I’m thinking about how to organize some thoughts on a paper I’ll be writing over the next couple of months. I know what I want to write about but I’m not sure how to approach it— that is, without slipping into either appropriation, reductivity, clinical abstraction, or reification. 

Levi-Strauss, in “The Sorcerer and His Magic” poses a question: when the shaman, in purporting to suck out someone’s disease, produces a stone hidden beforehand in his mouth, how does he reconcile himself with himself? Eleni Stecopoulos draws a line from this to the practice of the Fox sisters, whose followers persisted in belief even after the sisters confessed to faking their spiritualist practices, because their belief had become efficacious. “The authority of the healer hinges on the performance, which is an interactive situation,” Stecopoulos writes, but how can someone writing on what I might call “idiolectic magic” approach the situation?

In critically approaching someone like Daniel Paul Schreber or Marguerite Porete, is it ethically fit to write as the shaman hiding a rock in his cheek, or as the patient “miraculously” healed (Badious has a thing or two to say about the miracle, too, as the contingent and unpredictable torsion erupting into the event, but that’s kind of the opposite of what I’m thinking about here)? In both the narrow field of Schreber scholarship and the broad selection of writers treating medieval women mystics, there’s an uncomfortable binary between treating their subjects as mentally ill and hence almost entirely bound up in causal determinacy (“we may explain away the experiences of Hildegard as such…”) or,gamely but with perhaps useless mock-naivete, as genuine conduits to higher powers (see the trend, in the late 70’s, of scholars treating Schreber as religious utopian and effacing the abject and socially engaged elements of his memoirs).

Is there a way to break this pattern and secularize the mystical concepts of thinkers thinking in “magical” frameworks? If there is, I’m not even sure that’s how I want to go about it. Both Schreber and Porete are intensely somatically engaged, and their writings don’t reduce to the disembodied universality lurking behind much of how we receive our discourses of both psychoanalysis and theology. If possible, I’d like to write about both as subjects in bodies concerned with writing their own experiences as subjectivized bodies. 

To borrow from Lacan, then, I think I’d be foolish to approach them as “fools” or “knaves” and I would certainly want to avoid being a Lacanian “fool” or “knave” myself. If anyone is big into disabilities studies, particularly in the areas of cognitive disabilities, disabilities poetics, or somatics, I would love to be pointed in the right direction as I continue trying to orient myself towards a thesis that doesn’t feel reductive or unjust.

I’m going to get an F on this paper and Brian Teare is going to punch me in the eye.