Conway

 If, as Deleuze suggests, disability is overwhelmingly viewed as a model for “controlled ‘situations of abandonment’,” the critique of the dogmatic image of thought recenters disability and turns it into a model for revolt (Deleuze 2007, 235).

The disabled body becomes a literary war machine that refuses the philosophical language of the unified liberal subject and becomes a mechanism through which we can come to understand how philosophy itself functions as a dispositif that thwarts the formation of new worlds and new forms-of-life on the grounds of a metaphysical and epistemological incongruity and incorrigibility. Disability speaks through the figure who refuses to be represented or represent anything. Disability liberation coincides with and effectively highlights the need for a new approach to difference and the images of thought that have proliferated across the canon. The disabled body manifests as both the target and refutation of a dogmatic image of thought that acts as method of philosophical immunization.

Normalization and the Image

The normalizing power of the image of thought becomes clearer when one can view the image of thought, and the philosophical project it is posited by, as possessing a certain discursive power. Deleuze, both in his earlier monographs and his later work with Guattari, provided an articulation of the relationship between the state and the image of thought. There is a striking similarity between Foucault’s work on normativity and the formation of apparatuses and Deleuze’s critique of the dogmatic image of thought.

...the apparatuses that enable these processes of subjectivation and interventions into divergent cases necessarily form something else as well. “[O]ne role, among others, of these systems is to form an image of society, a social norm” (Foucault 2013, 214-215). An apparatus is what both establishes a norm, establishes it as the “image” of any given social order, and directs subjects toward that norm.

The dogmatic image of thought doubtlessly sets such a norm, and moralizes it, especially when it must fall back onto a subjective presupposition that “everyone knows” what rationality means or that “no one can deny” the irreproachability of reason. It is through the establishment of this norm that the monster first begins to creep through the shadows of the discourse. Georges Canguilhem describes the monster and the mad as foils for a central norm.

“In the nineteenth century, the madman was in an asylum, where he was useful as a foil for reason, and the monster was in the embryologist’s jar, where it was useful as foil for the norm.”

CANGUILHEM 1962, 35

The individual in the nineteenth century “is always described in terms of his possible or real divergence from something that is no longer defined as the good, perfection, or virtue, but as the normal” (Foucault 2013, 216). The apparatus is what draws the lines of battle across each and every individual subject. Deleuze and Foucault share a resonance in that the State-form inspired image of thought is one that sees obedience as mastery and adherence to reason. One ought to look no further than Foucault’s processual theory of the subject. Foucault’s shift to Ancient Greece toward the end of his lectures at the Collège de France is not a conventional “ethical turn,” but rather a demonstration that “the strength of bourgeois rule has been built—even before economic factors—on two centuries of ethical struggle, of transforming morality, of a generalized dictatorship over behavior and attitudes” (Tarì 2021, 189). The model of civil war is fundamentally maintained in these lectures, it is just extended to the foundations of the ethical itself.

Conway