Diderot's Letter on the Blind as Disability Political Theory. (February 2020)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Hirschmann, Nancy J.
• Is Part Of: Political theory. Volume 48:Number 1(2020:Feb.)
• Page Start: 84
• Page End: 108
• Publication Date: 2020-02
• Subjects: Diderot -- blindness -- disability -- empiricism -- knowledge; Political science -- Periodicals; Science politique -- Périodiques; 320.05
• DOI: 10.1177/0090591719843063
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 0090-5917

Abstract

This essay considers Denis Diderot's Letter on the Blind for the Use of Those Who Can See as a work that can contribute to a disability political theory. By recounting the experiences of visually impaired persons in their own words, Diderot opens up possibilities for a disability politics of self-representation, maintaining that sighted persons should listen to blind persons' accounts of their own experience rather than relying on their own imaginings and assumptions. By using blind experiences to challenge a philosophical problem that intrigued philosophers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries amid often-unsuccessful efforts to "cure" blindness through cataract surgeries, Diderot develops a powerful critique of the empiricist stress on vision as the primary source of perception and provides a remarkably forward-looking critique of disablist attitudes toward the blind. Through this philosophical discourse, he engages a political argument about the way knowledge is gathered, evaluated, and interpreted through relationships of power.