&quot;Veux-tu regarder, bourreau!&quot;: The Somanormative Dimensions of the Diderotian Citoyen

Caeton, D.; Caeton, D.

doi:https://doi.org/10.1353/jlc.0.0035

Caeton, D.

Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies (2010), 4, (1), 73–88.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/jlc.0.0035
Language: English
Pages: 16

Abstract

Writing at the convergence of medical discourse and the philosophical discourse of statecraft, the philosophe Diderot was firmly within the grasp of the noso-politics of the eighteenth century. The article argues that the Lettre sur les aveugles poses an example of somanormativity: a concept meant to denote the hegemony of compulsory ablebodiedness and mandatory independence. Thus, through a reading of Diderot's major works the article seeks to demonstrate how citizenship is ineluctably bound to categories of exclusion. Through a discourse of supercripping, disabled people exemplify a trajectory to normalcy that is to be instructive for all unenlightened citizens. Moreover, by vaunting the achievements of his subjects as extraordinary, disability, through the illogic of overcoming, becomes further understood as a primary manqué. Paradoxically, then, the acceptance of blind people engenders a somanormative binary of ability versus disability that ultimately gives shape to the otherwise amorphous category of citoyen.

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