Ehrenberg

The depressed individual is unable to measure up; he is tired of having to become himself. 

Alain Ehrenberg.

Gil Eyal (on Ehrenberg)

"At some point around the mid-20th century, the society of discipline and norms that fixed the individual in her place has been destabilized and has given way to a society organized around the sovereign individual, who is free to set her own norm of self-development, who is responsible for her destiny and who therefore finds herself in a void, not knowing how to act, nor even why is it preferable to act. The melancholia once reserved as the privilege of a few great geniuses, has now become a depression available to anybody. To the neo-liberal creed of “everything is permitted”, the depressed individual replies “but nothing is possible”. 

Stiker (excerpts)

"From ancient Greece to the Renaissance, a fundamental feature common to all these different cultures was the question of the meaning of disability. Schematically, in Greece, birth deformity was a curse or even malefice and individuals were excluded or left to die by exposure to the elements; in Hebrew culture, certain expressions of disability were treated as an impurity, but the poor had to be approached with compassion. The New Testament shows Jesus detaching infirmity from sin and placing himself closer to disabled hordes banished from temples and cities; this alternative intimacy of relations happened because the existence of disability proclaimed the Kingdom of God. At the end of the Byzantine Empire, we see a man like Zotikos found one of the first leper colonies. As for the Middle Ages there was a great deal of harshness for those termed “crippled,” as they were assigned the role of revealing a world beyond socially sanctioned appearances (the buffoon), or of the cripple without resources, constituted as a figure of Christ. The suffering and stigma associated with disability was to be alleviated while also serving as an opportunity to make the individual/organization granting charity into a vehicle of their own salvation. "

David Mitchell & Sharon Snyder

"Stiker’s historical analysis demonstrates that in each of the key epochs of Western thought—the classical era, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, the Victorian age, the modern—that disability and disabled populations continue to surface as that which must be assimilated or made to disappear. The less visible physical and cognitive difference becomes, the more a society can pride itself upon its own illusory value as a human(e) collectivity. The “success” of integration can be based upon a variety of assimilation strategies, from legislative policies to segregation to eradication, but Stiker argues that there is a disturbing ideology underwriting each action along this continuum—the social ideal of erasure.  The rhetoric of sameness dominates the twentieth century by vehemently promoting the erasure of differences as its ultimate goal".

David Mitchell & Sharon Snyder

"Significantly, Stiker reserves his fiercest critique for the twentieth century...While nineteenth-century medical discourses of restoration still abound, our century forwards legislative initiatives seeking to “level the playing field” between disabled and nondisabled. According to Stiker, this rehabilitative approach “marks the appearance of a culture that attempts to complete the act of identification, of making identical."

David Mitchell & Sharon Snyder

"For example, the deaf and mute are subnormal according to Jewish law, while the blind are considered normal and enjoy their full rights. It has at times been said that the blind were looked on as persons who had died. The Encyclopedia Judaica sees this as only a rhetorical formula.6 But all these distinctions in no way detract from the fundamental fact that disabilities as a whole were judged impurities, disqualifying their bearers from active participation in the cult. In the Qumran texts, reflecting a late and admittedly Essene Judaism, we find an Essene regulation that denies the disabled engagement in combat on the one hand and participation in communal meals on the other. “And no man, lame, blind or crippled or having an incurable defect of the flesh, or afflicted by an impurity of the flesh, none of these shall accompany them to battle,” and, in the appended regulation, “every person afflicted by these impurities, unsuited to occupy a place in the midst of the Congregation, and every person stricken in his flesh, paralyzed in the feet or hands, lame or blind or deaf or mute or stricken in his flesh with a defect visible to the eye . . . let not these persons enter to take a place among the Congregation of  men of repute. And if one among them has something to say to the Council of Sanctity, he will be questioned apart; but this person shall not enter into the midst of the Congregation, for he is afflicted,” and elsewhere “the slow-witted, the fools, the silly, the mad, the blind, the crippled, the lame, the deaf, the underage, none of these shall enter the bosom of the Community, for the holy angels dwell in its midst.”

Stiker, Henri-Jacques

Charity, the founding principle of ethical and social order for centuries, endures but becomes tangled among other ideas issuing either from the struggle of the exploited classes or from economic and technical development (the idea of assimilation to the community of the normal). To the extent that the idea of charity persists, it directs a series of practices, such as the appeal to a philanthropic attitude, devotion to an almost spiritual mission, fear of opposition to government power. In the disinterested service of a form of poverty the worker at rehabilitation institutions had the dominant characteristic of being an “apostle” before being a professional, of being generous before being salaried, a kind of lay brother or sister, marked in the first hand by a sense of vocation. And this corps of social workers, in all logic, could not make claims against a government that was itself viewed in “charitable” optics (by citizens as intermediaries) and never critically seen as a manipulator of economic or ideological interests. Thus, the institutions were content with weak resources, very loose coordination, and minimal rationality.

Stiker, Henri-Jacques

As Agnes Pitrou has shown, there are, for example, underground networks of family solidarity; in periods of crisis hidden economies, “black markets,” develop. Under certain conditions social spaces, public without being statist, differential without being individualistic, may arise or be created, and there is a fertile ground, thus far scarcely noticed, for this to happen.

Stiker, Henri-Jacques

On the model of “Be beautiful and keep quiet” we have “Take your benefits and don’t ask for more.” People will pay as much as needed—in the double form of subsidies to institutions and aid to individuals—in order to make the problems of social misery disappear, in the desire to leave the social surface as it is and without necessarily reducing inequalities. Paying seems easier than establishing aggressive programs to offset the problems of these deficiencies. 

Stiker, Henri-Jacques

The medical eye is everywhere. An immense power, which has taken up where father confessors and directeurs de conscience (spiritual advisors) left off. The proof no longer needs to be laid out, so numerous are the analyses. But the analyses clearly have not changed anything: this power is still in place and holding firm.48 The dimensions of this power have been stated time and time again: exclusive possession of knowledge, limitation of access to information and medical “secrets,” the position as “counselor” and social “monitor”...The power network of physicians and medicine is tight, intense, far-reaching. I shall not rehearse the analysis of this network at present.

Stiker, Henri-Jacques

Mbembe

Generations of French people were exposed to pedagogy aimed specifically at habituating them to racism. It was founded essentially on the principle that the relationship to Blacks must be a relationship of nonreciprocity. Nonreciprocity was justified by the qualitative difference between the races, a thematic that was inseparable from older ideas of blood that had been used to justify the privileges of the nobility and that were now redeployed by the colonial project.

Achille Mbembe

Mbembe

These cuts and scars prevent the realization of community. And the construction of the common is inseparable from the reinvention of community. This question of universal community is therefore by definition posed in terms of how we inhabit the Open, how we care for the Open—which is completely dif­ferent from an approach that would aim first to enclose, to stay within the enclosure of what we call our own kin. This form of unkinning is the opposite of difference. Difference is, in most cases, the result of the construction of desire. It is also the result of a work of abstraction, classification, division, and exclusion—a work of power that, afterward, is internalized and reproduced in the gestures of daily life, even by the excluded themselves. Often, the desire for difference emerges precisely where people experience intense exclusion. In these conditions the proclamation of difference is an inverted expression of the desire for recognition and inclusion.

Achille Mbembe

Mbembe

In such conditions we create borders, build walls and fences, divide, classify, and make hierarchies. We try to exclude—from humanity itself— those who have been degraded, those whom we look down on or who do not look like us, those with whom we imagine never being able to get along. But there is only one world. We are all part of it, and we all have a right to it. The world belongs to all of us, equally, and we are all its coinheritors, even if our ways of living in it are not the same, hence the real pluralism of cultures and ways of being. To say this is not to deny the brutality and cynicism that still characterize the encounters between peoples and nations. It is simply to remind us of an immediate and unavoidable fact, one whose origins lie in the beginnings of modern times: that the processes of mixing and interlacing cultures, peoples, and nations are irreversible. There is therefore only one world, at least for now, and that world is all there is. What we all therefore have in common is the feeling or desire that each of us must be a full human being. The desire for the fullness of humanity is something we all share. And, more and more, we also all share the proximity of the distant. Whether we want to or not, the fact remains that we all share this world. It is all that there is, and all that we have. To build a world that we share, we must restore the humanity stolen from those who have historically been subjected to processes of abstraction and objectification. From this perspective, the concept of reparation is not only an economic project but also a process of reassembling amputated parts, repairing broken links, relaunching the forms of reciprocity without which there can be no progress for humanity. Restitution and reparation, then, are at the heart of the very possibility of the construction of a common consciousness of the world, which is the basis for the fulfillment of universal justice. The two concepts of restitution and reparation are based on the idea that each person is a repository of a portion of intrinsic humanity. This irreducible share belongs to each of us. It makes each of us objectively both dif­ferent from one another and similar to one another. The ethic of restitution and reparation implies the recognition of what we might call the other’s share, which is not ours, but for which we are nevertheless the guarantor, whether we want to be or not. This share of the other cannot be monopolized without consequences with regard to how we think about ourselves, justice, law, or humanity itself, or indeed about the project of the universal, if that is in fact the final destination. Reparation, moreover, is necessary because of the cuts and scars left by history. For much of humanity, history has been a process of habituating oneself to the deaths of others—slow death, death by asphyxiation, sudden death, delegated death.

  Achille Mbembe

Mbembe

Never has the perspective of a Becoming Black of the world loomed more clearly. No region of the world is spared from the logics of the distribution of violence on a planetary scale, or from the vast operation under way to devalue the forces of production. But as long as the retreat from humanity is incomplete, there is a still a possibility of restitution, reparation, and justice. These are the conditions for the collective resurgence of humanity. Thinking through what must come will of necessity be a thinking through of life, of the reserves of life, of what must escape sacrifice. It will of necessity be a thinking in circulation, a thinking of crossings, a world-thinking.

Achille Mbembe