Candace Vogler

The Critical Limits of Embodiment: Disability's Criticism

No one is ever more than temporarily able-bodied. This fact frightens those of us who half-imagine ourselves as minds in a material context, who have learned to resent the publicness of raceor sexor otherwise-marked bodies and to think theories of embodiment as theories about the subjectivity of able-bodied comportment and practice under conditions of systematic injustice. From this perspective, disability studies may be twice marginalized—first, by able-bodied anxiety; second, by a tendency to treat disability as just another hindrance to social mobility, perhaps one best left to medical discourse or descriptive sociology. New work in disability studies, however, challenges established habits of thought about “having” a body. Disability studies dissolves deeply entrenched mind-andbody distinctions and further destabilizes the concept of the normal, whose charted internal ambiguities have themselves become too familiar. An ethics and a politics of disability are crucial to the work of the university—pedagogically, theoretically,

The Moral of the Story

5 This essay grows out of Gayatri Spivak’s remark that fiction is often read as “gossip about imaginary people,” and is meant as a development of her phrase. I am grateful to Stanley Cavell for conversation about his work and to Neil Hertz, Jeff McMahon, Daniel Morgan, Bradin Cormack, Jaime Hovey, Melissa Bradshaw, Toril Moi, Hank Vogler, Larry McEnerney, and Neville Hoad for conversation about mine. Lauren Berlant gave me tremendous editorial advice and encouragement. Gabriel Lear and Richard Strier gave me detailed comments on an earlier draft. Robert Pippin has been an unimaginably generous, patient, and invigorating conversation partner. Jay Schleusener has been my constant interlocutor on these topics for four years. 1. BernardWilliams, Shame and Necessity (Berkeley, 1993), p. 13. 2. For an example of this, see Nomy Arpaly,Unprincipled Virtue: An Inquiry intoMoral Agency (Oxford, 2003). The Moral of the Story

Social Imaginary, Ethics, and Methodological Individualism

It may be impossible to do ethics without engaging the individuating question, What should I do? or, more generally, How should I live? It may, in turn, be impossible to engage these questions without appreciating their impersonal dimension, a dimension that owes much to the operations of the social imaginary. Crudely put, imaginaries are complex systems of presumption—patterns of forgetfulness and attentiveness—that enter subjective experience as the expectation that things will make sense generally (i.e., in terms not wholly idiosyncratic). Accordingly, action-guiding, personal answers to ethical questions will turn on some mode of more general sense-making—What should I do? and How should I live? can be restated as What should one (in my circumstances) do? or How should one (in my circumstances) live? “In my circumstances” becomes the point of contact between the personal question and the general, socially extended imaginary frame—that is, “my circumstances” both are and are not mine alone. The actual or potential commonality of circumstance, and the presumption that there will be a take on circumstances that lets sense-making happen, draw together questions about philosophy, ethics, politics, and the social imaginary. In “African Modes of Self-Writing” (Public Culture 14 [winter 2002]: 239–73), Achille Mbembe argues that the multiplicity of narratives about African history, spirituality, and people have failed to provide a take on Africa “systematic enough to situate human misfortune and wrongdoing in a singular theoretical framework” (239). While the failure is at once philosophical, ethical, and political, the

Introduction: Violence, Redemption, and the Liberal Imagination

Violence haunts liberal political thought. The defining image of early modern European social contract theory—and an image that remains potent in contemporary contractarian moral and political theory —l ocates the possibility of civil society in a compact among men who are long accustomed to the use of force in the bloody business of self-assertion and self-preservation. These men, so the story goes, surrender their right to fight one another (and to dominate the defenseless), investing a common, sovereign power with the right to command obedience for the sake of peace, justice, prosperity, and reasonable expectations of security. In turn, their consent legitimates this common power—the state—at least as long as its use of coercion serves the welfare and good future of a voluntarily toothless citizenry.1

Virtue, the Common Good and Self-Transcendence

Aristotle apparently thought that work on virtue had a profoundly political aspect. According to Aristotle, our capacity to perceive good and bad is inextricably linked to the complexities of our sociality, and it is hard to imagine a sound reading of Aristotle (or any other good philosopher) on such topics as virtue and practical reason that did not involve our capacity to distinguish good from bad. Human beings, Aristotle thought, are at home in ordered communities, and our very capacity to track practical good and bad and right and wrong (even to engage in means-end reasoning, interestingly) is properly exercised in society: