210 RüdigerKunow
AttheFarEndoftheNormativeBody:LateLifeandDisability
In the following pages, I will discuss two wide and extremely
importantfieldswherethebiologyofthehumanbodyhasgivenrisetoa
dense network of "vital normativities" (Canguilhem) which insistently
define the life ways and life chances of people. Late life ("age") and
disability are both widely accepted and highly suggestive names for
non-normative physicalities. As forms of "peripheral embodiment"
(Mitchell and Snyder, Biopolitics of Disability 31, 180-81) they
designate aspects of the human condition which exceed at least in part
humancontrolandinterventionandwhichmostpeoplewouldrathernot
have for themselves or their loved ones. One is a potentiality—every
human being, indeed every organic life form, is likely to age if it lives
longenough—,theotheraconditioncausedbycontingentfactors.Both
are objects of intense affective investments, individually and
collectively:fearedandloathedbymanypeople,camouflagedordenied,
they mark conditions in which people are "born into absences" (Pease,
"Introduction" 30), are interpellated into a civic identity which
materializes itself almost exclusively in living bodies. These conditions
ofmarginalization,ifnotoutrightdenial,haveinthehistoryofcultures,
includingU.S.culture,generatedspecificpracticesandformsofcultural
presencing.
The attempt undertaken here, of grouping together late life and
disability,canbejustifiedonanumberofgrounds,apartfromtherather
obvious fact that late life is a period of the human life course in which
disabling impairments, corporeal or cognitive, occur more frequently
than at any other time.^53 More importantly, late life and disability are
bothconditionswherethegrammarofnormswhichregulatetheirpublic
presence are seemingly anchored unquestioningly in the "natural order
of things" and thus largely unchallenged in the social and cultural
manifold.^54
(^53) Significantly, norms addressing late life or disability are often of delimiting
kind, marking off the expanse of what is not or no longer possible, naming
inexorablelimitstohumandesire.
(^54) A note on terminology: in spite of the reservations expressed by many
activists, I will retain here the term "disability" because it is the current and
comprehensivetermwhichreferstobothaphysiologicalconditionwhichentails