In what ways do we implicitly structure our dominant ideas about minoritarian identities as pathological; as forms of, or symptoms of, a disease? And what would it mean to take this position of the pathogen relegated to the margins of the book, the built environment, histories, and society as a space we occupy together? Pathologies of the Margins; a study in dissipation considers these questions which sit at the intersection of medical knowledge(s) and cultural criticism as an ambiguous space for consideration. In what is called a heuretic practice, art and theory are brought in cohabitation to expand and distort the possibilities of the otherwise and otherhow built into the forgotten and pathologized margins. Following in a synthetic amalgam created by a concurrent reading of Joseph Grigely’s Textualterity: Art, Theory, and Textual Criticism, Fred Moten’s Blackness and Nothingness (Mysticism of the Flesh), and Georges Canguilhem’s Normal and the Pathological a series of peregrinations through art and history masquerading as chapters attempt and fail to answer the questions they put forth, opting instead for the possibility of further questions scribbled in the margins between writer and reader. When those who are relegated to the pathological margins are allowed to die for the greater health of the body politic, and life chances are distributed unevenly along lines of what and who are considered normal, what does it mean to think again and deeply about Canguilhem’s idea that “Disease is a new way of life” and Moten’s assertion to think the pathogenic as that which “bears or is the potential to end the world”?

Editor: Evan Fusco
Year: 2021
Dimensions: 4.5 x 6.5 in
Cover: Softcover
Language: English