jasbir k. puar

"The Right to Maim situates disability as a register of biopolitical population control, one that modulates which bodies are hailed by institutions to represent the professed progress made by liberal rights–bearing subjects...this book is largely about what happens after certain liberal rights are bestowed, certain thresholds or parameters of success are claimed to have been reached: What happens when “we” get what “we” want?...But my argument also makes a critical intervention into the literatures of and scholarship on biopolitics, which have been less likely to take up issues of disability and debility. Michel Foucault’s foundational formulation hinges on all the population measures that enable some forms of living and inhibit others: birthrates, fertility, longevity, disease, impairment, toxicity, productivity. In other words, these irreducible metrics of biopolitics are also metrics of debility and capacity. Biopolitics deployed through its neoliberal guises is a capacitation machine; biopolitics seeks capacitation for some as a liberal rationale (in some cases) or foil for the debilitation of many others. It is, in sum, an ableist mechanism that debilitates. Biopolitics as a conceptual paradigm can thus be read as a theory of debility and capacity. Addressing disability directly forces a new, discrete component into the living/dying pendulum that forms most discussions of biopolitics: the living dead, death worlds, necropolitics, slow death, life itself. These frames presume death to be the ultimate assault, transgression, or goal, and the biopolitical end point or opposite of life. I am arguing that debilitation and the production of disability are in fact biopolitical ends unto themselves, with moving neither toward life nor toward death as the aim. This is what I call “the right to maim”: a right expressive of sovereign power that is linked to, but not the same as, “the right to kill.” Maiming is a source of value extraction from populations that would otherwise be disposable. The right to maim exemplifies the most intensive practice of the biopolitics of debilitation, where maiming is a sanctioned tactic...justified in protectionist terms and soliciting disability rights solutions that, while absolutely crucial to aiding some individuals, unfortunately lead to further perpetuation of debilitation".

jasbir k. puar