Affirming an Impersonal Life: A Different Register for Disability Studies

A fundamental tenet of the disability movement continues to be the validation of one’s own identity and politics based on various disabilities: sensory, psychiatric, developmental, environmental, and physical (or any combination of the aforementioned). Underlying this politics of identity is the self-reflexive individual. Giorgio Agamben has argued that Gilles Deleuze moves the discussion to a different register, that of the impersonal life (without a self). The article asserts that the field of Disability Studies should embrace this different register, thereby affirming the vitalism of an impersonal life.