THE MULTIPLICITY OF EMBODIMENT 121its effects on his brain, and even on his personality and behavior. Simi-
larly, attending adequately to illness often involves grappling with bodies as
unavoidably material realities. Bruno Latour, the sociologist most known
for showing how scientific objects are constructed, had colon cancer, as
he mentioned in his essay on the limits of social constructionism (2004).
This he’d rather not regard merely as a “fact” to be deconstructed. Cather-
ine Malabou’s grandmother had Alzheimer’s disease, which brought her to
thinking about destructive or “negative” plasticity as inescapably material
(2012). Others writing about bodily matters, including illness, disability,
and even experiences of oppression and marginalization, have also chal-
lenged exclusively representational and (de)constructionist approaches.
If scientific facts and medical models do not fully grasp such embodied
realities — if even they do violence to them — epistemological critique only
gets one so far as well.
This argument, however, should not be taken as a concession to some
ultimate or inevitable biological reductionism, as if the social addresses
only the surface; to really get at the depth one has to give in, finally, to bi-
ological nature. The point, rather, is that these two shouldn’t be easily sep-
arated. The example of illness and injury can be disarming, leading one to
put down the tools of critical thinking altogether. Of course, Latour’s read-
ers might well reason, he must treat his cancer as biologically real, and not
merely as a construct, or a metaphor. What good would that do? Or: there
is no doubt, Malabou intimates, that Alzheimer’s disease can create un-
bearable suffering. The mere thought of such suffering might be taken for
evidence that biology trumps all. But while cancer and Alzheimer’s disease
are absolutely biological, they are not strictly, purely natural, if that means
untouched by the contingencies of social life. They involve undeniable dis-
ruptions, genuine pain, and irreducibly physical events (lesions, malignan-
cies, plaques, and tangles), but their etiologies are thought to involve both
biologically and socially patterned exposures and vulnerabilities, and they
are experienced not as pure processes of nature, but as entangled with the
practices, meanings, and knowledges that variously and differentially shape
embodied lives. To take a stubbornly realist attitude, as Latour put it, is not
to deny these social imbrications, but rather to see them, too, as actual.
Similarly, to say that oppressions are felt and experienced in the body — to