筑波学院大学紀要第18集

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2023年

The Big Normate Does Not Exist:
Hegel, Lacan, and Disability
A. Tyler Jorn ＊1. The constitutive role of disability in the process of subjectivisation
Lacanʼs early theory of the mirror stage describes the process by which an infant (which is
not yet a subject) begins to build up an imaginary self-identification – a proto-ʻegoʼ or ʻIʼ – througha process, not of truthful recognition, but of fictive misrecognition. Put simply, the relative
wholeness and autonomy of the entity reflected in the mirror presents a phantasmatic ideal, anʻimagoʼ, which belies the infantʼs experiences of bodily incompleteness, fragmentation, clumsiness,and incapacitation. Though the ʻlittle manʼ remains ʻtrapped in his motor impotence and nurslingdependenceʼ, Lacan writes, he nevertheless discovers in the mirror a ʻspecular imageʼ which willserve throughout life as the substrate or ʻroot-rockʼ of all those secondary identifications by meansof which he will progressively ensconce himself within the socio-symbolic order as a libidinally1ʻnormalʼ, mature subject. Crucially for Lacan, however, this ego-form is constitutively unattainable,
a mere ʻideal-Iʼ; it is situated ʻin a fictional direction that will forever remain irreducible for any single
individual or, rather, that will only asymptotically approach the subjectʼs becoming, no matter how
successful the dialectical syntheses by which he must resolve, as I, his discordance with his own
2

realityʼ. The ego, in short, is the object of a never-ending fundamental project by which the subject
desperately tries to overcome the ineliminable lack at the heart of its own being. No matter how
complete or successful this ego becomes, it can only ever approximate (ʻapproach asymptoticallyʼ)
the desired state of originary perfection.
Three points of clarification are in order. First, the state of wholeness represented by theimage in the mirror is apprehended, never as such, but always only negatively, in the form of
its absence; it is a retroactive (nachträglich) construction which comes into being in the act ofegoic misrecognition itself. What the infant discovers in the mirror, in other words, is not thesolution to a problem but rather the problem itself, one that did not exist until it was presented in
the form of its solution – not unlike the way in which falling in love creates the very unhappiness＊筑波学院大学 経営情報学部、Tsukuba Gakuin University

1

Jacques Lacan, Bruce Fink (tr.), The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function as Revealed in Psychoanalytic2

Ibid., 76.

Experienceʼ, in Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English, (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2006), 76.

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筑波学院大学紀要182023that subsequently determines the meaning and truth of the entire past history of oneʼs current
relationship (or, as Lacan would say, that ʻquiltsʼ the relationship). So far from being a source of
inner peace, the ego is rather a lure that keeps the subject trapped in a cycle of perpetual insecurity
and dissatisfaction. Second, this initial problem first conjured by the appearance of the spectral
image is not one of mere empirico-physical imperfection or inadequacy, but rather concerns thever y phenomenality of embodiment as such. As Shildrick writes, precisely because the infant
is psychically exposed from birth to ʻimages of castration, mutilation, dismembermentʼ, and thelike, i.e., ʻimagoes of the fragmented bodyʼ, it follows that the ʻstability and distinction of normative
embodimentʼ demands ʻa re/suppression of the dis-integration which belongs to the subject asembodiedʼ, and a corresponding ʻlifelong desire to recognise oneself, and to be recognised as a3

unified and stable selfʼ. Third and finally, the emergence of this (retroactively constituted) problem
of embodiment is both conceptually isomorphic with and temporally proximate to the way in which
the subject emerges as a subject of lack in the process of socialisation qua integration into the sociosymbolic (i.e., linguistic) order – or, expressed in psychoanalytic terms, as (symbolically) ʻcastratedʼ.
Subjectivity proper, i.e., as constituted by desire, is born in the recognition of the desire of the(m)Other, i.e., in the childʼs awareness that it is not the exclusive object of the (m)Otherʼs attention(I cannot recognise myself as recognised by another until and unless I am not the sole focus of her
attention; being looked away from is the a priori condition of being looked at). What the subject
is always trying to recover – that which constitutes the cause of its desire – is the ʻlost objectʼ,the constitutively absent ʻThing-in-itselfʼ, ʻdas Dingʼ, which first appears at the moment when the(m)Otherʼs desire reveals itself to be the desire of/for another.
Taking these three points together allows us to draw two important conclusions. First, it mustbe said that the process of ego-formation is ontologically correlated with a traumatic confrontation
with disability, now properly understood as the dis-integration intrinsic to embodiment as such; theimage in the mirror is the spectral negation of the infant laid bare in the ʻorganic inadequacy of [its]4natural realityʼ. What is more – and to repeat – the spectral image, this ʻroot-stockʼ of subsequentidentifications, insofar as it elicits this impotence and inadequacy in the very process of (seemingly)
rectifying it, cannot but fail to deliver on the promise of full integrity which it holds out: every
imaginary embellishment serves only to expose further embellishment-requiring imperfections, ad
infinitum (a phenomenon which is evident from even the most parochial experience of seeing oneʼs
reflection in an actual mirror). Lacanʼs own choice of example is unusually apt here. Lacan describes
how he has often had the occasion
to reflect upon the striking spectacle of a nursling in front of a mirror who has not yet masteredwalking, or even standing, but who – though held tightly by some prop, human or artificial (what,
in France, we call a trotte-bébé [a sort of walker]) – overcomes, in a flutter of jubilant activity,
the constraints of his prop in order to adopt a slightly leaning-forward position and take in an
3

Margrit Shildrick, Embodying the Monster: Encounters with the Vulnerable Self (London: SAGE Publications, 2002), 79–80.

4Lacan, The Mirror Stageʼ, 77.

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A. Tyler Jorn: The Big Normate Does Not Exist5

instantaneous view of the image in order to fix it in his mind.

In other words, the image which the infant ʻfixes in her mindʼ as the raw material for subsequentego-curation is one whose integrity is already compromised by a vulnerability which the eventual
removal of the walker will only displace and defer, never overcome.
Second, there is every reason to think that the disclosure of the inadequacy of embodimentelicited by the identificatory misrecognition of/in the spectral image not only accompanies theprocess of castration but indeed is fundamentally and irreducibly linked to it. The subject, thatis, cannot but discern that the constitutive impotence and instability exposed by the image aresomehow deeply implicated in its failure to secure the unmediated desire of the (m)Other. What
this means is that the lifelong project of curating the ego-ideal has a twofold significance: thephantasy of full jouissance is concomitant with the phantasy of total emancipation from the finitude
of embodiment, i.e., from disability. The ego that would be the sole object of the (m)Otherʼsattention and affection would also and necessarily be one unburdened by limits to what it can do.
ʻThe illusor y ideal whole of the non-disabledʼ subject, Dan Goodley writes, ʻis sustained by the
6

localisation of lack in the disabled body: there is castration, not hereʼ. Or as Tobin Siebers nicely
puts it, ʻthe body posited by social constructionism is a body...infinitely teachable and adaptableʼ.
This perfectly able body ʻis a prop for the ego, a myth we all accept for the sake of enjoyment, for we
all learn early on, as Lacan explains, to see the clumsiness and ineptitude of the body in the mirror
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as a picture of health – at least for a little whileʼ. In short, the road to boundless love is paved withdreams of absolute freedom.

2. Disability as the ‘master trope of disqualification’
What we have been calling the ʻ(m)Otherʼ has a strictly formal rather than empirical status.
It refers not to any actual others – and certainly not to any actual mothers – but rather to a deep
structure of (socio-)psychical subjectivity as such. Put simply, the (m)Other signifies that fromwhich ultimate satisfaction qua full, unmediated love and attention are sought, that which enfolds
the promise of das Ding within itself. Insofar as this ʻThingʼ is constitutively lost, however, the(m)Other is also inextricably bound up with the source or agency of the manifold prohibitions
which render it inaccessible, i.e., the source of ʻthe Lawʼ in the most general sense, what Lacan
sometimes calls the ʻNom-du-Pèreʼ, the name/no of the Father qua Law-giving authority (nom andnon are homophones in French). To repeat, ʻMotherʼ and ʻFatherʼ denote not any ʻrealʼ persons here
but rather abstract functions or positions which structure the socio-symbolic order itself (thoughthese functions may well be, and often are, carried out by actual mothers and fathers in real life).
In other words, the Other (or ʻBig Otherʼ) is itself ontologically and irreducibly contradictory –fractured, dis-integrated, ʻbarredʼ. Dangling out the promise of a fulfilment to which it forever denies
5

Ibid., 75–6.

6

Dan Goodley, Disability Studies: An Interdisciplinary Introduction (London: SAGE Publications, 2011), 132.

7

Tobin Siebers, Disability Theory (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2008), 60.

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筑波学院大学紀要182023

access, it is the engine of a desire which is condemned to perpetual oscillation between fawningobedience and the temptation to anarchic transgression.
The Lacanian concept of the Other is roughly equivalent to what Rosemarie Garland-Thomson
calls – drawing attention to its norm-generating and normalising functions – the ʻnormateʼ. As sheputs it, the normate ʻusefully designates the social figure through which people can represent
8

themselves as definitive human beingsʼ. As a social figure rather than a sociological category, thenormate – or what we might call, playfully echoing Lacan, the ʻBig Normateʼ – is not an empiricalcollection of really existing people but a structure governing how subjects relate to other subjects.
It is true, of course, that certain really existing people seem to belong to the Normate more thanothers, but the important thing to grasp is that this is true for everyone equally, qua subject. The
Normate is not a club to which a few unlucky souls are denied membership; one cannot be ʻinʼ orʻout ofʼ the Normate in this sense. The Normate is rather that to which the subject remains always
and forever extimate vis-à-vis others who cannot but appear to it either as privy to a jouissance towhich it is denied access or else as somehow complicit in such denial. Thus if the Normate names
ʻthe constructed identity of those who...can step into a position of authority and wield the power it
grants themʼ, we should not take this to mean that one is ever in a position to fully own this identity
oneself; it is always and necessarily the authority of another. This is what Lacan is getting at when
he says, obscurely, that the Other does not exist. The Other/Normate is an ʻillusory, ideologicalʼ
entity, ʻan image that dominates without material substance, a phantom “majority” opposed to an
9overwhelming and equally illusory “minority”ʼ.

The Normate, then, and crucially, is always encountered in the form of a barrier which thesubject must negotiate in pursuit of an authority and acceptance which remain forever out of reach.
On the basis of what we have outlined above, it should by now be clear that the name for this barrieris, in a word, disability. If the Normate, as Garland-Thomson argues, is ʻthe figure outlined by the10array of deviant others whose marked bodies shore up the normateʼs boundariesʼ,then ability, as

Tobin Siebers succinctly puts it, ʻis the ideological baseline by which humanness is determined. The
lesser the ability, the lesser the human beingʼ.

11

These (phantasmatic) ʻdefinitive human beingsʼ

circumscribed by this barrier are those whose infinite poietic plasticity and perfect wholeness andstability are the ideal and model of all ego-formation. This is likewise what Mitchell and Snyder are
getting at when they describe disability as the ʻmaster trope of human disqualificationʼ.

12

Althoughthey are more interested in the ways in which disability functions in narrative representation (quaʻnarrative prosthesisʼ), their underlying theoretical assumption is more radical. ʻFor all populationsʼ,
they claim, ʻphysical and cognitive limitations constitute a baseline of cultural undesirability from
8

Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature (New9

Ibid., 32.

10Ibid., 8.

11

Siebers, Disability Theory, 10.

York: Columbia University Press, 2017), 8.

12David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder, Narrative Prosthesis: Disability and the Dependencies of Discourse (Ann Arbor: The
University of Michigan Press, 2000), 3.

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A. Tyler Jorn: The Big Normate Does Not Exist

13

which they must dissociate themselvesʼ.

This unambiguous indictment of ʻall populationsʼ suggeststhat there is something primordially disturbing about disability which subtends the specificity of
every particular socio-cultural construction of disability, such that ʻphysical or cognitive inferiority
has historically characterised the means by which bodies have been constructed as “deviant”ʼ.

14

To describe disability as the master trope of human disqualification is to posit that ʻdisablisationʼ
is the logic of social exclusion as such: exclusion is accomplished through ascriptions of disability,
while counterclaims to participation in full humanity almost always involve challenging or disproving
such ascriptions. One important implication of this is that the recuperation of a given marginalised
identity is usually accomplished through a procedure of decoupling from another identity which
henceforth assumes the excluded status of the former. This is evident, Mitchell and Snyder argue,
from the fact that as ʻfeminist, race, and sexuality studies sought to unmoor their identities fromdebilitating physical and cognitive associations, they inevitably positioned disability as the “real”
limitation from which they must escapeʼ.

15

Even within disability communities themselves thesame dynamic of recuperation-through-exclusion plays itself out, for example, in the way in which
disabled people are routinely forced to exploit ʻinstitutionally enforced hierarchies of disabilityʼ
which presuppose a rank ordering of disabilities according to their degree of assimilability. For
example, it is often noted that ʻthe fate of people with physical disabilities has often depended upon
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their ability to distance themselves from their cognitively disabled peersʼ.

3. Disability and concrete universality: the constitutive exception
Thus far we have been sketching out the rough contours of an ontology of disability which
can be summarised in two key points. First, disability was seen to be a basic structural featureof subjectivity qua irreducible component of desire. It manifests itself in the form (for the mostpart unconscious) of an ineliminable limit – what the German philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte
calls a ʻcheckʼ (Anstoß) – on the subjectʼs power to master its own fate. Disability is a constitutive
inadequacy which the subject is always already in the process of struggling to overcome in andthrough its project of curating an ego-ideal whose seamless integrity, stability, and autonomy attractand hold the full, unmediated attention and loving acceptance of the Other. As Lennard Daviswrites, ʻThe disabled body, far from being the body of some small group of victims, is an entity
from the earliest of childhood instincts, a body that is common to all humansʼ.
18

different idiom, insofar as Lacan at least partially assimilates the Other to God,

17

Expressed in a

we might say thatthe project of ego-formation can be re-cast in terms of what Sartre describes as the fundamental
project of becoming God qua (impossible) endeavour to establish ourselves as the foundation of
13

Ibid., 3.

14

Ibid., 2 (my emphasis).

15

Ibid.

16

Ibid., 3.

17

Cited in Shildrick, Embodying the Monster, 80.

18

See Slavoj Žižek, The Big Other Doesnʼt Existʼ, Journal of European Psychoanalysis (Spring–Fall, 1997).

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筑波学院大学紀要182023

our own nothingness. Subjectivity or ʻbeing-for-itselfʼ is defined, Sartre says, by desire in the sensethat the subject wants to take over the ʻimpermeability and infinite densityʼ of nature or ʻbeing-in19

itselfʼ, i.e., wants to ʻescape from contingency and facticityʼ and thus ʻbe its own foundationʼ.

Theʻfundamental valueʼ animating all human life is thus ʻthe in-itself-for-itselfʼ, the ideal of an absolutepermanence and stability of being to which ʻwe can give the name “God”ʼ. Simply put, ʻhuman20

realityʼ is ʻfundamentally the desire to be Godʼ.

Desire accordingly signifies the subjectʼs attempt

to reacquire the lost object by obliterating any distance or distinction between the Other anditself. To do so, however, demands an ʻescape from contingency and facticityʼ, the annulment of all
limitation, permeability, and vulnerability – the ascension to absolute freedom qua simultaneous andinstantaneous realisation of all possibilities.
Second, and consequently, disability was seen to be the logic of all social exclusion. If theNormate represents the ideological ideal of human plenitude, and if ability is the name of that selfconstituting boundary behind which the Normate sequesters and regulates itself, it follows thatability is the index of oneʼs participation in humanity, such that to dehumanise another person isalways to implicate him or her – somehow and to whatever extent – in a negation of the power
to engage in that primordial struggle against oneʼs natural instability, vulnerability, etc. whichconstitutes the essence of ʻhuman-realityʼ. It is important to grasp this in its full significance:
disability represents the impossibility, not simply of recovering the lost object, but more profoundlyof fully engaging in the struggle for recovery at all. It is, of course, commonplace to deny desire todisabled people, but this is here meant in a fully ontological rather than a merely ontico-empiricalsense. It is not simply that disabled people lack sexuality, etc. (this is of course false, but besidethe point here), but instead that to be marginalised or excluded as disabled is to be denied desire
as such, in that what is being ascribed is an insurmountable limit to oneʼs ability even to fantasise.
In other words, oneʼs physical and/or cognitive differences are held to make it impossible even tolet oneself be duped by the ideal of an ego whose immunity to all ʻcontingency and facticityʼ mightsecure the infinite love of the Other. Human-reality is defined by the power, not actually to become
God, but rather to pursue God, and to be (defined or excluded as) disabled is to be compelled toresign oneself to the hard fact of the futility of this pursuit and the illusoriness of ultimate jouissance,i.e., to the ineluctability of castration. This is precisely what it means to say that the Normate is thebaseline for inclusion in humanity. To be empirically constituted as disabled is to be dehumanised
qua denied the ʻdefinitiveʼ human phantasy of merging with the Other by becoming the ground ofoneʼs own being. One is human just to the extent that one is able to dream the impossible.
Julia Kristeva is not wrong, then, when she invokes an ʻisolated world of disabilityʼ – ʻanotherworld, an antiworld, the world of disability cut off from the worldʼ.
19

21

The point is not that theJean-Paul Sartre, Sarah Richmond (tr.), Being and Nothingness: An Essay in Phenomenological Ontology (New York:
Washington Square Press, 2018), 735.

20
21

Ibid., 747.
Julia Kristeva, Jeanine Herman (tr.), Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, and...Vulnerabilityʼ, Womenʼs Studies Quarterly, Vol. 38,
No. 1/2, Citizenship (Spring/Summer, 2010), 254. See also Josh Dohmen, Disability as Abject: Kristeva, Disability, andResistanceʼ, Hypatia, Vol. 31, No. 4 (Fall, 2016), 762–78.

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A. Tyler Jorn: The Big Normate Does Not Existʻreallyʼ (empirically) disabled inhabit a kind of ghetto-(anti-)world to which the ʻreallyʼ abled havebanished them (sociologically speaking, of course, and to repeat, this is frequently the case), butrather, and more fundamentally, that ability just is the most general operator of the Normateʼs logic
of inclusion/exclusion, that which polices the boundary that circumscribes the ideological domainof ʻdefinitive human beingsʼ. Disability is implicated a priori in every gesture of exclusion; it is thename of the Outside ejected in and through the Normateʼs self-constituting sequestration. This notionof an antiworld inhabited by the less-than-fully-human – of a group whose particularity consists
entirely in its passive constitution as the wholly negative other excreted by the active self-defining/
enclosing of another group – can be further clarified with reference to the Hegelian/psychoanalytic
concept of concrete universality, or what Kisner terms the ʻconstitutive exceptionʼ, meaning an
exception without which the rule that excepts it could not exist. Such an exception is ʻoxymoronicʼ,Kisner explains, in that it ʻcannot be merely excluded from the universal because the universal isconstituted through it, and yet at the same time it cannot be included within the universal because
22

of its very exceptive character.ʼ

In ordinary life, of course, it is the rule, not its exceptions, which

we take to constitute the universal (e.g., all chairs must partake of some universal ʻchairnessʼ whichallows us to distinguish them from all other things in the world that are not chairs). The idea of theconstitutive exception flips this reasoning on its head. It refers not to any mere ʻabstract universalʼ
qua sterile property which, like the Cartesian cogito, is equally present in all particulars, but rather
to something which, as Žižek puts it in The Puppet and the Dwarf, is
opened up by the symptomatic void in the order of Being, by the necessary inconsistency inits structural order, by the constitutive presence of a surnuméraire, of an element which isincluded in the totality of Order, although there is no proper place for it in this totality, andwhich, for this very reason – since it is an element without further particular specifications –professes to be the immediate embodiment of the Whole.

23

The classic example here is that of the German and the Jew under Nazism. As McGowan nicely
summarises it, ʻThe attempt to assert German particularity establishes an opposition between two
particulars (German and Jew), but one of these particulars must take on the form of the universal inorder to define the other. In an ironic twist, however, it is not the Germanʼ but rather the opposing
particular, the Jew, which ʻcomes to act as universal because it provides the basis through which
one can identify oneself as a Germanʼ.

24

Now if what we have argued above is true, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that disability
is the ultimate constitutive exception, the master exception that constitutes the inner truth of
every other. If it is indeed ʻthose who are excluded, with no proper place within the global order,
who directly embody the true universality, who represent the Whole in contrast to all others who
22

Wendell Kisner, The Concrete Universal in Žižek and Hegelʼ, International Journal of Žižek Studies, Vol. 2, No. 2 (2016), 13.

23Žižek in ibid., 5, 13.

24

Todd McGowan, Emancipation After Hegel: Achieving a Contradictory Revolution (New York: Columbia University Press,2019), 193–4.

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筑波学院大学紀要182023

stand only for particular interestsʼ, then disability, as the denial of the very nihilation constitutive ofexistence – a kind of premature death, an externally imposed fixity of being which kills the desire forthe in-itself-for-itself (= God) – is nothing if not the most ʻradical universalityʼ.

25

ʻIs nothingʼ – that is

to say, in the eyes of a Normate which is itself nothing outside of its omnipresent gaze, the universal
can only ever appear as pure negation, nullity. Just as the Nazi ʻphilosopherʼ Alfred Rosenberg could
only describe Jewishness as an ʻanti-raceʼ – the absence of a distinct racial identity

26– so too can

the Normate only articulate its particular identity (viz., its investment in the phantasy of a limitlesspotentiality-for-being) by opposing itself to another particular which it ejects out of the process of its
own self-sequestration, one which has only a negative and opposing (non-)identity: the ʻdis-abledʼ.
This example is useful in that it draws much-needed attention to the political dimension ofuniversality. As Kisner notes, the power of the concrete universal lies in the fact that it alone isin a position to expose the hypocrisy – the mere one-sided particularity – of every purportedly
abstract universal. Only the concrete universal is in a position to say, ʻThe former universal...is afalse universal, not because it excludes us and we demand recognition, but because by excluding27

us it fails to be truly universalʼ.

In doing so, it exposes the contradiction inherent in every abstract

universal as such (i.e., as dependent upon what it excludes), which in turn opens up the possibilityof a political project focused no longer on this or that particular demand, but on the universal claimthat resonates in every demand.

28

Put in other words, the constitutive exception is, in Hegelianjargon, ʻsingularʼ rather than merely particular; it is a ʻparticular-become-universalʼ as opposed tojust another particular which could be set off against other particulars as so many ʻspecial interestsʼ.
For this reason, ʻthe constitutive exception is the singularity which, as self-relating universality, is29

the concrete universal that can inaugurate a new beginningʼ.

Such a new beginning would not belike the reactionary pseudo-beginnings of fascism, Stalinism, etc., which marshal a false universality
in the service of the hegemonic domination and destruction of other particulars; there is no way
for the figure of the asylum seeker, the disabled, etc. qua singular to assume vis-à-vis another the
position and status of the Nazi vis-à-vis the Jew, insofar as these figures acquire their identity only
and precisely in the way in which they expose the sham universality of the special interests that
eject them. But nor would it mean, as Kristeva advocates, simply encouraging non-disabled people30

to acknowledge their own irreducible vulnerabilities.

It would rather – at least this is the hope –be one that could, by laying bare the inherent failure of the universal itself, serve to mobilise whatŽižek calls a ʻpolitical logic of the excess constitutive of every established Orderʼ,31

and thus to open

up entirely new ways of thinking about humanity and human freedom as such. The claim ventured
here is that disability might constitute the axis – a little tilted, to be sure – around which such a new25

Kisner, The Concrete Universalʼ, 13–14.

26

McGowan, Emancipation After Hegel, 194.

27

Kisner, The Concrete Universalʼ, 14–15.

28Žižek in ibid., 15.

29

Ibid., 26.

30

See Dohmen, Disability as Abjectʼ, 764.

31

Kisner, The Concrete Universalʼ, 16.

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A. Tyler Jorn: The Big Normate Does Not Exist

political logic might turn.

References
Dohmen, Josh. ʻDisability as Abject: Kristeva, Disability, and Resistanceʼ. Hypatia, Vol. 31, No. 4 (Fall, 2016).
Garland-Thomson, Rosemarie. Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture andLiterature. New York: Columbia University Press (2017).
Goodley, Dan. Disability Studies: An Interdisciplinary Introduction. London: SAGE Publications (2011).
Kisner, Wendell. ʻThe Concrete Universal in Žižek and Hegelʼ. International Journal of Žižek Studies, Vol. 2, No. 2(2016).
Kristeva, Julia. ʻLiberty, Equality, Fraternity, and...Vulnerabilityʼ. Trans. Jeanine Herman. Womenʼs Studies
Quarterly, Vol. 38, No. 1/2, ʻCitizenshipʼ (Spring/Summer, 2010).
Lacan, Jacques. Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English. Trans. Bruce Fink. New York: W. W. Norton &Company (2006).
McGowan, Todd. Emancipation After Hegel: Achieving a Contradictory Revolution. New York: Columbia
University Press (2019).
Mitchell, David T. and Snyder, Sharon L. Narrative Prosthesis: Disability and the Dependencies of Discourse. Ann
Arbor: The University of Michigan Press (2000).
Sartre, Jean-Paul. Being and Nothingness: An Essay in Phenomenological Ontology. Trans. Sarah Richmond. New
York: Washington Square Press (2018).
Shildrick, Margrit. Embodying the Monster: Encounters with the Vulnerable Self. London: SAGE Publications(2002).
Siebers, Tobin. Disability Theory. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press (2008).
Žižek, Slavoj. ʻThe Big Other Doesnʼt Existʼ. Journal of European Psychoanalysis (Spring–Fall, 1997). URL:
https://www.lacan.com/zizekother.htm. (Accessed 10 Sept 2022.)

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