Shared Suffering and Chronic Vulnerability in the Poetry of Brian Teare

Brian Teare’s The Empty Form Goes All the Way to Heaven (2015) emphasizes our embodied existence as a process of ongoing change intimately linked to all others. Empty Form offers a conception of vulnerability as inevitable and persistent, as well as a shared site of potential. As this chapter ultimately argues, instead of contributing to the liberal humanist fantasy of mastery and control—which is a pervasive disavowal of vulnerability—medicine as an institution can help foster an awareness of epistemic vulnerability that is crucial to undoing oppressive social relations. If medicine can view the embodied individual as an assemblage characterized by flows of human and nonhuman vitality—as a permeable ecosystem, rather than a stable entity—then medicine (and the culture it helps shape) can start to view vulnerability, and death, as intersubjective and transformational.