Oliver Sacks, The Embodied Mind, and the Value of Desire

WILLIAM MAJOR Oliver Sacks, The Embodied Mind, and the Value of Desire I. NARRATIVES OF SELF ccoRDiNG t? neurologist Oliver Sacks, "neurology's favourite word is 'deficit,' denoting an impairment or incapacity ofneurological function: loss of speech, loss of language, loss of memory, loss of vision, loss of dexterity, loss of identity and myriad other lacks and losses of specific functions (or faculties)" (Man 3). Perhaps the most intriguing "loss" for our purposes is this putative "loss of identity," to which all other deficits in the ill or the disabled, either simply or in some combination, often lead. It follows, ofcourse, that the premise for such loss must be an identity to lose, a notion to which Sacks subscribes but that Francisco J. Várela, Evan Thompson, and Eleanor Rosch, authors of The Embodied Mind (1991), and I dispute. Sacks notes, however , that loss need not be the only defining characteristic of the neurologically impaired; indeed, as he suggests in his Preface to The Man Who Mistook His Wife for A Hat (1987), part of his mandate as a neurologist is to reintroduce into the medical field the classical narrative case history, the better to "restore the human subject at the centre— the suffering, afflicted, fighting, human subject—we must deepen a case history to a narrative or tale," Sacks writes, "only then do we have a 'who' as well as a 'what,' a real person, a patient, in relation to disease— in relation to the physical" (viii). In his investigations of neuropathology , then, Sacks finds that his patients inevitably compensate for the effects ofneurological impairment: "it must be said from the outset that a disease is never a mere loss or excess—that there is always a reaction, on the part of the affected organism or individual, to restore, to replace, Arizona Quarterly Volume 55, Number 3, Autumn 1999 Copyright © 1999 by Arizona Board of Regents ISSN 0004-1610 84William Major to compensate for and to preserve its identity, however strange the means may be" (Man 6). Thus, out of the detritus of the illness experience Sacks locates some vestige of inviolable subjectivity in what he sees as a universal '"striving to preserve identity'" (Man 6). While both Sacks and Várela, Thompson, and Rosch employ provisional notions of identity in their respective theorizations on the nature of selfhood, the former is not prepared to accept fully what it means to have one's self—a dubious construct for Várela and his co-authors—determined by the body. Although Sacks clearly recognizes that "bodyimage is not fixed . . . [it] is dynamic and plastic" (Leg 194), he presupposes the self as the basic unit in any theorization of subjectivity, rather than the contingency that would follow from a theory of the body as the prime element in identity. The self is thus less material than ideological , lending organization and coherence to random experience, a position that seems to contravene what it means to have an experience in the first place. While Sacks' autobiography, A Leg To Stand On (1984), and The Embodied Mind explore the ontological and epistemological quandaries and the vexing generic questions raised in an attempt to theorize the contingent self, Sacks works through corporeal experience to posit the inevitability of the human subject;1 Várela, Thompson, and Rosch, however, substitute the epistemological frontiers of cognitive theory (which they explore at great length and with much success) with the comfortable platitudes of an Eastern meditative philosophy that would seem to fail to take into account the primacy of the body in the construction of self. The effect of the latter appears to be a certain denial of the very material nature of experience upon which they deconstruct humanist identity. Before embarking on a sustained examination of A Leg To Stand On and The Embodied Mind, I want to discuss Varela's essay, "The Reenchantment of the Concrete," in which Várela uses a cognitivist and post-humanist methodology to critique Enlightenment modes of subjectivity . Várela argues that the West's suppositions about the world and experience, based as they are on assumptions that are supposed to be '"rationalistic"' and "'objectivist,'" are in reality '"abstract"' and devoid...