Superfluousness of the faulty: Economy of the 'disabled' body symbolism

Filozofija I Društvo 20 (1):245-278 (2009)
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Abstract

In the modern culture, the phenomenon of the 'disabled' body is a intersection place of its ableist ideology, power relations and pseudoscientific explanations, and they are urged by the neo-eugenic project of the perfect world creating. As the prisoner of the biomedical discourse, such a body, deprived of any agensy, loaded with the culture-historicaly constituated non-power, is a particularly suitable field of the mainstream culture for spreading almost archetypically powerful apocaliptic visions of confronting with the enemy's otherness. For that reason, the underlying supposition of the article is that the 'disabled' body, by means of the uniqueness of its morphology and anatomical-physiological structure, says nothing about itself, the basis of that it which would qualify to be a cult victim of the discriminatory gaze, but it is a reflection the culture frustrated by its own failure to produce an apsolutelly controlable order of things. Our ideas of demonic figure of the 'disabled' body conceal the century-old negentropic struggle of the Western civilization, conceptualy supplied with the criteria, norms and standards of health, normalcy, beauty and the truth, instrumentally supplied with the preventive and rehabilitative provisions of medicine, cosmetology and fashion and institutionally supplied with asylums, to provide itself with kingdom of peace and serenity through pouring out any otherness, first of all the cultural one, intentionally reduced to the pure biological. Fenomen 'ometenog' tela predstavlja u savremenoj kulturi tacku ukrstanja njene 'neometenisticke' ideologije, odnosa moci i pseudonaucnih objasnjenja motivisanih skrivenim neoeugenickim projektom stvaranja savrsenog sveta. Kao zarobljenik biomedicinskog diskursa, takvo telo, liseno ma kakve agensnosti, obremenjeno kulturno-istorijski konstruisanom ne-moci, jeste narocito podesan poligon mejnstrim kulture za sirenje skoro arhetipski snaznih apokaliptickih vizija suocavanja sa neprijateljskom drugoscu. Zato je osnovna teza koju clanak nastoji da dokaze, da 'ometeno' telo specificnoscu svoje morfologije i anatomsko-fizioloske strukture ne govori nista o sebi sto bi ga kvalifikovalo da bude kultna zrtva diskriminisuceg pogleda, vec da je refleksija kulture frustrirane vlastitim neuspehom u proizvodnji apsolutno kontrolabilnog poretka stvari. Iza nase predstave demonskog lika 'ometenog' tela skriva se vekovna negentropijska borba zapadne civilizacije, konceptualno opremljene kriterijumima, normama i standardima zdravlja, normalnosti, lepote i istine, instrumentalno prevencijskim i rehabilitacijskim merama medicine, kozmetike i mode a institucionalno azilima, da obezbedi sebi vecno carstvo mira i spokoja u rastakanju svake drugosti, a ponajpre one kulturne koju namerno redukuje na cisto biolosko.

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