We Stand Without Apology Before a Resigned Philosophy:
The history of philosophy is, among many other things, a history of an articulation of a world disclosed exclusively through increasingly refined notions of capacity and ability. In an insurgent context, this would not be a controversial claim. But there is no place in insurgency among those who hold themselves out to be metaphysicians in our age anymore.
The prolonged counter-insurgency has deepened the war – into all our guts. And our philosophers have not stopped grounding and re-grounding the claims upon which this war is waged. Seeking new, ever deeper, constituent fictions, they make of our subjection an aesthetics. But it is a nauseating aesthetics of an athleticism of the principles of capacity and production – which they claim, as sorcerers, to separate. We know better.
If the world is in ruins today, it is in the ruins of what it can do.
Human beings, metaphysically machinated into a series of isolatable capacities, perplexed by the world that they have revealed as a factory floor of unfolding necessities, seek to speak to the crises facing them in vain. Perhaps this is what makes their condition so constitutionally embarrassing.
Philosophy since, at least, Aristotle has been an activity of circumscribing beings predicated on capacities, then epistemically celebrating those capacities and moving the barriers of exclusion around (and often calling that liberation).
What is the use of institutional critique? We certainly have no use for it anymore. If it is any wonder why the institutional figure of the “disabled philosopher” feels “excluded” from “academia,” and they do, this cannot be simply reduced to the historical force of discrimination that we call “ableism”. This social force is not what we have focused on. We do not seek to redeem an institution by extending its boundaries, in a playful activism that does nothing but keep the prattling ongoing.
Instead, we have tried, with limited success surely, to reveal something else. We have sought to uncover that ableism remains universally acceptable in the final instance because it is a metaphysical predicate. It is an organizing principle of the revealing of this world, which is one we must do away with.
As our dear friend Samuel White says, surely to the “radical” philosopher’s annoyance, “the eugenic has become unspoken because it no longer need be said.” We must clear the way to speak again.
RevoltingBodies 