will or something 🎸 (@emofoucault.bsky.social)

Dialogues on Disability: Shelley Tremain Interviews Will Conway _Hello, I’m Shelley Tremain and I would like to welcome you to the one hundred and twenty-eighth installment of Dialogues on Disability, the series of interviews that I am conducting with disabled philosophers and post to BIOPOLITICAL PHILOSOPHY on the third Wednesday of each month. The series is designed to provide a public venue for discussion with disabled philosophers about a range of topics, including their philosophical work on disability; the place of philosophy of disability vis-à-vis the discipline and profession; their experiences of institutional discrimination and exclusion, as well as personal and structural gaslighting in philosophy in particular and in academia more generally; resistance to ableism, racism, sexism, and other apparatuses of power; accessibility; and anti-oppressive pedagogy._ _The land on which_ _I sit to conduct these interviews is the traditional ancestral territory of the Haudenosaunee and Anishinaabeg nations. The territory was the subject of the Dish with One Spoon Wampum Belt Covenant, an agreement between the Iroquois Confederacy and the Ojibwe and allied nations around the Great Lakes. As a settler, I offer these interviews with respect for and in solidarity with Indigenous peoples of so-called Canada and other settler states who, for thousands of years, have held sacred the land, water, air, and sky, as well as their inhabitants, and who, for centuries, have struggled to protect them from the ravages and degradation of colonization and expropriation._ _My guest today is Will Conway. Will is a Ph.D. student in philosophy at Stony Brook University whose investigations focus on eugenic modernity, biopolitics, and the apparatus of disability. Most of Will’s work can be found at revoltingbodies.com, a blog on which he has written since 2020._ _Welcome back to Dialogues on Disability, Will! When I_ _interviewed you in 2021_ _, you were an M.A. student at Duquesne University. Please bring us up to date on your career trajectory and life in general (if you wish) since our last conversation._ I seem to remember that I had equal difficulty answering this question when I was previously interviewed for Dialogues on Disability. Certainly, some things in my life have changed since 2021, but my commitments remain stubbornly the same, even if my tools and avenues of intervention have changed. As for my career, I must admit that I am terrible with so-called “self-advocacy.” A few weeks ago, I participated in a panel at SPEP (Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy) and the demand for a short introductory bio made me short-circuit for a second. As you know, the great discipline of academic philosophy persistently demands that one have a clean account of oneself, whether it be their area of expertise, their research trajectory, or who they know and who is in their network. I struggle with these things. I will say that recently I have been working more diligently on my own research, likely due to the encouragement and support of my friends, both in academia and outside of it. _[Description of image below: Will sits at a table by the window in a coffee shop with a companion. He is looking down at the wooden table which holds his coffee cup and saucer, the cup and saucer of his companion, and menus. A parked car and stacked patio chair can be seen through the window, as well as trees and buildings in the distance.]_ _How does the apparatus of disability operate at Stony Brook? What have you experienced there with respect to ableism and inaccessibility?_ I want to begin by speaking about inaccessibility; then I will speak about ableism. With respect to inaccessibility, I want to emphasize the experiences of the undergraduate students, who have been at the vanguard of this issue during my time at Stony Brook. Stony Brook has a long history of violations of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), which, increasingly, means little as the ADA steadily reveals itself to have been a failed liberal intervention to comfortably uphold the ableist predicates of neoliberalism. The Wang Center, one of Stony Brook’s newer architectural pride and joys, has one automatic door and one ramp. Many disabled people cannot use them. At the end of the ramp, for example, one is confronted by a door without an automatic opening. With respect to accommodations at Stony Brook, there’s routinely a lack of accountability, as the student newspaper, _The Statesman_ , recently reported. None of this inaccessibility is unique to Stony Brook, but the fact that a lot of Stony Brook was designed amid student uprisings in the 60s and 70s is reflected in the highly disciplinary design of the campus itself. This decentralization of the campus results in the necessity of buses to navigate the campus. To the likely surprise of no one, this general campus-wide transportation is not accessible. The ableism that I have experienced is always in the same philosophical tenor as that which any disabled person who engages with philosophy experiences. The specter of phenomenology and the history of rationalism, with their ahistorical subject and supposedly irrefutable necessity of this subject’s capacities, sometimes loom heavily over philosophy at Stony Brook. Phenomenology depends on this ahistorical and necessary subject to function as a discourse that must be left untouched, not that a ghost of Husserl or Merleau-Ponty is haunting the halls (though they very well may be). The subject, unity of that subject, the givenness of its abilities, the ahistoricity and a priori nature of these supposed abilities, all of that is beyond reach—and for good reason, phenomenologists say. Because we could not talk about experience otherwise, they say. This approach to the question of experience is pretty uncritical; that is, I think the philosophy of experience needs to be subject to a critical endeavor. Nevertheless, many Stony Brook faculty have offered insights into my work that have been invaluable to me, including Peter Caravetta, whose guidance on Giorgio Agamben has been extremely helpful. I have experienced a considerable amount of ableism in philosophical endeavors outside of academia too; so, I don’t think that ableism is inherent only to exclusionary institutions. Yet philosophy is exclusionary. From Aristotle onward, philosophy has been a practice that depends on, first, circumscribing the population worthy of it and then meditating onward. Philosophy can often take the form of an affirmation of the very conditions of exclusion. I think that, in this way, all disabled philosophers have experienced that discomfort from other philosophers. Philosophy plays a constitutive role in the upkeep of the apparatus of disability and its persistence. Any philosophy department, of any institution, will, in one way or another, reflect that. I am sure that in my job as a philosophy instructor that I have contributed to the constitution and persistence of the apparatus of disability, which is what makes philosophy of disability so unacceptable to the history of philosophy. _Next year marks the centennial of Foucault’s birth in 1926. Foucault has been a vital focus of your academic research and public philosophy. How has Foucault’s work shaped your thinking about disability?_ Foucault is really my first philosophical love, followed closely by Giorgio Agamben—who is deeply indebted to Foucault. Without Foucault’s work, mine would simply not exist. I engage with philosophy primarily because of my encounter with Foucault. He provided for me not just a method, but an _ethos—_ a way in which to comport myself towards the issues that I confront in my work. When it comes to disability, Foucault’s work has given my own its contours. It has done so in several ways: First, I take seriously the anarchic claim that sits at the core of Foucault’s entire corpus: there is no given, no irrefutable baseline, no sovereign subject, no vital trajectory, nor will that normatively underwrites its formation. Foucault demands that we have the courage to refuse these fantasies, irrespective of the discomfort that doing so may engender. So, on the one hand, we can state and examine—as you have in your own work, Shelley—how disability is historically constituted and situated, that is, disability is not a transhistorical _a priori_ that stands beside, like a mirror, to the normal, so-called able-bodied, subject; nor is it some dialectical relation or undecidable differentiation. Disability is rather both a discursive formation and an object of discourse. Not something confined to textual iteration, disability is written in blood, outside the text. On the other hand, Foucault gives us the tools to understand how disability is a technology of governance, explicitly showing in lectures such as _Psychiatric Power_ , _Abnormal_ , and _Birth of Biopolitics_ how this government operates. Your explication of Foucault in these regards is an element of your monograph on him and feminist philosophy of disability that is generally overlooked. As you show, Foucault elucidates the means through which abnormality is established, problematized, and dealt with accordingly. What Foucault reveals to us about disability is that what we do not openly say about it enables its stranglehold on us to persist. By this I mean the violence of the given, the necessity for a subject and, importantly, its innate ahistorical capacities, or even human capacity itself. Foucault vanquishes, through a dialogue on the vanquished, these sovereign claims to rationality, normativity (an increasingly nauseating term in contemporary discourse), and security that have been the tools to destroy certain forms of life for the sake of preserving the right kinds of lives, the lives that deserve living. Foucault has also enabled me to go beyond what I think can be dangerous discourses about production and utility with respect to disability. With my remarks here, I may find myself in trouble with some of my Marxist contemporaries. A very popular trend now attempts to insert disability discourse into a conventional, traditionalist, conception of Marxist politics. In doing so, it naturalizes disability, accepts the notion of the industrial reserve army, and the surplus population, that is, a strain of Marxist philosophy of disability accepts the supposed reality of a surplus population, which must be organized alongside some global united working class against the ideology of eugenics. This kind of disposition is wrong and dangerous for two reasons: First, this disposition takes up the grid of intelligibility of eugenic modernity and simply plays within its categories. One can only even speak of a supposed “surplus” of human beings once one has conceded to a mode of production that has rendered it an apparent phenomenon to be managed. Beyond that, this disposition plays directly into the intrusion of economic logic into all aspects of existence. It is a disposition that tacitly admits that all is, or must be, in relation to production, even supposedly “surplus” human beings. This kind of disability politics accepts a world revealed to us as potentially processes of production. It leads to the exact same anxiety that Marxists have regarding the _lumpenproletariat_. In my view, however, that is where our commitment must always lie if we are crip philosophers—with those whom both Hegel and Marx call the “rabble.” The violence of accepting such an ontology, with these categories, to me is unacceptable. Furthermore, a good reading of Foucault teaches us that from the French physiocrats to the Russian Cosmists, and on to the American and British effective altruists, “moral nomadism” of vagabondage, vagrancy, etc. is always considered unacceptable to the moralists of production. Second, eugenics cannot be reduced to an ideology. We must get beyond this. Eugenics is the result of a litany of historical strategies of knowledge that cannot be merely placed in the camp of political ideologies. Eugenics, in its modern political form, was a movement that spawned out of the British Left. These details are conveniently forgotten, perhaps because we do not want to confront the historical evidence that even the supposedly emancipatory discourses of the nineteenth and early twentieth century were congruent with and corresponded to the commitments of their reactionary counterparts. To simply treat eugenics as a branch of conservative social Darwinism is to reveal that one is either unfamiliar with the history or engaged in a tactical effacement. The old political distinctions of early modernity are no longer legible in the age of biopolitics. When institutionalists, left or right, speak of “releasing pressure” on healthcare and social security systems, they often land at the same conclusion. MAiD in Canada is a perfect example where the old political constituencies no longer held up. Foucault shows us that we cannot sit and console ourselves with tales about our humane alignment with progress, when it is often that very progress that subjugates and liquidates forms of life. The social model of disability (which treats disability as an ideological illusion and impairment as its real, underlying content) and Marxist variations of the social model (which treat eugenics as an ideological byproduct of a _particular_ mode of production) fit neatly within the formations of knowledge that made eugenics an organizing ontology of the present. Foucault persistently pushes us to go further, ironically demanding that we start at the level of practices and formations with which we are confronted in our present, not taking any of our current predicates as (pre)given. We must challenge the apparatus of disability itself, challenge its claims that disability is prediscursive, in addition to challenging the metaphysical assumptions that ground economy, Marxian economism included. _What directions do you think that future philosophical scholarship on Foucault and disability should take?_ We are at an inflection point in our epoch. Agamben, in a recent memoir, wrote that Hannah Arendt’s work was read “too late” and that “the hour of her legibility had long since passed.” I do not believe that this is a genuine risk for the work of Michel Foucault, but I do believe that the more entrenched our current condition becomes, the harder it will be for Foucault’s work to be legible to us. Philosophy continues to be stuck in the loop of trying to provide new rational ground to power. The future of Foucault scholarship depends on actually taking seriously archaeology and genealogy as not just methodologies, but as a kind of _ethos_. To take them as a way of life. Years ago, I ran a reading group with two friends, who were both annoyed at the state of Foucault scholarship. We approached him as a “destituent” thinker. We read him as the kind of thinker that neutralizes the claim power has on life, by revealing the operations that attempt to naturalize and ground the claim, and one that archives modes of disengagement with power. Destitution is not just a negation of the state as an institution. In lectures such as _Security, Territory, Population_ , Foucault shows us that the state is a set of practices and what can be called “conductings of conduct”. I believe that this work on Foucault, that is, this emphasis on a Foucault that reveals to us the various ways in which power—because it is without inherent legitimacy—is perpetually and desperately seeking ground is true to the spirit of his work. There is so much scholarship that tries to make Foucault to be some sort of secret but ardent theorist of a kind of democracy; the work of Sergei Prozorov, Roberto Esposito, Antonio Negri and Judith Butler comes to mind. This kind of work is interesting for what it reveals about these thinkers, but I think the result of it is a creative misreading of Foucault. There is great discomfort with the anarchic aspect of Foucault’s work; some authors seem to seek in Foucault some kind of acceptable arrangement of power. They are destined for disappointment and continued discomfort. As Foucault says, his work is an ethics of discomfort. Last year, Bernard Harcourt published an essay on genealogy and argued that it could, perhaps, “vindicate” particular practices of governance. This is not the direction in which I would like to take genealogy, as I do not think it is ever in the business of making those kinds of judgements—especially not of governance. Genealogy is not the practice of arriving at reasonable governance. This, then, is one of the great chasms between critical theory and genealogy. Genealogy does not attest to the irrationality of rationalizations of domination. We must work toward a perpetual de-realization of power. That is the “true movement,” if there is such a thing, in Foucault. To philosophers, critical theorists, and others who write off that declaration as highfalutin poetics, I have nothing to say, though I might ask them why they want to demand an answer to how the “should” be governed. When it comes to work on Foucault and disability, I believe that we must dismantle the apparatus of disability through a genealogical insurrection against the historical appearances of conceptions of human capacity. We need to see how philosophy has functioned to ground an autarchy of the human being predicated on its so-called capacities. I have tried to open the door to what this investigation might look like in various essays, with various levels of clarity. A friend of mine once said that the world is in the ruins of what it “can do.” And I think this skeptical disposition towards potentiality generally is the right skepticism to have in this moment. I think that the timeliness of this skepticism is most evident in philosophical discourses on artificial intelligence. I challenge anyone interested in philosophy of disability to earnestly listen to the discourses on it and not notice how ableism is a basic principle of its conditions of existence. The moment that thought became a question of ability, of capacity, of the effectuation of the world via human capability, a development like this was inevitable. Artificial intelligence is only a question of thought if thought is understood as capacity. This understanding of thought must be recognized as a historically constituted notion. All these questions about the subject and artificial intelligence are frustrating for this reason: We spend so much time handwringing about whether artificial intelligence presents us with a concept of thought without a thinking subject. The question is not what this preoccupation tells us about the substantiality or ideality of the subject, but rather how it reveals to us that Reason has always been aligned with a technology of the self that mobilizes the human. Once thought is grounded in a faculty, we cannot speak of it in any other terms than as an exceptional capability. What I am saying in this context has many implications; so obviously this problematization is one avenue of research that needs to be pursued with rabid Foucauldianism. Whether I, myself, pursue it, I cannot say. It would require very delicate but vast work. _What are you working on right now? Is your current work what you will present at Philosophy, Disability, and Social Change 6 ___on the panel to commemorate Foucault_ ‘s birth__?_ I cannot believe that you are organizing the sixth edition of this conference. What a wonderful achievement. I am currently working on a few projects, some smaller ones and others quite arduous. On the more soporific and scholarship-oriented side of things, I am working on an investigation into Foucault’s presentation of the Cynic across his later lectures and trying to directly connect it to the “methodology” that Foucault lays out in _On the Government of the Living_ , which he calls anarcheology. Anarcheology, broadly speaking, is a mode of delegitimizing power through an analysis of practices that must begin with a commitment to sever one’s bind to power. I argue that the cynic form of life is anarcheology pursued through a scandalous relation to the truth, that is, by living out a relationship to the truth that perpetually refuses power. As I intimated earlier, I believe that Foucault’s work comprises an ethos rather than a methodology, in the conventional sense of the term. Hence, biographers who over-sensationalize Foucault’s life (sometimes in a blatantly homophobic way) actually lose what was revolutionary in his work and perhaps even his life. I am not interested in a hagiography of Foucault; David Halperin has already literally done this. We so often love to take for granted what Foucault meant by the art of existence. I believe that conceiving Foucault’s work as an ethos is one way to actually see how it dissolves the chasm between “thought” and “practice.” In other words, the cynic is an anarcheologist. I will not present this project at Philosophy, Disability, and Social Change 6. I will likely discuss the deep connection between utopian discourse in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and gait analysis. There is a well-established hygienic element to discourses on utopia. But the emphasis of this work is gait and posture. This utopic world, this no-place which is both withheld and promised to us, is a world without lumbering. I will focus particularly on the interactions between utopian thinkers. Walter Benjamin and his critics’ strange analyses of his work, when coupled with their own utopianism, reveal these authors to be extremely biosocial thinkers. But beyond that, posture and gait have played crucial roles in how we conceive of the human being and its politics. Aristotle’s political animal is one whose “posture is upright,” unlike that of the naturalized slave or those “wretches” who find themselves beyond the wall of the _polis_. This “added capacity for politics,” as Foucault describes the assumption in Aristotle, directly coincides with how they move and use their bodies. I want to try and understand the relationship between what you have called the “eugenic impulse” of philosophy and the utopian trajectory of philosophy. So, I will use Philosophy, Disability, and Social Change 6 as an opportunity to work through these ideas more thoroughly. _Will, how would you like to end this interview? Are there topics or concerns that we have not discussed that you would like to address? Would you like to recommend some books, articles, blogs, or videos that readers and listeners should explore for more information about the issues that you have addressed?_ There is a plethora of “resources” that go underappreciated in the kinds of spaces in which I float. For readers of English, one such place would be IllWill.com. It is one of the only publications still trying to keep insurgent thought in circulation. As for books, I strongly recommend Marcello Tari’s _There Is No Unhappy Revolution: On the Communism of Destitution_, given that “destituency” was a topic touched on in this interview. My use of the term _destituency_ is largely informed by Tari’s book and by The Invisible Committee’s _Now_, which I also strongly recommend. For something closer to a kind of polemical cultural commentary (it’s really an anti-commentary), I recommend the Neo-passeism blog. I have no strong justification to recommend it; I just want more people to read it. It is difficult, in a world dominated by the logic of “attention,” to maintain this kind of work. And there is an opportunism that hides in any public-facing—digital or otherwise—encounter. Doing this kind of work cannot be about “finding an audience.” That is for the social programmers and commentators to worry about. That cannot be the “metric” of “success,” if we can even talk about such a thing as success. We must always try to avoid that entrepreneurialism of the self that neoliberalism consistently demands of us. Doing this kind of work must, instead, be about trying to posit interventions that allow people to find one another through them. Nothing I write or say is ever truly written by me, for authorship is a juridical concept. Everything that I come to write or say as I continue my education and research always has, hidden in it, the thousands of conversations that I have heard, overheard, participated in, etc. I have always found, and continue to find, that the most interesting and worthwhile discussions happen at the edges of the discourse. I think that projects like yours attest to this. My answers carry with them so many of the insights that I have garnered from BIOPOLITICAL PHILOSOPHY. I really want to congratulate you on the kind of encounters and debates that you foster in this interview series and on this blog in general. **_Will, thank you so much for this inspiring interview. Your remarks will be especially appreciated by the growing number of philosophers of disability who draw upon Foucault’s work, though not only these philosophers._** **_Readers/listeners are invited to use the Comments section below to respond to Will Conway’s remarks, ask questions, and so on. Comments will be moderated. As always, although signed comments are preferred, anonymous comments may be permitted._** **_The entire Dialogues on Disability series is archived on BIOPOLITICAL PHILOSOPHY_**** _here_****.** **_From April 2015 to May 2021, I coordinated, edited, and produced the Dialogues on Disability series without any institutional or other financial support. A Patreon account now supports the series, enabling me to continue to create it. You can add your support for these vital interviews with disabled philosophers at the Dialogues on Disability Patreon account page_**** _here_****.** __________________________________ _Please join me here again on Wednesday, December 17, 2025, for the next installment of the Dialogues on Disability series and, indeed, on every third Wednesday of the months ahead. I have a fabulous line-up of interviews planned. If you would like to nominate someone to be interviewed (self-nominations are welcomed), please feel free to write me at [email protected]. I prioritize diversity with respect to disability, class, race, gender, institutional status, nationality, culture, age, and sexuality in my selection of interviewees and my scheduling of interviews._ ### Share this: * Click to share on X (Opens in new window) X * Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window) Facebook * Like Loading... ### _Related_ https://biopoliticalphilosophy.com/2025/11/19/dialogues-on-disability-shelley-tremain-interviews-will-conway-2/