Inhuman Resources

What gets stranded outside the borders of the political? Inhuman Resources develops an account of sabotage, insubordination, and the invisible activities that undermine the ideas of accountability and identification on which representative politics rely. Drawing from histories of labor, disability, infrastructure, writing, and war, Williams offers genealogies of the tropes of paralysis and sabotage, which leave behind notions of public citizenship to reveal an “inhuman” agency that hinges on the unexpected friction between humans, materials, machinery, and other non-human life. Spanning an ambitious range of subjects—from prison architecture to digital animation, legal history to self-help books, and electrical blackouts to silkworms saturated with toxic dye—Inhuman Resources gathers materials for thinking differently about insurgent activity.