Re-embodying “sight”: representations of blindness in critical theory and disability studies

Abstract

In my thesis I engage selected texts of Jacques Derrida, David Wills, and Jean-Luc Nancy in order to draw on specific motifs that are relevant for a thinking of sight and blindness. The motifs on which I elaborate are immediacy, prosthesis, and extension respectively. In consecutive chapters, based on close readings of these selected texts and the development of these motifs in them, my study elaborates on the relevance of the work of these three thinkers for a thinking of sight and blindness that does not conform to the hierarchical dualisms of Western metaphysics. Following this, I engage three texts by selected theorists from the large and growing field of disability studies—Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, Lennard Davis, David T. Mitchell, and Susan L. Snyder—in order to make the case that disability studies has not yet challenged its own metaphysical assumptions.