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Reconsidering Identity Politics, Essentialism, & Dismodernism An Afterword peggy phelan For all their merits, the healthy always disappoint” (125). So goes the ‹rst sentence of Emil Cioran’s remarkable essay “On Sickness.”1 Aphoristic and given to certain lapses in logic, Cioran’s essay does not argue so much as gesture toward generative speculation. “As long as one believes in philosophy , one is healthy; sickness begins when one starts to think,” he writes. Cioran’s notion of sickness interests me as a metaphor for what disability studies does to some of Western philosophy’s favorite orthodoxies. Disability studies exposes what we normally take on philosophical faith and sends us to the rougher task of unthinking what we have learned to believe. I am well aware that disability and sickness are not the same, but I want to invoke sickness in Cioran’s terms because it helps illuminate the kind of thinking at work in Bodies in Commotion. This thinking overturns philosophical orthodoxies about embodiment. Refusing the ideological imperative of the autonomous self, the essays in this volume take seriously concepts of interconnection , the enmeshed nature of the social body, and the complex work of responding to, in all senses, the richness and awkwardness of extraordinary bodies. Employing concepts of disability that range from dementia to Deafness, these essays reanimate and rearticulate the consolidations that 319 “ have surrounded two decades of critical work on “the body.” Much of that work has been written by performance studies scholars who have been extremely attentive to the ways in which race, class, gender, national origin, and sexuality have complicated our approaches to “the body.” But it is only in the last few years that issues of ability have been brought into the conversation . Now that they have arrived, the encounter between performance studies and disability enriches both ‹elds immeasurably. Our usual philosophy no longer works. It held that there are some aberrant bodies among us and those unlucky enough to have such bodies should compel sympathy, compassion, or other more or less paternal and patronizing feelings. But those days, as this extraordinarily wide-ranging volume everywhere demonstrates, are long gone. Indeed, we have emerged on the other side of the rainbow, where the “able” body seems an unusual and increasingly rare occurrence. Morbid obesity, old age, and the side effects of decades of chemical toxicity in the environment have all contributed to the withering away of the “normal” body. Indeed, Lennard Davis, citing a report that between 40 to 80 percent of people over sixty-‹ve are disabled, suggests that the acronym TAB, temporarily able-bodied, might be employed as a way to emphasize “the shaky footing on which normalcy rests” (Davis 2002, 36). This term is useful because it makes health the contingent variable that it truly is, given that all human bodies are (so far anyway) mortal. The human body, in whatever form it takes, is ‹nite, changeable, and destined to die. In this sense, all bodies must come to terms with limits and incapacities. Therefore, how we think about the live body matters, if only because it sheds light on the act we will all undertake before our bodies cease to be, the act of dying. Performance studies, as a discipline, is overtly concerned with what the live is and why it matters. Disability studies is dedicated to understanding how and why these longignored —and, therefore, in the philosophical sense “new” bodies—are rede‹ning the substance and force of life and death in the social imagination . As disciplines explicitly concerned with bodily practice, both performance studies and disability studies have had to contend with the force of identity politics. The Janus-faced ‹rst step in new disciplinary efforts of the past thirty years, identity politics affords opportunities to organize around group interests. In the case of disability studies, the importance of collective organizing was in itself revolutionary. Disability activists, many of whom were Vietnam vets in the United States, were actively trying to change the laws restricting access to education, employment, and environments. When this work began in earnest in the 1970s in the United States, disabled people were largely isolated within their own speci‹c communities. The blind socialized with the blind, but rarely with amputees.2 In this same period in 320 Bodies in Commotion the academy, disability was studied almost exclusively from a medical perspective , a perspective whose foundation was specialization. But activists urged people to ‹nd common cause in the oppressive system denying them basic protections and...

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