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  • Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, and . . . Vulnerability
  • Julia Kristeva (bio)
    Translated by Jeanine Herman

Disabilities are multiple—motor, sensory, psychical, mental—and singular. Each disabled person is a singular person experiencing his or her situation in a specific, different, unique way. Yet whatever the disabilities, they confront us with incomparable exclusion, different from the others: the disabled person opens a narcissistic identity wound in the person who is not disabled; he inflicts a threat of physical or psychical death, fear of collapse, and, beyond that, the anxiety of seeing the very borders of the human species explode. And so the disabled person is inevitably exposed to a discrimination that cannot be shared.

If I attempt to share this situation, however, it is not only because of my son’s neurological difficulties, which led to an atypical education for him and exposed me to the singularity of each disabled person. Nor is it because, as a psychoanalyst, I have treated psychical disabilities (depression, psychosis, borderline states, and other disorders). But because my frequent visits outside the Hexagon have convinced me that, compared to countries such as Sweden, Norway, Belgium, Canada, the United States, and many others, France has been slow to establish a true solidarity with disabled people and to provide personalized support for each of them.1 In fact, at the dawn of this millennium, while biology, anthropology, and astrophysics explore human frontiers and the most advanced democracies refuse discrimination against people whose bodies and minds test our notions of human identity, trying to incorporate them into every level of society, France, in this difficult, provocative, and promising moment, is still a long way from creating what one would be right to expect from the country of the rights of man. [End Page 251]

More fundamentally still, faced with the rather cynical pragmatism of some and the religious clashes of others, I am convinced that humanism—which has always been in search of itself, from its emergence in the past to its crises or revitalizations today and in times to come—can find a chance to revitalize itself in the battle for the dignity of the disabled by constructing what is still sorely lacking: respect for a vulnerability that cannot be shared. My ambition, my utopia, consists of believing that this vulnerability reflected in the disabled person forms us deeply, or, if you prefer, unconsciously, and that as a result, it can be shared. Could this humanism be the “cultural revolution” with which to construct the democracy of proximity that the postmodern age needs?

The outsize nature of this ambition is actually built on ordinary, painful, everyday experiences. Here are three, among many others:

John, Claire, and the Woman on Television

People Say I’m Crazy was the title of a documentary shown on TV in the United States, which I saw during a recent visit. The film aims to show how a schizophrenic person can be “cured” and “integrated” into society. The hero, stuffed full of medications that make him “obese” (his complaint), might be saved by his sister, a filmmaker who comes up with the idea of filming poor John, who likes to draw and make woodcuts. Thanks to the film, his works are soon made public; he has an exhibition; he is showered with grants. The madman has become “a disabled artist.” He can leave the appalling shelter he shares with a few others of his kind, and even find a certain serenity, because social services now pays for a home worthy of being called one. Now he is cured. The only thing left to do is to award the film a prize, which happens shortly thereafter.

From time to time, the artist protests against the camera that is trained on him and, to some extent, against those who are making his illness a work of art. But he ends up going along with it, and participates, so to speak, in the filming. Isn’t the camera a third party that recognizes him, a bit of space between his ill-being and his family? John is not crazy enough to deprive himself of that. More than the charming, “very American” therapist who encourages him with her kind, “social worker...

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