Encountering Ability On the Relational Nature of Human Performance.

Includes bibliographies and index.

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 Ethics1. 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 Ability5. 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 Interrogation2. 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 CitedAbout the Author; Index.

"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"--

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