Inbuilt Errans:What Is and Is Not ‘Radical Indifference’

‘Inbuilt errans’ points to the core of the concept, namely the semantic entanglement of errantry and error. Errans as the erroneous wandering or the drifting error complicates the celebration of movement, fluidity, flexibility, or even ‘queering’. The rigid or stubborn aspect of errans, its erroneousness on the other hand not only accompanies but also enables its errancy. The ‘rigidity’ (as rigidity in flux) requires scare quotes in order to mark the ways in which these qualities might collapse when a question of ‘to whom?’ is posed. Through an eclectic errantry through a personal anecdote, a meme video, an ethnographic note, as well as medical history and queer theory, this text theorizes, with the help of the ‘inbuild errans’ of the human body, that is, its orifices, a ‘radical indifference’ that points to an unplanned, ambiguous, and weak while at the same time strategic, rigid, and powerful form of resistance.Zairong Xiang, ‘Inbuilt Errans: What Is and Is Not “Radical Indifference”’, in Errans: Going Astray, Being Adrift, Coming to Nothing, ed. by Christoph F. E. Holzhey and Arnd Wedemeyer, Cultural Inquiry, 24 (Berlin: ICI Berlin Press, 2022), pp. 159-75