The Islamic Republic of Iran punishes homosexuality with death but it actively recognizes transsexuality, and partially funds sex change operations. This article aims to examine how this seemingly progressive stance on transsexuality is connected to the IRI's larger oppressive apparatus of gender. It will first provide an overview of the cultural politics of gender and sexuality under the Islamic Republic's rule, and will then discuss the confluence of religious and medical literatures that led the Islamic Republic to adopt its new (...) discourse on transsexuality despite – or perhaps rather because of – its sex/gender politics. The article does not deny that this emerging discourse has been somewhat empowering for those transsexuals who genuinely desire surgical transformation. But empowering as it might have been for such transsexuals, the emerging discourse is still deeply troubling since it systematically regards homosexuality and more generally any sexual or gender non-conformity as unintelligible, perverse, and punishable by law, except for those willing to transform their "wrong bodies." The article will, therefore, demonstrate that the IRI's permission of transsexuality and sex change operations is motivated by a goal that is more about assimilating gender atypical individuals into the heteronormative order than about broadening horizons for sex/gender possibilities. The article ends by discussing how this discourse is making non-surgical trans/multi-gendered identity illegible and illegitimate not only as a publicly recognized possibility, but also with regard to transpersons' own self-perception and self-constitution of their gender and sexual subjectivity. (shrink)

The growing field of feminist disability studies explores how human bodies are interpreted through cultural values and expectations surrounding physical and mental ability. This paper contributes to and expands upon this conversation by examining how the ideal of “able-mindedness” functions to maintain racial divisions and inequalities through attributions of cognitive and psychiatric disability to bodies of color. Drawing upon contemporary examples from popular social media, public policy, and academic discourse, the author shows how racialized and nonnormatively gendered bodies are (...) identified and interpreted through norms of able-mindedness and used as markers against which the ideal of the able mind is upheld. This “discourse of pathology” operates insidiously within academic theorizing by remaining largely invisible because it tracks our deeply ingrained assumptions about the undesirability of cognitive and psychiatric disability. The author argues that because of the entanglement of race with disability, so long as the normalizing and privileging of the ideal of able-mindedness goes unchallenged and we maintain the myth that there exists a normal mental state, both racism and ableism remain very much alive, including within the academy. (shrink)

Reviews the book, Pathology and the postmodern: Mental illness as discourse and experience by Dwight Fee . This provocative collection of short essays, edited and assembled by Dwight Fee, constitutes yet another useful addition to SAGE Publications’ Inquiries in Social Construction series . Including the work of such postmodern and social constructionist thinkers as Kenneth Gergen, Mark Freeman, Vivian Burr, Jane Ussher, Simon Gottschalk, Steven Sabat and Rom Harré, this anthology sets out to explore the relationship between mental distress (...) and specific cultural, economic, and historical contexts and trends. 2012 APA, all rights reserved). (shrink)

Girard’s attempts to present his main ideas have been numerous and, according to himself, never fully satisfying: many problems arise when looking for the best way to explain what Mimetic Theory is about, mainly because the order of the discourse and the logic of the underlying long argument, just as the micro level of the analysis and the macro one, are twisted with one another in a hermeneutical circle that can easily be misinterpreted as vicious. A thorough work of (...) analysis of the essential logical features of Mimetic Theory main hypotheses has been done by Jean–Pierre Dupuy. In what follows, we are going to use a few of his concepts in order to set the analysis of secularization and modernity and their consequences both at a micro level, dealing with modern pathologies, and at the macro one, investigating the displacement of the sacred. (shrink)

This present book explores recent advances in modeling discourse processes, in particular, new approaches aimed at understanding pathological language behavior specific to schizophrenia. The contributors examine the modeling paradigm of formal semantics, which falls within the scope of both linguistics and logic while providing overlapping links with other fields such as philosophy of language and cognitive psychology. This book is based on results presented during the series of workshops on Coherence and Discourse organized by SLAM, a project (...) developed to systemize the study of pathological language processing by taking an overarching interdisciplinary approach combining psychology, linguistics, computer science and philosophy. The principle focus is on conversations produced by people with psychiatric disorders such as schizophrenia and autism. The contributions come from young and experienced researchers, and invited speakers. The book appeals to likeminded students and researchers. (shrink)

Eric Campbell has argued that we should abolish moral discourse on the grounds that making moral judgments leads to “potentially severe practical pathologies”, including hypocrisy and self-delusion. However, his account of moral judgments only plausibly describes deontological judgments. Thus, his argument only supports deontological abolitionism. This view is certainly interesting. But it is not as extreme as moral abolitionism. Moreover, I argue that Campbell’s account, when reconstructed as an argument for deontological abolitionism can play only a very limited dialectical (...) role. (shrink)

Pathologizing Black Bodies reconsiders the black body as a site of cultural and corporeal interchange; one involving violence and oppression, leaving memory and trauma sedimented in cultural conventions, political arrangements, social institutions and, most significantly, materially and symbolically engraved upon the body, with "the self" often deprived of agency and sovereignty. Consisting of three sections, this text focuses on works of the 20th and 21st century fiction and cultural narratives by mainly African American authors, aiming to highlight the different ways (...) in which race has been pathologized in America and examine how the legacies of plantation ideology have been metaphorically inscribed on black bodies. The variety of analytical approaches and thematic foci with respect to theories and discourses surrounding race and the body allow us to delve into this thorny territory in the hope of gaining perspectives about how African-American lives are still shaped and haunted by the legacies of plantation slavery. Furthermore, this volume offers insights into the politics of eugenic corporeality in an illustrative dialogue with the lasting carceral and agricultural effects of life on a plantation. Tracing the degradation and suppression of the black body, both individual and social, this text includes analysis of the pseudo-scientific discourse of social Darwinism and eugenics; the practice of mass incarceration and the excessive punishment of black bodies; and food apartheid and USDA practices of depriving black farmers of individual autonomy and collective agency. Based on such an interplay of discourses, methodologies and perspectives, this volume aims to use literature to further examine the problematic relationship between race and the body and stress that black lives do indeed matter in the USA. (shrink)

Per Aage Brandt, commenting on a passage from Merlin Donald, suggests that there is ‘a narrative aesthetics built into our mind.’ In Donald, one can find an evolutionary account of this narrative aesthetics. If there is something like an innate narrative disposition, it is also surely the case that there is a process of development involved in narrative practice. In this paper I will assume something closer to the developmental account provided by Jerome Bruner in various works, and Dan Hutto's (...) account of how we learn narrative practices, and I'll refer to this narrative aesthetics as a narrative competency that we come to have through a developmental process. I will take narrative in a wide sense, to include oral and written communications and self-reports on experience. In this regard narrative is more basic than story, and not necessarily characterized by the formal plot structure of a story. A story may be told in many different ways, but always via narrative discourse. Also, having narrative competency includes not just abilities for understanding narratives, but also for narrative understanding, which allows us to form narratives about things, events and other people. To be capable of narrative understanding means to be capable of seeing events in a narrative framework. (shrink)

Medicalization appears to be an issue that is both ubiquitous and unquestionably problematic as it seems to signal at once a social and existential threat. This perception of medicalization, however, is nothing new. Since the first main writings in the 1960s and 1970s, it has consistently been used to describe inappropriate or abusive instances of medical authority. Yet, while this standard approach claims that medicalization is a growing problem, it assumes that there is simply one “medical model” and that the (...) expanding realm of “the medical” can be more or less clearly delineated. Moreover, while intended to establish the reality of this growing threat, this research often requires making arbitrary or unjustified distinctions between different practices. To better clarify the concept of medicalization, I will focus more on capturing the variety of medical practices than on the sociological aspects of medical discourse. In doing so, I will explore the distinction between medicalization and pathologization, a distinction that is often overlooked and that brings with it many conceptual and practical implications. After defining these terms, I will use some examples to show that while pathologizing is closely tied to medicalizing, both can occur independently. I will then further develop this distinction in terms of the different individual and social effects of these practices. (shrink)

The present volume explores recent advances in modeling discourse processes, particularly new approaches aimed at understanding pathological language behavior specific to schizophrenia.

This paper explores how Deleuze and Guattari's philosophical concepts extend and elaborate discursive and psychoanalytic interpretations of qualitative research findings. Analyzing data from a UK research project exploring young people's engagements with Social Networking Sites (SNSs), Deleuze and Guattari's schizoanalytic method is drawn upon to consider complex desire-flows in the social. In particular the notion of ‘affective assemblages’ is developed to explore the relationships between school and online spaces and subjective interfacing with these spaces. The paper suggests online space is (...) heterosexually striated and SNSs create new intensified gendered and sexualized identities and affective relations between young people. Investigating the case study of a teen girl, Louise, who is socially rejected through the affective assemblage of the SNS, then pathologized at school for violently retaliating against being called a ‘fat slag’ online, the paper suggests a Deleuzoguattarian analysis offers new theoretical tools for thinking about discursive subjectification but also for mapping complex desire-flows and micro movements through and against discursive/symbolic norms. (shrink)

Contemporary consumer culture sees the body as the crucial indicator of the self and apparent bodily ageing as problematic. All bodies age, but how is evidence of ageing culturally interpreted? This article develops a critical-pragmatic analysis of consumerized body discourses, with particular focus on the semiotics of the visibly ageing face, in the context of lifestyle magazine features and advertisements on skin care. Such texts work to equate ageing with the look of ageing, problematize ageing appearance, and offer marketized solutions (...) to the ‘problem’ of ageing, using markedly gendered strategies. Texts aimed at a female market project skin care as a serious issue, pathologize the look of ageing, offer highly technologized solutions, and naturalize surgical intervention. The male market is being discursively engaged by strategies designed to normalize male investment in products and processes traditionally seen as in the domain of female bodily grooming. Consumerized male narcissism is enabled by ironic, ‘uncommitted’ discourses, the use of highly masculinized images and text, and, more recently, discourses which draw attention to the salience of the female appraising gaze. (shrink)

This paper examines the role of modality resources (e.g., “may”, “often”) in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) in representing behavioral pathology focusing, in particular, on Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). ADHD diagnosis requires reports of non-practitioners (e.g., carers and teachers); an effective understanding of behavioral descriptors by the lay community is thus of paramount importance. The study combines qualitative linguistic discourse analysis and a corpus approach to study the presence and functions of modality, adopting a (...) Systemic Functional perspective towards language. The study argues that in the DSM-5 modality is an important linguistic resource for conveying clinical significance, inferred from graduations of recurrence and probability. However, adopting features of professional discourse in representing behavioral pathology for non-experts, especially when those resources are inherently evaluative, stresses the need of health literacy among the lay social community and accessibility in health communication materials, particularly when non-practitioners are involved in the diagnosis practice. (shrink)

The personal, political, and aesthetic ideals that Irish modernists found embodied in the figure of Charles Stewart Parnell—independence, self-mastery, and a capacity for radical self-fashioning—have been well attested in Irish literary historiography. What has been less often noted is the centrality of sexual health to the conception, articulation, and emulation of those virtues, particularly when attempting to translate Parnell’s public persona to the stage. This essay addresses this lacuna by tracing how a medicalized and politicized conception of sex informed Irish (...) modernist efforts to dramatize the Parnell myth at the Abbey Theatre. It begins by establishing the hitherto underexamined ways in which the Parnell myth informed the infamously divisive sexual politics of J. M. Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World (1907), in which the fallen leader and his career provide a template for Christy Mahon and the virile autonomy he is held to embody. Building on this analysis, the essay proceeds to explore the ways in which Synge’s restaging of the Parnell myth, and the medicalized and politicized model of sex which underpinned it, informed Lady Augusta Gregory’s efforts to resuscitate (and sanitize) Parnell for Abbey audiences in 1911’s The Deliverer. Finally, through a close reading of Lennox Robinson’s largely overlooked 1918 play, The Lost Leader, the essay charts how the organicist and hereditarian model of sexual health upon which earlier iterations of the Parnell myth had rested began to give place to a more psychoanalytic model. It then identifies the implications of this shift for Robinson’s reading of Irish politics in the wake of the 1916 Easter Rising. In doing so, the essay highlights the ways in which sexual health emerged as an extra-moral normative framework in Irish political discourse, and it demonstrates how a Medical Humanities approach and a sensitivity to the social history of medicine in Ireland can enrich critical understandings of the Parnell myth and its modernist afterlives. (shrink)

The article aims at elaborating a non-speculative concept of social pathology. In the first section, various conceptualizations (e.g. Habermas, Honneth) are critically revaluated. It is argued that (a) applying the originally medical concept of ‘pathology’ on social entities has untenable connotations (due to the lacking social equivalent of death); (b) grounding social pathology on the level of ‘social suffering’ is not in accordance with the actors’ horizon shaped by biomedical- and psy-discourses. To avoid these dead-ends, social pathologies are reinterpreted as (...) structural distortions causing diseases or mental disorders. To refine this initial definition, in the second section, Merleau-Ponty’s concept of chiasm is used as an ontological framework translating between medical and social diagnoses. The proposed concept of social pathology refers to those patterns of disrupted pre-intentional, intentional and mediated intertwining, which manifest as ill or psychopathological chiasm. In the third section, two case studies are elaborated: the intersubjective structures of depressed and asthmatic chiasm. Finally, the implications for critical theory and praxis are overviewed. (shrink)

The authors consider the nature of explanatory models in the social sciences in order to suggest ways in which conceptual systems differ. They suggest that, in many cases, theorists, researchers and clinicians can utilize insights from rival models in building their own models, without sacrificing the integrity of their own work.

In conjunction with the growing feminist literature on pregnancy and visualization, this paper uses Foucault’s The Birth of the Clinic to demonstrate how the effort to make the interior of the pregnant body visible in medical discourse was a crucial part of the development of the modern medical gaze. In doing so I develop two concurrent arguments. First, I argue that the pathological corpse of the Clinic can conceptually serve as a double for the pregnant body as it (...) emerged in modern medicine in the 20th century. At the same time I use the insights of the Clinic to illustrate changes in pregnancy from early modernity to the 20th century. In early modernity, the pregnant body was understood in terms of generation, as a tree that bears fruit; by the 19th century, the pregnant body was a machine that reproduced the species. This transition can be seen in the overlap of pathology and pregnancy in early modernity, an overlap that continued throughout the 19 century and is inadvertently reinforced through the practice of ultrasound. (shrink)

This book argues that Jürgen Habermas’ critical theory can be productively developed by incorporating a wider understanding of fantasy and imagination as part of its conception of communicative rationality and communicative pathologies. Given that meaning is generated both linguistically and performatively, MacKendrick argues that desire and fantasy must be taken into consideration as constitutive aspects of intersubjective relations. His aim is to show that Habermasian social theory might plausibly renew its increasingly severed ties with the early critical theory of the (...) Frankfurt School by taking account of these features of practice life, thus simultaneously rekindling the relevance of the nearly forgotten emancipatory intent in his earlier work and rejuvenating an emphasis on the contemporary critique of reason. This innovative new study will be of interest to those focusing on the early writings of Habermas, the writings of the Frankfurt School, and the relation between critical theory, hermeneutics, and psychoanalysis. (shrink)

This book argues that Jürgen Habermas’ critical theory can be productively developed by incorporating a wider understanding of fantasy and imagination as part of its conception of communicative rationality and communicative pathologies. Given that meaning is generated both linguistically and performatively, MacKendrick argues that desire and fantasy must be taken into consideration as constitutive aspects of intersubjective relations. His aim is to show that Habermasian social theory might plausibly renew its increasingly severed ties with the early critical theory of the (...) Frankfurt School by taking account of these features of practice life, thus simultaneously rekindling the relevance of the nearly forgotten emancipatory intent in his earlier work and rejuvenating an emphasis on the contemporary critique of reason. This innovative new study will be of interest to those focusing on the early writings of Habermas, the writings of the Frankfurt School, and the relation between critical theory, hermeneutics, and psychoanalysis. (shrink)

In this paper, we offer some compelling reasons to think that issues relating to vulnerability play a significant – albeit thus far underacknowledged – role in Jürgen Habermas’s notions of communicative action and discourse. We shall argue that the basic notions of discourse and communicative action presuppose a robust conception of vulnerability and that recognising vulnerability is essential for making sense of the social character of knowledge, on the epistemic side of things, and for making sense of the (...) possibility of deliberative democracy, on the political side of things. Our paper is divided into four principal sections. In Section 1, we provide a basic outline of Habermas on communicative action and discourse. In Section 2, we develop an account of vulnerability and communication in the context of speaker/hearer relations. We specifically focus on distorted communication, vulnerability and speech. In Section 3, we focus on elaborating epistemic pathologies in the context of epistemic oppression and testimonial injustice. In Section 4, we focus on explaining how Habermasian resources contribute to vulnerability theory, and how introducing vulnerability theory to Habermas broadens or deepens his theory of communication action and his discourse ethics theory. (shrink)

The purpose is to identify common and distinctive features of concepts and methodology of the problem of subject within different discourses, implicitly or explicitly relevant to the definition of "clinical" mode of human existence. The research methodology combines techniques of discourse analysis and basic principles of historical and philosophical studies. Originality of the research lies in definition of the clinical philosophical discourse as a special communicative process, where utterances not only focus on disease syndromes, and reveal phenomenology of (...) inner experience of a pathological self, but also structure a certain type of sociality. Clinical discourse represents the space where the patient is treated not as a subject but as an object of disease. Ontology of clinical discourse prevails over ontology of disease, since its structures determine the notion of disease as such. Categorization of the disease, the idea of disease as a phenomenon subdued to professional authority leads to the idea of the need for patient’s isolation from the natural environment and removing him to special social institutions. The clinicist doctrines share the intention to reduce the patient’s self to its bodily dimension, while ignoring social determinants of psychological deviations. Conclusions of the study are summarized in the following positions: the current clinical discourse is based on the positivist-biological trend in humanitarian knowledge and it is the basis for the production and reproduction of medical and pharmaceutical repressive ideology; criticism of philosophical clinical discourse opens the possibility of overcoming the dominance of purely clinicist discourse; such a transformation is possible only after a paradigm shift in understanding the category of subject. (shrink)

Adorno and Levinas argue from distinct yet intersecting perspectives that there are pathological forms of freedom, formed by systems of power and economic exchange, which legitimate the neglect, exploitation and domination of others. In this paper, I examine how the works of Adorno and Levinas assist in diagnosing the aporias of liberty in contemporary capitalist societies by providing critical models and strategies for confronting present discourses and systems of freedom that perpetuate unfreedom such as those ideologically expressed in possessive (...) individualist and libertarian conceptions of freedom. (shrink)

This paper addresses the question of what happens to consciousness under the influence of psychedelic drugs—specifically of psilocybin, or “magic” mushrooms— and performs a Foucauldian discourse analysis upon the answers that have been variously proposed. Predominant societally legitimated answers (the pathological, psychological, and prohibition discourses) are those that, in Foucault's sense, are imposed from the outside as “scientific classifications,” that is, they are based upon observations of the effects of mushrooms on others. By contrast, a series of resistive (...) discourses (the recreational, psychedelic, entheogenic, and animistic discourses) have been constructed in opposition, as a means of making sense of the subjective experience of taking mushrooms. When critiqued, only the animistic discourse— the belief that mushrooms occasion encounters with discarnate spirit entities, or animaphany—transgresses a fundamental societal boundary. In the West, to believe in the existence of spirits is to risk being labeled “mad,” and as such the phenomenon of mushroom‐induced animaphany goes largely ignored. It nevertheless remains a phenomenon in need of further scholarly research. (shrink)

In Plato's Philebus the last section of the discussion on the falseness of pleasure is dedicated to those pleasures intrinsically mixed with pain. This paper focuses specifically on bodily mixed pleasures, an analysis that extends from 44d to 47c, while its focal point is 46-47c. By adopting the anti-hedonists' methodology, Socrates cunningly transforms his entire analysis of bodily mixed pleasures into a discourse on human disease, in which medical terminology prevails. Two major points are made in the reading suggested (...) here. Despite Socrates' quasi-medical language, a substratum of poetic discourse is underlying his analysis. Thus, a network of poetic associations—probably promptly recalled by Plato's audience—not only reveals the intertextual encounter between medical, philosophic and poetic discourses but also contributes to the interpretation of Socrates' analysis. Hence, the pathology of love as expressed through poetry illuminates the meaning, questionable in straightforward medical terms, of passage 46c6-d2, while it also reveals the unfolding unity underlying Socrates' analysis, otherwise thought to comprise three distinct medical cases. Ancient medical lore is important for the understanding of passage 46d7-47a1 on the affliction of knêsis and psôra, not only because it confirms the analogy between the physiology of knêsis and that of sexual arousal and climax, but also because it illuminates the specific medical treatment Socrates is describing. Thus, in the crucial debate about whether Plato uses the term aporiais or pyriais in 46e2, medical evidence seems to support the latter. The reading pyriais makes this complicated paragraph more comprehensible in terms of meaning and syntax, while stressing the importance of heat in the processes of both the curing of knêsis and of human orgasm. Besides, it further confirms the intertextual encounter between the Phaedrus and the Philebus. (shrink)

Thanks to Axel Honneth, recognition theory has become a prominent fixture of critical social theory. In recent years, he has deployed his recognition theory in diagnosing pathologies and injustices that afflict institutional practices. Some of these institutional practices revolve around specifically juridical institutions, such as human rights and democratic citizenship, that directly impact the lives of the most desperate migrants. Hence it is worthwhile asking what recognition theory can add to a critical theory of migration. In this paper, I argue (...) that, although its contribution to a critical theory of migration is limited, it nonetheless carves out a unique body of ethical insights related to diagnosing the interpretative and epistemic pathologies and injustices associated with the legal processing of migrants’ claims for asylum. Going beyond discourse ethics, which mainly highlights procedural violations of legislative and judicial deliberation, it trains our gaze on the institutional biases that lead migrants to be misrecognized or under-recognized as credible witnesses to their own refugee status. (shrink)

In 1960, a relatively new ‘syndrome’ began appearing with growing frequency in psychiatric hospitals and in doctors’ offices. Eventually termed ‘delicate self-cutting’, this new model for typical self-mutilative behavior was developed in conjunction with a description of the ‘typical’ self-mutilator: young (adolescent to just post-adolescent), female, and almost always attractive. This article contends that, despite recent efforts to change the nature of research on self-mutilation, the myth of a typical mutilator, developed from a particular historical bias, continues to work in (...) popular and medical discourses on the subject. I will begin with a detailed discussion of the medical discourse in an effort to ask how the myth was made. Noting that the female body, here, is singled out as pathological at a time when, specifically in the USA, the emergent Women’s Movement was beginning to contest certain gender lines, I would like to examine how the medical discourse and material bodies interrelate and interact with each other and with the cultural narratives around them. Finally, I end with examples from the 1999 film Girl, Interrupted, as well as other recent popular and medical accounts, to illustrate not only the perpetuation of the myth of the ‘typical’ self-mutilator but also the inability or refusal to recognize the biased nature of the medical discourse in the instance on self-mutilation. (shrink)

Chinua Achebe, the contemporary Nigerian novelist, is considered as one of the prominent figures in African anti-colonial literature. What makes his works specific is the way he approaches the issues of colonization of Africa in an objective manner and through an innovative language which aims at providing a pathology; a pathological reading meant to draw on the pre-colonial and colonial history without any presumptions so as to present the readers with possible alternative African discourses in future. His first novel (...) Things Fall Apart can be taken as the best representative of such a penchant in Achebe. The present study seeks to approach Things Fall apart by reflecting on those discursive features which have provided the ground for constructing such a pathological reading and an alternative to the colonial discourse. To this end, some key terms introduced by Homi Bhabha and Mikhail Bakhtin such as ‘hybridity’, ‘otherness’ and ‘polyphony’, constitute the cornerstone of this study. Presumably, such an innovative reading of Achebe’s Things Fall Apart is to lead to a better understanding of his discourse and the efforts made by him to help the African readers figure out how to piece together what once fell apart; what they can rely on for building an independent future in the so-called postcolonial era. (shrink)

My concern here is with the way a new American medical discourse in the Philippines fabricated and rationalized images of the bodies of the colonized and the subordinate colonizers. I am interested in reading the reports of biological experiments as discursive constructions of the American colonial project, as attempts to naturalize the power of foreign bodies to appropriate and command the Islands. The origin of the American colonial enterprise at a time when science lent novel force and legitimacy to (...) public policy gave scientists and doctors an opportunity to construct a new physiology and pathology of colonialism. The medical laboratory thus became an important site for the construction of the social space of interaction between American and Filipino bodies.5 The Filipino emerged in this period as a potentially dangerous part of the zoological realm, while the American colonizer became a resilient racial type, no longer inevitably susceptible to the tropical climate but vulnerable to the crowd of invisible, alien parasites newly associated with native bodies. This new medical discourse in the tropics accorded with a broad shift in the language and practices of medical science that occurred at the end of the nineteenth century. Generally, the medical concern with constitutions and climate gave way to a greater interest in the specific microbial causation of individual disease. At the same time, the colonial doctor’s anecdotes and clinical impressions seemed less convincing, and increasingly the laboratory was called on to authenticate knowledge. Warwick Anderson is a medical doctor who is completing his doctorate in the history and sociology of science at the University of Pennsylvania. His current project is the politics of disease theory in southeastern Asia. (shrink)

The author of this paper is currently working on a pilot project with school children and individuals who are in their final years of their prison sentence. The project should offer a pragmatic alternative to the way humanism has established and defined our mode of expressions. Such modes effect our ways of deliberation and judgement when it comes to ethical issues. This paper will act both as a critique and provide, at the same time, a positive alternative to those who (...) are still being coerced into confessing an act they committed in a language in which they do not only not recognise themselves but risk, moreover, not being understood. The likelihood of this occurring stems from a fundamental disconnect, namely the fact that their way of communicating does not chime in with the expectations of the knowledgeable others whose formal speech registers betray deeply-ingrained oppressive humanist modes of discourse and ideologies which, having long been normalized are, to the former’s detriment, regrettably and routinely overlooked. The aim of this paper is to introduce my project in order to show the reader that many of the postmodern critiques of narrative and agent formation can be overcome by a cybernetic system of a new mode of writing, by means of which the intentions of the agent are fragmented and reconstructed immediately by a secondary, non-human agent – the software. I shall be making a case that this software will become vital to mediate human storytelling through non- human generation creating an enhanced understanding for both reader and writer. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to advance research on CSR beyond the stalemate of economic versus ethical models by providing an alternative perspective integrating existing views and allowing for more shared dialog and research in the field. It is suggested that we move beyond making a normative case for ethical models and practices of CSR by moving beyond the question of how to manage organizational self-interest toward the question of how accurate current conceptions of the organizational self seem to (...) be. Specifically, it is proposed that CSR is not a question of how self-interested the corporation should be, but how this self is defined. Economic and ethical models of CSR are not models of opposition but exist on a continuum between egoic and post-egoic, illusory and authentic conceptions of the organizational self. This means that moving from one to the other is not a question of adopting different paradigms but rather of moving from illusion and dysfunction to authenticity and functionality, from pathology to health. (shrink)

Мета роботи полягає у постметафізичній концептуалізації суб’єкта у клінічному дискурсі філософської антропології. Теоретичний базис дослідження поєднує засоби дискурсивної аналітики і загальні принципи історико-філософської науки. Логіка дослідження збігається із парадигмальним розумінням трансформацій суб’єкта та передбачає перехід від діагностичних стратегій аналізу індивідуального буття як основи патологічності суб’єкта до дослідження терапевтичних моделей концептуалізації комунікації як детермінанти патології та, нарешті, до аналітики суб’єкта в горизонті полісуб’єктної соціальності. Наукова новизна полягає у розкритті основних антропологічних моделей суб’єкта, що відповідають функціям діагностики й терапії. Показано, що, попри (...) революційність певних проектів, що дозволяє їх віднести до постметафізичних, у них залишаються рецидиви метафізичності, які існують в образі суб’єкта, що мислиться як основа справжності. Відповідно до критеріїв практичної імплементації ключовою є трансформація теорій суб’єкта, орієнтованих на самопокладання і автономію, у концепції, сфокусовані на відповідальності, турботі про суще і здійсненні у якості людини. Висновки. Доведено, що образ посткласичного суб’єкта, зосередженого на ідеалі власної автентичності, мусить діагностуватися як патологічний. Показана недоцільність акцентуації виключно на дискурсивності, розмові, результатом якої стає ствердження незалежності внутрішнього, хоч і маргінального світу девіантного суб’єкта. Обґрунтована необхідність доведення проблеми до логіки соціальної взаємодії, у якій виникає та форма смислової організації феноменів, що є нормальною структурою життєвого світу і на основі якої виникає повноцінний суб’єкт із уявленнями про власну самодостатність, і з турботою про суще. (shrink)

In today’s America the persistence of crushing poverty in the midst of staggering affluence no longer incites the righteous jeremiads it once did. Resigned acceptance of this paradox is fueled by a sense that poverty lies beyond the moral and technical scope of government remediation. The failure of experts to reach agreement on the causes of poverty merely exacerbates our despair. Are the causes internal to the poor – reflecting their more or less voluntary choices? Or do they emanate from (...) structures beyond their control? If both of these explanations are true, poverty experts will need to shift their focus to a hitherto under-theorized concept: coercion. I defend this claim by appealing to distinct areas of philosophical inquiry: social epistemology and moral theory. Poverty knowledge is directly related to both of these inquiries. The aim of poverty knowledge is clearly moral: to reduce suffering and to empower the weak. While the former aim is grounded in utilitarian thinking, the latter aim is grounded in the social contractarian insight that poverty is unjustly coercive, imposing excessive limits on the opportunities and choices of the poor that render them vulnerable to domination by others. Equally obvious is the social nature of poverty knowledge. All knowledge depends on the reliable testimony of others. Poverty knowledge not only ostensibly offers us the most reliable, scientific beliefs about the causes and effects of poverty, thereby determining how we morally judge the poor and their poverty, but it reciprocally bases its understanding of poverty on what the poor themselves have to say about it. What unites both social epistemology and moral theory – at least the social contract variants I will be examining here – is concern about the limits and possibilities of rational choice. As poverty knowledge came of age in the fifties and sixties, it absorbed the language of rational choice prevalent in economics, especially the Keynesian economics whose moral underpinnings can be found in Rawlsian social contract theory. Echoing a different economic theory supported by a different, more libertarian, brand of social contract theory, poverty expertise in the eighties continued to use an abstract model of rational choice. I submit that, in both early and later epochs of poverty expertise, reliance on rational choice reasoning prevented poverty experts from appreciating the coercive impact of poverty on the poor. Social epistemology explains this failure by demonstrating the poverty of rational choice thinking and its mistaken reliance on inflated commonsense expectations about the capacity of individuals to calculate their long-term interests, free from the distortions of social bias. Social epistemology not only exhibits the dangers of not relying on expert testimony, but it also exhibits the dangers of relying on an unreliable source of expert testimony that has removed itself from its human subject matter. In order for poverty experts to become more reliable educators about poverty’s coercive impact on the poor they must return to their discipline’s social epistemological roots. Only a more descriptive and explanatory sociology can narrate a comprehensive story about how the lived experience of poverty relates to the larger social system. The social contractarian model best suited to underwriting this kind of poverty knowledge, I submit, is the discourse theoretic model that has been championed by Jürgen Habermas. When applied as a pedagogical method of dialog and not as a social contractarian model of rational normative consent, discourse theory highlights the unique epistemological advantages of empathetic understanding that are so essential to dispelling stereotypes about the poor. Dispelling these stereotypes is the first step toward respecting the poor as free agents who are nonetheless forced to make suboptimal choices. My defense of these claims proceeds as follows: Part One argues that poverty expertise rightly deserves the opprobrium critics have heaped on it. The charge – leveled by progressives and conservatives alike - that such expertise is ideological is true to the extent that poverty knowledge has all-too-easily accommodated the political aims of the agency that has funded it: the federal government. The shift from the war on poverty to the war on the poor – and the resulting shift from blaming poverty on economic structures to blaming it on the culture of poverty – would not have been possible without an increased emphasis on data gathering aimed at measuring poverty rather than describing it. Part Two assesses the consequences of turning away from qualitative research to statistical analysis: the coercive nature of poverty becomes invisible beneath the surface of aggregate individual choices. The failure to grasp how voluntary choices, ostensibly based on rational, self-interested calculations, can be coerced by social structures - and thereby lead to sub-optimizing behavior – invites the conclusion that the poor have only themselves to blame for their misery. Part Three suggests that this pathologization of the poor directly controverts the major aim of poverty research: to empower the poor as free and equal parties to the social contract. I argue that the different varieties of social contract theory that have justified poverty expertise over the last forty years – the welfarist model pioneered by Rawls and the market-based model defended by Nozick – embrace the same rational choice models favored by poverty experts and so conspire with the latter in neglecting important dimensions of poverty-related coercion. While the welfarist model conceals the coercive nature of bureaucratically administered entitlement programs and top-down urban renewal policies, the market-based model conceals the coercive nature of economic class structures. The discourse-theoretic alternative proposed by Habermas endorses a populist, democratic response to the overly abstract rational choice assumptions embedded in these other models. Despite this advance over its counterparts, the chief advantage of discourse theory for poverty knowledge, I submit, resides less in its proposed procedure of rational collective choice than in its heuristic as a dialogical method of social learning. I demonstrate this claim in Part Four, where I turn to the social epistemological insights of Allen Buchanan. Social epistemology offers a much needed corrective to theories of knowledge that rely on the reasoning capacities of isolated individuals. By stressing the connection between moral response and social belief, on one hand, and the dependence of social belief on epistemic authorities, on the other, social epistemologists suggest ways in which we can learn to distinguish reliable from unreliable authorities and become aware of our own error-prone cognitive proclivities. Their insights need to be supplemented by moral epistemologists who stress the affective dimension of knowledge, above all, the role that empathy plays in understanding the plight of others. Drawing from victim narratives, Diana Meyers shows that switching between first-person experiences of one's own and third-person reconstructions of others' experiences is essential to appreciating the gravity of human rights violations and the seriousness of human rights claims. It goes without saying that such empathy is just as essential to understanding the plight of the poor. Meyers mainly has in mind empathetic understanding that has been facilitated by third-person observation and literary encounter, but the importance of visceral and corporeal representation suggests that face-to-face dialog may sometimes be a more effective way to facilitate empathetic understanding. (shrink)

While dominant medico-psychological approaches in suicidology depict suicide as resulting from individual psychic/corporeal pathologies, suicides of minority groups are frequently understood in muc...

Journal Name: Semiotica Issue: Ahead of print.

This essay draws on two emerging fields—the study of comics or graphic fiction, and disability studies—to demonstrate how graphic fictions articulate the embodied, ethical, and sociopolitical experiences of impairment and disability. Examining David B’s Epileptic and Paul Karasik and Judy Karasik’s The Ride Together, I argue that these graphic novels unsettle conventional notions of normalcy and disability. In so doing, they also challenge our assumed dimensions and possibilities of the comics genre and medium, demonstrating the great potential comics hold for (...) disability studies. (shrink)