Crip sovereignty

Abstract

Crip theory traces a line of flight away from liberal disability studies in the direction of an ethics of degradation which revels in and exploits disability’s destabilising and disruptive potential. The danger of such an ethics, however, is that it risks romanticising disability and, in so doing, unintentionally underwriting ableist prejudices by continuing to index human worth to the capacity for self-determination, here in the form of a subversive “indeterminacy” and “heterogeneity”. Georges Bataille’s work can supplement crip theory insofar as it likewise joyfully affirms the scandalousness of degradation (uselessness, waste, etc.) while grounding this affirmation in an ontology of productive life überhaupt that shifts the responsibility for transgression from the individual onto society. For Bataille, more specifically, the point is that there is a categorical imperative to celebrate degradation as the a priori condition of a collective commitment to prevent global catastrophic suffering.