Superfluousness of the Faulty: Economy of the „Disabled“ Body Symbolism Cover Image

Izlišnost neispravnog: ekonomija simbolike „ometenog“ tela
Superfluousness of the Faulty: Economy of the „Disabled“ Body Symbolism

Author(s): Miša J. Ljubenović
Subject(s): Cultural Essay, Political Essay, Societal Essay
Published by: Institut za filozofiju i društvenu teoriju
Keywords: "disability"; body; culture; non-power; gaze; normalcy; ideal of perfection;

Summary/Abstract: In the modern culture, the phenomenon of the „disabled“ body is a intersection place of its ableist ideology, power relations and pseudoscientific explanations, and they are urged by the neo-eugenic project of the perfect world creating. As the prisoner of the biomedical discourse, such a body, deprived of any agensy, loaded with the culture-historicaly constituated non-power, is a particularly suitable field of the mainstream culture for spreading almost archetypically powerful apocaliptic visions of confronting with the enemy’s otherness. For that reason, the underlying supposition of the article is that the „disabled“ body, by means of the uniqueness of its morphology and anatomical-physiological structure, says nothing about itself, the basis of that it which would qualify to be a cult victim of the discriminatory gaze, but it is a reflection the culture frustrated by its own failure to produce an apsolutelly controlable order of things. Our ideas of demonic figure of the „disabled“ body conceal the century-old (absurd and idle) negentropic struggle of the Western civilization, conceptualy supplied with the criteria, norms and standards of health, normalcy, beauty and the truth, instrumentally supplied with the preventive and rehabilitative provisions of medicine, cosmetology and fashion and institutionally supplied with asylums, to provide itself with kingdom of peace and serenity through pouring out any otherness, first of all the (sub)cultural one, intentionally reduced to the pure biological.

  • Issue Year: 20/2009
  • Issue No: 1
  • Page Range: 245-281
  • Page Count: 34
  • Language: Serbian