Abstract

In What is Posthumanism, Cary Wolfe enlists Temple Grandin’s account of her autism to critique reductive ideas of subjectivity. He quotes Oliver Sacks’s comment that Grandin’s first book was “unthinkable because it had been medical dogma for forty years or more that there was no ‘inside,’ no inner life, in the autistic, or that if there was it would be forever denied access or expression” (129). As Wolfe sees it, that dogma is founded in no small part on the too-rapid assimilation of the questions of subjectivity, consciousness, and cognition to the question of language ability—a dogma that is perhaps even more entrenched in the humanities and social sciences than in areas such as medicine. Indeed, as many scholars have argued, the shibboleth “where there is reason, there is a subject” morphs, in the twentieth century, into “where there is language, there is a subject.” Wolfe’s work on the non-verbal aspects of autistic subjectivity is germane also to assumptions about the subjectivity of others who do not speak, or do not speak fluently, including people who are prelingually deaf. The idea that language is the sine qua non of subjectivity, an inadequate idea in itself, becomes even more reductive in the common slippage—in both everyday and philosophical discourse—from language to speech.

Comments

This is the author-accepted manuscript of Linett, M. “‘Seeing, seeing, seeing’: Deafness, Knowledge, and Subjectivity in Elizabeth Bowen,” Twentieth-Century Literature, vol. 59, no. 3, Fall 2013, pp. 465-493. Copyright Duke University Press, the version of record is available at DOI: 10.1215/0041462X-2013-4005

Date of this Version

9-1-2013

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