A Nietzschean Critique of Interpretations Of

THE AFFIRMATION OF BLINDNESS: A NIETZSCHEAN CRITIQUE OF

INTERPRETATIONS OF SUFFERING FROM DISABILITY

A dissertation submitted

to Kent State University in partial fulfillment

of the requirements for the

degree of Doctor of Philosophy

Caleb A. Berkemeier

August 2021

Except for previously published materials

Dissertation written by

Caleb A. Berkemeier

B.A., Mount Vernon Nazarene University, 2009

M.A., Kent State University, 2012

Ph.D., Kent State University, 2021

Approved by

Sara Newman______, Co-chair, Doctoral Dissertation Committee

Tammy Clewell______, Members, Doctoral Dissertation Committee

Wesley Raabe______,

Deborah Barnbaum______,

Anthony Fernandez______,

Accepted by

Babacar M’Baye______, Chair, Department of English

Mandy Munro-Stasiuk______, Interim Dean, College of Arts and Sciences

TABLE OF CONTENTS------iii

ABBREVIATIONS OF NIETZSCHE’S WORKS------vi

EPIGRAPH------vii

CHAPTERS

I. Introduction

1. The Problem of Suffering from Disability------1

2. The Affirmation of Blindness------7

3. A Note on Terminology------14

Part I. Disability and the Meaning of Suffering

II. Disability Studies and the Meaning of Suffering

1. Introduction------19

2. Michael Oliver and Suffering from Oppression------20

3. Tobin Siebers and Suffering from Ideology------26

4. Susan Wendell and Suffering for Difference------34

5. Conclusion------40

III. Disability and the Problem of Suffering

1. Introduction------42

2. Suffering Defined------44

3. Suffering and Value------50

4. A Nietzschean Interpretation of Suffering------60

5. Suffering and Power------68

6. Conclusion------76

IV. The Ideological Interpretation of Suffering

iii

1. Introduction------80

2. Theories of Ideology as Theodicies------81

3. Is the Ideology-of-Ability Theory “True?” ------86

4. The Ideology-of-Cure Theory------96

5. Conclusion------108

Part II. Blindness and Suffering

V. Three Interpretations of Blindness

1. Introduction------112

2. Kenneth Jernigan and the National Federation of the Blind------115

3. A Deflationary Interpretation of Blindness------122

4. A Religious Interpretation of Blindness------129

5. An Affirmative Interpretation of Blindness------139

6. Conclusion------147

VI. Ressentiment, Bad Conscience, and the Oppression Narrative

1. Introduction------151

2. Ressentiment------153

3. Imaginary Compensation for Powerlessness------161

4. Ressentiment and Imaginary Compensation in Georgina Kleege’s Blind Rage-

------167

5. Internalized Ableism and Bad Conscience------175

6. Conclusion------182

VII. The Affirmation of Blindness in Literature

1. Introduction------185

2. Blindness and Power in Sophocles’ Oedipus Cycle------193

3. Blindness and Power in Milton’s Samson Agonistes------207

4. Conclusion------217

VIII. Conclusion------219

WORKS CITED------224

Abbreviations of Nietzsche’s Works

A – The Anti-Christ

BGE – Beyond Good and Evil

D - Daybreak: Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality

EH – Ecce Homo

GM – On the Genealogy of Morality

GS – The Gay Science

HAH – Human, All Too Human

NCW – Nietzsche Contra Wagner

NUL – Nietzsche Unpublished Letters

TI – Twilight of the Idols

Z – Thus Spoke Zarathustra

WP – The Will to Power

I have often asked myself whether I am not more heavily obligated to the hardest years of my life than to any others. As my inmost nature teaches me, whatever is necessary—as seen from the heights and in the sense of a great economy—is also the useful par excellence: one should not only bear it, one should love it. Amor fati: that is my inmost nature. And as for my long sickness, do I not owe it indescribably more than I owe to my health? I owe it a higher health—one which is made stronger by whatever does not kill it.

I also owe my philosophy to it. Only great pain is the ultimate liberator of the spirit, as the teacher of great suspicion which turns every U into an X, a real, genuine X, that is, the letter before the penultimate one. Only great pain, that long, slow pain in which we are burned with green wood, as it were—pain which takes its time—only this forces us philosophers to descend into our ultimate depths and to put away all trust, all good- naturedness, all that would veil, all mildness, all that is medium— things in which formerly we may have found our humanity. I doubt that such a pain makes us “better,” but I know that it makes us more profound.

—Friedrich Nietzsche, NCW “Epilogue”

vii

Chapter I. Introduction

1. The Problem of Suffering from Disability

In their chapter in the Disability and Social Theory reader, Tanya Titchkosky and Rod

Michalko challenge “the hegemonic taken-for-granted character of the disability-as-a-problem frame” (127). What they mean is that the disabled body is automatically and unreflectively interpreted as a problem because it deviates from a presupposed “natural” or “normal” body.

Thus, in every domain of social life—e.g., science, education, medicine, employment, rehabilitation, politics, etc.—disability is approached as something to be normalized. Scientists, doctors, and rehabilitation specialists attempt to mitigate or eliminate the problem of disability through treatments and cures. Educators and human resources professionals attempt to normalize disability through accommodation strategies and technologies. Politicians and political activists seek to integrate disability into mainstream socioeconomic life through civil rights legislation.

All of these efforts certainly have practical value, and we would not want to live in a world in which people did not pursue these goals. However, for Titchkosky and Michalko, automatically interpreting disability as a problem in need of a solution precludes the possibility that disability may have its own value. As they put it, from the disability-as-problem perspective, “[disability] may participate in normalcy, but it can never be normal, let alone be valuable, enjoyable or necessary” (128).

The notion that disability could be valuable, enjoyable, or necessary strikes at the heart of the common-sense perspective about disability that we find in mainstream social and cultural life. But it resonates well with perspectives that come out of the disability rights movement

(DRM), and out of Disability Studies (DS)—the academic and theory-driven wing of the DRM.

From these quarters, we are told that the real disability problem is how people with impairments are discriminated against, marginalized, excluded from participation in social life, and rendered disabled by structural and attitudinal barriers. Such people are not primarily disabled by their bodies; they are disabled within social contexts and physical environments that have been constructed, intentionally and unintentionally, to exclude them. Thus, disability is imposed on impaired people by an oppressive social structure that is maintained by the non-disabled.

Disability is an identity to be reclaimed from non-disabled oppressors, a weapon to be used for critiquing ableism and other harmful ideologies, a form of life that is valuable specifically because it is different, and/or an identity of which to be proud.

Most DS theorists share the view that “common sense” ideas about suffering from disability are misleading and harmful stereotypes. In Part 1 of this dissertation, I focus on four such theorists—Tobin Siebers, Michael Oliver, Susan Wendell, and Eli Clare—all of whom challenge the “common sense” belief that the disability experience is dominated by suffering.

Oliver argues that, for most people, the only suffering they experience is due to social oppression, not their impairments. There are, of course, impairments that do cause suffering—in particular, those that cause physical pain or psychological distress. Siebers, Wendell, and Clare attempt to provide nuanced perspectives that acknowledge the reality of suffering without supporting the usual disability stereotypes. However, as I will argue, their interpretations of

suffering are both underdeveloped and too beholden to the disciplinary imperative that disability theory must serve an emancipatory end for disabled people.

Having such an ethical imperative at the core of disability theory tends to focus attention on the social, cultural, and political conditions under which disability is experienced for the purpose of political and social transformation. For most DS theorists, the problem of suffering seems too individualized, too much of a distraction from the social mission. I, too, intend this dissertation to serve an emancipatory goal; however, my conception of “emancipation” radically departs from the standard DS approach. In my opinion, what disabled people need most is not emancipation from oppression but, rather, emancipation of the mind—or, in Nietzschean terms, emancipation of the spirit. What disabled people need more than anything is the capacity and ability to flourish as individuals, and flourishing can only occur—to use more Nietzschean language—under conditions of psychological health.

I will have much to say about what constitutes psychological health and individual flourishing throughout the dissertation. For now, I want to establish at the outset that concepts such as “psychological health,” “flourishing,” “suffering,” “oppression,” “disability,” etc. essentially depend on interpretation of facts. The idea that disabled people are socially oppressed, for example, is an interpretation, not a fact. The interpretation is based on discrete facts that are combined into a higher-level perspective regarding an abstract social relation, but it is not itself a fact in the technically restricted sense of that concept. How then should we go about evaluating our interpretations of facts? One way of evaluating an interpretation is to determine how well it explains a set of facts. But whether an interpretation makes the most sense of a set of facts is not sufficient for determining if it is a good interpretation. We should not only

consider if an interpretation fits the facts; we must also consider the psychological effects an interpretation has for those who believe it.

Suppose that a person believes she is an oppressed disabled person in the United States.

Let’s assume for the sake of argument that this interpretation is the best account of all relevant facts. Perhaps this person lives in the pre-Civil Rights Era when it certainly was the case that ordinary disabled people were oppressed. Now imagine that she psychologically suffers a great deal from the belief that she is oppressed, so much so that she spends every waking moment of life with feelings of hatred, resentment, envy, and rage toward those who are believed to be her oppressors. Based on this interpretation, she does not take legitimate opportunities to improve her life out of the belief that any such action would necessarily fail within an oppressive system.

For this hypothetical person, the vital question is this: is her factually accurate interpretation good for her, “good” in the sense that it promotes psychological health and individual flourishing?

My Nietzschean answer to this hypothetical is that this person is holding to a bad interpretation because it has a negative psychological effect that likely leads to a stunted life.

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) was a nineteenth-century philosopher and self-described psychologist who questioned the taken-for-granted assumption that truth must be our highest value and absolute priority. He does not mean—as his postmodern followers mistakenly think— that there is no such thing as truth, or that truth is whatever we want it to be. Instead, Nietzsche challenges the notion that truth should always be our highest value. If, for example, a truth causes us to be stunted and psychologically unhealthy people, then it would be better to embrace a delusion in order to flourish in strength and psychological health. People who are filled with negative affects like hatred, resentment, envy, and rage are psychologically unhealthy, and no

one can flourish when under the control of these bad feelings. If disabled people, then, are consumed by any of these negative affects because they are interpreting themselves as oppressed, it would be better for them to give up this stultifying interpretation for the sake of their capacity to flourish as individuals, even if their interpretation technically fits the facts.

I therefore take a two-fold approach when analyzing and critiquing DS interpretations that try to explain the problem of suffering from disability. I address the interpretations as explanations for sets of discrete facts, but how well these interpretations fit the facts is not my main concern. I am primarily concerned with the psychological effects of these interpretations and whether they are good or bad for us. I am also concerned with the psychological motivations for these interpretations because, like Nietzsche, I believe that the self-interested satisfaction of our psychological needs plays a major role in what we think about an abstract concept like oppression. One such need is for the experience of suffering to be meaningful. We humans are incredibly resilient creatures, and we have an impressive capacity for enduring suffering if we believe that there is a justification for it. What we cannot accept is meaningless suffering; and, from a Nietzschean point of view, the problem of meaningless suffering is the most urgent problem for modern, secular people who can no longer genuinely rely on the former metaphysical and religious justifications for it. We have a psychological need for “theodicies”— i.e., meaningful, justificatory explanations for suffering that allow us to endure it and even value it. I see this motivation at the heart of the various DS perspectives on suffering from disability, and I believe it is important to frame these perspectives as such because doing so allows us to get at their most important aspect—not of their truth, but of their value for our psychological health and flourishing.

In this dissertation, I argue in favor of a Nietzschean interpretation of suffering from disability, according to which suffering is a valuable and necessary experience for individual flourishing. Any suffering that is caused by disability—whether it is derived from impairments or from bad social relations—has value, and it is in our best interest to recognize and appreciate this value. By “flourishing,” I mean the full development of the human capacity to express power through our multifarious drives. According to Nietzsche, humans are a complex amalgam of drives and desires—or “wills.” Chief among them is the “will to power,” a psychological drive for control and domination. A powerful person is one who is able to harness and direct his drives through his will to power toward worthwhile and creative goals. Such a person values the ideals of human excellence and proficiency in whatever he pursues. But power can only be expressed if it has something to overcome, a resistance to the expression of power. This is why suffering is valuable; resistance to our will to power necessarily involves suffering, and devaluing suffering or seeking to eliminate it will diminish our capacity to express power. I will have much more to say about all of this in chapters 3 and 4, but briefly stated, a good interpretation of suffering from disability depends on our exposure to suffering in the perpetual process of overcoming resistances to our will to power.

For those who may be unfamiliar with the concept of power in Nietzsche’s philosophy, the preceding paragraph may be troubling. After all, isn’t expressing power what tyrants and oppressors do, an amoral exploitation of the weak? In Chapter 3, I will explain why this narrow understanding is not Nietzsche’s conception of power. In brief summary, all humans express power any time they strive against and overcome a resistance to their wills. For example, writing a dissertation is very difficult and presents a tremendous amount of resistance to my will to write a dissertation. The process involves a lot of unpleasant feelings, and at times, the unpleasantness

can be quite intense. I could decide that suffering through the writing of a dissertation is not worth it and quit, in which case I would have failed to strive against and overcome a significant resistance to my will. I may have multiple motivations for continuing to write, but from a

Nietzschean perspective, the fundamental thing that motivates me is my will to power. I desire to express my power by doing something difficult, by overcoming a resistance to my will. If writing a dissertation was an easy thing to do, it would provide little or no resistance to my will, and there would be no opportunity to express my power through it. This would be an undesirable state of affairs because expressing power is the essence of what it means to flourish. Therefore, from a Nietzschean point of view, anything that presents a resistance to one’s will to power should be valued, including any resistance that derives from disability.

2. The Affirmation of Blindness

The title of this dissertation is derived from my argument for an affirmative interpretation of suffering from disability. For me, the argument is more than an academic exercise. I was born with a degenerative retinal disease, and I have been progressively losing sight since I was a child.

Now, in my mid-thirties, the disease has advanced to the point where I have lost almost all usable vision. It was probably inevitable that I would come to focus my attention on how to interpret the suffering my blindness has caused me. However, this is not a strictly personal dissertation. My own disability may be a launching point for analysis, but I believe that the arguments I am making are applicable to the disabled experience in general. More specifically, I believe these arguments are vital for blind people, which is why the second part of the dissertation focuses on blindness specifically. I have met many blind people in my life, and I

have learned about many perspectives and life stories. I have paid close attention to how their interpretations of blindness affect them. Are they psychologically healthy? Are they flourishing?

If not, what is getting in their way? What beliefs, desires, values, interpretations, or psychological dispositions are to blame? I have asked of myself the same questions, and this dissertation is my attempt to provide some answers.

There is a particular perspective I find among blind people that I am especially interested in critiquing because I believe it is both unhealthy and highly seductive (a dangerous combination). It is the perspective of blind people who are typically of a younger generation and who view blindness as a politicized personal identity. These people have a high level of self- awareness about being blind and interpret every experience that is had in a social context as something to do with blindness. If they have an awkward interaction with a store clerk, it must be because the clerk is uncomfortable with blind people. If they make a mistake at work, their co-workers probably think it has something to do with blindness. And when the restaurant waiter asks their companion what they would like to order, this is not merely the waiter’s embarrassing faux pas but an indication that the non-blind view all blind people as less than fully human. This perspective is demonstrated by Annie Brady, an activist and artist who describes her experience of blindness at a TEDx Talks event. Her presentation is titled “Blind, Not Broken,” and I recommend watching it, not only to hear what she says but also to hear how she is saying it. At various points during the talk, Brady’s tone is emphatic, almost desperate, as she tries to convince the audience that she is not “broken.” To my ear, it sounds like she is trying to convince herself as well.

Brady opens the talk with a common blind experience: “I can’t tell you how many times, when traveling with a sighted companion, I’ve had [people] ask [her/him], ‘Is she. . . you know. .

. blind?’ [. . .] In one fell swoop, they take away my autonomy.” She goes on to say that these people do this because they cannot “deal with her blindness,” and so they choose to avoid her.

The claim that autonomy is negated in situations like these is a conventional idea within the politicized identity perspective. It is so conventional that no one ever seems to question if this is a necessary or good interpretation of the experience. In an insightful passage describing the psychological dynamics at play in these interpersonal interactions, Tanya Titchkosky and Rod

Michalko write that

disabled people experience the ways non-disabled others experience us. We

experience their experience, or better, we experience ourselves through their

experience of us. Through the contemporary frame of disability-as-problem, we

experience ourselves as having a problem and we also have the ‘strange

experience’ of being a problem to and for others. (135)

This is a pitch perfect description of the psychology underlying Brady’s perspective on her blindness. She experiences herself through others’ experience of her. If others believe she lacks autonomy, then she experiences a lack of autonomy. Later in her talk, she describes her experience trying to get a job. She thought that, if she was smart, witty, and likeable enough, she would not struggle to get a job: “I thought I was the exception to the rule. I wasn’t—because, as I quickly realized, it wasn’t about how smart or funny or likeable I am. It was about other people’s perceptions of me, about the tendency to confuse difference with ‘wrong’ and blind with

‘incompetent’.” When she does eventually get hired, it is through an affirmative action program.

She spends a long time at this job feeling ashamed of how she was hired and fearing that, if she made a single mistake, her co-workers would assume that it is because she is blind. So, even

when her blindness was not an issue, she was still fixated daily on what other people thought about her blindness.

Titchkosky and Michalko may have described well the experience of people like Brady, but they make a fundamental mistake in universalizing their insight and assuming that all disabled people share this experience. I know it is a mistake because I used to be like Brady. I experienced myself through other people. In Nietzschean terms, I was a “reactive” psychological type. In social contexts, my thoughts and behaviors were thoroughly determined by how other people treated me, by what other people thought about me, and, most importantly, what I mistakenly assumed that other people thought about me. Through a long process of analyzing my experience of blindness, and with the guidance of a Nietzschean perspective on psychological health and flourishing, I have been moving away from a reactive psychological state. I have made it far enough that, with some infrequent exceptions, I no longer experience my blindness through the filter of others’ experience of me. Many of my blind peers, however, remain mired in psychological reactivity, and they need to know that this is not a necessary or inevitable feature of being blind.

Another issue with the blindness-as-politicized-identity perspective is its tendency to devalue suffering generally, and evade the problem of impairment-derived psychological suffering—i.e., psychological distress that is caused by an impairment and that cannot be meaningfully attributed to social causes or contexts. Feeling distress because you have experienced a discriminatory act in a public place is an example of socially-derived psychological suffering; feeling distress because you cannot see the face of your child is an example of impairment-derived psychological suffering. The latter form of suffering is difficult to acknowledge because it would seem to play into the stereotypes that already exist about the

disability experience, and so the issue of psychological suffering from impairments is placed outside the parameters of “productive” discussion.

Brady seems to take this same view of the issue. She mentions reading about

LUXTURNA, a gene therapy for specific eye diseases. This therapy could treat her eye disease, but it costs $900,000, and so it is unavailable to her. One of the people who had vision restored by LUXTURNA says the best thing she has seen since the treatment is the stars. Upon reading this, Brady experiences a moment of impairment-derived psychological suffering: “suddenly, for one second, I wanted to see them—wanted it with an ache so powerful it stole the breath from my lungs. [. . .] that one second threatened to change everything.” The “threat” is that Brady’s blindness will become a problem for her because it causes her suffering. She makes sure we know that this experience lasted precisely one second, and it is the only example of impairment- derived psychological suffering in her talk. All of the other bad experiences she has had that have caused her psychological distress can be blamed on social causes. For her, there is clearly no value in impairment-derived suffering.

For those who think that disabled people are an oppressed group, acknowledging socially-derived psychological suffering is more acceptable because it adds to the ethical case against their oppressors. Of course, the word “suffering” is rarely used because of how the term has been historically deployed to mischaracterize the disability experience. Nevertheless, suffering is at the root of every disability theory and interpretation that asserts an oppressive power dynamic between disabled and non-disabled. “Oppression” would be a meaningless concept if the “oppressed” were not suffering because of it. But acknowledging suffering is not sufficient for psychological health and flourishing—suffering must also be valued as the condition for an increase in personal power. Social oppression perspectives typically do the

opposite; they devalue suffering because it is viewed as a mere byproduct of an unethical oppressive power dynamic. Therefore, the focus is on ending suffering by abolishing that power dynamic, not on the value of suffering as a stimulus for an individual’s will to power. Instead of recognizing the necessity of suffering for individual flourishing and psychological health, suffering is viewed as unnecessary and evil—and the sooner we are rid of it, the better.

In order to say anything meaningful and important about suffering from disability, we must first acknowledge that it is a central problem within the disability experience. In doing this, however, we are entering dangerous waters. The risk is that acknowledging the centrality of impairment-derived psychological suffering will only confirm what the non-disabled have always wrongly assumed about the disabled—that we are prisoners of our suffering, and our agency is therefore limited. And as for socially-derived psychological suffering, too much explicit focus on it would seem to encourage the kind of reactive psychological state that I have claimed is unhealthy for disabled people. The only way forward is through a Nietzschean interpretation of suffering from disability. We must stop allowing our perspective to be dictated by our fear of what the non-disabled will think if we acknowledge impairment-derived psychological suffering. And we also must stop allowing the interpretations and actions of the non-disabled to dictate our psychological and affective states. Adopting a Nietzschean perspective will achieve these goals through a decentering of the non-disabled other and a corresponding centering of ourselves. We can free ourselves from Titchkosky’s and Michalko’s trap of experiencing ourselves through how others experience us if our individual psychological health and flourishing becomes our main concern. But this will only happen if we accept that expressing power is the essence of flourishing, and suffering while striving to overcome resistance to the will is a necessary condition for the expression of power.

In Part 1 of the dissertation, I lay out in much greater detail the problem of suffering from disability and the various DS interpretations that try to explain it (or explain it away). To reiterate, the problem has two main aspects. The first is the potential meaninglessness of suffering from disability and the meaningful interpretations we invent to deal with the intolerability of meaningless suffering. Second is the invention of bad interpretations that devalue suffering, exacerbate unhealthy psychological and affective states, and inhibit individual flourishing. Chapter 2 covers three prominent DS theorists—Michael Oliver, Tobin Siebers, and

Susan Wendell—and their differing interpretations of disability and suffering. In Chapter 3, I elaborate my conception of suffering and the difficulty DS theorists have in analyzing it. This is also where I introduce the Nietzschean perspective on suffering, explicating his views on both the psychological need humans have for meaningful suffering and the necessary relationship between suffering and flourishing. With a Nietzschean interpretation in place, I then return in

Chapter 4 to DS interpretations of suffering that try to explain it as an effect of ideology. I point out aspects of these interpretations that could be harmonized with a Nietzschean perspective while critiquing other aspects that take us in the wrong direction toward bad psychological states.

In Part 2, I focus more narrowly on interpretations of blindness in memoirs, literature, and other non-fictional writings. Chapter 5 analyzes three different interpretations, which I call deflationary, religious, and affirmative. A deflationary interpretation asserts that blindness is nothing more than the basic biological fact of visual impairment, and any attempt to imbue blindness with meaning is therefore erroneous and potentially harmful. A religious interpretation takes the polar opposite position, imbuing blindness with metaphysical meaning and significance. While both of these interpretations have useful aspects, they also have serious flaws in that they cannot provide the kind of meaning for blindness that we need to flourish. An

affirmative interpretation provides the best perspective by valuing suffering from blindness as an essential condition for individual flourishing.

In Chapter 6, I return to the oppression interpretation and show how fitting one’s life into a narrative of oppression encourages the development of bad psychological and affective states. I do this by way of two Nietzschean concepts, ressentiment and imaginary compensation for powerlessness, and apply them to a couple of texts by blind authors. I also analyze the current trend in DS toward theories of internalized oppression/ableism and show how these theories are motivated by what Nietzsche identifies as the internalization of the drive for cruelty. Finally, in

Chapter 7, I argue that we can find affirmative interpretations of blindness in specific literary texts. I demonstrate this by analyzing John Milton’s Samson Agonistes and Sophocles’ Oedipus the King and Oedipus at Colonus, arguing that Oedipus, Tiresias, and Samson are more powerful than their sighted counterparts. As blind people, we need such inspiring examples so that we can affirm blindness in our own lives, and to guard against two seductive ideas—that suffering has no value and that we are powerless victims of oppressive circumstances.

3. A Note on Terminology

“Disability” is a slippery concept, and how we talk and theorize about it depends heavily on how we define it. Most people working in DS accept some version of a social model of disability, according to which disability is what results when people with impairments enter into a socially constructed world. For example, a wheelchair-user with impaired legs only becomes disabled when she tries to enter a building that does not have a wheelchair ramp. If the building had a ramp, she would not be disabled in the discrete situation of entering a building. Or, if the

people within the building have negative beliefs and attitudes about people with impaired legs, then she would be disabled by the way they behave toward her. This model is intended to counter what is often called a “medical model” of disability, according to which disability is a product of impairment requiring medical or rehabilitative intervention. DS theorists typically reject the medical model because it obscures the political, social, and cultural determinants of disability.

This is an extremely simplified summary of a complicated issue and debate within the field, but it is not within the scope of this dissertation to elaborate further. I briefly summarize these concepts for the purpose of contrasting my usage of the term “disability.”

Although the social model of disability is the dominant conceptualization of choice for most in DS, there are some who adopt different models, such as the International Classification of Disability, Functioning, and Health (ICF), a classification system produced by the World

Health Organization (WHO). Jerome Bickenbach is one such scholar who uses the ICF in his work. As he states, the ICF “is the only game in town” (57) because it is the only international standard for health practice and research. The ICF is widely criticized within DS for being a

“medical model” of disability, but Bickenbach argues that this is mostly a misunderstanding of the classification system. “Disability” in the ICF is an umbrella term that encompasses the complex interaction between an individual’s body and external factors, including social environments. Thus, the classification system integrates both the medical model and the social model in what the ICF refers to as a “biopsychosocial” approach. The goal is to balance the aspects of disability that exist within medical or biological domains with the aspects that exist within social, political, and cultural domains. While it is not the standard conceptualization of disability within DS, I will follow Bickenbach’s lead by relying on the ICF perspective and language when discussing disability.

The ICF has two parts, each of which is further split into two components. The first part involves functioning and disability, the components of which are body functions/structures and activity/participation. Body functions are the physiological and psychological functions of the body, whereas structures are the anatomical parts of the body. The term “body” encompasses brain functions and mental states, so mind and physical body are combined as a holistic unit.

Each component can be expressed in positive or negative terms. The negative state of the body functions/structures component is impairment; impairment is defined as a deviation from biological and biomedical norms, norms which are established via statistical analysis of human populations.

The second component of functioning and disability is activity and participation. Activity is the execution of an action or performance of a task, actions and tasks that are typically localized to what an individual is doing in her immediate environment. Participation is involvement in a life situation which, in contrast to an activity, typically references interactions that take place between individual and a wider environment. There are nine categories of activity/participation: Learning and applying knowledge; General tasks and demands;

Communication: Mobility; Self-care; Domestic life; Interpersonal interactions and relationships;

Major life areas; Community, social and civic life. I will not offer examples for each category, but this cursory view reveals that it would be impossible to group each category into either an activity set or participation set.

As with body functions/structures, there is a negative aspect to activity and participation.

Activity limitations are limits on the performance of an activity, and participation restrictions are problems with involvement in life situations. Here, too, limitations and restrictions are judged according to generally accepted standards which are based on statistical analysis of human

populations. Activity and participation are further qualified by the concepts of performance and capacity. Performance describes what a person does in his environment, from the most basic bodily action to the most complicated social involvement. Capacity describes a person’s ability to perform an action at every level of complexity. The gap between capacity and performance is a product of contextual factors, and so understanding why the gap exists can aid individuals and practitioners in altering contextual factors in order to improve performance.

The second part of the ICF involves contextual factors, the components of which are environmental factors and personal factors. Environments can be social as well as physical, and environmental factors can have positive or negative effects on the entire range of individual performance and capacity, from the most immediate body functions to complex social situations.

Environmental factors also include intangible elements such as attitudes, beliefs, and ideologies regarding disability. Personal factors are all of the features that make an individual unique, such as gender, race, age, habits, upbringing, coping styles, social background, education, character, and the innumerable experiences that constitute an individual person. All of these personal factors can have an effect on disability, from body function to activity and participation. Again, many DS theorists reject the ICF, and I suspect they would never accept it unless the ICF reflected a social model paradigm whereby the causation of disability derived, predominately or exclusively, from environmental factors. Nevertheless, I agree with Bickenbach that the ICF is the most comprehensive and analytically rigorous classification system available to us and, therefore, we should use it.

Part I. Disability and the Meaning of Suffering

Chapter II. Disability Studies and the Meaning of Suffering

1. Introduction

My main task in this chapter is to explicate the views of three prominent DS theorists regarding interpretations of disability and suffering. I am focusing on these three because they are good representatives of three schools of thought within DS. Michael Oliver represents the

Marxist-inspired British social modelist perspective. According to this perspective, disability is imposed on people who have impairments. An impairment is nothing more than an instance of value-neutral, biological variation. It is only when people with impairments enter into social environments that they become disabled by structural barriers and the negative beliefs/attitudes of the non-impaired. Disability, then, is essentially a manifestation of social oppression, and whatever might be suffered from disability can therefore be attributed to social causes. For

Oliver, the suffering that is caused by oppression is rooted in a capitalist socioeconomic order that devalues impaired people based on assumptions about their potential for economic productivity.

Another major school of DS thought focuses on cultural representations and conceptual constructions of disability. This approach is more dominant in the United States, and Tobin

Siebers is one of its influential proponents. His contribution to the field is a theory of ideology that purports to explain the pervasive devaluing of disability. The “ideology of ability” is a

system of beliefs that shapes our thoughts and desires regarding ability and covers up our contradictory fears about disability. For Siebers, whatever is suffered from disability can largely be attributed to the bad psychological effects of our ideological desire for ability. Susan Wendell represents the third major school of thought that I am classifying as feminist/phenomenological.

Beginning in the 1990s, disabled feminists began to make important contributions to DS by focusing on the lived experience of disability. The feminist/phenomenological perspective provided a serious critique of the traditional Marxist social model which sought to downplay phenomenological perspectives in favor of strict sociopolitical critique. The meaning of suffering from disability is still largely derived from interpretations of social oppression, although Wendell does go farther than most in acknowledging both impairment-derived suffering and the value suffering has for personal growth. What these three perspectives have in common is that they attempt to give meaning to suffering from disability. In this chapter, I will summarize their views before analyzing and critiquing them in subsequent chapters.

2. Michael Oliver and Suffering from Oppression

Within DS, it is commonly believed that ending the oppression of disabled people requires a critical response to stereotypical ways of thinking about and representing disability.

One such stereotype is the notion that disability is a tragedy that afflicts an individual person and makes his/her life uncommonly difficult. According to this interpretation, whatever people suffer from disability is mainly caused by their own bodies, which obscures the social factors that cause suffering. Therefore, DS literature wholeheartedly and unanimously rejects associating disability in any way with tragedy. In The Politics of Disablement, a foundational DS book, Mike Oliver

argues that "almost all studies of disability have a grand theory underpinning them. That grand theory can be characterised as ‘the personal tragedy theory of disability’" (1). He claims that viewing disability in this way individualizes the problem of disability and thereby obscures the socio-political dimension of disability. A significant consequence of this obscurity is that it absolves the non-disabled of responsibility for oppression of the disabled. Other DS theorists, such as Licia Carlson, identify conceptions of species-typical physiology and functioning as the basis for the conclusion that disability is a tragedy. According to Carlson, bodily variations that depart from physiological normality give rise to the belief that "disability is objectively bad, and thus something to be pitied, a personal tragedy for both the individual and her family, something to be prevented and, if possible, cured" (5).

For anyone who holds a personal tragedy model of disability, the preceding description might seem like common sense; however, many DS theorists question the notion that species- typical physiology and functioning is a meaningful concept. This skepticism is especially evident in the area of Critical Disability Studies (CDS) where “normality” is viewed as a conceptual tool for the implementation of particular forms of social control (See, for example, Margrit

Shildrick’s postconventional account of disability, Rosemarie Garland Thompson’s concept of the normate, Robert McRuer’s compulsory ablebodiedness, and David Mitchell’s and Sharon

Snyder’s critique of neoliberal disability inclusion). These theorists also argue that conceiving disability in this way actively harms the disabled and misrepresents them as unhappy and unable to function in everyday life. Tragic accounts of disability entail personal suffering, and so many in DS are wary of discussing that problem. Personal suffering seems to reinforce medical conceptions of disability as an abnormal condition that requires a medical response; this thinking

then perpetuates negative stereotypes about disabled people as one-dimensional victims of their biology .

In contrast to a medicalized approach, DS scholars emphasize and analyze the social determinants of disability. G. Thomas Couser summarizes this social conception of disability as being "a dysfunction not of the individual body but of the body politic" (179). Michael Davidson rejects disability as a medical condition and bodily infirmity, instead arguing that “disability is a set of social and cultural barriers to full participation in social life" (6). Colin Barnes, one of the staunchest advocates for a social model of disability, plainly states that "the social model is a deliberate attempt to shift attention away from the functional limitations of individuals with impairments onto the problems caused by disabling environments, barriers and cultures” (18).

And as Margaret Price argues, the social model agenda "[requires] a disorienting shift away from presumptions of tragedy, courage, or brokenness because it is foremost a social and political perspective. As such, it shifts the ‘problem’ of disability away from individuals and toward institutions and attitudes" (4).

There is little ambiguity concerning the source and meaning of suffering for disabled people in the work of Michael Oliver. For him, societal barriers produce disability, and so disabled people suffer from the oppression they must endure. He identifies these barriers as

“inaccessible education systems, working environments, inadequate disability benefits, discriminatory health and social support services, inaccessible transport, houses and public buildings and amenities, and the devaluing of disabled people through negative images in the media” (Understanding Disability 47). The common sense view is that disability is primarily a problem of the individual body; but if disability is a negative condition that is socially imposed on people with impairments, then saying disability causes suffering is equivalent to saying that

society causes suffering. In response to the criticism that impairments also cause suffering,

Oliver responds that, as a quadriplegic, he is acutely aware of the limitations that impairments cause. However, conceding that impairments are limiting is not the same as conceding that impairments cause suffering. Oliver never concedes the latter, and he does not dwell on the former because “the limitations that our functional impairments impose upon us are an inadequate basis for building a political movement” (Understanding Disability 48).

Oliver’s perspective that social structures and relations cause suffering has implications for the social mission to cure impairments. If suffering is the result of disability and not impairment, then seeking cures for impairments is misguided, and possibly pernicious, because it obscures the actual cause of suffering. Oliver is highly critical of the pursuit of cures, which is the goal of many charitable organizations. He calls it a “millenarian movement” because it promises radical social change by miraculous means. The charitable organizations would claim that they are basing their pursuit of cures on solidly scientific methods. But Oliver is skeptical for historical reasons: “The problem is, of course, that throughout the history of humankind, the number of cures that have been found to these ‘chronic and crippling diseases' could be counted on the fingers of one hand and still leave some over to eat your dinner with” (Understanding

Disability 33). He thinks that the zeal with which societies go about looking for cures is best explained by a desire to eliminate the burden of having to deal with disabled people. Seeking cures is therefore a matter of societal values and priorities and, in Oliver’s view, our priority

“should not be to make the legless normal, whatever that may mean, but to create a social environment where to be legless is irrelevant” (29).

Seeking cures also depends on the meaning of disability in a given society. For Oliver, the meaning of disability in British and American societies is determined by the ideologies of

capitalism and individualism. In a capitalist society, people are valuable to the extent that they are productive. Because disabled people are not as productive as their non-disabled peers, they are less valuable in a capitalist economy. Ideologies of individualism and self-sufficiency are crucial for justifying capitalism, and these ideologies further marginalize disabled people.

Consequently, disability is turned into a medical and rehabilitative problem rather than a problem with the prevailing social order. Theories are devised to explain the condition of disability, foremost among them being what Oliver calls the “personal tragedy theory” (Politics of

Disablement 1). The cultural contingency of these ideologies can be discerned when comparing them to the treatment of disabled people in other societies. Oliver describes a particular Mexican community in which blindness is believed to be a result of divine intervention. The community is thus deferential to blind people and takes care to include them in every aspect of community life

(Politics 15-6). In contrast, Oliver describes a study of disabled students in a British continuing education course which concluded that the students had poor self-esteem and a negative self- image. Oliver argues that these students have been socialized to believe that they are victims of tragic circumstances. This is because “teachers, like other professionals, also hold to this view of disability, curriculum materials portray disabled people (if they appear at all) as pathetic victims or arch-villains and their education takes place in a context in which any understanding of the history and politics of disability is absent” (Politics 92).

The meanings that are attributed to disability are therefore fundamental to the process of identity formation, which for Oliver is a product of material conditions during specific historical eras. For him, industrialization of Western economies was the most significant factor in the creation of a particular form of disability identity. He argues that, prior to industrialization, disabled people were integrated into social life. But once the value of a human being became a

matter of productive labor, those who could not produce in the economic order were devalued.

Scientific discourses of biological normality and deviance developed as a result of the new material conditions, and these discourses provided the justification for identifying disabled people as deviant. Disabled people then became objects of pity because they were unable to fully participate in capitalist societies. This is why they became characters in a great many sentimental stories and novels during the Victorian era. Ever since then, “whether it be in the novel, newspaper stories or television and films, disabled people continue to be portrayed as more than or less than human, rarely as ordinary people doing ordinary things” (Politics 62).

Identity formation is not merely a passive process. Following the lead of Antonio

Gramsci’s theory of cultural hegemony, Oliver argues that the class of professionals who do things to and write about disabled people create the interpretations and values according to which disabled people are judged. One such interpretation is “adjustment,” which is the idea that

when something happens to an individual’s body something happens to the mind

as well. Thus, in order to become fully human again, in order to form a disabled

identity, the disabled individual must undergo medical treatment and physical

rehabilitation as well as the process of psychological adjustment or coming to

terms with disability. Further, in order to adjust satisfactorily, the individual may

need to grieve and mourn for his lost ability and pass through a series of stages

before adjustment is complete. (Politics 63)

Oliver, along with other DS scholars such as Vic Finkelstein and Erving Zola, criticize the adjustment perspective for lacking theoretical coherence and empirical evidence. They argue that responses to becoming disabled are so varied that any theory that purports to explain a universally shared response must be inadequate. And so, the adjustment perspective exists for a

different reason—i.e., it provides justification for a particular power dynamic between professionals and “maladjusted” disabled people. The justification is needed to cover up the fact that disabled people are experiencing socially-derived psychological suffering from a particular form of capitalist socioeconomic order.

This hegemonic interpretation has also influenced cultural representations of disabled people, particularly in the films and television shows of the past several decades. The plots follow a predictable pattern. The disabled characters are bitter and wallow in self-pity because they have never adjusted to being disabled, even if they have been disabled for a long time. The problem is thus framed as an individual problem, and these characters view themselves as tragic victims. In these stories, the disabled people “treat their families and friends badly until, long- suffering enough, they confront these disabled people giving them ‘an emotional slap in the face’. The disabled person then realises that it is him or her who has the problem, accepts the rebuke and becomes a well-adjusted adult” (Politics 65). These representations not only create an unequal power dynamic with professionals, but also with family and friends. Expressing anger or frustration with the experience of prejudice or discriminatory attitudes is all-to-easily interpreted according to the culturally supported perspective of maladjustment. The upshot is that the real source of suffering for disabled people, an oppressive socioeconomic order, is obscured by attributing it to an individualized, personal problem.

3. Tobin Siebers and Suffering from Ideology

Oliver’s theory of identity formation is based on the premise that disability is a negative, oppressive social condition which is produced by a capitalist economy and cultural hegemony.

Thus, a disability identity is only redeemable if disabled people are conscious of their oppression and act collectively to resist oppression. Otherwise, a person who is disabled by their society will most likely internalize negative beliefs and attitudes about disability through cultural representations of disability. But this is only one position within DS. For theorists who depart from the strong social model, disability can have a very different meaning. Tobin Siebers, for example, does not think that disability is synonymous with societal oppression. While disability is largely determined by social factors, it is also inextricably linked to impairment, which personalizes disability in a way that is anathema to the strong social model. In his book

Disability Theory, he argues that “people with disabilities insist on the pertinence of disability to the human condition, on the value of disability as a form of diversity, and on the power of disability as a critical concept for thinking about human identity in general” (7). If disability can be valued in these ways, it is not merely identical to oppression, and it opens up the possibility that disability can be a positive personal identity.

For Siebers, disability is primarily a cultural and minority identity, not a biological or natural property. While impairments may be rooted in biology, disability is produced by the interaction between an impaired body and a social context. This is not to say that impairment is natural and disability is social, as the British social model claims. Even impairment is largely a social product in the sense that many impairments are caused by social factors, such as war, malnutrition, unhealthy and dangerous environments, and lack of access to healthcare. Both disability and impairment, therefore, are inseparable aspects of a personal identity. Siebers recognizes that this fact creates a problem because disability has both positive and negative

“valences.” Disability has a positive valence insofar as it provides an identity with beneficial psychological and social effects. However, it can also be negative when considering disability as

a physical or mental condition. He notes that many disabled people are perfectly comfortable and satisfied with being disabled, and they do not want to be changed or cured. However, such people are at least ambivalent about becoming more disabled or acquiring other disabilities, which indicates that there is something negative about disability. Siebers believes that this negativity is explained by a universal preference for ability, a preference that is often implicit in our beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors. But unlike Oliver, he wants to allow for the expression of negative beliefs and attitudes about disability (Siebers 8-9).

Siebers’ reason for allowing and affirming the personal expression of negativity derives from his perspective on suffering, which I will summarize in a moment. But first I must explain why he believes there is a preference for ability because it will illuminate the true source of oppression for disabled people. The reason for this preference is ideological, which he describes as follows:

The ideology of ability is at its simplest the preference for able-bodiedness. At its

most radical, it defines the baseline by which humanness is determined, setting

the measure of body and mind that gives or denies human status to individual

persons. It affects nearly all of our judgments, definitions, and values about

human beings, but because it is discriminatory and exclusionary, it creates social

locations outside of and critical of its purview, most notably in this case, the

perspective of disability. (Siebers 12)

According to this theory, oppression of disabled people has an ideological source. Because ability is an unquestionable good, anything that deviates from ability is assumed to be bad. A simple example of this implicit assumption is disability-selective abortion. Aborting a fetus with

Down syndrome is an ideological decision based on the belief that life is not worth living if it

must be lived without a particular set of valued abilities. Another example is the euthanization of severely disabled people, an ideological act that expresses a value judgment about a presumed incapacity to live well.

Abortion and euthanasia constitute the radical edge of the ideology of ability. Less extreme examples include the construction of physical spaces that exclude people with mobility disabilities and the creation of educational procedures that exclude people with learning disabilities. For Siebers, constructing a building without ramps or elevators is not accidental. It happens because the ideology of ability screens disability from view. The designers take for granted that people will have the ability to enter their building, and it is only through threat of legal penalties that they are forced to modify their practice.

Educational institutions also express a preference for ability through rigid procedures for passing courses and gaining credentials that disregard people with learning disabilities. Again, it is only the threat of legal penalties that forces these institutions to modify their procedures, and it is not uncommon for faculty to resist these modifications on the grounds that the ability to learn in a particular way is essential and, therefore, non-negotiable. On a personal level, the preference for ability expresses a value judgment about what one’s body can do, and such preferences are not limited to the non-disabled. Everyone is subject to the ideology of ability, which is why

Siebers says that it is “a conceptual horizon beyond which it is difficult to think” (8).

Ideology for Siebers is a system of beliefs that covers up contradictions in how people think and act, contradictions which are revealed through analysis of the system. The ideology of ability obscures two contradictions, the first being the significance of the material body. He points out that, on the one hand, the physical body seems irrelevant to the essential self, which is believed to be the amalgamation of beliefs, desires, attitudes, emotions, experiences, etc. But, on

the other hand, we invest substantial amounts of time, attention, and resources in perfecting the physical body—physically, cosmetically, and medically. Siebers thinks that the goal of perfecting the body is paradoxical and “preposterous”: “[we] hardly ever consider how incongruous is this understanding of the body—that the body seems both inconsequential and perfectible” (11). The second contradiction is the belief that we will triumph over physical decay and death despite all historical and scientific evidence to the contrary. Religions promise eternal life. Science fiction indulges the hope that we will evolve beyond our limited biological form.

Cybernetics extends the hope that the content of human consciousness will someday be downloadable so that we can exist outside of our bodies. For Siebers, these commonly believed or hoped for ideas contradict the truth that humans are “feeble and finite” (12), and that the enshrinement of ability as the ultimate good motivates the creation of an ideology that permits this truth to be ignored.

According to some perspectives, such as those of Antonio Gramsci and Louis Althusser, ideology is a dense web of cultural beliefs and values which so thoroughly structures social life that critiquing it is a difficult task. So it is with the ideology of ability because the concept of ability is the “horizon” beyond which it is difficult to think. However, Siebers argues that the exclusionary nature of this ideology creates outside “social locations” from which meaningful criticism can occur. He writes that “oppressed social locations create identities and perspectives, embodiments and feelings, histories and experiences that stand outside of and offer valuable knowledge about the powerful ideologies that seem to enclose us” (12). What he means is that a group of disabled people can develop a critical consciousness of this ideology through the experience of oppression. Many disabled people will internalize the ideological justification for their oppression and thus remain trapped within the belief system. But some people will come to

see that ability is not a natural or given fact but a value-laden phenomenon that is used to deny some people full participation in social life. For these people, a critical perspective on the concept of ability and its deployment in social life to oppress specific groups allows for the recognition and critique of the ideology.

From this critical perspective, innumerable mistaken beliefs about ability and disability can be addressed. One such belief is that it is better to be dead than disabled. This belief is based on the assumption that disability causes suffering to such a high degree that life is not worth living. Siebers has a nuanced response to this belief. First and foremost, he wants to challenge the unstated premise that suffering derives exclusively from the body. Much of the suffering that occurs as a result of disability happens for social reasons. A person with an intellectual disability might not experience any suffering simply because he has an intellectual disability. But if he is treated like a pariah in social contexts, he will undoubtedly suffer. When disabled people experience discrimination and prejudicial treatment, they suffer as a result. A wheelchair user might be perfectly contented at home, but when she enters the public square where she experiences condescension and dismissive attitudes, she suffers. Suffering can thus be a psychological response to how one is treated by others. Siebers writes that “wounds received in physical attacks may pale against the suffering experienced in the idea that one is being attacked because one is unjustly thought inferior” (24). The belief then that one is better off dead than disabled, properly understood, should be taken as an indictment of the social conditions that are forced upon disabled people.

But Siebers does not stop at locating the source of suffering in social contexts. He also seeks to “acknowledge the negative” in disability experience, by which he means the bad effects that derive primarily from the disabled body. When talking about bodily experiences, he refers to

“pain” and “physical suffering” rather than just “suffering,” presumably to distance the reality of impairment effects from the stereotypical rhetoric about disability and suffering. He also discusses pain in comparison to how pain is treated by postmodern “body theorists” such as Leo

Bersani. He writes that

pain in current body theory is rarely physical. It is more likely to be based on the

pain of guilt or social repression. Society creates pain, but this creation backfires,

producing an individual who struggles against society--this is the dominant

theoretical conception of pain. I do not want to underestimate the amount of

psychic pain produced by society; nor do I want to deny that psychic pain

translates into physical pain. Clearly, the pain of disability is less bearable

because people with disabilities suffer intolerance and loneliness every day. They

hurt because the nondisabled often refuse to accept them as members of the

human community. And yet many people with disabilities understand that

physical pain is an enemy. It hovers over innumerable daily actions, whether the

disability is painful in itself or only the occasion for pain because of the difficulty

of navigating one's environment. The great challenge every day is to manage the

body's pain, to get out of bed in the morning, to overcome the well of pain that

rises in the evening, to meet the hundred daily obstacles that are not merely

inconveniences but occasions for physical suffering. (66)

This passage contains a crucial distinction regarding suffering. For Siebers, experiences of suffering that are caused by a disabled body are physical, not psychological. And the physical suffering can be caused by the disability itself, or the disability can be the condition that causes secondary experiences of suffering. For example, fibromyalgia is itself a source of pain, whereas

blindness is not itself a source of pain. However, blindness can be the pre-condition for other experiences of pain. When attempting to navigate a loud, crowded room, a blind person will often experience stress and anxiety to such a high degree that the experience is painful. These experiences often lead to headaches and migraines. So, while blindness is not typically known to be an immediate source of physical pain, it can be a condition that leads to pain.

What Siebers does not mention is impairment-derived psychological suffering. It would appear from his silence on the matter that he believes psychological suffering is only caused by social factors, but it could also be true that he simply does not want to address the topic for fear of reinforcing the personal tragedy model of disability. Or, it could be the case that he thinks psychological suffering of this kind is a consequence of the ideology of ability. A disabled person might believe that he is better off dead than being disabled for reasons that have to do with the body and not social oppression. And holding such a belief would surely cause psychological suffering. But we have already seen that Siebers thinks this kind of belief is ideological, so this person would suffer because of an ideology, not because of his body.

Siebers’ ultimate purpose in discussing pain, physical suffering, and the “negative” in disability is to provide a foundation, and justification, for an identity politics rooted in pain. He devotes a significant portion of his book to refuting critics who argue that disability identity cannot be a basis for political action. He thinks that such an idea would not be commonly assumed “if [disability] were not thought to generate an onslaught of suffering that awakens a mysterious psychological mechanism rendering individuals defective as social and political actors” (192). Contrary to this common view, Siebers has provided an alternative account of psychological suffering which lays bare its ideological and social causes. He points out that even

physical pain is not simply a private experience. Pain only becomes meaningful when it gets interpreted in a social context. The same is true of psychological suffering. According to Siebers,

the feelings of injury central to identity politics reflect the emergence of a new

and oppositional social identity. Pain under the pressure of identity politics

changes from a feeling of private suffering into a theoretical position, a political

identity, from which the person in pain may join with others to reexamine the

world, the better to fight the oppression of minority people and to create a future

for them. (197)

This is the emergence of a new kind of pain—a “political pain” which has the power to liberate disabled people from the ideology of ability. A positive political identity is formed by redirecting suffering from the body toward its true social and ideological source. This political identity is therefore positive and counteracts the negative ideological representation of disability. It also provides a meaningful reason for the physical pain that some disabled people experience.

4. Susan Wendell and Suffering for Difference

Suffering is typically thought to be an unworthwhile topic of discussion for many in DS, especially for those who hold to the British social model, or for those who prefer to locate the problems of disability in socioeconomic structures or cultural representations. One group that is, however, comfortable with writing about personal suffering includes disabled feminists, particularly those who have chronic pain and fatigue disabilities. Susan Wendell is one such feminist, and her account of suffering compliments Siebers’ attempt to productively acknowledge negative aspects of disability. For her, the problem of suffering is the struggle to

accept and affirm one’s disabled body despite social pressure to reject it. Fear of and anxiety about disability are at the core of the non-disabled’s rejection of the disabled. This rejection comes in many forms including discrimination, prejudice, unconscious biases, and the distortion of actual disabled experience via inaccurate cultural representations. These negative emotions are responses to the natural precariousness of the human body. When people are unable to face and accept the truth that their bodies are fragile and only temporarily healthy, they displace uneasiness about their own bodies by rejecting the bodies of others. Wendell’s solution to this displacement is for non-disabled people to recognize that “[most] of us will live part of our lives with bodies that hurt, that move with difficulty or not at all, that deprive us of activities we once took for granted, or that others take for granted—bodies that make daily life a physical struggle”

(18). She points out that every person who is currently non-disabled, and who lives the average lifespan, will experience disability, either because of an accident or through the aging process.

Recognizing this truth is key to challenging the “otherness” of disabled people.

Wendell’s candor about the personal difficulties she faces because of her disability is unusual for DS. While Siebers writes openly about physical pain, he does not address the psychological effects of the personal aspects of disability. Wendell admits that she sometimes feels sad and envious hearing about other people's hiking expeditions or trips to places that are too exhausting for her (81). Siebers focuses on the experience of physical exhaustion in such situations and allows for the expression of personal, physical pain. But Wendell is expressing something quite different. She is referring to how she feels about being incapable of engaging in an activity, feelings that are not always products of social values. Sometimes negative feelings are the product of social values, such as “when people go on at length about someone's great energy, especially when their attitude seems to be that it is a moral virtue” (81). Under these

circumstances, the reason for negative feelings would likely be in response to how the activity is socially valued. But Wendell believes that it is possible to have negative feelings that are not products of social values. For her, there is something intrinsically enjoyable about running, dancing, climbing, and hiking, activities she is unable to do because of her disabled body.

If it is true that there is intrinsic value in these abilities, then desiring such abilities cannot be entirely ideological. Wendell thinks that ability and disability are socially and culturally constructed to a large extent. By “construction” she means that social contexts and environments play a major role in how disability is expressed and experienced, and cultural representations of disability influence what we think and believe about disability. But just because disability is subject to construction does not mean that it is a non-natural property. Wendell is critical of hardline social and cultural constructionists whose theories effectively eliminate the natural body by “[confusing] the lived reality of bodies with cultural discourse about and representations of bodies, or that deny or ignore bodily experience in favour of fascination with bodily representations” (43). Such is the case with an essay Donna Haraway wrote about the biomedical construction of immune system discourse. According to Wendell, Haraway’s essay treats the topic as though discourse is all there is to immune disorders, not real physical suffering with little political significance. She summarizes her position on the issue as follows:

I do not think my body is a cultural representation, although I recognize that my

experience of it is both highly interpreted and very influenced by cultural

(including medical) representations. Moreover, I think it would be cruel, as well

as a distortion of people's lives, to erase or ignore the everyday, practical,

experienced limitations of people's disabilities simply because we recognize that

human bodies and their varied conditions are both changeable and highly

interpreted. (43)

Wendell’s candor regarding the personal limitations with which disabled people must struggle contrasts starkly with Oliver’s minimization of such limitations. However, like him, Wendell is critical of the exaggerated efforts to cure disabilities because such efforts express negative beliefs about disabled people. But because she does not endorse the British social model, she is more willing to acknowledge negative aspects of disability that have their source in the body.

Applying this perspective to the issue of desiring cures reveals a greater depth to the problem of suffering than is found in Oliver’s theory. For Wendell, the problem of suffering and cure is bound up with the problem of personal identity. Personal identity is fundamentally constituted by difference. Having a particular disability makes a person different from a non- disabled person, and also different from a person with another kind of disability. The phenomenon of difference has intrinsic value, which means that disabilities have value because they engender difference. This is why the desire to cure disability is a problem—cures eliminate difference by reducing or preventing disabilities. Wendell points out that eliminating difference in other identity categories like race or gender is socially unacceptable. Aborting a fetus because it is black or female is abhorrent to almost all people in Western societies, but aborting a fetus that has a genetic abnormality is a common practice. If the reason why we do not abort black and female fetuses is because we value difference, then to be consistent, we should not abort genetically abnormal fetuses that would also instantiate difference. But the reason why we do abort such fetuses has to do with our conception of personal suffering and societal burden.

On the issue of personal suffering, Wendell argues that “widespread ignorance of the lives of people with disabilities, fear of disablement, and the assumption that disability is

primarily a biologically determined, rather than a socially constructed, phenomenon, contribute to the desire to prevent disability by preventing difference from the physical and mental 'norms' of a society” (80). In other words, decisions made on the basis of what we fear that others might suffer are largely made in ignorance of the significant role social context plays in how much one suffers from a disability. The proper thing to do is fight to create a more just society for disabled people as well as other minority groups. But as Wendell has already established, not all suffering experienced because of disability is due to social causes. There is some measure of suffering that is caused by the body, which means that there is some measure of suffering in difference. The pertinent question is, therefore, how much suffering is difference worth? Should we preserve the imperfections of the body, even at the cost of some suffering, for the sake of diversity?

This is not an easy question for Wendell because she believes there is a negative side to disability that does cause personal suffering, and she is sympathetic to the desire that people be spared this kind of suffering.

Part of what is at work in the sentiment, ‘Everyone wants a healthy baby,’ is a

desire that children be spared suffering. Although ignorance of disability probably

exaggerates the physical suffering (and underestimates the social suffering) of

most people with disabilities in the minds of people without disabilities, the

importance of ineliminable suffering must not be over-looked. Even people with

disabilities who identify strongly with being disabled and have very happy,

fulfilling lives might want to be cured, not for social reasons, but because they

want to have less pain or physical or mental difficulty. (81)

Wendell believes that disabled people are positioned best to decide how much suffering is worth experiencing for the preservation of difference. However, we cannot assume that the judgment of

such people is infallible because it can be difficult to distinguish between the social causes of suffering and the personal causes. The experience of loneliness, alienation, and frustration are usually the product of social causes, and these experiences make the physical and mental limitations of disability much worse. So, it is possible that disabled people might err in their judgment about whether difference is worth suffering for if they mistakenly personalize the cause. But Wendell maintains that the primary reason for concluding that difference is not worth suffering for is the non-disabled’s ignorance about social suffering.

The fact that the dominant focus of public rhetoric and effort is dedicated to preventing disabilities and finding cures justifies, in Wendell’s view, skepticism about the motivation to seek cures. While the elimination of suffering is the professed motive for the mission to prevent and cure disabilities, many disabled people believe that the true motive is to eliminate disability itself because it is unacceptably different. The assumption seems to be that disabled people are not yet good enough to fully participate in society; this is why Wendell claims that “my own resistance to the attitude that I need to be 'cured' in order to be a whole or fully acceptable person infuses my desire for a 'cure' with ambivalence” (82). Insofar as the personal suffering is concerned, she would “joyfully accept a cure” (83), but she insists that she does not need to be cured. The societal assumption that she needs to be cured is what causes her to be ambivalent about the entire enterprise. It would be better if the undue focus on cures was directed toward valuing disabilities as differences. This redirected focus would undermine the common sense view that disability is a tragedy and that everyone wants to be cured.

Wendell asserts that she does not need to be cured because she does not regret becoming ill. Her illness caused an “expansion of the self,” and these personal changes were meaningful to her; but the expansion only happened after she stopped searching for medical, psychological, and

spiritual cures. She reports that, “when I began to develop the ability to observe my symptoms and reduced my identification with the transient miseries of my body, I was able to reconstruct my life. The state of my body limited the possibilities in new ways, but it also presented new kinds of understanding, new interests, new passions, and projects” (174). She refers to this process as “transcendence of the body,” by which she means that the body no longer dictates who we are according to a narrow experience of personal suffering. Instead, the disabled body becomes an opportunity to expand the self and embrace the difference it makes possible.

Wendell is careful to point out that transcendence of the body does not imply a spiritual state of being, nor does it imply alienation from the body. Transcendence in this context is rather mundane because it simply involves “strategies for everyday living” (176). These strategies involve habits of thinking about, and interpretations of, the difficulties, discomforts, and pains we experience from the body. She concludes that “We cannot speak only of reducing our alienation from our bodies, becoming more aware of them, and celebrating their strengths and pleasures; we must also talk about how to live with the suffering body, with that which cannot be noticed without pain, and that which cannot be celebrated without ambivalence” (178). In doing so, suffering can be productively acknowledged and potentially channeled toward creative ends.

5. Conclusion

In the preceding sections, I have summarized different interpretations of suffering from disability that can be found in DS. If it seems as though the summaries are rather brief and theoretically thin, this is because I am attempting to draw out a mostly latent premise that is deeply embedded within political, cultural, social, and economic interpretations of disability.

Suffering is not Oliver’s, Siebers’, or Wendell’s explicit focus, and so drawing them out on this topic does not yield much content for explication. Nevertheless, the problem of suffering from disability is the central problem that motivates all DS theory, even though this fact has not yet been recognized or theoretically elaborated within the field. In subsequent chapters, I will support this claim by turning to analysis and critique of DS theories and interpretations of disability. I will show that DS interpretations satisfy a psychological need that we all have for suffering to be meaningful. They mostly generate this meaning by embedding disabled life into a narrative of social oppression, which, as I will argue, is an unhealthy way to give meaning to suffering. But, ultimately, all of our interpretations have as their end the flourishing of disabled people. The question is, which interpretation best achieves that end?

Chapter III. Disability and the Problem of Suffering

1. Introduction

In this chapter, I turn to a fuller explanation of the problem of suffering from disability, a problem that remains elusive in DS because of some conceptual confusions and lack of theoretical attention. Suffering from disability is traditionally viewed as a personal problem, and thus there has not been a compelling reason to foreground it in a field that primarily focuses on social, political, and cultural aspects of disability. However, as I argue, this view of suffering is too narrow and conceptually unclear. Once the conceptual issues are clarified, the problem of suffering can no longer be viewed as peripheral to social, political, and cultural issues. I begin by explaining what I mean by “suffering,” drawing an important distinction between suffering from physical pain and suffering from psychological distress. I make a further distinction between psychological suffering that is caused by impairment and psychological suffering that is caused by social factors. These distinctions are important because DS theorists tend to collapse different types of suffering into one concept; such collapsing allows them to appear as though they are addressing the problem of suffering when, in reality, they are only addressing the type of suffering that is caused by physical pain.

I then turn to how DS handles the value of suffering from disability. In general, suffering is devalued by DS theorists for a couple of reasons. First, impairment-derived psychological

suffering receives almost no attention within DS, and it is hard to value an experience when it is ignored. But the fact that this type of suffering is ignored is partially covered up by the so-called

“impairment turn” that precipitated a great deal of phenomenological attention to the experience of impairment and, occasionally, to the pain impairments cause. So, we have to analyze what is meant by “suffering” for the turn to impairment in order to recognize the lack of attention paid to impairment-derived psychological suffering. Second, socially-derived psychological suffering is devalued because it is interpreted as a byproduct of oppression. I call this kind of interpretation an “oppression narrative” because it is a ready-made story into which disabled people can insert their own lives. Upon doing so, they become victims of a class of oppressors—i.e., non-disabled people. According to such an interpretation, it would of course be difficult for a victim to value suffering that is imposed by a victimizer. Within DS, it is almost unanimously agreed that disabled people are oppressed. It is therefore unsurprising that the kind of suffering that occurs within bad social relations is devalued.

The second half of the chapter introduces a few ideas from Nietzsche’s philosophy that are relevant to understanding the problem of suffering and how humans deal with that problem.

Nietzsche was himself a disabled person who experienced a lot of physical pain throughout his life, as well as occasional limitations on his ability to write because of a visual impairment. This is undoubtedly why the problem of suffering is at the core of his entire philosophical project. As mentioned in Chapter 1, Nietzsche believes that human beings are not averse to suffering if they think there is a justification for it. What we cannot tolerate is meaningless suffering, and so we seek to give meaning to suffering through our interpretations of it—e.g., religious interpretations justify suffering by making it a prerequisite for salvation and/or eternal life. One of Nietzsche’s central concerns is that humans will lose their capacity to endure suffering as the old

justifications become obsolete in a modern, secular world. He warns of the coming of the “last men,” people who no longer believe in the value of suffering, and who consequently take refuge in hedonistic ideals. Their goal is increasing pleasure for as many as possible and mitigating/eliminating suffering.

Nietzsche is critical of hedonistic values—i.e., any value that is primarily motivated by the enhancement of pleasure or the reduction of displeasure—because he believes that suffering is an essential condition for human flourishing and the achievement of worthwhile goals. This is because humans flourish when they are able to exercise their will to power toward the achievement of a goal. Will to power is a fundamental human drive, but power can only be expressed as such if it has a resistance to contend with and overcome. For example, power can be expressed through the activity of writing a dissertation because writing a dissertation presents a tremendous amount of resistance. The greater the resistance, the more suffering one will experience in contending with it, which is why Nietzsche thinks that suffering is a necessary condition for human flourishing via the expression of power. Therefore, interpretations of suffering that are based on hedonistic values—e.g., social oppression—are bad for us because they inhibit our capacity to flourish. I argue that disabled people should adopt the Nietzschean interpretation of suffering as a valuable and necessary condition for our capacity to express power and thereby flourish. Additionally, a Nietzschean ethics of power can satisfy the psychological need for suffering to be meaningful—i.e., it is meaningful because it is only through suffering that we can express power.

2. Suffering Defined

Suffering is a nebulous concept, and entire books have been written with the aim of fully elaborating it philosophically, psychologically, and experientially. Analyzing the concept of suffering on these levels is not the purpose of this dissertation. I take for granted that there are experiences of pain and psychological states that can be characterized as suffering, and that these experiences and psychological states present problems for those who suffer. For me, suffering is a broad term that encompasses both experiences of physical pain as well as psychological distress. Not everyone defines suffering this way. Jamie Mayerfeld, in his Suffering and Moral

Responsibility, limits suffering to “an affliction of feeling” (3) in keeping with a particular tradition of ethical hedonism. An affliction of feeling is essentially a psychological experience of bad feelings such as anxiety, fear, dread, despair, and so on. Mayerfeld notes that this might be viewed as an idiosyncratic definition from the standpoint of the common sense understanding of suffering, but he limits the concept for the sake of pressing an argument that humans have a moral responsibility to alleviate it, or abolish it entirely if possible (111). In contrast to

Mayerfeld’s definition, I adopt the more common understanding of suffering which includes physical pain as well as psychological distress.

Physical pains are immediate experiences that emanate from the body. It is not only the sensations caused by tissue damage, anatomical injury, and the like, but also the sensation of fear and anxiety caused by stress hormones. Here, too, my definition deviates from Mayerfeld’s in that I classify fear, anxiety, dread, etc. as partly physical experiences, in addition to being psychological experiences. It might seem odd to erase the boundary between physical and psychological in this way; but, as I explain below, I do so in agreement with the standard DS position that these experiences are properly understood as embodied, not abstract “mental” experiences that are detached from the body.

We can interpret physical pain when we experience it, and what we believe about our physical pain can change the experience. For example, a physical pain might be experienced differently for someone who accepts or embraces it rather than rejecting or fighting against it, and meditative practices can alter the way in which pain is experienced. Interpretation can therefore be applied to pain and dramatically alter the experience, but interpretation is extrinsic to pain. We do not experience pain primarily because of what we believe, nor do we experience pain because of what we desire. Pain is an immediate experience of the body, and in this broad category are not only the acute pains of headaches, burns, and cancers but also the burdensome pains of panic, anxiety, and chronic fatigue.

Psychological distress, on the other hand, is closely linked with beliefs and desires. If we desire something, and that desire is obstructed, we tend to experience psychological distress, especially if we believe that the obstacle to satisfying our desire exists for no good reason. I use the term “desire” in its ordinary sense of wanting something strongly enough that it matters to us if the desire is unfulfilled. As in the case of experiencing pain, how we interpret the situation of our distress can alter the experience. If one desires to view a beautiful painting, and one is limited in doing so by blindness, then one will suffer psychologically if one believes that viewing a beautiful painting is a personally valuable thing to do. The interpretation of the situation is that one is lacking a valuable aesthetic experience, and if one believes it is bad to personally lack valuable aesthetic experiences, then one will experience psychological distress. One could have an alternative interpretation according to which viewing beautiful paintings is not personally valuable because beauty is a culturally determined value, and one’s culture’s aesthetic values are defective. Maybe one forms the belief that what one’s culture says is beautiful is actually ugly,

and one is better off not being exposed to ugliness. If this is one’s interpretation of one’s situation, then there is no longer any reason for psychological distress, and one will not suffer.

Mayerfeld would be skeptical of this example because he believes that “the relation between intensity of suffering and the intensity of frustrated desire is not a perfectly direct one”

(44). While it is true that in some situations the intensity of an unsatisfied desire, such as the desire of a starving person to eat, can rightly be characterized as suffering, it is more likely that an unsatisfied desire causes frustration but not suffering. Mayerfeld provides the following example:

Sexual desire can become so overpowering and so obsessive that it may propel

those affected by it into foolish, unseemly, unprincipled, and uncharacteristic

behavior; yet it would be untrue to claim that the thwarting of such desire leads in

most cases to intense suffering, or perhaps even any suffering at all. What it leads

to is simply very intense frustration, which we are able in our minds to separate

quite clearly from the experience of intense suffering. (44)

I agree with Mayerfeld that frustration is one kind of experience and suffering is another, and that it would be a mistake to assume that they simply coincide. However, it is not as obvious to me where the line should be drawn between frustration and suffering in the example of thwarted sexual desire. Mayerfeld is skewing the example by equating “intense frustration” with “intense suffering,” when a fairer comparison would be between intense frustration and a level of suffering that is something less than intense. He even concedes in a different chapter that there is such a thing as “mild suffering,” of which the mood we call unhappiness is an example (15). So, when it comes to unsatisfied sexual desire, or an unsatisfied desire for an aesthetic experience, or

any number of other experiences that are desired but cannot be had due to a disability, I think we can properly refer to these frustrated desires as suffering, if only at the mild end of the intensity scale.

The inability to satisfy a desire because of an impairment is one cause of psychological distress, but it is not the only cause. We can also suffer psychologically from how we are treated in a social context. Oppression, discrimination, marginalization, social exclusion, micro- aggressions, etc. are responsible for most of the psychological distress disabled people experience and is, therefore, the main target of much DS theory. Here, too, beliefs, desires, and interpretations play a role in the suffering we experience when we believe that we have been treated unfairly. Human beings seem to fundamentally desire good social relations and believe that good social relations are deserved—this is probably so obvious as to be trivial. What is not so obvious is how people will interpret the suffering they experience when they are subjected to bad social relations. I will have much to say about how suffering is interpreted throughout the dissertation; but at this point, it is important to first establish that psychological suffering can be further analyzed into two categories—the kind of psychological distress that is primarily impairment-derived and the kind of psychological distress that is primarily caused by bad social relations.

Before moving on from this brief sketch of the varieties of suffering, I should make a clarification. By drawing a distinction between physical pain and psychological distress, I do not mean to imply that psychological distress can be experienced in the absence of some kind of pain. Having loaded the concept of pain with feelings of fear, anxiety, and the like, it is undoubtedly the case that psychological distress is always accompanied by some kind of pain.

The difference between pain and psychological distress is, admittedly, a rough distinction, but

precisely elaborating the nature of these experiences and subjecting them to philosophical analysis is not my purpose. It is enough to show that there is an intelligible difference between pain and distress, between the physical and the psychological, in order to analyze and critique how suffering is conceptualized in DS. To my knowledge, no one in DS explicitly makes a distinction between pain and psychological distress when analyzing the problem of impairment- derived suffering. Of course, suffering does not receive much attention in DS to begin with, but when it is the topic of discussion, such as in the work of Siebers and Wendell, suffering appears to be conflated with physical pain. “Suffering” and “pain” are synonymous terms, and they are used interchangeably—or, to be more precise, on the rare occasion that the term “suffering” is used at all, it appears to simply be another way of referring to physical pain.

Why does the distinction matter? Is this nothing more than a quibble over semantics? I do not believe it is. Conceptualizing pain and psychological distress as two distinct ways of suffering calls into question disability theories that claim to address the problem of experiences of bodily suffering—suffering that is caused by one’s body, not one’s social environment. If suffering is synonymous with physical pain in these theories, then theories that claim to address the problem of impairment-derived suffering fall woefully short of their mark. If Siebers’ aim, for example, of “acknowledging the negative” in disability experience stops short of addressing impairment-derived psychological suffering, then he has left unacknowledged a significant amount of negative disability experience. Impairment-derived suffering encompasses more than the physical pains we endure; it also includes the psychological distress we experience when we cannot satisfy a desire to perform an activity or participate in a life situation because of an impairment. Siebers does seem to have a response to the latter problem, his assertion that beliefs and desires about ability are ideologically formed, and as such they are suspect. I will have more

to say about this argument in the next chapter. For now, the salient point is that Siebers, like most theorists who have been influenced by the “turn to impairment” in DS, limits his response to impairment-derived suffering to physical suffering, which calls into question the adequacy of his theory.

3. Suffering and Value

For DS theorists, the problem of socially-derived psychological suffering is the most basic reason for social and political theorizing about disability. Theories about oppression are responding to situations in which disabled people are suffering, to one degree or another. While the experience of suffering itself is rarely the focus, the experience is always presupposed. If disabled people did not experience suffering from oppression, theorizing about this social relation would be pointless. It is only because people suffer from oppression that there is a problem which demands our attention. For example, Oliver, Siebers, and Wendell each presuppose that disabled people are suffering from something, and what is most apparent when reading their theories is its cause. For Oliver, suffering is caused by a socioeconomic order that necessarily oppresses disabled people; for Siebers, suffering is caused by an ideological set of beliefs about ability; and for Wendell, suffering is caused by the failure to value human difference.

Both Siebers and Wendell address impairment-derived suffering in addition to suffering caused by social relations, but impairment-derived suffering is a marginal part of their theories.

They focus on how a social context produces beliefs and values that lead to oppression, and also how these beliefs and values are internalized by disabled people, leading to self-dissatisfaction

and even self-hatred. The fact that oppression requires, in order to become a problem, the experience of psychological suffering is more of a presupposition than an explicit claim. Because suffering is only presupposed in each of their theories, the impression they give is that socioeconomic oppression, the ideology of ability, and rejecting human difference are the most basic problems facing disabled people. If these are the basic problems, then resolving these problems, if resolution is possible at all, would significantly mitigate or eliminate the experience of psychological suffering. And so, psychological suffering is cast as more of an effect of the basic problem—which is oppression—not the basic problem itself.

But what is wrong with this, the DS theorist might ask? If psychological suffering is largely an effect of bad social relations, why not focus on attacking the cause? I do not think it is wrong to focus attention on how social contexts contribute to the construction of disability and the social relations that cause disabled people to suffer. However, I do think that a narrow focus on oppression and the suffering it causes has led Oliver, Siebers, and Wendell, along with many other DS theorists, to avoid addressing suffering on its own terms, addressing it not as an effect of a deeper problem, but as the deepest problem itself. The problem is that suffering from disability needs to have value; it is that appreciating its value requires that it be theorized as meaningful, which is difficult in a culture that typically treats suffering as a meaningless experience; it is that acknowledging and expressing the value of suffering seems to undermine fundamental goals of the disability rights movement; it is that giving meaning to, and recognizing value in, suffering appears to support stereotypical beliefs about disability which DS theorists have diligently worked to overturn. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that suffering from disability presents many problems.

Depending on one’s perspective, saying that suffering from disability has value might not seem like much of a problem. After all, the idea that people can gain something worthwhile from facing difficulties in life is a rather common, and pedestrian, observation. There is no shortage of memoirs in which disabled people describe and appreciate the challenges they have faced, if only in retrospect, because the challenges made them better people, or allowed them to gain something of value to their lives. But insofar as the DS perspective is concerned, such disability narratives undermine themselves to the extent that they rely on the trope of “overcoming disability.” It is a standard DS principle that casting one’s disability as the primary antagonist in a personal struggle to live well and flourish obscures the social and political aspects of disability.

And while finding value in the experience of disability does not necessarily entail an overcoming narrative, there seems to be a strong correlation between valuing disability and overcoming disability in memoirs that lack the typical DS politicization of disability. Therefore, valuing disability in this way remains a problem for anyone looking to address the value problem within a DS framework.

Both Wendell and Siebers also find value in the challenges posed by disability. For

Wendell, her disability enabled her to become a more thoughtful and substantial person, which might be read as a narrative of personal struggle and overcoming. Of course, this is a minor aspect of her book—most of what she writes about is how the disabled body is rejected in social contexts. For Siebers, the experience of oppression opens up the possibility for a liberatory social critique. Here, too, a negative experience has value, but it is valuable for a very different reason.

Instead of providing the opportunity for personal growth and benefits that are primarily individualistic, disability has a collective benefit and is good for a community. What is

“overcome” in this scenario is oppression, and, as the theory goes, the community learns new forms of interdependence that make everyone’s lives better.

The issue here is the meaning of “challenges” and “negative experiences.” Suffering, in the way that I have defined it, does not appropriately describe these accounts of personal experience or social transformation. Wendell uses “suffering” as a synonym for physical pain, and she does not grant sustained theoretical attention to the experience of impairment-derived, psychological suffering. Siebers typically means physical pain when he uses the word

“suffering,” and it would be odd, in his verbiage, to characterize negative experiences that arise from oppression as a matter of suffering. From his perspective, it would be more accurate to say that the negative experience of oppression involves a psychological mixture of pain and righteous indignation that, according to his theory, provides the ground for disability politics and social transformation. The fuller understanding of suffering, which includes impairment-derived psychological suffering, is not at issue in Wendell’s and Siebers’ theories. In other words, we should not assume that their use of words like “challenges,” “negative experiences,” and “pain” mean the same thing as suffering.

The point of this digression is to anticipate the objection that claiming there is value in suffering from a disability raises no significant problem. I am trying to show that there is ambiguity and slipperiness in how DS theorists conceptualize “the negative” in disability experience. The slipperiness is mainly the result of failing to clarify what is meant by suffering and how it might or might not cover a variety of negative experiences, including negative experiences that are caused by impairment-derived psychological suffering. The slipperiness is also the result of failing to discriminate between different levels of intensity of suffering.

Moderate psychological distress caused by an experience of marginalization is one thing, and the

constant, excruciating pain caused by a terminal illness is quite another. Somewhere along this continuum of experience we reach a point where it becomes difficult to affirm the value of suffering. It is precisely this hypothetical point, and all of the experiences that would be located on the more intense side of the continuum, that remains obscure in Siebers’ conception of “the negative” in disability.

For the sake of analyzing disability experience as broadly as possible, I will not make multiple distinctions between varying intensities of suffering. Instead, I will make just one distinction—the point along the continuum of negative disability experience at which the value of suffering is called into question for the person who experiences it. This threshold level of intensity will be different for each individual person, but it exists for everyone. The value of suffering becomes a problem once we have reached our own personal threshold. This approach is similar to Wendell’s questioning of how much suffering is worth experiencing for the sake of preserving different disability identities. However, while I am asking the same kind of question as Wendell, our presuppositions about the value found in disability and suffering are very different. For her, disability is valuable because it instantiates different personal identities, and difference of this kind is intrinsically valuable for communities and societies. Generally speaking, the more difference that exists in a community, the better off that community is.

My focus reverses Wendell’s order of priorities, placing the personal experience and meaning of suffering ahead of the social implications of such experiences and meanings. The typical DS social contextualization of the personal, and its concomitant politicization of the personal, tends to obscure the personal significance of suffering in favor of social critique and constructive political action. While it is not my intent to undermine the social and political approach to disability, I believe it would be prudent to subordinate the social and political

aspects of disability to the personal aspect for the sake of providing a more desirable account of disability and suffering. Subordination does not imply separation; there is no definitive separation between the personal and the sociopolitical, and the former is substantially influenced and shaped by the latter. However, insofar as suffering is concerned, social and political theories are inadequate to the task of describing the experience and elucidating the meaning of suffering.

This is because suffering is, first and foremost, a personal matter.

In her influential and discipline-defining essay “Disability Studies/Not Disability

Studies,” Simi Linton clearly articulates why DS has not adequately dealt with the problem of suffering. She states that her goal is to “[provide] a coherent rationale for marking a border, setting off Disability Studies as a socio-political- cultural examination of disability, from the interventionist approaches that characterize the traditional study of disability” (525). A sociopolitical-cultural approach to disability leaves little room for privileging the personal. Of course, the “traditional study of disability” is also inadequate for the task of dealing with disability and suffering on a philosophical level because it inappropriately separates disabled people from their social contexts. I would argue that, in order to get past this binary opposition between the sociopolitical-cultural approach and the individualized-medicalized-interventionist approach, a third way is needed. This third way might be characterized as a “biopsychosocial” approach, an interpretation of disability that takes into account biological and psychological factors along with social factors for understanding the complexities of disability.

Such an approach is more common in DS now than when Linton published her essay in

1998 (see, for example, the role it plays in some of the essays collected in Disability and the

Good Human Life, edited by Jerome Bickenbach, Franziska Felder, and Barbara Schmitz). And yet, these more complex approaches still tend to support, rather than subvert, the fundamental

aim of DS, to undermine traditional concepts of disability by turning disability into a social phenomenon and, thereby, diminish the extent to which it is a personal problem. The reason for this focus is aptly stated in Linton’s essay where she lists a number of problems with the “Not

Disability Studies” fields, such as healthcare, rehabilitation, and special education. She writes,

“Another problem is the view that disability is, perforce, a problem. The construction of disability as problem interferes with viewing disability as an issue, an idea, a metaphor, a phenomenon, a culture and a construction” (526).

Linton goes on to concede that disabled people have personal problems to which the disability services fields properly respond, but for her this fact is precisely why DS should not frame disability as a problem. Most of the problems that disabled people experience are the result of oppression, and the task of DS must be to expose the social roots of these problems and hold society responsible for them. And yet, Linton is also aware of a gap in how DS addresses the personal problems:

There are, of course, problems that are a direct result of impairment. Pain,

suffering, frustrations and anxiety often accompany impairment, and no amount

of social change or theory will take those away. Even though pain, and even less

extreme kinds of discomfort are mediated by social and political contingencies,

they remain intensely personal experiences. While I believe that discourse on the

social, cultural and political meaning of disability can and should take these issues

on, Disability Studies has not yet been successful in doing that. Paul Longmore, in

a personal conversation in 1996, described this gap in the literature as… the need

to theorize about impairment.’ It is incumbent upon Disability Studies theorists to

articulate these elements of experience as they are relevant to many areas of

inquiry, from literary criticism to anthropology, from clinical psychology to

cultural studies. (528)

Linton’s acknowledgement of the theoretical gap regarding impairment was an early move toward what became known as the “impairment turn” in DS. It was considered to be a correction of the British social model’s focus on disability at the expense of impairment. The turn to impairment was driven by disabled feminists who claimed that separating impairment from disability enforced a public-private distinction that "dismissed the experience of impairment and the ‘body-felt’, the physical experience of embodiment, altogether" (Be 424). Feminist theories of impairment played a crucial role for the "impairment turn" in DS by opening up legitimate ground to discuss the embodied dimension of disability. They could now write about

"impairment effects" which are "the direct and unavoidable impacts that 'impairments' (physical, sensory, intellectual, emotional) have on individuals' embodied functioning in the social world"

(Thomas 14). Ravi Malhotra and Morgan Rowe state in their work on disability rights and identity that, although the social dimension of disability experience remains crucial, they "agree with those scholars who argue that it is important to acknowledge that physical impairments have very real and occasionally subtle implications on the quality of life of disabled people and need to be fully analyzed" (4).

These approaches, which take impairment as a legitimate subject of analysis, are now common in DS, and I suspect that Linton would consider the gap between theorizing about disability versus impairment to be substantially closed. But for all of the criticisms the impairment turn has directed at the social model, it never managed to overcome the social model’s fundamental limitation. Most DS theorists of impairment still accept the premise that

disability is a social rather than a biopsychosocial phenomenon. Insofar as suffering is concerned, the impairment turn has allowed for the articulation of negative personal experiences, but these experiences were typically limited to physical impairment effects like pain and fatigue.

What the impairment turn has not produced is a substantial account of the psychological suffering that arises not simply from what the body feels but also from what the body cannot do.

As long as disability is narrowly defined as a social construction, such a focus will continue to be redirected toward the kind of suffering that is only socially-derived, and we will not be able to provide a more comprehensive analysis of impairment-derived psychological suffering.

But impairment-derived suffering is only one half of the problem. Socially-derived psychological suffering is still a crucial aspect of the disability experience, and, for most people, it is the primary source of suffering. The value we place on suffering will determine our interpretation of the experience. It would seem that suffering is devalued based on the social oppression interpretation that is dominant within DS. If the story we choose to tell about ourselves is that we are the victims of oppression, then whatever we suffer as victims could hardly have value for us. Narratives of oppression encourage us to think of ourselves as locked in a battle with an oppressor class. The oppressors inflict suffering on us, and so we seek to defeat our oppressors in order to end our suffering. Such a perspective necessarily devalues the experience of suffering. I will explain in greater detail why this is a problem in the next section, but my initial assertion is that a good interpretation of suffering from disability must value the experience, whether it is derived from impairment or from social contexts.

My claim that we should value suffering from disability will undoubtedly seem radical, maybe even perverse. After all, Disability Studies grew out of the Disability Rights Movement, a collective awakening of disabled people to the reality of their disadvantaged social position and

subsequent political struggle against oppression. It was the intolerable experience of psychological suffering that motivated people to join the movement and radically alter the social position of disabled people. In the not-too-distant past, we were thoroughly subjugated citizens, forced to rely on the good will of family, friends, charitable organizations, and the benevolent state. Of course, from the perspective of the disabled, charity and benevolence were offered with strings attached. The state was benevolent as long as the beneficiary remained subservient and did not attempt to exercise too much autonomy (see the case of Kenneth Jernigan in Chapter 5).

Charity allowed the disabled to continue a meager existence, but at the price of their representation as helpless victims of circumstance. Family, friends, and the disabled themselves internalized the misrepresentation, and so the terrible system of oppression continued for a long time. There were, of course, rare disabled persons who managed to break through the system and gain some measure of social influence and autonomy, but the vast majority remained in the oppressed under-class.

This is a common story of the plight of disabled people during the “Dark Ages” before the Disability Rights Movement. The story undoubtedly depends on simplifications, maybe even distortions, of the historical record, but then all exodus narratives depend on simplifications.

How true the story might be is not my main concern; I relate it for a psychological reason—to illustrate a common way that people within DS, and within the broader DRM, think about the individual and collective struggle against oppression. From this perspective, it would probably seem perverse to suggest that there was anything valuable about oppression and the psychological suffering that spawned the movement. And yet, it was the very fact of the experience of psychological suffering that provided the foundation upon which the achievements of the DRM were built. Is it even possible to imagine the achievements of the movement in the

absence of suffering? More broadly speaking, how many great achievements have ever been unconditioned by suffering? Suffering, I contend, is necessary for achieving anything of significance.

4. A Nietzschean Interpretation of Suffering

Friedrich Nietzsche was a disabled person. For most of his life, he dealt with severe physical ailments, against which he had to struggle in order to achieve his goals. In 1889, at the age of forty-four, he developed dementia and lived for the remaining ten years of his life in that condition until he died of pneumonia and stroke. It is commonly believed that the cause of his dementia was syphilis, although this is most likely wrong. A more probable diagnosis is that

Nietzsche had a brain tumor. Charlie Huenemann, in his chapter in the Oxford Handbook of

Nietzsche, argues that the tumor was most likely a retro-orbital meningioma, which can grow on the surface of the brain for decades if untreated (65). This would make sense of Nietzsche’s many ailments, the pain behind his right eye and intermittent headaches on the right side of his head, the random impairments on the left side of his body, the dementia as the tumor grew and pushed his brain back against his skull. It would also explain why he experienced these symptoms throughout most of his life, unlike syphilis which more rapidly impairs and kills.

Nietzsche’s poor health forced him into retirement in his early thirties. Migraines, accompanied by frequent vomiting, would incapacitate him for days. He also dealt with intestinal problems for most of his adult life, which might have been due to contracting dysentery as a young man and not having been properly treated for it. On top of these persistent physical pains, he also experienced recurring visual impairment severe enough to make it impossible for him to

write. In a letter to a friend, he comments that he has had to give up his academic position because he is “three quarters blind” (NUL 57). Nietzsche spent an inordinate amount of time calibrating every aspect of his daily physical life to avoid slipping into the physical condition that kept him from working. He reported to another friend that he estimated losing one third of a year to his illnesses (Huenemann 65). Moreover, psychiatric disorders and neurological illnesses ran in his family. His father and brother died of their illnesses when he was four years old, and he began experiencing excruciating headaches before the age of ten. He likely learned about the psychiatric disorders and neurological illnesses of his extended family members as a young child, the family history indicating that he was also fated to suffer.

Huenemann frames Nietzsche’s dilemma well with the following: “As a boy, he began to carry in his skull the cause of terrible suffering and helpless madness. The question he faced, over the rest of his life, was what to do about it” (66). What he did was put the problem of suffering at the center of his philosophy, producing, in my opinion, the most incisive analysis of the problem and its potential resolution of any modern philosopher. For him, suffering is not a worthless or meaningless experience. As horrible as it can be, it provides the conditions under which a person is enabled to flourish. Flourishing for Nietzsche is not synonymous with happiness or pleasure, as the word is likely to be understood today. Instead, flourishing is the cultivation of resilience, strength, and vitality—not necessarily of the body but certainly of the spirit.

The following passage, a letter to a friend, is Nietzsche’s most revealing comment on the relationship between his own flourishing in the midst of suffering. It is long, but worth quoting in full:

Although writing, for me, is forbidden fruit, you, whom I love and cherish like an

older sister, shall nevertheless have a letter from me. It is probably going to be the

last one! For the terrific and nearly incessant torture of my life makes me thirst for

the end. There have been a few indications that the cerebral stroke which will

release me is close enough on hand for me to entertain hopes. As far as agony and

renunciation are concerned, I can compare my life in recent years with that of any

ascetic of any period. Nevertheless, I have gathered much during these years

toward the purification and burnishing of the soul, and need neither religion nor

art. (You will notice that I take pride in this. Indeed, being completely forlorn has

permitted me for the first time to discover my own resources.) I believe I have

accomplished my life's work, but like one to whom no time was left.

Nevertheless, I know that I have poured out a drop of good oil for many and that I

have given a large number of persons a hint of their own spiritual elevation,

peaceableness and just sense. I am writing you this belatedly; really it should have

been said when I completed my Humanity. No pain has been able and shall be

able to lead me astray to become a false witness of life as I see it. (NUL 26)

When Nietzsche writes that pain will not tempt him to become a false witness of life, he is referring to the judgment that, because of suffering, life is not worth living. As a young man, he fell under the influence of Schopenhauer’s metaphysical philosophy of the will, according to which suffering is endemic to human existence. The only escape from suffering is in the renunciation and extinction of the will, which can be achieved through ascetic practices and mystical or aesthetic experiences (Janaway, Schopenhauer ch. 8). Nietzsche came to repudiate

Schopenhauer’s philosophy because of its pessimistic, life-denying conclusions. Although

suffering is unavoidable for him, and although it even drives him to hope for death, he still values his suffering because it has “purified” and “burnished” his soul, and the depth of his philosophical work is due to these good effects.

One of Nietzsche’s most illuminating passages on the value of suffering is found in

Beyond Good and Evil. He begins by scornfully criticizing philosophies such as hedonism, pessimism, and utilitarianism for basing their evaluations on pleasure and pain—i.e., the more pleasure and the less pain we experience, the better. He believes the desire to abolish suffering is a naive and undesirable goal, first, because it is practically impossible, and second, because the conception of well-being valued by these philosophies “renders people ridiculous and despicable” (BGE 225). He goes on to write:

The discipline of suffering, of great suffering - don't you know that this discipline

has been the sole cause of every enhancement in humanity so far? The tension

that breeds strength into the unhappy soul, its shudder at the sight of great

destruction, its inventiveness and courage in enduring, surviving, interpreting, and

exploiting unhappiness, and whatever depth, secrecy, whatever masks, spirit,

cunning, greatness it has been given: - weren't these the gifts of suffering, of the

discipline of great suffering? (BGE 225)

How is it that suffering can be a gift and productively discipline us? The reason is that there are two aspects to human beings, creature and creator. In order for the creator to reach its full potential, the unformed clay of the creature must “be molded, broken, forged, torn, burnt, seared and purified” (BGE 225). All great achievements require this process of formation by suffering.

Nietzsche does not limit the requirement to physical suffering, although this is one way that the creature can be molded. Any suffering provides the ground for an increase of strength, and the

creator is undermined when this process is negated through over-valuing pleasure or responding to pain with pity. In The Gay Science, he expresses his appreciation of this point when he writes that “I do not want to take my leave ungratefully from that time of severe illness whose profits I have not yet exhausted even today: I am well aware of the advantages that my erratic health gives me over all burly minds” (GS pref. 3).

According to Brian Leiter, a prominent contemporary interpreter of Nietzsche, the one thing that matters for him above all else is human excellence. Nietzsche is therefore concerned about how suffering is valued because values determine goals, and if people value happiness and abhor suffering, then there is “the risk that, rather than — to put it crudely — suffer and create, they will instead waste their energies pursuing pleasure, lamenting their suffering and seeking to alleviate it” (Leiter 107). Leiter cautions, however, against mistakenly assuming that, for

Nietzsche, suffering is intrinsically good. It would be easy to slide into this way of thinking about suffering, but it is what suffering makes possible that is good, not suffering itself. So, when

Nietzsche writes things like the following, “And as for illness: are we not almost tempted to ask whether we can do without it at all? Only great pain is the liberator of the spirit” (GS pref. 3), we should understand that he is not glorifying illness and pain per se, but rather valuing it as a condition for great achievements. And he is also placing high value on the condition of suffering for personal flourishing—or, in a more Nietzschean register, for an increase in an individual’s power and psychological health. In support of this view, he ends this section of the preface by stating that “I doubt that such pain makes us 'better' - but I know that it makes us deeper” (GS pref. 3).

Mayerfeld addresses this distinction between an intrinsic good and an instrumental good.

He concedes that suffering can be an instrumental good if it allows for the acquisition of goods

such as virtue or wisdom. However, as an ethical hedonist who believes that human experience should be evaluated on a pleasure/pain scale, Mayerfeld’s evaluation of suffering as an instrumental good is starkly opposed to that of Nietzsche’s. The reason is due to competing perspectives about the moral meaning of suffering. For Mayerfeld, “suffering is intrinsically evil for the individual who experiences it evil in itself” (85). He readily admits that he does not have an argument to demonstrate that suffering is intrinsically evil, and he is not “embarrassed” by this because, as he writes, “few moral claims appear to me more certain. Rather than argue for this claim, I shall simply assert it, and hope that enough of my readers agree” (85). Clearly

Nietzsche does not agree, but the disagreement is not really based on Mayerfeld’s construal of the issue. For Nietzsche, whether or not suffering is intrinsically evil is not the crucial point—the crucial point is that suffering, as an instrumental good, is necessary for an individual’s flourishing. Mayerfeld merely acknowledges that suffering can be an instrumental good, but it is by no means necessary for attaining things like virtue or wisdom. Therefore, given that suffering is evil, the fact that it can sometimes be an instrumental good is not a reason to refrain from seeking its abolition, which is precisely Mayerfeld’s goal. But for Nietzsche, achieving this hedonistic goal would obstruct our capacity to flourish.

Hedonistic values are foundational for interpreting both history and personal experience in terms of oppression, and for Nietzsche, hedonistic values despoil humanity. He refers to this kind of human being as the “last man,” and he illustrates the type in Thus Spoke Zarathustra:

The earth has become small, and on it hops the last man who makes everything

small. His species is ineradicable like that of the flea; the last man lives longest.

‘We have invented happiness’—say the last men, and blink. They have left the

regions where it was hard to live: for one needs warmth. [. . .] One still works, for

work is a pastime. But one is careful lest the pastime should hurt one. One no

longer becomes poor or rich; both are too burdensome. Who still wants to rule?

Who still wants to obey? Both are too burdensome. No shepherd, and one herd!

Everyone wants the same; everyone is the same: whoever feels different goes

willingly into the madhouse. ‘Formerly all the world was insane,’ –say the

subtlest of them and blink. One is clever and knows all that has happened: so

there is no end of derision. One still argues, but one is soon reconciled--otherwise

it spoils the digestion. One has one's little pleasures for the day and one's little

pleasures for the night, but one has a regard for health. ‘We have invented

happiness,’—say the last men, and blink. (Z prologue)

The “last men” are contemptible because of their hedonistic values and the behaviors that are motivated by such values. Tamsin Shaw refers to Nietzsche’s stance on hedonism as an “anti- hedonistic ideal,” which “presupposes what we might call an ideal of the dignity of humanity, according to which humans should pursue ends other than the merely animalistic ones of maximizing pleasure and minimizing pain” (347). Now, of course, humans do still pursue ends other than happiness, which is why the portrait of Nietzsche’s “last men” has the power to repel us. We don’t want to be like these men, and yet we can recognize ourselves in them. Shaw points out that this recognition provides evidence of our failure to commit to non-hedonistic values in the way that Nietzsche thinks we should. She concludes that, for Nietzsche, “the threat to the dignity of humanity derives [. . .] from our unwillingness to suffer or to make others suffer for the sake of great human goals, even as we acknowledge such goals to be what makes the spectacle of human life on this planet something worthwhile and valuable” (347).

The “last men” are no longer willing to suffer for great human goals because of the meaninglessness of suffering; this problem reached its apex in our modern age and continues to the present. Nietzsche makes this clear in On the Genealogy of Morality when he writes, “What actually arouses indignation over suffering is not the suffering itself, but the senselessness of suffering” (GM II:7). In the past, justifications were invented in order to cope with the horror of suffering. The Greeks invented gods who orchestrated the vast spectacle of human misery for their own pleasure. The Christians invented a soteriological system within which suffering was a prerequisite for other-worldly bliss. In both cases, a justification for suffering was offered to humanity, and as a result, humanity could not only endure suffering but productively channel it:

“Man, the bravest animal and most prone to suffer, does not deny suffering as such: he wills it, he even seeks it out, provided he is shown a meaning for it, a purpose of suffering” (GM III:28).

But in our modern age, supernatural justifications for suffering no longer compel belief, and we have failed to invent suitable alternatives. So, the “last men” do not simply seek happiness and avoid suffering because the former is pleasant and the latter is unpleasant; they also take refuge in hedonism because of the meaninglessness of suffering.

Shaw characterizes “the last man problem” in the following way: All substantial human action is motivated by values, values that give us a vision for how the world should be. As we act to bring about the kind of world we value, we must take into account the potential suffering that will be required of us. And, in doing so, we are confronted with the question of how much suffering is justified for the ends we pursue. Nietzsche’s view is that such a question will inevitably lead us to conclude that the price of suffering is not worth paying unless we have a meaningful justification for it. The result is paralysis, the inability to act for the sake of great goals. Shaw writes, “Insofar as we must engage in action in the world, and this action is liable to

entail suffering and sacrifice of various sorts, an overall theodicy has to be the necessary psychological anchor for all our motivations” (351). She calls this psychological need for a theodicy the “theodicy-demand,” and asserts that “much of Nietzsche’s work addresses the question of how this basic psychological need can be met once the religious solutions that we have evolved have been discredited” (352).

Shaw does not endorse the inhumane aspects of Nietzsche’s anti-hedonistic ideal, such as the legitimate imposition of non-voluntary suffering on other people for the sake of great goals, and neither do I. For me, the image of the “last man” is valuable for what it reveals about beliefs and attitudes about personal suffering and the kind of behaviors they motivate. I find in

Nietzsche a profound challenge to a disability politics that is based on the goal of emancipation from systems of oppression. The challenge is this: how much of our disability theory and political action derives from the values of the “last man?” When we formulate theories of oppression and decry the experience of oppression, how much of this is motivated by hedonistic values and the need for a theodicy to justify our suffering? I realize that I have done little so far to persuade the committed hedonist that hedonistic values are suspect, but this is not my aim. DS is a diverse field with many different perspectives, some of which appear to be sympathetic to a

Nietzschean approach to disability issues, as I demonstrate in subsequent chapters. My goal is to explore the possibility that the oppression narrative has hidden motivations—one such motive being the satisfaction of the theodicy-demand so that suffering from disability makes sense.

5. Suffering and Power

One might still ask, why is it a problem if our response to oppression is motivated by hedonistic values and a psychological need for a theodicy? Doesn’t the world we seek to create for disabled people justify these values and this motivation? There are a couple of issues to address in these questions. First, being motivated by a psychological need for a theodicy per se is not the problem. While Shaw ultimately rejects the theodicy-demand for licensing potentially inhumane political arrangements, I accept the Nietzschean perspective that the need for a theodicy is an inescapable feature of human psychology. Given this fact, the question is not whether it is legitimate to invent a theodicy but, rather, which is the best theodicy to invent. For

Oliver, Wendell, Siebers, and many others in DS, the oppression narrative is their theodicy.

Framing disabled experience in the sociopolitical realm as a contest between oppressor and oppressed imbues any suffering experienced in that realm with meaning. And to the extent that one believes that the sociopolitical encroaches on private life, the oppression narrative is a potentially wholistic explanation for all of the suffering disabled people experience.

I follow Nietzsche in rejecting the oppression narrative primarily because it is not the best solution for the theodicy-demand. I am also skeptical that the oppression narrative is the best interpretation of present-day facts, but factual validity is a secondary concern. The main concern is how this particular theodicy affects the disabled people who believe it and what kind of world is constructed according to its logic. Typically, the eschatological vision of the oppression narrative is a new world of fully realized egalitarianism. The sociopolitical structure conforms to some version of socialism or radical democracy, and all of the mechanisms that formerly served to oppress disabled people are eliminated. It does not matter whether this future world is believed to be possible or only an impossible ideal for which it is good to strive. In either case, the vision

of a future utopian world free of oppression for disabled people dictates a particular kind of disability politics that devalues suffering and endorses hedonistic values.

From a Nietzschean perspective, such a politics is actually bad for disabled people because it is founded on ideals that are inimical to psychological health and individual flourishing. For this reason, Nietzsche is highly critical of socialism, egalitarianism, and democratic forms of social organization. In one place, he writes of socialists that “[they] desire to create a comfortable life for as many as possible. If the enduring homeland of this comfortable life, the perfect state, were really to be attained, then this comfortable life would destroy the soil out of which great intellect and the powerful individual in general grow” (HAH I 235). The metaphorical imagery of growing from soil indicates Nietzsche’s understanding of the human being as very much a product of the natural world. He also employs this metaphor in Beyond

Good and Evil where he criticizes the so-called “free spirits” of his time who have been captured by egalitarian values:

they are un-free and ridiculously superficial, particularly given their basic

tendency to think that all human misery and wrongdoing is caused by traditional

social structures: which lands truth happily on its head! What they want to strive

for with all their might is the universal, green pasture happiness of the herd, with

security, safety, contentment, and an easier life for all. Their two most well-sung

songs and doctrines are called: ‘equal rights’ and ‘sympathy for all that suffers’ -

and they view suffering itself as something that needs to be abolished. We, who

are quite the reverse, have kept an eye and a conscience open to the question of

where and how the plant ‘man’ has grown the strongest, and we think that this has

always happened under conditions that are quite the reverse. (BGE 44)

The metaphor of humans as plants indicates Nietzsche’s concern for human growth and the conditions under which that growth occurs. From Schopenhauer, he carries on the idea that the natural world is replete with suffering, but instead of lapsing into Schopenhauerian pessimism, he embraces the world as it is and seeks to affirm life along with its suffering. From this perspective, the values and interpretations that lead us to attribute suffering to oppressive social structures are bad for us; they are bad because they militate against the kind of human flourishing that can only come from valuing suffering as a necessary condition for expressing power.

Bernard Reginster explains why rejecting suffering is bound to hinder human flourishing.

He notes that there is a “ubiquitous preoccupation with the problem of suffering in [Nietzsche’s] writings from the very beginning” (The Affirmation of Life 176), and it is this preoccupation that undoubtedly influences his doctrine of the will to power. Reginster defines will to power as essentially the desire (or psychological motivation) to express one’s power against a force of resistance, and power is measured by the degree to which resistance is overcome:

If [. . .] we take power—the overcoming of resistance—to be a value, then we can

see how it can be the principle behind a revaluation of suffering. Indeed, if we

value the overcoming of resistance, then we must also value the resistance that is

an ingredient of it. Since suffering is defined by resistance, we must also value

suffering. (177)

Rejecting suffering, then, and seeking to avoid it or eliminate it from the human experience entails a reduction of power. We cannot express great power in the absence of an opposing force, and such forces typically cause suffering. Nietzsche clearly thinks that the reduction of power as a consequence of the reduction of suffering is undesirable: “What is good? - All that heightens the feeling of power, the will to power, power itself in man. What is bad? – All that proceeds

from weakness. What is happiness? – The feeling that power increases – that a resistance is overcome” (A 2). Thus, for Nietzsche, happiness is not a matter of hedonistic pleasure but rather the feeling one gets when one’s power is expressed. This perspective is not based solely on an ethical claim; it is also a consequence of an observation about the natural world and the essential motivation of all organic beings and matter, from humans, to plants and animals, all the way down to unicellular organisms. “Above all,” Nietzsche writes, “a living thing wants to discharge its strength - life itself is will to power” (BGE 13).

The will to power is Nietzsche’s most controversial idea, as evidenced by its reception throughout the past century. Reginster provides a helpful summary of the various interpretations of the doctrine (The Affirmation of Life 103-06). During the first part of the twentieth-century, the will to power was widely believed to be an ethical principle for the domination of weak people by the strong. This interpretation was bolstered by misleading editions and translations of

Nietzsche’s writings produced by his anti-Semitic sister, Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche. Based on these fraudulent editions of his work, Nietzsche was appropriated by the Nazi’s in support of militaristic German nationalism. Following World War II, Walter Kaufmann and other commentators endeavored to produce accurate translations of Nietzsche’s writings and defend his reputation against spurious claims about his philosophy. But in doing so, Kaufmann and others tended to sanitize the more unpleasant aspects of Nietzsche’s thought, providing interpretations that downplayed his illiberal and anti-democratic perspective. The will to power, then, was interpreted as a strictly internal process of achieving self-control through the mastery of one’s drives. More recent interpretations of the will to power attempt to recast it not as a matter of control or domination but as a capacity to satisfy one’s desires and achieve one’s goals.

For Reginster, interpretations that attempt to downplay or reimagine the aspect of domination and control in the Nietzschean conception of will to power are based on the mistaken assumption that this is what will to power essentially consists of, rather than only being a subset of possible effects of willing power. This interpretive approach may seem implausible when we occasionally read Nietzsche saying things like “life itself is essentially a process of appropriating, injuring, overpowering the alien and the weaker, oppressing, being harsh, imposing your own form, incorporating, and at least, the very least, exploiting” (BGE 259). But

Reginster argues that such statements do not decisively establish that will to power is essentially exploitative or injurious to other people. Instead, he argues that these are possible effects of willing power but not necessary effects. To see this clearly, we must make a crucial distinction between will to power as a psychological motivation for human action and the substantive ends toward which will to power is directed. Or, to use different terms, we must see the distinction between will to power as a formal property, which all humans possess, and the content of an individual’s will to power, which will be different for each person depending on what they are individually motivated to do.

We can better understand the essence of willing power by looking to passages that highlight the formal property of overcoming resistance, such as when Nietzsche writes that “all expansion, incorporation, growth means striving against something that resists; motion is essentially tied up with states of displeasure; that which is here the driving force must in any event desire something else if it desires displeasure in this way and continually looks for it” (WP

704). Overcoming resistance is a formal property because it lacks substantive content—i.e., overcoming resistance is essentially the same act whether the content of overcoming is violent oppression or artistic creation. Nietzsche does not give us ethical principles for judging between

these very different manifestations of will to power, and this is a disturbing aspect of his philosophy. However, we cannot dismiss his descriptive account of the formal operation of willing power simply because it sometimes manifests in ways that are ethically abhorrent.

Nietzsche is describing a fundamental feature of our motivation to act, a description that is based on a naturalistic account of human psychology. On this descriptive level, will to power is just a psychological fact, disturbing though it may be.

From a Nietzschean perspective, suffering is required for human flourishing because striving against a resistance to one’s will to power necessarily involves some degree of suffering.

Thus, valuing the reduction or abolition of suffering is “life-negating” to the extent that it inhibits the expression of power. Nietzsche asserts this view in many places. Here is another typical passage:

Man does not seek pleasure and does not avoid displeasure: [. . .]. Pleasure and

displeasure are mere consequences, mere epiphenomena--what man wants, what

every smallest part of a living organism wants, is an increase of power. Pleasure

or displeasure follow from the striving after that; driven by that will it seeks

resistance, it needs something that opposes it—Displeasure, as an obstacle to its

will to power, is therefore a normal fact, the normal ingredient of every organic

event; man does not avoid it, he is rather in continual need of it; every victory,

every feeling of pleasure, every event, presupposes a resistance overcome. [. . .]

Displeasure thus does not merely not have to result in a diminution of our feeling

of power, but in the average case it actually stimulates this feeling of power—the

obstacle is the stimulus of this will to power. (WP 702)

According to this passage, if we believe that our most basic desire and motivation is gaining pleasure and avoiding displeasure, then we are deceiving ourselves about what truly motivates us. Thus, when Nietzsche writes about the type of “last man” who seeks happiness in nothing more than hedonism, he is not saying that such people do not have a will to power. Instead, they are mistaken about the deepest source of human motivation, and they have turned against their natural human instincts by adopting contrary values. This is precisely what Nietzsche means by

“life-negating” values; they are values that contradict natural human drives. Despite the fact that the “last men” also have power drives, they stunt their drives by devaluing the obstacles that are necessary for the experience of power to increase.

Will to power is not only a descriptive explanation of psychological motivation; it is also an ethical imperative which Nietzsche promotes as an answer to the problem of nihilism.

Nihilism is a somewhat protean concept in Nietzsche’s philosophy that refers either to the perspective that our highest values cannot be realized in this life, or that the values lack objective justification (see Reginster, The Affirmation of Life chap. 1). In many places, Nietzsche even refers to nihilism as an affective phenomenon or a physiological defect that does not presuppose any cognitive stance on the legitimacy or realizability of values (see Gemes, “Nihilism and the

Affirmation of Life”). The consequence, in any case, is the belief that life is meaningless, and there is something about this perspective that drives people to adopt life-negating values.

Nietzsche’s classic example of a nihilist is the Christian who holds to the life-negating values of humility, poverty, and chastity in defiance of a world that appears to be inimical to such values.

Christians are nihilists because they do not believe that their values can be fully realized in this life, and because the values they hold are life-negating.

The crisis of nihilism is beyond the scope of this dissertation, and so I will not further develop the concept. I briefly mention it here because it explains why, for Nietzsche, the will to power is not just a factual description of human psychology but also an ethical imperative. In order to resolve the crisis of nihilism, which Nietzsche believed was destroying European culture, it would be necessary to revalue life-negating values by embracing an ethics of power. I follow Nietzsche in valuing will to power as a vital and necessary condition for revaluation, although the context in which I seek to apply this value is far from Nietzsche’s monumental aim of saving European culture. I have the more modest aim of finding the values and interpretations by which disabled people, and especially blind people, are most likely to flourish.

A Nietzschean perspective on the problem of suffering is the best interpretive option for us because it recognizes and helps produce the conditions under which we are most likely to flourish. It does so for the following reasons: (1) it acknowledges that suffering is a central human problem, including suffering that is an effect of disability; (2) it recognizes that meaningless suffering is psychologically intolerable, and so it seeks to give meaning to suffering by interpreting it as an essential condition for our capacity to flourish; (3) it highly values the experience of suffering as a necessary condition for the exercise of our will to power; (4) it encourages us to value our will to power, and in doing so, the expression of power becomes the focus of our drives and goals; (5) it leads us toward affirmation of our lives, including affirmation of whatever we may suffer, as we learn to associate suffering with an experience of increasing power; (6) it undermines other interpretations of suffering, such as oppression narratives, that foster unhealthy psychological and affective states and that encourage us to interpret ourselves as powerless victims.

6. Conclusion

To conclude this chapter, I’d like to address some issues that remain ambiguous. First of all, in some places I have written about oppression as if it is an objectively true interpretation of facts, and in other places I have called oppression a narrative, suggesting that its objectivity is questionable. So, is oppression a narrative only, or a narrative that corresponds to objective facts? My Nietzschean perspective on oppression is that it is first and foremost an interpretation of facts. The salient issue is whether or not oppression is a good interpretation of facts based on both its correspondence with facts and the effect it has on those who believe it. On the correspondence level, I do not think it is currently a good interpretation because it is not well- supported by facts. Consider life for disabled people at present with life for disabled people in the mid-twentieth century. Based on how disabled people were treated seventy years ago,

“oppression” seems like a good interpretation of the facts. Disabled people did not have federally guaranteed civil rights, they were largely wards of families, institutions, or states, and participation restrictions effectively made them second-class citizens. Comparatively speaking, the situation of disabled people in the United States today could hardly be called oppressive.

How well the interpretation fits the facts, however, is not as important as the effect it has on those who believe it. Is the interpretation based on values, or promote values, that are detrimental to the flourishing of disabled people? If so, then it is a bad interpretation, even if it is well-supported by facts. For example, suppose that a blind person living in the 1950s believed that he was an oppressed member of an oppressed class, and this belief caused him to be consumed by resentment and pessimism. Suppose further that this blind man had the opportunity to flourish individually, even in service to the fight against oppression, but his resentment and

pessimism inhibited this potential expression of power. In such a situation, this man’s interpretation would be bad for him, despite the fact that it corresponds well to objective reality.

In Nietzschean terms, this man would be better off believing a delusion (see GS 107).

I have also claimed in this chapter that we need a more comprehensive analysis of impairment-derived psychological suffering, but the reason for this might not yet be clear. On the most basic level, DS should engage in this analysis simply because it is part of the disability experience, and choosing to either ignore the problem or dismiss it for being merely a misperceived effect of socially-derived psychological suffering cedes ground to the traditional stereotypes about disability and suffering. Critiquing stereotypes about impairment-derived psychological suffering is a fine thing to do, but the criticisms will be less effective at dislodging bad ideas if it has nothing with which to replace them. On another level, the analysis is needed in order to demonstrate that suffering is the most basic problem with which disabled people must contend, as opposed to something like oppression. As long as DS continues to tacitly endorse the idea that psychological suffering from negative experiences is merely a product of bad social relations, then the oppression narrative will remain a persuasive candidate for the most pressing problem disabled people must face. But if a new perspective on suffering can emerge, one that not only casts it as the deepest problem but also as an experience that has value, then perhaps a new kind of disability politics can emerge as well.

Finally, I should say something about the fact that my perspective on suffering rests heavily on a philosopher who is thoroughly anti-democratic and whose writings presuppose that only an enlightened remnant are capable of profiting from his insights. If one of my fundamental goals is to address the topic of suffering in a way that is relevant to all blind people, then basing my arguments on a Nietzschean perspective is bound to present difficulties. What I want to avoid

is a common theoretical maneuver which selectively takes from Nietzsche the parts one approves of while leaving the unappealing parts behind. To this end, I take his aristocratic elitism seriously and accept that not everyone can benefit from a Nietzschean perspective on suffering. However,

I do not believe this is due to natural incapacity but rather the incomprehensively complex psychological constitution of each individual person. Therefore, there is no reason to pre-judge who can benefit from this perspective, and I personally believe that many can.

Chapter IV. The Ideological Interpretation of Suffering

1. Introduction

In this chapter, I analyze two theories of ideology that support the oppression narrative.

The first is Siebers’ ideology-of-ability theory, which I described in Chapter 2. He argues that the ideology is all-encompassing; it influences everything from complex social structures, institutions, and culture to individualized beliefs, desires, and psychological dispositions. The ideology-of-ability theory provides a potential solution for the theodicy-demand—i.e., the psychological need for suffering from disability to be meaningful. But I argue, drawing on

Nietzsche’s philosophical drive psychology, that he fails to demonstrate that the ideology of ability is in fact all-encompassing. Siebers’ perspective is radically idealist in that he posits ideology as the fundamental motivation for a wide range of beliefs, desires, and behaviors concerning abilities. In contrast, Nietzsche’s naturalistic perspective posits drives (instinctual and psychological) as the fundamental motivational force behind beliefs, desires, and behaviors. This means that the value we place on expressing power through any number of abilities is primarily an effect of physiology and psychology, not ideology. If we take the approach that ideology can play a secondary role in shaping beliefs about the value of specific abilities, then we can benefit from Siebers’ perspective. But I depart from his view insofar as he promotes ideology as the primary, all-encompassing explanation for our beliefs and values.

I then turn to theories that purport to reveal the ideological reasons for both the social mission to cure impairments and the desire many disabled people have to be cured. I mainly focus on one expositor of the theory, Eli Clare, who argues in his most recent memoir that ideology is at the heart of the desire/search for cures. I focus on Clare because, like Wendell, his perspective partially incorporates some non-hedonistic values regarding disability and suffering.

Thus, Clare’s work is one good place within DS to begin building out a fuller Nietzschean perspective on suffering from disability. However, I ultimately conclude that critiquing the social mission to cure impairments according to a theory of ideology is the wrong approach. DS theorists are typically suspicious of the humanitarian value of compassion, which is the primary justification for curing impairments. They think “compassion” is merely an ideological cover for pernicious motives, such as the elimination of disability from the world. But from a Nietzschean perspective, compassion is a genuine and primary motivation that is also deleterious because it is a hedonistic value. Framing the issue of cure in ideological terms misses this more incisive critique by treating the hedonistic value upon which the curative mission rests as though it were superfluous. It also misses the more penetrating critique of the desire to be cured. The most pertinent issue is not whether disabled people want to be cured in order to attain an ideologically prescribed state of normality. The real issue is whether the desire to be cured is motivated by a hedonistic devaluation of suffering and, if so, how that motivation affects one’s psychological health and potential to flourish. This is why I ultimately conclude that the ideology-of-cure theory is inadequate and unpersuasive.

2. Theories of Ideology as Theodicies

How does Siebers’ ideology-of-ability theory look from a Nietzschean perspective? At first glance, it contains the crucial element for satisfying the theodicy-demand—an explanation for bad experiences and suffering which imbues such experiences with meaning. In a social context, every bad experience a disabled person has can be attributed to the ubiquitous ideology.

If a disabled person cannot get inside a building because it lacks a ramp, the reason is due to the designer’s ideological assumption that everyone is able to get into the building in one particular way. If a disabled person is subjected to a non-disabled person’s rude stare, the reason is that the non-disabled person is ideologically primed to believe that a disabled person is strange. Or, on the more radical end of the ideological spectrum, aborting a fetus because it has a genetic abnormality is attributable to an ideological assumption about the make-up of full humanity. The ideology of ability extends from the most benign preference for able-bodiedness to the most malignant program for the extermination of disabled people. It is all-encompassing, and there is no circuit breaker between the benign and malignant ends of the spectrum. As such, the mere preference for able-bodiedness carries within itself the potential for more harmful beliefs and motivations.

If these instances of maltreatment had no explanation, if they were merely random occurrences, they would be meaningless and, thus, intolerable. Providing an explanation that ties together all of the bad experiences and suffering disabled people must endure in social environments gives the experiences meaning. Additionally, the ideology of ability provides a structure for the formation of a group identity based on a collective experience of marginalization in social contexts, and the existence of this collective identity opens up the possibility for in-group solidarity and political action. This kind of social participation on the basis of a shared minority identity can be very meaningful for anyone whose consciousness has

been sufficiently raised. Instead of succumbing to the meaninglessness of individualized bad experiences, the belief that one is part of an oppressed class gives purpose to a shared struggle against oppression. In this sense, the bad experiences and suffering that one experiences as a result of the ideology of ability are tolerable to the extent that the ideology itself provides both a meaningful explanation for suffering and the conditions for the formation of a collective identity.

Not only does the ideology-of-ability theory provide a meaningful explanation for suffering within social contexts, it also provides a justification for impairment-derived psychological suffering. If a disabled person feels bad or suffers because of the inability to perform a desired activity, the reason is not that performing the activity is intrinsically valuable.

Instead, the reason for feeling bad is that the individual has an ideologically-based preference for able-bodiedness. Any bad feeling that a person might have for lacking the ability to perform a desirable activity can thus be directed away from the self and toward the ideology, and toward the society that sustains the ideology. Ideologies are social products that provide a coherent worldview, and they exist in part to cover up contradictions in belief systems that seek to explain and justify social structures. An ideology is therefore an inviting target for redirecting any bad feeling one might have because of an impairment. Instead of dwelling on the fact that an impairment limits performance of an activity, one can focus on the ideological basis for the desire to perform such an activity, and doing so inevitably leads away from personal limitation toward a social cause. Here, too, the potential intolerability of a meaningless personal limitation becomes tolerable when a suitable justificatory reason is given for it—i.e., a socially-derived ideological preference for ability.

The ideology-of-ability theory is Siebers’ own idea, but many in DS identify the same kind of phenomenon at the root of beliefs, practices, and cultural representations about disability.

“Ableism” is a more widely used term for what Siebers is pointing to with his theory. Fiona

Kumari Campbell, a prominent critic in this area, defines ableism as, “A network of beliefs, processes and practices that produces a particular kind of self and body (the corporeal standard) that is projected as [. . .] species-typical and therefore essential and fully human. Disability then is cast as a diminished state of being human” (Contours of Ableism 5). In contrast to disablement, which is the process by which impairment is turned into disability within a social context, ableism redirects theoretical focus to able-bodied identity. “Instead of looking directly at disability,” Campbell writes, we should “[focus] on how the able, able-bodied, non-disabled identity is maintained. The direction is to examine elements of what is presented as ‘normal’ or aspirational” (“Stalking Ableism” 215). Like the ideology-of-ability theory, the “ableism” theory also provides a meaning for suffering that directs focus away from the disabled body. In turning attention away from disability and toward an interrogation of the concepts of normality and ability that support a fictional ideal of able-bodiedness, one can have a theodicy that places all of the responsibility for suffering from disability on pernicious, socially constructed ideas about ability.

Wendell and Oliver have their own ways of identifying and criticizing the ideological preference for able-bodiedness. Oliver contends that disabled people are the casualties of ideologies of capitalism and individualism which valorize productivity and self-sufficiency for the sake of supporting the capitalist socioeconomic order. People with impairments are bound to be devalued according to such ideologies because they are believed to be useless to the capitalist system. For Wendell, the problem begins in individual human psychology. Non-disabled people reject disabled people out of fear and anxiety about the precariousness of their own health and bodily integrity. Somewhere deep inside, the non-disabled know that their able-bodiedness is a

temporary and contingent state of being, and most cannot cope with this fact. So, instead of dealing with their own insecurity, they redirect negative feelings toward the disabled. The psychological motivation for avoiding the reality of the fragile body manifests itself in particular beliefs and attitudes that value ability and devalue disability.

Siebers’ ideology-of-ability theory, along with these other theories, provides a meaning for suffering, especially for impairment-derived psychological suffering, (the kind of suffering for which a meaning is most urgently needed). In doing so, the ideology theory might be considered a potential solution to the “last man” problem, i.e., the emergence of modern human beings who seek refuge in hedonistic values to escape the horror of meaningless suffering (see my discussion in Chapter 3, section 4). Instead of succumbing to what Oliver calls an “individual model” of disability whereby a disabled person believes that suffering is a personal matter and a consequence of random impairment, disabled experience can be interpreted as a meaningful struggle against an oppressive social system. Such an interpretation manifests itself in the politicization of disabled life in various spheres. DS contributes to the struggle on the academic and intellectual front, providing theoretical concepts that can be weaponized by the activist class of the disability community in their battle against ableism and oppression. From this combination of theory and practice emerges a meaningful goal, the pursuit of which allows for the expression of power.

However, the potential of such a solution for the “last man” problem is only an appearance. The ideology-of-ability theory, like ableism and other such theories, is based on, and reinforces, hedonistic values. The goal of critiquing and mitigating the ideology of ability is ultimately directed toward the reduction of bad feelings and suffering, a hedonistic aim. This is why so much of Siebers’ theory is dedicated to the elaboration and promotion of a “positive

disability identity.” In a passage about an injured soldier who is having trouble coping with the loss of a limb, Siebers claims that “people with disabilities have a better chance of future happiness and health if they accept their disability as a positive identity and benefit from the knowledge embodied in it” (31). As a psychological matter, this is undoubtedly a true statement; disabled people who cannot accept the fact that they are impaired will be less happy than those who can accept it. But making the acceptance of impairment for the sake of happiness is a hedonistic goal derived from hedonistic values, and it therefore cannot serve as a solution to the

“last man” problem. If our interpretations that give meaning to suffering are based on hedonistic values, then we will inevitably fail to flourish as Nietzsche thinks we ought to do. Ideology, ableism, oppression, etc. ultimately have as their telos the cessation of all struggle and suffering.

Although these interpretations provide a reason for suffering, they recapitulate the aim of the

“last men,” which is to abolish suffering.

3. Is the Ideology-of-Ability Theory “True?”

In my framing of the ideology-of-ability theory as a psychologically motivated answer to the theodicy-demand, its status as a true description of a social phenomenon is called into question. Does the ideology actually exist, or is it only a fiction that allows disabled people to better deal with their suffering—a Nietzschean “illusion” which is necessary for living? Or, could it be a psychologically motivated theodicy that just happens to hit upon the truth? In the previous chapter, I explained that the most important aspect of the “oppression” interpretation is the way in which it can organize meaningless facts into a meaningful story about one’s life. Such is the case for theories about ableism and ideology of ability. These are interpretations, just as all

DS concepts are interpretations, and they are all constitutive elements of the oppression narrative. The ideology-of-ability theory, therefore, is first and foremost an interpretation that can be either good or bad for personal flourishing.

Since I have argued that the ideology-of-ability theory is motivated by hedonistic values,

I must conclude that it is bad for individual flourishing. We should, therefore, avoid adopting it as our social theory or interpreting our experiences according to the theory, even if the theory provides a plausible explanation of facts. But this conclusion is bound to be unsatisfactory for anyone who is not already persuaded by the Nietzschean perspective, or for anyone for whom the will to truth is an overpowering drive. I suspect that, for most people, the “truth” of the ideology theory is the most important issue. While I disagree that it is the most important issue, its explanatory power and correspondence with facts still matters. I do not endorse the postmodern transformation of Nietzsche into a relativist about truth, which seems to be the typical approach to Nietzsche in DS (see, for example, the conclusion to Disability and Social Theory, written by

Lennard Davis, Bill Hughes, and Dan Goodley). And so, the “truth-status” of the ideology interpretation must be addressed, but with the caveat that it is not the most important issue that should concern us.

On the surface, the most persuasive aspect of the ideology theory appears to be the explanation of seemingly incongruous ideas about the value of the physical body. Siebers points out that we are highly invested in improving and caring for the body while at the same time excluding it from the “essential self,” which is composed of the intangible phenomena of beliefs, desires, emotions, experiences, etc. We also irrationally believe that we will conquer physical decay and death despite all evidence to the contrary. Siebers concludes that there must be an ideology at work in order to hold these contradictory ideas together, but it is precisely on this

point that the theory fails. There is nothing truly contradictory about caring for our bodies and believing that beliefs, desires, emotions, and experiences constitute selfhood. In fact, emotions and desires are commonly thought of as embodied phenomena, and many of our experiences are bodily experiences. Only the crudest mind-body dualism would separate things out the way

Siebers does, and his rendering of such a position looks more like fodder for a Straw Man argument than beliefs that people actually hold.

As for the supposedly contradictory belief that humanity will eventually conquer death and decay despite all historical and scientific evidence to the contrary, Siebers again displays a rather simplistic understanding about the content and function of such beliefs. Belief in immortality, whether it be a naturally extended life or a supernatural afterlife, is more a matter of hope and faith than a factual claim based on a narrowly circumscribed epistemological commitment to empirical science. While some people do attempt to pursue and/or verify potential immortality by means of empirical science, for most people, such beliefs are explicitly non-empirical. Siebers is therefore missing the mark when he tries to elucidate a contradiction as if a belief in immortality is the same kind of belief as the belief that our bodies will decay and die. This is not to say that belief in immortality cannot be legitimately criticized, but this is not

Siebers’ point. He is not merely arguing that such a belief is wrong—he is arguing that the belief exists for an ideological reason, to conceal a contradiction, and this is what he has failed to demonstrate. Nor has he taken into account that anxiety about decay and death is often the overt reason for speculating about and hoping for immortality and, on an ideological account of such beliefs, it is precisely this anxiety which is supposed to be concealed.

The coherence of the ideology-of-ability theory depends on “ability” being some kind of first principle for humanity, the most primordial psychological motivation for everything we think and do. Siebers argues that

the ideology of ability is so much a part of every action, thought, judgment, and

intention that its hold on us is difficult to root out. The sharp difference between

disability and ability may be grasped superficially in the idea that disability is

essentially a "medical matter," while ability concerns natural gifts, talents,

intelligence, creativity, physical prowess, imagination, dedication, the eagerness

to strive, including the capacity and desire to strive--in brief, the essence of the

human spirit. It is easy to write a short list about disability, but the list concerning

ability goes on and on, almost without end, revealing the fact that we are always

dreaming about it but rarely thinking critically about why and how we are

dreaming. (13)

Siebers wants to undermine this list of abilities by framing it as a matter of ideology and subjecting it to critical scrutiny. However, the critique depends on how we think about these abilities in relation to disability, and not on what these abilities are and how they are manifested and experienced. Creativity, physical prowess, imagination, intelligence, talent, the desire and capacity to strive—these are a selection of Nietzschean drives that make possible the expression of personal power. While it may be that what we think about these drives could form an ideology, the drives themselves are not products of ideology. They are a collection of dispositions and psychological motivations that comprise human nature. As such, to say that there is an ideological preference for these human drives makes little sense. It is as nonsensical

to say that we have an ideological preference for striving as it is to say that we have an ideological preference for eating.

In critiquing the ideology-of-ability theory, Nietzsche’s drive psychology is helpful because it provides a positive and non-ideological account of the so-called preference for able- bodiedness. In “Nietzsche’s Philosophical Psychology,” Paul Katsafanas describes drives in the following way.

A drive is a disposition that induces an evaluative orientation. Drives manifest

themselves by structuring the agent’s perceptions, affects, and reflective thought.

Moreover, drives do not simply arise in response to external stimuli; they actively

seek opportunities for expression, sometimes distorting the agent’s perception of

the environment in order to incline the agent to act in ways that give the drives

expression. (752)

The first aspect of this compact description is that drives are dispositions in the broadest sense, not mere urges, momentary desires, or instinctual behavior. In structuring not only what we think and feel but also what we perceive, drives are fundamental to everything we experience, and they are also the cause of our constant propensity to evaluate every object of our experience.

Consider, for example, the drive to compete. There are many ways to be competitive, but all competitions require that a competitor have superior abilities in order to defeat opponents.

The requisite abilities might be physical if the competition is sport, or they might be cognitive if the competition is academic. In either case, it is preferable to have superior abilities, to be “able- bodied,” for the sake of satisfying the competitive drive. Furthermore, because drives induce an

evaluative orientation toward the objects of our experience, we will value ability relative to its utility in achieving our competitive goal. At this level of psychological motivation, it is difficult to see how the preference for ability could be caused by an ideology. Human drives are more basic than ideologies; in fact, ideologies are the product of drives because the drives structure our thoughts and beliefs. In the case of ability, an ideology could most certainly form as a result of the drive to compete, or any other drive that requires ability for its expression. But it would be a mistake to assume that drives are the effects of a fundamental ideology because this would be to reverse the true order of causation.

Another crucial aspect of a drive is that it exists independently of external stimuli, meaning that it does not simply become activated like a momentary desire by an object. It is always active and seeking opportunities to express itself and achieve dominance over other drives and, so, it will commonly distort perceptions and beliefs for the sake of achieving this goal. Nietzsche describes this phenomenon in the following way.

Suppose we were in the market place one day and we noticed someone laughing

at us as we went by: this event will signify this or that to us according to whether

this or that drive happens at that moment to be at its height in us and it will be a

quite different event according to the kind of person we are. One person will

absorb it like a drop of rain, another will shake it from him like an insect, another

will try to pick a quarrel, another will examine his clothing to see if there is

anything about it that might give rise to laughter, another will be led to reflect on

the nature of laughter as such, another will be glad to have involuntarily

augmented the amount of cheerfulness and sunshine in the world and in each case

a drive has gratified itself, whether it be the drive to annoyance or to

combativeness or to reflection or to benevolence. (D 119)

Katsafanas also provides an instructive example for this psychological phenomenon by describing the behavior of an aggressive person. Aggression is a drive and, like all drives, it is constantly seeking to express itself. And so, we typically find the aggressive person responding inappropriately in situations that do not call for aggression, such as the driver who experiences road rage when he misinterprets another driver’s maneuver as intentionally hostile. But the problem is not simply that this person has too much aggression; the problem is that the aggressive drive distorts the perception of the event so that he believes that his response is justified.

How does all of this apply to the belief in the ideology-of-ability theory? At the beginning of this chapter, I explained how the ideology-of-ability theory functions as an answer to the theodicy-demand. Nietzsche’s drive psychology gives further shape to how the theodicy- demand is satisfied. The desire for there to be a reason for suffering, and for the experience of suffering to be organized into a meaningful narrative, is itself a drive. As such, we should expect that there is likely to be perceptual and epistemological distortions in the interpretation that purports to explain these experiences. The ideology-of-ability theory is such an interpretation. It can explain every bad experience one has in a social context, and it can even explain bad thoughts and feelings that are more personal, and which lack a clear connection to a social context. And if a drive for meaning is the progenitor of the theory, then it is not passively waiting for external stimuli to begin interpreting and evaluating but actively and independently seeking a

reason to express itself. The existence of a drive for meaning does not necessarily invalidate the truth of the ideology theory, but it should at least begin to make us suspicious of its conclusions.

The ideology-of-ability theory may be the product of another drive as well—a drive for self-absolution. Consider again the scenario of blindness obstructing an aesthetic experience. In chapter 2, I explained how what one believes about the value of viewing a beautiful painting determines whether or not one suffers anything from being unable to see the painting. If one does believe that viewing a beautiful painting is a valuable thing to do, then one will experience a bad feeling, and blindness will take on a negative connotation, at least in the realm of visual aesthetic experience. How does one deal with the possibility that an impairment might be responsible for this bad feeling? Must we conclude that the bad feeling associated with the inability to have the aesthetic experience is the consequence of personal deficiency? Here again the ideology-of- ability theory provides the solution. One need not feel bad about personal lack and deficiency because the bad feeling is actually the consequence of an ideology of ability. There is nothing lacking in the individual; the real problem is that the individual is judging their experience according to a socially prescribed, ableist ideology. Thus, we can absolve ourselves of responsibility for any bad feeling or suffering we might experience from an impairment-derived activity limitation. We are not the problem—society is the problem.

Siebers’ critique of ability does not actually target ability, which is the capacity one has to express power, but rather what we think about the capacity to express power. Some disabilities make it very difficult to express, for example, physical power or intellectual power. Some people might believe that a person who cannot express power in these ways is not fully human. If it spawns a set of beliefs that ultimately conceals the fact that the holder of such a belief is himself

a fragile human being, then an ideology has formed. This account of ideology formation is plausible, and I have no doubt that many people have such an ideology. But what I am arguing is that it is implausible to posit a totalizing ideology of ability which is at the core of everything we think, do, and value. Humans, disabled and non-disabled, are by nature creative, intelligent, talented, striving creatures, and we all have different capacities for how much power we can express through our many drives. If we take a wholistic view of humans as a collection of many drives, the distinction between ability and disability becomes rather insignificant in most cases.

A disability might affect the capacity of a person to express power through physicality, but this is only one of many drives. Who is capable of expressing more total power—an obscure non- disabled person who is mediocre across all of her drives, or a quadriplegic whose intelligence, creativity, and ability to strive are so powerful that she achieves world-historic significance?

With some rare exceptions, disabilities do not obstruct the capacity to express power. We saw in the previous chapter that Nietzsche had multiple disabilities, and yet his capacity to express power was not hindered. In fact, it was the suffering he experienced from his disabilities that enhanced the power of his drives and enabled him to achieve world-historical significance.

But this account of Nietzsche’s life and achievement is difficult to incorporate into a DS framework because it looks like an overcoming narrative, the story of a disabled person who overcomes the obstacles a disability puts in the way of achieving goals. DS theorists tend to reject the idea that disabilities are best understood as opportunities for people to demonstrate their tough-mindedness and resolve to achieve despite personal limitations. Such an idea tends to diminish the social factors that produce disability and places personal blame on disabled people who fail to overcome their own limitations, as some disabled people are able to do.

The ideology-of-ability theory, then, provides a psychological defense against societal pressure to overcome disabilities. Whatever bad feelings or suffering we experience because of our failure to overcome is not our fault, but rather the product of an ableist society that has an ideological need to see disabled people overcoming disability. And any disabled person who is attempting to achieve a goal in spite of a disability is engaged in an ideologically determined pattern of overcoming behavior, or so the theory suggests. But Nietzsche did not achieve his goals in spite of his disabilities, and he did not characterize his disabilities as obstacles which had to be overcome before he could achieve something great. For him, his disabilities and the suffering they caused were essential for his development as a psychologist and philosopher. The overcoming narrative presupposes that disabled people have an antagonistic relationship with their disabilities, and the ideology-of-ability theory provides an explanation for why that antagonism exists. But these ways of interpreting disabled experience ignore the potential creative power contained within disabled experience, a creative power which Nietzsche’s own life exemplifies.

To be sure, there is a strain of theory within DS, influenced by queer theory, that valorizes disability as a site for new and better ways of living, ways that are opposed to what

McRuer would call “compulsory able-bodiedness,” or what Mitchell and Snyder would call

“ablenationalism.” Siebers is also influenced by this strain of thought, which is why he thinks that disability instantiates a special kind of subjectivity that allows a disabled person to escape the ideology of ability and critique it from an outsider’s perspective. However, the key difference between Nietzsche’s perspective regarding his disabilities and Siebers’ disability-as-positive- identity perspective is that Nietzsche valorizes the suffering his disabilities cause him and

Siebers does not. Nietzsche’s perspective is based on the necessity and value of expressing

power against opposing forces in order to accomplish goals and achieve personal excellence, and suffering is a necessary and instrumental factor in this process. For Siebers and the positive identity crowd, the value in disability is found in the fact that it instantiates difference, and the mere existence of human difference, provided that it can be recognized and appreciated as such, is the source of disability’s value. So, while the positive identity approach has something in common with the Nietzschean perspective, it arrives at a radically different conclusion because of what it values in disability.

4. The Ideology-of-Cure Theory

I now turn to a second type of theory that tries to explain the search and desire for cures as a product of ideology. The work of Eli Clare is central to this issue, but I will first provide some context before addressing his perspective. The ideology of cure can have different permutations depending on which disability theory we choose. According to a traditional Marxist theory of impairment and ideology, as exemplified by Michael Oliver in Chapter 1, the value of curing impairments is dictated by a covert ideological function. Disabled people are valuable to the extent that they are productive and capable of contributing labor power to the capitalist economy. A healthy body is the most productive kind of body, and so there is an economic reason to mitigate, reduce, or eliminate impairments. Towards this end, an ideology of cure develops. According to the ideology, it is good to cure impairments because they cause suffering.

Thus, the justification for curing impairments is based on the humanitarian values of pity and compassion. But humanitarian values are only an ideological justification for cure. What the

ideology conceals is the economic reason for curing impairments. Both disabled and non- disabled people believe that they are acting on humanitarian values when they support the effort to discover and deliver cures, but what they are actually doing is serving the interests of a particular form of socioeconomic structure.

I argue that the problem with this theory, with how cure comes to be valued within a particular social context, is that it treats humanitarian values as superficial; i.e., we might genuinely believe that we are motivated by such values, but in reality our actions are dictated by economic factors, of which we are unaware. From a Nietzschean perspective, however, humanitarian values, not economic structures, are fundamental to why we invest so much effort and hope in curing impairments. Obviously, economic structures play a role in how these values manifest in a given society, but economic structures are not fundamental to the origin of such values. This can be seen historically by tracing the emergence and proliferation of Judeo-

Christian values, from which our modern humanitarian values derive (see the first essay of

Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morality). If the traditional Marxist theory was correct, these values would have appeared after the emergence of capitalism; but they actually precede capitalism by more than a thousand years. Of course, a capitalist-inspired ideology can make use of whatever values happen to be at hand, but humanitarian values are more enduring than capitalism, and they will be around long after capitalism has disappeared.

Wendell argues for the existence of another kind of ideology of cure. According to this perspective, the humanitarian justification for seeking cures is a cover for a deep-seated human propensity to fear and reject human difference. In Chapter 2, we saw that she is personally ambivalent about being cured; her ambivalence is partly due to her suspicion that the level of

attention paid to curing impairments expresses an underlying belief that disabled people are societal burdens. Here, too, humanitarian values are superficial and serve to hide the essential reason behind the social mission to cure impairments. But unlike the traditional Marxist account,

Wendell posits a hidden psychological motivation for the mission. Disabled people are not viewed as burdens simply because they are perceived to lack the ability to contribute to the socioeconomic order; instead, they are viewed as such because, at a sub-conscious level, the non- disabled are seeking to distance themselves from identification with the disabled because they cannot accept the potential fragility of their own bodies.

Finally, the ideology of ability is another kind of ideology that has implications for curing impairments. If ability is the ideological baseline by which humanness is judged, then the social mission to eliminate impairments is a logical thing to do. And this logic does not only apply to the social mission. If the ideology of ability is at its most basic a preference for able-bodiedness, then every disabled person will at some point experience the seductive lure of hoping for a cure.

For Siebers and Wendell, hoping for, and accepting, a cure is not necessarily a bad thing because some impairments cause physical pain which it would be better to live without. But the problem with hoping for a cure is how it can easily lead a person to uncritically accept the ideology of ability, and accepting a cure is an explicit expression of the preference for able-bodiedness.

Again, Siebers is fine with accepting cures if the impairment causes significant physical pain; but the unstated assumption in his theory is accepting a cure for an impairment that does not cause pain is an act that concedes too much to the ideology of ability.

These three versions of an ideological explanation for curing impairments presuppose that humanitarian justifications are superficial, but from a Nietzschean perspective, this

presupposition has the issue exactly backward. A better question to ask about the effort to cure impairments is not what it conceals but what it reveals. Curing impairments is an important part of the mission to abolish suffering, a mission that is based on hedonistic values. There is nothing hidden about this goal, and the values upon which it is based are rarely questioned. But if

Nietzsche is right that hedonistic values lead to a state of human existence bereft of the capacity to significantly pursue non-hedonistic ends, then the mission to abolish suffering by curing impairments calls for critical examination. For those who are already convinced that increasing human pleasure and decreasing human pain is an ultimate ethical imperative, subjecting this mission to critical scrutiny will seem perverse (hence Mayerfeld’s admission that he simply has nothing to say to anyone who is not already convinced that suffering is evil). But there is more to a good life than how much pleasure and how little pain we can experience, and for disabled people specifically, our thinking about this issue and its implications for desiring a cure have very real consequences for our potential to flourish.

The foundation for such a perspective is present in quite a lot of DS theory, especially in postmodernist Critical Disability Studies (CDS), which is prevalent in the United States. The reason is that the postmodern tradition in philosophy appropriated parts of Nietzsche’s philosophy, and there are many postmodernists in DS. So, Nietzschean-inspired theory is common, such as in the aforementioned Disability and Social Theory, and Mitchell and Snyder dedicate an entire chapter to Nietzsche in their Narrative Prosthesis. But the “postmodern

Nietzsche” is only an appropriation based on a selective reading of his texts. Nietzsche would have found much of what DS stands for to be contemptible (a fact which I have thus far only implied but will explicitly demonstrate in subsequent chapters). Nevertheless, there is much in

DS that is amenable to a genuine Nietzschean perspective, if only in a latent form.

Wendell’s perspective on cure is a good example of a potentially genuine Nietzschean approach to the problem. If we put aside for a moment the aspect of her theory, which emphasizes cure’s ideological function, we can see that her justification for criticizing the social mission to cure impairments is based on non-hedonistic values. The first of these values is a commitment to the goodness of human difference. In Chapter 2, we saw that Wendell believes that a certain amount of suffering is worthwhile if it is directed toward the goal of preserving difference. In her case, chronic fatigue causes her some amount of suffering, and yet she is ambivalent about accepting a cure because to do so would move humanity a little closer to biological sameness. If all impairments could be cured, a major contributing factor to human diversity would disappear, and for a postmodern feminist like Wendell, there is something unacceptable about this possible world. So, for the sake of the goal of preserving the fullest expression of human diversity, a non-hedonistic value is required that accepts a possible reduction of pleasure/happiness for the sake of a biological instantiation of difference.

The second non-hedonistic value upon which Wendell bases her critique has to do with individual flourishing. Like Nietzsche, Wendell credits her suffering body for allowing her to achieve a higher state of existence. Although her impairment imposed some limitations on her activities, she also discovered new interests, passions, and projects that led to an “expansion” of the self. She refers to this expansion as “transcendence of the body,” meaning a reduction in a narrow fixation on personal suffering. Wendell does not regret her illness because she views it as an instrumental good—it has allowed her to become a better, more interesting person. Defined in this way, individual flourishing is a non-hedonistic goal because it is not primarily about gaining more pleasure or reducing pain.

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Because disability sometimes involves necessary suffering to one degree or another, the state of being disabled tends to call hedonistic values and goals into question. If the pursuit of pleasure and the reduction of suffering is supposed to be an ultimate goal, what does this mean for those whose disabilities involve a certain amount of irreducible suffering? I believe this is the unstated question that motivates both Nietzsche and Wendell in their valuation of non-hedonistic goals. The conclusions they reach are quite different, but they share a common starting point.

There are many theorists in DS who, like Wendell, share this Nietzschean skepticism regarding the hedonistic evaluation of suffering, which is why I claim that within DS there is already a foundation for a Nietzschean perspective regarding disability and suffering.

This foundation can also be seen in the recent work of Eli Clare, a disability rights activist and DS author. His concept of ideology deviates from the versions I detailed previously in that it is not concealing anything, nor does it serve a protective psychological function for the non-disabled. Instead, the ideology of cure is a set of beliefs that overtly devalues the bodies of disabled people. Clare has cerebral palsy, and he has spent most of his career “rebelling” against the assumption that his body is defective and needs to be cured. In his 2017 memoir, Brilliant

Imperfection, he asks us to “think of the things called defective—the MP3 player that won’t turn on, the car that never ran reliably. They end up in the bottom drawer, dumpster, scrapyard.

Defects are disposable and abnormal, body-minds or objects to eradicate” (ch. 1). He argues that the concept of the “defective body” is a catalyst for the formation of an ideology that justifies the social mission to cure impairments.

The case of Christopher Reeve has been a focal point for Clare throughout his many years of activism because it illustrates how the ideology of cure devalues disabled bodies. The

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famous actor from the Superman movies became a quadriplegic when he was injured in a horse- riding accident. He spent the rest of his life seeking a cure for his impairment, an effort that was highly publicized. In a documentary called Hope in Motion, Reeve is dismissive of disabled people who are critical of the mission to cure impairments by asserting that “there are some people who just really don’t dare to hope” (Clare ch. 1). For Clare, the movie is little more than

“propaganda” for the ideology of cure.

The narrator uses the words overcome, fight, determination, inspirational,

unwavering will, working tirelessly, amazing results more times than I care to

count. As these words pile one on top of another accompanied by rising violin

music, the film reveals itself as another over-the-top story about a tragically

disabled man who beats the odds, overcomes his paralysis, and through his

courageous struggle gives us hope and inspiration. There is nothing unusual here,

just the same old stereotypes. (ch. 1)

The documentary shows Reeve undergoing experimental surgeries and participating in grueling rehabilitation sessions as he doggedly pursues the goal of using his arms and legs again with full function. Of course, none of these efforts restored Reeve’s functionality, but the message of the film is that accepting one’s fate as a quadriplegic is unacceptable. The proper thing to do is hope for normal functioning and pursue it. This is also the message of the charity organizations with whom Reeve closely worked. From Clare’s perspective, these organizations fail to address the most significant social problems that disabled people face and, instead, spend most of their money on trying to fix individual bodies.

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In considering Clare’s criticism of Reeve, the medical/rehabilitation profession, and the charity organizations, it might appear as though he has an anti-Nietzschean perspective. After all, they are the ones who use the rhetoric of “overcoming,” “fight,” “determination,” and

“unwavering will,” whereas he dismisses such rhetoric as ableist. While these terms are certainly part of the Nietzschean lexicon, it would be too simplistic to base a judgment on rhetoric alone.

For Nietzsche, a psychologically healthy person is one whose drives are appropriately balanced and working in concert to achieve a worthy goal. A person is psychologically unhealthy when the drives are not balanced, such as when one drive has attained an inappropriate position of dominance over other drives. Nietzsche’s famous example for this situation is the ascetic individual who is disproportionately motivated by a single drive. In his Genealogy of Morality, he provides an extended treatment of the modern philosopher-scientist, a descendant of the religious priest, whose overpowering drive for truth results in the stunting of other drives. The philosopher-scientist might possess a powerful will to overcome obstacles to achieve the goal of attaining knowledge, but if this goal is pursued because of a domineering drive for truth, then a powerful will can be a liability rather than an asset.

Psychologically unhealthy people are quite capable of overcoming obstacles by means of a domineering drive. In fact, a domineering drive can often demolish obstacles with ease, such as in the case of the prolific philosopher whose overpowering drive for truth motivates him to overcome the obstacles of social and domestic life to pursue his goal of producing many books.

So, the fact that a person has overcome an obstacle is not a sufficient criterion for psychological health, nor is the tenacity by which the obstacle is overcome. In Reeve’s case, the Nietzschean question is not whether he possessed a powerful will or if he overcame obstacles but, rather,

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whether his will was properly deployed in service to drives working in concert to achieve a worthy goal.

Exactly what counts as a worthy goal is somewhat ambiguous in Nietzsche’s writings, and necessarily so because we cannot predict what a person whose drives are harmonized and properly directed will create, or the value the creation will possess. Nietzsche’s favorite exemplars of this supreme state of psychological health are geniuses such as Goethe and

Beethoven, people whose drives are perfectly balanced and therefore calibrated to express the maximum amount of power to achieve their ends. No one could have predicted the goals of these men, nor could the value of their creations have been anticipated. The creative individual creates, and the creation is evaluated once it exists. Attempting to posit abstract criteria for a worthy goal, then, is mostly an unreliable method. From a Nietzschean perspective, we are more likely to properly evaluate goals and achievements if our primary criterion is the psychological health of the person who pursues and achieves goals.

How does this analysis of psychological health and the pursuit of worthy goals apply to the ideology of cure? For Clare, the ideology diverts us toward an unworthy goal—i.e., seeking to change our bodies because of socially imposed ideas about what a “normal” body should be like. Although Clare doesn’t use the Nietzschean language of “psychological health,” his perspective coincides with Nietzsche’s in that he thinks that it is not good for disabled people to be fixated on normality. Everything the doctors and rehabilitation specialists do for Reeve is based on their notion of how his body should function normally. In one scene, a doctor explains that they are surgically implanting a pacemaker in Reeve’s abdomen so that perhaps he could breath “normally” using his diaphragm. Of course, there is nothing “normal” about breathing

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with the aid of a surgically implanted pacemaker, but the concept of normality obscures such facts. An alternative medical approach might instead be based on what works best for Reeve.

Maybe breathing with the aid of a pacemaker is not the optimum way for him to breath, but the concept of normal functioning preempts alternatives that do not project the appearance of normality.

From Clare’s perspective, Reeve’s quest to regain normal physiological function looks like an unhealthy obsession. It is true that Nietzsche was also interested in, and pursued, treatments for his various ailments, but his efforts were mainly intended to manage his disabilities so that they would not interfere with his writing. And as for the experience of his disabilities, Nietzsche was keenly aware of the value in what he suffered despite an occasional complaint about his pain. In contrast, there is no indication that Reeve found anything of value in his suffering. His efforts are entirely fixated on escaping his disabled condition. Such a goal is based on the hedonistic value of living without disability and abolishing the suffering that comes from quadriplegia. It is also based on the value of normality, a value which is also hedonistic.

For many people, disabled and non-disabled, deviating from normality in any respect causes bad feelings, and getting closer to normal, reduces those bad feelings. It would appear that there is a

Nietzschean drive at work in this desire to be normal, and it is from this drive that an ideology of cure might develop.

So far, I have focused on Clare’s opposition to the ideology of cure, but his overall position on cure is more nuanced. Brilliant Imperfection oscillates between strident anti-cure rhetoric and thoughtful reflection on the positive side of cure. As his activist career has matured, he has become increasingly uncomfortable with unqualified opposition. He relates a story about

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giving an anti-cure speech and “ranting” against Christopher Reeve, and then noticing a friend in the room who had recently survived cancer by the aid of medical interventions. He suddenly wondered how his anti-cure rant would be perceived by someone who has benefited from the social mission to cure impairments. This was a turning point in Clare’s approach to the problem of cure. A politics of anti-cure is easier to endorse when one’s impairment does not involve pain; the only issue that need confront such a person is disablement by an ableist society, which happens to be Clare’s situation. But for those with diseases and chronic pain conditions, treatments and cures are often a prerequisite for meaningful social participation. He acknowledges these cases and concedes that he needs to allow them to “jostle” his anti-cure politics.

The experience of loss that often accompanies disability must also be dealt with in a nuanced manner. This experience cannot simply be dismissed as the product of internalized ableism. The desire for cure is inextricably linked to losing abilities and “yearning” for their restoration. We remember or imagine what that idealized state of health is like and compare ourselves to people who possess the abilities we lack. Much of this yearning and comparing is dictated by ideology and ableism, but not all of it. Clare writes that

I too find myself yearning. Occasionally I wish I could step into the powerful

grace of a gymnast or rock climber, but that wish is distant, fading away almost as

soon as I recognize it. Sometimes in the face of a task I can’t do, frustration

overwhelms me, and I long for steady, nimble hands. But in those moments, I’ve

learned to turn away from yearning and simply ask for help. At the same time, the

longing I feel most persistently centers on body-mind change. (ch. 4)

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One of Clare’s losses is the ability to kayak which he can no longer do because of increasingly stiff joints. He categorizes it as a small loss, but it is an experience he misses. It is out of this experience that he is able to find some sympathy for Reeve’s obsession with seeking a cure.

Only a man experiencing a tremendous amount of loss could be so monomaniacal in his pursuit of normality. But Clare’s sympathy is limited by the fact that Reeve did so much to reinforce the ideology of cure and the ableist assumptions about what disabled people want.

For Clare, experiencing loss is simply a universal human experience, and acquiring a disability is only one of innumerable ways in which we can have it. In most cases, yearning for a former state of normality is counter-productive and caused by internalized ableism. This is why, despite his acknowledgment of the complications surrounding the issue of curing impairments,

Clare states that he would reject a cure if it were offered to him. Non-disabled people are incredulous when he tells them this, but part of his reasoning is that his disability gives him unique and highly-valued experiences.

Having shaky hands and shaky balance isn’t as awful as they imagine, even when

I slip, totter, descend stairs one slow step at a time. My relationship to gravity is

ambivalent. On mountain trails, I yearn to fly downhill, feet touching ground,

pushing off, smooth and fluid. Instead on steep stretches I drop down onto my

butt and slide along using both my hands and feet, for a moment becoming a four-

legged animal. Only then do I see the swirl marks that glaciers left in the granite,

tiny orange newts climbing among the tree roots, otherworldly fungi growing on

rotten logs. My shaky balance gives me this intimacy with the mountain. (ch. 6)

But in another passage, he writes that he would take a magic cure pill on the days when his muscle spasms are intense, when he cannot get his hands to accomplish a task, or when he is

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exhausted by non-disabled gawkers. The bottom line for Clare is that there is no simple answer to the problem of cure or the desire we sometimes have to be less disabled. The most pressing issue is how these desires are coopted by ideology and ableism in devaluing disabled bodies.

His final word on how disabled people should approach the problem of suffering and the desire/search for cures is that we must learn how to embrace our brokenness. This is difficult advice considering that the disability movement opposes stereotypical ideas about disability and being “broken,” but Clare gets around this issue by again universalizing it. A thread that runs through his memoir is the physical and sexual abuse he endured as a child from his father. He writes that, for many years, “I walked through the world detached from body-mind and emotion, skittish, fearful of human touch, hearing voices and seeing shadows, plotting suicide. When it became clear that I had to deal with this damage or end up dead, all I wanted was to be cured”

(ch. 9). By making the desire for a cure about abuse in addition to disability, Clare attempts to undermine the ideology of cure by redefining “cure.” By associating cure with any kind of human brokenness, he is laying groundwork for an inclusive community of broken people. In other words, the problem of cure cannot be turned against the disabled if the nondisabled are also in need of, and actively seeking, some kind of cure. The problem with cure is that it “dismisses resilience, survival, the spider web of fractures, cracks, and seams. Its promise holds power precisely because none of us want to be broken” (ch. 9), but Clare is curious to know “what might happen if we were to accept, claim, embrace our brokenness” (ch. 9).

5. Conclusion

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From the perspective of someone like Mayerfeld, there should not be any significant problem with the desire and search for cures because curing impairments contributes to the goal of abolishing suffering. But many in the disability movement and DS do think that there is a significant problem here, and this is why I claim that there is potential to develop a fuller

Nietzschean perspective on these issues. The notion that the ideology of cure “dismisses resilience” resonates with the Nietzschean perspective on the value of suffering, and it also strikes at the hedonistic values upon which the ideology is built. The invocation of resilience as an approach to the personal experience of disability is often a pretext for the social expectation that one should “overcome” disability, but Clare provides an alternative interpretation that makes it possible to constructively talk about resilience. He does so by interpreting disability as a valuable and essential gateway to individual flourishing, not as an obstacle that must be transcended before flourishing can occur.

Aspects of both Clare’s and Wendell’s perspectives on disability fit well with Nietzsche’s anti-hedonistic ideal. Wendell is critical of the automatic and unreflective judgment that impairments are biological mistakes that must be cured if possible. She does so on the grounds that these so-called mistakes provide individuals and communities valuable opportunities to progress toward higher ethical standards and a greater capacity for empathy. This can only happen by embracing the difference which disability instantiates, despite the suffering that is sometimes caused by it. Clare also sees the potential for a better kind of society that can only emerge if we all recognize the fact that “brokenness” is a universal human condition. Disability is only one kind of brokenness, and desiring and attempting to eliminate it from the human experience would be counter-productive for constructing a more inclusive society. Advancing these kinds of arguments requires a critical perspective on the hedonistic assumption that a

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society would be better if it had less suffering. Of course, despite occasional opposition to the hedonistic mission to cure impairments, there is much more in DS and the DRM that is starkly opposed to the Nietzschean perspective. While Clare’s inclusive community of broken people is based in part on opposition to the hedonistic goal of eliminating disability from the human experience, it is also based on the value and celebration of human weakness. This is why, despite some similarities, Clare’s opposition to the ideology of cure cannot be fully incorporated into a

Nietzschean critique of the social mission to cure impairments.

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Part II. Blindness and Suffering

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Chapter V. Three Interpretations of Blindness

1. Introduction

In Part 1 of the dissertation, I laid the theoretical groundwork for discovering an interpretation of blindness that would allow blind people to flourish. I argued that prominent DS theories—the British social model, the ideology of ability, ableism, disability as difference, the oppression narrative—do not offer satisfactory interpretations for a variety of reasons. In place of these interpretations, I have argued for a Nietzschean perspective, which I believe is a more fruitful approach to the problem of suffering from disability. A successful interpretation must first acknowledge that suffering from disability is, in fact, a central problem; the DS theorists struggle to do this for political reasons, and so their interpretations of this thorny issue are typically inadequate. A successful interpretation will also highly value suffering as a necessary condition for the expression of one’s will to power. My interpretation must, therefore, critique and provide an alternative to the devaluation of suffering that I find in interpretations which are based on hedonistic values.

In Part 2, I continue to develop a Nietzschean interpretation of suffering and apply it specifically to blindness. In this chapter, I consider three interpretations that illustrate different approaches to the meaning of blindness. The first is what I call a deflationary interpretation.

According to this perspective, blindness is nothing more than the simple fact of being visually

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impaired, and all attempts to imbue blindness with meaning beyond this basic fact are wrong and potentially harmful. This interpretation is most prominently asserted by the National Federation of the Blind (NFB) and by its influential former president, Kenneth Jernigan. Jernigan believed that the primary obstacle to social integration of blind people was, and still is, the mistaken view that there is something special about blindness, either positive or negative. The deflationary perspective deconstructs these mistaken views in order to reveal blindness for what it really is—a mere personal characteristic that possesses no more significance than eye color or height. The problem of suffering from blindness, then, is somewhat illusory. If a person suffers from blindness, it has nothing to do with the fact of being visually impaired; instead, it is a consequence of either social discrimination or personal ignorance about how to live well with blindness.

The second interpretation I consider attempts to find meaning in blindness by contextualizing it in a system of religious or metaphysical beliefs. My example of this approach is John Hull’s memoir Touching the Rock, in which he attempts to satisfy the theodicy-demand by interpreting blindness as having religious significance. Hull’s perspective is interesting because it exemplifies the only kind of viable religious interpretation that is possible in a post- metaphysical, post-Christian phase of Western culture. According to the traditional, pre-modern religious perspective, people were blind because they were being punished for sin, or because

God wanted them to be blind for some divine purpose. Hull is a highly educated Christian in a post-Christian culture and, therefore, this atavistic perspective is not an option for him; and so, he attempts to construct a meaning for his blindness out of religious imagery, symbolism, ritual, and practice.

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While both of these interpretations are interesting and have some useful elements, I ultimately conclude that neither can provide the kind of perspective we need in order to flourish as blind people. The deflationary approach rejects the notion that suffering from blindness is a central problem, which aligns it in some respects with various DS theories. As I argued in Part 1, and continue to argue in this chapter, the belief that suffering is not—or should not be—a central problem is largely based on conceptual confusions and evasions of the issue. Additionally, downplaying or dismissing the significance of suffering from blindness entails the devaluation of suffering. So, if a successful interpretation requires valuing suffering as a necessary condition for expressing power, then a deflationary approach to blindness and the suffering it may involve is a dead end.

Religious interpretations are also unlikely to provide the kind of perspective we need because they are unconvincing when inserted into the larger context of a secular, post- metaphysical culture. Modern religious interpretations of blindness simply have far less to offer compared to the pre-modern versions— (i.e., though we may now shudder at the thought, we cannot deny that the genuine belief that God himself has made us blind for some divine reason would be tremendously meaningful). There are, of course, many blind people like Hull who continue to find religious meaning in blindness, and I am not suggesting that these interpretations have no value. I am evaluating interpretations on a sliding scale of better or worse, and this approach precludes dichotomous judgments about the value or lack of value of any given perspective. Even the oppression narrative has some value in the sense that it makes suffering meaningful, and so the same holds true for religious interpretations. But the interpretation I am seeking should be broadly applicable to the lives of all blind people. Unless we plan on first

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converting all blind people to a religion, pursuing religious interpretations is not likely to yield the perspective we need to flourish collectively.

The third interpretation I consider takes an affirmative approach to blindness. In DS, this is sometimes referred to as an “affirmative model” of disability. I take issue with the DS version of affirmation because it is typically based on hedonistic values (the affirmative perspective of

Susan Wendell being a notable exception). In Chapter 2, I described a Nietzschean version of affirmation that is based on valuing suffering as a necessary condition for strengthening one’s will to power, and I further suggested that the process and experience of increasing one’s power through suffering can provide the meaning we need to bear it. I find this version of affirming blindness reflected in Jacques Lusseyran’s memoir, And There Was Light. As a blind man,

Lusseyran was the leader of a 600-member resistance cell in Nazi-occupied France, and he survived a German concentration camp. I argue that, of the three interpretations of blindness in this chapter, Lusseyran’s affirmative perspective on blindness and its meaning is closest in spirit with the Nietzschean perspective.

2. Kenneth Jernigan and the National Federation of the Blind

The National Federation of the Blind (NFB) was founded in the 1940s by Dr. Jacobus

Tenbroek, a blind lawyer, professor, and constitutional law scholar (Jernigan, Kenneth Jernigan

“Preface”). It is the largest organization operated and controlled by blind people in the United

States. Tenbroek founded NFB in response to the dismal situation of most blind people in the mid-twentieth century. Unemployment and under-employment were normal, monetary and material dependence on family and government agencies was common, and negative social

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attitudes perpetuated the belief that blindness was a terrible misfortune. Tenbroek believed that blindness was not a terrible misfortune, that blind people could live independent, productive lives if they were granted equal opportunity to do so (Jernigan, Kenneth Jernigan

“Introduction”).

NFB’s most powerful and eloquent defender of Federationist philosophy was its second president, Dr. Kenneth Jernigan (1968-1986). His influence on the organization cannot be overstated. In a posthumous compilation of his late writings and speeches, the editors refer to him as “the Master” and assert that Jernigan and the Federation are one and the same (Jernigan,

Kenneth Jernigan “Preface”). Born in 1926, his early life was typical for a blind person in the

United States. His family had no idea how to support and prepare him for an independent life. He received the standard minimal support from the rehabilitation agency in his state, but this support was based on the assumption that the blind are mostly helpless and cannot make substantive contributions to society. As a high school student, he wanted to attend university to become a lawyer. Jernigan’s rehabilitation counselor dismissed this aspiration because he believed that a blind person could not perform the role of a lawyer. Instead, he suggested that Jernigan become an English teacher because this profession seemed within the realm of possibility for a blind person. When Jernigan insisted that he wanted to be a lawyer, the counselor informed him that he could do so, but the rehabilitation agency would not support him financially. Having no money to pay for his own education, Jernigan was forced to accept the counselor’s ultimatum (Kenneth

Jernigan “Introduction).

The Federation, under the presidencies of Tenbroek and Jernigan, began advocating for more resources and social mobility for the blind against occasionally fierce opposition from government agencies and charitable organizations with vested interest in the “blindness system.”

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This system was built on the notion that blind people were helpless victims who needed the aid of non-blind custodians, and the agencies and charitable organizations promoted this idea to secure government funding and charitable donations. Therefore, the emergence of a consumer- based advocacy organization threatened the livelihood of many non-blind disability service careerists. Acrimonious battles over which organizations would speak for blind people raged for decades. At the height of the conflict, Jernigan was targeted by the FBI on the basis of false accusations by a government official and a hostile state newspaper. The Federation’s oppression narrative is rooted in this history of low expectations for blind people and the effort by rehab agencies and charitable organizations to destroy the NFB (Kenneth Jernigan “Introduction”).

NFB’s motto is: “You can live the life you want. Blindness is not what holds you back.”

According to this perspective, there is nothing about blindness, as a visual impairment, that causes suffering. If people suffer because they are blind, they do so for one of two reasons. First, they are ignorant about the innumerable techniques that can be used to reduce blindness to a mere inconvenience in one’s everyday life. Second, they suffer because they do not have equal opportunity to compete and succeed with their non-blind peers in a social environment that valorizes and rewards personal autonomy and achievement. Ignorance and discrimination, therefore, create the problem of suffering for blind people, not the fact of being unable to see.

The primary cause of both ignorance and discrimination is low expectations for what blind people can achieve. The social world is dominated by the non-blind, and they generally cannot imagine how the blind could function at full capacity in social contexts. Many blind people also have low expectations for themselves, which makes it impossible to realize one’s full potential in social contexts. This is a fundamental Federationist perspective, and it is emphasized at state and national conventions to this day.

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Jernigan argues that “[the] real problem of blindness is not the blindness itself but the mistaken notions and misunderstandings about blindness which are so widely prevalent in society” (As the Twig 2). In his view, to the extent that blindness can be characterized as a

“problem,” it only is so because there is a social problem. This view is not unusual—it is typical in the thought and rhetoric of special interest groups that experience discrimination. What is atypical in Federationist philosophy is the minimal amount of indulgence given to personal expressions of suffering from discrimination. NFB promotes a “pull yourself up by your own bootstraps” mentality, which naturally discourages paying undue attention to one’s personal struggle in the face of discrimination. “Suffering” is, therefore, not a word or concept that appears in Federationist publications. Suffering is too personal, too subjective, and not properly focused on the important task of fighting discrimination.

According to Jernigan, assuming that the experience of blindness is dominated by suffering is detrimental to the goal of social integration. A person cannot be an equal member of a community if that person is an object of pity or fear due to inaccurate assumptions about what that person’s life is like. To combat this perspective, the NFB has been publishing a series of short books since the early 1990s that are compilations of stories told from the perspective of

NFB members. They are known as the “Kernel Books,” and there are currently over thirty in publication. Jernigan believed that this series of books was a “revolution” because of its effect on views about blindness. He claims in one of his speeches, “We have brought about a sudden and momentous change in attitudes about the blind, our own attitudes and those of society. We have initiated activities directed toward causing basic changes in the socioeconomic structure of a minority” (Kenneth Jernigan 152). Several millions of them are in circulation, and they have

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received broad recognition for dispelling stereotypes about blindness by focusing on narratives that depict blind people living normal lives just like their non-blind neighbors.

The Kernel narratives are diverse in authorship, setting, and plot. Authors are young, middle-aged, and elderly. Some have affluent backgrounds and others came from abject poverty.

Some are educated and others have minimal education. The plots tend to focus on mundane, everyday life in order to demonstrate that blind people are just like their non-blind neighbors.

They are about people preparing holiday meals, going on vacations, working a wide variety of jobs, raising children, interacting with neighbors, participating in community events, and so on.

One of the persistent themes is the importance of self-sufficiency. “The Metal Pole,” for example, is one such story, written by Homer Page, a long-time NFB leader. He was born blind with some residual vision. His parents did not explain to him that he was blind, a common experience shared by many older Federationists. Consequently, he broke his arm twice before the age of six because he could not really see well enough to avoid danger. His parents showed him no pity or sentimentality. He does not comment on whether he thinks his parents’ behavior was inappropriate, but his stories are based on the premise that expressions of pity and sentimentality are an obstacle to achieving goals and living well.

Page begins by describing his first day of school. Because he didn’t know his vision was impaired, he enthusiastically joined the other children as they ran around the playground. While running, he collided with a metal pole that was bracing a slide. His face hit the pole, and he fell to the ground. Dazed and in pain, he thought the following: “I knew that if I lay there, or if I cried, I could not play with the other] children. I got up to join my new friends. They never commented nor did I” (Jernigan, Beginnings 54). Throughout his time at school, he and his friends did not talk about his blindness. He was always picked last for sports but first for

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academic competitions. Page states that these selections were appropriate and fair, and no one showed him pity or sentimentality. The metal pole became for him a symbol of the obstacles blind people experience and the proper response to such obstacles. He writes, “In my decades since my encounter with the metal pole, I have more than once found myself figuratively lying on the ground. What I learned at six years of age, and have relearned several times since, is that getting up is the best option. The other option is to play it safe and not really play” (55).

As an adult, Page sought a political career. More than once, he failed to attain elected office because his opponents used his blindness against him. They questioned his competence to perform the role of elected representative. When faced with this kind of blatant discrimination, he remembered the metal pole and refused to give up on his goal or give in to self-pity. He concludes his essay with advice to other blind people:

In the lives of blind persons there are occasional metal poles. Once it was

believed that those poles made life too dangerous or too difficult for us to be able

to participate with sighted persons on terms of equality, but now we know that

this is simply not true. However, we also know that when those poles appear in

our paths and flatten us, we must get back up and continue to run without

bitterness or self-pity. We must also improve our travel skills through life, so we

can avoid as many of those poles as possible. We must be tough enough to play

without sentimentality, and smart enough to know that in this way life will shower

us with abundance. (Jernigan, Beginnings 57-8)

This conclusion is representative of the Federationist perspective on the experience of adversity.

When one encounters an obstacle to achieving one’s goals, and especially when the obstacles are unfairly created by discrimination, the appropriate response is stoical perseverance and resolute

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action to overcome such obstacles. Optimism is also a highly valued psychological trait in a good

Federationist, as demonstrated by Page’s concluding sentence.

In another Kernel narrative, Marc Maurer, a former NFB president (1986-2014), describes how he became totally blind at age six due to an unsuccessful eye surgery. Before the surgery, he had a small amount of residual vision, just enough to see colors. His most vivid memory was of a multi-colored beach ball. He describes his devastation at having lost his sight following the surgery. Having once seen color and other objects, total blindness was a terrible experience for him. He did nothing but eat, sleep, and sit on the couch all day long. “I took no action. I ate when I was told, and I went to bed when I was told. The joy was gone. The day-today excitement about what to do and where to go and how to live was no more. I sat and brooded” (Jernigan, Old Dogs, “The Sliding Board”). This is an honest account of a child suffering because of blindness. But the story does not end here. Maurer goes on to report that his suffering lasted for only one week. All it took was for his mother to finally insist that he go outside to play, and after some initial reticence and tentative attempts, he had rediscovered the joys of childhood. He was engaged in the same play activities as before, only now he was doing them a little differently.

These stories represent NFB’s normative principles which govern the experience of, and responses to, personal suffering. Blindness might cause a person to suffer for personal or social reasons. Perhaps there are limitations on the life activities in which one would like to engage, or perhaps the attitudes of other people make one suffer. NFB does not deny that these experiences occur, but it does question the way in which these experiences are interpreted. Jernigan’s aim is to remove the mystery from blindness, to undermine misperceptions, and to show blindness as it actually is—utterly ordinary. This is why the narratives are written by ordinary blind people, and

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why most of the stories focus on mundane activities and events. He writes, “These are people who might live next door—people who go to work, raise children, experience disappointments, make successes, plan for the future, think about tomorrow's dinner, wonder about taxes and wage increases, and hope for better things ahead—people who yearn and dream, laugh and cry—just like you” (Beginnings vi). Blindness means no more than what eye color, height, or left- handedness mean—nothing significant.

3. A Deflationary Interpretation of Blindness

The NFB philosophy, as exemplified by the Kernel stories, is based on a deflationary interpretation of blindness. This interpretation counters those that have historically been attributed to it, such as blindness as special form of insight, blindness as tragic misfortune, or blindness as gateway to spiritual enlightenment. In his annual convention banquet speech of

1974, Jernigan makes this point abundantly clear when he argues that the entire history of literary representation of blindness is based on lies. He identifies nine erroneous interpretive categories: blindness as compensatory or miraculous power, blindness as total tragedy, blindness as foolishness and helplessness, blindness as unrelieved wickedness and evil, blindness as perfect virtue, blindness as punishment for sin, blindness as abnormality or dehumanization, blindness as purification, and blindness as symbol or parable. Jernigan notes that there are some contemporary stories that are finally portraying blindness honestly because they do not commit one of these misinterpretations. But as for everything that has come before, he derisively refers to the entire corpus as “sweetness without light, and literature without enlightenment”

(“Blindness: Is Literature Against Us?”).

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No matter how philosophically sophisticated the meaning might be, if it portrays blindness as anything more than a mundane experience, or if it erects an interpretive edifice on top of the brute fact of visual impairment, it is erroneous. Jernigan is in this regard a literalist about the phenomenon of blindness. His literalism is most overt in his rejection of any attempt to imbue blindness with symbolic meaning. Symbolic narratives of blindness might be used to satirize contemporary society, such as in Jose Saramago’s novels Blindness and Seeing; or it might have a parabolic function, such as in “Oedipus Rex.” In both cases, blindness symbolizes other forms of “unseeing,” such as the lack of foresight of an arrogant Oedipus and the cruel ineptitude of Saramago’s bureaucratic state. The symbolism of blindness is often found alongside many of the other categories of meaning, and it is employed by authors who have a philosophical point to make about humanity and/or society. The problem with narratives that use blindness symbolically is that they perpetuate the idea that there is something special, strange, or tragic about blindness.

Jernigan concludes that the literary tradition has “wrought havoc” on the lives of blind people. In that tradition, “there is an implied acceptance of blindness as a state of ignorance and confusion, of the inversion of normal perceptions and values, and of a condition equal to if not worse than death” (“Blindness: Is Literature Against Us?”). He believes that literature shapes the imagination, and thus the unrelenting negativity of the depictions of blindness must be implicated in the fear of, and discrimination against, blind people. Stories are essential to forming beliefs about blindness, which is why the Kernel books are so important to NFB’s mission. Contrary to what the literary tradition would have us believe, Jernigan asserts, “[mostly] we're just like you. We cry if we have reason to but not because of blindness. And we laugh if

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something's funny but, again, not because of blindness. Our lives are as varied, as interesting, or as dull as yours” (As the Twig Is Bent 3).

Given Jernigan’s and the Federation’s interpretation of blindness and suffering, there is little here to satisfy the theodicy-demand. Blindness cannot be integrated into a meaningful justification for suffering if blindness has no meaning beyond the brute fact of impairment. And the need for a theodicy would be irrelevant anyway if blindness, properly experienced, does not contribute to personal suffering. This might not be obvious at first because of the Federation’s history. Jernigan did believe that blind people were an oppressed minority, and some of his writings do contribute to the construction of an oppression narrative. I explained in Chapter 2 that an oppression narrative offers a justificatory reason for experiences of suffering. As such, it can satisfy the theodicy-demand to a certain extent. But the Federation’s deflationary interpretation of blindness ultimately undermines its oppression narrative. In order for the oppression narrative to be psychologically effective, it must dominate one’s interpretation of one’s experiences. But Jernigan makes it clear that blind people cannot allow an oppression narrative to predominate.

In one of his late essays, “The Day after Civil Rights,” he warns that undue focus on social oppression is corrosive.

If a minority lives too long in an armed camp atmosphere, that minority becomes

poisoned and corroded. We must move beyond minority mentality and victim

thinking. This will be difficult-especially in today’s society, where hate and

suspicion are a rising tide and where members of minorities are encouraged and

expected to feel bitterness and alienation and members of the majority are

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encouraged and expected to feel guilt and preoccupation with the past. (Kenneth

Jernigan 166-67)

Jernigan has a rights-based perspective on social oppression. Therefore, in his view, social oppression was substantially ended when blind people achieved civil rights and equality under the law. Low expectations for, and negative attitudes about, blind people might still exist, but we have the power to change these beliefs now that systemic barriers to equality have been dismantled.

Jernigan’s perspective runs counter to the generally accepted view in DS that social oppression remains a systemic problem even after the achievement of civil rights. According to this perspective, equality under the law is an important but fairly superficial achievement given the deep-seated nature of ableism. We saw in Chapter 3 that, for theorists like Siebers and

Campbell, ableism and the ideology of ability are pervasive, even in the United States, a country which leads the world in granting civil rights to its disabled population. Therefore, from a DS perspective, experiences of suffering can still be meaningfully interpreted as a consequence of social oppression, but this interpretation is not available to a Federationist. Jernigan’s philosophy, and the social vision promoted in the Kernel books, anticipates a world in which blind people are so thoroughly normalized and assimilated into their communities that blindness becomes a meaningless characteristic. The main problem for realizing this vision is ignorance, and the solution is the promulgation of NFB’s philosophy. The problem is not, in contrast to a common DS perspective, deep-seated systemic oppression that apparently has no solution.

A deflationary interpretation also undercuts the connection between blindness and suffering on a personal level. Story after story in the Kernel books depicts blindness as an ordinary and mundane characteristic that has little to do with how people feel. If anything is

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suffered in a Kernel story, it is mistreatment by the non-blind, or negative attitudes and beliefs about blindness. But in these cases, the solution is either to educate the non-blind or to strengthen one’s own resolve to not allow others to dictate how we feel about ourselves. Is there, then, anything to be suffered from the activity limitations that naturally arise from impaired vision? I think there is, but one will not find an indication of it in Jernigan’s writings or NFB’s philosophy. This is a difficult issue to analyze because of the subjective quality of impairment- derived psychological suffering. My claim is not that this kind of suffering is a universal experience, and I am prepared to believe anyone who says they suffer nothing from blindness as an impairment. However, I know from my conversations with other blind people that many do suffer in some respect, and it is certainly the negative connotation of the word “suffering” that prevents a nuanced treatment of the problem in the NFB literature.

If our conception of suffering and blindness is a constant state of pain or psychological distress, then Jernigan’s perspective is a necessary and vital corrective to this misunderstanding.

The Kernel books demonstrate an important truth: the everyday lives of blind people are not dominated by suffering. In fact, unless one has the misfortune of living in a highly disabling environment, the average blind person experiences relatively little suffering, quantitatively speaking. If a blind person is fortunate enough to live in an environment with few disabling barriers, and if negative attitudes/beliefs about blindness in a given social environment are fairly minimal, then experiences of suffering are likely to be infrequent. There is, of course, a certain amount of privilege in this hypothetical life-situation. There are still many places in the United

States where blind people are living in inhospitable physical and social environments, and experiences of suffering will be more frequent for such people. But, generally, blindness in the

United States does not entail a great deal of suffering. (This becomes especially apparent when

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learning about the appalling circumstances of blind people residing in many other countries, of whom we can legitimately say that their situation is oppressive.)

However, the Federationist perspective on suffering is inadequate to the extent that it ignores impairment-derived psychological suffering from blindness, infrequent though it may be.

The following are three non-inclusive examples of activity limitation caused by impaired vision that are not dependent on any particular social context: (1) the inability to see faces, (2) the inability to see beautiful objects, (3) the inability to engage in physical activities that require hand-eye coordination. From my conversations and experience in the blindness community, these are the three most prevalent sources of impairment-derived psychological suffering for blind people. While many forms of physical activity are within the capacity of blind people to perform, there are still many enjoyable physical activities which cannot be performed—e.g., running unaided at full speed on a wooded trail, playing a sport that requires hand-eye coordination, driving a car, etc. Depending on the level of vision loss, the experience of visual beauty is either significantly curtailed or impossible. And the ability to see another person’s face is a unique visual experience for which there is no compensatory alternative. The loss of this ability is especially difficult when it is the faces of one’s spouse or children that one cannot see.

My claim that these activity limitations that are not dependent on social contexts will be difficult to accept for anyone who believes that social context determines all human experience, or that “the personal is political.” Some DS theorists, such as Tom Shakespeare, argue that there is a subset of disability experience that is independent from social context. This means, in practical terms, that no amount of social change will bring about the elimination of some disabilities. But Shakespeare’s is a minority perspective; the standard view in DS is that disability is a “social construct,” meaning that all aspects of disability are socially determined.

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My view is that interpretations of disability are inseparable from social contexts, and therefore what we think about disability will be socially conditioned. However, there is a wide range of variability in how much a disability experience is socially conditioned, and there are some experiences for which social context is almost irrelevant. For example, when considering an instance of suffering because one will never see the faces of one’s children, trying to analyze such an experience as a social construct seems rather absurd. Only the most inhumane and one- dimensional type of social theory could assert that a social context determines whether or not a parent values the appearance of a child’s face.

The reason why we must make these distinctions is that our interpretation of suffering will depend on what we believe about the nature of blindness. If we believe that blindness is entirely “socially constructed,” then an oppression narrative is the most likely way in which we will give meaning to experiences of suffering. Or, if we believe that blindness is merely a brute fact to which interpretations are erroneously applied, then we will resist the impulse to find meaning either in blindness or in the experiences of suffering it engenders. I detailed the problem with the first approach in Chapter 3 where I argued that attempting to satisfy the theodicy- demand by way of an oppression narrative is both factually suspect and deficient in values. The problem with the deflationary approach is that it causes experiences of suffering that arise from blindness to be meaningless, and it is precisely the psychological intolerability of the meaninglessness of suffering that demands resolution. Some Federationists would dispute this assertion on the grounds that blindness need not cause suffering. Again, I accept that this is true for some blind people (for the congenitally blind, in particular). But for those who do experience impairment-derived psychological suffering from blindness, a satisfactory meaning for it is still needed.

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4. A Religious Interpretation of Blindness

A religious interpretation of blindness and suffering is perhaps the most antithetical perspective to that of the deflationary interpretation because of the meaning it can give to blindness. John Hull’s memoir, Touching the Rock: An Experience of Blindness, provides such an interpretation. Born in Australia in 1935, Hull moved to England in the 1950s to become a professor of religious studies at the University of Birmingham. His sight was impaired from childhood, although he was able to live mostly as a normally-sighted person. His partially detached retinas caused severe but temporary visual impairment. In his late forties, his vision deteriorated rapidly until he became totally blind. The transition from usable sight to no sight was fairly abrupt, making the experience of loss especially difficult for him. Desiring to record the experience of blindness and explore its complexity, he began to record his everyday experiences and thoughts about their meaning.

Each of my three examples of socially unconditioned activity limitation are addressed in

Hull’s memoir. After being completely blind for over a year, he reports distress at having difficulty visualizing the images of his wife and eldest daughter. He is able to more easily visualize their photographs, which he can remember from a time when he could see well. But he was already blind when his youngest daughter was born, and so “[the] place on the wall which should carry her portrait is completely blank” (19). In another entry, he describes the experience of seeing his daughter for the first time in a dream.

I could see her quite clearly in the dim light. In the dream, I knew that I had been

blind, and that this was the first time I had been able to see her. I stared at her, full

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of wonder, taking in every detail of her face as she stood there wreathed in smiles,

stretching out her hands to me. It was like a revelation. I thought, 'So this is her.

This is the smile they all talk about. These are those luminous brown eyes.' I had a

wonderful sense of a renewal of contact, as I felt that she was amazed as she

realized, in some way, that there was something different about me, that I was

responding to her in a new sort of way. (125)

In an entry called “Reaching into Clouds,” Hull describes an impression that his children are covered in black clouds. When he reaches into the clouds, he can feel their faces and clothing, but there is nothing when he pulls his hands back out. They are like “pillars of smoke” that make noise as they move around his house, merging and separating as the children play. As he adapts to total blindness over the course of a few years, he finds that he is bothered less frequently by the fact that he cannot see his children. He takes pleasure in the feel of his newborn son, and yet he still feels “pangs of regret” (190) when someone comments that his son is smiling at him.

Hull also experiences moments of suffering when he cannot physically interact with his children in the way he desires. He describes these interactions as being “merely present while things are being done. Even when we do things together, it is often individually but simultaneously, like eating, which we do at the same time, but separately” (151). Some activities do not present this dynamic of separateness, such as when he is able to build structures with his son using toy pieces that are easily manipulable without sight; but many other children’s activities are not so easily accessible. He describes a feeling of sleepiness when there is a lot of activity happening around him in which he cannot participate, a feeling akin to being drugged.

(This is an experience that I and many blind people have had.) Hull describes it as a kind of momentary depression that gives “a poignant sense of loss” (153). He goes on to write that

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“[there] is also a sense of longing for a relationship, for an experience, and perhaps some panic at the thought that this is now all passing me by and these golden years of children's play will never be recovered” (153).

In addition to the feeling of being drugged, Hull has experiences of panic when his environment is noisy or disordered. He describes a Christmas party that fills his house with people. As he attempts to make his way from room to room, carefully stepping his way through party guests and children’s toys strewn about the floor, he must retreat to his office to cope with a feeling of panic. He interprets these kinds of experiences in terms of losing territorial rights.

Blindness takes away one's territorial rights. One loses territory. The span of

attention, of knowledge, retracts so that one lives in a little world. Almost all

territory becomes potentially hostile. Only the area which can be touched with the

body or tapped with the stick becomes a space in which one can live. The rest is

unknown. (54)

His experiences of panic are rare, but at the very least, there is cognitive and psychological exhaustion that is always caused by being subjected to loud, disordered environments.

One might object that these activity limitations and psychological effects are socially constructed—i.e., Hull is having these experiences in social environments, and he wouldn’t have these bad experiences if the adults and children understood his needs and ordered the environments appropriately. Obviously, most of our experiences happen in social contexts, but this objection misjudges the practical consequences of implementing an abstract principle. What would it look like, practically speaking, if Hull’s friends and family were to ensure that all of his social interactions occurred according to an ideal state of full inclusion? Disorder and noise are essential to activities like children’s play and adult parties. If the disorder is removed to the

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degree necessary to perfectly accommodate a blind person, these activities would no longer be what they intrinsically are. Children cannot play in a perfectly quiet and orderly fashion, and forcing them to do so constantly would be a form of abuse. And while it is occasionally enjoyable to have a muted dinner party with little physical activity, something would be lost socially if this was the only kind of party that could be had.

More importantly, a blind person would not be well-served by these draconian measures to order a social environment. What would be the psychological effect of knowing that essential aspects of human activity are being suppressed for the sake of making us more comfortable? The typical blind person does not want to be the center of attention in this way, nor does she want to be the cause of others having to suppress normal human behavior. This is not inclusion—it is exclusion by other means. Instead of being excluded because we cannot meaningfully participate in a social activity, we would remain excluded in having been put on a pedestal as we watch everyone around us suppress normal human behavior. This does not mean that accommodations should not be made in order to make blind people more comfortable and included in social settings. But there is a limit to the principle of inclusion, and pushing beyond that limit actually reinscribes exclusion and discomfort in a different form.

Another example of a limitation on physical activity that requires sight is Hull’s anxiety that he will not be able to protect his family in dangerous situations. He recounts a dream in which he is intimately involved with his wife in a pub, and suddenly he is alone (84). Someone announces through a speaker that the blind man’s wife and daughter have been involved in a car accident. With cane in hand, he desperately tries to get outside to the scene of the accident, but he cannot move fast enough, which causes him to panic. This dream is paired with an actual experience of crossing a road with his family. He asks about who is holding the youngest

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daughter’s hand, but his question is ignored in the rush to get across the street. He writes, “I suddenly felt out of things, that my ability to watch over Lizzie had been destroyed, that there was no point in trying to care for her or bothering. [. . .] I was a mere lump of fat being carted around” (92). Again, there are many dangerous situations in which a blind person could protect a child. And, in many dangerous situations, having perfect vision will not avail a parent in preventing harm from befalling a child. However, there is still a subset of dangerous situations in which having sight is an advantage in giving protection, and there is nothing that can be done socially to change this fact, short of curing blindness.

The inability to have an experience of visual beauty is a third kind of activity limitation that is essentially unconditioned by social contexts. It is true that what we think of as beautiful is based on socially conditioned values, but I am not here referring to aesthetic judgment or taste. I am instead referring to the fact that there is such a thing as a visually aesthetic experience to begin with, and it is this universal human experience that is inaccessible to the blind. Several passages in Touching the Rock explore the issue of lacking access to visual beauty and the development of other aesthetic senses. Hull narrates a return to Melbourne, his childhood home.

He notes that it is a place of striking beauty, and he is grieved by the fact that he can no longer see the stunning scenery that he remembers from his youth. In another section, he comments that the feeling of loss occurs only when he returns to a familiar place that he could see in the past.

When he is in a new place that he has never seen, he doesn’t care about the visual aesthetic: “I just write that off as unavailable, and concentrate upon those parts of it which can get through to me” (194). These contrasting examples demonstrate the connection between a visual-aesthetic experience and caring about it, which occurs regardless of one’s particular socially determined aesthetic values.

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In another place, Hull connects visual-aesthetic experience with love for objects. For example, he used to love books: “I used to love handling my small collection of eighteenth- century books, noting the antique lettering, glancing at the woodcuts or the engravings, and musing over the old handwriting which is often found inside the covers” (200). Now that he is blind, he can only feel and smell books, and this is an inadequate aesthetic experience for developing a love for them. He also used to love the artistically rendered covers for gramophone records, but now “the sleeve is merely a casing, merely a protection for the disc and something upon which to put the braille label” (201). There is a suggestive link between the passage about loved objects and another passage about the sight of women, although Hull does not make this link himself. Early in his total blindness, he wants to know what women look like because he misses seeing female beauty (23). He chastises himself for caring about what women look like, blaming it on his concern for what other sighted men think. But I think Hull is misattributing the reason for what is, in fact, a natural impulse. And, when combined with the passage about loved objects, it suggests the disturbing possibility that loving a woman is incomplete without a visual experience of her.

These are only a small sample of Hull’s experiences as a blind man, and they only represent the kind of impairment-derived psychological suffering that is mostly independent from social construction. He describes many more negative experiences that do depend on social context. These are the typical experiences that all blind people have had—the waiters asking our dinner companions what we would like to eat; the acquaintances who make us guess who they are by the sound of their voices, or who make awkward blind jokes; the strangers who wave their hands in front of our faces to test our vision; the religious people who want to publicly pray for our healing; the doctors who assume that our family members are “caretakers” because they

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don’t believe we can care for ourselves; the people on the street who disrupt our concentration when walking by yelling directions at us; the people who insist that we can cure our blindness by applying a bizarre remedy; the people who pity us because they think our lives must be horrible; the people who withhold an opportunity because they assume we are incompetent. In general, these experiences can be summed up as having our blindness foregrounded in such a way that our full humanity is reduced to a single characteristic.

Hull does not make a distinction between impairment-derived and socially-derived experiences as I do. For him, all of these experiences are just the kind of difficulties a blind person must deal with in life. But making the distinction is important for two reasons. First, by elucidating the social conditions that cause suffering, something can be done to ameliorate it.

This is where the DS politicization of disabled experience and the development of an oppression narrative has the most value. Hull’s memoir is noticeably lacking in social critique. All of his experiences are framed as personal experiences, and so he has no theory to offer regarding experiences that are socially determined. The consequence for him personally is that he seems to passively accept more negative experiences than is necessary. Second, drawing out impairment- derived causes of suffering serves as a check on unbridled social critique. It does us no good to blame all of our negative experiences and suffering on society. This is the value of Jernigan’s perspective on the corrosive effects of perpetual victimhood. Ideally, we should hold both perspectives on suffering in balance so that we don’t get stuck in either passive acceptance of situations we can change or resentful discontentment in situations we cannot change.

But what is Hull’s overriding perspective? How does he interpret his blindness and the suffering it sometimes occasions? The primary theme of Touching the Rock is Hull’s search for meaning in his experience of blindness, a search which he believes is necessary in order for him

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to live well. In a section called “Fighting Depression,” he explains that his technique of isolating himself and remaining still for hours is becoming untenable because he cannot always withdraw from life, such as when he must care for the children or when he is committed to a social gathering. In trying to understand his experience of depression, he ponders symbolic and archetypal interpretations: “In the art and mythology of many peoples, blindness is associated with ignorance, confusion and unconsciousness. Perhaps my imagination has come under the power of these associations. Perhaps my actual blindness has activated the archetype of blindness within me” (63). Hull seriously considers these archetypal meanings because they illuminate his depressive symptoms, but he ultimately concludes that this archetypal meaning will not help him cope with his depression. And so, he must find an alternative archetype to satisfy his need for an effective theodicy.

In his preface, Hull mentions that, after he lost his sight, he read over twenty autobiographies of people who went blind and accomplished many things. Most were written in a novelistic style, and the protagonists typically displayed a stoical perspective and attitude about their blindness. For one such narrative, he comments that “[there] is not a trace of self-pity or even of self-analysis in the whole book” (163). As such, these narratives fail to provide substantial meaning for blindness. Hull is a devout Christian, and so, for him, “there can be no stoical resignation before an inscrutable destiny, no gritting of the teeth, no acceptance, however courageous, of a meaningless destiny” (163). His desire for coherent meaning “impels [him] to probe the experience, to grapple with it, to strip off layer after layer from it, to find meaning within it and to relate that meaning to the other parts or aspects of living” (163). This approach is antithetical to Jernigan’s promotion of a deflationary meaning for blindness. Whereas Jernigan is

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seeking to strip away meaning from the brute fact of visual impairment, Hull is seeking to build upon it an edifice of spiritual meaning.

An example of this method of interpretation comes in a passage called “Darkness Is as

Light with Thee” in which Hull integrates blindness into an analysis of Psalm 139. He applies the poem, line by line, to his experience. In the early verses, God is described as knowing everything about what the psalmist does. Hull compares this relationship between God and man to the relationship between sighted person and blind person. The sighted person sees him at a distance and knows what he is about by observing his actions, even discerning his thoughts and emotions by his facial expressions. The ease with which his children can accomplish visual tasks amazes him and parallels the psalmist’s amazement at God’s inscrutable knowledge. Darkness is described as under God’s dominion and subject to unification with divine light, to which Hull responds, “[the] world of heaven, of light, is his. The world of Sheol, of darkness and of the depths, is also his. It makes no difference to him where I am, or in what world I find myself”

(67). The psalmist wonders at the mysterious power of God who created him in his mother’s womb, to which Hull replies, “I was made in secret and I am still being made in the secrets of blindness, but all secrets are open to God” (69).

Similar attempts to imbue blind experience with religious meaning are scattered throughout the book. Hull clarifies that his method of interpretation should not be taken to mean that he thinks God made him blind, or that it is his fate to be blind. Instead, the brute fact of visual impairment is a natural, biological accident. For Hull, Christian faith is a creative act that gives meaning to random events through the medium of religious imagery: “meaning is conferred when chance is transfigured through a rebirth of images. [. . .] Images have their own energy, and the meaningful life is experienced as those images restructure the accidental content

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of life. The most important thing in life is not happiness but meaning” (197). He goes on to say that happiness is an accidental product of the natural world, and as such, it is an unreliable justification for life. Blindness does not make him happy—in fact, it would seem to be an obstacle to his happiness, although he does not say so explicitly. And yet, Hull is able to continue living by a theodicy he has constructed for himself out of religious faith and Christian symbolism.

The final entry in his memoir describes a pilgrimage to Iona Abbey where he intends to experience spiritual growth. He has difficulty orienting himself because of the size and complexity of the site. After a few days, he begins to explore at night so as to not be disturbed by other visitors. He discovers a large and heavy wooden door beyond which he can sense the enormous open space of the sanctuary. He explores this space over the course of several days, each time retracing his steps to the door to keep from getting lost. One night he makes it all the way to the main altar, a gigantic block of marble. To judge its size, he climbs on top and stretches out his body.

It was bigger than me and much older. There were several places on the polished

surface which were marked with long, rather irregular indentations, not cracks,

but imperfections of some kind. Could it have been dropped? These marks felt

like the result of impact. The contrast between the rough depressions and the huge

polished areas was extraordinary. Here was the work of people, grinding this

thing, smoothing it to an almost greasy, slightly dusty finish which went slippery

when I licked it. Here were these abrasions, something more primitive, the naked

heart of the rock. (216)

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The image of Hull lying on top of the altar is the culmination of his interpretive effort to give meaning to his blindness. The slow and methodical exploration of the Abbey and the progressive knowledge he gains of its layout symbolize his exploration of his blindness and his progress over a few years toward the development of his theodicy. And, like Hull’s own body, God’s altar is marked by imperfections that cannot be expunged.

Hull’s religious interpretation of his blindness is clearly meaningful to him, and its highest values are non-hedonistic. As such, it is a superior interpretation to a deflationary perspective; and it is also superior to the various DS perspectives that hold to hedonistic ideals and the devaluation of suffering. However, Hull’s interpretation also valorizes powerlessness, as we should expect given that he is contextualizing his blindness within a Christian worldview. For him, the inherent “weakness” in blindness neatly fits within the general Christian valorization of human weakness that is the necessary pre-condition for total reliance on God. For anyone who already holds this Christian worldview and its anthropological presuppositions, Hull’s approach can serve as a meaningful perspective that will satisfy the theodicy-demand. But as we advance further into the modern era, the traditional Christian perspective will become an increasingly untenable interpretation of suffering. We have already seen the cracks forming in Hull’s own worldview in that he believes that he is blind, not because God wants him to be so, but because of the random contingency of biological nature. For these reasons, we should conclude that a religious interpretation is not the best possible interpretation of suffering from blindness.

5. An Affirmative Interpretation of Blindness

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The best possible interpretation of suffering from blindness is one in which both suffering and blindness are affirmed in a Nietzschean sense. In Chapter 2, I described what this kind of affirmation looks like. In summary, affirming one’s life includes affirming one’s suffering out of the recognition that suffering is required for personal flourishing. It is to highly value the expression and increase of one’s power against opposing forces that cause suffering. Happiness, as hedonistic pleasure, cannot be one’s primary goal because such a goal requires the devaluation of suffering. Thus, affirmation in the Nietzschean sense entails highly valuing non-hedonistic goals and ideals.

Some DS theorists have promoted what they call an affirmative model of disability. For example, Sally French and John Swain write that an affirmative model is “a non-tragic view of disability and impairment which encompasses positive social identities, both individual and collective, for disabled people grounded in the benefits of life style and life experience of being impaired and disabled” (569); however, the benefits of which they speak are entirely hedonistic, having to do with the “liberatory” potential of disabilities that result in a personal increase in happiness and pleasure. Disabled women, for example, are said to be liberated from the monotony and stagnation of marriage because they are considered to be unmarriageable—what looks like a harmful stereotype about these women actually turns out to be a source of greater happiness for them. Disabled people are also said to have more fulfilling sex lives because they have to be more inventive in their sexual practices. French and Swain identify other benefits that follow the same pattern of increased happiness or pleasure through liberation from stultifying social conventions. When reading their list of so-called benefits from disability, I am reminded of the fable of the fox who, upon realizing that he cannot reach a bunch of delicious grapes,

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consoles himself with the belief that the grapes are actually sour. Genuine affirmation of disability cannot be had under such conditions.

In Chapter 2, I summarized Susan Wendell’s affirmative approach to disability that emphasizes the generative power of disability to achieve a kind of transcendence over the body.

Her struggle against chronic pain allowed her to become a deeper person—more reflective, introspective, and empathetic. Of all the DS interpretations of suffering from disability, I think

Wendell’s perspective comes closest to a genuine Nietzschean perspective and affirmation of suffering; it accepts that some amount of suffering is necessary for achieving non-hedonistic goals, and it appreciates the increase in personal power that can result from struggling with a disability. In contrast to Wendell’s non-hedonistic idealism, Jim Ferris exemplifies the hedonistic-materialist perspective in his criticism of notions of transcending the body,:

I want the meat of the body, the blood and guts, the pleasure of eating and shitting

and fucking and fucking again, and if some pain is the price to pay for these, then

so be it. So be it. I would much rather feel the world, taste it and smell it and wear

it even as it wears me out—I'd much rather have my painful smelly dirty

ultimately uncontrollable body than transcend my corporeal being. I'd rather leave

transcending for after I am done with this body. To me, transcending is the line

we've all been fed all our lives—your reward will come in the next life, so shut up

and suffer, and by the way here's some discrimination thrown in. No thank you. [.

. .] I don't want to live in a Platonic heaven of ideas—let's eat. And fuck.

Transcendence through fucking. (249)

In a DS context, I can appreciate Ferris’s defiant affirmation of everything his body feels. Such sentiments cut against the grain in a field that is dominated by the social model of disability and

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the priority of critiquing ableism and disablement. However, Ferris’s is a thoroughly hedonistic perspective, and a vulgar one at that. He does not value suffering—he affirms it out of necessity because it is inextricably combined with the basest of human pleasures he can experience. There is no real or substantial power to be had in the gratification of the most basic of human drives; nor does valuing impairments for their own sake advance us toward the achievement of excellence through the expression of power. When Nietzsche writes of his own pain in his letters, he does not value it for its own sake; it is only valuable to him because it enables him to achieve a kind of spiritual transcendence, out of which he produces his great work. This is affirmation in the Nietzschean sense, and any DS models that claim to be “affirmative” on the basis of merely fetishizing the impaired body should find a more appropriate term.

To demonstrate what I have in mind when I refer to an affirmative interpretation of blindness, I turn to an analysis of Jacques Lusseyran’s memoir And There Was Light, in which he describes his experiences as the leader of a resistance cell in Nazi-occupied France and his fifteen-month detainment in a concentration camp. Lusseyran was born with myopic vision which had the effect of emphasizing colors and dazzling light. He delighted in observing his environment and using his crayons to capture the colored light he saw. When he was eight years old, a rambunctious classmate accidentally pushed him into his teacher’s desk. The arm of his glasses plunged into his right eye and ripped out the tissue. The violent impact also lacerated the retina of his left eye, and both eyes required surgical removal. Within a few months, he had adapted to total blindness, being able to play as he used to and beginning to learn braille.

Early in his blindness, Lusseyran felt despair at having lost his vision, but then what he calls an “instinct” caused a reorientation in his thinking. He writes, “I began to look more closely, not at things but at a world closer to myself, looking from an inner place to one further

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within, instead of clinging to the movement of sight toward the world outside” (11). When he did this, he discovered that he could still see the light: “I was aware of a radiance emanating from a place I knew nothing about, a place which might as well have been outside me as within. But radiance was there, or, to put it more precisely, light” (12). This discovery filled him with confidence, gratitude, and joy, and these affects became fundamental to his psychological state in all of his circumstances. At times throughout the memoir, Lusseyran refers to this light metaphorically as a source of insight or joy. But he is not only speaking metaphorically. He claims to have a phenomenological experience of light and color that is far more vibrant and intense than when he could see with his eyes, and the colors give him insight into the hidden motives of other people.

Lusseyran recognizes that not every blind person shares his experience of blindness because they are cut off from the light by well-intentioned but ignorant sighted people. One of his most painful memories is that of a fifteen-year-old boy who was also blinded by an accident.

This boy terrified me. He was the living image of everything that might have

happened to me if I had not been fortunate, more fortunate than he. For he was

really blind. He had seen nothing since his accident. His faculties were normal; he

could have seen as well as I. But they had kept him from doing so. To protect

him, as they put it, they had cut him off from everything, and made fun of all his

attempts to explain what he felt. In grief and revenge, he had thrown himself into

a brutal solitude. (24)

Lusseyran calls this situation a tragedy, and he believes that every blind person can have the same experience as him if they are uncorrupted by the ignorance of sighted people. His parents were not fearful of his blindness, and they did not stifle his curiosity about the world and his

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exploration of it by being too protective. He believes that blindness can be merely a “temporary impediment” (28) as long as there is support from one’s family and community in learning to properly adapt.

The Germans conquered and occupied France when Lusseyran was seventeen, and he and his friends began participating in the Resistance. They began by building a network of young people who would distribute pamphlets that informed the French citizens about the war and the misdeeds of the Vichy government. The network grew to over six hundred members with

Lusseyran as its leader. Prospective members were brought to him for interviews, and he employed conversational techniques to discern if they were sincere in their desire to join the

Resistance cell. His success in this endeavor led his comrades to believe that he had a special psychological power from his blindness. Lusseyran also believed in his special ability: “If I could plumb these hearts and consciences — and I felt sure I could — it was because I was blind and for no other reason” (158). He attributes this ability to growing up blind and needing to rely on non-visual indicators to understand the world around him. When he detected the sound of confidence and sincerity in the voices of his interlocutors, he had a feeling of reassurance and love. “Around me it drew a magic circle of protection, a sign that nothing bad could happen to me. The light which shone in my head was so bright and so strong that it was like joy distilled.

Somehow I became invulnerable” (158).

During the occupation, Lusseyran was preparing for admittance to the Ecole Normale

Supérieure. The Vichy government decreed that the blind, and the disabled generally, were barred from entrance into the elite graduate schools. Despite being a top performer in his cohort of students and the support of his teachers, Lusseyran was not permitted to advance. The discriminatory act was devastating to him because it would ensure his exclusion from the upper

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ranks of French society. Worst of all, “what the satrap at Vichy was placing in jeopardy was my victory over blindness, at least the part of it I had won in the world of the mind” (215). He notes the extreme contrast in his experience of blindness.

My blindness conquered or skillfully offset [. . .] had, in the last two years, won

me the admiration, and far more important than admiration, the confidence of

hundreds of men. It was my blindness which had turned me from the boy

surrounded by friends but centered on himself, which I was at sixteen, into a new

man linked on all sides with thousands of other lives, committed to the cause and

effectiveness of thousands of other people. It was the very same blindness which,

all of a sudden, had cut me off from society or, to put it in the most moderate

terms, classified me as unfit. (216)

Lusseyran’s interpretation here is somewhat inconsistent with his earlier claim that it is the corrupting influence of ignorant people which turns blindness into a tragic condition. In this passage, he seems to deviate from this judgment by making blindness the cause of his exclusion rather than the Vichy government. But I think he is simply attempting to emphasize the irony of his situation with a poetic framing. On the whole, he does not frame his disability as a problem to overcome, like Christopher Reeve. Instead, he is closer in spirit to Nietzsche’s perspective that a disability can be a stimulating force toward the expression of power. In Lusseyran’s case, he uses it to fuel his efforts to resist and defeat the Vichy government.

While life in the French Resistance was extremely difficult physically and psychologically, Lusseyran says that he never felt more alive: “[even] in the difficulties of living we found an exhilaration that gave us strength. Somehow difficulties only sharpened the edge and made us better able to cut through the barriers” (172). His mind was razor sharp, and all of

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his actions were accomplished with the utmost proficiency. The situation of being in constant danger allowed him to achieve an almost super-human state of awareness and concentration that exhilarated him. In Nietzschean terms, Lusseyran experienced a substantial increase in his power due to the obstacles with which he was confronted. Nietzsche writes that having “a thirst for enemies” is a key feature of the will to power because enemies are a primary form of resistance against which one can exercise one’s strength (GM I:13). In Twilight of the Idols, writing about conflict between parties, Nietzsche says that “it is in the interest of its own self-preservation that the opposing party should not decay in strength; [. . .] only in opposition does it feel itself necessary, only in opposition does it become necessary” (TI V:1). And of the individual combatant, Nietzsche writes that “one remains young only on condition the soul does not relax, does not long for peace. . . . [. . .] One has renounced grand life when one renounces war” (TI

V:1). This is a perfect encapsulation of Lusseyran’s description of his psychological state during his fight against the Vichy government, and he notes that all of his comrades experienced the same heightening of power.

Eventually, Lusseyran was betrayed by a member of his cell and was imprisoned for over a year. He was then taken from his prison cell and interned for fifteen months at Buchenwald. He was transported there with two thousand French citizens, of whom only thirty survived. It is at this point in the memoir that Lusseyran begins to frame his experiences in religious terms, claiming that God began to direct his life upon entering the camp. He was put in a block for the disabled who were given half of the normal daily food rations and expected to die off quickly.

After a month, he developed pleurisy, dysentery, erysipelas, and an infection of the ears that made him deaf for two weeks. Despite his prolonged near-death condition, Lusseyran was serene throughout his illness. He writes, “[sickness] had rescued me from fear, it had even rescued me

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from death. Let me say to you simply that without it I never would have survived. From the first moments of sickness I had gone off into another world, quite consciously” (260). Although his body was close to death, he felt a powerful surge of life during the ordeal and asserts that he “had never lived so fully before” (260).

When Lusseyran recovered and left the hospital, he had attained a kind of spiritual transcendence that sustained him throughout the remaining year in the camp. “I was so happy that now Buchenwald seemed to me a place which if not welcome was at least possible. If they didn’t give me any bread to eat, I would feed on hope” (261). He became a mystical figure in the camp, and he pursued a mission to teach others how to survive in Buchenwald by discovering light and joy within themselves. Formerly, people would steal his food, but this behavior stopped when he returned from near-death. Inmates from all nationalities began to confide in him. They spoke to him in languages he did not understand, but they spoke to him anyway, drawn by the belief that he was a mystical figure. According to Jernigan, the mystical blind man trope is a false and damaging idea, but Lusseyran’s story undermines this judgment. Lusseyran accomplished something great because of his blindness, not in spite of it. This is what the affirmation of blindness looks like, and we should likewise affirm his story and seek to draw on blindness as a resource for achieving our goals. If, in doing so, we end up interpreting ourselves according to one of Jernigan’s anathematized representational categories, so be it. And, if we gain power because the non-blind believe we have special insight or mystical capacities, we should not seek to diminish that power by subjecting such interpretations of blindness to critical deflation.

6. Conclusion

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If Nietzsche is correct that humanity has a psychological need for suffering to be meaningful, then a deflationary interpretation of blindness will not satisfy the theodicy-demand.

We can accept Jernigan’s perspective that the traditional belief about the relation between blindness and suffering is inaccurate and calls for critique, but we can also simultaneously reject the unwarranted conclusion that blindness should have no meaning beyond the basic fact of visual impairment. Jernigan’s mere assertion of a fact does not invalidate interpretations of it. I accept Nietzsche’s view that humans are naturally interpretive creatures. We inevitably seek to interpret our experience of facts, and we will not be content for long with uninterpreted facts that have some negative effect on our thoughts and feelings. If, as I have argued, there is an experience of impairment-derived psychological suffering for at least some blind people that is socially unconditioned, then we should conclude with Nietzsche that such people cannot live well with the meaninglessness of that suffering. Unless we want to become like his “last men,” seeking refuge in hedonism because we are paralyzed by the meaninglessness of our experience, we need to find in blindness something beyond the basic fact of its biological manifestation.

Does this mean that we must accept Hull’s highly meaningful, religious interpretation? A religious interpretation would be superior to a deflationary interpretation because it attempts to satisfy the theodicy-demand. Therefore, a person who suffers anything from blindness will do better with an interpretation that provides a meaning for that suffering than with one that offers no meaning. However, from a Nietzschean perspective, Hull’s religious interpretation must also fail because it relies on metaphysical premises that are no longer valid or psychologically compelling in our modern age. Perhaps the most well-known thing about Nietzsche is his proclamation of the “death” of God, and so I will not enter into extended discussion on that

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issue. The relevant aspect of this proclamation for my argument is that modern humans are

God’s “murderers” in the sense that, through our monomaniacal pursuit of truth, we have demolished the necessary metaphysical foundation upon which our belief in God depended. And so, any attempt to construct a coherent and psychologically compelling meaning out of the remnants of religious material will always contain the seed of its own deconstruction.

We can identify this seed in Hull’s own religious interpretation. I indicated above that

Hull does not believe that God made him blind, or that it was his fate to be blind. Instead, he thinks that his blindness is an accidental property, a natural and random occurrence of biological life. The religious meaning for blindness, then, resides entirely in analogy and Christian symbolism. Hull can only construct his meaning by applying a religious interpretation to blindness. This is very different from an interpretation that posits a metaphysical reason for blindness, or that says one is blind because God wills it to be so. From the perspective of most of

Christian history, Hull’s claim that his blindness is an accident of nature would be considered ignorant and impious. Prior to a widespread belief in the process of evolution and random biological mutation, blindness had metaphysical significance. The Disability Rights Movement looks back on this history in horror, but our aversion to this history does not change the fact that the former metaphysical and religious understandings of blindness provided a more compelling interpretation of it than anything that is on offer today.

It is in Lusseyran’s memoir that we find the most potential for an affirmation of blindness that gives us the meaning we need without relying on metaphysical premises. While Lusseyran is a Christian and believes that God directed his life at Buchenwald, he does not speculate about the religious significance of being blind. For him, it is simply a fact about his life, and he proceeds with little reflection on such matters. Instead, blindness is depicted as a special capacity that

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allows him to achieve great goals like leading a French resistance cell, surviving a Nazi concentration camp, and being a figure of hope for thousands of people. An affirmative interpretation of blindness requires that we value all aspects of blindness, including any suffering it might cause. Lusseyran has these experiences as well. He is discriminated against by the Vichy government; he is shunned by his fellow prison inmates; he is initially mistreated by having his food stolen in the concentration camp. But he approaches these negative experiences, along with all of the things he suffers, as forces of resistance to be overcome. And he does this not in spite of blindness, but because of blindness. As blind people, we should seek to emulate his life.

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Chapter VI. Ressentiment, Bad Conscience, and the Oppression Narrative

1. Introduction

Nietzsche says that the will to power thirsts for enemies, and in the previous chapter, I argued that Lusseyran experienced the height of his power when he had enemies to defeat. But we must not conclude that contending with enemies automatically leads to increased power and psychological health. How we contend with our enemies determines whether or not we are flourishing while we do so. For Nietzsche, this is a psychological issue at its core. He makes a crucial distinction between two psychological character types—active and reactive. The active person is relatively free, psychologically speaking, from the influence of enemies, whereas the reactive person’s psychological state is highly determined by his/her enemies. The reactive person is very concerned about what enemies think about him/her, and his/her actions and behaviors are dictated by those perceptions. The psychological state of the active person, on the other hand, is not dictated by an enemy, and thus he/she can freely respond in psychologically healthy ways.

Recognizing the distinction between active and reactive psychological types is vital for evaluating interpretations of socially-derived suffering from disability. The actions and behaviors that flowed from Lusseyran’s interpretation of what he suffered socially demonstrates that he is an active type of person. In contrast, the blind boy he describes as having been rendered “really

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blind” by the people around him is reactive. He throws himself into “a brutal solitude” out of

“grief and revenge.” This boy’s actions and behaviors are thoroughly dictated by what others have done to him, and the result is powerlessness and an unhealthy psychological state. In this chapter, I argue that the currently widespread interpretation of everything that is suffered in a social context as “oppression” feeds the reactive psychological type. All of us have the psychological potential to become like the reactive blind boy, and whether we end up like him has a lot to do with how we interpret what we suffer in social contexts.

We are not, however, completely free to pick and choose our interpretations. Nietzsche is highly critical of the supposed autonomous rational agent who deliberately exercises libertarian free will to make choices. Instead, humans are constrained by a host of non-rational psychological and affective forces, and it is from these forces that a person’s interpretation of the world originates. One such force is ressentiment—a largely unconscious reaction of hatred and desire for revenge directed at those who are viewed as having power. Thus, ressentiment is especially evident in oppressed people, or in people who believe that they are oppressed. In this chapter, I argue that interpretations of the social causes of disabled suffering that construct narratives of oppression are motivated and fueled by ressentiment. This does not mean that oppression is always a misinterpretation; it means that, even in situations of actual oppression, ressentiment is likely to exist within those who experience powerlessness. Since my overriding concern is advocating for interpretations of suffering that promote the kind of flourishing that can only come from a state of psychological health, I argue that blind people must reject the oppression narrative because it is motivated by, and also feeds, ressentiment. We may not be completely free to choose a better interpretation, but recognizing the psychologically unhealthy aspects of a given interpretation will at least aid in moving us away from it.

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Another psychological force that feeds on narratives of oppression is what Nietzsche calls

“bad conscience”—i.e., a psychological state of self-punishment that primarily manifests itself in the feeling of guilt. Nietzsche’s genealogy of bad conscience reveals that it is the result of the human drive for cruelty which has been directed inward. This internalization of cruelty is the result of the civilizing constraints that have been placed on external acts of cruelty. Throughout much of human history, cruel punishments were inflicted on people in order to recompense debts or to punish transgressions against a social code. And importantly, these acts of cruelty were not mere formalities; inflicting cruelty on others gives pleasure to those who inflict it. This is why the cruelty drive was internalized when its external expression was blocked by modern humanitarian and moral principles. The internalization of cruelty is an important aspect of the argument I am pressing against the value of the oppression narrative because it explains the narrative’s latest development—i.e., internalized oppression, more commonly referred to as internalized ableism. I conclude that, due to its dependence on these bad psychological states, blind people should reject the oppression narrative if we intend to flourish.

2. Ressentiment

Ressentiment is a complex, negative emotion or affect that bears some similarity to envy and resentment, but it is not reducible to either of these affects. According to R. Jay Wallace, “it is a kind of focused hatred that grows out of a situation of structural comparative deprivation, and its essential features are psychically primitive by comparison with both moralized resentment and common envy” (128). He goes on to argue that envy and resentment are part of the “surface phenomena of mental life” (128), whereas ressentiment is a more primitive and

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unconscious mental state. When we envy someone, we typically know it, and analyzing our envy is not very difficult. The same is true when we resent someone, an affect that is overtly moralized—i.e., we tend to resent people if we believe they have done something wrong to us.

But ressentiment operates mainly at an unconscious level and is not essentially a moral affect because it has more to do with reacting to structural deprivation and impotence than experiencing a moral violation. And, while it can be experienced by anyone to one degree or another, for

Nietzsche, ressentiment becomes significant when it is experienced by those who are powerless to rid themselves of the affect.

Nietzsche says that ressentiment has a physiological cause—the need to “anesthetize” suffering by means of an emotion. And, in order for the emotional anesthetic to be effective, it must be directed at a source of suffering, typically an external source that can bear responsibility for the fact that one suffers:

[. . .] every sufferer instinctively looks for a cause of his distress; more exactly,

for a culprit, even more precisely for a guilty culprit who is receptive to distress, –

in short, for a living being upon whom he can release his emotions, actually or in

effigy, on some pretext or other: because the release of emotions is the greatest

attempt at relief, or should I say, at anaesthetizing on the part of the sufferer, his

involuntarily longed-for narcotic against pain of any kind. In my judgment, we

find here the actual physiological causation of ressentiment, revenge and their ilk,

in a yearning, then, to anaesthetize pain through emotion [. . .]. (GM III:15)

Nietzsche is careful to distinguish between ressentiment in this sense and the more common defensive reaction to an immediate source of pain. For example, we might lash out, physically or verbally, against a person who is causing us pain or suffering, but this is only a self-protective

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impulse. Ressentiment is instead “the attempt [. . .] to anaesthetize a tormenting, secret pain that is becoming unbearable with a more violent emotion [. . .] and at least rid the consciousness of it for the moment” (GM III:15). The situation of suffering, then, is not immediately or explicitly resolved as it might be with the overtly defensive reaction. The situation continues unresolved and, hence, ressentiment lingers and grows, resembling a seething, unquenchable hatred that mostly exists below the level of conscious awareness.

In the first essay of On the Genealogy of Morality, Nietzsche tells a story about an historical event that demonstrates the existence of ressentiment and how it operates to transform societies. The event is the emergence of Judeo-Christian values via a “slave revolt” against

Greco-Roman aristocratic values. He states that “[the] beginning of the slaves’ revolt in morality occurs when ressentiment itself turns creative and gives birth to values” (GM I:10). A “slave morality” is essentially reactive, developing in opposition to an active, “noble” morality. For

Nietzsche, Judeo-Christian religion has its origin in this reactivity of ressentiment; it motivates the “revolt” against the Greco-Roman aristocracy and their values. The morality of the aristocrats was essentially affirmative because it was not constructed in opposition to an enemy or an

“other.” For them, happiness was to be found in action, and they considered themselves “good” on the basis of their high-born status, noble character, and capacity to engage in self-directed action. In contrast, the slave morality of the powerless and oppressed was essentially negative in that it originated as a negation of aristocratic values. For them, “[happiness] manifests itself as essentially a narcotic, an anaesthetic, rest, peace, ‘sabbath’, relaxation of the mind and stretching of the limbs, in short as something passive” (GM I:10).

All humans are susceptible to ressentiment, including those in the aristocratic class; but when it does occur in people of noble character, “it is consumed and exhausted in an immediate

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reaction, and therefore it does not poison” (GM I:10). For example, when harm is inflicted on the noble man, he is capable of exacting revenge on his enemies and, in doing so, his ressentiment is discharged in the reaction. Nietzsche says that “[a] man like this shakes from him, with one shrug, many worms that would have burrowed into another man” (GM I:10). There is also in such noble persons the capacity to avoid psychological fixation on misfortune or guilt; “[to] be unable to take his enemies, his misfortunes and even his misdeeds seriously for long – that is the sign of strong, rounded natures with a superabundance of a power which is flexible, formative, healing and can make one forget” (GM I:10). In short, the noble, powerful person is not consumed by reactive emotions, and his/her behaviors are not dictated by reactivity toward others.

The powerless and oppressed, on the other hand, do not have the opportunity or the capacity to discharge their ressentiment in an immediate reaction to what their oppressors force them to suffer. Ressentiment therefore festers, motivating reactive thoughts, emotions, and behaviors that must be expressed indirectly and with subtlety. This is the original “creativity” of ressentiment; it motivated a revaluation of aristocratic, Greco-Roman values, because this was the only way the powerless and oppressed could successfully react against the powerful.

Aristocratic values postulated the existence of good and bad people— “good” meaning high-born and possessing the noble characteristics of an aristocrat, and “bad” meaning low-born and possessing the characteristics of a commoner or slave. In reaction to this set of values, the powerless and oppressed postulated the existence of good and evil people— “evil” meaning whatever harmful action an oppressor does against the oppressed, and “good” meaning whatever is done out of weakness in reaction to evil. Nietzsche says that the slave “has conceived the ‘evil

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enemy’, ‘the evil one’ as a basic idea to which he now thinks up a copy and counterpart, the

‘good one’ – himself” (GM I:10).

There are some ambiguities in Nietzsche’s conception of ressentiment as the psychological motivation for the slaves’ revaluation of aristocratic values, and so commentators have differing perspectives on the matter. The standard interpretation views the ressentiment- fueled slave revolt as a strategic operation through which the powerless achieve their goal of diminishing the powerful and depriving them of their advantages. From this perspective, ressentiment and the revaluation of values it motivates appears to be a means of achieving an end. When reading the first essay of the Genealogy, it would seem as though this is Nietzsche’s perspective. His language suggests that ressentiment is used instrumentally through some sort of rational and deliberative process to bring about the downfall of an oppressor. But this interpretation does not cohere well with Nietzsche’s philosophical anthropology, which stresses unconscious mental processes, instinctual behavior, the primacy of affect and physiology in determining character, the psychological illusion of free will, etc. In the context of his overall philosophy, a strategic interpretation of ressentiment seems inadequate.

I follow Wallace’s rejection of the standard strategic interpretation. According to him, it is implausible to assume that these new values would be genuinely internalized by the oppressed if they were invented for an instrumental reason. And it is also implausible to assume that the oppressors would adopt such values simply because they are widely promoted by people they view as contemptible. In order for the revaluation of values to be successful, there must be a deeper psychological reason that can account for a genuine internalization of new values— something beneath the level of conscious deliberation and instrumental reasoning. Wallace argues for an expressive interpretation of ressentiment and the values it creates. According to this

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interpretation, ressentiment is “a general emotional orientation [. . . that] emerges under conditions in which people find themselves systematically deprived of things that they want very much to possess, without any prospects for improvement in this respect” (116). Therefore, the new values of the slave morality are primarily an expression of negative, reactive affects rather than the products of conscious, instrumental rationality.

Wallace points out that systematic deprivation is not sufficient for developing ressentiment because people can be deprived in situations that are not caused by, or implicate, a class of oppressors. For example, natural disasters might cause widespread deprivation and lead to feelings of anger, frustration, and depression, but this is not the hatred of ressentiment that can only be directed at other people.

For the latter emotions to emerge, there need to be some people who are singled

out from the rest in not being deprived of the coveted goods, and who are publicly

known not to be deprived. The context of ressentiment is one in which some

people have things that you very much desire, but that you lack and feel yourself

unable ever to obtain. Thus, Nietzsche’s slaves are systematically excluded from

enjoying many of the desirable things that the masters in their society have in

abundance, including status, material possessions, and above all political power

and influence. Ressentiment is fundamentally occasioned by invidious

comparisons of this kind. (116)

Comparing oneself to others in this way induces envy, and this affect is similar to and involved in ressentiment. But envy per se does not necessarily cause ressentiment because it is possible to envy what another person has without having feelings of hatred or malice toward that person. It might also be the case that envy is only a temporary feeling that dissipates when one comes to

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possess what one currently lacks. But when there is a structural reason that would prevent one from ever gaining what one envies, then ressentiment is likely to emerge. And at a certain point in the development of ressentiment, the emotional focus shifts from one’s own deprivation to hatred and loathing of those who enjoy the advantages of power and a privileged social position.

Max Scheler, one of the great explicators of ressentiment after Nietzsche, argues that “feelings of revenge are favored by strong pretensions which remain concealed, or by great pride coupled with an inadequate social position” (32); and, when people find themselves in such a position,

“this psychological dynamite will spread with the discrepancy between the political, constitutional, or traditional status of a group and its factual power” (32). Scheler therefore concludes that ressentiment is strongest and most likely to develop in a society like ours where the values of equality and democracy are legally, institutionally, culturally, and philosophically enshrined.

Bernard Reginster also argues that ressentiment is the result of the feeling of impotence which occurs when one is in the subordinate position in a relationship constituted by power;

“ressentiment is a response not to the loss of a good or to the violation of a right, but to a lack of power: it bears an essential connection to the “feeling of impotence” (“The Psychology of

Christian Morality” 708). But whereas Wallace focuses mainly on the amelioration of psychic discomfort that manifests from a conflict between the experience of deprivation and aristocratic cultural values, Reginster encourages us to additionally think of deprivation in terms of the inability to express one’s power. The man of ressentiment seeks to revalue aristocratic values

“not because he seeks to spare himself regret over the loss or lack of the goods they represent, but because he wants to feel “superior”: he seeks to restore his damaged “feeling of power”

(712).

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But what happens in situations where the oppressed cannot actually overthrow their oppressor or make structural changes to their position of powerlessness? Nietzsche says that, for those who are “denied the proper response of action,” they must “compensate for it only with imaginary revenge” (GM I:10). Wallace elaborates Nietzsche’s claim in the following way:

[. . .] thoughts and fantasies can provide psychic gratification for a person whose

options for action are in reality limited. Gratifications of this kind belong to the

archaic logic of unconscious processes, which operate in accordance with

assumptions about the “omnipotence of thought” that are characteristic of

infantile mental life. We all experience pleasures that reflect the continuing latent

operation of these patterns of thinking in adult life, as for instance when we

indulge in sadistic fantasizing about someone who has done us wrong, or

daydream about the victory of the political party that we have been working in

vain to support all these years. It would be no surprise if the unconscious

ressentiment of the masses provided a source for archaic satisfactions of this kind,

involving an imaginary revenge against the powerful who are the objects of this

focused negative affect. (125)

The quintessential example of imaginary revenge is that of the Christian Judgment Day when

God will punish the wicked and recalcitrant for their defiance of Christian values and beliefs.

Nietzsche includes in his first essay a lengthy quotation from Tertullian in which the theologian rhapsodizes about witnessing the future torment of pagans in the fires of Hell. His imagined revenge is laced with cruel delight and sadistic humor. In one place, he says that the tragic actors will be more easily heard because they will be “screaming even louder in their own tragedy” as they burn; and in another place, he quips that the actors of pantomime will be more easily seen

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because the fire will make them “nimble” (qtd. in GM I:15). Tertullian is powerless, as an individual person, to destroy the pagan culture he despises, and so he compensates for this inability by imagining its future destruction. I see a similar version of ressentiment-fueled imaginary compensation at work in some of the social critiques that come out of the blindness community, and I will elucidate the similarities in the proceeding sections.

3. Imaginary Compensation for Powerlessness

The concepts of ressentiment and imaginary compensation for powerlessness described in the preceding section are focused on a specific historical event—i.e., the Judeo-Christian revaluation of values in what Nietzsche refers to as the development of a slave morality. But ressentiment is a universal feature of human psychology, and so it remains operative in our behavior and influences our affective experience. We may no longer have the kind of master/slave society that was formative for the emergence of Judeo-Christian morality, but ressentiment will still occur in people who live in societies that are structured according to a differential power dynamic, even if the power dynamic is more a matter of perception than of reality. To demonstrate that this is the case, I will analyze a letter that was anonymously posted in a disability community Facebook group. For the sake of brevity, I reproduce it here in truncated form.

Dear Normalist Elitist: You’re reaching a point where your attitudes towards

those with disabilities shows just how much disregard you have for your ease in

the world. You’re so disconnected with the abilities of us who have suffered

injuries, illnesses and accidents that disable us in some way. You treat us as if we

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can’t accomplish normalcy in life and are unable to seek out and pursue happiness. You avoid us at all cost and tell your kids to ignore us or not to ask questions you find too difficult to answer or even contemplate. I witness your discomfort as your children ask why I have no eyes and what’s that stick in my hand for? You should let your children learn and let them ask me directly, I promise I will be truthful with your offspring and not scare them. Maybe you as an adult are unable to face the reflection that is your mortality of your own physical and mental being? For you sightist elitist that think people who are blind or have visual impairment can’t do anything without help from a sighted person you are wrong. [. . .] You let one disability erase our multitude of abilities, achievements and accolades and think that that’s ok. You make yourselves look foolish and we see you for what you are. You are discriminative judgmental people who face a life time of being labeled the problem by those of us who are fixing the future. We will be here for you when you get sick, or get a disability and need assistance you never thought you’d need. We’ll just smile at your pleas for help and take you into the fold and make sure you feel connected to the community. We’ll listen as you complain about how hard it is to be disabled and how your life has changed. We’ll listen and we’ll make sure you remember the normalist elitist who make it worse for everyone else. We’ll help you through it because we’ve been here for much longer then you and have been fighting for your rights to equality and fairness. [. . .] Help yourselves and the generations coming after you and start getting rid of this normalist elitist bias and attitude.

The world will harm you in the blink of an eye and you’ll want the support

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networks we’ve been building with our blood, lives and words. You will ask for

help and be depressed when your friends turn away from you. You’ll cry alone at

night as you can’t go out and be as active as you were. You’ll beg and plead for

doctors and insurances to give you tools for a successful life and you will rage at

them when they tell you no it’s not worth the expense. Just remember you did this

to yourselves and didn’t act when you had a chance.

The first thing to notice about this social media jeremiad is the identification of a differential power dynamic that exists between oppressor and oppressed. The “normalist elitists” are the new oppressor class, and disabled people are the contemporary iteration of the slaves who remain in a subordinated position. But whereas the former power dynamic was based on opposition between the value of aristocratic characteristics and the lack of such characteristics in the slaves, the new power dynamic is based on the value of physical and mental abilities and the differential capacity to perform activities and participate in social contexts. It is true that superior physical and mental abilities were an aspect of aristocratic values, hence the emphasis placed on the capacity to impose one’s will on enemies in war and politics. But in the very different context of modern liberal democracies, physical and mental abilities are measured according to the democratic value of normality, as opposed to rarified aristocratic superiority.

The next thing to notice is the quasi-eschatological vision of the future for the so-called normalist elitist. Like Tertullian, who looks forward to God’s day of judgment when pagan’s will be punished for the pleasures they enjoyed in life, the blind author forecasts an analogous judgment day—the day upon which the non-disabled elitist acquires a disability. They will ask for help and be rejected; they will be depressed, lonely, and crying; they will experience impotent rage when the medical establishment deems them to be unworthy of care. The blind

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author’s conception of “judgment day” pales in comparison with Tertullian’s version, but it is perhaps the direst future that can be imagined in a post-Christian, post-metaphysical world. To be excluded, to be discriminated against, to not have one’s suffering affirmed by others—this is what constitutes “Hell” in a secular, liberal-democratic society.

Imagining the future downfall of an oppressor—a downfall that the oppressed are powerless to bring about—is a hallmark of ressentiment. The impotence of the disabled is presupposed in the author’s letter. If the non-disabled elitist will someday be lonely, depressed, and filled with rage, it is because the disabled are currently experiencing these negative emotions due to their deprivation. The text oscillates between expression of this impotence and the claim that the disabled are the ones who are “fixing the future” with their “blood, lives and words.”

The non-disabled ignore the “multitude of abilities, achievements and accolades” of the disabled and “look foolish” in doing so. From this perspective, it would appear that the disabled are actually quite powerful in their capacity to change the world. But if this were true, the plea to the non-disabled elitists would be irrelevant. The fact that the blind author needs to call on the elitists to use their temporary position of power to change the situation of deprivation for the disabled demonstrates the actual powerlessness of the disabled. If they were actually powerful, they would not need to rely on their elitist oppressors to restructure society.

The most telling indication of the actual impotence of the disabled is the final line in which the blind author warns the elitist that, if they end up experiencing deprivation when they become disabled, it will be because they “didn’t act when [they] had a chance.” This is an admission that the non-disabled elitists have all the power to act—i.e., when they become disabled, they will have missed their opportunity to do something about their newly acquired position of deprivation. How, then, can the disabled restore their damaged feeling of power if

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they are impotent to make real structural changes? The answer is revealed in the blind author’s imagined “judgment day.” When the elitists are brought low by disability, the formerly spurned people with disabilities will accept the elitists into their support networks. They will patiently listen and smile knowingly when the former elitists complain about the disability experience. But the disabled will not pass up the opportunity to remind the newly disabled elitists that it is people like them who are responsible for their newfound impotence. Thus, in lieu of actual power to change their situation of deprivation, the disabled satisfy their ressentiment with this compensatory relationship of condescending pity for the former elitist oppressor. We must keep in mind, however, that this is only an imaginary scenario. What the blind author describes as condescending and pitying acceptance of former elitists—which is essentially the establishment of a new power dynamic among the oppressed—does not actually occur in real life. It is only the imagining of an alternative reality in which the powerless are able to express some form of power.

In a post-Christian, post-metaphysical world, a supernatural revenge is no longer a viable option. Consequently, ressentiment-fueled fantasies of revenge will necessarily fall far short of

Tertullian’s fearsome imaginary revenge. All that can be imagined now is the enjoyment of a little bit of condescending superiority and a “I-told-you-so” attitude when a former non-disabled elitist acquires a disability. This is exactly what we should expect in the era of Nietzsche’s “last men.” Everything about the “last men” is weak and mediocre; they can no longer aspire to anything great, not even in their imagination. Therefore, we should not be surprised to find that their imaginary revenge is also weak and mediocre, and we also should not take this as an indication that ressentiment is no longer a motivating force. Ressentiment is still operative in the

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“last men,” but, like everything else about them, its strength pales in comparison to the ressentiment of humans from former eras.

Commitment to hedonistic values is a central characteristic of the “last men,” and it motivates the drive to increase pleasure and reduce/abolish suffering. These values and goals are demonstrated in the first sentence of the blind author’s letter: the attitudes and behaviors of the normalist elitists “shows just how much disregard [they] have for [their] ease in the world.” This is somewhat of a counter-intuitive opening line because it is not focused on the disabled’s suffering, but it perfectly encapsulates the combination of contemporary ressentiment with a

“last man” perspective. The blind author doesn’t say that the elitists are undeserving of their

“ease in the world,” but rather that they take it for granted and do not appreciate it. Thus, the blind author tacitly accepts “ease in the world” as a valuable state of existence, and he/she resents the fact that the disabled do not possess it. This is why the blind author tries to persuade the elitists to make structural changes to society so that they won’t have to suffer as much when they become disabled; this will have the effect of reducing suffering and increasing pleasure for the disabled.

In Chapter 3, I claimed that oppression narratives of disability are based on hedonistic values, a claim that is supported by this text. The blind author’s main concern is for equalizing affective experiences between oppressor and oppressed. The oppressor has it “easy,” whereas the oppressed deal with loneliness, depression, and rage. What the blind author wants is what the oppressor already has—hence the development of ressentiment and imagined compensation for not possessing it, and for being impotent to attain it. The democratic values of equality and fairness, then, are expressions of the blind author’s ressentiment. This is how he/she will get the pleasure he/she desires—by imposing values on the oppressor that will supposedly dismantle the

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power dynamic that is responsible for his/her oppression. On the one hand, such a narrative provides meaning for the disabled experience; but on the other, it encourages the growth of ressentiment and reinforces a sense of powerlessness. Blind people cannot flourish if they hold this perspective.

4. Ressentiment and Imaginary Compensation in Georgina Kleege’s Blind Rage

My next text for analyzing ressentiment and imaginary compensation for powerlessness is Georgina Kleege’s Blind Rage: Letters to Helen Keller. The book is an interesting mix of personal memoir and fictional psycho-biography. Kleege writes a series of letters to Helen Keller in which she speculates about Keller’s hidden motives for, and psychological reactions to, the events of her life. The reason Kleege is able to speculate about such things is that Keller’s memoirs and autobiographies are supposedly crafted to present a highly controlled image of

Keller, an image that Kleege believes to be artificial. The correspondence is, of course, one-sided because Keller died in 1968, but for many blind people, Keller’s persona and example loom large. Kleege says in the preface that she “wrote this book to exorcize a personal demon named

Helen Keller. While most people revere Keller as a symbol of human fortitude in the face of adversity, to me she always represented an example I could not hope to emulate” (viii).

Eventually, Kleege comes to believe that the exemplary figure of Helen Keller is a myth: “you with your perpetually cheerful, never complaining, triumphing-over-adversity demeanor. Helen

Keller as the symbol of the buoyancy and fortitude of the human spirit. Helen Keller as the source of inspiration” (94). Thus, Blind Rage is a very personal book, and we can expect that it will tell us more about Kleege than about Keller.

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Kleege’s fictional psycho-biography attempts to deconstruct the Helen Keller myth, but this is not a disinterested, academic search for psychological motivations. The title Blind Rage is an unintentionally revealing description of a negative emotion that leads to the development of ressentiment. According to the expressive interpretation I detailed in the previous section, ressentiment is the product of bad feelings—such as rage, envy, resentment, and hatred— combined with an experience of powerlessness to discharge these negative effects in an immediate reaction. As a blind child, Kleege experienced just this kind of powerlessness when she was told to be grateful for her fortunate life because Keller was also grateful. Kleege says that she “resented her for this, and suspected that her life, especially versions that appeared in [. .

.] school books and in popular entertainments like The Miracle Worker, were too good to be true” (viii). In another place, Kleege writes,

[. . .] the most important thing you need to know about me, and the reason for my

letter, is that I grew up hating you. Sorry to be so blunt, especially on such short

acquaintance, but one of the advantages of writing to a dead person is there's no

need to stand on ceremony. And you should know the truth from the start. I hated

you because you were always held up to me as a role model, and one who set such

an impossibly high standard of cheerfulness in the face of adversity. ‘Why can't

you be more like Helen Keller?’ people always said to me. Or that's what it felt

like whenever your name came up. ‘Count your blessings,’ they told me. ‘Yes,

you're blind, but poor little Helen Keller was blind and deaf, and no one ever

heard her complain.’ (1)

Notice the misdirected, negative emotions toward Keller. Keller was not the person telling

Kleege to be grateful—it was the adults in her life who thought it best to respond to Kleege’s

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blindness in this manner. If her hatred had been appropriately directed, perhaps it could have been discharged in an immediate reaction against their patronizing standard. But instead, the hatred is directed toward a mythological figure against whom it is impossible for Kleege to immediately react—hence the experience of impotence under the weight of a cultural icon. The result is a build-up of hatred and resentment, which turns into rage, and, combined with the inability to discharge these emotions, ressentiment is likely to grow.

Kleege’s experience is not unique. She describes trying to get a committee for a disability studies reading curriculum to put Keller on the syllabus and getting resistance from committee members. She attributes this to the resentment that all blind children feel toward the figure of

Helen Keller when adults strategically use her image to compel what they deem to be the appropriate attitude about blindness. For those who are actively involved in the disability movement, there is also resentment due to the belief that Keller’s influence has harmed the movement because “[her] life story inscribes the idea that disability is a personal tragedy to be overcome through an individual's fortitude and pluck, rather than a set of cultural practices and assumptions, affecting many individuals that could be changed through collective action” (1).

Is this a justifiable reason to resent Keller? While it is certainly true that cultural practices and assumptions are constitutive elements of disability, the temptation is to exclusively conceptualize disability as an issue of disablement, as the social model does. This way of thinking has the benefit of giving meaning to the disability experience, but it comes at the cost of feeding ressentiment. Kleege’s starkly defined binary opposition between disability as personal tragedy and disability as social construct is part and parcel of the oppression narrative. The oppressors promote the idea that disability is a personal tragedy because doing so absolves them of having to make structural changes to the power dynamic. The oppressed respond that

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disability is a social construct, which entails that it is precisely those with power who are responsible for it. This interpretation has a degree of plausibility, but the question we must continuously ask is whether the interpretation is good for us. Does it allow us to flourish by enabling the expression of our will to power, or does it hinder that expression by forcing us into a position of impotent reactivity?

Kleege describes visiting Keller’s childhood home. In one of the rooms was a beautifully woven carpet, and the tour guide comments, with affected pathos, that it is too bad that Keller could not have seen it. Kleege understands that the guide is attempting to induce the same pathetic response in the tourists by foregrounding Keller’s blindness: “[we] were supposed to feel grateful and lucky, and intone a private prayer of gratitude: ‘I wake each day and thank the

Lord I was not born Helen Keller’.” (2). Kleege is not in the mood for this maladroit appeal to pity. She writes, “I turned my resentment on the woman pointing out the carpet that poor little you never saw. I said, ‘But she could touch it’.” (2). Predictably, the guide is confused and perturbed by this interruption of the scripted pathos. Reflecting on this incident, Kleege further explains what she had in mind when she responded to the guide in this way: “[one] of the pleasures of a nice carpet is texture. She could feel it. She could walk on it barefoot. She had an imagination. Someone could describe it to her, and she could imagine it” (2).

Nietzsche says that a person of ressentiment is one who is both reactive in their thoughts and emotions and unable to rid oneself of this reactivity. Kleege’s resentful response to the tour guide demonstrates that her psychological state is reactive. In situations like this, an active blind person is unaffected by the condescending pity in which non-blind people occasionally indulge.

The appropriate response should be nothing more than a wry smile and mild contempt for the devaluation of suffering that is presupposed in sentiments of pity. Kleege does the opposite; she

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allows the guide’s pity to bait her into responding out of resentment, which demonstrates that the guide has the power in this situation. Kleege’s ressentiment also manifests itself in her attempt to compensate for the lack of an ability by substituting other abilities. In the previous chapter, I argued that the inability to see aesthetically pleasing objects can be a cause of impairment- derived psychological suffering for many people. Kleege’s response to the guide evades this problem by offering compensatory alternatives to the ability to see the aesthetically pleasing object. In doing so, she devalues suffering by denying the premise that Keller might have experienced any sort of bad feeling from being unable to see the carpet.

In one of his essays, Jernigan addresses the problem of reactivity in some of his own experiences. When he was a young man, an elderly woman gave him a nickel at a bus stop because he was blind. This act injured his pride, and so he attempted to give the nickel back to the woman. When she would not take it from him, he threw it down the street. Reflecting on the incident decades later, he says “I did little to improve the image of blindness. Instead, I did the exact opposite. Any notions the group at the bus stop had about the helplessness and immaturity of the blind were magnified and reinforced” (Wall-to-Wall Thanksgiving 5). Several years later,

Jernigan was returning home after a long day at his training center, and another elderly man wanted to help him across the street. Jernigan sped up his walk so that the man couldn’t get hold of him, to which the man reacted with surprise and hurt feelings. When Jernigan got to the other side of the street, he asked himself, “‘Are you really so insecure about your blindness after a hard day you can't afford to be kind to somebody who was only trying to help you?’” (6). In another scene, Jernigan tried to tip a hotel bellman for carrying his bags, but the bellman refused to take a tip from a blind man because he was “a Christian.” At this point in Jernigan’s life, he had mastered his own reactive feelings when confronted by these pathetic behaviors. He comments,

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“I didn't feel so insecure or unsure of myself that I needed to prove either to him or me that I was equal” (6).

These stories show Jernigan’s development away from a reactive psychological state and toward an active mindset that allows him to shake off the “worms of ressentiment” before they can burrow into him. In contrast, Kleege’s reactive response to the tour guide reveals personal insecurity and injured pride. She did not want anyone to think that Keller—and, by extension, herself—was a person who needed pity. Jernigan understood that blind people could not flourish if they remained reactive and powerless when confronted by stereotypical thinking and condescending behavior. Lashing out, adopting a petulant attitude, indulging in imaginary compensation, hating an oppressor, blaming a vague and abstract system of oppression, viewing oneself as a victim, etc.—all of these perspectives and behaviors increase ressentiment and inadvertently expose one’s reactive impotence.

Kleege’s Blind Rage is the antithesis of the expression of active power. The premise of the book is an imaginary reconstruction of Keller’s life that fills in the psychological “gaps” so as to make her biography palatable to Kleege. Before leaving Keller’s childhood house, she buys a cast-iron replica of the famous water pump which represents the scene of Keller’s first word.

I pick it up and make a fist around it. The waterspout protrudes between my two

middle fingers. It's a weighty item. It would make a good weapon. I think I should

get the flat, circular base inscribed with something, a word or sign of some kind,

perhaps my initials, and use it to seal my letters. My letters to you, Helen.

Because I guess the point is that I feel a need to write to you about these things.

Now that I've scanned your writing, visited your childhood home, and more

importantly released some of my hostility toward you, I begin to sense that there's

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more to your story than the official version. So, if you don't mind, I'd like to

ponder one or two incidents from your life and find out where it takes me. (10)

This is a remarkably revealing passage about Kleege’s psychological motivation for writing the book. The image of the weaponized cast-iron pump as the implement with which to stamp her letters drives home the point that she is working through negative feelings. As the letters unfold, she becomes more sympathetic toward Keller and the feeling of hostility subsides, but this change is only effectuated by an imaginary reconstruction of Keller’s life. As she postulates hidden motivations for Keller, it becomes increasingly obvious that she is putting herself in

Keller’s place and imagining how she would have reacted.

To give just one example of this approach, Kleege reconstructs the accusation of plagiarism against Keller. When she was eleven years old, Keller wrote a short story as a gift for the director of the Perkins Institution for the Blind. The director published it in the alumni magazine, and people noticed that it closely resembled another published short story. There was a lot at stake for the school because Keller’s education and intellectual ability were a well-known success story, and it would have made the school look bad if it turned out that the story was plagiarized. Some believed that Keller’s communicative ability was a hoax perpetrated by her teacher, Anne Sullivan. A committee was convened to discover if Keller had thoughts of her own, or if she was merely reproducing, like a machine, whatever was fed to her; or, even worse, if Sullivan was the real source of Keller’s achievements. The committee concluded that the original story was read to Keller a few years prior when she was learning to finger spell. While she did not remember this reading, the general idea of the story unintentionally influenced her own story.

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While the incident concluded well in Keller’s favor, Kleege is incensed that her explanation was not immediately believed and that she was subjected to interrogation by committee. For her, the nature of the questions, regarding “tricky” issues about the boundaries between knowledge, memory, and imagination, were better suited for philosophers and neurologists instead of an eleven-year-old girl. But Keller’s own account of this incident in one of her autobiographies does not indicate that she was very disturbed by the questions, and all of the recorded accounts of the meeting portray her as completely calm and articulate. But Kleege is incredulous that Keller “just sat there and took it” (12), and I think this is because Kleege cannot imagine herself sitting there and taking it. She writes, “If ever there was an occasion to throw a fit, this was it. The sheer lunacy of the charge should have been enough to trigger a tantrum. [. .

.] You were within your rights to overturn furniture, kick a few shins, throw something through a window” (12).

Kleege’s incredulity leads her to write a lengthy alternative account of the “trial” in which Keller experiences psychological turmoil as she struggles to answer the unfair questions from a hostile, unjust committee. And even though Keller is exonerated and supported by notable public figures such as Alexander Graham Bell and Mark Twain, Kleege cannot permit Keller to move on from the accusation.

I know you never forgot the incident. I'd wager there was not a day in the seventy-

seven years of your life that followed when you did not think about it. It would

come back to you out of nowhere, unbidden. There you'd be, sitting at your desk

typing a letter to your editor or standing on a stage receiving a bouquet of flowers

from a little girl, and the next moment you'd feel yourself propelled backward

through time to your eleven-year-old self, standing in a cold classroom while the

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air around you prickled with hostility and doubt, and the being inside you writhed

at the injustice and humiliation. So what I want to know is how you got over it,

because I know you never really did. (13)

Kleege, of course, cannot know this to be a true description of Keller’s internal experience of the plagiarism incident. It is, instead, the projection of her own ressentiment into Keller’s mind.

Only a person of tremendous ressentiment could compulsively think about and relive the experience of “writhing” at injustice and humiliation every day for seven decades. Imagining that

Keller was such a person allows Kleege to identify with her and thereby validate her own negative feelings of humiliation and powerlessness. In summary, Blind Rage is a fascinating book, not because it tells us anything about Keller, but because it tells us a great deal about

Kleege and how ressentiment motivates imaginary compensation for powerlessness.

5. Internalized Ableism and Bad Conscience

The contemporary version of the oppression narrative that we find in the disability community, and in many DS writings, is not limited to the differential power dynamic that exists between the disabled and the non-disabled. It also encompasses internalized oppression, or what is more commonly referred to as internalized ableism. According to this idea, disabled people tacitly accept the oppressor’s values of ability and normality, and these values influence what disabled people think about themselves and others. If a blind person feels bad because he/she cannot play a particular sport, the reason is that he/she has internalized ableist values. According to these values, having the ability to play the sport is good. Not having the requisite abilities is abnormal, and abnormality is bad. So, feeling bad because one cannot play a sport is a

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manifestation of internalized ableism. Internalized ableism is also said to reproduce power dynamics and oppressive hierarchies between disabled people. For example, blind people who have cognitive or intellectual disabilities are often critical of blind Federationists who highly value self-sufficiency and professional success. They claim that these blind people are displaying their internalized ableism when they insist that all blind people should strive toward self- sufficiency and assimilation into non-disabled communities. (The examples I am using here come from in-person and online discussions within the blind community, which is why I have not cited academic sources.)

If the oppression narrative is a product of ressentiment, and if ressentiment is an emotion that is directed outward at whoever is perceived to be an oppressor, then what is the connection between ressentiment and the inward turn of oppression? Nietzsche has an answer for this as well. He characterizes ressentiment as “explosive material” that becomes dangerous if it accumulates beyond a manageable level, potentially leading to “the inner disintegration of the herd” (GM III:15). In his account of the Judeo-Christian slave revolt in morality, it is the priests who manage the ressentiment of the masses: “[the priest’s prime use, is to detonate this explosive material without blowing up either the herd or the shepherd; [. . .] the priest is the direction- changer of ressentiment” (GM III:15). The priest does this by giving the common people a new target for their ressentiment—themselves. The priest says, “‘‘Quite right, my sheep! Somebody must be to blame [for your suffering]: but you yourself are this somebody, you yourself alone are to blame for it, you your self alone are to blame for yourself’” (GM III:15).

To accomplish this redirection of ressentiment, the priests exploit another aspect of human psychology, what Nietzsche calls “bad conscience,” the subject of his second essay in On the Genealogy of Morality. In his summary of the essay in Ecce Homo, Nietzsche says that bad

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conscience is “the instinct of cruelty that turns back after it can no longer discharge itself externally” (EH, “Genealogy of Morals: A Polemic”). There are two elements to consider here.

First, cruelty for Nietzsche is a fundamental human drive, and he goes to great lengths in the essay to demonstrate that, before the drive turned inward and was thereby substantially hidden, human history was steeped in externalized acts of cruelty. This was especially obvious in the innumerable and ingenious forms of punishment that incorporated torture for the sake of recompensing a figurative (or literal) debt owed to an individual person or to society. We should not assume that, because of the triumph of humanitarian values, the drive for cruelty no longer exists. Our treatment of enemies and criminals may now appear to be humane, but our drive for cruelty has not disappeared.

The second element is the inward turn of the cruelty drive. Nietzsche writes, “All instincts that are not discharged outwardly turn inwards – this is what I call the internalization of man” (GM II:16). He characterizes bad conscience as a “serious illness” that manifested when human beings were forced into civilized societies, an event that inaugurated relatively peaceful communities with limits placed on external acts of cruelty:

Lacking external enemies and obstacles, and forced into the oppressive

narrowness and conformity of custom, man impatiently ripped himself apart,

persecuted himself, gnawed at himself, gave himself no peace and abused himself,

this animal who battered himself raw on the bars of his cage and who is supposed

to be ‘tamed’; man, full of emptiness and torn apart with homesickness for the

desert, has had to create from within himself an adventure, a torture -chamber, an

unsafe and hazardous wilderness – this fool, this prisoner consumed with longing

and despair, became the inventor of ‘bad conscience’. (GM II:16)

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The general concept of internalization should be familiar to us given the prominence of psychosocial theories regarding unconscious, self-reflexive, identity-based forms of prejudice— i.e., internalized racism, sexism, ableism, etc. Typically, such theories explain internalization as a social process whereby people passively adopt prejudicial attitudes and beliefs that originate in harmful identity-based representations and discourses (see, for example, the theories of Oliver,

Clare, and Jernigan described in previous chapters). In contrast, internalization for Nietzsche reverses the order of priority in this process. A universal human drive for cruelty is the original ground for internalization. Social structures are responsible for forcing the drive to turn inward, but social structures do not create the drive. Nietzsche’s primary example of bad conscience is that of Christian guilt, the negative psychological experience of tormenting oneself because one has transgressed against God; but bad conscience is broader than this specific example, encompassing all instances of the internalization of cruelty for any reason.

The persistence of the drive for cruelty, in both its external and internal manifestations, is partly explained by the pleasure which is derived from acts of cruelty. In his commentary on

Nietzsche’s second essay, Christopher Janaway argues that, “[because] of the instinctive drive of all living things to express power, human beings tend to gain pleasure from inflicting suffering”

(Beyond Selflessness 127). The expression of power can take many forms and does not necessarily involve inflicting suffering on others, but this is one way in which power is expressed. Nietzsche says, for example, that the former practice of a creditor cutting out a chunk of flesh from a debtor for an unpaid debt satisfies the creditor, not because there is anything of worth in the flesh itself, but because the act gives pleasure to the creditor. Our humanitarian values may now prevent us from gaining satisfaction in this particular way, but the drive for cruelty remains and seeks pleasure in new expressive forms of power. Janaway, following

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Nietzsche, concludes that “human beings subjected to the restrictions of civilized society, and so constrained to internalize their instincts, satisfy their instinctive drive by inflicting suffering on themselves” (127). And, as with external acts of cruelty, the internalization of cruelty also has an element of pleasure in it.

Internalized ableism is, in fact, a manifestation of internalized cruelty, but it takes some digging to expose this deep-seated motivation. According to the internalized-ableism theory, valuing abilities that one may or may not lack and/or desiring to have those abilities is a product of ideology. For example, If I value visual aesthetic experiences, even though I cannot have such experiences, my value is based on an ideology that has been imposed upon me by my ableist society. Or, if I value difficult physical achievements that require vision, I do so because valuing such achievements is ideologically prescribed. But the basic act of valuing visual aesthetic experiences and physical achievements is not actually a product of ideology; these acts of valuing are trans-cultural and based on natural, universal human dispositions. I am not saying, of course, that culturally-specific values are not ideologically determined. The high value that is placed on mathematical intelligence for the purpose of manipulating complex financial markets, for example, is surely a product of ideology that is limited to a particular kind of culture. But theories of internalized ableism do not make such distinctions; they are based on the premise that valuing abilities is ideological all the way down.

So, if internalized ableism does not actually give us a coherent account of our values, why is it such a popular perspective within the disability community? I think there is more going on here than just a mistaken idea about a pervasive ideological preference for abilities.

Internalized ableism is a popular interpretation because it gratifies the inwardly-directed cruelty drive. If Nietzsche is correct, humans living in highly civilized societies will find reasons to

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abuse themselves in order to satisfy their need for cruelty. This might seem like a morbid view, but we should remember that inflicting cruelty—on others or on ourselves—is pleasurable. This is an aspect of the internalized ableism perspective that can only be observed in person. I have been a part of many meetings and conversations over the years in which members of a disability community confess their internalized ableism and painstakingly scrutinize the minutest of thoughts and feelings to root it out. Sometimes people seem to be quite disturbed by their supposed ableism, and yet it is always the case that the confessants appear to be simultaneously deriving some pleasure from the experience.

One of the earliest definitions of internalized oppression comes from the work of

Micheline Mason, which is highlighted in a chapter called “Internalised Ableism: The Tyranny

Within” in Fiona Kumari Campbell’s Contours of Ableism. Mason writes the following:

Internalized oppression is not the cause of our mistreatment; it is the result of our

mistreatment. It would not exist without the real external oppression that forms

the social climate in which we exist. Once oppression has been internalized, little

force is needed to keep us submissive. We harbour inside ourselves the pain and

the memories, the fears and the confusions, the negative self-images and the low

expectations, turning them into weapons with which to re-injure ourselves, every

day of our lives. (qtd. in Contours of Ableism 27)

Here we have the typical view that internalization is a process of passively adopting negative social beliefs and attitudes about disability. And once internalization has occurred, the individual disabled person becomes his/her own tormentor. Mason has the right description of the experience of internalized oppression, but she has the wrong explanation for it. We turn these weapons on ourselves not because we are automatons who have passively accepted whatever our

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society says about us, but because we have a drive for cruelty that has already been internalized.

Fear, confusion, bad memories, negative self-image, low expectations—all of this is merely contingent material for the cruelty drive. If we were not disabled, the drive would find other weapons for self-injury.

Campbell’s use of the term “internalized ableism” instead of oppression is significant because it moves us closer to the kind of bad conscience Nietzsche has identified. Oppression is mainly a description of a social context, which means that we can blame whatever bad feelings we have on external factors. This is what Campbell calls “disablement,” the social process by which people with impairments are disabled by physical environments and social contexts.

Ableism, on the other hand, is an all-pervasive ideology that promotes the values of able- bodiedness. Disablement, or oppression, maintains a distinction between oppressor and oppressed, but ableism blurs the distinction: “[from] the moment a child is born, he/she emerges into a world where he/she receives messages that to be disabled is to be less than [. . .]. We are all, regardless of our status, shaped and formed by the politics of ableism” (Contours of Ableism

17). Naturally, then, Campbell is suspicious of the “‘can do' generation of successful, assimilated professionals with disability” (20) for whom it would appear that internalized ableism is not a problem. She believes that even these people have “hidden stories” that have not been exposed due to lack of psychological research. For her, no one can be allowed to escape the ubiquitous experience of ableism.

It is not an accident that internalized ableism has become a central focus of the oppression narrative. In the post-civil rights era, the notion that disabled people are an oppressed minority is a less persuasive interpretation of disabled life than it used to be. Lacking the obvious markers of discrimination in law, bureaucratic obstacles, and blatant exclusion within local

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communities, social oppression is now mainly conceptualized as something “systemic”—which means, almost by definition, that it is hard to identify. In the 1950s, Jernigan could easily identify the rehabilitation agencies as oppressors of the blind. This is not so easily done in the 2020s.

Consequently, the oppression narrative must be reinvented in order to stay relevant under new social conditions, and internalized oppression/ableism is the ingenious answer; i.e., if we struggle to unambiguously identify an oppressor who is responsible for our suffering, we can always look within to find an unambiguous source of oppression within ourselves. But while internalized ableism shores up the oppression narrative for the sake of maintaining a theodicy for suffering, it does so by exploiting a psychological state that inhibits psychological health. This is just one more reason why we must not adopt the oppression narrative to satisfy our need for meaningful suffering.

6. Conclusion

In this chapter, I have argued that ressentiment is a motivating force in interpretations of blindness and suffering when suffering is attributed primarily to oppression. While I have questioned contemporary narratives of oppression on factual grounds, I am not arguing that bad social relations or power dynamics that are based on differences in ability do not exist.

Obviously, blind people, and disabled people in general, sometimes experience bad social relations and negative power dynamics, with varying degrees of frequency and intensity depending on one’s social position. The issue is not whether such experiences, or the conditions for such experiences, exist; the issue is how these facts are organized into a coherent narrative to give meaning to our lives. As blind people, we must ask ourselves, will turning our lives into a

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narrative of oppression help or hinder us? How likely are we to achieve personal excellence if we believe that an oppressor is robbing us of our autonomy and agency? If, as I have been arguing, ressentiment is the cause of interpreting ourselves as powerless against an oppressor, or system of oppression, then flourishing is impossible with such an interpretation.

Flourishing is also impossible if we allow our drive for cruelty to be fueled by a bad conscience about internalized ableism. The concept of internalized ableism is one of a number of ways that the oppression narrative maintains its hold on us, and it also has no possibility of resolution if resolution entails transcending the preference for abilities. As daunting as the

Christian interpretation of guilt toward God may be, it at least provides resolution for guilt through a divine sacrifice—i.e., God, as our creditor, absolving an eternal debt that we could never pay. But there is no such possibility for redemption within a post-Christian worldview.

Thus, Nietzsche concludes that

now the prospect for a once-and-for-all payment is to be foreclosed, out of

pessimism, now our glance is to bounce and recoil disconsolately off an iron

impossibility, now those concepts ‘guilt’ and ‘duty’ are to be reversed – but

against whom? It is indisputable: firstly against the ‘debtor’, in whom bad

conscience now so firmly establishes itself, eating into him, broadening out and

growing, like a polyp, so wide and deep that in the end, with the impossibility of

paying back the debt, is conceived the impossibility of discharging the penance [.

. .]. (GM II:21)

This is why we must reject not only the oppression narrative, but also internalized ableism as an interpretation of our thoughts, desires, and values. There is no affirmation to be had in this

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perspective—only pessimism, impotence, communal disintegration, internalized cruelty, and the

“worms” of ressentiment.

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Chapter VII. The Affirmation of Blindness in Literature

1. Introduction

According to Kenneth Jernigan, the entire history of the literary representation of blindness is based on lies. We saw in Chapter 5 that he rejects interpretations of blindness that make it out to be anything more than an ordinary biological fact and a mundane experience. His motivation to dismantle erroneous interpretations is more than a commitment to realism about blindness; he believes that literary representations have done great harm to blind people by perpetuating stereotypes that isolate and alienate us from our communities. Therefore, accepting a deflationary perspective on literary representations of blindness is an ethical imperative. As the title of his 1974 convention speech suggests, literature has been “against us” historically, and the way to fight back is by eviscerating every last interpretation of blindness. The only good literary representations, according to him, are strictly realistic, containing not the slightest gesture toward meaning or symbolism. He looks forward to the beginning of a new canon of literature that gets the representation of blindness right and, as for everything that has come before, we are left to conclude that it should be discarded.

Jernigan’s rejection of literary representation is not entirely idiosyncratic. His perspective is certainly on the radical edge of the evaluative spectrum, but critical approaches to portrayals of disability in literature are the norm in DS—i.e., analyzing literary representations of disability

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with the primary aim of exposing what is “problematic” about the representation. David Bolt’s concept of the metanarrative of blindness is one recent example of this standard approach. For him, the metanarrative is “the story in relation to which those of us who have visual impairments often find ourselves defined, an overriding narrative that seems to displace agency” (10). The metanarrative is reciprocally constructed out of cultural representations of blind people and the attitudes and beliefs that are widely held in predominately non-blind societies. For example, pedestrians will sometimes offer money to a blind person on the street because they assume she is accepting donations. This assumption is the consequence of the historical portrayal of blind people in the cultural arts as impoverished beggars. Even though there is no indication that the person is destitute or accepting money, the do-gooders are operating according to a metanarrative of blindness that overrides empirical evidence. The blind person’s agency is “displaced” because she has been interpreted according to the metanarrative regardless of her consent or the facts of her situation.

Bolt argues that the metanarrative is a product of our “ocularcentric” culture—i.e., privileging sight above the other senses and interpreting/evaluating everything through sight. The effect of this is what he calls “ocularnormativism”—"the perpetuation of the conclusion that the supreme means of perception is necessarily visual” (14). Because the metanarrative is all- pervasive, Bolt advocates for a critical approach to literary representations of blindness in order to identify ocularnormative premises. He comments that his students have asked him if they should avoid reading particular works of literature that contain pejorative depictions of blindness. In his opinion, this would not be a sensible thing to do because “the real problem is not with the primary works that we read. The metanarrative of blindness is tangible in society, so authors are bound to reflect and construct accordingly, be it on a critical, basic, or regressive

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level” (131). Instead, he encourages the approach of reading critically through a DS perspective, a “deconstructive” process that “involves a subversion of ableist, ocularcentric, and ophthalmocentric binaries, the effect being a dismantling of the metanarrative of blindness”

(131). The aim, then, is what he calls a “disruption” of any and all depictions of blindness that seem to perpetuate the ocularnormative metanarrative.

Bolt’s approach to literary analysis fits within the interpretive methodology that David

Mitchell and Sharon Snyder proposed twenty years ago in their book Narrative Prosthesis. They argued that “disability's representational fate is not so much dependent upon a tradition of negative portrayals as it is tethered to inciting the act of meaning-making itself” (6). In response to commentators like Jernigan, whose literary criticism was limited to merely pointing out stereotypes, Mitchell and Snyder promoted an interpretive method that would uncover the ways in which disability has been used for social, cultural, and ideological critique. They argue that, throughout the entire history of literature, authors have used disabled characters to add a

“disruptive punch” to their narratives. “Narrative prosthesis” is the term they give to this use of disability as a literary device: “disability has been used throughout history as a crutch upon which literary narratives lean for their representational power, disruptive potentiality, and analytical insight. [. . .] [Disability]characterization can be understood as a prosthetic contrivance upon which so many of our cultural and literary narratives rely” (49-51). This does not mean that depictions of disability in literature are not stereotypical or harmful, and Mitchell and Snyder still criticize representations on this level; however, they want to expand DS’s interpretive scope so that disability is properly seen as a linchpin for literature, not merely incidental to it.

I agree in spirit with the project of foregrounding disability as an essential aspect of literary representation, but I want to take a radically different approach to disability’s meaning.

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Representations of disability in literature are not exempt from the Nietzschean perspective on suffering I have been arguing for throughout this dissertation. From this perspective, the fundamental question to ask about disability in literature is not “What does this representation say about the culture in which it was produced?” but, rather, “What does this representation say about the capacity of disabled people to flourish under conditions that cause suffering?” Critical approaches to literary representation of disability seek to uncover cultural and ideological underpinnings for beliefs about disability that manifest in literature during various historical eras.

I think this is a worthwhile approach as an historical exercise, but it does not have much relevance to my concern for individual flourishing here and now. In fact, it is more likely to inhibit the capacity to flourish by supporting the oppression narrative and stoking ressentiment.

This must surely be the case if we adopt the Jernigan perspective that the history of literature is

“against us.” The current DS perspective is more sophisticated in its moderation and nuance, but it still directs our focus in the wrong direction by emphasizing cultural and ideological critique to achieve the discipline’s emancipatory goals.

Instead of the critical approach to literary representations of disability indicated above, I argue for an affirmative approach that is rooted in the Nietzschean affirmation of suffering as stimulus for will to power. Such an approach deliberately eschews critical interpretations that seek to deconstruct literary representations by uncovering hidden cultural and ideological reasons for them. A critical interpretation of blindness in Oedipus at Colonus, for example, will contextualize it as a product of an ocularcentric culture. It approaches the text with the presupposition that there is something “problematic” about the representation of blindness, and it seeks to undermine the text by exposing its cultural or ideological function—e.g., Bolt’s interpretive method of uncovering how literary texts manifest a metanarrative of blindness. An

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affirmative interpretation, in contrast, takes the representation of blindness in Oedipus at

Colonus at face value; it is a form of surface reading that operates on the presupposition that what is most meaningful about a literary text is what it plainly says, not what it conceals. How does Oedipus, as a blind man, experience his blindness? How is the suffering he experiences from blindness made meaningful? Is blindness a stimulus for his will to power? Is he flourishing in the Nietzschean sense? What value does this representation have for a blind reader? These questions also presuppose that the text’s original cultural context is not as important as what readers in the present can take from the text and apply to their own lives, and this will be my approach to the textual analysis.

Insofar as my interpretive method is a form of surface reading, it has more in common with Jernigan’s perspective than Mitchell’s and Snyder’s. However, my motivation for interpreting blindness in literature is the opposite of his motivation. Jernigan seeks to negate representations of blindness in literature whereas I seek to affirm them. This does not mean that our evaluations of particular literary texts never coincide. In fact, I agree with his negative evaluation of the majority of representations of blindness; much of this literature consists of dime store novels or conventional bourgeois fiction, and we should not be surprised to find negative portrayals of blind people in such stories because their commercial success depends on melodrama and cheap sentimentality (for examples, see his long list of literary texts in “Is

Literature Against Us?”). But Jernigan’s mistake is in failing to distinguish between parochial, conventional literary texts, of which there are many, and the rarer examples of texts that have transcended their time and place. He sees, for example, no difference between Sophocles’

Oedipus at Colonus or Milton’s Samson Agonistes and Kipling’s The Light That Failed or

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Richardson’s The Blind Child. He thinks that all are tainted by stereotypes and misinterpretations of blindness and must be rejected in total.

I argue for a more nuanced treatment of the history of literature that makes distinctions between transcendent and parochial texts. By “transcendent,” I do not mean that there is some sort of metaphysical difference between texts. I do not even mean that transcendent literature sprung into being as soon as the author put pen to paper, as traditional humanists seem to believe. I am prepared to accept the view that all literature is necessarily parochial and conventional when it is initially written and received, bound by the culture and historical moment in which it is produced. However, for whatever reason, a small subset of literary texts manage to transcend their parochial origins and are read continuously throughout history by people of different cultures. Why this has happened is not pertinent to the distinction I am making. All that matters is that this literary category exists, and I use the term “transcendent” merely to indicate that these texts are trans-culturally and trans-historically meaningful.

My claim is that there are transcendent literary narratives that depict blindness affirmatively—i.e., the narratives fulfill the criteria for a Nietzschean perspective on the value of suffering from blindness. I do not have a theory for why this is the case, but I hypothesize that at least one reason is the capacity of transcendent works of literature to elucidate features of a universally shared human condition in a way that parochial literature typically fails to do. (This is, admittedly, a view that is out of fashion in contemporary literary studies, but I think it is true all the same, and it will come back into fashion in the future.) Mitchell and Snyder are, of course, critical of this universalistic perspective. They comment that, in the past, “proponents of the universality in art sought to salvage disabled literary characterizations as evidence for inherent frailties in “the human condition" (16); but, in doing so, the culturally and ideologically

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constructed connection between disability and frailty remained uninterrogated and unchallenged.

Like them, I also want to criticize the universalist, humanistic, pre-DS interpretations of disability in literature, but for a very different reason. The problem with the traditional humanistic accounts of disability is that they are fixated on human weakness rather than human strength.

There is no Nietzschean affirmation of blindness to be had in the traditional humanistic interpretation of Oedipus as an exemplar of the frailty of humanity, nor is such an interpretation an adequate account of the textual evidence. I argue the same for interpretations of Samson

Agonistes that interpret Samson as a tragic victim of his blindness, as Jernigan does when he claims that the blind John Milton betrayed all blind people with his spurious representation.

Against these misreadings, I will argue that both Oedipus and Samson demonstrate a

Nietzschean affirmation of blindness in that they are actually more powerful than the other sighted characters. Despite the sighted characters’ misperception that these men are pitiable victims of blindness, Oedipus and Samson demonstrate their power by achieving their goals through overcoming resistance to their wills. They do not overcome blindness, nor do they overcome in spite of blindness. Instead, blindness, along with any suffering that is associated with it, contributes to resistance in valuable and desirable ways, which is essential for an affirmative interpretation of blindness and suffering.

One final reason for why I depart from current DS critiques of disability representation in literature is that they rely, at least in part, on the premise that representations from the past should be evaluated by the moral standards of the present. This is obvious in Jernigan’s case, but perhaps not so obvious with someone like Bolt. Elucidating a metanarrative of blindness, which entails exposing ocularcentric thinking and ocularnormative practices in a given culture, is on

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one level a descriptive approach. But these concepts also have moral implications, and it is clear when reading Bolt’s book that he thinks the metanarrative is bad because it causes blind people to suffer when their agency is compromised by it. While I see value in these concepts in the descriptive mode, it is very difficult to use these concepts without inevitably moralizing about the past. This is a problem because the oppression narrative relies heavily on an overly- moralized interpretation of the social world, and we are more likely to believe that we are oppressed if we insist on interpreting the historical experience of blind people as being primarily a matter of oppression.

In objecting to this kind of moral critique, I am not claiming that there is something irrational or theoretically incoherent in moralizing about the past. If people want to evaluate past representations of blindness according to present moral standards for the sake of improving conditions for blind people in the present, they can rationally do so. My Nietzschean objection to moralizing about the past is that it is a characteristic of a reactive person. It is Nietzsche’s contention that our modern morality has its roots in a revolt of an oppressed people against their oppressors, and the impulse to moralize is a cover for ideological combat. The DS moral critique of blindness representations from the past presupposes a universal moral standard regarding how blindness should be represented, a standard that apparently has been discovered only recently, and according to which almost all representations from the past fail to meet. But this new moral standard devalues representations from the past by necessity, and from this perspective it is difficult to see how any past representation can contribute positively to an affirmation of blindness. Choosing to interpret blind characters like Oedipus and Samson as powerless victims of an oppressive, ocularcentric culture will only reinforce the belief that blind people have always been powerless, and remain so to this day.

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2. Blindness and Power in Sophocles’ Oedipus Cycle

In Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus, the former king of Thebes is a wandering beggar. He is now a weak, elderly man, cared for and led around the countryside by his daughter, Antigone.

He is also blind, a disability he inflicted on himself upon realizing that he had murdered his father and married his mother. A prophecy has foretold that the land in which he is buried will be blessed, and the drama revolves around the matter of his final resting place. His sons, Eteocles and Polynices, are vying for control of Thebes. Eteocles has usurped the kingship of his elder brother, and Polynices comes to Colonus, an Athenian village, to persuade his father to ally with him and his supporters in Argos. Oedipus’ brother-in-law, Creon, also comes to Colonus as a representative of Thebes to ensure that Oedipus is buried on Theban land for the purpose of repelling Polynices and the Argives. Oedipus resists and curses both men because they cast him out of Thebes when they believed he was of no value to them. Creon kidnaps Antigone and

Oedipus’ other daughter, Ismene, and attempts to take Oedipus by force. Theseus, king of

Athens, intervenes to save Oedipus and his daughters, and Oedipus repays this act of kindness by making Colonus the site of his death and burial.

Interpreting this narrative affirmatively may seem like an impossible task because there are several evaluations of blindness that appear to disparage the condition. Many of these evaluations come from the Chorus or Athenian citizens. When they first encounter Oedipus, they say,

Oh dreadful—

dreadful to see him, dreadful to hear— [. . .]

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Oh blind, blind, poor man ... no eyes, no sight—

tell me, were you blind from birth?

Your life a life of pain [. . .] (273).

Oedipus is standing in the grove of the Furies, a sacred and forbidden place, and so the Chorus implores him to come toward them and away from the grove. They ask Antigone to lead him because she can see the way, and she says to Oedipus, “Come, father, follow me / with your frail, blind steps, follow me, father, / I will lead you on” (276). He follows her lead with difficulty because he is old and blind, groping his way toward the Chorus. These are some examples that, from a DS perspective, are “problematic” because Oedipus seems like a pathetic, helpless man specifically because he is blind. And Jernigan would certainly object to such a characterization of suffering and helplessness because it perpetuates negative stereotypes that are, in his opinion, false.

The narrative certainly begins by intentionally foregrounding Oedipus’ blindness, using it thematically to heighten a feeling of pity for a man whose impairment has made his life difficult and caused him suffering. This representation, however, is ironic, and concluding that Oedipus is simply portrayed as pathetic and helpless because he is blind is a misreading of the narrative.

The more accurate interpretation is that Oedipus is the most powerful character in the drama, and the contrast between the appearance of his weakness and the actual fact of his power is one of the play’s finest narrative aspects. The irony of his condition is highlighted when he asks a citizen of

Athens to bring Theseus to him so that he can divulge the blessing he will bring to the land by dying there. The citizen is doubtful that Oedipus could have anything of value to offer: “And what’s there to gain from a man who cannot see?” (269). Oedipus responds ironically:

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“Whatever I say, there will be great vision in every word I say” (269). He is well aware that the

Athenian citizens perceive him as a powerless blind man, and so he implores them,

Don’t reject me as you look into the horror

of my face, these sockets raked and blind.

I come as someone sacred, someone filled

with piety and power, bearing a great gift

for all your people [. . .] (285).

Our impulse may be to recoil at Oedipus’ description of the horror of his mutilated eyes because it seems to support the idea that blindness is suffering. On instinct, we may want to negate this representation with critique, focusing attention on ideological and cultural reasons for a sensationalized misrepresentation of ordinary blindness. But, as I have been arguing throughout this dissertation, we should scrutinize the impulse to critique and negate such representations by asking ourselves a perennial question—what is motivating our disavowal of suffering from blindness? Anyone who rejects the representation of blind Oedipus because it erroneously connects blindness with suffering—as Jernigan does—has not yet thought seriously about the problem of suffering. We cannot address the interesting and vital issues that are inherent in the experience of suffering from blindness if we continue to insist that blindness has nothing to do with suffering. Acknowledging the reality of suffering does not diminish us or make us weak; we are diminished and weak when we are unable to handle the reality of suffering, trying to fool ourselves and others into believing that suffering is a pseudo-problem. Oedipus displays his wisdom about the problem when he says, “Acceptance—that is the great lesson suffering teaches, / suffering and the long years, my close companions” (261), and we should not peremptorily dismiss this perspective.

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There is also the political motivation to negate representations of suffering from blindness, a motivation that is at the core of DS. Representations of suffering are not necessarily rejected for being erroneous but for being politically disadvantageous. As Siebers has argued, there is a false belief in mainstream political culture that the political agency of disabled people is undermined by narcissistic fixation on personal suffering (see the second chapter of Disability

Theory). Therefore, to advance politically, it is necessary for disabled people to reject anything that seems to support the belief that suffering from disability reduces one’s agency. And, because

Oedipus’ agency appears to be reduced when he is depicted as limited by suffering and disability, this literary representation must also be negated in some manner. The DS political approach to the problem of suffering is more sophisticated than Jernigan’s simple denial of the connection between suffering and blindness, but it is also more evasive. As I explained in

Chapter 2, there has been for a long time an intellectual current within DS that seeks to incorporate experiences of suffering into disability discourse and theory. So far, this current has not been reconciled with the counter-current that wants to screen out issues of suffering for fear that it will derail the DS political project.

I disagree with Siebers’ assertion that narcissism cannot be a consequence of suffering from a disability. One needs only to spend a brief amount of time in particular disability communities (especially online communities) to encounter people who are disproportionately focused on their impairment-derived suffering. And, as for socially-derived suffering, narcissism can certainly be a constitutive aspect of interpreting oneself within an oppression narrative because of the ressentiment and bad conscience that such an interpretation entails. But narcissism, ressentiment, and bad conscience are not psychological problems for disabled people alone; these bad affects can be experienced by anyone who interprets oneself as a victim of

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circumstances that are beyond one’s control. Siebers is right to criticize the way in which disabled people have been singled out historically for these bad affects, but the answer is not to deny the problem. The better approach is to acknowledge the problem and find an interpretation, such as the Nietzschean interpretation, to begin freeing oneself from bad psychological states and affects.

Toward this end, the representation of blindness in Sophocles’ Oedipus cycle is valuable because it affirms the Nietzschean perspective on suffering and power. The Athenian citizens may initially believe that Oedipus is a powerless blind man, but he demonstrates throughout the narrative that he is the most powerful person among them. With his curses, he has the power to affect the fates of his enemies. When Creon attempts to force him back to Thebes by kidnapping

Antigone, Oedipus curses him with the following words:

You, you swine—with my eyes gone, you ripped away

the helpless darling of my eyes, my light in darkness!

So may the great god of the sun, the eye of the day

that sees all things, grant you and all your race

a life like mine—blind old age at last! (342)

Here, again, Oedipus does not shy away from the truth that there is something to be suffered from blindness, and so he thinks it is a fitting punishment for those who disregarded him because he is blind. But even in his act of cursing, he continues to display his ironic perspective through compact rhetorical oscillations. Creon has “ripped away the darling of [his] eyes” though he has no eyes, ripped from his sockets by his own hands. Antigone is his “light in darkness” though he cannot see the light, and he prophesies universal blindness for Creon’s race under the “all-seeing eye” of the Sun.

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Irony has the effect of distancing oneself from a purely reactive psychological state; it is, therefore, a useful tool for achieving active self-mastery and expressing power. We are powerless when, in the face of discrimination or “ableist” encounters, we can only respond reactively. For example, we can respond in various ways when a stranger on the street grabs us because he thinks that we don’t know where we are going. Lashing out verbally or physically with uncontrolled anger may seem like an expression of power, but it is actually a product of personal insecurity. Having a stranger intrude on us out of a belief that we are incompetent could be a humiliating experience, and venting our anger because we feel humiliated is an expression of impotence. Or, we could do nothing in the moment and allow the encounter to feed our hatred and ressentiment toward sighted people; we could take our revenge indirectly by incorporating such experiences into an oppression narrative and using it to wage a war of values. In these scenarios, the sighted stranger is most powerful because we are impotently reacting to what he does, motivated by our fear that we might actually be powerless because we are blind.

Humiliation only occurs if we accept the premise of the stranger’s action. He may believe we are incompetent, but his action will only humiliate us if we share his belief, consciously or unconsciously, that we are incompetent.

From a Nietzschean perspective, we respond actively when we refuse to grant validity to an enemy’s interpretation of us (an “enemy” being anyone who opposes us in a power dynamic); and, Nietzsche would say, being able to respond actively rather than reactively is an indication of psychological health. Responding ironically is one good way of guarding ourselves against sliding into a reactive psychological state, and the two blind characters in the Oedipus cycle provide excellent models for active, ironic responses. Consider the blind prophet Tiresias’ confrontation with the still sighted Oedipus in Oedipus the King. Thebes is under a curse, the

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cause of which is not yet known. Oedipus summons Tiresias to help uncover the origin of the curse, and he is initially complimentary of the prophet’s power of insight. But when Tiresias indicates that Oedipus may be responsible for the curse, the king quickly turns to berating and insulting him: “You’ve lost your power, / stone-blind, stone-deaf-senses, eyes blind as stone!”

(152). In their back-and-forth dialogue, Oedipus continues to insult the prophet by associating his blindness with ignorance and impotence.

If this exchange were to occur today in real life, and if Tiresias was well-versed in DS and the oppression narrative, he would likely interpret Oedipus’ invective as “ableist” and a product of systemic oppression of blind people. He would be humiliated by the King’s public insult to his blindness. He would be enraged, and the experience would build his ressentiment toward sighted people. He would turn to moralizing about Oedipus’ “problematic” behavior, denouncing him for perpetuating harmful and hurtful stereotypes about blind people. He would appeal to values that have been constructed by his “disability community” in order to engage in indirect combat with his adversary. If we imagine for a moment Tiresias reacting to Oedipus’ provocations in this manner, it is difficult to avoid the uncomfortable thought that his motivations and responses expose his weakness and turn him into a pathetic figure— uncomfortable because this is how we typically react when we are faced with disrespect or discrimination. We do not perceive our reaction as weak or pathetic because contemporary disability culture is immersed in the values of reactivity, grievance, sensitivity, victimhood, sentimentality, etc. To see this clearly, we must step outside of our immediate cultural context and view ourselves from a different perspective, which is what reading literature from other cultures allows us to do—but only if we can refrain from moralizing about the alternative perspective, thereby devaluing it.

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Tiresias’ actual response demonstrates his power. He does not wilt under the king’s rhetorical assault but defiantly speaks against him: “I will go, / once I have said what I came here to say. / I will never shrink from the anger in your eyes— / you can’t destroy me” (158). He does not reactively fixate on Oedipus’ “ableist” attacks; instead, he takes an active approach by using irony to redirect the rhetorical assault toward Oedipus’ own weakness.

So,

you mock my blindness? Let me tell you this.

You with your precious eyes,

you’re blind to the corruption of your life,

to the house you live in, those you live with—

who are your parents? Do you know? All unknowing

you are the scourge of your own flesh and blood,

the dead below the earth and the living here above,

and the double lash of your mother and your father’s curse

will whip you from this land one day, their footfall

treading you down in terror, darkness shrouding

your eyes that now can see the light!

Soon, soon

you’ll scream aloud—what haven won’t reverberate?

What rock of Cithaeron won’t scream back in echo?

That day you learn the truth about your marriage,

the wedding-march that sang you into your halls,

the lusty voyage home to the fatal harbor!

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And a crowd of other horrors you’d never dream

will level you with yourself and all your children. (155)

Casting off insults, rather than allowing them to burrow into one’s psyche, is characteristic of active psychological health, which Tiresias displays in the conclusion to his lengthy invective:

“There. Now smear us with insults—Creon, myself and every word I’ve said. No man will ever be rooted from the earth as brutally as you” (155). Clearly, Tiresias is not humiliated by Oedipus, and nothing the king says to him has a negative psychological effect. The use of irony as a rhetorical weapon also indicates psychological health, which the prophet employs in this passage. Accordingly, he not only reverses Oedipus’ attack on his blindness but also mocks the

King’s unwitting sexual intercourse with his mother—the “lusty voyage home to the fatal harbor” (155). Tiresias goes on to prophesy that Oedipus will himself become blind as a result of his metaphorical blindness to the truth about his actions, but Oedipus cannot yet fully comprehend what the prophet is telling him. He concludes his sardonic tirade against Oedipus— the man who famously solved the Sphinx’s riddle—by saying, “Go in and reflect on that, solve that. / And if you find I’ve lied / from this day onward call the prophet blind” (158).

When reading these passages, it is difficult to countenance Jernigan’s flat rejection of

Sophocles’ Oedipus cycle for being detrimental to the image of blindness. Tiresias is clearly the most powerful figure in Oedipus the King, and Oedipus in turn is the most powerful figure in

Oedipus at Colonus. And, it is also difficult to see the appeal of imposing the contemporary oppression narrative on these texts because this interpretation undermines the real power of the blind characters. The oppression narrative presupposes that the oppressor has the power, and the oppressed are consequently perceived to be weak and impotent.

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Despite the misperceptions of the Athenian citizens at the beginning of Oedipus at

Colonus, the former king is far from impotent. At the end of the drama, as his death approaches, the stage directions characterize him in the following way: “Suddenly possessed of new strength,

Oedipus rises to his feet; the children attempt to help him, but he begins to move with slow, majestic steps, beckoning all to follow his path” (385). Oedipus intuits his final resting place, and he now independently leads the sighted characters in the direction of the holy burial ground:

Follow me, O my children,

come this way. I stand revealed at last, look,

a strange new role for me—I am your guide

as you were once your father’s. On, onward!

No, don’t touch me, let me find that sacred grave myself [. . .] (385)

Jernigan would reject the depiction of Oedipus’ walking by “second sight” as an example of stereotyping blind people as having magical powers, but this rejection is misguided. We are seeking affirmative representations of blindness—i.e., representations that incorporate blindness into a character’s active, psychologically healthy will to power, and the implicit or explicit valuing of suffering as instrumentally necessary for the expression of power. Sophocles’ Oedipus cycle is affirmative in this sense, but Jernigan would have us discard these narratives because they “tell lies” about blindness. Following his prescription would cut us off from one of the greatest examples of the affirmation of blindness in world literature. And for what purpose?

Because the depiction of blindness as being some kind of special power is harmful to blind people? It may be the case that, at some point in the past when blind people were actually oppressed, such depictions in literature contributed to their “otherness” in the minds of their sighted oppressors; but the argument that these depictions have an oppressive effect now is

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dubious. All blind people have had interactions with sighted people in which we are assumed to have special powers. These assumptions may be an annoyance, but why should we care if some sighted people think that we have a sixth sense or extraordinary compensatory abilities? These assumptions are only harmful to us if we reactively fixate on what a random sighted person mistakenly believes about us, which is precisely what Jernigan’s overly sensitive attack on literary representations encourages us to do.

But there is still the matter of the infamous line uttered by the Chorus in Oedipus the

King when the newly blinded Oedipus is revealed to the Thebans. Upon seeing him, they exclaim, “How can I say you’ve chosen for the best? / Better to die than be alive and blind”

(234). This line would seem, after all, to justify Jernigan’s claim that literature is against us. It would also appear to justify DS interpretations that seek to expose “ableist” assumptions about disability. Siebers’ ideology-of-ability theory is meant to critique the belief that it is better to be dead than disabled, and this belief is an implicit element in Bolt’s notion of a metanarrative of blindness. And while Mitchell and Snyder prefer to focus their attention on disability as an essential and valuable linchpin for literary narratives, they concede that most narratives typically do not transcend negative cultural beliefs about disability; and so, they make no attempt to rehabilitate or productively interpret “ableist” literary content.

An affirmative interpretation of blindness in literature must be able to accommodate statements within a text that unambiguously devalue blindness. This can be done if we understand that a literary text is a site for dynamic contestations of perspectives. The more dynamism a work of literature contains, the more interesting and valuable it is to us—which, incidentally, is an important factor in explaining why particular literary texts endure over time.

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Sophocles’ Oedipus cycle is an excellent example of the dynamic contest of interpretations. In response to the perspective that it is better to be dead than blind, Oedipus says the following:

What I did was best—don’t lecture me,

no more advice. I, with my eyes,

how could I look my father in the eyes

when I go down to death? Or mother, so abused ...

I have done such things to the two of them,

crimes too huge for hanging.

Worse yet,

the sight of my children, born as they were born,

how could I long to look into their eyes?

No, not with these eyes of mine, never. [. . .]

Now I’ve exposed my guilt, horrendous guilt,

could I train a level glance on you, my countrymen?

Impossible! No, if I could just block off my ears,

the springs of hearing, I would stop at nothing—

I’d wall up my loathsome body like a prison,

blind to the sound of life, not just the sight.

Oblivion—what a blessing ...

for the mind to dwell a world away from pain. (234-35)

What Oedipus is essentially telling the Chorus is that evaluating his action and subsequent blindness according to a hedonistic ideal of a “worthwhile” life is missing the point (and rather pedantic at that). Oedipus blinded himself for non-hedonistic reasons having to do with shame

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and dishonor. He rids himself of his eyes because he cannot bear to look upon the abomination of his children, or look into the eyes of his parents whom he dishonored, or, in his shame, meet the gaze of the Theban citizens. It is tempting for us modern readers to assume that his motivation has something to do with the reductionistic logic of pleasure versus pain, but we should resist this interpretive impulse. Oedipus does not blind himself out of a hedonistic calculation about whether he would be happier living in an impaired state. His action is motivated by fidelity to a strong cultural morality that prescribes honorable and dishonorable conduct, especially for those of noble birth and station in life. Within this cultural context, Oedipus’ action is both horrifying and admirable. It is the action of a noble man whose self-punishment must match the magnitude of his crimes.

Of course, the magnitude of the punishment depends a great deal on the perception that being blind is a terrible fate—and it probably was so considering the narrative’s time and place.

Life for a blind person in Ancient Greece was undoubtedly difficult, far more difficult than the experience of contemporary blind citizens of the United States. But it is precisely because blindness was a terrible fate in Ancient Greece that Oedipus’ self-blinding is a sublime achievement, whereas in the context of our contemporary society, it would amount to nothing more than a pathetic, and psychotic, act. As the NFB’s philosophy states, blindness need not be anything more than a minor inconvenience to one’s life. This is due to the financial independence, the assistive technologies, and the civil rights that a wealthy, individualistic, capitalist society offers to its blind citizens. Blinding oneself because one has done something shameful or dishonorable just doesn’t have the same meaning in a society that offers a relatively comfortable life to the blind.

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Jernigan’s knee-jerk reaction to the history of literary representations of blindness is a consequence of his failure to acknowledge and respect the differences between cultures and historical eras. He takes a statement like “it is better to die than be blind” and treats it as though it means the same thing across all times and cultures. The DS interpreters do the same, albeit in more subtle and sophisticated ways. This interpretive presentism flattens the dynamism in a literary text such as Oedipus the King. From this presentist perspective, it doesn’t matter what interesting response Oedipus makes to the Chorus. All that matters is there is a line in the drama that says it is better to be dead than blind, and the text is therefore forever “problematic” from a

DS perspective, or a hostile and harmful object to blind people from Jernigan’s perspective.

The affirmative perspective I am arguing for is opposed to presentist interpretation and moralizing. It does not seek to flatten out a text for the sake of pressing a contemporary political argument; instead, it seeks to emphasize and respect the dynamism that exists within a transcendent work of literature, even if this requires a defense of aspects of a narrative that devalue blindness. I hope it is obvious by now why this is necessary. If the affirmation of blindness depends on the expression of personal power, and if the degree to which power can be expressed depends on how much resistance there is to confront and overcome, then we must value whatever contributes to the resistance, including the explicit devaluation of blindness.

Oedipus’ and Tiresias’ power is greater because of the resistance against which they must contend in the form of negative beliefs and attitudes about their value as blind men. This fact is diametrically opposed to contemporary oppression narratives, according to which an individual’s power is diminished by negative social attitudes and beliefs about disability. The DS goal of

“emancipating” disabled people is in large part based on eliminating all forms of resistance against which we must contend. The hedonistic justification for this goal is that suffering is bad

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and must be abolished, but this cannot be done without a corresponding reduction of individual power. From this perspective, “affirmation” is a thoroughly social concept—i.e., disabled people are affirmed to the extent that their societies are willing and capable of giving us affirmation.

This is why DS is so focused on social, cultural, and political critique; affirmation is denied us within these domains, and we are supposed to criticize social, cultural, and political institutions until they grant us the affirmation we desire. I have already explained in previous chapters why this goal is not only unlikely to succeed but also a psychologically unhealthy pursuit, given that it depends on a narrative of oppression and a reactive state of mind. The more promising and psychologically healthy pursuit of affirmation of blindness, and affirmation of disability in general, is through a Nietzschean perspective that focuses on individual flourishing by valuing and continually seeking resistances to our will to power.

3. Blindness and Power in Milton’s Samson Agonistes

In his 1974 speech at the NFB national convention, Jernigan declared that, with the writing of Samson Agonistes, John Milton “betrayed himself and all others who are blind. In fact, he actually strengthened and reinforced the stereotype—and he did it in spite of his own personal experience to the contrary” (“Blindness: Is Literature Against Us?”). Jernigan’s unequivocal condemnation of the entire history of literary representation of blindness set the stage for literary criticism within the blindness community for subsequent decades. While a younger generation of critics, including Bolt and Kleege, has approached literary representation with more interpretive nuance and scholarly detachment, the overall perspective has not strayed too far from Jernigan’s identification of an oppressive literary canon that is rife with prejudicial stereotypes. Milton’s

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representation of a blind and imprisoned Samson is a quintessential example for this perspective because it seems to traffic in all of the usual stereotypes about blindness being a condition of weakness, depression, helplessness, and suicide. This is why Jernigan asserts that Milton—as a blind man—betrayed himself and all blind people with his dishonest portrayal.

An affirmative reading of Samson Agonistes will have to account for what Jernigan identifies as harmful lies and stereotypes about blindness. I argue that we should interpret

Milton’s drama in the same way as Sophocles’ Oedipus cycle—i.e., revaluing depictions of suffering in order to value the blind character’s will to power. In doing so, what seems like a stereotypical representation on the surface is transmuted into a form of valuable resistance that is necessary for the character’s expression of power. Milton’s narrative is fertile ground for the application of this interpretive method. The drama unfolds over the course of Samson’s final day in captivity before he destroys the temple of Dagon, killing himself along with the Philistinian aristocracy. Samson’s lamentations regarding his fate as a blind captive comprises much of the drama, and there are passages in which he appears to be depressed to the point of contemplating suicide. If we view Samson’s abjection and self-pity within the interpretive framework of contemporary disability politics, then we are likely to agree with Jernigan that it is an irredeemable narrative. But, if we suspend for a moment our presentist bias against representations of blindness from earlier historical eras and approach the text from a Nietzschean perspective, then an affirmative interpretation of the drama opens up to us.

The narrative begins with Samson taking a brief respite from his slave labor on a

Philistinian feast day. He questions the meaning of the prophecy that foretold his birth and the heroic service he would render to his Israelite people. For a time, he menaced the Philistines, killing their men and destroying their property, but now he is their prisoner on account of the

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betrayal of Dalila, his Philistinian wife. He foolishly revealed to her the source of his great strength—his hair. She shaves his head while he sleeps and hands him over to her people. They put out his eyes and sentence him to forced labor for his crimes. He cannot make sense of his current situation because it seems to radically contradict the divine prophecy about his life. Israel remains subordinated to the Philistines, and he is now a blind and powerless prisoner. Thus,

Milton’s dramatization of Samson’s imprisonment hinges on a crisis of meaning. What good is his suffering if his enemies remain in power? The meaninglessness of his situation is intolerable to him, and so we find him in search of a perspective that can make sense of his fate.

Samson clearly suffers from being blind. For Jernigan, this is enough to condemn

Milton’s portrayal, but we should reject Jernigan’s approach for two reasons. First, his approach presupposes that there is nothing intrinsic to blindness that causes suffering—a blind person only suffers either because of oppression or because of ignorance about how to live well with blindness. While these are indeed causes of suffering, Jernigan is wrong to limit the causes of suffering to these two extrinsic factors. As I argued in Chapter 5, there are intrinsic causes of suffering—such as aesthetic inaccessibility—that have nothing to do with extrinsic social factors and contexts. Prior to the disability rights movement, this was an uncontroversial point, and we see this reflected in Samson’s lament:

O loss of sight, of thee I most complain!

Blind among enemies, O worse than chains,

Dungeon, or beggary, or decrepit age!

Light, the prime work of God, to me is extinct,

And all her various objects of delight

Annulled, which might in part my grief have eased (332)

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Samson acknowledges that visual “objects of delight” give pleasure and have the power to

“ease” one’s grief. This is a more honest evaluative treatment of visual aesthetic experience than we find in the discourse of blind pride and oppression (e.g., the perspective of Annie Brady in

Chapter 1). Does Samson’s honesty about impairment-derived psychological suffering from blindness merit condemnation? It may be politically advantageous to deny impairment-derived psychological suffering, but such denials are ultimately evasive.

The second and more crucial reason to reject Jernigan’s condemnation of Milton’s drama is that it devalues suffering, and there can be no affirmation of blindness when suffering is devalued. Whether the suffering is intrinsic or extrinsic to blindness does not ultimately matter.

Suffering in general is what we must value in order to experience blindness affirmatively. This

Nietzschean perspective should affect our reception of the following infamous lines:

Inferior to the vilest now become

Of man or worm; the vilest here excel me,

They creep, yet see; I dark in light exposed

To daily fraud, contempt, abuse and wrong,

Within doors, or without, still as a fool,

In power of others, never in my own;

Scarce half I seem to live, dead more than half. (332)

Samson’s comparison of himself with a worm is undoubtedly Milton’s worst offense in

Jernigan’s estimation, and it is understandable that, in the context of the disability rights movement of which Jernigan was a leader, comparing a blind man to a worm is not great messaging. But we must separate our evaluation of these lines from the narrow historical context of the DRM because reading Samson Agonistes affirmatively is primarily a personal act, not a

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political act. For us, as blind people, blindness is affirmed when a blind character overcomes resistance to his/her will. The greater the resistance, the greater our power in overcoming it, and so we should value and affirm blindness to the extent that it heightens resistance to our will. If

Samson experienced his blindness as a mere inconvenience, as the Federation counsels, the consequence would be an undesirable reduction of resistance to his will. Therefore, we should not immediately reject the worm comparison simply because it portrays blindness negatively.

A stronger objection to my attempt to interpret these lines affirmatively is that Samson appears to be constructing an oppression narrative to explain his impotence and lack of agency.

As I argued in Chapter 6, interpreting oneself as a powerless victim of an oppressor has bad psychological effects, including the bad affect of ressentiment. Samson does not only lament blindness as an intrinsic condition of suffering; he also laments the fact that he is a prisoner of the Philistines, and his negative assessment of his blindness is mostly connected to this extrinsic factor. What disturbs him most is not that he is cut off from visual aesthetic experience but that blindness seemingly renders him unable to attack his enemies. Because he is in this condition, his enemies are free to abuse him and view him with contempt. This situation has driven him to a state of depression in which he feels like he is “half dead.” He is “in power of others,” not in his own.

This is the hallmark of the reactive type, those who are assaulted and oppressed by others and unable to act independently from a position of strength, reduced to only reacting to what others do to them. His oppression narrative at least has the merit of being a factually true description of his situation, but it is psychologically deleterious nonetheless. His father, Manoa, wants to pay the Philistines to release him now that he is blind and supposedly broken, but he has no desire to be released. Although his strength has returned with the growth of his hair, he believes he is

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useless because he is blind and that he deserves his imprisonment on account of his shame for having foolishly trusted his Philistinian wife:

Now blind, disheartened, shamed, dishonored, quelled,

To what can I be useful, wherein serve

My nation, and the work from Heav’n imposed,

But to sit idle on the household hearth,

A burdenous drone (347)

Dalila then comes to beg his forgiveness for her betrayal and attempts to persuade him to live with her again. She wants to take care of him, and tries to convince him that being blind has its advantages, such as shielding him from the dangers of his former life. Samson’s response to her offer further demonstrates his reactive, victimized perspective: “How wouldst thou use me now, blind, and thereby / Deceiveable, in most things as a child / Helpless, thence easily contemned, and scorned[?]” (357). We even see that Samson is not only concerned with how he will be treated but also with how others will perceive him: “In perfect thraldom, how again betray me, /

Bearing my words and doings to the lords / To gloss upon, and censuring, frown or smile?”

(357). Heightened sensitivity to how one is perceived by others is a basic feature of the reactive type, and it is important to notice the continuity of this perspective between disparate cultures and historical eras because it demonstrates that we are not dealing with a culturally-specific psychological phenomenon.

If this representation of Samson held true for the entirety of Milton’s drama, then blindness would not be affirmed, and Jernigan’s condemnation would be justified. But Samson

Agonistes, being a great work of literature, is a dynamic narrative that develops a complex representation of its protagonist. Midway through the drama, we begin to see that Samson is not

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as powerless as he first appears, a fact that he himself does not seem to fully comprehend. When

Harapha, a Philistinian warrior, comes to see his defeated Israelite counterpart, Samson is defiant. Harapha expresses his disappointment that he will never get the chance to face Samson in combat, but Samson challenges him anyway. Harapha says that it would be beneath him to fight a blind man, to which Samson replies that the Philistines have already resorted to an ignoble trick in order to subdue him. He mocks Harapha for his peoples’ cowardice and challenges him again: “Therefore without feigned shifts let be assigned / Some narrow place enclosed, where sight may give thee, / Or rather flight, no great advantage on me” (362). He tells

Harapha that the warrior can arm himself with the weapons of his choice, and Samson will defeat him with only an oaken staff.

This scene is very similar to the confrontation between Oedipus and Tiresias in that there is an apparently superior sighted character who attempts to shame and belittle an apparently weak, blind man. But in both of these confrontations, the blind men subvert the power dynamic by refusing to grant validity to their enemy’s presupposition that they are weak. Like Tiresias,

Samson reverses the attempt to shame him by using mocking humor to expose his enemy’s own shame. He undermines Harapha’s position of power by pointing out that the current power dynamic between them is based on his enemy’s shameful action. He also cleverly inverts the presupposition of his weakness as a blind combatant by indicating that fighting in a narrow and enclosed space will actually serve the purpose of preventing Harapha from cowardly running away from him.

Harapha is scandalized that he is being shamed by a disgraced prisoner. He intended to come gloat over a defeated enemy, but instead finds himself under rhetorical assault. As Samson

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continues to taunt and mock him, our original impression that he is a powerless, broken man is challenged. As Harapha retreats from the verbal combat, Samson finishes with the following:

Go baffled coward, lest I run upon thee,

Though in these chains, bulk without spirit vast

And with one buffet lay thy structure low,

Or swing thee in the air, then dash thee down

To the hazard of thy brains and shattered sides. (366)

It cannot be emphasized enough that these violent words are laced with mocking humor. The threat of swinging Harapha around like a rag doll and dashing him on the ground is an amusing image, and the line “to the hazard of thy brains” should provoke a laugh from the reader/audience. I don’t know if Milton intended these lines to be humorous, and I have no doubt that many directors and actors squelch the humor with a self-serious delivery. But a good director and actor will nuance the performance so that the humor shines through, and this is how we should interpret the lines as blind readers. The reason is that so much hinges on how we respond psychologically to experiences that challenge our perceptions of our competence and power as blind people. The goal is to guard against the worms of ressentiment from burrowing into our psyches and turning us into reactive types. One of the best ways to do this is to respond with ironic or mocking humor when someone interprets us as being powerless. Responding in this way allows a blind person to casually dismiss what would otherwise cause rage, hatred, and ressentiment to grow.

Harapha leaves, enraged by Samson’s insolent refusal to play the role of powerless victim. The Israelite contingent believes he will go to the Philistine lords and cause trouble for

Samson, but he expresses that he is not afraid of what Harapha will do. A public officer then

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arrives to inform Samson that he is being summoned to the feast of Dagon to perform feats of strength for the entertainment of the Philistinian aristocracy. He initially refuses to participate in the festival event because it will give his enemies another opportunity to view him with contempt. But then he comes to think that perhaps God intends to use him for some divine purpose at the feast of Dagon, and so he decides to attend: “If there be aught of presage in the mind, / This day will be remarkable in my life / By some great act, or of my days the last” (370).

As it turns out, both possibilities prove to be true. At the feast, Samson is permitted to rest between two central columns holding up the roof of the temple of Dagon. In a final act of power that far surpasses anything he accomplished during his career as a sighted warrior, he pulls down the columns and collapses the temple’s roof, killing himself along with the entire Philistinian aristocracy.

The destruction of the temple happens off-stage, and the Israelite contingent learns about the scene after-the-fact from a messenger who escaped the calamity. Just before the destruction,

Manoa speaks about his plan to ransom his captive son and bring him home to care for him. He cannot believe that Samson’s gift of strength will be wasted, and he hopes that “God will restore him eyesight to his strength” (373). We could interpret this line negatively as yet another statement of the sight-strength/blindness-weakness binary, but I think Manoa inadvertently expresses another meaning with this ironic metaphor. In this metaphorical construction, literal sight is actually irrelevant; what matters is the formal quality of power, which can be expressed in the absence of literal sight—i.e., “sight” restored to physical strength. Immediately following this line, Manoa hears the thunderous crash of the temple, underscoring the point that Samson did not need literal sight to accomplish more than all of his sighted enemies.

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Manoa and the Israelites suspect that Samson is responsible for the horrible sounds of dying following the crash. But they can only imagine he is capable of doing this with sight, so they speculate that God has restored his eyes. Their lack of imagination regarding the potential power of a blind Samson is challenged by the messenger who relates the actual event and

Samson’s final words:

Hitherto, lords, what your commands imposed

I have performed, as reason was, obeying,

Not without wonder or delight beheld.

Now of my own accord such other trial

I mean to show you of my strength, yet greater;

As with amaze shall strike all who behold. (378)

Once again, we have the reversal of an apparent power dynamic accompanied by an ironic perspective. Working within the dynamic established by his Philistinian captors, Samson frames what he is about to do as another feat of strength for their entertainment—but this final act will be deadly. One may wonder if his destructive act is really an elaborate way for a depressed man to commit suicide and thereby end his suffering, but I see little evidence for this in the text. To assume that Samson’s destruction of the temple is just a way for him to commit suicide presupposes that his experience of psychological suffering early in the drama has no value, and that there is no development in his character from powerless victim to powerful hero. From a

Nietzschean perspective, his suffering at the beginning of the drama is the valuable condition for a great act of power at the end, and his final ironic words do not indicate suicidal depression.

I should mention in conclusion that my affirmative interpretation of Samson Agonistes does not take a position on the ethical implications of Samson’s final act. In their introduction to

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the drama, the editors note that viewing Samson as a bad man is now the standard critical perspective among academic interpreters (323-25). For many, the destruction of the temple appears to be an act of mass murder, an event of divinely inspired terrorism, executed by a barbarian against a civilized people. I reject this interpretation for the same reason that I reject

Jernigan’s—it inappropriately judges the past by the moral standards of the present. My interpretation is instead seeking to elucidate the formal operation of power through the overcoming of resistance to the will of a blind character. Because there is resistance, there is suffering by necessity, and suffering is therefore a valuable experience for expressing power by the act of overcoming resistance. The substantive goals for which power is expressed is another matter entirely, and these goals will be determined by one’s cultural and historical context.

Therefore, my affirmative interpretation does not affirm the content of Samson’s goal but only the power by which he achieves his goal.

4. Conclusion

In this chapter, I have argued for a particular way in which blind people should read literary texts that have blind protagonists. It is an approach that seeks to interpret the text affirmatively according to the protagonist’s expression of will to power. It recognizes that an individual’s power cannot be expressed in the absence of resistance to the will, or in the absence of suffering; and, therefore, narratives that involve conditions that cause suffering, including discrimination and oppression, must not be reflexively discarded. However, my approach also acknowledges that many literary texts provide little to no material for an affirmative interpretation of blindness. Such is the case for the vast majority of parochial literature that

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deliberately sentimentalizes blind characters for the sake of evoking a cheap emotional response from the reader. These representations deserve criticism, but not the kind of moralized criticism we get from Jernigan or some DS critics. We should not critique these narratives on the ground that they perpetuate “ableism,” “oppression,” or some other bad social relation; instead, we should criticize them for obscuring the potential that blind people have for expressing power.

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Chapter VIII. Conclusion

While I have tried to write a self-contained dissertation on the problem of suffering from disability, I recognize that such a topic is better suited for a very long book. I view this effort as more of a schematic prelude to that larger project. Most of these chapters probably need to be twice as long as they currently are in order to persuade the skeptical reader, but I think the arguments hold up even in this truncated form. In a full-length book, the single chapter on literature would be expanded to cover an entire third part. I would analyze many more literary texts, including some non-affirmative examples in order to demonstrate the differences. I would also devote a couple of chapters to the issue of pity and disability. In retrospect, the lack of a chapter on this topic is perhaps the most significant deficiency of the dissertation because it is the one area in which the mainstream DS perspective is most Nietzschean. In failing to address the issue, I’ve given the impression that the Nietzschean and DS perspectives are more opposed than they actually are, a shortcoming of my project that I will have to correct in the future.

I first began to develop the ideas in this dissertation seven years ago. At that time, my perspective on the problem of suffering from disability was opposed to what I am now arguing.

In 2014, suffering from disability seemed like a taboo topic, and many in DS preferred to either ignore it or explain it away. Feminist theorists within DS had been discussing suffering for a long time, but their approach tended to focus on oppression as the root of the problem. This perspective presupposed that suffering was of no value and should therefore be eliminated via

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political action and social critique. I agreed then with the presupposition that suffering had no value, but I was dissatisfied with their analysis of the problem because it did not grapple with the reality of ineliminable suffering that is derived from impairments for which there is no social remedy. I personally felt constrained in how I should think and feel about my own impairment- derived limitations that caused me to suffer. There did not seem to be an appropriate forum for an apolitical discussion of suffering, and I believed that DS was, consequently, silencing the voices of those who had experiences such as mine.

I therefore set out to write a dissertation that would lay theoretical groundwork for an apolitical conception of suffering from disability. I planned to do this by contextualizing this experience within the more comprehensive experience of general human suffering. I would argue that, for thousands of years, humans have been representing their suffering through philosophical and literary conceptions of tragedy; and yet, within DS, thinking about disability as having anything to do with tragedy was, and still is, anathema. I believed that denying disabled people the right to express their disabled experience as tragic was tantamount to denying their full humanity given that tragedy is a fundamental mode of human experience. At this time, I was most influenced by the philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer because he seemed to provide the most robust account of apolitical suffering, placing the experience at the very center of all human experience by metaphysical necessity. I thought that, if suffering is fundamental to the human experience, then perhaps disabled people could claim privileged status given that many of us have a deeper understanding of suffering than the average person. I began presenting this idea at conferences, essentially arguing that we as disabled people have a right to suffer, and DS theorists who deny us this right are just as bad as the non-disabled people who reduce our humanity by wrongly assuming that all we do is suffer.

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I actually still think that there is some truth in my former argument; however, over the course of the past seven years, I began to recognize a serious flaw in this way of thinking. As I became more involved in disability communities, especially online communities of younger disabled people, I noticed an increasing amount of expressions of personal suffering. Suddenly, my perspective no longer seemed very radical. I initially reconceived my position as bringing to

DS a common perspective on suffering from outside the confines of academia, but then I started to also see this perspective reflected in more recent DS articles and books. The serious flaw in the perspective became all the more apparent to me—i.e., the bad psychological states and affects that seem to be strongly correlated with framing oneself as a sufferer while at the same time believing that suffering has no value. This perspective has intensified over the past several years so that now one routinely finds, primarily in the online communities, people expressing how much they suffer for the purpose of getting others to affirm their experience. At the risk of overstating the practice, it seems to me that a “cult of suffering” is growing within some disability communities; the more one suffers, the more one is affirmed by the community, which incentivizes a disproportionate focus on both the experience and cause of suffering.

This may seem like a strange criticism given that I have written an entire dissertation on the problem of suffering from disability, but there are crucial differences between my current perspective and the perspective of many in some disability communities. In reading Nietzsche’s criticism of Schopenhauer, I gradually came to accept that the Schopenhauerian worldview leads to a cult of suffering. It supports the hedonistic idea that there is nothing in life worth suffering for, and so the only appropriate thing to do is seek to mitigate or eliminate it. But it also, paradoxically, turns suffering into a kind of currency with which one is able to purchase the affirmation of other people; expressions of suffering now seem to be transactions within an

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economy of pain, which I suppose is an inevitable development of a wealthy and affluent society that has undergone pervasive capitalization of every aspect of ordinary life. In this economic sense, we could say that suffering has value in that, the more of it one has, the more affirmation one can acquire from other disabled people. But from a Nietzschean point of view, this sort of economic value is a perverse distortion of suffering’s true value.

In opposition to the trend toward exploiting one’s suffering as a way to get affirmation from other people, I have argued for valuing suffering as a necessary condition for pursuing significant, non-hedonistic goals, a pursuit that leads toward psychological health and individual flourishing. Significant goals are difficult to achieve because of the resistance we encounter in the external world and within our own bodies. But humans have a will to overcome resistance, not only for the sake of gaining the object of our desire, but also for the sake of expressing and experiencing our power. Suffering is a necessary condition in this process of overcoming because resistance to our will is painful. Knowing this, we must value the suffering that is intrinsic to resistance for being a stimulus to our will to power. Devaluing suffering, or valuing it perversely, will have the effect of diminishing the power we can express because we will not have a compelling reason to subject ourselves to suffering or to channel it productively. But if we do value suffering and channel it productively to pursue significant goals, then we will be engaged in the perpetual process of striving to overcome resistance to our wills, a process that is essential to living well.

While I believe the arguments in this dissertation contribute to the discipline of DS by challenging some taken-for-granted presuppositions about disability experience and theory, I am much more concerned about how these arguments may help disabled people, especially blind people, live well. Suffering from disability is, in fact, a problem, a problem for which there are

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better and worse ways of responding. In my view, the worst way to respond is by devaluing suffering and attributing the cause of the experience to being impotently stuck in an oppressive system. It is very tempting to adopt a reactive state of mind and construct a narrative of oppression into which we can embed our lives, but doing so is psychologically unhealthy. It opens us up to being consumed with ressentiment toward real or imagined oppressors, and it actually obstructs our potential to transform our world by diverting us into ineffectual acts of imaginary compensation for what we mistakenly perceive to be our powerlessness. There is a better perspective available that can give us the meaning we need for dealing with suffering from disability, a Nietzschean perspective that interprets suffering not as an indicator of weakness, but as an essential and valuable condition of strength.

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