The Nightmare of Health: Metaphysics and Ethics in the Signification of Disability

Signification and Possibility

Snyder, Brueggeman, and Garland-Thompson consider disability "a fundamental human experience" as well as "the ubiquitous unspoken topic of contemporary culture" (2). This is accurately stated but oblique, as it is ability, more precisely, that is the ubiquitous topic, and a topic not only difficult to recognize but even to speak—perhaps a topic that is unspeakable. The study of disability tends to suggest this reversal, while often reversing the way sociocultural articulations appear to work, such as when disability critiques seek to expose reification. Indeed, the theoretical study of disability is concerned largely with the assumption of ability, with ableist assumptions that emerge constantly, by which behaviors and conditions appear as if they were real or natural. Confronting discourses about defective eyes or legs, or about mental or emotional affliction—features that putatively cause one's inability to see or walk or cope—a disability critique will often recognize that, in the language of ability, seeing, walking, and coping are themselves being defined and thus emerge as at best interpretations of the supposed psychosomatic realities, realities that are revealed to emerge posterior to the always ad hoc, if naturalized, interpretive terms.¹ Insofar as the study of disability becomes itself caught up in such a reversal, such study becomes defined according to what it does: not primarily concerned with the body or the mind, nor with specifically defined impairments, but rather with the discourse of the possible and the sociocultural context and ramifications of such discourse.

I wish to examine what disability means, what the study of it entails, in a way that moves beyond a critique of the word as joining with ableism, with the constitution of categorical human ability. As Peggy Phelan recognizes, any expression of disability—such as the categorical phrase "people with disabilities"—will tend to develop an ontology of central, standardized human ability, submitting performance to articulations of competence already established in the sociocultural imagination (322).² Even in such expressions, however, we may hear inflections of radical difference, desire for the unnatural priority of ability to any conception of competence. Thus, we may consider how a virgule marks any expression of disability as dis/ability, marking the non-presence of ability by striking through the ostensibly simple dialectic of articulated competence and the lack of access thereto. Indeed, ability is never articulated and cannot be; all we have of ability is what we have through signification. As language provides the inevitable and impossible approach to its objects, the linguistic conditions of possibility for approach are also the conditions of impossibility, hence the im/possibility that marks dis/ability. It is redundant—if perhaps heuristically useful—to point out that nature, being, and ability are terms to be thought of as under erasure, caught as if logically posterior to incomprehensible referents, even as the referents themselves nevertheless cannot be thought of outside reference. As we view the discourse of disability participating in the sociocultural signification of ability, we concomitantly view ability as the possibility of signification. We undermine the naturalization of the sociocultural as the origin of articulation as we find articulation emerging in response to imperatives to articulate and to disarticulate. We find the imperative of overcoming the ontology of ability inherent in articulations of that ontology: we recognize the denaturing in the heart of naturalization.

Of course, not only contemporary expressions of the notion of disability constitute the ableist articulation of ability. Historically, the expression of disability has articulated the recognition of categorical difference. "Disability" has usually indicated the emergence of specific problems inherent for a subject that are of another order than problems considered too general, pertaining to most or all subjects, or idiosyncratic, pertaining only to an individual. The characterization of deafness as involving ability different from hearing is a counterexample to commonly noted expressions of disability, expressions by which difficulty has typically been cited as the primary feature of a condition. And whereas earlier in history—pre-Enlightenment, in the West—supposed difficulty, strangeness, and deformity may have aided in the development of centralized ideals...