The Specter Haunting Autism

Abstract

"Does autism represent the ultimate withdrawal into a singular existence—autonomous, self-ruled, in-divisible—or the resorption of every uniqueness into interlocking sets, aggregates, collectives, categories and taxonomies? Psychiatry’s relentlessly assimilative patterning—its reduction to a set of symptoms or given criteria, its refashioning of clinical-temporal specificities as common shapes, traits or features, ideal types or nosologies—renders each instance of it spectral, a slippery ubiquity at once utterly unique and utterly common, communal, even universal. The enigmas crazing the current discourse on autism and its clinical-institutional surround suggest that, rather than cleaving to one or another orthodoxy, analysts might more generatively follow Derrida in conceiving of our practice as a paradoxy, requiring a stance running counter to all currents of shared opinion. Such a practice would insist that we persist in a conspiracy to invoke the specter of an undead subjectivity, one which goes on emerging apophatically, like the appearance of a water-mark, from the negative space of the knot or aporia, bar or wall, “void at the center of the torus” or “true hole;” the whirlpool, gap, slot or slit opening between the saying and the said, between the spoken sentence and what is understood in what is heard—from within language, that is, dominated or ruled by sense (meaning)—at once by semblance. Somewhere in the nod we were dropping cargo. Somewhere in the nod we were losing infrastructure, losing redundant systems, losing specific gravity. Weightlessness seemed at the time the safer mode. Weightlessness seemed at the time the mode in which we could beat both the clock and affect itself, but I see now that it was not. I see now that the clock was ticking. —Joan Didion, The Last Thing He Wanted "

Keywords:

• autism Keyword: autism
• Hamlet Keyword: Hamlet
• Wittgenstein Keyword: Wittgenstein
• Lacan Keyword: Lacan
• Benvenuto Keyword: Benvenuto

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Rights: In Copyright