MONDAY NIGHT LECTURE SERIES | DOING NOTHING/NOTHING DOING | SPRING 2026

High and Idle: Empire, Care, and the Refusal to Recover

Intoxication has long been portrayed as the enemy of progress — the antithesis of rational, productive action. Modern therapeutics, meanwhile, promise restoration to activity: recovery, productivity, self-mastery. This talk explores what it means to resist that imperative. Building on a decolonial analysis of drug politics, this talk asks what forms of agency reside in sedation, burnout, or the refusal to “get better.” Drawing from Kaye’s current book project, Using Drugs: Race, Empire, and the Ordering of Health, the lecture examines intoxication as a practice of doing nothing that does something — suspending the time of labor, loosening the grip of (colonial) discipline, and imagining forms of freedom beyond sobriety’s moral economy. Tracing this lineage from the opium wars to the opioid epidemic, Kaye considers what a decolonial ethics of slowness, numbness, and refusal might look like in our own overactive present.

Doing Nothing/Nothing Doing
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