Well... this is by far the longest amount of time I've ever invested into a video-- I think 2 months have passed since my last video, but it still feels like its been much longer than that. A hellish summer semester later, and I was finally able to complete this video after multiple setbacks. This is something a bit new for me in terms of engaging with Derrida, so I hope you enjoy the project of this video.
And what is the project of this video? Well... it's my first attempt at trying to draw out what ableism does to the able-bodied individual, and how the systemic and institutional control of people with disabilities actually additionally acts as an ideological control of the able-bodied individual. We see this happen through what I'm terming "crip hauntology", or the constitutive framing of the disabled subject and aspects of disability as specters or ghosts (I'm using abstract language here, but it should make more sense within the video). Here, disability is related to the state of being unproductive-- not in an ableist sense of "people with disabilities just stay inside!", because fuck that line of thinking, but moreso in the sense that there's a natural tension between people with disabilities and the capitalist mode of production, and that people with disabilities often stand in opposition to the motivation of capital to make people's work life thir entire life. Thus, we see ideology's reaction to this tension and contradiction from the person with disabilities to the logic of capital--- to construct the person with disabilities as a ghost, as what Derrida calls a "hauntology", and by constituting the person with disabilities as a ghost that occupies the liminal space in between being and non-being, productivity and a portrayed "idleness", ideology turns the person with disabilities from a subject into an object of fear by which the able-bodied worker rejects through a total immersion in work and being a productive, obedient worker for the benefit of capital, which of course works directly into the hands of our American economic system.
Anyways, this is turning into a bit of an impromptu essay in the description, which wasn't my intention, but I think I illustrated an outline of what I wanted to get across in this video, and I hope you get something valuable out of the project I created here. From what I saw, there was very little work done on this subject, so hopefully this can engage in new ways of thinking... or it can just wither away in the ether of Youtube video essays, either one is fine.
Anyways, as always, love and solidarity, and enjoy the video,
First as Tragedy
(Also, I very lightly touch on it, but if you want a deeper video on Hauntology from a Mark Fisher critique of culture and art, Epoch Philosophy did an awesome video on Fisher and Hauntology which you can find here: https://youtu.be/gFyaNG9xbEU)
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