As any of his acolytes know, Slavoj Žižek, the popular and eccentric theorist, routinely denigrates neoliberalism and its multicultural crusade, the “rainbow coalition” whose primary goal is complete inclusion in democratic and cultural representation with none of the unsavory revolution necessary for systemic change. Disability, of course, is one of the colors of this rainbow, with activists seeking fair representation and rights a la the Civil Rights Movement. Writing about the Mandela sign-language interpreter debacle, however, Žižek claims that interpreters are less “for those who cannot hear the spoken word” and more “for us – it makes us (who can hear) feel good to see the interpreter, giving us a satisfaction that we are doing the right thing, taking care of the underprivileged and hindered?” According to Žižek, civil rights, and particularly rights accorded to those with disabilities, only shore up a liberal fantasy and subject. As such, pairing disability studies with Žižekian theory seems disingenuous at best and ludicrous at worst. Yet Žižek’s antipathy towards identity politics mirrors a burgeoning trend in disability studies as well. Critics like Lennard J. Davis and Robert McRuer argue for a disability studies that moves beyond the historically important but outdated mode of identity politics and into a universal understanding of disability, according to Davis, and a locally fixed one, according to McRuer. I would like to suggest that Žižek’s troubling of the object/subject divide can provide fruitful ways of understanding disability and disability studies in this post-identity politics moment. In particular, Žižek’s understanding of the Lacanian objet petit a, or the object of desire that constitutes the subject, can help reread the process of objectification at the heart of numerous identity-based readings. Understanding every subject as object certainly does not mitigate the very real effects of construing living beings as less than, but it can reimagine objecthood itself.
About the presenterMariah Crilley
Mariah Crilley is a second-year Ph.D. candidate in English literature at West Virginia University. She graduated with a B.A. in English from Chatham University and an M.A. in English from Duquesne University. She is interested in how disability studies and ecocriticism can merge to provide fruitful new understandings of being in the world.