Overriding Immanence
Overriding Immanence

Normativity and the Sick Body

Summary/Abstract: Phenomenologists have given considerable attention to questions of human embodiment and the experience of being enmeshed within the immanent world, most notably in the thought of Merleau-Ponty. This focus on incarnation has, in turn, heavily influenced contemporary philosophy of religion and post-theological turn phenomenology. Yet when speaking of the human experience of embodiment, philosophers run the risk of adopting a normative perspective that universalizes a particular type of human body while excluding or marginalizing different forms as deviant, defective, or deficient. This paper considers numerous critiques against the perceived normativity in Merleau-Ponty’s account of embodiment in the Phenomenology of Perception (feminist, gender studies, post-colonial critiques) before positing disability studies as an even more radical – and privileged – means to dispense with phenomenological normativity. In doing so, this paper attempts to open a space for multiple phenomenological perspectives for experiencing the world as a body, yet without lapsing into an entirely relativistic individualism that precludes phenomenology from making meaningful claims about the experience of human embodiment as such.

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