23.1.,
30.1,
13.2.,
20.2.2025,
4 - 6 pm
Kunsthalle Exnergasse
The Right to Maim Reading Club
The work of Jasbir Puar is crucial for understanding the intersections of imperialism and mass disablement. Come and read together, process together, regulate emotionally. We can decide on the format collectively, distribute pdfs of the book and if you would like to join online please contact us and we can create a hybrid encounter.
In The Right to Maim Jasbir K. Puar brings her pathbreaking work on the liberal state, sexuality, and biopolitics to bear on our understanding of disability. Drawing on a stunning array of theoretical and methodological frameworks, Puar uses the concept of “debility”—bodily injury and social exclusion brought on by economic and political factors—to disrupt the category of disability. She shows how debility, disability, and capacity together constitute an assemblage that states use to control populations. Puar's analysis culminates in an interrogation of Israel's policies toward Palestine, in which she outlines how Israel brings Palestinians into biopolitical being by designating them available for injury. Supplementing its right to kill with what Puar calls the right to maim, the Israeli state relies on liberal frameworks of disability to obscure and enable the mass debilitation of Palestinian bodies. Tracing disability's interaction with debility and capacity, Puar offers a brilliant rethinking of Foucauldian biopolitics while showing how disability functions at the intersection of imperialism and racialized capital.
The Reading Club will be held mainly in english.
Book cover © Jasbir K. Puar, The Right to Maim
That's how you get here!
Public Transport
subway U6, bus 40A - station Währinger Straße/Volksoper
trams 5, 33, 40, 41, 42 - station Spitalgasse
Arrival by car
There are a number of public car parks around WUK. Parking tickets are required.
Disabled parking
A disabled parking space is located behind the WUK at Wilhelm-Exner-Gasse 5.
Barrier-free access to Kunsthalle Exnergasse via Währinger Straße 59 through the passageway into the courtyard, left to lift B, 1st floor, direct entrance via the automated glass door on the right into Kunsthalle Exnergasse.
Barrier-free WC available
Please note: The WUK courtyard is mostly paved with cobblestones.
There is a tactile guidance system for blind and visually impaired people only from the courtyard gate at the Währinger Straße entrance to the WUK information office.
