MAXI  WALLENHORST

Lecture
Aug 9 / 15:30 / PODIUM
FREE

Maxi Wallenhorst is a writer living in Berlin. She’s a doctoral researcher at Leuphana University Lüneburg. Most recently, her essays have appeared in e-flux journal and Berlin Review. 

Against Vulnerability! On Weakness

Throughout the 2010s and early 2020s, vulnerability became a focal point of aesthetic discourse, especially in feminized fields such as performance and poetry. Suddenly there were bodies everywhere, and it seemed important to redescribe them as precarious, entangled, vibrant, a "soft animal": inherently capacious yet at risk. While these new rhetorical twists—now so easy to satirize—helped make certain structural antagonisms palpable, they also contracted our political imagination: as if embodiment, to paraphrase Marina Vishmidt, were merely an ontological common and not a brutally simple abstraction of capitalist social relations. As if all we had to do with our vulnerabilities was be more careful. Through a queer and Marxist-feminist lens, this talk develops another concept of weakness. It figures weakness not as a sentimental property of individuals but as the very quality of social struggles—the slack, partial, barely-holding ties that bind struggles, critiques, and desires—a weakness that queer poetics is especially equipped to register. As Larry Mitchell writes, "Even weak links in the chain are links in the chain." To this end, the talk figures out the weak spots in some poems. It close-reads them for the way they show just how weak the connection between struggles, critiques, and desires has to be in order to generate enormous force.