Engaging Uselessness: Philosophical Reading and Dwelling in the Excess

Abstract

In this article, I explore how to make space in the neoliberal academy for inquiry that welcomes what is yet to be thought, imagined, anticipated while also remaining responsible to institutional demands that privilege a certain type of academic subject. I draw upon Manning and Massumi’s notion of uselessness to position philosophy as a generative tool. Specifically, I explain how useless reading of philosophy positions becoming an academic subject as a continuous process of experimentation and learning instead of a reproduction of available descriptions enabled by neoliberalism. Philosophical reading exceeds the boundaries of what is already recognizable, and I dwell in that excess, shifting the focus away from complicity or resistance as the only possible responses to neoliberal mandates (either/or) and move instead toward rethinking ways of being, knowing, living, and responding to others in the world (both/and).

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