The Silent Biomedical Others. Intimacy, Communication, and Neurological Queerness

Abstract

In this essay, I delineate the relationship between movement, thought, and the ability to speak. In neurology, the biomedical view constructs the image of the subaltern, a muted lifeform devoid of personality and whose life is not congruent with the concepts of autonomy and capacity. I propose to name these human beings “biomedical others.” An anomaly, this subaltern, is an underside of the philosophical totalization of subjectivity. In the biomedical framework, others are devoid of speech. Medicine, its institutes, and agents in the healthcare system speak to them. However, the lives of biomedical others are based on gestures, facial expressions, and body commands that are enacted as micro-gestures. The urgency to give voice to the biomedical others is the ethical task of this essay. They are namely voiceless and powerless, evoking a different kind of ethics: fragility, minority, and silence.

Keywords

• biomedical others
• disability
• neurology
• patient
• subaltern