Encountering Ability : On the Relational Nature of Human Performance / Scott DeShong.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

DeShong, Scott.

Series:

Value inquiry book series

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Ability--Philosophy.

Ability.

Disabilities--Philosophy.

Disabilities.

Philosophy.

Physical Description:

ix; 217 pages ; 24cm.

Place of Publication:

Leiden : Brill Rodopi, 2016.

Summary:

In 'Encountering Ability', Scott DeShong considers how ability and its correlative, disability, come into existence. Besides being articulated as physical, social, aesthetic, political, and specifically human, ability signifies and is signified such that signification itself is always in question. Thus the language of ability and the ability of language constitute discourse that undermines foundations, including any foundation for discourse or ability. Drawing on Gilles Deleuze's theory of primary differentiation and Emmanuel Levinas's philosophy of ethical relationality, 'Encountering Ability' finds implications of music, theology, and cursing in the signification of ability, and also examines various literary texts, including works by Amiri Baraka and Marguerite Duras.

Contents:

1 Metaphysics of Ability: The Nature of Performance 11

1 The Conceptual Environment of Ability 11

2 Culture. Nature, and Correlative Thinking 14

3 The Enigma of Generalized Ability 17

4 Matters of Articulation: Competence, Performativity, and Imperativity 23

5 The (Dis)engagement of Signification with Ethos 27

6 Internal Difference and Recursivity in Terms and Concepts 32

2 On the Origin of (Human) Ability: Language, Possibility, and Ethics 37

1 Signification as Human Dis/ease 37

2 Concomitant Potentiality and Impotentiality in Language 43

3 Biopolitical Articulation and the Production of Ableism 48

4 The Reflexive Ability of the Post/human 51

5 Allerity and Ethics in the Encounter of Ability 57

3 The Nightmare of Health: Approaching Disability 65

1 Woundedness as the Disarticulation of Dis/ability 65

2 Imagination and Trauma: Signifying the Reality of Ability 71

3 The Trace of Ability and the Ethics of Disability Studies 78

4 The Distress of (Studying) Psychic Ability 82

5 Language Performing the Disability of Ability 87

6 Blessing and Curse in the Ethics (of Ethics) of Dis/ability 92

4 Dis/ability in Black and White: The Relationality of Political Ability 95

1 Approaching the Naturalization of Political Access 95

2 The Articulation of Whiteness in Liberal Modernity 99

3 The Im/possibility of Blackness in the Signification of Subjectivity 105

4 Awakening to Woundedness: The Trauma of History 111

5 Engaging Ethics by the Trace of the Color Line 115

5 Ability as Response and Irresponsibility: Dialogue and Struggle 123

1 Response and Irresponsibility in the Context of Interrogation 123

2 Improvisation as Gesture toward the Ability of Ability 128

3 Blackness as Engagement of Vocativity 134

4 Tracing Vocativity in Poetics and Politics 139

6 Denatured Criticism: Ethics, Violence, Improvisation between Levinas and Baraka 145

1 Prelude 145

2 Theme 145

3 Fugue 147

4 Dance 152

5 Coda 159

7 Encountering Dis/ability in the Work of Marguerite Duras 161

1 Writing as Opening and Dis/articulation 161

2 Approaching Differential Ontology by "Everything at Once" 164

3 The Work and the World: The Performative Space of Ensemble 169.

ISBN:

9789004323216

900432321X

OCLC:

951955843