Better Medicine: Shared Suffering and Chronic Vulnerability in Brian Teare's The Empty Form Goes All the Way to Heaven

Abstract

Abstract: A posthumanist understanding of the body does not view "illness" and "health" as properties of the individual body, but as emergent features of the relationships between bodies. As such, a relational view of health opens up avenues for the betterment of both human bodies and their social and physical environments. Drawing on posthumanism and the ethics of vulnerability, this article demonstrates how Brian Teare's The Empty Form Goes All the Way to Heaven (2015) provides a different way of thinking (and doing) illness, death, and vulnerability. With his acceptance and promotion of the body's dynamic materiality and chronic vulnerability, Teare advances a posthuman ethics based on our shared embodied condition.