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The Subject at Hand: Blind Imaging, Images of Blindness
- Social Research: An International Quarterly
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Volume 78, Number 4, Winter 2011
- pp. 1243-1262
- 10.1353/sor.2011.0053
- Article
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This essay describes the friendship between Denis Diderot, the Enlightenment philosopher and art critic, and Melanie de Salignac, a seventeen-year-old girl who had been totally blind since her infancy. I compare their discussion of her conceptualizations of visual phenomena to autobiographical accounts by blind people from the 19th century to the present, and to theories about brain plasticity developed by modern cognitive scientists who study images of blind people's brains.