IN DEFENCE OF DE-PERSONS

HTTP://GUTSMAGAZINE.CA/ISSUE-SIX/IN
May 10, 2016
by Johanna Hedva

We must now collectively undertake a rewriting of knowledge as we know it.

Sylvia Wynter

I want to make a defence of de-persons. According to the American Psychiatric

Association, I am one. That is, I have been diagnosed with depersonalization/derealization
disorder (DP/DR for short), which means that I have significant, persistent, or recurrent
depersonalization (i.e., experiences of unreality or detachment from ones mind, self, or
body). What that means is that, at various times, my body, self, environment, and the world
itself do not feel real.

There are many ways to talk about personhood, and many of them are discourses about
what isnt personhood, or more sinisterly, who does not qualify to be part of that category.
DP/DR falls into this kind of discourse on personhood: the kind that defines who is not. The
suffix hood as it is attached to the word person is important here: hood means a
state of condition or being. So, when were talking about personhood, by definition,
thestate of the condition or the being of a person can be said to be different than the
person. In other words, personhood is apart from the person, personhood is not the person.

There is another way of looking at hood: the Proto-Germanic etymology of hood can
literally be translated to mean bright appearance. I am moved by this at the same time
that Im antagonistic to what it arrogatesthe implication that to be anything one must not
only appear, but also be bright.

Before I go further, Id like to claim the soil that I stand on, so I can dig as deep as I can
down into it. I am not a representative for a specific kind of experience; I am presentativeof
it. That is, Im doing it right now, in front of you, and in front of myself. I am a proponent of
aporia: thinking with holes in it, thinking that contradicts itself, that circles back, that reveals
the knotting and fraying and re-weaving of an argument so that it contains all of its

mistakes, so that you can see them, and so that I wont forget how I got here. My address
is from an affirmation of messiness, a testimony of and to disorder, an honouring of
incomplete-ness. Anne Boyer writes: Its not just our errors we become brave about, but
our projectsand our ownincompleteness. So here I am, in transit.

If Im going to wander around personhood, Ive got to reckon with universality, because
universality is the foundation for how we construct persons. Its the bedrock beneath the
patches of soil upon which all of us stand. Sara Ahmed explains it:

The universal is a structure not an event. It is how those who are assembled are
assembled. It is how an assembly becomes a universe The universal is the promise of
inclusion Universalism is how some of us can enter the room. It is how that entry is
narrated as magical; as progress.

I am guilty of hoping for such magic. Ive played the game of universalism, as we all have:
its the main game in town. So this is me trying to get out of town. The concept of the
person that has been defined, deployed, policed, and immured by universality is one that
promises self-determined completeness, wholeness, and power. In other words, that which
can be both mastered and the master.

A defence of a de-person could be said to be an embodiment of incompleteness, a

demonstration of bad thinking, a performance of un-comprehension, a refusal of mastery at
all.

Again, Im trying to get out of townIm headed for the wilds.

I start with the American Psychiatric Association (APA) because it is the institution that, so
far, has had the most influence in my life in terms of how Ive been constructed as a person
by the medical-industrial complex, and also as a citizen who is a political, cultural, racial,
gendered, economic, and social being. Ive been diagnosed with four conditions recognized

by the APA, which means my personhood has been defined, deployed, policed, and
immured by the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.

Receiving a diagnosis from the DSM is a life sentence: its ICD codes (which stand for
International Classification of Diseases), once scratched into your file, will remain with you
until death, and even afterward. If you become famous, they can find you posthumously
think of the speculative diagnoses that have wormed their way into the soil of Vincent van
Gogh, Jane Bowles, Virginia Woolf, oh, how I could go on.

Here is a summary of the DSM-Vs description of the main symptoms of depersonalization

and derealization in DP/DR:

The individual may feel detached from his or her entire being (e.g., I am no one, I have
no self). He or she may also feel subjectively detached from aspects of the self, including
feelings (I know I have feelings but I dont feel them), thoughts (e.g., My thoughts dont
feel like my own), whole body or body parts Episodes of derealization are
characterized by a feeling of unreality or detachment from, or unfamiliarity with, the world,
be it individuals, inanimate objects, or all surroundings. The individual may feel as if he or
she were in a fog, dream, or bubble, or as if there were a veil or a glass wall between the
individual and world around.

Depersonalization and derealization are not the same thing, but more like two sides of the
same experience: one describes a state of interiority (depersonalization), in terms of how
one feels about oneself; and the other describes an exterior state (derealization), or how
one feels about ones environment. DP/DR could be said to describe the skin between the
outside and the inside, and in both places, there is the feeling that neither is real.

The DSM-V has a little moment where it locates itself within the United States and its
imperial horizon, with the following passage about Culture-Related Diagnostic Issues:

Volitionally induced experiences of depersonalization/derealization can be a part of

meditative practices that are prevalent in many religions and cultures and should not be

diagnosed as a disorder. However, there are individuals who initially induce these states
intentionally but over time lose control over them and may develop a fear and aversion for
related practices.

Then, the following is offered as a risk and prognostic factor:

There is a clear association between the disorder and childhood interpersonal traumas in a
substantial portion of individuals In particular, emotional abuse and emotional neglect
have been most strongly and consistently associated with the disorder.

But the DSM has little to say beyond this passage on symptoms that can be correlated to a
cause; that is, why someone might experience such feelings. And the extent that they allow
trauma to reach is only interpersonal, never generational, institutional, or societal.

DP/DR is characterized as a disorder, not a disease, and its important to note the clinical
difference between the two. It comes down to whats called etiology, which is the cause
for something. If the etiology is known, its a disease. If no one has a clue, its a disorder.
So, embroidered into their own system of classification is the APAs acknowledgement of
both the failure and recursivity of its system. Theyve built in a kind of disclaimer for how
they will recognize and validate your experience, and it is based entirely upon their
ownrules of what is recognize-able. It has nothing to do with how you might recognize, or
feel validated within, or define, your own experience.

The clincher for all disorders and diseases, in terms of psychiatrythat is, when you go
from being well to illis when symptoms impair the individuals ability to function
normally. When the normative stops performing is when psychiatry intervenes. But
nowhere in the DSM is a definition of normaland youd really think there would be, since
so much in its 991 pages seems to rely upon it, and what it is not.

As we saw in the clause about volitionally induced experiences, the main problem arises
when control is lost. However, the agency of the individual person is the primary measure
for what kind of control is at stake: the DSM and APA are only concerned with self-control

not the loss of control, freedom, or agency as it can be affected, granted, rescinded, and
mitigated by the state.

Self-possession and self-mastery are the most legible and preferred forms of selfhood
within a society built upon the ideology of possession. What the DSM and APA configure,
and warn against, as a loss of self control can be read as a refusal of the mastery and
wholeness that Fred Moten and Stefano Harney have called the object/ive of
enlightenment self-control. That one cannot possess ones own self, it follows, precipitates
the necessity of a society that can do it for you. In turn, this instantiates the construct of a
self in ownership of itself as what is the mostthe onlyacceptable kind of person.

I think of the residents of Flint who had absolutely no control over whether they were in
possession of the most basic resource needed for their life to be sustained: water fit to
drink. I think of Joyce Curnell, a 50-year-old Black woman who died in the Charleston
County Jail because she was not given water to drink, despite repeatedly asking for it.
Thearticle about the lawsuit filed on behalf of her family reads: She spent the last 27 hours
of her life behind bars. During that time she became too sick to eat or call for help,
according to court documents filed this week. She vomited all night and couldnt make it to
a bathroom, so jailers gave her a trash bag. Instead of possession of her life, the police
gave her a trash bag.

When we confront the implications of these examples, we can see the state as a
mechanism that creates depersonalization. It is a device that simultaneously produces and
perpetuates de-personhood while negating the possibility of self-control. How about that for
a cause?

I also think of the many books Ive read on healing trauma, all of them written by white
doctors, that inevitably tell me that I have to regain a sense of self-mastery if I want to live
a productive life. In the recent bestseller The Body Keeps the Score, Dr. van der Kolk
asks, and then attempts to answer, the question: How can people gain control over the
residues of past trauma and return to being masters of their own ship?

Did no one stop and think about using the word master in the same sentence as ship?

The prefix de as we use it in English today is inherited mainly from French and Latin,
where it has meant down, down from, from, off; concerning, and also down, off, away,
from among, down from, but also down to the bottom, totally hence completely. It also
functions as a pure privative, a privative being a grammatical device that reverses a
verbs action, as in: not, do the opposite of, undo.

So, a de-person, is a not-person.

(I am no one. I have no self.)

And it is also a down-from person: a person down from the status of personhood.

In December 2015, I had a dissociative panic attack for the first time in three years without
my medication on hand. It was in the Copenhagen aquarium called Den Bl Planet, which
has been designed to make one feel as though underwaterstupid of me to forget my
meds, especially because for twenty years Ive had the recurring nightmare of being
underwater in an ocean of black water. One enters Den Bl Planet as though being
submerged into a sea cave. Inside, there is only dim, blue light. Silhouetted shadows of
fish, sharks, and whales are projected onto the ceiling. One can peer up at them circling
overhead. The lapping, sloshing sounds of water stream from hidden speakers, but they
are mostly drowned out by the voices of children running around, darting like little fishes.

In the bathroom, where I waited for the attack to pass, the only thoughts in my brain were
thing, thing, thing (a fog, dream, or bubble). There was blueblue paint on the wall of the
stall?which equaled thing. Each time the door slammed, it was with such ferocity that
my body felt rippedinto two things, then three, then many. The sound of the hand dryer,
even more ferocious and splittingthing, thing, thing.

Language breaks down (I cannot speak, or understand what is being spoken to me, during
these states) but not because it never existed, or because it is nothing, or because it seems
inadequate in a postmodern way, but because it uncreates. As Simone Weil puts it,
decreation is to make something created pass into the uncreated. Something that had

been createdsomething that had created mehas passed into its twinned shadow
state.No longer is the first-person intact, the I dissolves, and all the boundaries around
everything that have hitherto contained them, are drained of their solidity.

Down-from-ness. Not-ness.

How many people, as I write this, have been declaredpolitically, legally, medically,
culturally, economically, racially, socially, and gender-binarilyto be de-persons?

(as if there were a veil or a glass wall between the individual and world)

How many are struggling against such declarations? And how might we ever know the
answer to this question?

How many are resisting? What does that resistance look like, what does it do?

Id like to ask the APA: What about depersonalization when the state has made you that
way, has removed your agency from yourself, has taken over the control of how you are
identified and thus legitimized? What about derealization when the state has detached your
environment from you, dispossessed you of your land, or turned your surroundings into
something unbearable, something that cannot possibly be real?

When a person feels that they are not real, or that the world around them is not real, and
that they have no control over either realm: how do they fit into the universal version of
person?

In other words, who will they be allowed to beor not to be? Hamlets famous question
reveals his privilege, power, and, specifically, his authority: that he gets to decide whether
to be or not. At its etymological root, authority is about authorship: Hamlet can be
theauthor of himself.

How many are not allowed this? Whose stories have already been written for them?

The self-determined thing cannot be so if it emerges in a relationship, Denise Ferreira da

Silva writes, emphasis mine. So, what about those of us who have not had the privilege
that Hamlet had, to write our own story according to our own terms? (There is a clear
association between the disorder and traumas.)

What about those of us who have emerged vis--vis others, in relationship to each other,
and because of our own Other-ness? (My thoughts dont feel like my own!)

Da Silva calls them no-bodies. Jack Halberstam calls them zombies. Neve Be has called
them invisible theorists. Ive called them sick women. Moten and Harney have traced a
territory where they reside called the undercommons, and named a co-present condition
for some in that territory as, simply, blackness.

I think about the suffix ness instead of hood. It can also be traced to Proto-Germanic,
and means an action, quality, or state. Nowhere is the condition of being.

I think of the many for whom, politically, it is true that nowhere is the condition of being.

My main question here is: for those who are not, for those who have emerged in
relationship to rather than via self-determination, for those who are particular and
sometimes nowhere rather than universal, for those in the undercommons, for us invisible
theorists and for us no-bodies, how does the affirmation of de-person-nessoffer a new
form of political agency?

Its important to revisit ones past thinking and to lay it bare. As a principle of my feminism, I
think its important to quote myselfit puts my inspection and honouring of the past into
relief. As bell hooks says, Im working with the work. I want you to know that Im dealing
with history, and that Im troubled by how it has constructed my experience. I want you to
know that Im still listening, reading, and learning. In some primal, preverbal way, I feel Ive
got to deal with that first before I can look ahead; as a white-passing a.k.a. white-privileged
person, I believe it is my first obligation not to be a-historical.

To reckon with being haunted is important political work. It can account for why the world
right now has come to be as it is. And it can re-imagine a world that is not already foretold.

On January 19 2016, Mask Magazine published my article Sick Woman Theory, the
beginning of a project that is still radically incomplete, as am I. In it, I proposed a theory
that provocatively constructed a new universal subject position: the Sick Woman.

Let me be clear: I did not mean that our illnesses are not real, that our suffering is not ours,
that we are all literally women, or that women are essentially more vulnerable or more sick.
No, I was trying to get my head around what political conditions have constructed the soil
where I standand where stand many who are no-bodies, who live in a world, self, and
body that dont seem real when measured against the hegemonic norm.

Because of the nature of my chronic illnesses (endometriosis, fibromyalgia, and an as-yetto-be-diagnosed autoimmune disorder) and my mental illnesses (bipolar disorder, complex
PTSD, panic disorder, and DP/DR), I noticed that where I was standing:

1.

feminized me as a weak and crazy woman, despite the fact that I identify as
genderqueer;

2.

presumed I am white and middle-class, fixing to me the attendant signifiers of

middle-class whiteness (think of the Victorian white woman in bed with an
unnamable malaise and a maid bringing up her breakfast), despite my background
being poor and mixed-race Korean and white;

3.

moralized me, as though I had either willfully decided to put myself on the patch of
sick-soil, or ended up there because Id somehow lost my strength to be well; and

4.

erased my differences and specificities as a political, cultural, and social citizen.

From those observations, I began with some terms that have found their way into my soil,
and which claim to identify me: sickness, woman-ness, weakness, whiteness. I wanted to
reclaim a version of my self, rewritten into a version of the world that accounted for why I
felt detached from it in the first place (as if she were in a dream). I felt around for my body
(detached from her entire being) and, upon finding that it was both in pieces and missing
pieces, and that it had already been laid claim to by institutions without my permission, I
flailed like a bird trapped in a room. On every wall there were windows, but I kept only flying
up. Right into the ceiling.

The aporia of Sick Woman Theory is that it requires a cruelly optimistic humanism: to
construct and nurture a version of a human against a version of the humanand it still
relies upon the masters tools of enforcing discrete selfhood and self-possession. This
universalizing move is what Ahmed would call a melancholic universalism: the
requirement to identify with the universal that repudiates you.

Remember, bad thinking. Messiness. Being haunted.

I cannot think of a form of embodiment that is not somehow disordered. The enforcing of
self-possession has happened probably because of the selfs radical disorder. How this can
feel unbearable has resulted in the political implication that we are all ungovernable.
Governance then becomes the management of self-management, as Moten and Harney
write.

I forgive myself for my impulse to call for the ousting of the Healthy White & Propertied
Male from the throne of the universal subject position that hes sat in for so long. The
direction to go, we are conditioned to believe, is up. Like birds trapped in a room.

But its the throne itself that we must tear down: the throne on which the universal sits. That
there is a throne at all is the problemregardless of who sits in it. We dont need to go up.
Lets look to the windows, the way out.

We who are blasted apart, de-person-ed, detached from being, if we are looking toward
that throne of universality to consolidate and stabilize us as subjects, to make us whole as
people, to bestow upon us, finally, a political agency that we can call our own, in that we
can own it like a possession, then we are looking in the wrong direction. The place to begin
is by turning our backs on that throne, and toward an agency that doesnt depend on
enlightenment humanism, on the universal, on the self-determined subject of a rational
mind, on the hegemonic figure who has power over himself and others. Such an agency
can only function by constructing against its human, the monster, the monstrosity of the
Other. If our kind of agency depends on anything, it will depend on recognizing and
honouring that we are all of us disordered, messy, incorrigible, that we are in relationship to

others and interdependent on each other, as much as we are each of us differentand that
is fine.

The APA has a topic page on their website for Emotional Health that defines it like this:

Emotional health can lead to success in work, relationships and health. In the past,
researchers believed that success made people happy. Newer research reveals that its the
other way around. Happy people are more likely to work toward goals, find the resources
they need and attract others with their energy and optimismkey building blocks of
success.

There are many nights, when I start up in bed, the fight-or-flight nut of my brain exploding
its juices through my body, and I feel as if the only thing that really exists is being
extinguished: me. I also feel this sucked-out vacuum of self-extinction in line at the
pharmacy, to be told that one of my medications costs $800 USD a month without
insurance.

In capitalism, the primary purpose of ones lifeboth ideologically and materiallyis to

accumulate value. This is done through ones labour, but of course primarily relies upon the
exploitation of the labour of others and various resources of all kinds. As Silvia Federici has
argued, such exploitation requires an accumulation of differences, beyond Marxs primitive
accumulation of natural and labour resources, to justify itself: self/other, white/black,
male/female, society/nature, us/them, life/death.

The order that collects differences, the order that collects what Marx called labor still
objectifying itself, is the order of governance, write Moten and Harney. Governance was
invented for that which is ungovernableId like to suggest that it was invented for depersons in their promiscuous lack of self-control (a feeling of detachment from, or
unfamiliarity with, the world).

Within such a system, the person who is unable to labour because of their difference from
the normatively ableist well, is considered not only useless because they cannot work to
accumulate value, but they also stand in direct opposition to two important tenets of
capitalist ideology. The first is the premise that capitalist technology can take command of
the body. As Carolyn Lazard has written:

Capitalism objectifies the body. It views the body as an exploitable resource and attempts
to render it indestructible and unstoppable with the aid of technology And yet as
advanced capitalism has deemed the physical body an obsolete, outdated tool, the body
still remains. It continues to fail under capitalist conditions and gets pathologized as illness.
The body is another inconvenience that must be enhanced and optimized.

The second tenet the de-person antagonizes is the promise that neoliberalism can reduce
everything, including the decision to survive, down to personal choice, a matter of
willpower, and a problem the market can solve.

In neoliberalism, wellness is a prevarication: it usually stands in for life, but life in terms
of wealth, race, power, and, primarily, ability. Wellness in this context is paradoxically both
an innate moral virtue and an individuals own responsibility to maintainand is soaked in
ableism.

Mia Mingus puts it perfectly:

Ableism cuts across all of our movements because ableism dictates how bodies should
function against a mythical norman able-bodied standard of white supremacy,
heterosexism, sexism, economic exploitation, moral/religious beliefs, age, and ability.

Boyer writes: Wellness, like gender, was so constructed, on a good day I could fabricate its
appearance in eighteen minutes.

I cant write about the prefix de without also writing about the prefix dis. De and
dis are twinned, convex and concave, like depersonalization and derealization. Dis
comes directly from Old French and Latin and means apart, in a different direction,
between, as well as lack of, not do the opposite of apart, away. Almost the same as
debut for its Proto-Indo-European root, dwis, meaning twice. So, a two-ness, a
split-off.

Depersonalization disorder falls under the DSM-V category of Dissociative Disorders, and
the name for the bit of time when I am detached from myself is calleddissociation.

Again, I quote the DSM-V so as to reveal the conceptual framework upon which such
diagnoses rely:

Dissociative symptoms are experienced as unbidden intrusions into awareness and

behavior, with accompanying losses of continuity in subjective experience and/or inability
to access information or to control mental functions that normally are readily amenable to
access or control The dissociative disorders are frequently found in the aftermath of
trauma, and many of the symptoms, including embarrassment and confusion about the
symptoms or a desire to hide them, are influenced by the proximity to trauma.

Two weeks is the longest continuous period of time during which Ive been dissociated. It
occurred at the psychotic peak of a manic episode. When the dissociative episode began, it
was mid December, nearing the 2012 holiday season. When it subsided, and I emerged, it
was a few days into the new year, January, 2013.

I remember little of what happened during those two weeks. It was a loss of continuity in
subjective experience, yes, and, yes, also an inability to access information normally
amenable to access and control. The DSM is right there.

I was house-sitting for friends who were out of the country for Christmas. I was in the
second year of my MFA; it was the winter break, classes were to resume at the end of
January. At the time I was seeing a person, whod been something of a best friend for a
year prior, in a relationship that was viscid, confusing, held together the way strands of hair

in a drain are, by soapy debris and the centripetal force of a vortex. I know that he was
present for much of the episodehe must have been, because when I returned, he was
no longer there. His abandonment was so abrupt, violent, and totalI never saw him again
that the only reason for it must be that he witnessed something terrifying during those
two weeks.

Perhaps challenging the premise that I am not intact during these episodes, I wrote a lot
while dissociated that winter. In fact, I wrote nearly an entire manuscript of poems. Reading
them now, I feel flanked by embarrassment and confusionthe proximity to trauma. But Id
like to quote one here (I shall quote only myself!), in an effort to reveal what a mind can
do during a loss of subjective experience.
ON LYING STILL FOR THE HOURS OF AN AFTERNOON

Eventually, one witnesses

an event that was once
considered an alchemical miracle:
the light from the sun changes
from white to gold. Imagine that
each day, when we arent home,
the sofa and its cushions
are bathed in this, this, this, this, thisthis, magic.
When a person puts her face
in this divine arc, shes only
irritated. She squints. Thats because
we are the most fragile
of all creatures. Even a sofa
can stare directly into the sun,
even the sofa can outlast us. Imagine:
an immense ball of fire,
in an infinite icy vacuum
has a storm rage on its face for 14,000 years,
has towers of flame taller than whatever,
spitting godhead nuclear hydrogen light into nothingness

into the abyss that keeps expanding

and it hears nothing back.
It says nothing back.

Ive included this poem as a monument to astonishment, my own astonishment. Im

astonished that I wrote it. I dont remember writing it, and so Im astonished that the
oriented, possessed-of-herself (according to the institutions of the APA and DSM) Johanna
Hedva was absent when it was created. So maybe the word for its inclusion in this essay is
not monument, but cenotaph: a tomblike monument to someone buried elsewhere. A
someone, elsewhereso thats where I went.

A mental collapse, for me, is a totalizing inability to function in this world: I cannot speak,
understand language, get out of bed, read, write, bathe or feed myself, sleep or wake
without medicationand this usually lasts several months. It is that I cannot be in any
legible way. Instead of being, I barely exist. I swim in jagged visions and washes of feeling.
I pass into a territory, or an atmosphere, where language cannot go, and where noneno
one person, and also no thoughts, no definitions, no explanations, no languagecan follow
me.

There has been only one dissociative episode in which a complete thoughta full,
coherent sentencecame to me that I still remember. It occurred toward the end of my
worst mental collapse, one that lasted four months and from which it took me nearly
eighteen months to recover. The dissociation happened at night, in a car. I was being
driven through Elysian Park in Los Angeles. As usual, I felt as if I was being obliterated,
and I felt my existence start to shred. But that night, the obliteration deepened: it was not
only me who was being extinguished, but also meaning itself. The world slid. I felt as if I
was floating in space, detached from the spaceship, a speck in an infinite dark.

The thought that came to me was this: There is only Nothingness. And it is beautiful. I wept
for the next twelve hours. It is how I came to understand myself as a mystic.


In the fall of 2015, I was a research fellow in a project called at lands edge, under the
mentorship of Fred Moten. Id sent him an early draft of Sick Woman Theory, but I only
wanted to talk about mysticism. After the dissociative episode that brought the thought of
Nothingness with it, my panic during such episodes had diminished, and Id found myself
embracing the feeling of self-extinction. The best way I could describe it was through the
language of mysticism, but as an atheist, and freshly graduated from a critical theory
program, this felt untenable.

In my meetings with Fred, we spoke of mysticism as an experience of union with the world.
Fred, in his usual precise but gentle evisceration of what we take as truth, talked about the
fatal flaw embedded in the notion of such a union, which is that union already implies
separability. That is, because mysticism produces both a new concept of the self (that
there isnt a self) and a new concept of the world (that it is an entity ones self can be in
union with), mysticism is at odds with the concept of itself. In other words, how can you be
in union with anything, if your self does not exist?

I like that. That the baffling, painful, annihilating, transformative, intense-as-fuck process of
contradiction that is dissociation, results in a state of contradiction that is in itself a refusal
of what is.

Ive come to believe that what mysticism ultimately proposes is that the extent that one has
a self is how much of it you can give away.

As Fred pointed out to me, the etymological root for the words privilege and private is
the same. Its from the Latin privus, which means simply, individual. That an individual
can have privilege is also the extent to which such an individual can be private. Its why
white people dont know what white supremacy is, or that they benefit from itwhiteness
itself is a kind of totalizing assumption toward privacy.

As Fred said, Privilege is a radical incapacity for sociality.


The affirmation of de-person-ness that Im proposing is not so much a refusal of discreteness, of personhood as such, but rather: an affirmation of indiscrete-ness, of a tremendous
indiscretion. De-governable, de-master-able, de-possessed, de-owned, de-owing, deprivate, de-privileged, de-individual.

The political manifestation of thisI thinkis a radical sociality, a bunch of chairs for us all
to sit in.

Which will certainly be a big fucking mess.

Lets go.

Earlier versions and excerpts of this text have been read live on The Oracle Hour on
KCHUNG Radio with Amanda Yates Garcia, on February 7, 2016; at Sick Fest, at Chapter
510, in Oakland, on March 26, 2016; at Sick/Tender/Haunted, hosted by South of Sunset in
Los Angeles, on March 31, 2016, and at lands edge: Dialogues, at Los Angeles Municipal
Art Gallery, on April 3, 2016. Id like to thank the hosts, fellow speakers, and audiences at
each event for their support in bearing witness to the development of this ongoing project.
Id also like to thank Michelle Dizon and the at lands edge fellows, Fred Moten,
Constantina Zavitsanos, Neve Be aka Lyric Seal, Carolyn Lazard, Anne Boyer, Emma
Borges-Scott, and Johannes Beck for the conversations weve had together that have
informed this work.

ABOUT
Johanna Hedva is a fourth-generation Los Angelena on her mothers side and, on her
fathers side, the granddaughter of a woman who escaped from North Korea. She is the
writer/director of The Greek Cycle, a series of feminist-ed and queered Ancient Greek plays
that were performed in Los Angeles from 2012-2015; and the author of The Crow and the
Queen, a novel published in limited-edition handmade hardcovers in 2013. She is currently
at work on This Earth, Our Hospital (Sick Woman Theory and Other Writings), a political
manifesto that converges with autohagiography, and her second novel, The Twin.

Image by Pamila Payne

Nails by Merkel

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