3). A subject passes for being able insofar as articulations of health obscure the metaphysics of health, insofar as the signification of ability is cut off from its signifyingness. One passes in the sleep of ableist competency, in the imaginary dream of articulable ethos and psychosomatic, sociocultural functioning, whereas not to pass is to be marked in opposition to ableism, to accept (with or without express claiming) or to be conferred with the marking of disability (as Sandahl and Auslander note, 2005b, pp. 3–4). The context of passing, however, insofar as passing seems to occur, articulates not terms of achievement but terms of origin: the narrative of passing marks one not with the ability, but still with the disability. While identification involves claims of reality, it invokes the fissility of its terms and references, raising ambivalent and ambiguous implications that reveal identifications of race and other categories to be both ableist and im/possible, a situation of always incomplete passing. In subjective passing to white identity, it is not whiteness but the marked condition from which one passes that is marked— emphasized as real, in Werner Sollors’s terms—as opposed to what is thereby cast as the fictive non-ethnicity of his or her performed whiteness (Sollors, 1997, p. 249; Pfeiffer, 2003, p. 5). The dynamic of fiction versus reality, played out in terms of the imaginary, continues insofar as any reference to whiteness or ability occurs, marking the failure of passing, as the cyborg’s putative transcendence of prosthesis marks the artificiality of prosthesis.

Dis/ability in Black and White

105

When the articulation of whiteness takes place, the contrastingly marked nonwhite defines the politics of an ableism that, thus marked, itself fails to pass into the metaphysics of white ability. That is, the conditions of possibility of whiteness as political privilege coincide with the conditions of its impossibility. The imperative to liberty emerges with the impossibility of liberty, as liberty meets its other in the genitive “of” whereby an “empire,” in Jefferson’s words, is required for establishing and maintaining putatively natural freedom. 3. The Im/possibility of Blackness in the Signification of Subjectivity In any context of passing to whiteness and any context of marked difference—in any context where whiteness may be indicated—the possibility of the articulation of whiteness emerges as the possibility of signifying an idealized difference, difference from marked or otherwise opposed race or ethnicity. As whiteness must and cannot be signified, as both imperatives apply, it must be engaged by the markedness of alterity to whiteness, whereby the identity of the subject as non-white is itself never a fixed or simple mark. The possibility of signifying whiteness is inherent in the marking of racial or ethnic difference, marking that thereby is itself the possibility of whiteness and that, moreover—in articulating the sameness inherent in whiteness in the moment of difference from whiteness—is the im/possibility of whiteness. While whiteness as the impossible ideal of equality or the space of naturalized sameness is never attainable, the possibility entailed in whiteness emerges not as sameness different from racial marking, but as sameness inherent in the difference whiteness as sameness purports to overcome, difference emergent in and as the marking. To recognize the im/possibility of whiteness is to move beyond the observation that whiteness is constituted by contrast with marked racial or ethnic others, others by which it nevertheless can only emerge; it is also to recognize that whiteness is never constituted otherwise than by the virgule which traverses im/possibility and dis/ability. Whiteness is only indicated by marking that gestures toward non/marking, that indicates the constitutive deconstitution the virgule traces. It is indicated only by a gesture of non/whiteness toward the whiteness of whiteness, a gesture that engages the signifyingness of the signification of whiteness (to reiterate Levinas’s term). Moreover, while in any context of political ability, an engagement of specific terms involved in the signification of whiteness and non-whiteness might not be recognized, the signification itself must take place, as there is no escaping im/possibility in a context of political ability, just as there is no escaping the im/possibility, stated more broadly, of any signification of human health, ability, and nature. The fictive moment of whiteness, when it is expressed, does not simply reify an alterior moment, as Sollors’s observation on passing suggests, for

106

ENCOUNTERING ABILITY

alterity has no origin besides whiteness, no origin aside from the signification, albeit reduced in the articulation of the imaginary, by which the fiction of whiteness emerges. The reified origin from which one passes is only apparently a fiction different in kind from the imagined fiction of supposedly accessed, ableist whiteness. The objectified alterity from which the subject fictively escapes persists in the heart of signified subjectivity, as the two moments, object and escape, constitute—by way of the imaginary—the ontology of ableism. The dynamics of these fictions are legible in Lott’s analysis of the development of whiteness in the context of the fetishization of blackness (1993), as they are in most treatments of whiteness as having been constructed socioculturally in opposition to moments of simultaneously constructed racial alterity to European whiteness—in what has been variously referred to as the construction, invention, or assumption of race (see Hannaford, 1996, for example). The metaphysical discourse of whiteness as im/possible is entailed by but altogether other than racial articulation, other than the subjective ableism of the articulated or constructed ontology of whiteness and its others. The im/possible otherness of whiteness emerges in Toni Morrison’s Playing in the Dark, where whiteness as American subjectivity exceeds any articulation. Whiteness as “mute, meaningless, unfathomable, pointless, frozen, veiled, curtained, dreaded, senseless, implacable,” as Morrison gleans it from canonical nineteenth- and twentieth-century United States literature (1992, p. 59), emerges in literature and history as invoked in the discourse of the subject. Whiteness emerges as the transcendent purity or truth of discourse that silences discourse concerning subjectivity while also being the possibility of subjectivity. Beyond a constructivist ableism where white or assimilative privilege emerges in contrast with racial or ethnic otherness, Morrison observes the inarticulate discourse of whiteness as ability, discourse not emergent but instead no more than traced. She recognizes the discourse of whiteness in the mark of its unmarkedness, a mark that gestures toward the effaced and effacing trace of the discourse’s im/possibility. That is, she reads whiteness in blackness, which emerges almost never recognized as blackness as such, tending instead to appear the ground of the non-emergent figure of whiteness, a figure recognizable in fiction or chimera only as the figure of ableist whiteness. She reads a dynamic that gestures toward the im/possible reality of whiteness, toward the aftermath of having missed the trace of im/possible whiteness that the pervasive performativity of blackness, itself never grasped, entails. As (politically) performative, blackness displaces: it displaces itself and is the displacement of any mark of identity, human identity for our purposes here (a focus I keep in this chapter with regard to the humanist associations of whiteness for liberal modernity). For Stuart Hall, blackness “is always complexly composed. . . . It is never in the same place” (2000, p. 152). In addressing what she refers to as “performing blackness” in nineteenth-century United

Dis/ability in Black and White

107

States culture, Saidiya V. Hartman engages the performativity of blackness in an analysis that reveals the denaturalization of blackness by blackness and a correlative destabilization of any notion of black identity (1997, pp. 56–58).7 For the radical Black Arts movement of the 1960s and 1970s in the United States, blackness cannot be defined or grasped; according to Kimberly W. Benston, in the development of culturally black art, “blackness may indicate a self-interpreting process which simultaneously ‘makes and unmakes’ black identity” (2000, pp. 3–4). David Lionel Smith writes that any “adequate account of African-American aesthetic practices would call the concept of ‘blackness’ into question” (1991, p. 95). For Fred Moten, blackness as performativity always exceeds itself, exceeding articulation, “always a disruptive surprise moving in the rich nonfullness of every term it modifies” (2003, p. 255). Blackness emerges as excess, gesturing toward the blackness of blackness and the whiteness of whiteness as a non/marking of the excess endemic to performativity. Emergent everywhere in United States literature and culture, human blackness according to Morrison appears the limit or frame of whiteness—the limit of its possibility—and a mark that traverses it, blackness as the principle of the principle of non-marking, the signifyingness of the signification of the white. Blackness indicates the virgule of the non/white, a seam where the image of (non)color meets a symbolic alterity the trace of which only emerges in terms of the seam. A stroke of performativity, blackness—as it gestures toward and draws upon the blackness of blackness—marks entirely otherwise than by articulation of the human: it is marking as a pervasive fleshy outside emergent as a stroke through the heart of what thereby becomes dis/articulated humanity. Blackness as markedness raises the virgule of the in/articulable, and as such the marking refers to what both joins and divides the human and the inhuman, as well as freedom and constraint, fascism and anarchy. Blackness as example (perhaps par excellence) of race instantiates a moment of confronting such an engagement of juncture with division. In the raced, we engage humanity as the question of the object against the question of the subject, questioning that cannot emerge without the marking of human typology, marking of the “constitutional divide” that Campbell notes concerning the naturalization produced in ableist discourse (2009, p. 6). Blackness bears variable legibility in the engagement of the blank, abstract competence of whiteness, signifying not just alterity and marginality, but also suffering and degradation, as Patterson recognizes in formulating his black/white dyad and drawing on Thomas Hobbes to emphasize dynamics of “honor” and “dishonor” that emerge as a matter of “political psychology”— dynamics produced by the “symbolic instruments” of a master/slave legacy (Orlando Patterson, 1982, pp. 8–11). Insofar as the legacy of slavery imputes “social death” for blackness, in Patterson’s terms, his observation refers to modernity, where blackness belongs to technological social and material production whereby flesh, considered psychic and somatic, is embodied into ar-

108

ENCOUNTERING ABILITY

ticulation as an economic resource. This is a reading by which social life articulated as racially white personhood is in modernity also biopolitical, liable to be reduced to what Agamben calls “bare life” (2004), so that no articulated social position, such as master or slave, escapes production that reduces flesh to ableist embodiment. Other than racial identity and political subjectivity, there emerges the im/possibility of subjectivity and character, of ethos and ethnos, performativity emerging in response to the enigmatic imperativity of the dis/articulating seam of race, as the whiteness of political ability is dis/articulated by the stroke or gesture of blackness without which articulation cannot emerge. Whiteness as articulated ontology and whiteness as the im/possibility of subjectivity are entailed in the performative mark of blackness that makes possible the legibility of ableism as well as a glimpse of the im/possible trace of political and other ability. In a dynamic of signified internal otherness that Hall suggests in the formation of identities, otherness that one may “attempt to expel” (2000, pp. 146–47), we find the kernel of black performativity— inapprehensible blackness, in the dimension of the real—the most intimate moment in the differential ontology of subjective race, as the markedness of blackness refers to the absolute alterity of unlimited ability as whiteness. Gestured toward by this markedness, the Other as symbolic whiteness appears, for the politically able and racially ontological subject, a moment in what Lacan calls “extimacy”: an externality that is intimately inside (1992, p. 139). As Jacques-Alain Miller writes concerning extimacy, “the Other’s proximity exacerbates racism,” meaning the proximity of racial or ethnic otherness is not simply a matter of difference but of the differentiality inherent in race or ethnicity, dwelling at the heart of the putatively non-raced entity that the fully able subject would be (1988, p. 125). Blackness not only emerges as race, but also marks the ableism of normalized non-raced humanity as idealized or symbolized into the Other that is whiteness, whiteness whose extimacy in the subject emerges with the reality of the markedly raced other that appears inferior, repulsive, mad, or disabled, and thus to be spurned, to be made invisible and kept so. In the logic of extimacy, the exterior but intimate stroke of blackness in relation to the subject marks the trace of transcendent whiteness that is also lodged internally, neither of them being proper to the subject and both thereby deconstituting subjectivity in the moment of its constitution. As whiteness, with its implications of equality and im/possible subjective liberty and competence, is the symbolic Other whose unmarkedness emerges from the marking of the non-white as black or otherwise raced, blackness as performative expresses both capital and lowercase otherness, in Lacanian terms: it both indicates and dwells as the transcendence and the object of racial discourse, thereby being the locus of both subjectivity and human difference. Perhaps it seems easier to define whiteness, in its symbolic signification, while whiteness is impossible to locate, in comparison with some specificity

Dis/ability in Black and White

109

in the location of blackness, as appurtenant to reality, while the definition of blackness escapes us. Not only does whiteness have no location, but it appears the unlocatability of the human, of the performative, of ability. Insofar as blackness is inextricable from the signification of the unlocatability of whiteness, however, it is also elusive, always slipping toward disarticulation of itself as the marker of the unmarking of whiteness, if not more simply losing all specificity, perhaps appearing just to express human multiplicity in general. We might consider whiteness the meaning of blackness, considering the ableist ontology of whiteness as well as im/possible differentiation of whiteness, the meaning in each case not what blackness refers to, but what blackness inhabits. In Invisible Man, echoing Emerson’s remarks about the “black drop” (1909, vol. VIII, p. 226), Ralph Ellison develops the analogy of “Optic White” paint, which involves various materials in the development of the white, the signal ingredient being a small quantity of pure black (1990, p. 200), and where a dip of paint maker’s “black . . . finger” makes for the purest white (p. 218). The black here is at the heart of the white, as if the meaning of whiteness; blackness is not additive to but constitutive of whiteness, the supplement of whiteness, the supplement internal and essential to whiteness, yet which requires whiteness for emerging into articulation. As expressed subjectivity is a matter of whiteness, we may consider articulated whiteness the space of subjective meaning, although for Ellison (as for Morrison) there are no genuinely white subjects, which Ellison’s narrator indicates in recognizing that what is universally accepted as the purest white paint is actually “a brilliant white diffused with gray” (p. 205). For this analogy, color is all there is, and blackness the kernel of color, yet blank whiteness is the locus of color’s meaning, its expressed (political) possibility. The primary cultural blackness Ellison and Morrison express for all people of the United States, an implicit blackness of all Americans, emerges in their work not merely as figural, although it is not literal, certainly not representing an attempt to minimize the variety of racial and ethnic differences recognizable in the United States. Perhaps seeming a cultural effect of an intersubjective American context such as Mills describes, this primary blackness exceeds articulations of subjectivity as a moment in the signification of history, in the im/possible signification of United States history. Blackness, the signification of blackness and the signification blackness emerges as, becomes the aspect of United States history that strikes through history’s articulation, performing historicity such that history, the body of history, loses shape in confrontation with flesh as history and history as flesh, history other than articulated historicization. Addressing an embodiment of history, as opposed to history’s flesh, involves considering an ableism of history and politics: it involves a focus on competence by which the performativity of history would be obliterated. This is to address an imaginary that involves a sleep or dream of history, persisting as if untroubled by the haunting of the political

110

ENCOUNTERING ABILITY

and the historical by the dynamics of whiteness and blackness, dynamics by which whiteness only emerges in relation to the mark of blackness, by the performative stroke that invokes unmarked, liberal Enlightenment ability. Attention to the dynamics of race will overwhelm embodied history, as whiteness involves symbolic excess of imaginary history, while blackness invokes excess in terms of the real. The body cannot fundamentally disturb ableism, for it belongs to the imaginary and therein is already articulated, already taking shape under the aegis of ableism. Articulated race is of the body, not of the flesh; the “contested icon” that is “the black body,” as Livio Sansone describes the body’s varying function in sociocultural discourses (2003, p. 11), circulates in economies of signification without definite reference to the excessive performativity of flesh. Attributed to a body conceived as individual or historical, blackness is disruptive insofar as it is inarticulate, gesturing toward excess, toward dis/articulation at the seam between the image of the historical human and the performativity of the flesh. As blackness indicates it, the seam vanishes, while there also emerges and vanishes the seam between symbolic whiteness and the imaginary, between whiteness and the intersubjectively constructed ontology of ableist history. By invocations of blackness there occurs a waking, as Morrison suggests in discussing the incorporation of African-American literature into the United States canon (1989, p. 11). A performative disturbance of the sociocultural imaginary gestures toward the inassimilability of the flesh and, while not bringing whiteness present, brings the specter of the unmarkedness of whiteness to haunt history as history’s possibility and impossibility. In Shadow and Act, Ellison writes of “the whole of American life as a drama acted out upon the body of a Negro giant, who, lying trussed up like Gulliver, forms the stage and the scene upon which and within which the action unfolds” (1964, p. 28). American life and history as drama, life unfolding as action in images and in the language of conflict, arises here upon embodied black labor power and emerges from blackness as the image containing images—the frame of mise en scène—and the soil of American life, its fleshy and its imagistic context. Ellison’s metaphor of body and drama is a myth of origin by which racial images and icons emerge, yet the metaphor raises how the language exceeds such icons—for example, in blackness as the frame of the frame, as signification of the metaphor’s terms and the excess or critique of such signification. Considering Ellison’s intent with this figure to emphasize how “the Negro began slowly to exert an influence upon America’s moral consciousness” (p. 29), the figure entails, for blackness, signification endemically excessive, less an articulation of such consciousness than a performative significatory constitution of its flesh. Otherwise than the iconic Gulliver whose ability inheres in the body’s rising up against oppression, the waking of blackness emerges as an exceeding of the images in Ellison’s fig-

Dis/ability in Black and White

111

ure, as disarticulating performativity, indicating a trace of ability (and morality) not determined by intimations of the mythic narrative. Offering a glimpse along the seam of the flesh, the discourse of blackness dis/articulates the ableism of various versions of mythic American origin, progress, and destiny. The United States as part of a uniquely geographical opening of Enlightenment liberation, as a New World democracy, develops a more mythically pure whiteness than occurs in Europe, arguably, as the United States of America in myth is a nation founded as if new and on a purity of liberty and self-determination. This myth of whiteness is extracolonial, emphasizing a transcendence of all contexts of subordination even as the myth has been underpinned by Native American genocide, transatlantic chattel slavery, and many other cases of injustice. Toward waking at the seam where the real meets such imaginary mythology, blackness carries a trace or fleshy thread of United States history, a thread or scar of de/historicizing flesh that, despite mythology seeking symbolic whiteness, marks the approach to whiteness and thus emphasizes the impossibility of achieving whiteness in the imaginary or elsewhere. 4. Awakening to Woundedness: The Trauma of History The figure of a historical thread of blackness suggests a possible apprehension of blackness that would amount to what we can apprehend of the human, the marked human, even as the humanity of blackness cannot be approached without engaging im/possible whiteness. This figure does not define marked humanness, the mark that traces human performance, performance that in E. Patrick Johnson’s words must be “appropriated” to have meaning, reductively articulated meaning (2003, p. 3). Blackness entails apprehension that, in its movement toward what exceeds it, moves beyond articulation. To attempt apprehending yet to avoid appropriating blackness is to seek the thread of waking history, an insomnia of history as the history of history, the past as what Nathaniel Mackey refers to in terms of a “cut” by which “an insistent previousness evade[s] each and every natal occasion” (1986, p. 34). In Homi K. Bhabha’s words, such a thread or scar will “interrupt our collusive sense of cultural contemporaneity,” foundering narratives of origin or progress and of the mythic accomplishment of privilege, of (white) subjectivity (1994, p. 4). For Bhabha, we might locate blackness as a cultural moment, but we cannot read it as present spatially or temporally; we cannot appropriate it into imaginary contemporaneity, as we cannot comprehend it. Like claiming dis/ability, claiming blackness—such as Sexton suggests for resistance to normativity (2008, pp. 1–10) or what Hortense J. Spillers calls “claiming the monstrosity” of black (and female) flesh (1987, p. 80)—is claiming that can only gesture toward the denaturing performativity that blackness involves, toward life not expressed as or constrained in simple living presence. By blackness we approach the apprehension of inassimilable history, the trauma of history with-

112

ENCOUNTERING ABILITY

out conciliation, the mark of a traumatic non/foundational non/event prior to articulated socioculturality. Such apprehension, itself traumatic, engages a brokenness of the body as the unsignifiability entailed in flesh: it involves apprehension of performativity that the suturing process of articulation can begin to pattern, but cannot enmesh. As occurs in Lennard J. Davis’s notion of primary and non/foundational woundedness, the differentiation of a primary and broken blackness opens to an infinity of signified possibility by which we engage the im/possibility of signification of the human. Such differentiation emerges as discontinuity, what Moten refers to as the “universalization of discontinuity, where discontinuity could be figured as ubiquitous minority, omnipresent queerness” (2003, p. 69). From Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Moten adopts the term “queer performativity” for the disruption of naturalization that is endemic to blackness, for blackness as dis/ability that engages the im/possibility of ability in the association of blackness with the ability of whiteness (Sedgwick, 1993, pp. 8–9).8 As whiteness entails unlimited, im/possible liberty, and is thus already queer in its incomprehensibility and self-contradiction, there is nothing of blackness as queerness not entailed in white ability, yet all of which is integrally traced by the unmarking that blackness and queerness mark of de/natured whiteness and sexuality—traced, that is, in inapprehensible tracing without which there can be no nature of human whiteness or sexuality. As queer subjectivity, Queer blackness as dis/ability carries an emphasis on objectification, a moment of apprehension that is not an apprehending, and that cannot be claimed, but only gestured toward in any claiming of queerness and/or blackness. It is a moment by which emerges a universalization of suffering outside any subjectivity that would be oriented amid, or would take a position of observation over, a historical world or unfolding time. Moten writes that “(black) performance is the resistance of the object and the object is in that it resists, is in that it is always the practice of resistance” (2003, p. 263). Blackness as discursive, performative human objectness emerges as the resistive thread of history, the flesh of an inassimilable past whose trauma persists for any formulation of the politics of ability, a past by which the dead are not excluded from consideration in the metaphysics of the signification of ability. In various respects, Moten emphasizes resistance by and to the human as object, particularly in the chapter of In the Break concerning Frederick Douglass’s experience of Aunt Hester’s screaming while an overseer beats her (2003, pp. 1–24; Douglass, 1963). The scream for Douglass and for critics later, Moten notes, both vanishes with its apperception and becomes replayed for voyeuristic satisfaction, through both moments falling into articulation and failing to emerge as performative breath or flesh of apprehensible history. The blackness of the scream yet persists, if without comprehensible meaning, as an instance of Sigmund Freud’s Nebenmensch als Ding, the other person or

Dis/ability in Black and White

113

neighbor as thing, which calls, or recalls, the listener to pre-originary wounding (1966, p. 331). Simon Critchley writes, “The Nebenmensch als Ding initiates a traumatic relation to the other that recalls me to my traumatic self-relation, to my wounded subjectivity” (1999, p. 210). As what is black in United States history, the scream emerges, for (arguably) all perceivers, “like me,” the brokenness of the subject recalled as object, the subject in apprehension of its accusativity and its disembodied vocativity. Blackness as the fleshed historical, to the extent that it can be apprehended as such, emerges as lower-case other, the object as the kernel that is like me, its metaphoricity raising the inherent metaphoricity of self, being what no subject can entirely recognize as its property but which emerges as a personal shock to be apprehended, an internal foreignness perhaps to be negotiated, but never grasped. While blackness as flesh in the United States historical context emerges as the extimate object, it entails also the always-oppositional infinite alterity of desired and escaping subjective whiteness. It raises the trauma, within history and subjectivity, of the inextricability of objectification and im/possible transcendence—trauma, that is, endemic to signification. As breath of the other, breath that marks the suffered objectness of the other, the encountered scream wakes as awakening, awakens responding to enigma. Insofar as one perceives it as “my” breath, the same breath through different embodiments, the flesh of breath appears engaged by language that cannot signify flesh, while it must signify. Insomniac breath, it has no home, no body; Bhabha writes of the “unhomely” aspect of blackness (1994, p. 9), the wandering from any place one could call one’s own. To encounter such breath is to find alterity inhabiting one’s home, thus not to be at home; it is not to rest in one’s bed, but to wake as if in prison or at risk of attack or imprisonment. The waking of blackness is awakening as if under subjection, in the dispossessive prison of ableist culture. Awakening in articulated blackness in the United States, indeed, can be awakening to unheimlich imprisonment where proximity to alterity is so close that one’s breath is not one’s own, so that in speaking one does not speak one’s own, one’s mother tongue. For Moten, blackness in the United States is “born not in bondage but in fugitivity, in stolen breath and stolen life,” one’s life having been wrenched from the possession of another (2003, p. 305). Such living resembles what Levinas calls Abrahamic wandering without a homeland, without defenses, in an imprisonment of exposure to others by what he calls the inescapable “persecution” of accusativity (1998, pp. 111–12), as the fugitive is always on the verge of apprehension. The fugitive is “nomadic,” to draw on Deleuze’s thinking, its movement emphasizing existence outside itself, which contrasts with Gottfried Leibniz’s conception of “monadic” subjectivity (Deleuze, 1992). As flesh and breath of accusative United States history, blackness emphasizes accusative gesturing and invokes the limits of political ability; the unhomely wandering of blackness disturbs the dream of an imaginary liberty of political subjectivity.9

114

ENCOUNTERING ABILITY

Performing a critical engagement with political ability, the signification of blackness develops implications for the im/possibility of ethics—for im/possibility that chapter 3 considers essential for ethics. For Levinas, the im/possibility of signification arises with the pre-originary trauma of relating to alterity, a trauma whose force can never be fully present but which is “unconvertible into a memory,” excessive of history and indicative of an excessiveness of historicity (1998, p. 105). As a matter of signification, ethics for Levinas is never other than im/possible, the good emerging no more than in an effacement of its trace, even while ethics involves a radically concrete and empiricist encounter with alterity. Encountering blackness as the suffering of im/possible history, in its gesture toward flesh as unmarkedness that is the im/possibility of political ability as whiteness, we approach in blackness such an encounter as Levinas depicts for the ethical: the facing of the face (1992b, p. 83). Linda Bolton notes that “In the American landscape, in which the identity of the I is conceptually European, it is solely the face of the [American] Indian and African Other that arises to contest the unrestricted privileges of freedom and to demand that freedom answer to justice” (2004, p. 7). Not signified facing but exposure per se, and two-way exposure, facing blackness— facing the breath of blackness, the edge of breath in language the discourse of blackness entails—is to face suffering by which the facing is accused, by which subjective freedom yields to accusativity, in substitutive neighboring by which the alterity of the other becomes proper to any putatively emergent subjective facing. The possibility of subjective engagement emerges with disempowerment, with the dis/abling of subjectivity in accusativity, as the subjective possibility or “I can” of articulated whiteness meets its limit at the dis/articulation that black performativity involves as the flesh of the face. Such facing entails specific features of (articulated) United States history, to include middle passage, the institution of slavery, and other physical violence and civic oppression. Blackness in the United States involves what in Beloved Morrison refers to as “rememory” of slavery and other historical trauma (1987), recursive signification of history that redoubles and exceeds itself as it gestures toward the sediment of history that lodges for all American political ability, in signification such as Levinas refers to concerning the encounter with the face. Bhabha writes of rememory variously in terms (adopted from Morrison, 1989) of “stroke,” “black space,” and “not-there” as he describes how the signification of blackness divides signification against itself, dividing the present and presence, while also dividing human freedom from itself, as the alterity of a violent past intervenes on the possibility of synchrony or contemporaneity (Bhabha, 1994, pp. 198–99, 251). In facing that interrupts the presence of the face, blackness raises a trace of history irrecoverable in presence—memory redoubled and intensified, redoubling and intensifying, by its inassimilability to any presence of encounter. The trauma and terror of the flesh of history emerge in the stroke that never brings a referent present, as the affective dimension of the encountering emerges without dom-

Dis/ability in Black and White

115

ination by the cognitive, involving apprehension without logic, without epistemology, without the possibility of assimilation or practical amelioration. 5. Engaging Ethics by the Trace of the Color Line In approaching political ability, we engage historical trauma amid the nightmare of the question of ability and of questioning the nature of nature and the health of health. It is questioning such as Deleuze discusses in terms of the “aim of literature”: “Health as literature, as writing, consists in inventing a people who are missing” (1997d, p. 4). This health consists in gesturing toward a virtuality or “possibility of life” that traumatically remains im/possible, in its failure to become actual or present—gesturing toward a people (or indeed the possibility of a people, which is to say of people as such, the human or the humane) who in signification remain in/completely hailed into being (p. 4). In the discourse of blackness, we read particular moments of the trauma of the signifyingness of signification, reading such trauma in what W. E. B. DuBois calls the “common disaster” of people who are marked as other and thereby seem missing from—yet who, in the markedness, themselves mark the lack that is inextricable from—articulations of subjectivity and history (1940, p. 117). As DuBois engages the trauma of blackness, he engages blackness as psychic, sociocultural, historical, and metaphysical trauma. In The Souls of Black Folk, he finds blackness emerging in terms of psychic doubleness, discussing doubleness as the condition of “the Negro,” who is “gifted with second-sight in this American world” and who can only “see himself through the revelation of the other world.” Drawing on a sense of himself as a black American and a fully capable Enlightenment individual, DuBois depicts a “twoness,—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts” (1982, p. 45). The way he presents being black already includes two identities; the Negro entails both, in a case of what Judith Butler calls being “excluded from the universal, and yet belong[ing] to it nevertheless,” a case of emphatically hyphenated existence (1997a, p. 91). DuBois thus draws the “color line” not between two beings, one black and the other white, but through one existence that is both and thereby neither, as the line, located in blackness, must im/possibly articulate a relation to evasive American whiteness. For DuBois, blackness entails having the historical disaster of race cut through the possibility of identity, the stroke or black space of rememory marking through the possibility of sociopolitical ability. DuBois does not explicitly argue that whiteness is fictive and that blackness is the non/foundationally wounded case of human experience and ability. However, Ellison and Albert Murray extend DuBois’s thinking toward such a perspective, for example in Murray’s description of the United States as having a thoroughly “mulatto” culture. Murray observes that all claimants of socalled white privilege are pretenders in the fiction of ableism, either arrogant

116

ENCOUNTERING ABILITY

or duped (1973, p. 97), since whiteness always entails dwelling beyond what DuBois calls the “veil” of black and white separation, dwelling as if apart from the memory of history. DuBois intimates such an extension of thought in his critique of the misnamed “Negro problem” as instead a problem endemic to the United States’ entire population, its full sociocultural context (1982, p. 43), a problem whose complexity—indeed im/possibility—Nahum Dimitri Chandler addresses in X: The Problem of the Negro as a Problem for Thought (2014). Moreover, in “The Souls of White Folk,” where DuBois analyzes putative whiteness as transparent pretense and not political ability, he depicts claimants of whiteness as the wounded and the petty, the psychically suffering: “I see the working of their entrails,” he writes, while “crouching as they clutch at rags of facts and fancies to hide their nakedness, they go twisting, flying by my tired eyes and I see them ever stripped,—ugly, human” (2007, p. 17). The claimant of whiteness is “tethered to a fable of the past,” attempting to cry “I am white!” (p. 29). Marked pseudo-whiteness, here, is opposed to im/possible liberal whiteness. Arguably, some of DuBois’s rhetoric remains legible in terms of an ableist ontology of race or an idealization of post-racial subjectivity, yet the implications of his thinking about whiteness and blackness undermine the ontology whose political trappings he critiques, troubling the idealization of human subjectivity. In Double-Consciousness/Double Bind (1994), Sandra Adell argues for an extension of DuBois’s double consciousness, developing it as an example of the unhappy consciousness Hegel depicts as the condition of modern humanity, the unresolved dialectical moment where we may glimpse subjective accomplishment, political liberty, and aesthetic and linguistic expression, but we cannot realize them (or for Hegel, not yet). It is awareness of a restrictive context of ability, of being caught in the ableism history has brought about, awareness that political and other ability is im/possible. Such a reading of double consciousness is faithful to the dynamics expressed in Emerson’s use of the term—whereby “understanding” and “soul,” a pair of idealized moments, remain separate temporally and otherwise, and neither can be grasped per se—Emerson being DuBois’s primary source for the term, according to Dickson D. Bruce (Bruce, 1992, p. 300). In “The Transcendentalist,” Emerson writes, “The worst feature of this double consciousness is, that the two lives, of the understanding and of the soul, which we lead, really show very little relation to each other: one prevails now, all buzz and din; and the other prevails then, all infinitude and paradise; and, with the progress of life, the two discover no greater disposition to reconcile themselves” (1982, p. 254). Commenting on DuBois’s development of the idea (and further development by others) in the context of race, Dorothy J. Hale finds double consciousness to involve an increased awareness on the part of the subaltern for whom “the fact of conflict” between an ontology and its transcendence (that is, between ableism and ability) is the “more compelling—or at least more legible” aspect of the doubleness, more important than articulated racial or other specific

Dis/ability in Black and White

117

terms of conflict (1998, pp. 204–206). What emerges most significantly in lived doubling is discrepancy per se, entailing an inextricability from endemically discrepant existence and experience, entailing the stroke of im/possibility or dis/ability. The historical traumatic stroke of subalternity through liberal political ability, as a stroke through the individual’s ability and through ability generally, is for Bhabha a postcolonial moment: colonialist rememory striking through any supersession of coloniality, an inassimilable past that arises to trouble any imaginary present. Subalternity in colonialism persists as the limit of modern and postmodern political possibility, a waking from the sleep of political privilege, as exigencies of labor, illness, and environmental degradation continue with more or less success to trouble the sleep of capitalistic, laissez-faire political ability, if not all political ability. Variously articulated in the ableism of particular contexts, the mark of subalternity gestures toward the unmarked im/possibility of ability that cultures of domination, or any ethos, can only pretend to pass toward. The subaltern, as black in the United States and other contexts, indeed wakes in prison, becomes the waking of the prison, waking that reveals limits by and through imprisonment, the prison having been invoked by Foucault as an example of heterotopia that reflects the limits and impossibilities of a culture (1998, p. 180). In the flesh of the subaltern, we encounter the nightmare of limitation that political ability must face in the encounter of its health or wholeness. Subjective political ability becomes engaged with its im/possibility in the dis/ability and objectness of the stroke entailed in subalternity, as the moment of rememory emerges for supposed political presence. With political signification marked inevitably by historical subaltern otherness, no instance of subjectivity can evade the context wherein Frantz Fanon describes his dislocation at being named Negro, being stricken thus in public. Fanon writes that in response to such marking, “I took myself far off from my own presence, far indeed, and made myself an object. What else could it be for me but an amputation, an excision, a hemorrhage that spattered my whole body with black blood?” (1968, p. 112). Expressed in terms of race for Fanon and DuBois, political subjectivity, all its positions directly or indirectly marked by subalternity, involves both being and nonbeing, or being in/human. Fanon, like DuBois, places the problematic of objectification and dis/ability in the context of political signification as he notes, “The Negro is not. Any more than the white man” (p. 231). Like the blackness Ellison depicts in the sermon of the prologue to Invisible Man, marked or stricken (which is to say all) subjectivity both is and is not, does and does not, and gains and gains not.10 Moreover, amid these contradictory conjunctions by which Ellison raises the indeterminacy of subjective ability endemically marked as raced—in this sermon on the “Blackness of Blackness” that has existed “from the beginning”—there emerges a signal disjunction: “Black will make you,” the preacher shouts, “or black will un-

118

ENCOUNTERING ABILITY

make you” (1990, pp. 9–10). Amid an exposition of blackness as non/foundational, having contradiction as its logic, there emerges an expression of possibility concerning the creation of the subject (to include the object, since “you” is both nominative and accusative, as well as plural). The “or” raises a moment or kernel of the possible in blackness, for blackness that, as in Ellison’s passage concerning Optic White, is sine qua non for the im/possibility of political privilege, of political ability expressed as whiteness. Invisible Man emphasizes that the dis/ability of black, redoubled and redoubling consciousness, as the stroke of subaltern rememory, must arise for there to emerge the im/possibility of liberal political ability. Ellison depicts the nightmare of internal division and dis/ability as the im/possibility of ability, identity, and human signification, much as DuBois and Fanon do, as a struggle to be engaged toward the possibility of liberal political ability. Whether any of the three authors would imagine or prefer a unified consciousness such as Hegel suggests, the political context they engage includes struggle with the nightmare, struggle one might will or choose, or prefer or not prefer, while the occurrence per se of the struggle is unavoidable. Making “no more than” a preference, thereby instantiating a “suspension”—as Agamben finds Herman Melville’s Bartleby doing when faced with the biopolitical imperatives of his context—involves maintaining a “capability” that involves not escaping from, but engaging the im/possibility of, political signification (Agamben, 1999b, pp. 256, 259). As Bartleby’s expression of non/preference “destroys all possibility of constructing a relation between being able and willing” (p. 255), it can suspend ableism by invocation of the ability of political ability, but it cannot obliterate political imperativity. Waking from the sleep of imaginary political ability involves the multiple imperativity of the health of subjective and sociocultural performativity, entailing the health of political health: the waking engages concomitant imperatives such as those of difference and sameness, contradictory and im/possible imperatives. Involving such im/possibility, double consciousness exceeds liberal humanist politics, exceeding its ontology, to use Levinas’s terms, expressing performance otherwise than ontologically. The thwarting of racial presence in DuBois’s double consciousness engages metaphysics much as Levinas’s metaethics does, gesturing toward a primacy of differential relationality. As the color line cuts through being, the stroke marking and dividing presence and humanity—dividing and redoubling the nature of the human and the nature of nature, in supplemental, recursive, redoubled metaphysics—the line itself is not stable. The color line shifts and deflects even as DuBois’s language might seem to fix it, shifting from an apparent position between beings to becoming a stroke according to which beings are internally divided and also indistinguishable, such that the stroke itself is most palpable. Beings are not ordered as “logical opposites,” in Hale’s words (1998, p. 206); we encounter the blackness of marked Americanness and the Americanness of a whiteness queerly entailed only insofar as the other mark is made. The line

Dis/ability in Black and White

119

entails its own beyond, to echo the subtitle of Paul Gilroy’s Against Race: Imagining Political Culture beyond the Color Line (2000). As DuBois’s color line seems to be articulated, to be located, it tends to vanish, or rather thought or signification erases it the moment it turns up (closing its openness and opening its closedness in the same moment, to recall the formulation of the human that Agamben details in The Open, 2004, drawing on Heidegger). As articulation brings the force of ontology, the slippages and erasures involved in DuBois’s approach to the color line emerge as awakening to what evades thinking, what cannot become present or be thought in terms relevant to presence, yet which bears the freight of subalternity in the history of political ability. DuBois’s color line emerges as a trace of relationality, in Levinas’s inter-human terms indicating a historical engagement and obligation between subjects before there are subjects, relationship prior to any particular agency or (racial or ethnic) marking. Unsayable and enigmatic, the line, or the glimpse of it DuBois’s thought affords, draws attention to the withdrawing trace of obligation left by history. The color line as self-effacing and baffling suggests in its withdrawal the trace of which Levinas writes, drawing attention to ethical obligation, the trace of pre-originary trauma—inter-human trauma, as it is embedded in the relationality of signification—that withdraws as it is encountered in the exposure of suffering in the face. The enormous suffering and violence of history emerge only this subtly, glimpsed in withdrawal at the edge or seam where the imaginary meets the real, in Lacanian terms. Neither expressed by Levinas nor implied by DuBois does such a trace of ethicality per se emerge regarding specific individuals, let alone involving articulated sociocultural categories. That is, the trace of ethicality does not itself emerge in practical or historicized articulation, even though DuBois and Levinas both draw on specific historical moments: the suffering face reflects the conditions of enslaved and oppressed African Americans, in DuBois’s case, and the Jews of the Shoah, for Levinas. While not translatable or applicable directly into practical ethics—not to be subsumed in an ontology of practice, an ableism of pragmatism—a glimpse of the withdrawing trace may occur amid the implications of articulated politics, implications by which we may approach the obligation of history. We engage the metaphysics of the color line in terms of a trace of im/possible alterity for any articulation of the human, toward overcoming what Bhabha, following Fanon, calls the “ontology of Man,” the logic of political and biopolitical ableism by which the actualization and idealization of human ability exclude the wealth of human performance not articulated in terms of specific or general competence (Bhabha, 1994, p. 238; Fanon, 1968, pp. 109–10). This is to recognize articulated ontology as the origin of ableism, as the logic of origin and the teleology of ethos as articulated ontologically. All the Aristotelian causes—material, formal, efficient, and teleological— become articulated in various ways as logical components of human ontology,

120

ENCOUNTERING ABILITY

as shape, substance, origin, and potential become articulated in idealizations expressed as norms of the development of dominant significations of body, psyche, and citizen. As there appears no way out of such exclusionary ableism except through undermining its ontology, Fanon aims at the ontology, and DuBois in his critical approach to the color line addresses the metaphysical context in which such ontology of the human emerges. The language of liberal politics attempts to expand this ontology by way of inclusion, seeking ever more completely to articulate ability, the nature of the human, the whole of humanity. We have associated this tendency with im/possibility as whiteness, whiteness being a term for the incomprehensible fullness of political ability. The color line, glimpsed as the mark of the unmarkedness that emerges as the im/possibility of whiteness, draws attention through the whiteness of whiteness—an internal recursive engagement of whiteness, as opposed to simple expansion—to the im/possibility that marks through any ontology of inclusion. In the same moment, the line’s marking draws attention through the blackness of blackness to the unsignifiability of performativity, attention to the proliferation of non-exclusion. The color line dis/articulates liberal politics, raising a confrontation with the ability of political ability, signifying that politics must im/possibly exceed itself. The discourse of inclusion entails the im/possibility of non-exclusion, the cohabitation of the blackness of blackness and the whiteness of whiteness, the sameness of sameness with the difference of difference (as well as the difference of sameness with the sameness of difference), the dream of the political entailing the nightmare of political ability. Thus emerges what James Baldwin calls the “nightmare” of the American dream (1993, p. 89): from the recognition that some people are unable to share it, we move through the dream’s imaginary and suffocating ableism to its necessary and impossible exceeding of its limits, the im/possibility by which it becomes nightmare, entailing the nightmare of whiteness. Where the color line emerges explicitly in sociopolitical language, it tends often to function in ableist ontology. In the discourse of Affirmative Action concerning college admissions, for example, markers of race can be invoked concerning one’s sociocultural ability to benefit and contribute, as the color line is articulated so as to expand the inclusiveness of an ableist ethos, under terms expressed for competence. As instances of liberal political discourse, Affirmative Action policies often exemplify how the discourse remains incapable of expressing its entailed non-exclusivity, the primacy of difference, a primacy that Sexton in detail argues is not only absent from, but denied by, discourses of multiculturalism that effectively banish difference from unity by emphasizing the reductiveness that is equality (2008). Purely laissez-faire politics might work from non-exclusivity, if such politics could ever emerge—in a context, for instance, where consumers negotiated prices of goods and terms of contracts, where corporate ableism and the surveillance and enforcement of sociocultural limits and tolerance were not pervasive.

Dis/ability in Black and White

121

Such limits arise in the name of liberation; they have emerged in the ableism of an articulated whiteness seeking a dialectic of invisibility and hypervisibility of the articulated black. While blackness may be recognized and included in discourses of liberty, and thus managed, the blackness of blackness remains excluded (not to say that it can be noted at all). Ability itself, as the signification of the ability of ability, remains proscribed, which it is the function of ethos to do, in the name of enhancing ability, of removing limits on ability. Affirmative Action tends to serve articulated liberal political whiteness, becoming a programmatic effort to include more variously marked individuals in the articulation of competence for the ethos. Access emerges according to articulations of ableism—including articulations of literacy, numeracy, and the like (to include facility with application processes)—naturalized as human ability is naturalized, emerging where access can never open toward ability or open the questioning of ability by beginning with the openness of access, a non-exclusivity of access and a primary differentiality of the performatively accessible. Emphasizing “differenciation” (to use Deleuze’s term, 1994, p. 65) and the non-exclusivity of access would mean emphasizing potentiality not conscripted by actuality and emphasizing the non/foundational differentiality of being. The ontology of whiteness, as political ableism, holds the attention of post-Enlightenment politics, politics detached from ethics, as ethics is expressed by Levinas. Academic admissions, supposedly enhanced by Affirmative Action, remain explicitly exclusionary practices, components of sociocultural articulation by which the metaphysics of subjectivity is persistently occluded while nevertheless invoked in signification by the ableist imaginary. That the teleology of such articulation must be the im/possibility of symbolic whiteness, raising the im/possibly absolute competence of the whiteness of whiteness, goes unremarked in political discourse focused on the rights and empowerment of the explicitly marked subject, while the blackness of blackness—the (redundantly put) queer performativity of im/possible flesh—as the trace of such im/possibility, the trace of the discourse of non-remarking, withdraws infinitely so subtly that it is overwhelmed in pragmatic politics. The black body and other icons become inevitably appropriated, as the stroke of im/possibility that emerges in the trace of black flesh withdraws in the ethical confrontation of the face, while the stroke yet haunts politics with the ability of political ability. It remains, nevertheless, the task of politics, liberal and otherwise, to face the facing entailed in the color line, the facing that for all its self-effacing, its withdrawal, is never obliterated but returns at the seam of forgetting, as rememory, to re-emphasize the alterity in sameness and vice versa of all politics—of the politics of politics, the nature of politics’ nature, the health of the health of political ability.

Five ABILITY AS RESPONSE AND IRRESPONSIBILITY: DIALOGUE AND STRUGGLE 1. Response and Irresponsibility in the Context of Interrogation We have found thinking of ability to involve thinking of possibility, the signification of possibility and the possibility of signification, which is to engage im/possibility and thus dis/ability. Focusing on Walter Benjamin’s various uses of “ability” as a suffix, Samuel Weber discusses a “virtuality” in these uses that reflects the emergence of ability as always a matter of response (2008, p. 10). Like the virtuality Gilles Deleuze expresses for what is not captured in articulated ontology, what Weber finds in Benjamin’s approaches to ability, in the virtuality of Benjamin’s signification of ability, is entirely real. From the thought of Deleuze (with reference to that of Martin Heidegger) and Emmanuel Levinas, we have observed that the differentially relational dynamics of signification are non/foundational for ontology, as possibility and impossibility—terms Deleuze replaces with “virtuality”—belong, together as im/possibility, to the significatory relationality of reality (Giorgio Agamben’s emphasis on im/potentiality has provided an alternative approach to signification and ontology). Weber raises the im/possibility of the responsiveness of signification (pp. 127–28)—that is, ir/responsibility—as he addresses Jacques Derrida’s development of what Weber calls the “legacy of Benjamin’s ‘-abilities’” (Weber, 2008, p. 122). Continuing a consideration of response that has persisted explicitly and implicitly throughout the previous chapters, we may think about ability in terms of response and responsibility as we further address the signification of ability. By such thinking, we encounter responsibility and also nonresponsiveness or irresponsibility, response perhaps difficult to accept as such, unacceptable response. An interrogation of the responsibility of responsibility cannot naturalize response, cannot divide responsibility from irresponsibility or unacceptability, nor determine what it might mean to respond irrelevantly or not at all. The interrogation responds, and the response is occurring before interrogation begins; its im/possibility, its nature as interrogation and its failure to be such, continue in response to the enigmatic and other imperativity that frames the questioning of articulation and disarticulation (to draw terms again from Alphonso Lingis’s reading, 1994, pp. 24– 25, of Maurice Merleau-Ponty). As articulation, a question determines the interrogation to which the question should respond, disarticulating the inter-

124

ENCOUNTERING ABILITY

rogation as such, whereas the question’s disarticulation—the extent to which it disarticulates its framing—opens the responsibility of questioning itself. Between ontological, purposive response (itself an impertinence) and irrelevant, reckless lack of response that may seem distracted or a distraction, there arises irresponsibility that is response fraught by its limits, by its impossibility and its error, the broken circularity of its gesturing toward internal relationality and differentiality, through which the imperativity to which questioning responds involves the enigmatic, denaturing imperativity that engages us in the questioning of questioning. We engage a primary differentiality as does Deleuze, for whom the “differenciation” of originary non/Being in Heidegger’s ontological difference “corresponds to questioning”: Deleuze writes that differenciation “is the being of questions, which become problems” (1994, p. 65). As Weber observes, the ability to respond is inextricable from the ability to engage in signification, which always involves the signification of ability. Emerging always in terms of response, ability is never originary and never only, indeed at all, itself. To use Mikhail M. Bakhtin’s term (1981), ability is dialogical, a notion reflected also in the work of Levinas and Martin Buber (1970). The engagement of signification that ability emerges as is an engagement of imperative alterity, an engagement of the imperativity of relationality, and of inter-relationality, and the relationality of relationality. As ability persists otherwise than simply ontologically, outside a context of ableism—as performativity does not fall into articulations of subject, performance, and world—response does not emerge simply or directly. Ability as significatory response is dis/articulated and dis/articulating, response as questioning in the face of imperativity, questioning by which response and imperative remain unclear, enigmatic. When it is other than ableist, other than ontologically articulated, expressed ability as response to imperativity is indeterminately and differentially responsible, variously questioning, propounding, withdrawing, static, and mute, which is to say irresponsible. Ability as signifying response—that is, dis/ability as response—is ir/responsible not only to any context of articulation, but also to the alterior imperativity in response to which it can only ever emerge. We have discussed how Levinas’s thought involves the emergence of ability in response and as response to alterity. For Levinas, the engagement of alterity occurs in language, by which an absolute and imperative alterity, named Other, is traced in the context of inter-relational signification. The Other never emerges, not even as alterity, but only may be traced in response, and only as the response dis/articulates, fails to articulate the tracing, fails with broken syllables to achieve presence. The absoluteness of the Other, while life and death of the discourse, pertains to “an irrecuperable time” (1998, p. 104). In seeking language’s dis/articulating response to the relationality of alterity, Levinas emphasizes the “mysterious undercurrent of countless virtualities of [the] ancient vocables” of religious texts—particularly for

Ability as Response and Irresponsibility

125

him, the Hebrew Bible—undercurrents of voice and text that disrupt any naturalized functioning of quotidian or practical language (1993a, p. 12). He notes that the language of such texts is “suspicious of any rhetoric which never stammers” (1992e, p. 197). Deleuze writes that resulting from currents of disruptive rhetoric, such as may occur in literary language, “language itself will begin to vibrate and stutter” (1997c, p. 108). Outside naturalized notions of communication, language involves response disruptive of any focus on or centrality of subjectivity, any focus by which the ability of language and the language of ability would articulate positions of subject and world in relation to performance. As such ir/responsiveness in language disrupts subjective ability, we may approach response by considering grammatical cases, turning for instance to the vocative, which for Levinas is the case by which the Other is to be engaged (1990, p. 7). In such (attempted) engagement, a predominance of vocativity will overwhelm nominative and predicative functions of language (Levinas also discusses the dative for language toward engaging the Other, 1969, p. 69). Subjectivity is one kind of response, an ontological formation by which a subject may perform in a position over and against a world, in terms of competence as required by the articulatory imperatives of a sociocultural context. Levinas’s notion of accusativity provides an alternative: response that shows subjectivity to be one kind of response, albeit one imagined to be natural by virtue of the self-activating mythology it brings, as Judith Butler has demonstrated (1997b). Language for which dativity or vocativity is the focus emerges differently, involving not just a rotation of the model to emphasize another case, but a denaturing of the model of positions that involves an imagined centrality of the performing and predicated nominative. This is to think of language as always response, response always emergent before any deployment of language, signification as possibility and impossibility before the thought of possibility or capability emerges. As vocative, ability in signification becomes response as address to nonarticulated alterity, responsibility as question and in question, open and energetic yet halting and stalling, as in the undercurrent of vocables. It is response incapable of responsibility, response as dis/ability. It calls for an other to call or speak, as James N. Comas describes in his study of vocativity, yet no call is complete or comprehensible, as the vocative emerges otherwise than in a way that would congeal identity through specific interpellation (Comas’s title Between Politics and Ethics suggests a locus for negotiating the vocative, 2006). Response emerges as if playing in response to a serious question, or questioning in response to serious questioning, or a ruse—necessarily impertinent, because the imperative question to which ability emerges, as itself responsive questioning, will not be understood, engaged as it is with im/possible relationality. In the context of responsiveness associated with ability, subjectivity arises in a tenuous and temporary position (as occurs, indeed, for the subjective position that appears in critical discourse such as I am composing now,

126

ENCOUNTERING ABILITY

then editing now, then forgetting now). We have noted Georges Canguilhem’s observation that the ubiquity of illness becomes excluded by a metaphysics of health (1989). The resilience of metaphysical subjectivity, whose performativity is conscripted to standards of socioculturally articulated competence, is an anomalous moment, however pervasive it might seem. It is an odd moment in which subject and world are set apart from the ubiquitous waking of performativity where health, signification, and ability exceed articulated limits that develop in what Jacques Lacan calls the imaginary. For the imaginary subject, there occurs an effacement of the trace of performance, as imaginary or competent language inevitably works to efface the alterity to which the language responds. Indeed, mainly what we are accomplishing here is learning how our language erases the trace of waking, as in subjective language we must continue, if more restlessly, to sleep the ableist dream in its odd resilience. In the resilient tenuousness of subjective ontology, the ability of ability as ir/responsible signification withdraws from the force of articulation, articulation that obscures absurd and aware recursive responsiveness in the articulation’s positive responding to questions of which the dimensions seem known. Pervasively vocative language raises invocation, provocation, and convocation, expressing language’s performative engagement in the world differently from a configuration according to grammar in which a competence of tenses and cases takes a central role. As basic for language, the vocative suggests affect, if nebulous affect, to be fundamental for meaning, while (un)founding sociocultural relations on linguistic features associated with imperative alterity and the trace. A vocative emphasis blurs differences between kinds of language that would be organized by systemic physical functions, such as cortically based cognition or limbically based aggression or fear and other emotion. Physiological models focus on the individual brain or nervous system, on the individuality of what in medical and anthropological pragmatism appears the individually functioning organism. Such physiology neglects broader biosemiosis, the transgredience (to use Bakhtin’s term; see Clark and Holquist, 1984, p. 79) among organisms and of species amid environments, in ecosystems and otherwise, for considering the performative context of signification, by which language is based in itself. 1 For a vocative conception of language, signification’s differentiality precedes articulation, communication, and expression. When we view language as articulation or performativity in terms of competence—in terms of the ontological formation of language in a sociocultural context—an articulated notion of responsibility emerges, with response articulated perhaps in terms of serious responsiveness to what is articulated as serious. As articulability resides in the sleep of the imaginary, the responsibility of responsibility, as ir/responsibility, is the waking of dialogue, the dis/abling nightmare of the recursive health of dialogue’s intervention into the dream of communication. Signification becomes struggle, even as irresponsibility is play. Awakening response occurs in pain or as pain or jouissance, a

Ability as Response and Irresponsibility

127

matter of flesh and the imperativity of im/possible otherness, flesh in ir/response to alterity by which such fleshy performance emerges as response. The becoming articulate of such flesh is its possibility, yet a possibility at which it fails, as it responds to the effaced trace of absolutely significant alterity that is nevertheless impossible to articulate. Dis/abled, dis/articulate, the flesh persists in response and as response. As the imperative to articulation tends to overwhelm the impossible with the purely possible, overwhelming ability with ableism, we may yet hear the withdrawing of the trace of language’s excessive and unconscious performativity, in response to enigmatic alterity, as an awakening (of it and us) to the residual vocativity of signification, as we hear the evocative in language. The seam of the Lacanian real emerges in evocation insofar as we engage the struggle and pain of signification, the trauma of flesh other than the body by which flesh must be articulated, a trauma of performativity that emerges otherwise than simply in response to imperative competence. It is the trauma, we might say, of a vitalist exceeding of the articulated and articulating death that is competence. Signifyingness emerges traced as the flesh of putatively embodied language. Through evocation, the withdrawing trace of un/health and dis/ability shadows ableism and imaginary wholeness. Through language, there emerges evocation of struggle and as struggle and ir/responsibility. A vocative emphasis for the signification of ability and the ability of signification dis/establishes evocation and other moments of vocativity as non/foundational for language. In vocativity, ability as signifying irresponsibility and irresponsible signification emerges as struggle we might consider generally as song, or prayer, or curse. This is ability heard, or rather overheard, as snatches of response that respond to an unclear whom, response that acquires no identity, that is exhausted by no idea of identity. Identity attributed to a respondent cannot exhaust the virtualities of the vocative response itself, the responding, where the trace of ability would emerge. To avoid using “hear” metaphorically and avoid privileging physical hearing, we may emphasize secondary meanings that entail attention, heeding, and pausing to apprehend, perhaps better expressed by the synonym “hark” or a Latin etymological relative of “to hear,” cavere, meaning to be on guard. David Roediger discusses a sense of awareness drawn perhaps from the Wolof language of western Sudan: the word hipi, from which “hip” may have entered English through African-American usage (1994). Roediger suggests that, as reflected in formations such as “hiphop,” the term primarily expresses aural and tactile dimensions of awareness, avoiding a privileging of vision while also avoiding specific sensory modes, thus tending to indicate awareness per se. To think of ability is to have awareness of it. Ability, as response to alterity, emerges insofar as such response is awakened to, as it emerges for awareness, as response becomes signified or signifies. Ability as response entails a doubleness, in the ability of ability, a recognition or reaffectation, a

128

ENCOUNTERING ABILITY

waking to and in vocative response as if overhearing itself, bringing awareness of non-identity and a sense of response’s engagement of the imperative alterity to which response occurs. As signification, ability as response and the ability to respond resonate with ability as awareness, in redoubled response, signification of signification that in each moment of response entails signification’s im/possibility. Ability as response is literally absurd as it is hearkened, its irresponsibility redoubled in a recursivity of response. 2. Improvisation as Gesture toward the Ability of Ability Occurring through signification, such indeterminate apprehension, not yet grasping and not epistemological, involves the awareness Levinas discusses as awakening to an intimation of otherness in the ethical encounter (2001, pp. 61–64). Considering alterity in relation to the vocative, we move toward approaches to language that arise from religious thought, as the approaches of Bakhtin and Levinas do. Similar to both (and to Buber, by whom Levinas is influenced and who like Levinas draws on Judaic tradition), Catherine Pickstock develops a conception of language as dialogical. For her, language emerges as vocative response to “a donating source which one cannot command,” to the imperative alterity of an excess Pickstock expresses as divine (1998, p. 49). Her work follows a tradition of observing a connection between divinity and linguistic meaning or expression—an example being Heidegger’s discussion of the shared etymology of the German denken and danken, to think and to thank (2002)—which could base divinity in meaning or vice versa. In Pickstock’s perspective, calling vocativity the basis of language emphasizes the excessiveness of its source, alterity that gives without reserve—to use Levinas’s wording—in a context of liturgy, which is a key term for Levinas also. For Pickstock and Levinas, language foremost, or preoriginally, responds as an engagement of excess considered divine, excess that persists for any attempted articulation by which grammatical cases, temporality, and other positioning may emerge. In vocativity as response engaged with the excess of the divine, Pickstock suggests the excess in language that Levinas calls the signifyingness of signification, and hence the im/possibility endemic to all signifiability (Levinas, 1998, p. 100). Pickstock’s treatment of vocativity in language emphasizes dis/articulation, the dis/ability of signification. She writes of liturgy as involving a stammer, stammering that engages transcendent alterity such that ontology—philosophy, in Pickstock’s words—is “consumed” by transcendent excess, as she expresses in her subtitle, On the Liturgical Consummation of Philosophy (1998). She laments that Vatican II “ironed-out” the stammer in official liturgy, which had maintained the resonance of the forgotten Greek middle voice, of that voice’s indeterminacy between passivity and agency. The Vatican’s attempt to overcome “confusion” and thereby open access to a broader range of participants results in language’s acquiescence to articulabil-

Ability as Response and Irresponsibility

129

ity, an example of ableism in religious practice (1998, p. 176). The attempt at clarity occludes the richer responsibility of the language, response that involves the im/possible responsibility of responsibility, the excess of response in response to excess, ir/responsibility. For Pickstock, as waking and stammering may arise in the evocation of the older liturgy, an enigmatic gift of ability can be received as responded to, irresponsibly, in the necessary ingratitude by which a gift may emerge as gift (following a logic of the gift drawn from Levinas and from Derrida, 1992; see also Bernasconi, 1997). Emphasizing signification other than sociocultural articulation, the stammer, like Levinas’s “mysterious undercurrent” of “ancient vocables,” corresponds with various expressions of aesthetic theory, for instance concerning poetry. Examples include the Modernist disruption of linguistic familiarity, the disarticulating vocality of Charles Olson’s projective verse, and the polyvocal inter-referentiality of work referred to as L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E. Fred Moten, discussing Cecil Taylor’s Floating Garden, addresses the evocative other of articulation in terms of “the trace of mousike” (2003, p. 58), a trace of what Roberto Calasso calls ak‫܈‬ara, the syllable, “the irreducible vibration that precedes meaning” (2001, p. 160). Insofar as the evocative, redoublingly overheard response of dis/articulation can become emphasized in poetry, the un/signifiability of ability can emerge otherwise than in an ableism of language. The stammered and stammering engagement of the withdrawing trace of alterity, by which ability must and cannot be engaged, becomes the focus of poetic language thought of in terms of voice, much as it does for ethical and religious discourses that emphasize the vocative (although I reiterate that this is not to privilege speaking over writing, with reference to Derrida’s emphasis that writing is the basis of language, 1976). For engaging ability through evocative, dis/articulating response, we may use terms that emphasize music. This is not to make a distinction between music and language, but to enjoin them in semiosis and sound, breath and signification, in song as signification, whether from the vocal cords or elsewhere (as in the multi-organic art Summer Loeffler discusses as Deaf music, 2014). As we may find the erasure of the trace in the dis/articulation of any field of performativity that is ir/responsible to imperative alterity—to recall the performative “fields” of life, language, and ethics mentioned in chapters 2 and 3 (and to anticipate the importance of “field” in chapter 6)— we can recognize performativity in evocative response not determined as belonging to any division of the arts or expression. 2 Moreover, this is not to refer to music figurally. As evocative response—“music” being perhaps a name for evocativity—all music involves dis/articulation, although this means it articulates, entailing comprehension and ableist responsibility. Music as well as language involves the body and the flesh, responding in step and otherwise and failing to engage the unforeseen, as music nevertheless always works to improvise, in its becoming (to cite Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s depiction of music in A Thousand Plateaus, 2005, pp. 310–50).

130

ENCOUNTERING ABILITY

Levinas is critical of embodiment (or ontology) in music, as he is of art generally for developing totalizing narrative, formality, and other “thematization” that naturalizes or domesticates the potential alterity of the aesthetic (he explicitly considers the aesthetic in “Reality and Its Shadow,” 1992d, and throughout his work he uses examples from literary texts and often writes in a literary mode; see Robbins, 1999, and Eaglestone, 1997). Levinas writes, “the instants of a melody exist only in dying,” as sound loses life in being frozen as music is performed, falling into terms of competence, his reference to death here expressing reductive articulation in “duration” as opposed to the “evanescence” proper to “real beings.” He also observes, “A wrong note is a sound that refuses to die” (2001, pp. 21–22). Insofar as the wrong note corresponds with his remarks concerning the approach to the trace, where “the relationship between the signified and the signification is . . . unrightness itself” (1986, p. 355), his comments on music shift the object under critique from music per se to the rightness of idealized aesthetic production, raising the potential of the otherwise in music. Elsewhere, Levinas uses the figure of “harmonics” while considering how a verse in the Hebrew Bible may “resound within other verses”; such resounding disrupts aesthetic or conceptual resolution and moves the engagement of Biblical text continually into the text’s inherent, insoluble difficulty (1992e, p. 197). Levinas develops a critique not of the literary or otherwise aesthetic but of the articulation of the aesthetic, a critique of propriety’s exclusion of the improper, and thus he opens the possibility and im/possibility of a dis/articulating, ir/responsible performative aesthetic. We can think of all music as involving ir/responsibility, working in a gap between purposive and reckless response. “Interpretation” expresses this working, pertaining to the performer’s engagement of a pre-existing or written piece, suggesting hearing and overhearing in negotiation—with response, irresponse, and error—in an evocative context of redoubling and recursive performativity, where response may entail dis/articulation. Interpretive response and irresponsibility emerge among members of ensembles, as well as members of audiences, whether or not such positions appear stable or confluent. A primacy of evocativity in the context of music opens the dis/articulation of various naturalizations, including naturalizations of music and evocativity. The stammer of vocativity in music becomes redoubled, recursive, and echoic insofar as the heard and overheard resonate dialogically. Inevitably however, possibility begins to sustain, even amid im/possibility, so that imaginary rightness arises, justifying Levinas’s concern. Music of any kind potentially responds as ringing nature, as if to a natural imperative, a pure gift from a positive divinity. Such is the ableism of the musical, what Levinas would call the said as opposed to interpretive saying, response as simply responsibility, a caricature of the (im)possibility of response to imperative alterity (1998, pp. 5–7).

Ability as Response and Irresponsibility

131

Improvisation, as engagement of the unforeseen, can be a matter of ir/responsibility, response to the im/possible terms engendered by enigmatic imperativity. Foreseeing, as provisionality, is named in the term, but with a negating particle. Foreknowledge appears negated, although in the term’s common use the non-provisionality or contingency tends to emerge with the implication of knowing too well: the non-foreseeing can become foreclosed by a knowledge of what to play, a trusting of what David Sudnow calls “ways of the hand” (1978)—or trusting “crips,” stock phrases—so the provisional and the temporary constitute a ruse, the flow of temporality trusted too well in moving forward to a place one knows. Still, perhaps especially in such a ruse, there remains the implication of responding without or despite bounds or guidelines, perhaps flailing, but in any case responding such that guidelines of competence prove fissile. The implications of improvisation arise in many of John Cage’s works, where much or all of a performance is accidental, or the category of the accident makes no sense. Cage emphasizes a non-exclusivity of performance and an indeterminate temporality among the process of composition, the performer’s (and audience’s) approach to the work, and the execution of the piece—execution where positions of composer, performer, and audience lack distinction—so that rightness is either disrupted or absent. As Cage discusses in various parts of Silence, a note will not be wrong or misplayed: categorical dimensions of music (such as noise) become reconfigured or disrupted, and temporality becomes internally problematic, as such parameters of provisionality and improvisation become indeterminate (2011). Cage’s work suggests that music as such exceeds music. Not limited to music—the key term being performativity— improvisation opens ways of thinking about ability with regard to ir/responsibility. Improvisation intimates both ableism and inability, not in opposition, which would simply be ableism, but instead co-implication, ability engaged with its others, and thus dis/ability, im/provisation. Expressly, improvisation involves the gap between knowing response and recklessness, between the canny and the literally uncanny, involving unrightness in performance, music’s engagement with the emergence of edges or seams. Using Hazel Smith and Roger T. Dean’s terminology, we can consider purposive and reckless response as respectively referential and non-referential improvisation, so that the gap emerges between their two notions (1997, p. 30). The gap emerges amid what Paul Zumthor calls “coincidence between the production and transmission of a text” (considering “text” broadly), disrupting correlation between the two moments, the gap for him being key to the “principle” of improvisation (1990, p. 181). Raising ir/responsibility in the gap and by the gap, as the overheard response to enigmatic alterity—raising unrightness, or un/rightness—improvisation disturbs the sleep of the imaginary concerning music and other performance. In im/provisation, music or performativity addresses what it can and cannot do, amid the questioning of its ability’s im/possible signification.

132

ENCOUNTERING ABILITY

Returning to a potentially restrictive reading of Sudnow’s ways of the hand, we ask again whether whatever we call improvisation is named well, whether a contextual sensitivity might keep response within the ableist bounds of a situation, be it of music, conversation, dance, financial management, interrogation techniques, sex, or any other situation where an attenuated responsibility to the finite details of a context is all that is involved, without an invocation of alterity. This would be improvisation of the body, of the image, without engaging flesh, which can only be engaged im/possibly, ir/responsibly. Some music or other performance may seem regimented, perhaps more to some observers than others, although demarcating genres of music or language does not account for the emergence of improvisation as dis/abled response in one context as opposed to another. Still, considering improvisation in specific areas, such as jazz, can help develop the notion of ability as irresponsibly overheard and as overheard irresponsibility, although this brings the hazard of naturalizing jazz or other music as improvisational and thus, among other problems, obscuring the flesh of modes of performance that are inappropriately considered less improvisational. Much has been written about the role of pronounced noise and dissonance in jazz, such features often being significant for a lack of aesthetic resolution (thus posed in classical Western terms), involving an emphasis on process and what Ajay Heble calls “contingency” as well as “disturbance to naturalized orders of knowledge production” (2000, p. 9). Also, discussions of jazz emphasize relations among members of an ensemble, relations theorized as emergent in performance, which puts performativity over teleology or deliberation and relationality over individuality. The context of ensemble raises the ethical encounter described by Levinas, as the voice or sound associated with a given member occurs in response to its encounter with other sound, sound thought of in relation to another member or as the sonic emergence of the ensemble of relations. Levinas’s discussion of modern political contexts frames the question of rights, typically posed for individuals, in terms similar to those of ensemble, whereby any context of individual rights “must be conceived on the basis of the meeting, in which the wish for peace—or goodness—is the first language” (1993c, p. 125). 3 We can think of the subjectivity of the participant giving way amid the relationality of an ensemble, where membership entails accusativity, involving an onus of response to the ensemble. Generalizing a jazz aesthetic, William J. Harris implies that in processes of inversion and revolution of musical and social materials in jazz, the artist yields control upon entering, so entering is not active (1985, pp. 13–33); any framing of action also involves passivity, in an indeterminacy of passivity and action (recalling Pickstock’s emphasis of the Greek middle voice). The ensemble not only emerges as a convergence of the members’ contributions, but involves more than the moment, musical expression and reference exceeding the apparent performance, involving, as Paul F. Berliner notes, the influence of aesthetic and other history in the en-

Ability as Response and Irresponsibility

133

semble’s relations and its sound (1994, p. 491). The ensemble is not just an aggregation of members in apparently present performance, but a matter beyond, or other than, the physical and temporal present. Afro-Cuban jazz musicians, for example, describe such exceeding when they say their playing engages dead ancestors. The ensemble is not simply audible but overheard, for any listening. It is response to imperativity not simply present, while the ensemble is itself imperative for any instance of response, any contribution. The ensemble exceeds itself, and to engage it is also to engage excess not proper to the apparent ensemble. By this perspective on jazz, neither participation in the ensemble nor the ensemble itself is ever entirely responsible, or quite competent, regardless of matters of skill. The dissonance of jazz occurs at various levels and in various dimensions, in response to imperatives such as those of art, physics, and politics, of theory and practice, as dissonance emerges in and as the gap between responsibility and recklessness, between the provisional and the impossible. The ensemble is more a vocative context than an accusative one, various modes of vocativity emerging in its voices: for example, invocation of a past moment or phrase, evocation of a glimpsed enigma, or provocation of another voice, perhaps another voice in history. Voicing emerges in a way we could describe as without point sources. Dissonance appears endemic to the ensemble, as well as any voice, of any kind, in music or otherwise, since voice only emerges in relation to the ensemble. The vocativity of ability, of dis/ability, emerges expressly in terms of the ensemble. Instead of a nominative entering voice, there occurs a voicing, or rather entrance occurs voicedly, in adverbial modification of a joining of the ensemble, connecting with Levinas’s observation that “sensations . . . resound adverbially” in the experience of language (1998, p. 35). For “voice,” indeed, we may substitute “response,” or ir/responsibility, as a moment of irresponsibly joining an ensemble whose imperativity entails differential, relational alterity that exceeds the context. Ability as response becomes voicing as overhearing, redoubled voicing in ir/responsibility to the withdrawing trace of alterity, a tracing that voicing erases as voice and trace would emerge. The ensemble’s dissonance— aesthetic, temporal, and other—is entailed in a redoubling of response by which we cannot distinguish sounds and participants. Overhearing and voicing are themselves indistinguishable; to reiterate David Patterson’s words, “The organ by which we hear is the tongue” (1988, p. 100). Responding takes place before a voice enters the ensemble, response by and to the voice. Music cannot be said to be there, to be present, but is always also elsewhere, of another time, im/possible. The dissonance and the interpretive gap, the ir/responsibility of the ensemble, obtain across genres and for ostensibly solo performances. However imaginarily undisturbed a piece of music might appear, insofar as it emerges as response engaged with flesh, music im/possibly engages the withdrawing trace of mousike, of ak‫܈‬ara, at the seam entailed by the ability of its ability as differential inter-relational response.

134

ENCOUNTERING ABILITY 3. Blackness as Engagement of Vocativity

Following the previous chapter’s concern with political ability, we may think of the ir/responsibility of music as an engagement of history in excess of the ensemble and in excess of the expressions of political context. If we continue with the example of blackness as a key moment of political ability, a focus on jazz remains relevant. Nathaniel Mackey writes of jazz as black music, in a way that relates to the dis/ability of the subject and a concomitant emergence of voice in the ensemble, considering both in relation to historical and political circumstances; particularly important is his “Other: From Noun to Verb” (1992). Mackey writes of blackness as political otherness that has become socioculturally degraded and devalued in terms of human ability, emerging as objectified alterity to subjective ability, having been “othered,” as Orlando Patterson details (1982), through a history of slavery, servitude, and continuing oppression in (particularly American) history and culture. When not articulated as proper to specific people, blackness refers primarily to the ir/responsible performativity of the flesh of history against the articulation of subjectivity, just as whiteness refers primarily to the idealized blankness of the liberal subject. That is, the metaphoricity of blackness refers putative skin color to the incomprehensibility, invisibility, darkness, and dis/articulation of flesh in the context of political ability, not vice versa. According to Mackey, reverse (or recursive) othering becomes a response of blackness to culture, an ability of responding to aspects of oppressive culture such that the aspects themselves become othered—ironically or violently altered, distorted through the ir/responsibility of improvisation—so the aspects’ othered emergence makes an impact on the broader culture. While the process of othering can produce a celebration of blackness, casting blackness for example as creative force, the reversal in the othering expresses violence as historical trauma endemic to the culture. Thus for Amiri Baraka, writing in an essay that influences Mackey’s, jazz involves such matters as an ability to “murder” Western song forms that emerges when John Coltrane improvises songs. In Baraka’s conception, Coltrane’s performance returns the forms ir/responsibly to the culture, now as othered songs and forms, reenabled as they are disabled (1968a, p. 174). Coltrane’s improvisational ability emerges as an instance of dis/ability in Western music, inability as ability and vice versa: the disarticulation of form is dis/articulation, the formality of musical form returned as other to itself, in an instance of improvisatory violence meeting the ableist violence of form in Western culture. The explicit otherness Baraka finds in Coltrane’s improvisation, a moment of claiming blackness, entails a gesture toward the otherness per se of blackness, which belongs to the culture—the blackness of blackness that is implicated both in the ableism of articulated whiteness and the impossibility of transcendent whiteness. A gesture toward the trace of dis/articulation that blackness can perform in response to the imaginary competence of the articulation of music,

Ability as Response and Irresponsibility

135

it dis/articulates as does the non/preference or in/action of Bartleby in Herman Melville’s eponymous story, which others Bartleby’s otherness and otherness in general, as Bartleby’s supervisor (mis)reads him as white. In focusing on Coltrane’s music, Baraka provides an example of blackness as im/provisational for political ability, a moment of response, as ir/responsibility, to the ableism of the human that is entailed in an Enlightenment emphasis on subjective whiteness. Involving the thread of historical trauma in the United States, blackness involves the excess of history that emerges for the ensemble, the cultural ensemble in relation to which we hear Coltrane’s improvisation. Ralph Ellison reflects such trauma in attributing to blackness a historical “blues impulse” (1964, p. 28), an impulse that emerges also in the counter-diasporic merger of music and technology that Alexander G. Weheliye calls “sonic Afro-modernity” (2005). We find the historical dynamics of ir/responsibility and trauma in the improvised modification known as Signifying, as well as in other practices of African-American oral culture. As response, blackness partakes of the ensemble, entailing the recursivity of doubled consciousness, W. E. B. DuBois’s possibility implicated with impossibility; blackness raises the overheard virgule of dis/articulation of the human. Considered in terms of improvisation, involving for Moten “a kind of lyricism of the surplus,” blackness “is only in that it exceeds itself; it bears the groundedness of an uncontainable outside” (2003, p. 26). Blackness engages improvisational ir/responsibility, the overheard mark of (human) ir/responsibility, as it invokes the uncontainable, inarticulable, dis/abled nature of human nature, the (ill) health of political health. Blackness raises what is responsive in and to music, what thrives in the gap and as the gap between ableist purpose and reckless desire. Blackness is improvised otherness toward primary differentiation, involving response that must be irresponsible, as the response cannot emerge otherwise than as struggle. Mackey describes the aesthetics of such struggle and its trauma in terms of Spanish cante moro, black song or deep song, also referred to as duende, which is not to conflate blackness with darkness but to find that the terms similarly, yet differentially, oppose the primary reference of whiteness as involving light and transcendence (among other putative qualities). Mackey emphasizes tactility, a brokenness in the voice by which breath is heard and overheard, by which flesh emerges at the edge of music; paraphrasing Federico Garcia Lorca, he presents cante moro as expressed by a “voice in the dark, among the dead” (1997, p. 195). The tactility resists the tendency of vision to emerge and establish mastery (and moreover undermines the visual metaphoricity of the opposition between blackness and whiteness). Writing in the context of disability studies, Janet Price and Margrit Shildrick discuss such resistance in terms of an aesthetic of touch for ethics (2002, p. 69). As Lingis reflects in his development of enigmatic imperativity, emphasizing darkness to downplay the visual may especially allow the aural to emerge, thereby enabling movement away from the visual and toward a tactile

136

ENCOUNTERING ABILITY

approach to the performative engagement of flesh (1994, pp. 23–24). The tactility and aurality of song inhabit voicing, becoming voicing as response, in a taking up of the burden of song, an evocation of the burden of history. Inhabited as opposed to mastered, song may carry the burden of history, as it takes up a burden of improvisation, raising the markedness of the human and thereby gesturing toward the flesh. Evoked and invoked, flesh sings in ir/response to the im/possible imperativity of (liberal) political and other ability, insofar as the differential marking of flesh emerges through im/provisational signification of the ability of political ability. As chapter 4 discusses, since blackness as marked humanity emerges otherwise than as subjectivity, it is inaccurate to think of subjects as black, as in imagining that “we” (perhaps Americans) are all really or somewhat (culturally) black, while being symbolically and ontologically white in our subjectivity, implying that race is just befuddled in the imaginary by articulations of skin, origin, habit, and other personal factors (articulations Charles W. Mills analyzes in detail, 1998, pp. 41–66). As blackness in signification emerges marked, as markedness per se, when articulated in terms of subjectivity it must be appropriated, domesticated in ableism whereby the suffering of history is appropriated to a myth that articulates agency. Insofar as blackness is appropriated to a mythology of subjectivity, we lose the dialogism of ir/responsible dis/articulation that blackness raises as the burden of song, the dialogism by which blackness marks the im/possibility of subjectivity. Other than subjectivity, blackness as othered and othering—as overheard marking and dis/articulation—bears the inevitable violence of the articulation of performativity, violence tangible in the suffering of cante moro and emergent through the ir/responsibility of improvisation. Entailing Homi K. Bhabha’s “unhomely” trauma (1994, p. 9) as the historical thread of Toni Morrison’s “rememory” (1987), blackness entails improvisational performativity that Moten finds in Black Arts discourse: “the inveterate transformationality that blackness as it is demands and makes possible” (Moten, 2003, p. 154). Variously approached as practice, object, and process in Black Arts and Black Power discourse (as Kimberly W. Benston notes, 1984, 2000) and extending through what Jared Sexton calls the broader “heterogeneous and countervailing black radical tradition” (2008, p. 3), blackness, even in an activist context—perhaps especially so—becomes emphatically problematic signification of socioculturality, signification of coextensively active and passive humanity. For Stokely Carmichael, blackness is historical response that is ir/responsible to the articulatory context of political ability in the United States. He frames black power as deriving from a historical lack of power, black ability being inability, which emerges in a political context in response to racially articulated ableism (1998, p. 1427). Moreover, Carmichael poses inability labeled “white” as an articulated moment of ability that founders in response to black inability, as he asks and responds, “why do white people in

Ability as Response and Irresponsibility

137

this country associate black power with violence? Because of their own inability to deal with blackness” (p. 1429). He expresses black power or ability as signification to which the articulated inability responds: “it is the word ‘black’ that bothers people in this country” (p. 1429). The dis/abling of political ability and power in black ir/response becomes associated with (“white”) violence that is itself passive, suffered as inability, violence whose now ir/responsible power lies in an indeterminacy of action and passivity. Thus blackness indicates variegated sociocultural struggle, struggle engaging suffering and violence, invoking the struggle itself of history with signification, struggle of ability with the signification of ability. As a vocative moment between purposive response and reckless expression—a moment always evocative, invocative, provocative, and more—the expression of blackness, insofar as it is legible, emerges not determinable as either violence or suffering, rage or stammering madness, or blessing or cursing in response to the imperatives of political ability. The power or ability involved in blackness is non/power, dis/ability that arises with the indeterminability of the virgule, the recursion entailed by blackness in its gesture toward the blackness of blackness. Encountering the “nakedness and destitution,” in Levinas’s terms (1992b, p. 83), of the un/signified and dis/articulating black “face”—which Linda Bolton finds the only face that emerges in the black/white political context, since the white as such is transcendent, never emerging to be faced (2004, p. 7)—we confront ethical im/possibility, yet the encounter is not articulable as either involving or excluding suffering, thankfulness, madness, or violence. The exposure of blackness in its nakedness as blackness, its queer vulnerability (its “outness,” to cite Moten, 2003, p. 255), requires the nonexclusion of such various aspects in the signification of the encounter. Seeking the signification of the flesh of faced history involves ir/responsibility as struggle within response, although the struggle may produce articulations of specific aspects in particular instances. The struggle in and of blackness responds to enigmatic historicity, tactile yet illegible, overheard yet mistaken, irresponsibly apprehended in its irresponsibility. The ability to struggle per se is always elsewhere and of another time, illegible, dis/articulated, withdrawing as a trace of historical imperativity. Blackness as struggle emerges as incompetent speech and incompetent struggle, the exposed excessive vocativity of struggle as such. It responds as prophetic, speaking forth, in dis/ability, liturgical excess, in tongues by which what is most apprehensible and traumatic is dialogism itself, the hyphen of Buber’s I-Thou (1970), while the trace of the Other about whom prophecy would be intended is at most overheard, in the trace’s withdrawal. In chapter 3, we have observed psychic dis/ability in terms of such language, in terms of ir/responsibly engaging language’s exceeding itself, engaging signification’s engagement of the im/possibility of signification. Cursing exemplifies such wakeful ir/responsibility, perhaps expressible as madness: it is language as

138

ENCOUNTERING ABILITY

invocation of its origin in differential relationality, competence performing its incompetence in engaging an imperative trace of alterity. The struggle overheard in the improvisatory othering of blackness, as Baraka’s depiction of Coltrane’s music suggests, involves various aspects pertinent to the curse, aspects such as Agamben notes in The Sacrament of Language (2010, p. 42–43). These include engagement of a divine or otherwise absolute Other, engagement with language and thus the vocative context of speaking/writing (a context in which an engagement of subjectivity is addressed), and engagement of sociocultural context, which in the case of blackness involves the historical emergence of marked human blackness in opposition (albeit typically articulated for specific people, in ableism) to an Enlightenment ideal of im/possible subjective whiteness. Entailing all these dimensions, the curse, as an expression of liturgical excess that also engages such excess as alterity, exemplifies the ir/responsibility of dialogism, overwhelming articulation—overwhelming, for example, the competence of what Pickstock calls the ironed-out Vatican II liturgy and what Levinas considers the aesthetic deadness of articulated spoken and musical response. Cursing involves a dynamic of struggle amid signification with the relationality of alterity, relationality that blackness gestures toward, significatory struggle where responding becomes response to responding itself. Read in terms of curse indistinguishable from thanks and blessing, as signification that is ir/responsible, the othering of othering of blackness overwhelms the ableism of religious, linguistic, and aesthetic expression. Trauma, suffering, and celebration are overheard in the bitter gift from the Other with which signified and signifying blackness is engaged. Such struggle amid signification is jihad, to use the Arabic word for struggle, although not necessarily struggle in a religious context, if we observe the literal meaning of the word. Baraka and other activists in the 1960s and 1970s adopted “jihad” as a term for radical black struggle, reflecting among other factors a heightened interest in Islam among African Americans. A complex word that in the Qu’ran refers to various kinds and aspects of struggle, jihad is nuanced beyond the popular implication of “holy war” that is one possibility (and thus im/possibility) of jihad: jihad of the sword, which is not limited to a notion of armed conflict, although Baraka undoubtedly meant to freight “jihad” with the fearsome implication of war, investing the term with rage and violence, jihad inflicted with the force of cursing. More broadly, jihad reflects the historical struggle of blackness as suffering, as well as the madness of struggle and the ir/responsibility that engaging in struggle involves. In one four-part schema, besides jihad of the sword are that of the heart, the tongue, and the hand, which we could read respectively as a questioning of subjectivity, a vocative engagement of sociocultural articulation, and a fleshy response to imperativity. In all cases, jihad as a struggle of ability involves the redoubled and im/possible engagement of ability as responding, engagement with the trace of alterity. However intended when raised in the

Ability as Response and Irresponsibility

139

context of Black Power activism, jihad expresses the ir/responsible improvisational struggle of blackness in the United States, involving performativity with more subtle implications than some radical invocations of the word may appear to entail. What might seem the contradictions of black struggle, such as the signification of divinity and violence in a voice of suffering and the improvisation of violence as overheard suffering, emerge as matters of im/possible ability. 4. Tracing Vocativity in Poetics and Politics We have been examining nominally black struggle in the United States in terms of a phenomenology by which race is not the property of individuals or categories, but instead—even as we think of it as such property—race emerges as a moment in sociocultural signification that, besides invoking the freight of performative signification in history, evokes the problematic of (human) signification per se. Baraka’s observations in Blues People concerning the merger of African religion and European thought, as it occurred among slaves brought to the Western hemisphere, locate the dynamics of significatory struggle amid a context of impulses toward transcendence, as African religion that focused on the strength of one divinity over another became engaged with a Western “philosophy that attributed all glory to the mind of man” (1963, pp. 33, 9). Baraka finds such engagement also in the relationship of Puritanism with philosophy (p. 10), moving the locus of struggle outside identifications of blackness and whiteness and focusing on a broader context in which significatory struggle involves the complexities of jihad and cursing, which include passivity emergent in apparently active expression. Baraka’s poetry has been called bombastic, vituperative, violent, and bigoted in its expressions of black suffering and black (and male heterosexual) strength. Considered in terms of struggle in and of signification, however, the voicing of his work is more complex, as is expressed in various approaches to his poetry. Jerome Rothenberg and Pierre Joris suggest some of these approaches in describing Baraka’s work as “informed by the line of Pound & Olson, modified by participation in Beat/‘bohemian’ doings & by ongoing attention to jazz & blues rhythms” (1998, p. 525). The poetry’s vocative emphasis emerges through projective features such as fragmentary words and syllables, broken syntax, improvisations in orthography (going beyond attempts to capture demotic speech), punctuation as material that is expressive as opposed to structurally logical (open-ended parentheses, for example), and treatment of the page as improvisational space, where constellations of elements combine and diverge otherwise than according to line or rhetorical logic. Partly as a result of these features, the affective material of Baraka’s poems tends to shift, often erratically, within and among poems, as a reading of the collection Black Magic shows: amidst outrage there emerge passages of flattened affect and rapt religious language, examples of the latter including

140

ENCOUNTERING ABILITY

several expressions of seeking an enigmatic “holy nuance” (1969, pp. 183, 199). Heard and overheard in Baraka’s writing is maddened affect, such as pathos emerging amidst rage and celebration, in a stammering of affect as well as the details of the language. Readers often discuss these various aspects of Baraka’s work in terms of improvisation. William J. Harris finds in the poems’ voicing a lack of control, a passivity or non-mastery, that Harris considers characteristic of participation in the jazz ensemble (1985, p. 14). Mackey finds Baraka’s phrases “tend to slide away from the proposed, to refuse to commit themselves to any single meaning” (1978, p. 126).4 Clyde Taylor observes a tendency toward “absoluteness” in Baraka’s voice that, in a context of deliberately “unedited” language, contributes to ambivalence in the poetry, as well as ambiguity (1978, pp. 112–13). Lloyd W. Brown finds nihilism in Baraka’s work, while a Dionysian expression of rage and aggression enables force in language, and the entailed excess lends to the language’s disabling, the poetry developing vocative expression between purpose and recklessness, overwhelming intention as the expression turns against itself (1980, pp. 116–17). Improvisation in vocativity overwhelms what we might otherwise read as Baraka’s pronounced subjectivity, overwhelming subjective responsibility with ir/responsibility, such as we can hear in Walt Whitman’s poems, where “Myself” is overwhelmed in “Song” (1980).5 In Blues People, Baraka writes of an African-American language of struggle, an emergent struggling language, a language thus of blackness in struggle and language engaging in blackness as a struggle of signifiability with itself (1963, p. xii). It is language engaging the range of trauma, suffering, cursing, and thanking of struggle as signification and signification as struggle, including the various moments of jihad. The cursing and other abuse in Baraka’s work are legible as struggle in black response, including engagement with divinity, history, and signification in the ir/responsibility of im/possible ability, in the cry of dis/ability. The abusiveness of Baraka’s work is legible as the poetry’s abuse of its language, language abusive and engaging in abuse endemic to signification, endemic to the excessiveness of language that Moten observes, in blackness, as “lyricism of the surplus” (2003, p. 26). The ir/responsibility of blackness overheard in Baraka’s language is itself abusive and abused, emerging outside deployment or instrumentality, making the language in/adequate for custom or habit in the articulation of an ethos. Levinas writes of the call to ethical responsibility, through the saying of the “anarchic,” a saying entirely other than in mastery or competence, as occurring “only by an abuse of language,” oblique and damaging mis/use through which neither the saying nor language conceived otherwise emerges whole or healthy (1998, p. 196, n. 19). The “sick word” of Baraka’s language (to recall Augusto Ponzio on Maurice Blanchot, 1997, p. 325) entails the dis/ability of blackness, by which blackness engages the ableism of wholeness and health. Ill and abusive, abused language responds ir/responsibly to the

Ability as Response and Irresponsibility

141

imperative of ableist health, performing im/possible response to the enigmatic imperativity of the signification of the ability of ability, to the wholeness of wholeness and health. The blackness in Baraka’s work becomes marked as unsignified, effacing the trace it would make in response to enigmatic imperativity, insofar as we read Baraka’s explicit references to blackness as voiced in redoubling, in improvisatory ir/responsibility to the imperativity of the ensemble. In his use of the term “nigger,” for example, abusive language meets the abusing of language, including the abuse of the word’s abusiveness, and meets the abuse language is compelled to do and be. This word, which even in its most pointed use can never be other than overheard, raises the question of whose voice, or what kind—a black voice, or a white voice?—which is an ableist question. An ableist hearing takes the term for one dimension of struggle, by which there arises sociocultural articulation of a speaker possessing a valence of the term, along with a judgment as to whether the speaker can escape or intend the term’s mark. Whatever intentions are attributed to a speaker, “nigger” marks the rage, violence, suffering, madness, unhomeliness, abuse, patience, and thankfulness of a context of human degradation, marking and exceeding these aspects as it marks the im/possibility of political and other ability, including the ideal of subjective citizenship as whiteness. Robert F. Reid-Pfarr notes that the marking emerges without the word’s expression, as there can be no invocation of blackness, “no articulation in the absence of degradation, no way of saying ‘black’ without hearing ‘nigger’ as its echo” (2001, p. 137). The term entails im/possible unmarking that the markedness of blackness responds to and gestures toward, the trace of which escapes articulation. Marking the illness of health—the im/possibility of health—the word marks the dis/ability of blackness, the dis/ability blackness cannot not entail.6 As “nigger” in Baraka’s language evokes the broad aspects of struggle, we overhear ableist and enigmatic implications in such aspects. The opening poem of In Our Terribleness reiterates a salutary use of the term, framed in a religious context and culminating in an expression of being “niggers together” (Baraka and Fundi, 1970, n.p.), an expression of claiming, invoking perhaps the health or “possibility of life” of “a people who are missing,” to recall Deleuze’s description of literature (1997d, p. 4). In the repetition, we overhear the term as struggle, struggle voiced in ir/responsibility. The word is unable to accomplish, or to fail at, either erasing the struggle or overcoming the degradation that blackness as ir/responsibility entails, so that the im/possibility of saying emerges for Baraka’s language, emerging as saying that continues in possibility along with the impossible. “Nigger” emerges improvisationally, as if a ruse, a playing that nevertheless engages a serious question, irresponsibility that does not avoid pointed, articulated response. In acceptance of the name “nigger,” the acceptance occurs in an unacceptable way; the question of ability is engaged ir/responsibly, in dis/ability, disparagement treated as if it were a gift rejected in the acceptance, acceptance that in terms of language

142

ENCOUNTERING ABILITY

emerges in saying as unsaying and vice versa. It is a kind of acceptance DuBois expresses when he refers to the “gift” of double consciousness (1982, p. 45). As saying that fails to evade the said, Baraka’s use of the term exemplifies what Levinas calls the “skepticism” of language, the im/possibility that is always ready to be overheard in and as ir/responsibility (1998, p. 170). In such skepticism, saying always entails unsaying and non-saying (which we may or may not think of as silence). Blackness responds unacceptably in skepticism, as unsaying in saying, in Aimé Césaire’s expression, “Accommodez-vous de moi. Je ne m’accommode pas de vous!”: “Put up with me. I won’t put up with you!” (1983, pp. 56–57). Attributing the voice of these lines to blackness that addresses whiteness, Césaire has the voice reject the dynamic by which it consists with the alterity of whiteness, while invoking the dynamic nevertheless, and the rejection is expressed in the unacceptable terms of accepting no alternative. Insofar as we avoid attributing simple action to this signification of the not putting up, we overhear the vocative engagement of ir/responsibility. Overheard as response, it is ir/responsible blackness, stated in the second sentence as an action, but which would be a passive act (put up or accommodate) that will not be taken. Concomitant is the response of giving an imperative in response to imperativity, an imperative given to alterity, given for this other to perform the inaction, the putting up. By the language of this line, an alterity is compelled to suffer the overheard markedness’s nonsuffering of the non-marking that the alterity is, alterity suffering the otherwise-than-acting of in/action. This line of poetry performs saying that unsays in the performance, engaging ability by dis/articulating ability, striking through its possibility with a response other than response or negation. We find ir/responsibility as dis/engagement, not passivity, but the radical im/passivity of the Hebrew Bible’s offering one’s “cheek to the smiter,” engaging confrontation ir/responsibly (Lam. 3:30, New Jewish Publication Society Bible). The struggle overheard in the dialogism of Baraka’s and Césaire’s language bears such skepticism, abuse, and unrightness as emerges in the non/activity of Mohandas Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. Such putative non-activity, perhaps conceivable as Levinasian, entails a vocative moment of explicitly ir/responsible political ability that for Gandhi and King involves (among other matters) racial and class marking and language referring to the divine. If, as Randolph Bourne suggests, “war is the health of the state” (1946), political dis/ability may emerge as illness that participates in the im/possible health of such health. In nonviolent resistance, passivity becomes radical as non-response, irresponsibility not characterizable as action or inaction, but emerging as improvisation with which the phenomenological political ensemble must contend (as the supervising attorney must contend with Bartleby’s non/response). Such performativity, other than competent and without articulable ability, emerges otherwise than as belonging to an ethos,

Ability as Response and Irresponsibility

143

emerging as an extimate moment ethos cannot naturalize but only encounter amid the relationality of signification. For the overhearing of such political dis/ability, its voicing emerges ir/responsibly, bearing the im/possibility Levinas expresses for the ethical encounter. In such overheard ir/responsibility, which must be irresponsibly overheard, the unrightness of the ability of political ability is in/audible, heard as withdrawing through a trace of the im/possible imperativity entailed by the ensemble. Thus justice becomes evoked, invoked, provoked, and convoked, its performative flesh without body, its ability possible as the possibility is effaced, in the justice of justice. The ability to respond, response as ability, overheard as ir/responsible emerges to overwhelm the ableism of the ethical and that of the political. Thus ir/responsible dis/ability as the mark, the virgule traversing humanity, dis/articulates as unrightness the im/possibility of ethical living and dying.

Six DENATURED CRITICISM: ETHICS, VIOLENCE, IMPROVISATION BETWEEN LEVINAS AND BARAKA 1. Prelude To further engage ability and inability and thereby to approach gesturality toward dis/ability, this chapter continues to address dynamics of response and irresponsibility, as developed in chapter 5. I proceed without some of the key terminology developed across the previous chapters, however—even without explicit terminology concerning ability—although the chapter recalls and recapitulates many themes and figures from those chapters, including consideration of Amiri Baraka’s poetry and the thought of Emmanuel Levinas (and it maintains the first-person plural much of the time, continuing this usage as expressed near the end of the introduction). Among other moments of ability the chapter’s discourse encounters is the ability of its own mode of operation, as it engages the possibility, which is the impossibility, of criticism—literary and philosophical criticism, mainly, although the encounter emphasizes problems of distinguishing and delimiting types of criticism, or response more generally, which is to say problems identifying the critical as such. The discussion is set up as a rather uneasy encounter of works written during the 1960s and 1970s by Baraka and by Levinas, an encounter involving uneasiness that might variously appear to serve the interests of Baraka or of Levinas. As these two figures are joined in the chapter’s title by “between,” we begin by addressing this term, through which to address key elements of Levinas’s thinking and consider one concern of the chapter: an interrogation of discursive (and by extension cultural and personal) assimilation and difference, with some emphasis on the question of ethics. As the chapter progresses, the emphasis shifts to a more overt concern with music, and with musing (without explicit reference to this apparently false etymological resonance), which raises a consideration of how critical or theoretical discourse might begin to meet, if not join, its other, or how it might encounter its ability and inability, encountering the question of the critical nature of criticism or the theoretical nature of theory.1 2. Theme Between as “by two” both divides and joins two. Thinking about the word may emphasize dichotomy, the accounting of two beings with a space be-

146

ENCOUNTERING ABILITY

tween them. Simultaneously, it emphasizes a union, a belonging in which two are engaged, a proximity. They do not cease to be two, yet in being named thus, they are together. Noting the double nature of “between” is simple, although it is perhaps easy to forget, and the implications of engaging it are enormous and difficult, as we recognize in finding these implications in Levinas’s treatment of the proximal relation. While the work of Levinas focuses on ethics, he does not prescribe ethical behavior or attitudes, nor does he describe any practical ethics. Concerned with metaethics, he approaches the conditions under which ethics may take place. The subjunctive is significant: it not only implies that ethics often does not take place, but intimates more importantly that ethics as such cannot be determined, cannot even be said to be. Levinas does not claim to identify the conditions for ethics; instead, he considers how to think the conditions’ possibility, which correspondingly entails how to think their impossibility. For Levinas, ethics involves the primary aspect of existence—human existence, in his terms—which is relationality. He calls ethics “first philosophy,” meaning an engagement with ethics must precede any thinking that focuses on being (1992b). Being emerges under erasure, as a being’s thinking of, speaking with, or otherwise relating with another being is primordial to and excessive of any notion of being as such, so the question of proximity precedes any determination of being. To think about beings per se, for Levinas, is to account moments of experience and organize the world in a way that obscures the relational excess of the more fundamental proximal encounter. When Levinas describes the encounter as face to face, he emphasizes implications of the exposure of one instance of facing to another such instance (1992b, p. 83). Solicitude, caress, and command, for example, emerge as primordial, anterior to any determination of being—of what faces—and to even the generality of being. Levinas does not mean a reified face, but indeed more: the face-to-face relation emerges in and as language, a matter of not just visual but verbal, and therein tactile, exposure. As the face-to-face ethical relation cannot be captured or expressed in a logic of individual beings, the relation may seem removed, transcendent for whatever we might think of as imminent of a relation. It is not that ethics or goodness never emerges, however—Levinas insists the contrary—but that we cannot determine or even know the emergence, it is so close to us. As Levinas finds what is closest to us outside our knowing, he puts the vibrancy of the face-to-face relation outside (or deeply inside) articulations of encounters and of intending to encounter; the relation involves what Andrew Tallon calls “nonintentional affectivity” (1995). We may consider how, with such an ethical relation in mind, we can encounter the discourse or thought of another, encountering what Levinas calls one’s “expression,” or one’s oeuvre or work (1969, pp. 175–83).2 I pose an encounter between Baraka and Levinas that at first invokes a logic of being and involves an attempt to assimilate their thinking, while including typical

Denatured Criticism: Levinas and Baraka

147

assumptions about the work of each. Toward an ethical encounter, we become concerned with two areas that involve the implications of proximity. One area, in two moments, entails how to engage the thought of Baraka and how to engage that of Levinas; a related area involves an engagement of the two discourses with each other, an engagement between the two. In the work of Baraka and in that of Levinas, we find justification both for avoiding claims of having grasped what each says and for resisting any assimilation of them to each other. As we develop an emphasis on proximity, we should avoid articulating the sort of knowledge that would possess their discourses, which would lead to absorbing them together or one to the other (as chapter 3 notes concerning a relationship between the thought of Jacques Lacan and that of Levinas). We should avoid, at various levels, what Levinas would oppose as an assimilation of the other to the same and what Baraka would oppose as an obliteration of difference, an instance of assimilation that for Baraka may or may not concern race or ethnicity.3 3. Fugue Having stated this theme, we may note that on the surface, the works of these two appear so different that they resist any meaningful engagement, particularly concerning ethics. Levinas takes great care to avoid violence in any form. He writes of the ethical relation as “passive” at the root (1998, pp. 113– 14), depicting what Thomas Carl Wall calls the “radical passivity” entailed in encountering the face of the other (1999). Baraka expresses ethos and goodness in poetry and in prose, as in the Foreword to the anthology Black Fire: “We will be righteous and our creations good and strong and righteous” (1968b, p. xvii). However, unforgivably for many readers, he emphasizes an altogether different radicality, a rooting out of what he calls white influence and oppression from the world, as his poetry incites action and advocates violence. In “BLACK DADA NIHILISMUS,” he writes, . . . Rape the white girls. Rape their fathers. Cut the mothers’ throats. (1964, p. 63) Poetry becomes an active and violent force in Baraka’s work, especially in his use of “projective verse” (a term developed by Charles Olson), involving an openness of poetic form by which “energy-discharge” toward the reader projects the content of the poem toward action in the world (Olson, 1967). The voice of Baraka’s “Black Art” calls black poets to violent action and exhorts black readers to “speak” the message: . . . We want “poems that kill.” Assassin poems, Poems that shoot

148

ENCOUNTERING ABILITY guns. Poems that wrestle cops into alleys and take their weapons leaving them dead with tongues pulled out and sent to Ireland. (1969, p. 116)

The poem includes vituperation against the “negroleader” who collaborates with whites. Baraka’s poems of this period so often associate enemy whiteness with power in commerce, government, and culture that at least in rhetoric, the enemy appears to become the power per se, historical and ideological oppression and control associated with whiteness, although only later does Baraka mitigate the appearance of bigotry with statements such as “the only whitey is system and ideology” (2000, p. xiii). Levinas dedicates Otherwise than Being to all who suffer the “hatred of the other man” that was represented in Nazism (1998, p. v). Arguably, as Baraka develops a militancy of those who have been victimized, he moves toward a broader expression of justice and works in opposition to the oppression represented by Nazism or whiteness, yet in many of his poems, he simply excoriates his others. One might argue that Baraka develops a logic of division, not only reflecting but promoting a world where people live in allergic relations, where the separating aspect of “between” rules encounters and profound antipathy and violence emerge at the root of language. This glance at Baraka’s work, alongside a brief discussion of Levinas, suggests a compelling opposition between their two discourses. More careful attention to Baraka’s writing, however, may lead beyond the opposition, as some remarks in the preceding paragraph have begun to do. Any survey of Baraka’s prose will undermine the characterization of his work as simply violent and unethical, as will further consideration of his poetry. Much of Baraka’s violent poetry is collected in Black Art (published as the final third of Black Magic in 1969). Among other poems in Black Art are those that emphasize black communalism through the use of cosmic imagery, representations of chants, and appeals to the divine. An example is the second poem titled “Part of the Doctrine” in Black Art: . . . Through God. We are raised and the race is a sun sons suns sons burst out of heaven to be god in the race of our raise through perfection. (1969, p. 200; see also “Race” and “Planetary Exchange,” pp. 222–24) In my discussion of Levinas above, the religious emphasis of his thought is latent. In Otherwise than Being, he states that engaging in the face-to-face relation entails “religiosity” (1998, p. 117), and he describes the speaking involved in the encounter of the face in terms of “kerygma” (p. 99). Levinas has said that his work focuses on “not ethics, not ethics alone, but the holy,

Denatured Criticism: Levinas and Baraka

149

the holiness of the holy” (quoted in Derrida, 1999, p. 4). Toward negotiating the seemingly resistant aspects of Baraka’s poems, we might seek a correspondence between him and Levinas on the topic of religiosity or divinity as the core of the ethical. In a critique that would develop a focus on religiosity, we might engage the violence in Baraka’s work with a concern for the good, in a way that goes beyond developing an apology for his represented violence and his verbal aggression (leaving aside the question of whether goodness and violence are incompatible). Most of Baraka’s explicitly revolutionary and violent poems avoid matters of religion or divinity (unless we count attacks on Christianity and Judaism that associate “God” with a Western focus on transcendental abstraction). Largely, Baraka’s poems with cosmic or religious emphasis lack the violence, vituperation, racism, profanity, and sexually abusive aspects of much of his other work. While Baraka often “wields language as a curse,” in Kimberly W. Benston’s words (1984, p. 165), he tends to avoid explicit cursing, tending not to invoke or entreat what he considers divine force to inflict or support aggression or violence. We might argue that throughout his work in the 1960s and early 1970s, Baraka develops an expressive space for the divine, moving toward a reading by which the poems of violence for political exigency would support, without contravening, the focus of those emphasizing divinity (a notable exception being “BLACK DADA NIHILISMUS,” which ends with a prayer that “a lost god damballah” would sanction righteous violence, although perhaps the expressed absence of the god reinforces the point, 1964, p. 64). Thus we might interpret Baraka’s poems such that a concern with the divine is never absent from his broader discourse. As we approach Baraka’s poetics toward a sense of his oeuvre, while recalling Levinas’s focus on the significance of language for the ethical relation, the two begin coming together concerning an engagement of divinity through language, an engagement that might harmonize their discourses regarding how goodness transcends or perseveres through any allergy between beings. Perhaps we discover a faith, on their part, in goodness that may obtain in what the previous chapters have considered a primacy of relationality for discourse. Baraka addresses a discursive engagement with the divine when he asks, in “Ka ’Ba,” . . . What will be the sacred words? (1969, p. 146) In his representation of chanting in “Form Is Emptiness,” he contemplates how while haunting language, the divine is not word is no lines

150

ENCOUNTERING ABILITY no meanings (p. 155).

In other poems in Black Art, the phrase “holy nuance” occurs (1969, pp. 183, 199), resonating with what Levinas calls the trace of the transcendent in language and human encounter (1986). The implications of incommensurability in “nuance” and “trace,” however, as well as a sense that the nuance or trace remains beyond apprehension, lead us to see that just this concern with divinity engaged through language creates resistance for attempts to correlate the discourses. The works of Baraka, as well as those of Levinas, suggest divinity that cannot be assimilated discursively, but that, in its absolute difference, disrupts discourse, entailing inarticulable differentiation. To use Levinas’s terms, we approach not divinity involving totalized articulation, but divinity by which articulation and disarticulation proliferate infinitely in discourse. Besides working out an interpretation of Baraka that addresses his violence in preparation for an engagement with Levinas, we could address the work of Levinas to prepare for an engagement with Baraka concerning the relationship between ethics and violence (having already made assumptions that characterize the work of each author, we must reiterate). We could begin with Jacques Derrida’s “Violence and Metaphysics” (1978), to consider whether Levinas cannot avoid violence and aggression in his thought; this essay is Derrida’s critique of Levinas’s Totality and Infinity (1969). We could examine Otherwise than Being and other later works by Levinas, which take Derrida’s critique into consideration. We could consider various readings, such as that by Luce Irigaray, which consider sexism in Levinas’s approach to the feminine (2004), and we might address his express politics, particularly his support of the state of Israel (Levinas, 1992a). Still it is likely that, after negotiating either figure or both to build connections regarding the ethical, any attempt at developing a logical engagement between their discourses will result in unacceptable stretches and qualifications, if we involve any characterizations concerning the work of each author. Maintaining the generalizations we have made, we find that while inevitably, approaching Levinas will reveal something in him we could identify as aggression, it becomes difficult to indict as violent the approach to ethics he develops most fully in Otherwise than Being (an approach that, for John D. Caputo, is misnamed “ethics” and avoids the violence Derrida considers philosophy to involve, 1993). While we might bring Baraka’s work toward Levinas’s topics of compassion, passivity, peace, and receptivity in developing a focus on the religious dimension of the poetry, it becomes difficult to locate an expressed or implicitly prevailing approach to ethics or religion in Baraka’s oeuvre that primarily emphasizes such topics. Between the two, we have problems arguing the connections, or rather a problem of what to do with differences. Such problems are not only endemic to a candidly fraught encounter like this one; most attempts to connect or to apply discours-

Denatured Criticism: Levinas and Baraka

151

es must resort to finesse, remaining tentative at best. The issue of finesse moves us beyond logical difficulty to the ethical and political problem of assimilation. A version of the logical problem emerges in the shape of this chapter so far, and which it maintains a bit longer, beginning as it has by emphasizing Levinas’s thought in a way that would seem to privilege his work theoretically over Baraka’s poetic practice. It appears I have allowed the words of Levinas to set the theme or terms of ethics in a language of criticism, leaving the poetics of Baraka to develop these terms, or perhaps other terms, in fugal response. The appearance, however, may depend on how we name or perceive the poetic and the critical—such as whom we consider poetic and/or philosophical and how (whether the encounter occurs within or without such nominations and conceptions)—and how we imagine the temporality of responding, how we configure the structure of origination and response (as occurs in my writing or otherwise). We should avoid applying Levinas’s thinking generally to Baraka’s work in a way Levinas might be applied to any article of language or behavior, and we should avoid assimilating both discourses to a third, in another mode of application, as will occur if we use a prevailing language of religiosity or ethics. Applying Levinas is a problem for reasons internal to his thinking. Since he does not express an ethics proper, but instead resists such expression, it would be inappropriate to apply his thought to a text or situation to determine how or whether ethics takes place. Moreover, adequating the details of any text or situation to a theory would commit hermeneutical violence to the applied thought and whatever we submitted to theory, simultaneously entailing assimilation and emphasizing a hierarchical gap between the two. To maintain fidelity not only to Baraka’s work but that of Levinas, instead of applying Levinas’s thought we need to put it in proximity, finding the two in a between where neither is adequated to the other, while we may still recognize their proximity. To examine the resistance to application in Levinas’s thought, we might attempt an application to Baraka’s work, illuminating the resistance and leading toward a non-hierarchical proximity of the discourses. Throughout Baraka’s works are explicit references to faces, and images of faces and facing (often involving aggression) and staged encounters (which occur in his plays as well as his poetry). Many, perhaps a majority, of these facings involve interracial confrontations. We could think about how to develop Levinas’s face-to-face encounter in a way that applies to the social context of Baraka’s work. As such an encounter involves exposure per se, however, involving not a signified face for Levinas but the “signifyingness of signification” (1998, p. 5), trying to apply Levinas’s theorizing to Baraka’s representations of faces leads outside such representations toward what exceeds representation, what is not contained in the expression of any face as a certain face. We approach the implications of expression as such, what in language exceeds de-

152

ENCOUNTERING ABILITY

terminations of context. For the attempt to apply Levinas, we recognize that Baraka’s language exceeds various kinds of determination, including determination as an appropriate demonstration of Levinas’s theory. We realize this excess is endemic to Baraka’s work and not something we need Levinas’s consideration of signification to identify for us. That is, as we engage the excess and resistance of the face and the facing that is emergent in Baraka’s work, we find that the entailed failure of application does not depend on the application’s attempt, which would make it a successful application. While in apparent agreement about the excess of signification, Baraka and Levinas severally exceed the context of agreement. Baraka’s work, as well as that of Levinas, makes a specifically Levinasian reading of Baraka (and vice versa) inappropriate, indeed impossible, although it is more accurate to say the possibility of such readings makes the readings impossible. 4. Dance We (or you or one) may find it hopeful and discouraging, perhaps maddening, that in (my) bringing the work of Levinas and of Baraka face to face, we are unable to develop adequate logical connections, to perform an application, to build upon similarities, to manage readings into a hermeneutic system, or to engage in what could be expressed as an ethical encounter. Each one’s works yield a world in which alterity and difference are maintained, in opposition to one in which differences are submitted to conciliation. Attending to their work makes it imperative that in engaging them, we avoid articulating their sameness even on this point, on resisting similarity. We should maintain their alterity, and are compelled to do so insofar as we are attending to them, even when they appear the same. Perhaps it is possible to work with what they oppose, however, without determining their thought or expressing similarities between them. In its development so far, this chapter has expressed what Baraka’s poetics opposes and what Levinas’s thinking opposes. For considering proximity between the two, we can try to clarify what they oppose, which means focusing on the issue of assimilation. In the works of Baraka and those of Levinas, we find opposition to neutrality, dispassion, and disinterest in thought and in encountering others. Also, we find opposition to epistemology and psychology, the logic of knowing and the notion that logic obtains for individual psychic entities, the notion that thought submits to a logic of individuation. Stating that Levinas and Baraka each opposes these aspects and opposes methods and principles of assimilation, of absorbing or erasing difference, does not necessarily develop comprehension of the thought of either of them, nor does it draw them into assimilation. We do not necessarily assimilate or grasp them as a result of stating that each opposes controlling or centralizing discourses, totalization, the philosophical rule of ontology over thought, or to try to capture all these in brief, the centrality or domination of the logos.

Denatured Criticism: Levinas and Baraka

153

Naming an object or objects of opposition cannot avoid imputing opposition to each discourse, but that is all that occurs necessarily. We can stop short of calling either discourse’s opposition to the object aggressive, for example, but leave each undetermined concerning how it opposes. For a discourse, articulating the opposed object does not necessarily lead to determining any activity of the discourse or any essence of it. Insofar as stating the object of opposition leads us back reflectively, it leads back to what we can call a field of discursive life, an area where the discourse dwells and functions, while not leading to an articulation of the dwelling or the functioning of the particular discourse. This reflecting and returning does not reveal identity, intention, force, or life of the discourse, but only reveals that the vitality of the discourse does oppose what we name opposed. The other of the object that is opposed—the field the discourse thrives in—need not appear comprehensible, or true, real, or complete, but instead virtual, emerging as gestured toward by terms such as “nuance” for Baraka and “trace” for Levinas. For each discourse, we avoid telling what it is; we work with how it relates, perhaps with how it means. We may ask whether the object the discourses oppose itself suffers violence in being grasped, in assimilation such as is entailed by the term “logos.” One response says we need to be equally vigilant about assimilation regarding such objectification, while another says assimilation need not be our concern in this aspect of our approach; yet another notes the assimilation of moments is in fidelity to the propensity of assimilation the named moments address, the propensity “logos” indicates. We may engage these responses as we pursue how this question involves the discourses of Levinas and Baraka, as we continue to consider whether we do assimilative violence to the two discourses in naming as similar the object(s) they oppose. The risk of assimilating Baraka and Levinas might seem greater if we were to focus on additional textual passages to examine how they oppose what they oppose, exposing the passages to particulars of assimilation. However, in this exposure there would be no necessary assimilation, and greater empirical specificity of material should lead away from assimilation (as it tends to have done when we have considered citations above). Such specificity should support our care to take each discourse as it indicates objects of opposition, treating each discourse as primary and then matching the objects. If we are not beholden to our processes of selecting passages, we may attend to the discourses solicitously, perceiving oppositions and relations among oppositions insofar as the discourses name them, never adequating objects of opposition beyond how we happen to recognize similarities among the objects of the differing discourses, perhaps doubting our recognition as we go, improvising as we go. Such care for maintaining difference has led me to be patient in what might seem roundabout ways of iterating what perhaps I should avoid putting in a single sentence: that Levinas’s and Baraka’s dis-

154

ENCOUNTERING ABILITY

courses both, but differently, oppose the assimilation of difference governed by the logos. We risk hermeneutical violence in coming to any understanding of a discourse, including an understanding of what it opposes. How we return or reflect from the oppositions is important, whatever the extent of any perceived match in oppositions—how we return to what we have considered the field of the discourses. It may seem odd to avoid knowing a discourse or thought, while working to know an object it opposes, to know what is outside it, then casting back not to know the discourse, but to encounter a field it shares (at least potentially) with other discourses. The movement might appear dialectical, although properly it is not. It does not return to synthesis, which the notion of the field avoids insofar as the notion allows the discourses to subsist together in undetermined alterity. The return might appear Aufhebung, the response to an articulated thesis as that which is opposed to it—in this case, opposing the logos itself, the possibility of thesis itself—yet the field of proximity does not lead toward a later moment of synthesis. The field is not to be considered total, but infinite; we try to see what an infinite context of discourse would look like, where suggested relations only rise to apprehension as partaking of the (escaping) nuance or trace. Encountering the field in which the discourses belong together is descriptive activity. We engage how the discourses’ terms emerge and relate as the terms will, where the saying of each discourse may belong. In description of the field, aspects of the thought of Baraka and Levinas should emerge in a proximal encounter we may share. In such description, we engage in work that is interminable, the difficulty of which Ludwig Wittgenstein notes in the statement, “If you complete it, you falsify it” (1980, sec. 52e). As the two discourses emerge sharing a field of concern, each facing its other, they will dwell as others to what they each oppose. Since the discourses of the proximal field oppose and exclude their others, the ethicality of either discourse seems not our focus; indeed, we cannot judge the ethicality of a discourse. In the case of each discourse, the oppositional other appears to be the centrality of the logos, the locus of control and mastery: what is opposed in the engagements of Baraka and Levinas is what this chapter opposes. If the distinction between these cases and the chapter appears superfluous, that perception would depend on an assimilation of my chapter’s theoretical points with its working through the texts of focus. Such perception would entail an application of theory to text that, even in the case of a text’s apparent application to itself, my writing of this chapter is resisting. The opposition to control and mastery we reflect back to, in the proximal field, makes the field recognizable as an area where non-mastery and non-domination are expressed. We may look to the field for the possibility and impossibility of approaching the discourses involved, to include approaching them ethically. Since where we encounter the thought of Levinas and Baraka is not apprehensible except by traces and nuances—as it (and the

Denatured Criticism: Levinas and Baraka

155

discourses) emerges virtually—it is a place of responding but not of determinations of responsibility. In proximity, the ethical cannot be said to happen, although there emerges perhaps a glimpse of the trace or nuance of the ethical, of the possibly ethical. The ethical would not be what is said or done, but what will, or may, have been said or done. Alternatively, the ethical, or whatever it is we have been working with, is what may have been played, and the field that involves the possibility and impossibility of encounter is an improvisational field, which discourses join by voicings. A discourse emerges in the field not as an essence, but in how the discourse voices: not that it is a discourse, but that it voices discursively, or it discourses voicedly, perhaps in tension or opposition with any sense of rule. Following Nathaniel Mackey’s “Other: From Noun to Verb” (1992), if we think of music in terms of performativity, of movement per se more than any substantiality in an event, instead of considering voices of what may be played or sung, we consider the voicing. This is not necessarily active voicing, but voicing audible as it emerges, voicedly, in the field, its participation expressed adverbially, as the sound emerges in terms of nuances of belonging as voicing in the activity and passion of the field. Voice is audible in the field—the music—in proximity with other voicing; a voicing enters the field already in response (or not) to others, which themselves already voice in response to the voicing’s entrance before the entrance takes place. While no essence of voice is determined, the way a voice means (or does not) emerges in the field, as a way in proximity with how other voicings mean, emerging in ways not recognizable specifically but obliquely, as the ensemble of voicings—the field, or opening, perhaps a hiatus—thrives itself as the voicings’ interrelationships entail (or alternatively, as is entailed in the exposure of the face, among faces, speaking or performing faces). The conditions of possible music, always, may have become voiced, music thriving in terms of nuance or trace of what appears to consist in the present, in our presence. It is so even as music is sensuous material, breath and vibration. Never neutral, not indifferent, voicing engages passion that is its own and another’s, the passion of the ensemble. The subjunctivity and transcendence of music emerge as the ensemble or field of the voicings, and improvisation is always involved. The ensemble emerges with the improvisation, which works against stasis or assimilation, although stasis itself is a moment of ensemble. Music as such moves against what is rote, determinate, or determined, even in cases of great attention to order and discipline. “Ensemble” indicates simultaneity, togetherness, which in a description of a field becomes a belonging of voicings in a same time that is a fissured same, an area where differentiations make meaning and identity is oblique. As listening means voicing, we inhabit the field, not knowing in a grasping, but joining improvisation in a responding where “between” becomes “among.” When Mackey writes of jazz, he explicitly engages African-American music, bringing African-American life and music into voice without exclud-

156

ENCOUNTERING ABILITY

ing other music or identity (1992). When he focuses on “othering” as a process that has happened and continues to happen to African Americans, a process of exclusion, he emphasizes that othered people have learned how to other forms of music, both in expression of the injustice of having been othered and in celebration of their skill at improvising on the forms, as the people also maintain in music features identified as racial or ethnic. Mackey’s discourse and its music oppose an excluding, othering formalism, as he celebrates othering in a field of improvisation he thereby joins voicedly. The nuances of anarchy become voiced, in opposition to hierarchy that applies form to performance; instead of on control, a focus emerges on a sense of response. We read the voicing of Mackey’s discourse in the field proximally with all voices that emerge, involving all musicians and music in opposition to exclusionary formalism (while such formalism is itself a moment of response in the ensemble). Perhaps more explicitly and recognizably than other music, jazz for many listeners emphasizes performativity over rote playing, as Baraka discusses in “Hunting Is Not Those Heads on the Wall,” for example (1966b). Modification of melody, rhythm, and timbre becomes working out beyond apparently originary material. Call and response phrasing engages one player with another in obligation, where one substitutes for the other virtually, while the substitution does not bind either to specific responses. Harmonic substitution involves chordal voicings that, like melodic and rhythmic modification, become obligated to novelty emerging in the ensemble, not necessarily assimilating the music to rules of tonal organization. Mackey’s “Other” essay responds to and develops points made in Baraka’s discussion of the othering of African-American music and musicians, which Baraka published as “Swing: From Verb to Noun” in Blues People (1963, pp. 142–65). Baraka is critical of white musicians’ appropriation of jazz and the corresponding devaluation of black musicians’ contributions, one result of which was many black musicians’ inability to get work (or reasonable pay for it). Baraka focuses on an exclusionary aspect of social assimilation in the United States that occurs despite what he recognizes as the origin of jazz in difference. He emphasizes the pervasive brutality of determination that initiates and maintains the context of othering, which is also the context of the othering of othering. A focus on lack of control, including improvisation with the lack, emerges in Baraka’s view of English as a language imposed on him by history. William J. Harris notes that in the 1960s, Baraka came to see the language, like the American society he lived in, as somewhat foreign. Being denied full status as a citizen in the society, Baraka felt excluded from native facility with a language he saw as belonging to the dominant people of the society (Harris, 1985, pp. 86–87; see Baraka, 1963, pp. ix–xii, 1–10). Along with Baraka’s skill comes his “crudeness” with English (Harris, 1985, pp. 89–90): like a

Denatured Criticism: Levinas and Baraka

157

celebrating Caliban, he writes poems that revel in the “curse,” wielding vituperation improvisationally, confronting while evading control of language. Postcolonial theorists have emphasized that in the colonial situation, a colonized person must use language that has belonged first to the colonizer. In James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Stephen Dedalus says that for the Irishman speaking English, the language is “his before it is mine,” adding, “My soul frets in the shadow of his language” (1985, p. 189; also see Márquez, 1997, p. 162, and William J. Harris, 1985, p. 86). In The Tempest, Caliban similarly suffers linguistic colonization; Prospero’s tyranny has been well explicated, particularly his imposition of Italian (fictionally) on Caliban. Caliban tells Miranda, You taught me language, and my profit on’t Is, I know how to curse. (1.2.363–64) He follows with a curse on her for the bitter gift. Shakespeare freights “profit” with its meaning of surplus value, the attainment of something often not measurable or predictable, and Caliban profits from the power in cursing. Caliban knows he will be punished, yet he says, “I needs must curse” (2.2.4). What power he has depends on the language and more particularly the curse, by which he gains inscrutable but palpable value not captured in the logic of Prospero’s regime. Caliban, Stephen, and Baraka are adept speakers of Italian and English (in their respective cases), of the colonizer’s language. Aside from the implications of a possible maternal language for Caliban (and perhaps the magic of Prospero), there is no fully voiced, natural, unproblematic language that any of these figures could otherwise access: we cannot impose a myth of primary language in Stephen’s or Baraka’s case. As Paul Brown has detailed, it is erroneous to think that Prospero has full mastery of language, or by extension to think there is a sphere of mastery or whiteness in which any speaker is fully voiced and free (2000). Caliban as we read him speaks within culture, not being legible as a figure of pure nature. Indeed, the adeptness of the colonized in the colonial language reflects the artifice of anyone’s naturalizing claim to possess language, which emerges for all speakers as some “his” before it is “mine.” In the “darkness” or inapprehensible otherness of the colonized (to quote Prospero, 5.1.275), as well as what Baraka depicts as blackness (not to be conflated with Prospero’s expression of darkness), we read the struggle engaged by anyone who wields language. While English is Baraka’s first language, he is not disingenuous in claiming it is not his mother tongue. Emphasizing the bastard or stepchild status of one othered within the culture of the language, he expresses an aspect of the broad problematic of linguistic expression.

158

ENCOUNTERING ABILITY

Despite what control he wields, it is reductive to see Baraka’s use of the rough edges of English as entirely chosen by him, and it is also reductive to emphasize personal psychology, such as to view his rough language in terms of a personal aesthetic that involves narcissism (as Jerry Gafio Watts tends to do, 2001). By emphasizing an improvisatory aesthetic in an ensemble of relations, we avoid reducing the features of Baraka’s work to social pragmatism or psychological exigency, such as the reduction Harris implies by connecting Baraka’s work with the “cleansing anger” of Frantz Fanon and “any means” of Malcolm X (William J. Harris, 1985, pp. 28–29). It is through the sociocultural and historical implications of improvisatory othering that explicit social and political exigencies are exceeded, through improvisation involving the surplus value of the language. W. D. E. Andrews comments that Baraka’s “conception of revolution puts historical and sociological realities before ethics” (1982, p. 217). Where ethics may occur only in improvisatory and proximal relations, and where we are not naïve about determining “realities,” we may read Baraka’s poetics as offering voices in opposition to any appropriation of the good. As his works resist and oppose assimilation, in their iconoclasm and aggression, in their othering of othering, they emerge in ensemble, supporting and maintaining differences among discourses such that relations may be not assimilative, but proximal. In the poetry, such opposition emerges explicitly and implicitly, as in a passage from “Black People!”: you cant steal nothin from a white man, he’s already stole it he owes you anything you want, even his life. (1969, p. 225) Baraka articulates what he opposes: the “white man” in appropriation, assimilation, and totalization has “already” absorbed difference and relations of otherness—in short, everything—and thereby “owes” everything back to the world of differences, a world Baraka and “you” inhabit. Exceeding the articulation is the performative affect of the voicing, of voice improvising outside any logic of tolerance or accommodation, voicing that the passion of the ensemble entails, voicing of the field of proximity we engage in these lines. Among other implications of the prevalence of unmanageable voice in this poetry, we find difference as such emerging as primary, by which we may sense, as if primordial for any moment’s being, a discomfiting excess of proximity among inter-related voices. “Sometimes unfeeling of each other (thing) but Music joins us,” Baraka writes (1968a, p. 174). His work develops an improvisatory aesthetic we might be tempted to read as explaining what seems a poetics of ethics emergent in the work of Levinas. Explicitly and implicitly, however, Baraka’s work resists being read in contexts of assimilation. Insofar as it comes into relation with other discourses, his work (and that of Levinas) tends to dwell or

Denatured Criticism: Levinas and Baraka

159

move among them, however uneasily—in dance, perhaps, perhaps in unease (or disease) endemic to dance (which is to say writing). 5. Coda Whatever aggression we can read in Baraka’s work appears non-subsuming, uncontained, and undetermined by ethos or ethnos, in a way that perhaps allows us to say that beyond finding violence in his language, we find something like a gift—that we may take as gift, perhaps, amid the engagement we enter upon reading his work. In the work (his and ours), we may find a generosity of energy (or vim, life force expressed in the root of the word “violence”), finding energy improvisationally expended “without anticipated profit of return,” as Steve McCaffery (in an essay emphasizing Levinas) writes of texts that work in the mode of the gift (1997, p. 176). An instance of participation we see as aggressive may thus, in giving energy amid an ensemble or field of relations, appear to express thanks at its opportunity to join. We see how even aggression or perhaps domination may join the ensemble in a mode of receptivity or passivity, and we may consider passivity in the energy or aggression of our joining, perhaps in resistance we may encounter to joining—resistance we could think of as subjectively ours—or perhaps in our preference not to join. McCaffery refers to the poetry of John Cage as an example of art that donates its energy and that involves a gift modality in the responsiveness of reception, indeterminate responsiveness by which the loci of production and reception are blurred (which applies to all of Cage’s work, not being limited to his poetry, and which reflects what Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari refer to by various notions, such as “assemblage,” 2005). Gerald L. Bruns also writes of Cage’s art and thought, as Bruns develops a view of ethics that emphasizes the proximal relation. This view involves responsiveness and responsibility that emerge without control, irresponsibly, where we inhabit an area of proximity along with others’ words and discourses, without the need or ability of grasping or intending, without grasp or intent that would insist on being principled activity that daunts the receptivity that persists in responsiveness (1994, p. 220). Bruns cites Cage’s reference to Meister Eckhart, who notes that “divine unconsciousness” informs responsiveness (Eckhart, 1941, pp. 106–107; Cage, 2011, p. 64; Bruns, 1994, p. 215). Performative, even violent energy in the proximal field of the ensemble of indeterminate production and reception begins to appear legible as an infinity of religiosity. Discourses— philosophical, artistic, entertaining, political, and critical, among other nominations—that thrive in such proximity may become questioning for each other, but without any requirement of their mutual tolerance. This is questioning by proximity, with a sense of being exposed to the other, each moment of discourse submitting to others and the ensemble as the moments occur. Dialogue may be another name for ensemble, and religiosity another name for

160

ENCOUNTERING ABILITY

dialogue. In such dialogue, what is good would be found in seeking traces and nuances, amid something like what Mikhail M. Bakhtin refers to as the “transgredience” of dialogue (quoted in Clark and Holquist, 1984, p. 79; see also Todorov, 1988, pp. 94–95). Perhaps by the possibility of such improvisational dialogue, we may engage a nuance or trace of the possibility of ethics. I hope we will have joined in encounters of Levinas and of Baraka, and an encounter between them, without determining either discourse or assimilating any moment with any other, in critical encountering that critically engages the nature of criticism. Entering such proximal relationality among moments in various dimensions, where no discourse is a figure for another or suffers under theorization, we (you with me) would seek to arrive in an improvisational field where perhaps the ethical and the violent may cohabit, where neither is managed by the other or truncated, absorbed, controlled, or named by an assimilating discourse that imposes standards of toleration. We might think of our approach as critical, or poetic or philosophical, or otherwise, yet in any event we enter a heterodox area, and a place of musing, of notes toward, where the proximity between discourses emerges—where proximity may be fostered to emerge—besides however they appear to be separate.4 It is an area where discursive and other ability emerges always stricken through, under erasure, emerging as possible impossibility and impossible possibility that we may express as dis/ability.

Seven ENCOUNTERING DIS/ABILITY IN THE WORK OF MARGUERITE DURAS 1. Writing as Opening and Dis/articulation I intend the previous chapter to approach dis/ability mostly through a performative engagement of others’ texts, whereby my text might be read as doing what it cannot, or perhaps not doing what it does, to which I could add that I would not wish it to, or would prefer it not to, in a gesture perhaps toward textual or personal im/potentiality. Whereas the opening and closing remarks frame the chapter largely in the language of criticism and theory, language much of the chapter maintains, the text runs into difficulty and revises its critical mode so as to undermine some points, undermining its and my competence in some respects, while moving at one stage to what I intend as a musical mode that engages the critical approach, the main concerns of discussion, and the framing and other formal aspects of the chapter. I hope to open the two modes, and the figures and texts on which I focus, in a plurality of ways that move toward what my improvisation of the modes or approaches does not prescribe or determine. While I do not expect to be entirely or perhaps at all successful at such an opening (as the question of success should fail to make sense in the moment of its articulation), I hope to engage ability with its other, inability or disability, particularly in engaging ability as response with response and irresponsibility. Largely working otherwise than in the language with which I have attempted to approach ability in the previous chapters, I desire in chapter 6—more explicitly than in the other chapters, although perhaps this is to say more implicitly—to explore how a piece of discourse can gesture toward various terms traversed by the relational virgule, including im/potentiality, im/possibility, and dis/ability. Indeed, the ability of a (critical) discourse involves the functioning of the discourse’s implications otherwise than in the articulated language of the discourse, as the ability of the discourse’s ability performs otherwise than the discourse’s language, or the discourse per se, can claim to perform. This chapter returns to a more traditional mode of literary theory and criticism (insofar as I accurately name the mode of the earlier chapters, that is), with a focus on the works of a specific artist, Marguerite Duras, and her commentary on the works and on the making and reception of art. I have chosen Duras because of a thread running through her commentary and much secondary assessment of her writing, films, and theatrical pieces: an emphasis

162

ENCOUNTERING ABILITY

on her coextensive artistic ability and inability and that of her works. The tension between ability and inability is a truism of art, raising for example the remark attributed to Pablo Picasso that it took a “lifetime” for him to achieve the uncontained expression he found in art made by children, while recalling the aleatory practice of John Cage that we have noted near the end of chapter 6 and have observed in previous chapters. Drawing on the thought of “the mystics and Cabalists,” Giorgio Agamben writes, “Only when we succeed in . . . experiencing our own impotentiality do we become capable of creating, truly becoming poets” (1999b, p. 253). Agamben approaches the broader im/potentiality of all (human) signification, an emphasis he derives from Aristotle, whom he summarizes: “insofar as [humans] know and produce . . . every human power is adynamia, impotentiality; every human potentiality is in relation to its own privation” (Agamben, 1999e, p. 182; Aristotle, 1984, sec. 1046a). To use other terms from Agamben, art’s encountering of “contingency,” which opens toward the im/possible ability of ability, involves performative “decreation,” by which “the actual world is led back to its right not to be; all possible worlds are led back to their right to existence” (1999b, p. 271). Duras is often credited with deliberate or competent control of craft and technique, which her own comments tend to resist, while assessments of her works often emphasize the largely uncontrolled, open result of technique, which her comments on the works tend to support. She discusses her technical decisions in detail, sometimes writing scrupulous directions, such as those for India Song, the play that is the basis for her film of that title. Nevertheless, Duras is eloquent about how her work opens to what exceeds it, exceeding her control, and about how her control not only serves such excess, but emerges from it and remains engaged with excess that she expresses in various ways. “I can not stop a text,” she says, casting the excessiveness of the material prior her control, so we may consider the performative amorphousness of her technical achievement a result of the amorphousness of the material (Duras and Costaz, 1983, p. 97; trans. Susan D. Cohen, 1993, p. 64). Not only does Duras’s mastery achieve surrender and her knowledge achieve “ignorance” (Cohen, 1993, p. 15, drawing on Friedrich Nietzsche), but we must approach the first of each pair through considering the second. We do not find quite dialectical relationships between technique and material, form and content, control and abandon, and related dyads, but encounter openness that precedes and infiltrates control, technique, and expression, so that in approaching Duras’s ability, we encounter concomitant inability or disability, which is to say in/competence or dis/ability. In many of her comments about writing, Duras addresses an encounter with abandon or yielding, the encountering of a call or vocation that leads toward what exceeds the ability one might articulate for the activity of writing. At times she distinguishes between modes of expression, as in the following passage:

Encountering Dis/ability: Marguerite Duras

163

One thinks up writing on one’s own. Everywhere. In no matter what case. Cinema, no. Films to do not call. They do not await like the written work, that great rush into the book. When no one makes films, films do not exist, have never existed. When no one writes, the written work still exists, it has always existed. When everything is over, on the dying world, the gray planet, it will still exist everywhere, in the air of time, on the sea. (1990a, p. 132) It becomes clear, however, that she does not restrict “writing” to written or printed texts. She notes, “I am also talking about the written text even when I seem to be speaking of cinema. I don’t know how to talk about anything else. When I’m making movies, I’m writing” (p. 69). When she says, “I’ve talked a lot about writing. But I don’t know what it is,” Duras undermines determinations of writing as she expresses the incomprehensibility of writing’s ontology (1990b, p. 32). Her remarks about writing gesture toward the primary, non/foundational differentiality Gilles Deleuze discusses in his approach to Martin Heidegger’s fundamental ontology (Deleuze, 1994, p. 65). For Duras writing exceeds, or is the name of excess, a name for what exceeds itself, signification in excess of articulation that thus disarticulates as it signifies. Her perspective recalls the consideration in previous chapters, drawing on Agamben and Claude Lévi-Strauss as well as on Deleuze and Emmanuel Levinas, of language as indeterminate signification, perhaps particularly human signification. Signification entails excess in various respects, such as alterity or foreignness to itself, yet within itself, as a signifying being puts his or her life “at stake in language,” for Agamben (2010, p. 69), and thereby suffers him- or herself in “passive potentiality that undergoes something other than itself . . . [that] undergoes and suffers its own non-Being” (1999e, p. 182). Duras observes that for one who writes, “It’s as if writing were something outside you, in a tangle of tenses: between writing and having written, having written and having to go on writing; between knowing and not knowing what it’s all about; starting from complete meaning, being submerged by it, and ending up in meaninglessness” (1990b, p. 25). Engaging the incompleteness and incommensurability of signification—the “malady” or “disease” Agamben cites from Lévi-Strauss and Friedrich Max Müller— Duras’s remarks about writing address the epistemology and also the metaphysics of technique and of technical and artistic control (Agamben, 2010, pp. 15, 67; Lévi-Strauss, 1987, p. 63; Müller, 2013, pp. 353–54). In her work and her remarks about it, we can read technique’s exceeding of itself, an escaping trace (to raise Levinas’s term) of the outside of technique, the outside of the specific technical moment and that of the particular technique or kind of technique, and moreover that of technique in general. For Deleuze, literature provides a way to examine the dis/ability of writing, which extends to signification broadly. Drawing on Marcel Proust (1974, p. 110), Deleuze writes that literature “opens up a kind of foreign language

164

ENCOUNTERING ABILITY

within language,” which involves “a becoming-other of language” by which language is “toppled or pushed to a limit, to an outside or reverse side that consists of Visions and Auditions that no longer belong to any language. These visions are not fantasies, but veritable Ideas that the writer sees and hears in the interstices of language, in its intervals. They are not interruptions of the [writing] process, but breaks that form part of it, like an eternity that can only be revealed in a becoming” (1997d, p. 5). In terms of ability, the techniques Duras employs in creating novels, plays, and films are not (just) what they are and do not (just) do what they do. She recognizes that the writing and other work puts itself in question and puts in question the material it engages, or rather the material puts technique in question, as interrogation emerges in the context of work that thus emerges in a context of response, of becoming and becoming-other in response, of ir/responsibility. Duras’s work and her commentary indicate that what linguistic or technical expression is not is fundamental, and therefore non/foundational, to what it is. Its differentiality and relationality emerge as primary, entailing the alterity of signification to itself. 2. Approaching Differential Ontology by “Everything at Once” Of India Song, Duras notes “the fundamental way the film casts doubt” (Duras et al, 1987, p. 15). To approach this “way,” this means of fundamental undermining that is an undermining of fundamentality, many analyses of the various works of her “India cycle” consider their technical aspects. Perhaps the most significant aspect is what Duras discusses in terms of “the discovery, in The Woman of the Ganges [La Femme du Gange], of the means of exploration, revelation: the voices external to the narrative” (1976a, p. 6). Through the film and the script of La Femme du Gange, and the play and film versions of India Song, to the final work of the sequence—the film Son Nom de Venise dans Calcutta Désert—off-stage and off-screen voices gain emphasis as Duras first privileges voice-over, then removes the speech of the on-screen characters, and finally removes the images of the actors. Across these works and her commentary on them, Duras develops an extended treatment of the use of voice in theater and film, developing for these genres vocativity such as chapter 5 considers. Focusing on what the voices can and cannot do, we can develop a sense of how the India cycle opens to the excess of writing.1 In the General Remarks for the play India Song, Duras elaborates on the discovery and development of the external voices: “This discovery made it possible to let the narrative be forgotten and put at the disposal of memories other than that of the author: memories which might remember, in the same way, any other love story. Memories that distort. That create” (1976a, p. 6). The remarks refer to anonymous voice-overs, which have no clear relation to any on-screen characters or depicted narrative. Disembodied, placed outside the grasp of the viewer or reader, their “memory of the love story is illogical,

Encountering Dis/ability: Marguerite Duras

165

anarchic” (pp. 9–10). The “love story,” most of which does not occur in the present, emerges in various ways. Depicted slightly on stage and on screen, while largely presented by the conflicting and conflicted, sometimes confused, admittedly uncertain voices, the narrative—a mixture of narratives, that is—emerges unstable, incomplete, and unverifiable. Also in the play and film of India Song are voice-offs, off-stage voices of on-screen characters, which in the longest segment of each work (the second act reception at the French Embassy) present the speech of people at the reception, including some onscreen characters whose mouths remain closed; whereas some characters speak to each other in the text of the play, no character speaks on screen in the film. The voice-offs might offer more reliable narration, but with voices divorced from bodies—so the visual characters become what Lucy Stone McNeece calls “hieroglyphs” (1996, p. 127)—these voices only increase the sense of incommensurability between the little on-screen action and aspects of narrative discernible from the various voices. The “exploration” or “revelation” of the various voices in the film and the dramatic text of India Song develop what Duras calls writing, which “isn’t just telling stories. It’s exactly the opposite. It’s telling everything at once” (1990b, p. 27). With the off-screen voices of on-screen characters in particular, Duras intends to avoid “the inevitable realism of direct sound, and the dishonesty it represents. So you see, when they speak and hear their own words, the words have infinitely more echoes. I mean, while they are supposed to be speaking their words, at the very same time, they could be saying something entirely different. The field opens up, the field of speech opens infinitely wide” (Duras et al, 1975, p. 75; trans. Durand, 1997, p. 308). The voice-overs draw inferences, express desires, speak of their forgetfulness, and discuss a future that may or may not be related to the present scene. As we listen to all the voices, we do not get specific references that could develop a comprehensible story. Rather, a surfeit of referentiality floods the work through the voices, as they open to “everything,” so the excess in writing and of writing overwhelms diegesis. Marie-Claire Ropars-Wuilleumier writes that Duras makes “the voice the means of writing, thus reintroducing, according to the Derridean project, writing into speech” (1980, p. 242), permitting us to engage what Roland Barthes calls “writing aloud” (1975, pp. 66–67). As Régis Durand observes, the external voices allow Duras to work outside “fixed narrative space, to explore what literally cannot be said: not the mystical unknown or attainable, but what is always taking place on another scene, in between words, elsewhere” (1997, p. 309). In India Song, voice gains emphasis over images partly because the filmed or staged space remains undefined. Duras writes that the set of the second act of the play “should seem accidental—stolen from a ‘whole’ that is by its nature inaccessible” (1976a, pp. 49–50). Mirrors in the film set of the second act divide shots such that the space is uncertainly presented, creating what Deborah N. Glassman refers to as obliquity and disorienting stratifica-

166

ENCOUNTERING ABILITY

tion in what becomes the “virtual” space of the film (1991, p. 79). The long, static shots do not establish rounded, explicated space, not sutured or articulated space, but expose the uncertainty of imagistic presentation. We sense that what is outside this space, and outside filmic space and image in general—the outside or other side of any space and of space per se—is not excluded, but instead shadows the apparent presence of space, suggesting a trace of what Duras calls “everything.” Montage contributes to the erasure of filmic space in India Song, for example in a sequence that includes the character Anne-Marie Stretter dancing, along with recurring shots of a piano with her photo on it. As the voice-overs relate Stretter’s death during this sequence, there develops a crossing between visual and aural dimensions of montage, as Ropars-Wuilleumier observes: “Montage is already present in the voice,” involving non-self-correspondence that decenters the subjectivity of viewing or reading (1980, p. 249). Duras notes her discomfort with discussions of film that separate image and sound (Duras et al, 1987, p. 88). As the vocality of her films gains emphasis, it is inappropriate to designate voices as on, off, or over, insofar as such designations purport to relate the voices marginally to primary and central visual images. Duras remarks that in cinema, “voice is all around” (1990a, p. 133). 2 The voice-overs’ speech is not directed at the spectator or anyone else, except when these anonymous voices seem to respond to each other. In the preface to La Femme du Gange, Duras writes that the voices are to be ignorant of any spectators (1973b, p. 103). She refers to the voice-overs of India Song as “intangible, inaccessible” (1976a, p. 12). Her stage directions and other remarks for the play, however, are intimate with her readers, as audience members, engaging us through an insistent use of the first person plural. Moreover, she describes the voice-overs as “very close, enclosed like us in this place” (p. 12). The voice-offs (and voice-overs) of the second act of India Song “should sound, to the spectator, like his [sic] own ‘internal reading’ voice” (p. 49). Emphasizing such intimacy for the encounter of her works, Duras casts the place of spectatorship as a space of reading, a space of access to the plurivocity and excess of writing. In notes toward a possible staging of her novella The Malady of Death, she writes, “I always think nothing can replace the reading of a text, that no acting can ever equal the effect of a text not memorised,” thus placing the performance of the work in a context of reading (1986, p. 57). At one point in the stage directions for India Song, she describes a voice-over “as if reading” (1976a, p. 13). Along with the distortion and creation Duras notes for the memories of the India cycle’s voice-overs, we may perceive the accidents, indirection, and faltering of reading aloud as audible features of the excess of writing. The intersection of writing and reading emerges in spectatorship such that apprehending the material is an aspect of the performance, and thereby part of the open field of writing; the indistinctness between material and technique entails not only a flooding between

Encountering Dis/ability: Marguerite Duras

167

levels and aspects of production, but also reception. Durand observes that “nothing is closer to me than my voice” (1997, p. 301), a proximity that becomes invaded and opened insofar as the work emerges in one’s “reading” voice. Just as Duras insists the director or author is written by the opening of the material, the audience takes part in the opening and the writing. The viewer or reader, or director or author, does not become an abstraction, but the reverse: we engage materiality in the work as something not abstracted into positions, essences, or other technical or structural aspects. The voices, even the disembodied voice-overs, have what Barthes calls “grain” (1975, pp. 66–67), being “profoundly physical” in Durand’s words (1997, p. 308). What “from the point of view of sound” Duras calls the “echo chamber,” which she specifies as “the image, the stage,” is where voices engage each other such that reading occurs, reading of what she calls writing. In that space, affect is not subsumed under technique, narrative contour, or position (1976a, p. 49). In the stage directions to India Song, Duras’s repeated references to affect developed by the voices—such as fear, desire, and suffering— emphasize affect as the main focus of the work (p. 10, for example). In the various voices and synesthetically between voices and images, affect prevails over temporal or spatial detail or positioning; the love story that is “in [the] voices” (according to directions for the voice-overs, 1976a, p. 106) emerges more sensate than diegetic. Voice-overs emphasize how “striking” they find “the image” of the closed score of “India Song” on the piano of the ViceConsul’s dead mother (p. 89). Other voices note that what the Vice-Consul cannot “bear” about India is “the idea” of it (pp. 42–43), as the idea emerges affectively for him and the voices through imagery instead of exposition. In a voice-off exchange between the Vice-Consul and Stretter, a moment of his “knowledge” is equated simply with “pain” (pp. 96–97). As the voices of Duras’s films “vocalize a space on the screen,” in Marilyn R. Schuster’s words, the position of the spectator becomes “contradictory, precarious” (1993, p. 79). “Where are we?” (“Où est-on?”), asks one voice in the film of India Song; the question resonates in terms of image and sound and production and reception, besides expressing uncertainty about details of narrative, character, and the positioning of the voices. While commenting on the physical space where she works as director of her films, such as when she edits at night (Duras and Gauthier, 1987, p. 61), Duras considers the space of the audience (for a play, here): “But which is the darkroom for them? Is it the stage where not a word is said, or that space where everything happens invisibly? Is it the stage that is seen, where nothing happens, or that other space we spoke about where everything happens? The darkroom is what I call the reading room” (Duras and Gauthier, 1987, p. 140). As she considers theatrical and filmic space in this interview with Xavière Gauthier, Duras notes concerning the space or “echo chamber” of the work that “it’s in them,” the audience (p. 140). The “reading room” of the work is “that other space. The stage [or screen] being only an antechamber, clear consciousness” through which the

168

ENCOUNTERING ABILITY

audience engages the work (p. 141). By this space that is “in them,” the audience is of the work and vice versa, merging with its material and its materiality. Gauthier says that confronting Duras’s work, which “comes over the side,” is terrifying, that seeing the play India Song “terrorized” her (p. 141). This spectator contends with material emerging between the work and her space of reading, as the material of the work floods and merges with her life and world (recalling implications that chapter 6 considers for the term “between”). Duras’s audience is somewhere and in some time other than what Sarah Kozloff, describing the function of voice-over in film, refers to as comforting and educational “Storytime” (1988, p. 129). This does not mean one could not take up a subjective position by which to escape the experience of merging with the writing of the work. Duras says it is possible to “flee” the film of India Song, although only in a “complete, flawless refusal” (Duras et al, 1987, p. 15), fleeing the excessiveness of reading and writing in which potentiality and impotentiality, possibility and impossibility are mutually engaged. One could construct an interpretation of India Song without much difficulty, approaching it through a hermeneutic that posits historical narrative events and contiguous characters, attributing variations in narrative presentation to filmic techniques that offer an interpretive challenge. One could decide to assemble details into a hierarchical structure, which could develop a locus of directorial authority (which we run the risk of doing by citing Duras to undermine her authority). Such an approach would be more difficult for Son Nom de Venise dans Calcutta Désert (1976b, Her Venetian Name in Deserted Calcutta), which Duras made subsequently to India Song by using the same soundtrack, except for the final few minutes, while filming a largely different set with no characters present, except in scant images near the beginning and end. For Duras, this film completes the process of discovery of external voices she began while filming La Femme du Gange—that is, a process that arrives at incompleteness, or in/completeness. She writes that while making Son Nom de Venise, she thought, “I’m getting nowhere. I’ll end up nowhere. There are people mad enough to produce me. But I’m going toward a sort of No Man’s Land of cinema where there will no longer be any correlation between sound and image, toward a kind of dissociated cinematic time” (Duras et al, 1987, p. 88). Concerning the voices in La Femme du Gange, Duras refers separately to “the film of the image and the film of Voices” (“le film de l’image et le film des Voix,” 1973b, p. 103). By Son Nom de Venise, these two aspects have become engaged in a sonic-imagistic space that, when absorbed through the hour and a half of the film, becomes incomprehensible in narrative and characterological terms. As the voices are intimate yet inaccessible, image and voice are engaged with each other without “correlation”; put otherwise, neither is what it is, but instead “image” and “voice” emerge under erasure. We confront a filmic “space” where the reality of particular aspects and techniques, and that of technique per se and of the art form of film, encounter

Encountering Dis/ability: Marguerite Duras

169

what exceeds articulated reality, exceeding any presumed consistency or stability for their ontology. Liliane Papin writes that in Duras’s films, “Spectators and actors share the same fictional space, the one where doing, representing, and believing are depicted” (1998, p. 198). These actions, and the senses of hearing and vision, become indeterminately comprehensible, or in/comprehensible, as the space of film and drama exceeds stage, screen, and theater. Positions of spectator and director become erased as the fictional space becomes emphatically such: erased space, the space of writing, that which exceeds itself. “In them,” as Duras says—in the audience—the space of film emerges from “everything,” from the world in and around stage, screen, and theater, in lateral flooding that overwhelms the hierarchical positioning of author, narration, point of view, and other putative aspects of interpretive structure. Duras suggests as much in a remark, during the making of India Song, that the film’s success would only occur “in that it documents a failed project. A result that fills me with hope” (Duras et al, 1987, p. 16). 3. The Work and the World: The Performative Space of Ensemble Duras recalls that she wrote in her working notes, “India Song will be built first through sound, then through light” (Duras et al, 1987, p. 15). Whereas India Song might seem like a silent film (as Glassman suggests, 1991, p. 74), lacking the direct speech of on-screen characters and having little other onscreen sound, we could consider both it and Son Nom de Venise as primarily sonic works, with “image-over” instead of voice-over. Discussing what we could call the erased success of Son Nom de Venise, Duras explains, “What there is to see in Son Nom de Venise doesn’t obstruct the sound. In India Song or in La Femme du Gange, there is something in the image that keeps the sound from going as far as it could and fully taking its place. Here that ends, the sound wholly prevails” (Duras et al, 1987, p. 89). As a term for what in filmic space involves the failure by which writing is accomplished, “sound” emphasizes the broadly aural dimension, which is complex in the soundtrack that serves for both India Song and Son Nom de Venise. Concerning the voices, Lib Taylor notes, “The force of words is not in their promise of access to coherent meaning; rather the compulsion of the verbal text is in its auditory dimension. The human voice takes on a symphonic quality as the dialogue is orchestrated into the musical composition” (1998). Besides the speaking voices, in both films there are the Vice-Consul’s off-screen screams of pain, horror, and despair (he cries “Anna-Maria Guardi,” Stretter’s born—Venetian—name); various sounds attributable to the streets of Calcutta and the natural environment of India; the largely incomprehensible song and chatter of the beggar woman from Savannakhet (who becomes a double for the highly civilized Stretter, the French Ambassador’s wife; Duras, 1976a, p. 22); and the Western music of the soundtrack (various

170

ENCOUNTERING ABILITY

instrumental airs and dances, ranging from Beethoven’s 14th Diabelli Variation to the blues of “India Song,” composed for India Song by Carlos d’Alessio), music sometimes presented as being played in the setting and sometimes as having been recorded. In addition to these literally musical features, in the play’s stage directions Duras describes the physical setting of India Song in terms of the “musical sense” of the “names of Indian towns, rivers, states, and seas” that emerge at various times in the voices (1976a, p. 5). The musical sense prevails over historical accuracy at levels other than that of the voices—for example, in locating the French Embassy in Calcutta. These various sonic elements join in an improvisatory, synesthetic ensemble of relationships that participate in what Wendy Everett calls multisensorial “polyphony” across the works (2008, p. 15). As the montage of voices merges into the broader aleatory music of the soundtrack and images of the films, the various dimensions of space merge to create what Duras, in several places and in various terms, expresses as the porosity of narrative, character, drama, and film (for example, 1976a, p. 146; Duras and Gauthier, 1987, p. 59). Entailing voice, image, and other aspects, including the full ensemble of the work(s) as it is screened or performed—as it emerges “in” the audience—the “music” of film develops otherwise than under the director’s control. Duras notes, “The music of India Song, the inner music of the text which creates the meaning, comes afterwards, without my intervention” (Duras and Clarens, 1975–1976, p. 34).3 Of d’Alessio’s music, Duras says that in Son Nom de Venise, it is “treated like raw material, like words” (Duras et al, 1987, p. 90). Concerning the use of music in India Song she notes, “At the time I simply needed a certain motion to go with Anne-Marie [Stretter]’s movement. Purely and entirely physical, you see? Therefore musical” (Duras and Clarens, 1975–1976, p. 34). Duras’s comment implies that the raw material of music, and the ensemble of the work, might be thought of as dance, the fleshy movement of the body of music. Dancing introduces the on-screen characters of the play and film versions of India Song, and Duras describes the merger between Stretter and the beggar woman as a matter of “dance” (Duras et al, 1987, p. 68). Because dancing is ubiquitous in India Song, Carol J. Murphy describes the film as a performance of dancing to which the music, voices, and images are set (1982, p. 150). Dance appears the referent of music, or rather it is dance primarily that music as such involves. From this perspective, the ensemble that constitutes the writing of the film’s space is a matter of dance. As music in excess of the film enters the space of film, the flesh of music, dance as such—which is to say writing, the flesh of writing, the primary inter-relationality gestured toward in writing and as writing, as music, as dance—constitutes the space of the work. By Son Nom de Venise, Stretter’s movement, not depicted on the screen, is basic, or primordial, non/foundational. It is the non/present reality by which the worlds of spectator, director, and production merge—“everything at once”—as the gesturality

Encountering Dis/ability: Marguerite Duras

171

of dance traverses the music that constitutes the non/space (raising the pun no/where, now/here) of the film. Since the space is erased, stricken through, traversed by a virgule, the literal and figural are not exclusive: the letter of writing, the “raw material” of words, in its flesh is not what it is. Noting the imperative to “use words in order to break them,” Duras refers to engaging the incommensurable flesh of writing as well as that of dance or the body and that of technique in general (Duras and Brée, 1972, p. 408). She titles India Song with words unable to mean what they mean. A poetic fragment, two English words stand with a space between them, a space where their relationship might be figured variously by revelations of what the space might elide of language or punctuation (song of India; India of song; India: song; or India, song—just to begin). The space marks a caesura in the “‘internal reading’ voice,” a gap of performativity legible in the written, although the music of a voice might seem to elide it in imagined competence. The gap as such speaks, opens the space where writing speaks and speech writes, as Duras discusses with Gauthier concerning what they call the “blank” (Duras and Gauthier, 1987, pp. 1–3). It is the space of what Durand calls “elsewhere” (1997, p. 309); it has the “magnetic force” McNeece attributes to “silence” that emerges between the voices in the play and the films (1996, p. 135). Entailing an im/possible distinction between identity and separation, and between proximity and inaccessibility, the blank or space has the significance of the echo chamber, the theater or darkroom where music and voice merge with image in flooding that is written between work and world. As a title may claim to take the place of the work, it would mark a space of translation and reduction. For a work produced in France and in French (primarily, since the play and film of India Song contain fragments of Asian languages and other European ones), the English title opens the question of translation, as Katharine A. Jensen notes (1987, pp. 182–83), besides that of the space between signifier and signified. From such space, unstable gaps and separations, and thereby proximities, proliferate, such as between the real and the fictional (for example between the French set and the Indian setting of the film); the beggar woman and Stretter; the character and the actor; body and flesh; object and environment; accessing and the accessed; form and substance; presence and absence; life and death; sameness and difference; time and stasis; time and space; nature and artifice; speaking and silence; reading and writing; image and sound; music and dance; spectator and spectacle; author and spectator; desire and object; attraction and repulsion; colonizer and colonized; and the Italic and Germanic branches of the Indo-European language tree. As the voices and other music in these works “trouble” narrative (to use Duras’s depiction of the role of the voices in La Femme du Gange, 1973b, p. 103), writing troubles thought concerning such pairs, thought becoming troubled by the thought of thought. Such troubling involves an exceeding of translatability, as any moment, to take a term from Duras, “dis-

172

ENCOUNTERING ABILITY

solve[s]” in its approach toward the other, in dissolution toward otherness that she refers to as “religious.” While she is circumspect in her use of the latter term, she suggests a definition of it as “that surge of the human being toward the whole”: a whole, we may gather, that exceeds itself, in a health that exceeds any attempt to achieve it (Duras and Gauthier, 1987, p. 155). Various critics have discussed Duras’s approach in the India cycle to suffering in Southeast Asia, as well as her treatment of the suffering of women and her approach to gender more generally. Concerning these topics, I suggest that the opening to writing in the works we have considered makes a significant contribution to the political efforts and accomplishments of Duras’s oeuvre, and such an opening, which we can trace throughout her art, should be key for any consideration of her ethics (this observation arises in approaches to Duras by Martin Crowley, 2000, and Esther Marion, 2004, both of whom engage the thought of Levinas with Duras’s work). As we may surmise from her tentative, erased use of “religion,” however, Duras avoids claims that her art addresses social or political problems, and she avoids expressing an ethics.4 Explicitly and implicitly, Duras slights her authority, without reestablishing it at another level (which I do not think occurs in the quotations included in this chapter). As filmmaking and directing are writing and reading, the ability of the author emerges as her inability, entailing a gesture toward functional and significatory dis/ability and also ethical dis/ability that, as previous chapters discuss, is perhaps as much as we can apprehend concerning the ethicality of ethics. In Duras’s work and her comments about it, which perhaps are indistinguishable in terms of genre, ability exceeds the production of art and the space of presentation, to involve reception (including commentary and critique), as the excess in and the exceeding of these dimensions involves “everything” that traverses subject, performance, and world. In the work of Duras, the ability of the artist emerges with its other, indistinguishable from its other, and as its other—in other words, differentially related amidst itself—which is to suggest that the signal achievement of Marguerite Duras is an achievement of ability other than itself, ability to be found (or not) indeterminate and indeterminately amid subject, performance, and world. The virgule traverses the genitive “of” between the work of Duras and the Duras of the work, as well as the world of each, amid conditions of possibility that are also conditions of impossibility. Encountering the works of Duras helps us recognize what I have been trying to express throughout this work of mine: that any and all ability is able as it is not, as any context or question of ability—both being matters of signification of ability and vice versa—relates to and un/founds itself in differentiation, always enigmatically gesturing toward, while in response to, the im/possible nature of the ability of ability.

NOTES Introduction 1. The word “language” and its variants are unavoidable, although it is an obvious misnomer, with the root of lingua or “tongue” and thus the term’s exclusionary implications—its ableism—and also a privileging of the spoken over the written. I use “semiotic” and other alternatives where I can. Similar problems occur for other terms in my text, such as the metaphoric use of “heart” and various instances where understanding is conflated with vision. 2. Concerning the biosemiotic, see Translation Translation, ed. Susan Petrilli, especially Augusto Ponzio’s preface (2003). On new materialism and new vitalism—the gist of which is emergent in the thought of Deleuze (who refers to his work as “vitalistic,” 1990c, p. 143) and that of Deleuze and Félix Guattari— see particularly Jane Bennett’s Vibrant Matter (2010), in which we might read her term “vitality” as congruent with the way I develop “ability,” and also the writing of Elizabeth Grosz (1994, 2008) and texts written and edited by Diana Coole and Samantha Frost (2010). Also see Spirit and the Politics of Disablement by Sharon V. Betcher, for whom “Christianity as a philosophical deep materialism” subtends her consideration—influenced by Deleuze—of ability and disability (2007, p. 22). Through the work of Quentin Meillassoux (2009), I engage speculative realism in chapter 1. 3. John D. Caputo discusses Levinas’s thought as not exactly concerned with ethics, insofar as ethics is considered part of philosophy; his reading of Levinas shifts the focus from ethics to “obligation” (1993). Following Caputo, we may read Levinas as working outside philosophy, so that for Levinas (and Caputo) “metaphysics” implies an emphasis on signification, rather than on properly philosophical foundations. 4. In an essay in Posthuman Subjectivities, a special issue of Subjectivity edited by Callus and Herbrechter, I develop this point about posthumanism, particularly in relation to disability studies (DeShong, 2012). 5. Myrdene Anderson and Floyd Merrell, for example, discuss various implications of using the virgule for dis/ability (2001). It would be difficult to find a precise origin of the usage, although it shares a history with other wording—such as “(dis)ability”—that has been used in opposition to “handicapped,” “crippled,” and other terms that are often taken to be inaccurate or derogatory.

Chapter 1 1. For Heidegger, the handy, or ready to hand (zuhanden), and the present at hand (vorhanden) are modes or attitudes of access (1962, pp. 95–107): what comes ready to hand seems natural as it is apprehended in performance, and so does what appears present at hand, although the present at hand entails a theoretical sense of how a tool or apparatus functions. In language I develop subsequently in this chapter, Vorhandenheit entails comprehension in a context of competence, by which the item, the subjective user, the world in which it is used, and the performance or mode of use all appear determined in a rational or scientifi-

174

2.

3.

4.

5. 6.

7. 8.

ENCOUNTERING ABILITY

cally clear way. Heidegger is critical of the naturalized technological determination of Vorhandenheit, as it obscures the fuller performativity involved in Zuhandenheit. McRuer’s approach to “ability trouble” is adapted from Butler (1990); he emphasizes “not the so-called problem of disability but the inevitable impossibility, even as it is made compulsory, of an able-bodied identity” (2006, p. 10). McRuer does not specifically engage the co-implicated possibility and impossibility I find endemic to the signification of ability, and thus he does not clearly address the problematic of ability itself: his critique focuses on normalization, but not quite on naturalization. Meillassoux has referred to Heidegger as a correlationist thinker (2009, p. 8), one who fails to subordinate access under primary and differential relationality; Jean-Luc Nancy criticizes Heidegger for presenting “‘access to’ a priori as the only way of making-up-a-world and of being-toward-the-world” (Nancy, 1997, p. 59; Heidegger, 1995, p. 196). Deleuze asks whether such a critique arises from misinterpreting Heidegger—arising perhaps from readings that emphasize pragmatic aspects of access, as Graham Harman observes (2002, p. 1)—although Deleuze doubts that Heidegger “conceive[s] of being in such a manner that it will be truly disengaged from any subordination in relation to the identity of representation,” disengaged from articulation that occurs by access and from the articulation of access (Deleuze, 1994, p. 66). In Enforcing Normalcy, the argument of which he summarizes in “Bodies of Difference,” Lennard J. Davis (following Henri-Jacques Stiker, 1999) maintains that since scientific rationality has prevailed in the West, normalization has replaced the earlier function of idealization (which had been dominant from the classical period into the Renaissance) in formulating conceptions of human ability and perfectibility. A key point for Davis is that the use of the word “normal” and its relatives, in various Western languages in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, developed as a response to scientific rationality (2002b, p. 100). Michel Foucault, throughout his oeuvre, delineates this terminological history as he documents the development of normalization in terms of disciplinarity, focusing on how the development takes place in terms of medicine, sexuality, criminality, and psychic functioning more broadly; yet Foucault intimates a lingering emphasis on idealization. McRuer draws on Adrienne Rich’s “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence” (1986) for his conception of the compulsory. Competence in linguistic ability is often associated with Noam Chomsky’s work, although I do not adopt the term from Chomsky, who in fact wishes to “sever” its “association” from “ability” (1980, p. 59). In linguistics, the use of “competence” in relation to “performance” has been largely superseded by other terminology (Neil Smith, 2000, p. ix). On the sociocultural modification of ability and disability in response to aggregations of performance, see Shelley Tremain (2002), whose thinking is influenced by the work of Butler. Merleau-Ponty’s thought, in particular the distinction between the body and flesh, is important for some scholars in disability studies: see for example Jackie Leach Scully (2002), Miho Iwakuma (2002), and Carrie Sandahl (2002), particularly Sandahl’s consideration of “disability phenomenology,” a term she credits to

Notes

175

Simi Linton. The term “social flesh” has been developed by Chris Beasley and Carol Bacchi, for whom it “highlights human embodied interdependence” (2012, p. 107).

Chapter 2 1. Agamben emphasizes that mythic or religious expression is not foundational for the oath or for language generally, but that such expression is secondary (2010, pp. 42–43), as I discuss in chapter 3. 2. I take the English translation of Kojève from Daniel Heller-Roazen’s translation of Agamben’s The Open (2004). To engage the remaining term in Kojève’s remark, the dis/ease or dis/ability is also constitutive of the fatal, of the notion of fatality, the nature and ability of the articulation of death. 3. For the history of the West, Catherine Labio locates in the Enlightenment the most explicit theorization that humanity reflexively shapes itself, a full theorization that the nature of the human originates in the search for and the inevitable reflexive shaping of that nature and origination, so that in theory, at least from the Enlightenment forward—although an imperative of competence may arise to repress the reflexivity of reflexivity—neither the object nor the approach to it can ever accomplish a claim to nature (2004, p. 5). 4. I take the English translation of all quotations of Aristotle in this chapter from Heller-Roazen’s edition and translation of Agamben’s Potentialities (1999g), while occasionally including an alternative English term in brackets. 5. Agamben interprets here the following quotation from Aristotle’s Metaphysics: “A thing is said to be potential [or capable] if, when the act of which it is said to be potential is realized, there will be nothing impotential” (Agamben, 1999b, p. 264; Aristotle, 1984, sec. 1047a). 6. More recent writing in this vein includes Bennett’s vitalism, with its emphasis on “thing power” (2010), and other work in materialism, such as that of Grosz (who extensively considers Deleuze, 2008) and Coole and Frost (2010). Deleuze observes, “There’s a profound link between signs, events, life, and vitalism: the power of nonorganic life that can be found in a line that’s drawn, a line of writing, a line of music. It’s organisms that die, not life. Any work of art points a way through for life, finds a way through the cracks. Everything I’ve written is vitalistic, at least I hope it is, and amounts to a theory of signs and events” (1990c, p. 143). 7. Mikhail M. Bakhtin writes of alterity in terms of similar linguistic inassimilability, discussing how “expression” exceeds “meaning,” for example, in Toward a Philosophy of the Act (1993, p. 31). Louis Althusser’s notion of interpellation (1971), taken from Jacques Lacan, to which chapter 1 refers in connection with “hailing” as an etymological source for “health,” resembles Levinas’s accusativity, although for both Althusser and Lacan the calling involves a dialectical structure that Levinas seeks to avoid in his development of accusativity. 8. See Bernasconi (1988): “trace” is perhaps better known from the work of Derrida, who borrows it from Levinas. The term influences Derrida’s development of différance (1976).

176

ENCOUNTERING ABILITY Chapter 3

1. David Wills’s work provides further consideration of prosthesis (1995). 2. Sharon V. Betcher draws on “the analytic corpus of disability studies” in developing her notion of “crip/tography” (2014, p. 14), a way of “learning to live precarious life”: “learning to live disability, which releases the realm of ideals, fantastical eschatologies, and redemption” (pp. 22–23). Betcher borrows from the title of Butler’s Precarious Life (2004), in which Butler draws on Levinas to emphasize the vulnerability of (human) living. 3. For one of few works that explicitly uses the terminology of metaphysics in addressing the notion of health, see Kenneth A. Richman’s Ethics and the Metaphysics of Medicine (2004). 4. Arthur W. Frank agrees with Davis in writing that “sooner or later, everyone is a wounded storyteller,” insofar as everyone at some point becomes “ill” or “disabled” such that she or he must “make sense” of his or her “survival,” as his or her physical and social condition becomes a matter of trying to survive (1995, p. xiii). 5. See Snyder and Mitchell for an example of reductive criticism of science (2001, p. 378). Criticism of normalizing discourse commonly targets scientific method and scientific academies and other establishments, sometimes simplistically characterizing science, whereas science as critical thought entails such moments as Canguilhem’s observations regarding error (1989) and must come to counter-hegemonic conclusions and confront the problematic of the im/possibility of nature, in which science can recognize in itself its nightmare. Insofar as this does not happen, the failure should not be attributed to science per se; normalizing and idealizing discourse is not proper to biological or medical science, but is a problem of metaphysical sociocultural articulation—a problem of the institutions of scientific discourse (Kuhn, 1962)—that scientific thought comes to critique, as Canguilhem’s work exemplifies. Focusing on science per se imagines it as univocal, which in practice it is not, while finding it much weaker critically than it is, yet crediting it with power over various strong sociocultural discourses. 6. The fictive sociocultural imaginary here is entirely different from Cornelius Castoriadis’s conception of the self-exceeding social imaginary—a distinction he makes emphatically (1987, p. 3)—although the imaginary as I read it must eventually engage this other. My emphasis on overcoming or exceeding the imaginary moves toward what Castoriadis calls the “radical imaginary” which, “within the having-to-be” (in other words, in response to imperativity), “emerges as otherness and as the perpetual orientation of otherness, which figures and figures itself, exists in figuring and in figuring itself, the creation of ‘images’ which are what they are and as they are as figurations or presentifications of significations or meanings” (p. 369). When Castoriadis writes of the “decanting” of the imaginary notion of social classes, he intimates something closer to what I discuss as the sociocultural imaginary, whereby the mystifications of class emerge; in the developing consciousness of oppression through categories of class, by which the questioning of class organization becomes struggle, the transformations of and through the radical social imaginary take place (pp. 151–56). The notion of class is a function of both senses of the so-

Notes

7.

8.

9.

10.

11.

177

cial imaginary: both a discursive mystification and a soluble, unstable formation by which the mystification is always in the process of its undoing. Lacan says the imaginary “joins the real” at a “seam,” “joint” in French (1991b, p. 98; 1978, p. 122), and the real meets the symbolic at a “junction,” “fault line,” or “ridge”—French “jonction,” “cassure,” and “ligne” (1991a, p. 271; 1975, p. 298); see also Brody (1998, pp. 57–58). The symbolic, imaginary, and real are not separate areas of psyche but different approaches, so to speak, to the psychic—they are “profoundly heterogeneous,” in Alan Sheridan’s words (1977, p. x)—and thus the “seams” do not separate areas of psyche but distinguish between what might be considered modes of approach. McRuer discusses a haunting of the able by disability and suggests an emergent haunting of disability studies by globalization, drawing on Derrida’s development of the figure of haunting in Specters of Marx (McRuer, 2006, pp. 199– 200). Also, McRuer’s chapter “Noncompliance” discusses the im/possibility entailed in all attempts at “rehabilitation” to health, rehabilitation coerced or otherwise (pp. 103–45). Reflecting the nightmare of health with his term “aesthetic nervousness,” Ato Quayson—drawing on Davis’s chapter in Bending over Backwards concerning the eighteenth and nineteenth century novel (Davis, 2002a, pp. 79–101), as well as on Mitchell and Snyder (2000)—supports the point that the dream that is health is in fact the nightmare thereof (Quayson, 2007, pp. 19–20). See also Cheryl Marie Wade’s reference, in the poem “Cripple Lullaby,” to the “nightmare” that emerges in the “dreams” of those who live on the “manicured street” of normality (1997). I note additionally that in Enforcing Normalcy, Davis suggests that “the disabled body is a nightmare for the fashionable discourse of theory” (1995, p. 5), although even when he made this observation, “theory,” let alone a sense of its vogue, could hardly be so generalized. David Ross Fryer notes that “a [post-humanist] theory of ethical subjectivity . . . requires both Levinas and Lacan, not in spite of the fact, but precisely because of the fact that they disagree” (2004, p. 238). Tension or discord between the terms and ideas of Levinas and Lacan can be helpful to the thinking of dis/ability, particularly in the context of ethics, with which Lacan as well as Levinas is emphatically concerned. The Ravishing of Lol Stein (1966) is perhaps the work by Duras most commonly cited for engaging madness and its writing; this novel is the first piece in Duras’s “India cycle,” which I consider in chapter 7. Although her writing has often been discussed as feminist, Duras resisted the label throughout her life. See Nancy L. Eisland’s depiction of the divine as “the disabled [Christian] God . . . who was physically tortured, arose from the dead, and is present in heaven and on earth, disabled and whole” (1994, p. 107).

Chapter 4 1. For the lack of a genetic or biological basis for recognized political categories of race, see Michelle M. Wright (2004), Paul Gilroy, with his emphasis on “infrahumanity” (2000), and Jared Diamond (1997), particularly Diamond’s chapter titled “How Africa Became Black” (pp. 376–401).

178

ENCOUNTERING ABILITY

2. Deleuze expresses blackness and whiteness as not in themselves real, but as representational and idealized, as oppositional abstract moments of “indifference,” writing that “indifference has two aspects: the undifferenciated abyss, the black nothingness, the indeterminate animal in which everything is dissolved—but also the white nothingness, the once more calm surface upon which float unconnected determinations like scattered members: a head without a neck, an arm without a shoulder, eyes without brows” (1994, p. 28). 3. The sociocultural articulation of female gender involves a vast commentary we could center on Simone de Beauvoir’s Second Sex (1974), toward expanding on the metaphysics of masculinity, white masculinity, and white male heterosexuality much as I consider whiteness per se. White heterosexual males encounter their own versions of “invisible barriers disciplining the space in which [they] may move,” to cite John Edgar Wideman’s depiction of those “born black in America” (1995, p. 221); nevertheless, the metaphysical ableism of Western cultures tends to universalize aspects of the highly specific circumstances of the generalized straight white male. My final chapter, on Marguerite Duras, addresses gender concerning her work, particularly near the end of the chapter. See also the reference in chapter 3 to Allen Thiher’s writing on Duras. On the articulation of social class, see the note to chapter 3 on Cornelius Castoriadis. 4. Heidegger and Deleuze both distinguish equality from sameness, a distinction that emerges in a fuller quotation from Heidegger: “The same never coincides with the equal, not even in the empty indifferent oneness of what is merely identical. The equal or identical always moves toward the absence of difference, so that everything may be reduced to a common denominator. The same, by contrast, is the belonging together of what differs, through a gathering by way of the difference” (1971, p. 218). 5. Besides the plethora of writing on sociocultural whiteness—for just two examples, see Richard Dyer (1997) and the collection edited by Mike Hill (who suggests all whiteness studies be called “after whiteness studies,” 2004, p. 9)—I refer again to work in the sciences and to texts by Wright (2004), Gilroy (2000), and Diamond (1997). 6. For Alain Badiou, the problem of ethics in the context of political ability is a matter of sameness amid the given of infinite alterity, a matter he discusses in response to Levinas’s emphasis on facing such alterity (2001, pp. 18–29). Drawing on Deleuze, I mean to push the problem further than Badiou does, into an indeterminacy of sameness and difference in the political. 7. Hartman writes that she avoids “reducing performativity to performance,” which Butler warns against, by “deploy[ing] both terms in an expanded sense” that would keep performance from entailing articulation (1997, p. 217, n. 20; Butler, 1993, p. 234). 8. On queerness and disability, see McRuer, who argues that the cultural emergence of heterosexuality as compulsory depends on the more primary cultural context of “compulsory able-bodiedness” (2006, p. 2); see also McRuer and Wilkerson (2003, especially p. 14). On naturalization concerning sexuality, see Myra J. Hird, Sex, Gender, and Science (2004) and the collection Queering the Non/Human, ed. Noreen Giffney and Hird (2008), as well as Timothy Morton’s exploration of what he calls “Queer Ecology” (2010).

Notes

179

9. Suzanne L. Cataldi (2005), developing implications concerning gender, discusses flesh and breath as related moments of “threshold” between beings and between interior and exterior, notions that emerge in the work of Luce Irigaray, particularly in Irigaray’s consideration of Merleau-Ponty’s thinking (Irigaray, 1993, pp.151–84). I note that the banished or fugitive non-subject of homo sacer that Agamben discusses in various works does not correlate well with the dynamics of blackness and whiteness I develop in this chapter. 10. McRuer observes that the main character of Invisible Man achieves such indeterminate, and in McRuer’s wording “noncompliant,” expression by using a repetition of affirmatives—“yeses”—that connect with a tradition of AfricanAmerican resistance (2006, p. 136), in non/compliance resonant with that of Herman Melville’s Bartleby (1986).

Chapter 5 1. On Bakhtin’s adoption of the notion of transgredience “from German aesthetic thought (specifically from Jonas Cohen),” see Tzvetan Todorov (1988, pp. 94–95). 2. “Field” is a term that both Levinas and Deleuze, in various places, use to depict relation and signification; in this usage, it is related to Heidegger’s term “gathering” (1977, p. 20). See also the area of philosophy referred to as Field-Being, which bears some similarity with the implications of my discussion of the field (see the web site of the International Institute for Field-Being). I do not draw directly on Pierre Bourdieu’s development of the notion of the field. 3. Don Ihde develops a phenomenology of sound, particularly in his treatment of a polyphony of voices—especially in his final chapter, “The Face, Voice, and Silence”—which without citing Levinas comes close to Levinas’s treatment of the face and language (1976, pp. 181–86). My use of “ensemble” is influenced by Moten and by Foucault’s theorization of the heterogeneous “ensemble of relations” that “we live inside” (1998, p. 178); see also Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of “assemblage” (2005, p. 4). Ronald Radano writes of the contribution of jazz and other African-American music to American culture in terms of “oppositional black noise,” emphasizing a higher incidence of musical noise in African music in contrast with Western music (2000, p. 40), and he traces the development of this contribution from interracial religious camp meetings, extrapolating from such ensembles that “it is in the originary noise of interracial recognition that we locate the sonic freedom of being American” (p. 47). 4. Mackey borrows “slide away from the proposed” from Baraka’s description, in the liner notes of Archie Shepp’s Four for Trane, of John Tchicai’s saxophone solo on “Rufus” from the album (Baraka, 1968a, p. 160). 5. Donald Pease’s thinking on Whitman’s poetry suggests various aspects of vocativity, to include the accusativity of calling, as in being called to a vocation—to work, such as the work of ethics; he notes Whitman’s being called to a project of “universal liberty” (2004). Pease implies a reversibility in vocativity by finding the middle voice emergent in Whitman’s work. 6. Randall Kennedy suggests that “nigger” in sociocultural ableism may lose force eventually (2002), although it would just be to have blackness inflected by an-

180

ENCOUNTERING ABILITY other term. Currently, the word continues to be overheard in various valences of the struggle of human signification.

Chapter 6 1. In the introduction to the English edition of Gilles Deleuze’s Essays Critical and Clinical, Daniel W. Smith succinctly applies Deleuze’s notion of becoming to relationships: “In a becoming, one term does not become another; rather, each term encounters the other, and the becoming is something between the two, outside the two” (1997, p. xxx). See Paul de Man’s “Resistance to Theory” concerning a definition of the theoretical as that which engages with resistance and in resistance, including resistance amidst itself (1986). 2. Levinas distinguishes between “works,” which “mask” the person and belong to an economy that does not “commit the interiority from which works proceed” (1969, p. 176), and “expression,” which involves such “interiority” and thus the irreducible signification entailed in the face (pp. 181–82). He leaves room, however, for facing one’s expression in the aggregate of work one develops throughout his or her life. Still, considering Levinas’s focus on the facing of the face (1992b, p. 83), I emphasize what he would consider a movement “outside the subject” (1993b) and what Baraka would find an improvisational context, such that the faces of subjective authors as such do not emerge. David Carroll derives from several theorists the notion of “‘unwork’ rather than work,” which requires continual engagement (1987, p. 187), involving indeterminacy that extends to the notion of authorship—to a subjective dissolution that we find expressed across the writing of Deleuze; Carroll observes specifically that Michel Foucault’s sense of aesthetics emphasizes and promotes such unfinished engagement. Concerning the title of this section of the chapter, I note Levinas argues against the reductiveness of what he calls “thematization” (1998, pp. 5–7), whereby the facing is masked and the work appears complete. 3. In the preface to Home: Social Essays, Baraka writes—not entirely ironically—that he almost became a “white” artist, but instead chose to become “even blacker” (1966a, p. 10), implying that during the 1960s and 1970s, black identity for him was not a given. See my chapters 4 and 5 for theoretical matters of race and ethnicity that are relevant for approaching Baraka’s work and important for any engagement of that work with a figure such as Levinas who, as a philosopher, might be considered complicit in European metaphysics. 4. Deleuze and Claire Parnet write, on the topic of Deleuze and Guattari: “We were only two, but what was important for us was less our working together than this strange fact of working between the two of us. We stopped being ‘author.’ And these ‘between-the-twos’ referred back to other people, who were different on one side from on the other. . . . This had nothing to do . . . with processes of recognition, but much to do with encounters” (1987, p. 17).

Chapter 7 1. Besides the works I discuss, the India cycle includes three novels Duras wrote previously: The Ravishing of Lol Stein, The Vice-Consul, and L’Amour.

Notes

181

2. Jacques Lacan, with reference to Aristotle, emphasizes the “auditor” instead of the “spectator” for theater, as “theater takes place at the level of what is heard, the spectacle itself being no more than something arranged on the margin” (1992, p. 252). 3. Duras’s emphasis on music suggests the “principle of music” Walter Pater finds “all the arts in common aspiring towards” (1980, p. 105), although she tends to avoid the transcendental implications of Pater’s thinking. 4. Duras implies it would require a “feminine strength,” if not specifically that of women, to effect cultural change (Duras and Gauthier, 1987, p. 77). She says, “Imagine what the world would be if we opposed passivity to . . . to all the stupidity, to all the rulers, to . . . to all men as well” (p. 47). She privileges “inertia,” a “refusal to respond” that is “colossal strength; it’s the strength of the child, for example, the strength of the woman. . . . It’s a kind of feminine strength, which doesn’t explain itself” (p. 77). Duras avoids saying she presents a voice proper to women, calling her writing “neutral” and assenting to its being described as “asexual” (p. 7). On whether there could be écriture feminine or any writing identifiable as women’s (or reading, we might presume), she remarks, “Who knows?” (p. 2). However, she says a male writer is likely to “interfere” with the presentation of the space of human experience (p. 7). Underlying this remark is recognition that the expression of women often transgresses aesthetic or ethical strictures: “Maybe it’s only women who write,” she suggests, as only they are “mad” enough to “write completely” and “carry on outside the conversation of the life they live,” like “madmen” (p. 31).

WORKS CITED Adell, Sandra. (1994) Double-Consciousness/Double Bind: Theoretical Issues in Twentieth-Century Black Literature. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Agamben, Giorgio. (1991) Language and Death: The Place of Negativity. Translated by Karen E. Pinkus and Michael Hardt. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. ———. (1998) Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Translated by Daniel Heller-Roazen. Stanford: Stanford University Press. ———. (1999a) “Absolute Immanence,” pp. 220–239. In Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy. ———. (1999b) “Bartleby, or on Contingency,” pp. 243–271. In Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy. ———. (1999c) “The Idea of Language,” pp. 39–47. In Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy. ———. (1999d) “Kommerell, or on Gesture,” pp. 77–85. In Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy. ———. (1999e) “On Potentiality,” pp. 177–184. In Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy. ———. (1999f) “Pardes: The Writing of Potentiality,” pp. 205–219. In Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy. ———. (1999g) Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy. Edited and translated by Daniel Heller-Roazen. Stanford: Stanford University Press. ———. (2004) The Open: Man and Animal. Translated by Kevin Attell. Stanford: Stanford University Press. ———. (2010) The Sacrament of Language: An Archaeology of the Oath. Translated by Adam Kotsko. Cambridge, United Kingdom: Polity Press. ———. (2011) “On What We Can Not Do,” pp. 43–45. In Nudities. Translated by David Kishik and Stefan Pedatella. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Althusser, Louis. (1971) “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses: Notes towards an Investigation,” pp. 127–186. In “Lenin and Philosophy” and Other Essays. Translated by Ben Brewster. New York: Monthly Review Press. Anderson, Myrdene, and Floyd Merrell. (2001) “End Notes: Semiotically Digesting Dis/ability,” pp. 267–272. In Semiotics and Dis/ability: Interrogating Categories of Difference. Edited by Linda J. Rogers and Beth Blue Swadener. Albany: State University of New York Press. Andrews, W. D. E. (1982) “‘All Is Permitted’: The Poetry of LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka.” Southwest Review, 67:2 (Spring), pp. 197–221. Aristotle. (1984) The Complete Works of Aristotle: The Revised Oxford Translation. Two Volumes. Edited by Jonathan Barnes. Various translators. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Artaud, Antonin. (1958) The Theatre and Its Double. Translated by Mary Caroline Richards. New York: Grove Press. Assmann, Jan. (1992) “Inscriptional Violence and the Art of Cursing: A Study of Performative Writing.” Stanford Literature Review, 9, pp. 43–65. Badiou, Alain. (2001) Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil. Translated by Peter Hallward. London: Verso Books.

184

ENCOUNTERING ABILITY

Badmington, Neil. (2003) “Theorising Posthumanism.” Cultural Critique, 53 (Winter), pp. 10–27. Bakhtin, M[ikhail] M[ikhailovitch]. (1981) The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Edited by Michael Holquist. Translated by Caryl Emerson and Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press. ———. (1993) Toward a Philosophy of the Act. Edited by Michael Holquist and Vadim Liapunov. Translated by Liapunov. Austin: University of Texas Press. Baldwin, James. (1993) The Fire Next Time. New York: Vintage Books. Baraka, Imamu Amiri [as LeRoi Jones]. (1963) Blues People: Negro Music in White America. New York: Morrow Quill. ——— [as LeRoi Jones]. (1964) The Dead Lecturer. New York: Grove Press. ——— [as LeRoi Jones]. (1966a) Home: Social Essays. New York: William Morrow and Company. ——— [as LeRoi Jones]. (1966b) “Hunting Is Not Those Heads on the Wall,” pp. 173–178. In Home: Social Essays. ——— [as LeRoi Jones]. (1968a) Black Music. New York: William Morrow and Company. ——— [as Ameer Baraha]. (1968b) Foreword, pp. xvii–xviii. In Black Fire: An Anthology of Afro-American Writing. Edited by Baraka [as LeRoi Jones] and Larry Neal. New York: William Morrow and Company. ——— [as LeRoi Jones]. (1969) Black Magic: Sabotage, Target Study, Black Art: Collected Poetry, 1961–1967. Indianapolis: The Bobbs-Merrill Company. ———. (2000) “Preface to the Reader,” pp. xi–xiv. In The LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka Reader. Edited by William J. Harris. New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press. Baraka, Amiri (LeRoi Jones), and Fundi (Bill Abernathy). (1970) In Our Terribleness: Some Elements and Meaning in Black Style. Indianapolis: The BobbsMerrill Company. Barnard, Suzanne. (2002) “Diachrony, Tuché, and the Ethical Subject in Levinas and Lacan,” pp. 160–181. In Psychology for the Other: Levinas, Ethics, and the Practice of Psychology. Edited by Edwin E. Gantt and Richard N. Williams. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press. Barthes, Roland. (1975) The Pleasure of the Text. Translated by Richard Miller. New York: Hill and Wang. Bataille, Georges. (1988) “Letter to X, Lecturer on Hegel,” pp. 89–93. In The College of Sociology (1937–1939). Edited by Denis Hollier. Translated by Betsy Wing. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Bauman, H-Dirksen L., and Joseph J. Murray, eds. (2014) Deaf Gain: Raising the Stakes for Human Diversity. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Bauman, Zygmunt. (2009) “Identity in the Globalizing World,” pp. 1–12. In Identity in Question. Edited by Anthony Elliott and Paul du Gay. London, United Kingdom: Sage Publications. Beasley, Chris, and Carol Bacchi. (2012) “Making Politics Fleshly: The Ethic of Social Flesh,” pp. 99–120. In Engaging with Carol Bacchi: Strategic Interventions and Exchanges. Edited by Angelique Bletsas and Chris Beasley. Adelaide, South Australia: University of Adelaide Press.

Works Cited

185

Beauvoir, Simone de. (1974) The Second Sex. Translated by H. M. Parshley. New York: Vintage Books. Benjamin, Walter. (1989) “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” pp. 255–263. Translated by Harry Zohn. In Critical Theory and Society; A Reader. Edited by Stephen Eric Bronner and Douglas MacKay Kellner. New York: Routledge, Chapman, and Hall. ———. (1996) “One-Way Street,” pp. 444–488. Translated by Edmund Jephcott. In Selected Writings, Volume One, 1913–1926. Edited by Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Bennett, Jane. (2010) Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham: Duke University Press. Benston, Kimberly W., ed. (1978) Imamu Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones): A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice Hall. ———. (1984) “I Yam What I Am: The Topos of (Un)Naming in Afro-American Literature,” pp. 151–172. In Black Literature and Literary Theory Today. Edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. New York: Methuen. ———. (2000) Performing Blackness: Enactments of African-American Modernism. London: Routledge. Berger, James. (2014) The Disarticulate: Language, Disability, and the Narratives of Modernity. New York: New York University Press. Berliner, Paul F. (1994) Thinking in Jazz: The Infinite Art of Improvisation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Bernasconi, Robert. (1988) “The Trace of Levinas in Derrida,” pp. 13–29. In Derrida and Différance. Edited by David Wood and Bernasconi. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. ———. (1997) “What Goes Around Comes Around: Derrida and Levinas on the Economy of the Gift and the Gift of Genealogy,” pp. 256–273. In The Logic of the Gift: Toward an Ethic of Generosity. Edited by Alan D. Schrift. New York: Routledge. Betcher, Sharon V. (2007) Spirit and the Politics of Disablement. Minneapolis: Fortress Press. ———. (2014) Spirit and the Obligation of Social Flesh: A Secular Theology for the Global City. New York: Fordham University Press. Bhabha, Homi K. (1994) The Location of Culture. London: Routledge. The Birth of a Nation. (1915) Directed by D. W. Griffith. Film. Epoch. Blanchot, Maurice. (1981) De Kafka à Kafka. Paris: Gallimard. Boethius. (1962) The Consolation of Philosophy. Translated by Richard H. Green. Indianapolis: The Bobbs-Merrill Company. Bogues, Anthony. (2004) “Power and Imperial Desire: Rethinking Domination and American Freedom.” Futures of American Studies Institute. Dartmouth College. 26 June. Bolton, Linda. (2004) Facing the Other: Ethical Disruption and the American Mind. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. Bourne, Randolph. (1946) The State. New York: Resistance Press. Brody, Donna. (1998) “Levinas and Lacan: Facing the Real,” pp. 56–78. In Levinas and Lacan: The Missed Encounter. Edited by Sarah Harasym. Albany: State University of New York Press.

186

ENCOUNTERING ABILITY

Brown, Kate E., and Howard L. Kushner. (2001) “Eruptive Voices: Coprolalia, Malediction, and the Poetics of Cursing.” New Literary History, 32:3 (Summer), pp. 537–562. Brown, Lloyd W. (1980) Amiri Baraka. Boston: Twayne Publishers. Brown, Paul. (2000) “‘This Thing of Darkness I Acknowledge Mine’: The Tempest and the Discourse of Colonialism,” pp. 205–229. In William Shakespeare, The Tempest: A Case Study in Critical Controversy. Edited by Gerald Graff and James Phelan. Boston: Bedford-St. Martin’s Press. Bruce, Dickson D., Jr. (1992) “W. E. B. DuBois and the Idea of DoubleConsciousness.” American Literature, 64, pp. 299–309. Brueggemann, Brenda Jo. (2001) “Deafness, Literacy, Rhetoric: Legacies of Language and Communication,” pp. 115–134. In Embodied Rhetorics: Disability in Language and Culture. Edited by James C. Wilson and Cynthia Lewiecki-Wilson. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Brune, Jeffrey A., and Daniel J. Wilson. (2013) Introduction, pp. 1–13. In Disability and Passing: Blurring the Lines of Identity. Edited by Brune and Wilson. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Bruns, Gerald L. (1994) “Poethics: John Cage and Stanley Cavell at the Crossroads of Ethical Theory,” pp. 206–225. In John Cage: Composed in America. Edited by Marjorie Perloff and Charles Junkerman. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. (2011) On Ceasing to Be Human. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Buber, Martin. (1970) I and Thou. Translated by Walter Kaufman. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. Butler, Judith. (1990) Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge. ———. (1993) Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex.” New York: Routledge. ———. (1997a) Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative. New York: Routledge. ———. (1997b) The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection. Stanford: Stanford University Press. ———. (2004) Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. New York: Verso Books. Cage, John. (2011) Silence: Lectures and Writings. Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press. Calasso, Roberto. (2001) Literature and the Gods. Translated by Tim Parks. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Callus, Ivan, and Stefan Herbrechter. (2007) “Critical Posthumanism: Or, the Inventio of a Posthumanism without Technology.” Subject Matters, 3:2/4:1, pp. 15–29. Campbell, Fiona Kumari. (2005) “Legislating Disability: Negative Ontologies and the Government of Legal Identities,” pp. 108–130. In Foucault and the Government of Disability. Edited by Shelley Tremain. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. ———. (2009) Contours of Ableism: The Production of Disability and Abledness. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Works Cited

187

Canguilhem, Georges. (1989) The Normal and the Pathological. Translated by Carolyn R. Fawcett and Robert S. Cohen. New York: Zone Books. Caputo, John D. (1993) Against Ethics: Contributions to a Poetics of Obligation with Constant Reference to Deconstruction. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Carmichael, Stokely. (1998) “Black Power,” pp. 1426–1430. In Call and Response: The Riverside Anthology of the African American Literary Tradition. Edited by Patricia Liggins Hill, et al. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Carroll, David. (1987) Paraesthetics: Foucault, Lyotard, Derrida. New York: Routledge. Carroll, Sean. (2010) From Eternity to Here: The Quest for the Ultimate Theory of Time. New York: Penguin Group. Castoriadis, Cornelius. (1987) The Imaginary Institution of Society. Translated by Kathleen Blamey. Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press. Cataldi, Suzanne L. (2005) “Breath, Flesh, and Divinity in Luce Irigaray’s Philosophy of Religion.” Institute for Feminist Theory and Research Conference. Liverpool University. 18 June. Caughie, Pamela. (1999) Passing and Pedagogy: The Dynamics of Responsibility. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Césaire, Aimé. (1983) The Collected Poetry of Aimé Césaire. Translated by Clayton Eshleman and Annette Smith. Berkeley: University of California Press. Chandler, Nahum Dimitri. (2014) X: The Problem of the Negro as a Problem for Thought. New York: Fordham University Press. Chomsky, Noam. (1980) Rules and Representations. New York: Columbia University Press. Chrétien, Jean-Louis. (2000) “The Wounded Word: The Phenomenology of Prayer,” pp. 147–175. Translated by Jeffrey L. Kosky. In Phenomenology and the “Theological Turn”: The French Debate. Edited by Dominique Janicaud, et al. New York: Fordham University Press. Cioran, E. M. (1970) “On Sickness,” pp. 125–139. In The Fall into Time. Translated by Richard Howard. Chicago: Quadrangle Books. ———. (1995) Tears and Saints. Translated by Ilinca Zarifopol-Johnston. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Clark, Katerina, and Michael Holquist. (1984) Mikhail Bakhtin. Cambridge: Harvard University-Belknap Press. Cohen, Ed. (2009) A Body Worth Defending: Immunity, Biopolitics, and the Apotheosis of the Modern Body. Durham: Duke University Press. Cohen, Susan D. (1993) Women and Discourse in the Fiction of Marguerite Duras: Love, Legends, Language. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. Comas, James N. (2006) Between Politics and Ethics: Toward a Vocative History of English Studies. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Coole, Diana, and Samantha Frost. (2010) “Introducing the New Materialisms,” pp. 1–43. In Coole and Frost, eds. New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics. Durham: Duke University Press. Corker, Mairian, and Tom Shakespeare, eds. (2002a) Disability/Postmodernity: Embodying Disability Theory. London: Continuum. ———. (2002b) “Mapping the Terrain,” pp. 1–17. In Disability/Postmodernity: Embodying Disability Theory.

188

ENCOUNTERING ABILITY

Critchley, Simon. (1999) Ethics, Politics, Subjectivity: Essays on Derrida, Levinas, and Contemporary French Thought. London: Verso Books. Crowley, Martin. (2000) Duras, Writing, and the Ethical: Making the Broken Whole. Oxford, United Kingdom: Clarendon Press. Davis, Lennard J. (1995) Enforcing Normalcy: Disability, Deafness, and the Body. London: Verso Books. ———. (2002a) Bending over Backwards: Disability, Dismodernism, and Other Difficult Positions. New York: New York University Press. ———. (2002b) “Bodies of Difference: Politics, Disability, and Representation,” pp. 100–106. In Snyder, Brueggeman, and Garland-Thomson, eds., Disability Studies: Enabling the Humanities. Deleuze, Gilles. (1988) Spinoza: Practical Philosophy. Translated by Robert Hurley. San Francisco: City Lights Books. ———. (1990a) “Lettre-préface,” pp. 5–6. Foreword to Mireille Buydens, Sahara: L’esthétique de Gilles Deleuze. Paris: Librairie Philosophique J. Vrin. ———. (1990b) The Logic of Sense. Edited by Constantin V. Boundas. Translated by Mark Lester with Charles Stivale. New York: Columbia University Press. ———. (1990c) Negotiations: 1972–1990. Translated by Martin Joughin. New York: Columbia University Press. ———. (1992) The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque. Translated by Tom Conley. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. ———. (1994) Difference and Repetition. Translated by Paul Patton. New York: Columbia University Press. ———. (1997a) “Bartleby: Or, the Formula,” pp. 68–90. In Essays Critical and Clinical. ———. (1997b) Essays Critical and Clinical. Translated by Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. ———. (1997c) “He Stuttered,” pp. 107–114. In Essays Critical and Clinical. ———. (1997d) “Literature and Life,” pp. 1–6. In Essays Critical and Clinical. ———. (2001) Pure Immanence: Essays on a Life. Translated by Anne Boyman. New York: Zone Books. ———. (2006) Nietzsche and Philosophy. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson. London: Continuum. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. (1990) Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. ———. (2005) A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Deleuze, Gilles, and Claire Parnet. (1987) Dialogues. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. New York: Columbia University Press. de Man, Paul. (1986) “The Resistance to Theory,” pp. 3–20. In The Resistance to Theory. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Derrida, Jacques. (1976) Of Grammatology. Translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. ———. (1978) “Violence and Metaphysics: An Essay on the Thought of Emmanuel Levinas,” pp. 79–153. In Writing and Difference. Translated by Alan Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Works Cited

189

———. (1992) Given Time: I. Counterfeit Money. Translated by Peggy Kamuf. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. (1994) Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International. Translated by Peggy Kamuf. New York: Routledge. ———. (1999) Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas. Translated by Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Derrida, Jacques, and Jean-Luc Nancy. (1991) “‘Eating Well,’ or the Calculation of the Subject: An Interview with Jacques Derrida,” pp. 96–119. Translated by Peter Connor and Avital Ronell. In Who Comes After the Subject? Edited by Eduardo Cadava, Connor, and Nancy. New York: Routledge. DeShong, Scott. (2012) “On (Post)Human (Dis)Ability.” Posthuman Subjectivities. Edited by Ivan Callus and Stefan Herbrechter. Special Issue of Subjectivity, 5:3, pp. 265–275. Diamond, Jared. (1997) Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies. New York: W. W. Norton and Company. Dimock, Wai-chee. (1989) Empire for Liberty: Melville and the Poetics of Individualism. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Douglas, Mary. (1991) Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. London: Routledge. Douglass, Frederick. (1963) Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave. Garden City, New York: Dolphin Books. DuBois, W. E. B. (1940) Dusk of Dawn: An Essay Toward and Autobiography of a Race Concept. New York: Harcourt, Brace. ———. (1982) The Souls of Black Folk. New York: Penguin Books. ———. (2007) “The Souls of White Folk,” pp. 17–29. In Darkwater: Voices from Within the Veil. New York: Cosimo Books. Dudiak, Jeffrey. (2001) The Intrigue of Ethics: A Reading of the Idea of Discourse in the Thought of Emmanuel Lévinas. New York: Fordham University Press. Durand, Régis. (1997) “The Disposition of the Voice,” pp. 301–310. In Mimesis, Masochism, and Mime: The Politics of Theatricality in Contemporary French Thought. Edited by Timothy Murray. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Duras, Marguerite. (1966) The Ravishing of Lol Stein. Translated by Richard Seaver. New York: Pantheon Books. ———, dir. (1973a) La Femme du Gange. Film. Editions Benoît-Jacob. ———. (1973b) La Femme du Gange, pp. 99–194. In Nathalie Granger, Suivie de La Femme du Gange. Paris: Gallimard. ———, dir. (1974) India Song. Film. Films Armorial. ———. (1976a) India Song. (1973) Translated by Barbara Bray. New York: Grove Press. ———, dir. (1976b) Son Nom de Venise dans Calcutta Désert. Film. Cinéma 9. ———. (1986) The Malady of Death. Translated by Barbara Bray. New York: Grove Press. ———. (1990a) Green Eyes. Translated by Carol Barko. New York: Columbia University Press. ———. (1990b) Practicalities: Marguerite Duras Speaks to Jérôme Beaujour. Translated by Barbara Bray. New York: Grove Weidenfeld.

190

ENCOUNTERING ABILITY

Duras, Marguerite, et al. (1975) Marguerite Duras. Paris: Editions Albatros. Duras, Marguerite, et al. (1987) Marguerite Duras. Translated by Edith Cohen and Peter Connor. San Francisco: City Lights. Duras, Marguerite, and Germaine Brée. (1972) “An Interview with Marguerite Duras.” Translated by Cyril Doherty. Contemporary Literature, 13, pp. 401– 422. Duras, Marguerite, and Carlos Clarens. (1975–1976) “India Song and Marguerite Duras: An Interview by Carlos Clarens.” Translated by Tom Milne. Sight and Sound: International Film Quarterly, 45:1, pp. 32–35. Duras, Marguerite, [and Gilles Costaz]. (1983) “Je Suis Muette devant le Théâtre que J’écrits.” Interview. Le Matin, 3 June, pp. 97–99. Duras, Marguerite, and Xavière Gauthier. (1987) Woman to Woman. Translated by Katharine A. Jensen. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Dyer, Richard. (1997) White. London: Routledge. Eaglestone, Robert. (1997) Ethical Criticism: Reading after Levinas. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Eckhart, Meister. (1941) Meister Eckhart: A Modern Translation. Translated by Raymond Bernard Blakney. New York: Harper and Brothers Publishers. Eisland, Nancy L. (1994) The Disabled God: Toward a Liberatory Theology of Disability. Nashville: Abingdon Press. Elkins, James (1996) The Object Stares Back: On the Nature of Seeing. New York: Simon and Schuster. Ellison, Ralph. (1964) Shadow and Act. New York: Vintage Books. ———. (1990) Invisible Man. New York: Vintage Books. Emerson, Ralph Waldo. (1876) English Traits. Boston: J. R. Osgood. ———. (1909) Journals of Ralph Waldo Emerson, with Annotations. Ten Volumes. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. ———. (1982) Selected Essays. Edited by Larzer Ziff. Harmondsworth, United Kingdom: Penguin Books. Everett, Wendy. (2008) “Image, Music, Film.” Studies in European Cinema, 5:1, pp. 7–16. Fanon, Frantz. (1968) Black Skin, White Masks. Translated by Charles Lam Markmann. New York: Grove Weidenfeld. Felman, Shoshana. (1985) Writing and Madness (Literature/Philosophy/Psychoanalysis). Translated by Martha Noel Evans, Felman, and Brian Massumi. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Fiedler, Leslie. (1996) Tyranny of the Normal: Essays on Bioethics, Theology, and Myth. Boston: David R. Godine. Fields, Barbara J., and Karen E. Fields. (2012) Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life. London: Verso Books. Fisher, Gary. (1996) Gary in Your Pocket: Stories and Notebooks of Gary Fisher. Edited by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. Durham: Duke University Press. Foucault, Michel. (1965) Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason. Translated by Richard Howard. New York: Pantheon Books. ———. (1973) The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. [Translated by Alan Sheridan.] New York: Vintage Books. ———. (1990) The History of Sexuality, Volume One: An Introduction. Translated by Robert Hurley. New York: Vintage Books.

Works Cited

191

———. (1998) “Different Spaces,” pp. 175–185. Translated by Robert Hurley. In Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology. Edited by James D. Faubion. Volume Two of Essential Works of Foucault, 1954–1984. New York: New Press. ———. (2000) “Interview with Michel Foucault,” pp. 239–297. Translated by Robert Hurley. In Power. Edited by James D. Faubion. Volume Three of Essential Works of Foucault, 1954–1984. New York: New Press. Frank, Arthur W. (1995) The Wounded Storyteller: Body, Illness, and Ethics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Freud, Sigmund. (1961) Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Edited and translated by James Strachey. New York: W. W. Norton and Company. ———. (1966) “Project for a Scientific Psychology,” pp. 283–397. In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Volume One. Edited and Translated by James Strachey. London: Hogarth Press. Fryer, David Ross. (2004) The Intervention of the Other: Ethical Subjectivity in Levinas and Lacan. New York: Other Press. Galvin, Rose. (2003) “The Paradox of Disability Culture: The Need to Combine versus the Imperative to Let Go.” Disability and Society, 18:5 (August), pp. 675–690. Giffney, Noreen, and Myra J. Hird, eds. (2008) Queering the Non/Human. Aldershot, United Kingdom: Ashgate Publishing. Gilroy, Paul. (2000) Against Race: Imagining Political Culture beyond the Color Line. Cambridge: Harvard University-Belknap Press. Glassman, Deborah N. (1991) Marguerite Duras: Fascinating Vision and Narrative Cure. Rutherford, New Jersey: Farleigh Dickinson University Press. Goldberg, David Theo. (1993) Racist Culture: Philosophy and the Politics of Meaning. Oxford, United Kingdom: Blackwell Publishers. Goodley, Dan. (2009) “Bringing the Psyche Back into Disability Studies: The Case of the Body with/out Organs.” Journal of Literary and Critical Disability Studies, 3:3, pp. 257–272. Grosz, Elizabeth. (1994) Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. ———. (2008) Chaos, Territory, Art: Deleuze and the Framing of the Earth. New York: Columbia University Press. Hale, Dorothy J. (1998) Social Formalism: The Novel in Theory from Henry James to the Present. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Hall, Stuart. (2000) “Old and New Identities, Old and New Ethnicities,” pp. 144– 153. In Theories of Race and Racism: A Reader. Edited by Les Back and John Solomos. London: Routledge. Halperin, David M. (1995) Saint Foucault: Towards a Gay Hagiography. New York: Oxford University Press. Haney López, Ian F. (1996) White by Law: The Legal Construction of Race. New York: New York University Press. Hannaford, Ivan. (1996) Race: The History of an Idea in the West. Washington: Woodrow Wilson Center Press. Haraway, Donna J. (1991) “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century,” pp. 149–181. In Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York: Routledge.

192

ENCOUNTERING ABILITY

Harman, Graham. (2002) Tool-Being: Heidegger and the Metaphysics of Objects. Chicago: Open Court Publishing. Harris, Cheryl I. (1992–1993) “Whiteness as Property.” Harvard Law Review, 106, pp. 1709–1791. Harris, William J. (1985) The Poetry and Poetics of Amiri Baraka: The Jazz Aesthetic. Columbia: University of Missouri Press. Hart, Lynda. (1998) Between the Body and the Flesh: Performing Sadomasochism. New York: Columbia University Press. Hartman, Saidiya V. (1997) Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and SelfMaking in Nineteenth-Century America. New York: Oxford University Press. Hayles, N. Katherine. (1999) How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Heble, Ajay. (2000) Landing on the Wrong Note: Jazz, Dissonance, and Critical Practice. New York: Routledge. Heidegger, Martin. (1959) An Introduction to Metaphysics. Translated by Ralph Manheim. New Haven: Yale University Press. ———. (1962) Being and Time. Translated by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. San Francisco: Harper and Row Publishers. ———. (1970) “What Is Metaphysics?” pp. 325–361. Translated by R. F. C. Hull and Alan Crick. In Existence and Being. Chicago: Henry Regnery Company. ———. (1971) “‘. . . Poetically Man Dwells . . . ,’” pp. 211–229. In Poetry, Language, Thought. Translated by Albert Hofstadter. New York: Harper and Row Publishers. ———. (1973) “Overcoming Metaphysics,” pp. 84–110. In The End of Philosophy. Translated by Joan Stambaugh. New York: Harper and Row Publishers. ———. (1977) “The Question Concerning Technology,” pp. 3–35. In “The Question Concerning Technology” and Other Essays. Translated by William Lovitt. New York: Harper and Row Publishers. ———. (1992) Parmenides. Translated by André Schuwer and Richard Rojcewicz. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. ———. (1995) The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude. Translated by William McNeill and Nicholas Walker. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. ———. (2002) Was Heisst Denken? Frankfurt am Main, Germany: Vittorio Klostermann. Hill, Mike, ed. (1997) Whiteness: A Critical Reader. New York: New York University Press. ———. (2004) After Whiteness: Unmaking an American Majority. New York: New York University Press. Hird, Myra J. (2004) Sex, Gender, and Science. Basingstoke, United Kingdom: Palgrave Macmillan. Hofstadter, Douglas R. (1980) Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid. New York: Vintage Books. Hope, Richard, trans. (1966) Aristotle. Metaphysics. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

Works Cited

193

Ihde, Don. (1976) Listening and Voice: A Phenomenology of Sound. Athens: Ohio University Press. Irigaray, Luce. (1993) An Ethics of Sexual Difference. Translated by Carolyn Burke and Gillian C. Gill. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. ———. (2004) “What Other Are We Talking About?” Translated by Esther Marion. In Encounters with Levinas. Edited by Thomas Trezise. Special issue of Yale French Studies, 104, pp. 67–81. Iwakuma, Miho. (2002) “The Body as Embodiment: An Investigation of the Body by Merleau-Ponty,” pp. 76–87. In Corker and Shakespeare, eds., Disability/Postmodernity: Embodying Disability Theory. Jarratt, Susan C., and Nedra Reynolds. (1994) “The Splitting Image: Contemporary Feminisms and the Ethics of Êthos,” pp. 37–63. In Ethos: New Essays in Rhetorical and Critical Theory. Edited by James S. Baumlin and Tita French Baumlin. Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press. Jefferson, Thomas. (1781) “Extract from Thomas Jefferson to George Rogers Clark.” In Papers of Thomas Jefferson, Retirement Series Digital Library. The Thomas Jefferson Foundation. Available at http://retirementseries. dataformat. com/Document.aspx?doc=150989079, accessed 8 June 2014. Jensen, Katharine A. (1987) Afterword, pp. 181–195. In Duras and Gauthier, Woman to Woman. Johnson, E. Patrick. (2003) Appropriating Blackness: Performance and the Politics of Authenticity. Durham: Duke University Press. Joyce, James. (1985) A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Harmondsworth, United Kingdom: Penguin Books. Kaufman, Eleanor. (2012) Deleuze, the Dark Precursor: Dialectic, Structure, Being. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Kennedy, Randall. (2002) Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word. New York: Pantheon Books. Kojève, Alexandre. (1979) Introduction à la Lecture de Hegel: Leçons sur la Phénoménologie de l’Esprit Professées de 1933 à 1939 à l’École des Hautes Études. Edited by Raymond Queneau. Paris: Gallimard. Kozloff, Sarah. (1988) Invisible Storytellers: Voice-Over Narration in American Fiction Film. Berkeley: University of California Press. Kuhn, Thomas. (1962) The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Kuppers, Petra, and James Overboe. (2009) “Introduction: Deleuze, Disability, and Difference.” Journal of Literary and Critical Disability Studies, 3:3, pp. 217–220. Labio, Catherine. (2004) Origins and the Enlightenment: Aesthetic Epistemology from Descartes to Kant. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Lacan, Jacques. (1975) Le Séminaire de Jacques Lacan, Livre 1: Les Écrits Techniques de Freud, 1953–1954. Edited by Jacques-Alain Miller. Paris: Editions du Seuil. ———. (1977a) “The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious or Reason since Freud,” pp. 146–178. In Écrits: A Selection. ———. (1977b) Écrits: A Selection. Translated by Alan Sheridan. New York: W. W. Norton and Company.

194

ENCOUNTERING ABILITY

———. (1977c) “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience,” pp. 1–7. In Écrits: A Selection. ———. (1978) Le Séminaire de Jacques Lacan, Livre 2: Le Moi dans la Théorie de Freud et dans la Technique de la Psychanalyse. Edited by Jacques-Alain Miller. Paris: Editions du Seuil. ———. (1991a) The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book I: Freud’s Papers on Technique, 1953–1954. Edited by Jacques-Alain Miller. Translated by John Forrester. New York: W. W. Norton and Company. ———. (1991b) The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book II: The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis, 1954–1955. Edited by Jacques-Alain Miller. Translated by Sylvana Tomaselli. New York: W. W. Norton and Company. ———. (1992) The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 1959–1960. Edited by Jacques-Alain Miller. Translated by Dennis Porter. New York: W. W. Norton and Company. ———. (1998) The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XX: On Feminine Sexuality, The Limits of Love and Knowledge, Encore 1972–1973. Edited by JacquesAlain Miller. Translated by Bruce Fink. New York: W. W. Norton and Company. Leshem, Dan. (2005) “The Question of Ethical Discourse: Emmanuel Levinas, Primo Levi, and Giorgio Agamben,” pp. 153–160. In The Legacy of Primo Levi. Edited by Stanislao G. Pugliese. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Lévi-Strauss, Claude. (1987) Introduction to the Work of Marcel Mauss. Translated by Felicity Baker. New York: Routledge. Levinas, Emmanuel. (1969) Totality and Infinity: An Essay in Exteriority. Translated by Alphonso Lingis. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press. ———. (1986) “The Trace of the Other,” pp. 345–359. Translated by Alphonso Lingis. In Deconstruction in Context: Literature and Philosophy. Edited by Mark C. Taylor. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. (1988) “Useless Suffering,” pp. 156–167. Translated by Richard Cohen. In The Provocation of Levinas: Rethinking the Other. Edited by Robert Bernasconi and David Wood. New York: Routledge. ———. (1990) Difficult Freedom: Essays on Judaism. Translated by Seán Hand. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. ———. (1992a) “Ethics and Politics,” pp. 289–297. Translated by Jonathan Romney. In The Levinas Reader. ———. (1992b) “Ethics as First Philosophy,” pp. 75–87. Translated by Seán Hand and Michael Temple. In The Levinas Reader. ———. (1992c) The Levinas Reader. Edited by Seán Hand. Oxford, United Kingdom: Blackwell Publishers. ———. (1992d) “Reality and Its Shadow,” pp. 129–143. Translated by Alphonso Lingis. In The Levinas Reader. ———. (1992e) “Revelation in the Jewish Tradition,” pp. 190–210. Translated by Sarah Richmond. In The Levinas Reader. ———. (1993a) “Martin Buber’s Thought and Contemporary Judaism,” pp. 4–19. In Outside the Subject. ———. (1993b) Outside the Subject. Translated by Michael B. Smith. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Works Cited

195

———. (1993c) “The Rights of Man and the Rights of the Other,” pp. 116–125. In Outside the Subject. ———. (1998) Otherwise than Being: Or Beyond Essence. Translated by Alphonso Lingis. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press. ———. (2001) Existence and Existents. Translated by Alphonso Lingis. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press. Lindon, Mathieu. (1978). “Description d’un Combat: H. Melville ‘Bartleby.’” Delta, 6 (May), pp. 5–27. Lingis, Alphonso. (1994) Foreign Bodies. New York: Routledge. ———. (1998) The Imperative. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Linton, Simi. (1998) Claiming Disability: Knowledge and Identity. New York: New York University Press. ———. (2005) “What Is Disability Studies?” PMLA, 120, pp. 518–522. Llewelyn, John. (1991) “Am I Obsessed by Bobby? (Humanism of the Other Animal),” pp. 234–245. In Re-Reading Levinas. Edited by Robert Bernasconi and Simon Critchley. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Loeffler, Summer. (2014) “Deaf Music: Embodying Language and Rhythm,” pp. 436–456. In Bauman and Murray, eds., Deaf Gain: Raising the Stakes for Human Diversity. Lott, Eric. (1993) “White Like Me: Racial Cross-Dressing and the Construction of American Whiteness,” pp. 474–495. In Cultures of United States Imperialism. Edited by Amy Kaplan and Donald E. Please. Durham: Duke University Press. Lucretius Carus, Titus. (1921) Of the Nature of Things: A Metrical Translation by William Ellery Leonard. London: J. M. Dent. Lucy, John A. (1997) “Linguistic Relativity.” Annual Review of Anthropology, 26, pp. 291–312. Mackey, Nathaniel. (1978) “The Changing Same: Black Music in the Poetry of Amiri Baraka,” pp. 119–134. In Kimberly W. Benston, ed., Imamu Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones): A Collection of Critical Essays. ———. (1986) Bedouin Hornbook. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press. ———. (1992) “Other: From Noun to Verb.” Representations, 39, pp. 51–70. ———. (1997) “Cante Moro,” pp. 194–212. In Sound States: Innovative Poetics and Acoustical Technologies. Edited by Adalaide Morris. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Magill, David. (2004) “Modernism’s Hard Bodies: Jazz Age Corporeal Anxieties and U. S. White Masculinity.” Northeast Modern Language Association Convention. Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. 5 March. Marion, Esther. (2004) “Bridging Ethics and Beauty: Levinas and Duras.” Phenomenological Inquiry, 28, pp. 52–73. Márquez, Antonio C. (1997) “Voices of Caliban: From Curse to Discourse.” Confluencia-Revista Hispanica de Cultural y Literatura, 13:1 (Fall), pp. 158– 169. McCaffery, Steve. (1997) “The Scandal of Sincerity: Towards a Levinasian Poetics.” Pretexts: Studies in Writing and Culture, 6:2, pp. 167–190. McLuhan, Marshall. (1964) Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company.

196

ENCOUNTERING ABILITY

McNeece, Lucy Stone. (1996) Art and Politics in Duras’ “India Cycle.” Gainesville: University Press of Florida. McRuer, Robert. (2006) Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability. New York: New York University Press. McRuer, Robert, and Abby L. Wilkerson. (2003) “Introduction: Cripping the (Queer) Nation.” In Desiring Disability: Queer Theory Meets Disability Studies. Edited by McRuer and Wilkerson. Special Issue of GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 9:1–2, pp. 1–23. Meillassoux, Quentin. (2009) After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency. Translated by Ray Brassier. London: Continuum. Melville, Herman. (1986) “Bartleby,” pp. 1–46. In “Billy Budd, Sailor” and Other Stories. New York: Penguin Books. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. (1968) The Visible and the Invisible. Edited by Claude Lefort. Translated by Alphonso Lingis. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. ———. (1976) Phenomenology of Perception. Translated by Colin Smith. London: Routledge. Michalko, Rod. (2002) The Difference that Disability Makes. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Miller, Henry. (1964) “Obscenity and the Law of Reflection,” pp. 175–189. In Henry Miller on Writing. Edited by Thomas H. Moore. New York: New Directions Books. Miller, Jacques-Alain. (1988) “Extimité.” Translated by Françoise MassardierKenney. Prose Studies, 11:3 (December), pp. 121–131. Mills, Charles W. (1998) Blackness Visible: Essays on Philosophy and Race. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Mitchell, David T., and Sharon L. Snyder. (2000) Narrative Prosthesis: Disability and the Dependencies of Discourse. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Mollow, Anna. (2004) “Identity Politics and Disability Studies: A Critique of Recent Theory.” Michigan Quarterly Review, 43:2 (Spring). Available at http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.act2080.0043.218, accessed 21 March 2013. Morris, David B. (1993) “The Neurobiology of the Obscene: Henry Miller and Tourette Syndrome.” Literature and Medicine, 12:2 (Fall), pp. 194–214. Morrison, Toni. (1987) Beloved. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. ———. (1989) “Unspeakable Things Unspoken: The Afro-American Presence in American Literature.” Michigan Quarterly Review, 28:1 (Winter), pp. 1–34. ———. (1992) Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. New York: Vintage Books. Morton, Timothy. (2010) “Queer Ecology.” PMLA, 125, pp. 273–282. Moten, Fred. (2003) In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Mullen, Harryette. (1994) “Optic White: Blackness and the Production of Whiteness.” Diacritics, 24:2–3 (Summer–Fall), pp. 71–89. Müller, Friedrich Max. (2013) Introduction to the Science of Religion: Four Lectures Delivered at the Royal Institution. London: Forgotten Books. Murphy, Carol J. (1982) Alienation and Absence in the Novels of Marguerite Duras. Lexington, Kentucky: French Forum Publishers.

Works Cited

197

Murray, Albert. (1973) “White Norms, Black Deviation,” pp. 96–113. In The Death of White Sociology. Edited by Joyce A. Ladner. New York: Random House. Nancy, Jean-Luc. (1997) The Sense of the World. Translated by Jeffrey S. Librett. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Nietzsche, Friedrich. (1965) Beyond Good and Evil. Translated by Marianne Cowan. Chicago: Henry Regnery Company. ———. (1968) The Will to Power. Edited by Walter Kaufmann. Translated by Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale. New York: Vintage Books. ———. (2005) Twilight of the Idols, or How to Philosophize with a Hammer, pp. 153–225. In The Anti-Christ, Ecce Homo, Twilight of the Idols, and Other Writings. Edited by Aaron Ridley and Judith Norman. Translated by Norman. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Noland, Carrie. (2009) Agency and Embodiment: Performing Gestures/Producing Culture. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Oliver, Mike. (1983) Social Work with Disabled People. Basingstoke, United Kingdom: Macmillan. Olson, Charles. (1967) “Projective Verse” and “Letter to Elaine Feinstein,” pp. 15–30. In Selected Writings of Charles Olson. Edited by Robert Creeley. New York: New Directions Books. Omi, Michael, and Howard Winant. (1986) Racial Formation in the United States from the 1960s to the 1980s. New York: Routledge. Overboe, James. (2009) “Affirming an Impersonal Life: A Different Register for Disability Studies.” Journal of Literary and Critical Disability Studies, 3:3, pp. 241–256. Papin, Liliane. (1998) “The Theater and the Sacred: A Religious Pagan,” pp. 195– 203. Translated by John W. Kneller. In Critical Essays on Marguerite Duras. Edited by Bettina L. Knapp. New York: G. K. Hall and Company. Pater, Walter. (1980) The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry. Edited by Donald L. Hill. Berkeley: University of California Press. Patterson, David. (1988) Literature and Spirit: Essays on Bakhtin and His Contemporaries. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky. Patterson, Orlando. (1982) Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Pease, Donald. (2004) “From Goliad to Abu Ghraib: Walt Whitman and the Limits of U. S. Imperialism.” Futures of American Studies Institute. Dartmouth College. 25 June. Petrilli, Susan, ed. (2003) Translation Translation. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Pfeiffer, Kathleen. (2003) Race Passing and American Individualism. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. Phelan, Peggy. (2005) “Reconsidering Identity Politics, Essentialism, and Dismodernism: An Afterword,” pp. 319–326. In Sandahl and Auslander, eds., Bodies in Commotion: Disability and Performance. Pickstock, Catherine. (1998) After Writing: On the Liturgical Consummation of Philosophy. Oxford, United Kingdom: Blackwell Publishers. Plaza, Monique. (1986) Écriture et Folie. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Ponzio, Augusto. (1997) “The Relation of Alterity in Bachtin, Blanchot, Levinas.” Russian Literature, 41, pp. 315–331.

198

ENCOUNTERING ABILITY

———. (2003) Preface, pp. 13–16. In Susan Petrilli, ed., Translation Translation. Price, Janet, and Margrit Shildrick. (2002) “Bodies Together: Touch, Ethics and Disability,” pp. 62–75. In Corker and Shakespeare, eds., Disability/Postmodernity: Embodying Disability Theory. Proust, Marcel. (1974) Correspondance avec Madame Straus. Paris: Livre de Poche. Quayson, Ato. (2007) Aesthetic Nervousness: Disability and the Crisis of Representation. New York: Columbia University Press. Radano, Ronald. (2000) “Black Noise/White Mastery,” pp. 39–49. In Decomposition: Post-Disciplinary Performance. Edited by Sue Ellen Case, Philip Brett, and Sue Leigh Foster. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Reid-Pfarr, Robert F. (2001) Black Gay Man: Essays. New York: New York University Press. Rich, Adrienne. (1986) “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence,” pp. 23–75. In Blood, Bread, and Poetry: Selected Prose, 1979–1985. New York: W. W. Norton and Company. Richman, Kenneth A. (2004) Ethics and the Metaphysics of Medicine: Reflections on Health and Beneficence. Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press. Robbins, Jill. (1999) Altered Reading: Levinas and Literature. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Robertson, Lisa. (2003) Occasional Work and Seven Walks from the Office for Soft Architecture. Astoria, Oregon: Clear Cut Press. Robinson, Douglas. (1994) “Linguistics and Language,” pp. 465–470. In The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism. Edited by Michael Groden and Martin Kreiswirth. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Roediger, David. (1994) “A Long Journey to the Hip Hop Nation.” St. Louis PostDispatch, 18 March, p. B7. Ropars-Wuilleumier, Marie-Claire. (1980) “The Disembodied Voice: India Song.” Translated by Kimberly Smith. Yale French Studies, 60, pp. 241–268. Rothenberg, Jerome, and Pierre Joris, eds. (1998) Poems for the Millennium: The University of California Book of Modern and Postmodern Poetry, Volume Two, From Postwar to Millennium. Berkeley: University of California Press. Russell, Emily. (2011) Reading Embodied Citizenship: Disability, Narrative, and the Body Politic. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Sandahl, Carrie. (2002) “Considering Disability: Disability Phenomenology’s Role in Revolutionizing Theatrical Space.” Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism, 16:2 (Spring), pp. 17–32. Sandahl, Carrie, and Philip Auslander, eds. (2005a) Bodies in Commotion: Disability and Performance. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. ———. (2005b) “Introduction: Disability Studies in Commotion with Performance Studies,” pp. 1–12. In Bodies in Commotion: Disability and Performance. Sansone, Livio. (2003) Blackness without Ethnicity: Constructing Race in Brazil. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Scarry, Elaine. (1985) The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World. New York: Oxford University Press.

Works Cited

199

Schuster, Marilyn R. (1993) Marguerite Duras Revisited. New York: Twayne Publishers. Scully, Jackie Leach. (2002) “A Postmodern Disorder: Moral Encounters with Molecular Models of Disability,” pp. 48–61. In Corker and Shakespeare, eds., Disability/Postmodernity: Embodying Disability Theory. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. (1993) Tendencies. Durham: Duke University Press. Sexton, Jared. (2008) Amalgamation Schemes: Antiblackness and the Critique of Multiracialism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Shakespeare, Tom, and Nicholas Watson. (2001) “The Social Model of Disability: An Outdated Ideology?” Research in Social Science and Disability, 2, pp. 9– 28. Available at http://disability-studies.leeds.ac.uk/files/library/ Shakespeare-social-model-of-disability.pdf, accessed 5 June 2014. Shakespeare, William. (1974) The Tempest, pp. 1611–1638. In The Riverside Shakespeare. Edited by G. Blakemore Evans. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Sheridan, Alan. (1977) Translator’s Note, pp. vii–xii. In Jacques Lacan, Écrits: A Selection. Smith, Daniel W. (1997) “‘A Life of Pure Immanence’: Deleuze’s ‘Critique et Clinique’ Project,” pp. xi–liii. Introduction to Gilles Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical. Smith, David Lionel. (1991) “The Black Arts Movement and Its Critics.” American Literary History, 3:1 (Spring), pp. 93–110. Smith, Hazel, and Roger T. Dean. (1997) Improvisation, Hypermedia, and the Arts since 1945. Amsteldijk, The Netherlands: Harwood Academic Publishers. Smith, Neil. (2000) Foreword, pp. vi–xvi. In Noam Chomsky, New Horizons in the Study of Language and Mind. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Snyder, Sharon L., Brenda Jo Brueggeman, and Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, eds. (2002a) Disability Studies: Enabling the Humanities. New York: Modern Language Association. ———. (2002b) “Introduction: Integrating Disability into Teaching and Scholarship,” pp. 1–12. In Disability Studies: Enabling the Humanities. Snyder, Sharon L., and David T. Mitchell. (2001) “Re-Engaging the Body: Disability Studies and the Resistance to Embodiment.” Public Culture, 13:3 (Fall), pp. 367–389. Sollors, Werner. (1997) Neither Black nor White yet Both: Thematic Explorations of Interracial Literature. New York: Oxford University Press. Solnit, Rebecca. (2001) Wanderlust: A History of Walking. New York: Penguin Books. Sontag, Susan. (1990) Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors. New York: Anchor Books. Spillers, Hortense J. (1987) “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book.” Diacritics, 17:2 (Summer), pp. 65–81. Spinoza, Benedict de. (1996). Ethics. Edited and Translated by Edwin Curley. London: Penguin Books. Stiker, Henri-Jacques. (1999) A History of Disability. Translated by William Sayers. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Sudnow, David. (1978) The Ways of the Hand: The Organization of Improvised Conduct. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

200

ENCOUNTERING ABILITY

Tallon, Andrew. (1995) “Nonintentional Affectivity, Affective Intentionality, and the Ethical in Levinas’s Philosophy,” pp. 107–121. In Ethics as First Philosophy: The Significance of Emmanuel Levinas for Philosophy, Literature, and Religion. Edited by Adriaan T. Peperzak. New York: Routledge. Taylor, Clyde. (1978) “Baraka as Poet,” pp. 112–118. In Kimberly W. Benston, ed., Imamu Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones): A Collection of Critical Essays. Taylor, Lib. (1998) “Sound Tracks: The Soundscapes of India Song.” Theatre Research International, 23:3, pp. 205–214. Available at http://dx.doi.org/ 10.1017/S0307883300019969, accessed 3 December 2005. Thiher, Allen. (1999) Revels in Madness: Insanity in Medicine and Literature. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Todorov, Tzvetan. (1988) Mikhail Bakhtin: The Dialogical Principle. Translated by Wlad Godzich. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Tremain, Shelley. (2002) “On the Subject of Impairment,” pp. 32–47. In Corker and Shakespeare, eds., Disability/Postmodernity: Embodying Disability Theory. Tucker, Irene. (2012) The Moment of Racial Sight: A History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Tyjewski, Carolyn. (2006) “Ghosts in the Machine: Civil Rights Laws and the Hybrid ‘Invisible Other,’” pp. 106–125. In Critical Disability Theory: Essays in Philosophy, Politics, Policy, and Law. Edited by Dianne Pothier and Richard Devlin. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press. Veltman, Robert. (1998) “Lars Porsena and My Bonk Manager: A SystemicFunctional Study in the Semogenesis of the Language of Swearing,” pp. 301–316. In Linguistic Choice across Genres: Variations in Spoken and Written English. Edited by Antonia Sanchez-Macarro and Ronald Carter. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Wade, Cheryl Marie. (1997) “Cripple Lullaby,” p. 409. In The Disability Studies Reader. Edited by Lennard J. Davis. New York: Routledge. Wall, Thomas Carl. (1999) Radical Passivity: Levinas, Blanchot, and Agamben. Albany: State University of New York Press. Walters, Shannon. (2014) “Unruly Rhetorics: Disability, Animality, and New Kinship Compositions.” PMLA, 129, pp. 471–477. Watts, Jerry Gafio. (2001) Amiri Baraka: The Politics and Art of a Black Intellectual. New York: New York University Press. Weber, Samuel. (2008) Benjamin’s -abilities. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Weheliye, Alexander G. (2005) Phonographies: Grooves in Sonic Afro-Modernity. Durham: Duke University Press. Whitman, Walt. (1980) “Song of Myself,” pp. 49–96. In Leaves of Grass. New York: New American Library Wideman, John Edgar. (1995) Brothers and Keepers. New York: Vintage Books. Williams, Raymond. (1977) “Structures of Feeling,” pp. 128–135. In Marxism and Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wills, David. (1995) Prosthesis. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Wilson, Anne, and Peter Beresford. (2002) “Madness, Distress, and Postmodernity: Putting the Record Straight,” pp. 143–158. In Corker and Shakespeare, eds., Disability/Postmodernity: Embodying Disability Theory.

Works Cited

201

Wittgenstein, Ludwig. (1980) Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology. Edited by G. E. M. Anscombe and G. H. von Wright. Translated by Anscombe. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Wright, Michelle M. (2004) Becoming Black: Creating Identity in the African Diaspora. Durham: Duke University Press. Žižek, Slavoj. (1989) The Sublime Object of Ideology. London: Verso Books. Zumthor, Paul. (1990) Oral Poetry: An Introduction. Translated by Kathryn Murphy-Judy. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Scott DeShong is Professor of English at Quinebaug Valley Community College in Danielson, Connecticut, where he is also Chair of the English Department, having served previously as Coordinator of Liberal Arts and Sciences and General Studies. His scholarly emphasis is in literary theory. His previously published work addresses posthumanism, ability and disability, race, twentieth-century United States literature, and the writing of Emmanuel Levinas.

INDEX ability of ability (introduced), 1, 2, 4–5, 18, 32–33 ableism (introduced), 20–21 access (introduced), 11–13 accusativity (Levinas), 3, 52, 59–60, 63, 67, 79–81, 89, 93–94, 113–114, 118, 125, 132–133, 175, 180 actuality (Agamben, Aristotle), 5, 7, 13, 32, 41, 43–45, 49, 53–54, 58, 67–68, 77, 95–96, 101, 162 Adell, Sandra, 116 Affirmative Action, 120–121 After Finitude (Meillassoux), 15–16, 41–42, 173, 174 After Writing (Pickstock), 128–129, 132, 138 Agamben, Giorgio, 1, 3, 5, 7, 9, 84, 90– 91, 101, 103, 123, 179 “Absolute Immanence,” 67 “Bartleby, or on Contingency,” 32, 43–45, 53–54, 58, 59, 61, 67– 69, 77, 90, 118, 162, 175 Homo Sacer, 41, 50, 51, 53 “The Idea of Language,” 40 “Kommerell, or on Gesture,” 30 Language and Death, 54 “On Potentiality,” 41, 43, 49, 54, 55, 59, 93–94, 96, 162, 163 “On What We Can Not Do,” 44, 72 The Open, 39–42, 45–47, 49–51, 54, 57, 61, 62, 108, 119, 175 “Pardes: The Writing of Potentiality,” 45 Potentialities, 9, 175 The Sacrament of Language, 38–39, 47, 59, 60–61, 62–63, 89, 92, 138, 163, 175 agrammaticality, 44–45 aggression. See violence. alterity. See otherness. Althusser, Louis, 25–26, 100, 175 American Indians. See Native Americans. anaphora, 45, 48 Anderson, Myrdene, 33, 173

Andrews, W. D. E., 158 animal, 38–42, 45–46, 49–51, 54, 56, 91, 92, 178 anthropogenesis, 37–38, 46, 61–62 Anti-Oedipus (Deleuze and Guattari), 52–53 Aquinas. See Thomas Aquinas, Saint. arche-writing (Derrida). See writing. Aristotle, 5, 9, 50, 52, 181 De Anima, 41, 45 Metaphysics, 11, 43, 46–47, 54, 55, 58, 93–94, 96, 162, 175 Poetics, 27 Politics, 40 Rhetoric, 27 Artaud, Antonin, 91 articulation (introduced), 15–16 assimilation (see also sameness), 8, 79, 105, 106, 120–121, 145–160 Assmann, Jan, 88 aurality. See deafness, hearing, overhearing, sound. Auslander, Philip, 65–66, 98, 104 Bacchi, Carol, 62, 175 Badiou, Alain, 178 Badmington, Neil, 5 Bakhtin, Mikhail Mikhailovitch, 124, 126, 128, 160, 175 Baldwin, James, 120 Baraka, Amiri, 7, 8, 138, 139–142, 145–160, 179, 180 “Black Art,” 147–148 “BLACK DADA NIHILISMUS,” 147, 149 Black Fire, 147 Black Magic, 139–140, 147–150 Black Music, 134–135, 138, 158, 179 “Black People!” 158 Blues People, 139, 140, 156 “Form is Emptiness,” 149–150 Home: Social Essays, 180 “Hunting is Not Those Heads on the Wall,” 156 In Our Terribleness, 141 “Ka ’Ba,” 149

206

ENCOUNTERING ABILITY

Baraka, Amiri (continued) “Part of the Doctrine,” 148 Preface to The LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka Reader, 148 bare life (Agamben), 49–51, 53, 55, 108 Barnard, Suzanne, 81 Barthes, Roland, 165, 167 “Bartleby” (Melville), 5, 9, 43–45, 47, 53–54, 59, 61, 66, 67–69, 70, 77, 90, 93, 118, 135, 142, 179 “Bartleby, or on Contingency” (Agamben), 32, 43–45, 53–54, 58, 59, 61, 67–69, 77, 90, 118, 162, 175 “Bartleby: Or, the Formula” (Deleuze), 44–45, 59, 68, 87 Bataille, Georges, 30, 80 Bauman, H-Dirksen L., 21–22 Bauman, Zygmunt, 48, 49 Beasley, Chris, 62, 175 Beauvoir, Simone de, 178 becoming, 3, 38–39, 50, 58–59, 63, 66– 68, 70, 93, 127, 129, 163–164, 180 Being and Time (Heidegger), 10, 12, 19, 47, 48, 87, 173–174 Bending over Backwards (Davis), 22, 69–70, 75, 177 Benjamin, Walter, 16, 35, 41–42, 123 Bennett, Jane, 173, 175 Benston, Kimberly W., 107, 136, 149 Beresford, Peter, 85–86 Berger, James, 89–90 Bergson, Henri, 3 Berliner, Paul F., 132–133 Bernasconi, Robert, 129, 175 Betcher, Sharon V., 52–53, 62, 173, 176 Beyond Good and Evil (Nietzsche), 80 Bhabha, Homi K., 7, 111, 113, 114, 117, 119, 136 Bible, 124–125, 130, 142 biopolitics, 5, 40, 42, 45, 51–56, 65, 69, 70, 74, 77, 80–85, 88, 90, 91, 103, 108, 118, 119 The Birth of a Nation (Griffith), 102 “Black Art” (Baraka), 147–148 Black Arts, 107, 136

“BLACK DADA NIHILISMUS” (Baraka), 147, 149 Black Fire (Baraka), 147 Black Magic (Baraka), 139–140, 147– 150 Black Music (Baraka), 134–135, 138, 158, 179 “Black People!” (Baraka), 158 Black Power, 136–139 blackness, 7, 9, 36, 95, 97, 105–121, 134–143, 147–158, 177, 178, 179, 180 Blackness Visible (Mills), 96–97, 99, 109, 136 Blanchot, Maurice, 30, 82, 140 blessing, 78, 87, 89, 92–94, 137, 138 blindness, 15, 49–50 Blues People (Baraka), 139, 140, 156 body (opposed to flesh). See flesh. Boethius, 12 Bogues, Anthony, 103 Bolton, Linda, 57, 59–60, 114, 137 boredom (Agamben, Heidegger), 45– 46, 49 Bourdieu, Pierre, 179 Bourne, Randolph, 142 breath, 11, 75, 94, 112–114, 129, 135, 155, 179 Brody, Donna, 76, 177 Brown, Kate E., 88–89, 90, 93 Brown, Lloyd W., 140 Brown, Paul, 157 Bruce, Dickson D., Jr., 116 Brueggemann, Brenda Jo, 6, 74 Brune, Jeffrey A., 104 Bruns, Gerald L., 30, 54, 159 Buber, Martin, 124, 128, 137 Butler, Judith, 3, 20, 85 Bodies that Matter, 178 Excitable Speech, 115 Gender Trouble, 2, 15, 174 Precarious Life, 176 The Psychic Life of Power, 25, 125 Cage, John, 30, 54, 131, 159, 162 Calasso, Roberto, 129 Caliban (The Tempest), 156–157 Callus, Ivan, 5, 173

Index Campbell, Fiona Kumari, 27, 32, 33, 35, 78, 97, 104, 107 Canguilhem, Georges, The Normal and the Pathological, 15, 19, 24, 69, 126, 176 Caputo, John D., 57, 62, 150, 173 Carmichael, Stokely, 136–137 Carroll, David, 180 Carroll, Sean, 10 Castoriadis, Cornelius, 176–177, 178 Cataldi, Suzanne L., 179 categorical imperative (Kant), 28, 29 Caughie, Pamela, 102 Césaire, Aimé, “Notebook of a Return to the Native Land,” 142 Chandler, Nahum Dimitri, 116 character (literary and personal), 27–29, 60, 87, 108, 164–171 Chomsky, Noam, 174 Chrétien, Jean-Louis, 92 Christianity, 53, 149, 173 Cioran, E. M., 80 claiming (identity), 66–72, 77, 82–83, 87, 95, 101, 104, 111–112, 134, 141 Claiming Disability (Linton), 66 Clark, Katerina, 126, 160 class. See social class. Cohen, Ed, 28 Cohen, Jonas, 179 Cohen, Susan D., 162 colonialism, 35, 111, 117, 157 color line (DuBois), 115–121 Coltrane, John, 134–135, 138 Comas, James N., 125 competence (introduced), 5, 10, 23–36 compulsion. See imperativity. Coole, Diana, 26, 173, 175 Corker, Mairian, 82 correlationism (Meillassoux), 16–18, 26–27, 29, 32, 33, 41–43, 174 Crip Theory (McRuer), 2, 15, 21, 27, 44, 65, 68–69, 72, 174, 177, 178, 179 Critchley, Simon, 113 criticism (as a practice), 1–2, 4, 8, 9, 78, 145–161, 176 Crowley, Martin, 172

207 cursing, 7, 78, 87, 88–94, 127, 137– 140, 149, 157 cyborg (Haraway), 104 d’Alessio, Carlos, 170 dance, 30, 132, 158–159, 170–171 Dasein (Heidegger), 45–47, 53–55 Davis, Lennard J., 71, 72, 78, 80, 94, 112, 176 Bending over Backwards, 22, 69–70, 75, 177 “Bodies of Difference,” 174 Enforcing Normalcy, 174 De Anima (Aristotle), 41, 45 de Beauvoir. See Beauvoir. de Man, Paul, 180 deafness, 17, 21–22, 31, 56, 66, 74, 129 Dean, Roger T., 131 defamiliarization, 129 definition (reversed), 5–6, 9–10, 63, 76 dekhomai (Aristotle), 55–56, 93–94 Deleuze, Gilles, 4, 5, 36, 37, 43, 47, 55, 63, 83, 99, 123 Anti-Oedipus, 52–53 “Bartleby: Or, the Formula,” 44–45, 59, 68, 87, 90 Dialogues, 97, 180 Difference and Repetition, 1, 2–3, 13, 16, 18–19, 26, 29, 31, 32– 33, 40, 53, 57–58, 68, 77, 98, 103, 121, 124, 163, 174, 178 The Fold, 113 “He Stuttered,” 45, 68, 125 “Lettre-préface,” 53 “Literature and Life,” 60, 62, 70, 115, 141, 163–164 The Logic of Sense, 24, 25 Negotiations, 173, 175 Nietzsche and Philosophy, 3 Pure Immanence, 67 Spinoza, 3, 19, 58–59 A Thousand Plateaus, 129, 159, 179 denaturing (introduced), 2, 5, 15–19 Derrida, Jacques, 30, 123, 165 Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas, 148– 149 “Eating Well,” 81 Given Time, 129

208

ENCOUNTERING ABILITY

Derrida, Jacques (continued) Of Grammatology, 8, 38, 73, 129, 175 Specters of Marx, 177 “Violence and Metaphysics,” 150 desubjectivation (Foucault), 30, 54 dialogism (Bakhtin), 7, 123–130, 136– 138, 142, 159–160 Dialogues (Deleuze and Parnet), 97, 180 Diamond, Jared, 177, 178 différance (Derrida), 175 Difference and Repetition (Deleuze), 1, 2–3, 13, 16, 18–19, 26, 29, 31, 32–33, 40, 53, 57–58, 68, 77, 98, 103, 121, 124, 163, 174, 178 “Different Spaces” (Foucault), 78, 117, 179 differential ontology (Deleuze, introduced), 1, 2–3, 17–19 Difficult Freedom (Levinas), 93, 125 Dimock, Wai-chee, 103 dis/ability (introduced), 6, 9, 32–34 disability studies, 1–2, 5–6, 16–17, 19, 36, 64–94, 104, 135, 173, 174– 175, 176, 177 disease, dis/ease (see also illness), 39– 40, 47, 50, 55–56, 60, 62–63, 88, 159, 175 distress, 85–87, 90–92 divinity, 1, 7–8, 9, 14–17, 39, 44–45, 50, 59, 61, 62, 68, 81, 87–93, 124–125, 128–130, 138–142, 148–151, 159–160, 172, 175, 177, 179 double consciousness (DuBois), 7, 115– 120, 135, 142 Douglas, Mary, 85, 90 Douglass, Frederick, Narrative of the Life, 112–113 dream, sleep (see also waking), 55, 56, 75–77, 80, 87–88, 91–92, 99, 102, 104, 109–110, 113, 117– 118, 120, 126, 131, 177 DuBois, W. E. B., Dusk of Dawn, 115

The Souls of Black Folk, 7, 115–120, 135, 142 “The Souls of White Folk,” 116 Dudiak, Jeffrey, 60 Durand, Régis, 165, 167, 171 Duras, Marguerite, 8–9, 161–172, 178 La Femme du Gange, 164, 166, 168, 169, 171 Green Eyes, 163, 166 India Song, 162, 164–171 The Malady of Death, 166 Practicalities, 163, 165 The Ravishing of Lol Stein, 177, 180 Son Nom de Venise dans Calcutta Désert, 164, 168–171 Woman to Woman, 8, 88, 167–168, 170, 171–172, 181 Dusk of Dawn (DuBois), 115 Dyer, Richard, 178 Eaglestone, Robert, 130 Eckhart, Meister, 59, 159 Eisland, Nancy L., 177 Elkins, James, 41 Ellison, Ralph, 7, 115–116 Invisible Man, 109, 117–118, 179 Shadow and Act, 110–111, 135 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, English Traits, 101 Journals of Ralph Waldo Emerson, 101–102, 109 Selected Essays, 116 empire of liberty (Jefferson), 103, 105 empiricism, 12–13, 18–19, 33, 36, 58, 63, 66, 68, 83, 99, 114, 153 enigmatic imperativity (Lingis). See imperativity. Enlightenment, 6, 34, 65, 95–104, 110– 111, 115, 121, 135, 138, 175 ensemble, 8, 130, 132–135, 140–143, 155–160, 169–172, 179 equality, 98–99, 103, 105, 108, 120, 178 erasure (Derrida, Heidegger, introduced), 30–32 error, 19, 24–25, 69, 78, 124, 130, 176 eternal return (Nietzsche), 18, 57–58

Index ethics (Levinasian, introduced), 9, 56– 64 “Ethics and Politics” (Levinas), 150 “Ethics as First Philosophy” (Levinas), 30, 63, 80, 114, 137, 146, 180 ethos, 6, 27–30, 57, 82, 84–85, 87–90, 93, 96, 104, 108, 117, 119–121, 140, 142–143, 147, 159 Everett, Wendy, 170 evil, 49–50, 58–59 exceptionality (Agamben), 41–43, 49– 50 Existence and Existents (Levinas), 79, 128, 130 extimacy. See “Extimité.” “Extimité” (Lacan, Miller), 91, 94, 108, 113, 142–143 face, facing (Levinas), 8, 30, 55, 63, 79–81, 114, 119, 121, 137, 146–148, 151–152, 154–155, 178, 179, 180 facility (see also disease, fluency), 10, 17, 19, 21, 23–24, 47–50, 55– 66, 121, 156 Fanon, Frantz, 117, 118, 119–120, 158 Felman, Shoshana, 84 feminism. See gender. La Femme du Gange (Duras), 164, 166, 168, 169, 171 Fiedler, Leslie, 22 field (existential, improvisational), 8–9, 18, 25, 40, 53–56, 94, 129, 153–160, 165–167, 179 Field-Being, International Institute for, 179 Fields, Barbara J., and Karen E. Fields, 96 filmmaking (Duras, related to writing), 162–164 first philosophy, 3, 57, 61–62, 64, 146 Fisher, Gary, 69 flesh (Merleau-Ponty), 26–29, 33, 52– 53, 59, 62–63, 71, 73–75, 82, 83, 91, 94, 99, 103, 107–115, 117, 121, 126–127, 129, 132– 138, 143, 170–171, 174–175, 179

209 fluency (see also facility), 10, 23–24, 47–50, 62–63, 89–94 The Fold (Deleuze), 113 foreignness. See otherness. “Form is Emptiness” (Baraka), 149–150 Foucault, Michel, 3, 15, 20, 30, 50, 54, 85, 89, 97–98, 103, 174, 180 “Different Spaces,” 78, 117, 179 The History of Sexuality, 40, 47 Madness and Civilization, 34 The Order of Things, 33 foundation. See non/foundation. framing (Heidegger), 12, 15–16, 21, 28–29, 32, 66 Frank, Arthur W., 176 Freud, Sigmund, 73 Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 75 “Project for a Scientific Psychology,” 112–113 Frost, Samantha, 26, 173, 175 Fryer, David Ross, 177 The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics (Heidegger), 41, 45–47, 174 Fundi (Bill Abernathy), 141 Galvin, Rose, 83 Garland-Thomson, Rosemarie, 6 Gauthier, Xavière, 167–168, 171 Gemeinschaft, 80–81 gender, 15, 35, 88, 97, 111, 150, 172, 177, 178, 181 Gesellschaft, 80–81 gesture (Noland, introduced), 30, 66–70 Ghandi, Mohandas, 142 gift, 8, 92, 115, 129, 130, 138, 141–142, 157, 159 Gilroy, Paul, 119, 177, 178 Glassman, Deborah N., 165–166, 169 God. See divinity. Goldberg, David Theo, 97 Goodley, Dan, 71, 83 goodness, 3, 9, 27–29, 49–50, 57–59, 62, 81, 84–85, 90, 92–94, 114, 132, 146–147, 149, 158, 160 grammar (see also accusativity, vocativity), 7–8, 9, 34, 44–45, 125–128, 139 Green Eyes (Duras), 163, 166

210

ENCOUNTERING ABILITY

Grosz, Elizabeth, 173, 175 Guattari, Félix, 83, 173, 180 Anti-Oedipus, 52–53 A Thousand Plateaus, 129, 159, 179 Gulliver’s Travels (Swift), 110–111 Hale, Dorothy J., 116–117, 118 Hall, Stuart, 106, 108 Halperin, David M., 68–69 Haney López, Ian F., 101 Hannaford, Ivan, 106 Haraway, Donna J., 104 Harman, Graham, 174 Harris, Cheryl I., 100–101 Harris, William J., 132, 140, 156–157, 158 Hart, Lynda, 26 Hartman, Saidiya V., 106–107, 178 haunting (see also nightmare), 75, 93, 102–104, 109–110, 121, 149– 150, 177 Hayles, N. Katherine, How We Became Posthuman, 5, 51–53, 70 “He Stuttered” (Deleuze), 45, 68, 125 health, 1–2, 19, 24–25, 54–56, 64, 65– 94, 98, 102–105, 115–118, 121, 126–127, 135, 140–142, 172, 175, 176, 177 hearing (see also deafness, overhearing, sound), 93, 165, 169, 181 Heble, Ajay, 132 Hegel, G. W. F., 40, 50, 56, 97, 116, 118 Heidegger, Martin, 1, 3, 4, 5, 30, 31, 32, 37, 39, 43, 49–50, 57, 68, 77, 119, 123, 124, 163, 178 Being and Time, 10, 12, 19, 47, 48, 87, 173–174 The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, 41, 45–47, 174 An Introduction to Metaphysics, 53 “Overcoming Metaphysics,” 18 Parmenides, 41 “‘. . . Poetically Man Dwells . . . ,’” 98–99 “The Question Concerning Technology,” 12, 16, 28, 38, 75, 179

Was Heisst Denken? 80, 128 “What Is Metaphysics?” 18, 40 Herbrechter, Stefan, 5, 173 hermeneutics, 145–160, 168–169 heterotopia (Foucault), 78, 117 Hill, Mike, 178 hip (Roediger), 127 Hird, Myra J., 178 history (theorized), 50, 53, 100, 106, 109–119, 134–137, 139–140 The History of Sexuality (Foucault), 40, 47 Hobbes, Thomas, 107 Hofstadter, Douglas R., 52 holism. See wholeness. Holquist, Michael, 126, 160 holy nuance (Baraka), 139–140, 150, 153–156, 160 Home: Social Essays (Baraka), 180 Homo Sacer (Agamben), 41, 50, 51, 53 How We Became Posthuman (Hayles), 5, 51–53, 70 humanism, 48–49, 52–53, 81, 98–99, 106, 118 “Hunting is Not Those Heads on the Wall” (Baraka), 156 I-Thou (Buber), 124, 137 idealization (introduced, related to normalization), 20–21, 72, 174 Ihde, Don, 179 illness (see also disease, health), 5, 24– 25, 34, 54, 69–71, 80, 82, 83, 85–88, 92, 117, 126, 135, 140– 142, 176 image (in film), 101, 102, 164–171, 176 imaginary (Lacan), 6, 13, 20, 56, 60, 65–66, 71–80, 86–88, 91, 94– 121, 125–127, 130–136, 171, 176–177 impairment, 6, 15, 17, 21, 65–66, 85 imperativity (Merleau-Ponty, introduced), 2, 23–35 im/possibility (introduced), 9, 33–34 impotentiality. See potentiality. improvisation, 7–8, 20, 30, 54, 59, 70, 91, 104, 128–143, 153–160, 161, 170, 180

Index In Our Terribleness (Baraka and Fundi), 141 In the Break (Moten), 7, 56, 107, 112– 113, 129, 135, 136, 137, 140, 179 inclusiveness. See non-exclusion. India Song (Duras), 162, 164–171 inequality. See equality. infinity (Levinas), 22, 24, 55–56, 71– 72, 84, 100, 103, 112–113, 150, 154, 159, 165, 178 infrastructure. See technology. insomnia. See waking. inter-human order (Levinas), 62, 80–81, 119 interpellation (Althusser), 25–26, 100, 125, 175 An Introduction to Metaphysics (Heidegger), 53 Invisible Man (Ellison), 109, 117–118, 179 Irigaray, Luce, 150, 179 irresponsibility, 7, 123–143, 145, 159, 161 Iwakuma, Miho, 174 James, William, 18, 99 Jarratt, Susan C., 27 jazz, 8, 132–134, 139–140, 155–156, 179 Jefferson, Thomas, 103, 105 Jensen, Katharine A., 171 jihad, 138–139, 140 Johnson, E. Patrick, 111 Jones, LeRoi. See Amiri Baraka. Joris, Pierre, 139 Joyce, James, A Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man, 157 justice, 57, 70, 82, 111, 114, 143, 148, 156 “Ka ’Ba” (Baraka), 149 Kant, Immanuel, 13, 15, 25, 28, 29, 41, 98 Kaufman, Eleanor, 47 Kennedy, Randall, 179–180 King, Martin Luther, Jr., 142 Kojève, Alexandre, 40, 50, 56, 175 Kozloff, Sarah, 168

211 Kuhn, Thomas, 176 Kuppers, Petra, 2, 19 Kushner, Howard L., 88–89, 90, 93 L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, 129 Labio, Catherine, 175 Lacan, Jacques, 3, 4, 6, 25, 58, 71–77, 79, 95, 98–99, 119, 126, 127, 147, 175 “The Agency of the Letter,” 87 “The Mirror Stage,” 71–75 Seminar Book I, 103, 177 Seminar Book II, 71, 177 Seminar Book VII, 91, 94, 108, 181 Seminar Book XX, 87 Lamentations, 142 law, 20, 23, 33, 61, 75, 84–85, 89, 90, 100–101, 103 Leibniz, Gottfried, 77, 113 Leshem, Dan, 59 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 39, 44, 47, 61, 62–63, 163 Levinas, Emmanuel, 5, 7–8, 31, 37, 52, 55, 58, 118, 121, 123, 143, 145–155, 158–160, 163, 172, 173, 175, 176, 177, 178, 179 Difficult Freedom, 93, 125 “Ethics and Politics,” 150 “Ethics as First Philosophy,” 30, 63, 80, 114, 137, 146, 180 Existence and Existents, 79, 128, 130 “Martin Buber’s Thought and Contemporary Judaism,” 124– 125, 129 Otherwise than Being, 1, 2, 10, 16, 32, 34, 43, 48, 51, 54, 56, 57, 61–62, 64, 79, 87–88, 93, 105, 113, 114, 124, 128, 130, 133, 140, 142, 147–148, 150, 151, 180 Outside the Subject, 3, 180 “Reality and Its Shadow,” 130, 138 “Revelation in the Jewish Tradition,” 130 “The Rights of Man and the Rights of the Other,” 132 Totality and Infinity, 3, 4, 9, 30, 57, 59–60, 71–72, 103, 125, 146, 150, 180

212

ENCOUNTERING ABILITY

Levinas, Emmanuel (continued) “The Trace of the Other,” 32–33, 62, 82, 92, 130, 150 “Useless Suffering,” 62, 80–81, 119 liberalism, 7, 33, 97–100, 106–110, 116–121, 134, 136 Lindon, Mathieu, 44, 68 Lingis, Alphonso, 28–29, 34, 123, 135– 136 linguistics, 24, 34–35, 174 Linnaeus, Carolus, 42 Linton, Simi, 82, 174–175 Claiming Disability, 66 literacy, 19, 23–24, 74, 121 “Literature and Life” (Deleuze), 60, 62, 70, 115, 141, 163–164 liturgy, 7, 92, 128–129, 137–138 Llewelyn, John, 81 Loeffler, Summer, 129 The Logic of Sense (Deleuze), 24, 25 logos, 8, 37–38, 61, 71, 86, 152–154 Lorca, Federico Garcia, 135 Lott, Eric, 101, 106 Lucy, John A., 30 Mackey, Nathaniel, 7 Bedouin Hornbook, 111 “Cante Moro,” 135 “The Changing Same,” 140, 179 “Other: From Noun to Verb,” 8, 134, 155–156 madness. See psychic ability. Madness and Civilization (Foucault), 34 Magill, David, 101 The Malady of Death (Duras), 166 marginality, 11–12, 21–23, 35, 65–69, 73, 83–86, 97, 107 Marion, Esther, 172 markedness, 30, 54, 98–121, 136–142 Márquez, Antonio C., 157 “Martin Buber’s Thought and Contemporary Judaism” (Levinas), 124–125, 129 materialism. See new materialism. McCaffery, Steve, 159 McLuhan, Marshall, 75 McNeece, Lucy Stone, 165

McRuer, Robert, Crip Theory, 2, 15, 21, 27, 44, 65, 68–69, 72, 174, 177, 178, 179 medical model of disability, 12–14, 65, 86 Meillassoux, Quentin, 27, 37 After Finitude, 15–16, 41–42, 173, 174 Melville, Herman, “Bartleby,” 5, 9, 43– 45, 47, 53–54, 59, 61, 66, 67– 69, 70, 77, 90, 93, 118, 135, 142, 179 mental health, mental illness. See psychic ability. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 95, 123, 174– 175, 179 Phenomenology of Perception, 2, 25, 45 The Visible and the Invisible, 2, 12, 25–26, 29, 45, 63, 71, 83 Merrell, Floyd, 33, 173 metaethics, 3, 57, 118, 146 metaphysics. See non/foundation. Metaphysics (Aristotle), 11, 43, 46–47, 54, 55, 58, 93–94, 96, 162, 175 Michalko, Rod, 71, 80 middle voice, 128, 132, 179 Miller, Henry, 91 Miller, Jacques-Alain, “Extimité,” 91, 94, 108, 113, 142–143 Mills, Charles W., Blackness Visible, 96–97, 99, 109, 136 “The Mirror Stage” (Lacan), 71–75 Mitchell, David T., 82, 176 Narrative Prosthesis, 66, 73, 177 Mollow, Anna, 25, 38 Morris, David B., 91 Morrison, Toni, 7 Beloved, 114, 136 Playing in the Dark, 106–109 “Unspeakable Things Unspoken,” 110, 114 Morton, Timothy, 178 Moten, Fred, In the Break, 7, 56, 107, 112–113, 129, 135, 136, 137, 140, 179 Mullen, Harryette, 101

Index Müller, Friedrich Max, 39, 47, 62–63, 163 multiculturalism (see also nonexclusion), 56, 98, 120 Murphy, Carol J., 170 Murray, Albert, 115–116 Murray, Joseph J., 21–22 music, 7, 8, 54, 129–135, 138, 145, 155–159, 161, 169–171, 175, 179, 181 mythology, 1, 39, 92, 97, 110–111, 125, 136, 157, 175 Nancy, Jean-Luc, 174 Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, 112–113 Narrative Prosthesis (Mitchell and Snyder), 66, 73, 177 Native Americans, 111, 114 naturalization (introduced), 3–6, 9, 14– 17 Nazism, 148 Negotiations (Deleuze), 173, 175 new materialism, 4, 173 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 30, 162 Beyond Good and Evil, 80 Twilight of the Idols, 3 The Will to Power, 18, 57–58 Nietzsche and Philosophy (Deleuze), 3 “nigger,” 141–142, 179–180 nightmare, 55–56, 76–77, 86–87, 115, 117–118, 120, 126–127, 176, 177 noise (in music), 131–132, 179 Noland, Carrie, 30, 66 non/being (Agamben, Deleuze, Heidegger), 32, 40, 54–55, 58, 76–77, 80, 94, 117, 124, 163 noncompliance (McRuer), 15, 68–69, 177 non-exclusion (opposed to inclusiveness), 55–57, 60, 85, 120–121, 131 non/foundation, non-foundation, 2–5, 8–9, 18–19, 26–27, 30–33, 37, 42–43, 49, 57–58, 61–64, 68, 70, 79, 82, 86–87, 111–112, 115, 118, 121, 123, 127, 163– 164, 170, 173

213 The Normal and the Pathological (Canguilhem), 15, 19, 24, 69, 126, 176 normalization (introduced, related to idealization), 13–17, 19–21, 72, 174 “Notebook of a Return to the Native Land” (Césaire), 142 oath (Agamben), 37–39, 89, 90, 92, 175 objectification, 106, 112–117, 134, 153 object-oriented ontology, 4, 16 obscenity. See cursing. Of Grammatology (Derrida), 8, 38, 73, 129, 175 Oliver, Mike, 14 Olson, Charles, 129, 139, 147 Omi, Michael, 96 “On Potentiality” (Agamben), 41, 43, 49, 54, 55, 59, 93–94, 96, 162, 163 ontological difference (Deleuze, Heidegger), 18, 42–43, 124 ontology (related to phenomenology), 26–27, 31–32, 58 The Open (Agamben), 39–42, 45–47, 49–51, 54, 57, 61, 62, 108, 119, 175 Optic White (Ellison, Invisible Man), 109, 118 othering (Baraka, Mackey), 8, 134–136, 138, 156–158 otherness (introduced), 3, 57–61, 78–79 Otherwise than Being (Levinas), 1, 2, 10, 16, 32, 34, 43, 48, 51, 54, 56, 57, 61–62, 64, 79, 87–88, 93, 105, 113, 114, 124, 128, 130, 133, 140, 142, 147–148, 150, 151, 180 Outside the Subject (Levinas), 3, 180 Overboe, James, 2, 19, 67, 82–83 “Overcoming Metaphysics” (Heidegger), 18 overhearing (see also deafness, hearing, sound), 127–143, 179–180 pain, 26, 66, 69, 86, 126–127, 167, 169 Papin, Liliane, 169 Parmenides (Heidegger), 41

214

ENCOUNTERING ABILITY

Parnet, Claire, 97, 180 “Part of the Doctrine” (Baraka), 148 passing, 102–106 passivity, 8, 55–56, 59, 63, 67, 80, 128, 132, 136–137, 139–140, 142, 147, 150, 159, 163, 181 Pater, Walter, 181 Patterson, David, 93, 133 Patterson, Orlando, Slavery and Social Death, 97, 107–108, 134 Pease, Donald, 179 performativity (introduced), 4–5, 9, 18– 27 Petrilli, Susan, 173 Pfeiffer, Kathleen, 102, 104 Phelan, Peggy, 65 phenomenology, 4, 13, 15–16, 21, 25– 32, 41, 58, 67, 86, 139, 142, 174–175, 179 physis, 4 Picasso, Pablo, 162 Pickstock, Catherine, 7–8 After Writing, 128–129, 132, 138 Plato, 57 Playing in the Dark (Morrison), 106– 109 Plaza, Monique, 82 “’. . . Poetically Man Dwells . . .’” (Heidegger), 98–99 Poetics (Aristotle), 27 Politics (Aristotle), 40 Ponzio, Augusto, 31, 82, 92, 140, 173 A Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man (Joyce), 157 postcolonialism. See colonialism. posthuman, 5, 51–52, 173 potentiality (Agamben, Aristotle), 5, 7, 9, 41–61, 66–70, 77–80, 87–88, 91, 93–94, 95–96, 98–99, 101, 119–121, 123, 130, 161–163, 168, 175 Practicalities (Duras), 163, 165 prayer, 92, 127, 149 predication, 9–10, 59, 62–63, 67, 125 Price, Janet, 135 primordiality, 57, 62–63, 70, 76–77, 82, 146, 158, 170

privileging, 4, 13, 15–27, 35, 78, 96, 99–106, 111, 114–118, 127, 129, 151, 164, 173, 181 profanity. See cursing. projective verse (Olson), 129, 139, 147 prophecy, 88–89, 92, 137 prosthesis, 9, 22, 23, 38, 66, 73–77, 80, 85–87, 94, 104, 176 Proust, Marcel, 163–164 proximity (Levinas). See face. psychic ability (per se), 23, 28–29, 34, 72, 82–92, 94, 98, 137, 174 The Psychic Life of Power (Butler), 25, 125 Pure Immanence (Deleuze), 67 Quayson, Ato, 177 Qur’an, 138 queerness, 36, 66, 68, 70, 95, 112, 118, 121, 137, 178 “The Question Concerning Technology” (Heidegger), 12, 16, 28, 38, 75, 179 race. See blackness, whiteness. racism, 89, 96–97, 108, 149 Radano, Ronald, 179 radical empiricism (Deleuze, James). See empiricism. The Ravishing of Lol Stein (Duras), 177, 180 real (Lacan, introduced), 58, 71–78 “Reality and Its Shadow” (Levinas), 130, 138 recursivity, 1, 4–7, 16, 21, 30–34, 37– 48, 53–54, 58, 62, 64, 67, 79, 82, 93, 114, 118, 120, 126, 128–130, 134–135, 137 reflexivity, 4, 12, 40–42, 49, 51–64, 175 Reid-Pfarr, Robert F., 141 reification, 6, 49, 65, 103, 105–106, 146 relationality (introduced), 1–4, 8–9, 16– 19, 31–34 religion. See divinity. rememory (Bhabha, Morrison), 114, 115, 117–118, 121, 136 response. See irresponsibility.

Index restlessness. See waking. Reynolds, Nedra, 27 rhetoric, 25–28, 54, 66, 116, 125, 139, 148 Rhetoric (Aristotle), 27 Rich, Adrienne, 174 Richman, Kenneth A., 176 Robbins, Jill, 93, 130 Robinson, Douglas, 24 Roediger, David, 127 Ropars-Wuilleumier, Marie-Claire, 165, 166 Rothenberg, Jerome, 139 Russell, Bertrand, 55, 75 Russell, Emily, 104 The Sacrament of Language (Agamben), 38–39, 47, 59, 60– 61, 62–63, 89, 92, 138, 163, 175 sameness (see also assimilation), 9, 18, 56–57, 76–77, 91, 98, 103, 118, 171, 178 Sandahl, Carrie, 65–66, 98, 104, 174– 175 Sansone, Livio, 110 saying and said (Levinas), 10, 31–32, 60–62, 87–88, 94, 130, 140– 142, 154 Scarry, Elaine, 27 Schuster, Marilyn R., 167 science, 4, 96, 176, 178 Scully, Jackie Leach, 174 seam, 73, 76–77, 79, 81, 87, 89, 94, 95, 99, 103, 107, 108, 110, 111, 119, 121, 127, 131, 133, 177 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, 69, 112 Sexton, Jared, 56, 97, 98, 111, 120, 136 sexuality, 6, 21, 26, 35, 36, 69, 85, 89, 91, 104, 112, 132, 139, 149, 174, 178, 181 Shakespeare, Tom, 2, 16–17, 82 Shakespeare, William, 157 Sheridan, Alan, 177 Shildrick, Margrit, 135 Shoah, 119 sickness. See illness. sight. See blindness, vision.

215 signifier and signified, 39, 47, 58, 61, 171 signifyingness of signification (Levinas), 1, 32, 34, 43, 46, 48, 61, 79, 92, 115, 128, 151 Skeptics, 44, 69 slavery, 97, 107–108, 111, 114, 119, 134, 139 Slavery and Social Death (Patterson), 97, 107–108, 134 sleep. See dream. Smith, Daniel W., 33, 55, 180 Smith, David Lionel, 107 Smith, Hazel, 131 Smith, Neil, 174 Snyder, Sharon L., 82, 176 Narrative Prosthesis, 66, 73, 177 social class, 24, 88, 104, 142, 176–177, 178 social metaphysics (Mills), 96–97 social model of disability, 14, 16–17, 22, 86 Sollors, Werner, 104, 105–106 Solnit, Rebecca, 20 Son Nom de Venise dans Calcutta Désert (Duras), 164, 168–171 Sontag, Susan, 5 The Souls of Black Folk (DuBois), 7, 115–120, 135, 142 “The Souls of White Folk” (DuBois), 116 sound (in film), 165–171 spectatorship, 8, 65–66, 98, 166–171, 181 speculative realism. See Meillassoux. Spillers, Hortense J., 26, 111 Spinoza, Benedict de, 19, 58 Spinoza: Practical Philosophy (Deleuze), 3, 19, 58–59 stammer, stutter, 33–34, 45, 68, 82, 87, 92, 125, 128–130, 137, 140 standardization, 14–15, 19–24, 27, 31, 44–45, 65–66, 69, 98, 126, 160 Stiker, Henri-Jacques, 174 stroke. See virgule. structures of feeling (Williams), 29, 57 stutter. See stammer. subalternity, 116–119

216

ENCOUNTERING ABILITY

subjectivity (linguistic). See accusativity. Sudnow, David, 131, 132 supplementation, 33, 38, 73–78, 91, 109, 118 swearing. See cursing, oath. symbolic order (Lacan), 58, 72–73, 76, 99, 103, 107–111, 121, 136, 177 tactility, 31, 127, 135–136, 146 Tallon, Andrew, 146 Taylor, Cecil, 129 Taylor, Clyde, 140 Taylor, Lib, 169 technology, 16, 19–22, 25, 38, 41–42, 49–50, 75, 78, 104, 107–108, 135, 173–174 The Tempest (Shakespeare), 157 thematization (Levinas), 64, 130, 180 theology. See divinity. theory (as such), 9, 82–83, 92, 133, 145, 151, 154, 161, 177, 180 Thiher, Allen, 86, 88, 178 thinking (as such, Aristotle, Cioran, Heidegger), 45, 47, 80 Thomas Aquinas, Saint, 42 A Thousand Plateaus (Deleuze and Guattari), 129, 159, 179 Todorov, Tzvetan, 160, 179 totality, 7, 19, 24, 31, 41–42, 51, 55–57, 71–74, 87, 103, 130, 150, 152, 154, 158 Totality and Infinity (Levinas), 3, 4, 9, 30, 57, 59–60, 71–72, 103, 125, 146, 150, 180 touch. See tactility. trace (Levinas, introduced), 3, 9, 10, 32–33, 55, 62–64, 67, 71, 79– 81 “The Trace of the Other” (Levinas), 32– 33, 62, 82, 92, 130, 150 transcendence, 3, 13, 14, 20, 24, 53, 58–59, 63, 66, 92, 98–108, 111, 113, 116–117, 128, 134–135, 137, 139, 146, 149–150, 155, 181 transgredience (Bakhtin), 126, 160, 179

translatability, 31, 56, 66, 98, 101, 103, 119, 171–172 trauma. See woundedness. Tremain, Shelley, 174 Tucker, Irene, 98 Twilight of the Idols (Nietzsche), 3 Tyjewski, Carolyn, 78 unhomely (Bhabha), 113, 136, 141 United States of America, 7, 9, 19, 36, 72, 85, 95–121, 134–139, 155– 156, 178, 179 unrightness (Levinas), 92, 130, 131, 142–143 “Useless Suffering” (Levinas), 62, 80– 81, 119 Veltman, Robert, 88, 89, 91 victimhood, 67, 70, 80, 148 violence, aggression, 8, 60, 66, 74, 88, 114, 119, 126, 134, 136–139, 140–142, 147–154, 158–160 “Violence and Metaphysics” (Derrida), 150 virgule, stroke (discussed), 6, 9, 32–34, 43, 47–48, 51, 54, 60, 62, 64, 67–68, 93, 95, 105, 107–110, 114–121, 135, 137, 143, 161, 171–172, 173 virtuality (Deleuze, Levinas), 3, 13, 18, 48, 53, 57–58, 59, 62, 115, 123, 124, 127, 153, 154–155, 156 vision (see also blindness), 6, 11, 15, 21, 23, 41, 46–47, 50–54, 74– 75, 78, 104, 121, 127, 131, 134–136, 146, 164, 165–169, 173, 181 vitalism, 4, 16, 53, 82–83, 127, 153, 173, 175 vocativity, 3, 7, 62, 93–94, 113, 125– 130, 133, 137–142, 164, 179 voice-off, voice-over, 8, 164–169 von Uexküll, Jacob, 45 vorhanden (Heidegger), 19, 48, 87, 173–174 Wade, Cheryl Marie, 177

Index waking (see also dream), 46, 50, 79–82, 86–88, 91–92, 99, 102, 110– 113, 117–119, 126–129, 137– 138 walking, 6, 11–13, 17, 20, 74–75, 104 Wall, Thomas Carl, 59–60, 61, 80, 147 Walters, Shannon, 54 Was Heisst Denken? (Heidegger), 80, 128 Watson, Nicholas, 2, 16 Watts, Jerry Gafio, 158 Weber, Samuel, 123, 124 Weheliye, Alexander G., 135 “What Is Metaphysics?” (Heidegger), 18, 40 whiteness, 7, 36, 95–121, 134–135, 138, 139, 141, 142, 148, 157, 178, 179 Whitman, Walt, 140, 179 wholeness, 24–25, 54–56, 69, 70, 73– 75, 80, 83, 91, 95, 102, 117, 127, 140–141 Wideman, John Edgar, 178 Wilkerson. Abby L., 178 Williams, Raymond, 29, 57 Wills, David, 176 Wilson, Anne, 85–86 Wilson, Daniel J., 104 Winant, Howard, 96 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 154 Wolof, 127 Woman to Woman (Duras and Gauthier), 8, 88, 167–168, 170, 171–172, 181 world (introduced), 12–17 woundedness, trauma, 69–71, 75–81, 86, 87, 92, 94, 111–119, 127, 134–140, 176 Wright, Michelle M., 177, 178 writing (Derrida, Duras), 8, 38, 129, 159, 161–172 Žižek, Slavoj, 58, 73 zuhanden (Heidegger), 12, 47, 48, 173– 174 Zumthor, Paul, 131

217