Evan Calder Williams: On Paralysis

Editor Brian Kuan Wood talks to Evan Calder Williams about his e-flux journal essay series, “On Paralysis.” Recorded in May 2025 before the launch of e-flux journal issue #152, the conversation discusses stoppage, sabotage, disability, delay, and damage, as well as the critical tools the “On Paralysis” series finds in the hidden intimacies between limited movement and expressive power. 

Read all four installments of the series here: Part One, Part Two, Part Three, and Part Four. 

 

Paralysis has become a term and idea inseparable from contemporary understandings of subjectivity, infrastructure, politics, and war. Conjuring associations of indecision, physical immobility, and trauma, it names a breakdown of the normal processes of circulation and information that promise systemwide health and seamless flow. But what if the very smoothness of these circuits of production is precisely what debilitates human bodies and broader systems of relay and exchange? And what are the potentials for refusal and unexpected agency that can be found in the interval when nothing works like it's supposed to?

Evan Calder Williams is an associate professor at the Center for Curatorial Studies for Bard College, where he also teaches in the Human Rights program. He is the author of the books Combined and Uneven Apocalypse; Roman Letters; Shard Cinema; and, forthcoming with Sternberg Press, Inhuman Resources. He is the translator, with David Fernbach, of Mario Mieli’s Towards a Gay Communism and is a Contributing Editor to e-flux journal, as well as a former member of the editorial collective of Viewpoint Magazine.