The Disarticulate: Language, Disability, and the Narratives of Modernity by James Berger (review)

James Berger’s second book has been published in New York University Press’s Cultural Front series, which, rather than having a thematic focus, develops “new ways of thinking about—and promoting—open and egalitarian societies.” As such, his title represents something of a misnomer. “The Disarticulate,” as Berger explains in the book’s helpful introduction, was originally “The Dys-/Disarticulate,” before an editorial decision to erase the slash so as to avoid confusion. The erasure and subsequent reintroduction of this slash, this confusion, this stutter acts as a fitting reenactment of the ethical challenges presented by this book, which concerns itself with the relationship between the symbolically apprehensible and the not-linguistic, the speaking and the non-speaking. For Berger, the figure of the dys-/disarticulate resides, or at least is imagined to reside, at the boundary of the social-symbolic, a liminal place where there is no adequate terminology. As disarticulate, this figure is “forcibly severed from the social fabric, stigmatized, silenced, possibly physically dismembered” (2). As dysarticulate, this figure is “blocked from language, standing at the convergence of all of language’s impasses: those of injury, trauma, neurological variation, socio-political silencing, and the workings of language itself as language plots its own aporias.” Figured linguistically as the “outside of language” and perceived as the “other,” the dys-/ disarticulate foregrounds and problematizes representational strategies and ethical considerations. Berger brings a wealth of both professional and personal experience to bear on such matters. His first book, After the End: Representations of Post-Apocalypse (1999), engaged with the limits of language by considering what would be the symbolic remainder after trauma, after “apocalypse.” His relationship with his two developmentally disabled sisters, Susan and Claudia, led him, meanwhile, to reflect on experiences of separation, questions of home and institution, feelings of sibling responsibility, and, ultimately, the issue of care as it relates to those with linguistic and cognitive impairments. Issues of metaphor, trauma, and care animate this important work, which has much to offer the fields of disability theory, literary studies (particularly the study of modernist and postmodern literature), and neuroscience.

Today, all of us live among the ruins of Babel. The first, Adamic, language purported to be a perfect language, a language that named things truly, unambiguously, perfectly. Each term was precisely a proper term. With the fall of Babel came the fall into languages, “into ambiguity, duplicity, multiplicity, jokes, puns, lies, translations, fictions, and truths in the plural” (16). If language was once indexical, truly naming the thing, after this second fall it became merely conventional, always dependent on a third term. According to Berger, if language is tropic, lacking proper terms, then “catachresis” should be understood as the general condition of language. Catachresis is, for him, the very foundation of language. As such, an account of its workings constitutes a great deal of this book. Berger defines catachresis, or kata-chresis (kata: against; chresis: use), as “an abuse of language,” that is, as “the use of the wrong word or of a word with a standard usage in one context dragged into a use against usage in another” (28). A good example of this would be the statement “I see a voice.” Understood in this way, catachresis takes the common understanding of metaphor to its extreme. Where metaphor commonly means to make an implicit comparison between two different things, summoning a term from one context to another, catachresis means “to ‘bear across’ … from the inexhaustible, and inexhaustibly desired, realm of not-language into language” (29). It means to gesture toward the outside of language. Accordingly, it is, Berger suggests, catachresis that facilitates the emergence of language out of nonlanguage.

Such an understanding of metaphor as catachresis serves to highlight, for Berger, a central problem of a particularly influential strain of thought in disability studies—the rendering of all metaphorical use of disability as problematic. Although Berger also takes issue with the work of Rosemarie Garland-Thomson...