Conclusion: Thinking Differently

Abstract

The postconventional and often explicitly postmodernist theories that I have been using as my mode of analysis throughout are proving essential tools to critical disability studies because they enable us to embark on the crucial ethical step of thinking differently. Nietzsche might not be the most obvious philosopher to associate with refiguring disability, but his project of thinking and consequently feeling beyond normative frameworks sets up the conditions of possibility for a radical socio-cultural and socio-political revaluation of who and what is to count in the era of postmodernity. As I have been arguing all along, critical disability studies takes its lead from a plethora of postconventional theories — which in the main have little or nothing to say directly about the specificity of the disabled condition — and creatively bends and rearranges them to reveal new insights pertinent to the issues in hand. It is simultaneously an act of bricolage and resistance that aims to break through the limitations of the modernist paradigm to construct more appropriate modes of engaging with the disabled body. Whilst acknowledging that the concerns of liberal humanism have contributed greatly to the amelioration of the material oppressions directed against disability and cannot be lightly dismissed, a more critical approach takes the further step beyond the straight-jacket of binary differences to explore the fluidity of all forms of categorisation.

We have to learn to think differently — in order at last, perhaps very late on, to attain even more: to feel differently

(Nietzsche 1982: 104)