Scholarly Seminar Series: 

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The specter haunting autism

         an essay in five scenes

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There is something spectral about the spectrum.

 

In a recent essay, the analyst Sergio Benvenuto cunningly argues that autism haunts psychiatry as a kind of present absence, its slippery ubiquity evoking the etymology of the word itself:  apparition, appearance, image, the Latin spectrum rooted in the Indo-European spek, meaning to observe.  Viewing autism as a spectrum or sliding scale of differences suggests that its various forms and iterations are so heterogeneous they might not even, in the end, add up to a single syndrome.  If each case of autism is understood to be unique and distinct, in some sense individual (undivided or indivisible, single, singular) or conditional (contingent, dependant on condition or circumstance) it becomes ever more challenging to find the elusive common feature that links them; the elusiveness of this shared unary trait renders autism ever more ghost-like.  As testimonies and representations of autistic people become more current in the culture, more familiar, more marketed—online, in memoirs, as characters in novels and shows—it almost seems psychiatry is beginning to abandon the category. 

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Does autism represent the ultimate withdrawal into a singular existence—autonomous, self-ruled, in-divisible—or the resorption of every uniqueness into interlocking sets, aggregates, collectives, categories and taxonomies?  Psychiatry’s relentlessly assimilative patterning, since Kraepelin—its reduction to a set of symptoms or given criteria, its refashioning of clinical-temporal specificities as common shapes, traits or features, ideal types or nosologies—results in a situation in which each instance of autism presents as, at once, utterly unique and utterly common, communal or even universal. 

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The enigmas crazing the current discourse on autism and its clinical-institutional surround suggest that, rather than cleaving to one or another orthodoxy, analysts might more generatively follow Derrida in conceiving of our practice as a paradoxy, requiring a stance running counter to all currents of shared opinion.  Such a practice would insist that we persist in a conspiracy to invoke the specter of an undead subjectivity, one which goes on emerging apophatically, like the appearance of a water-mark, from the negative space of the knot or aporia, bar or wall, ‘void at the center of the torus’ or ‘true hole;’ the whirlpool, gap, slot or slit opening between the saying and the said, between the spoken sentence and what is understood in what is heard—from within language, that is, dominated or ruled by sense (meaning)—at once by semblance. 

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Presenter: Benjamin Davidson

Dates/Times: October 11th, 1:00 pm Pacific Time

Location: Online via Zoom

Contact: organizer Sheila Cavanagh at sheila@yorku.ca

Fee: free, donation to School encouraged

Note: This is a continuously changing ongoing series