Wisdom to Make the World Go On: On Disability and the Cultural Delegitimation of Suffering

This essay proceeds by exploring the wisdom, even authority, of bodies that admit suffering, namely, the socially abjected bodies of the disabled. What seems to the cultural eye the physical obstinacy of disability suggests rather a religious, philosophical, and/or cultural rejection, namely, an undigested or inadmissable awareness that to live will involve us in physical and/or psychic suffering.