Disabling Philosophy
Abstract
Drawing on a Laruellean symptomatology, this paper proposes a non-philosophical theory of disability that exposes and explores the relationship between debility, illness and the biopolitics of environmental contamination. The traumatic etiology at the basis of this relation – which can be traced through the slow violence of Anthropocene politics everywhere from Flint, Michigan to the nuclear disaster at Fukushima – is now ever more pressing as we find ourselves in the midst of a global pandemic. With these end times in mind, and inspired by Laruelle’s theory of philosophical decision, the essay argues for a “disabling-(of)-philosophy” that places thought under the condition of the disabled victim-in-person, a condition that demands a radical rethinking of our species-being in response to the inherent violence of the philosophical world and its catastrophic organization of the planet. The essay presents severe cognitive disability as a paradigmatic case of a non-philosophical “radical concept” where the immanent object (the disabled body) becomes the occasion for its own non-philosophical theory, one that by necessity and out of the urge for survival must reject all forms of philosophical decision. As a non-philosophical posture of thought cloned from the Real and effectuated by symptoms in the body, the disabling-(of)-philosophy proposed here can be mobilized as a radical political position, a “weapon of last defense” geared toward disabling the capitalist forces of biospheric annihilation

Copyright (c) 2020 Oraxiom: A Journal of Non-Philosophy

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Oraxiom is published under the following license: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0). Under this license, users of our content must give appropriate credit to authors and source as well as indicate if changes were made, cannot be used for commercial purposes, and, in the instance that it is built upon or transformed, may not be distributed. For Oraxiom, the copyrights allow the audience to download, reprint, quote in length and/or copy articles published by Oraxiom so long as the authors and source are cited. For more information on our license, see the following: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0.