Interventions into Disability Politics, 20th November 2024
In 1999, the American radio speaker Thom Hartmann proposed to explain the origin of ADHD as an “evolutionary mismatch”: ADHD people would be characterised by “pre-modern minds”, fit for hunter-gatherer societies and unfit for life in agriculture-based societies, including ours. In 2011, the neuroscientist Jared Reser analogously proposed to explain the autistic mind as fit for the life of “solitary foragers” in prehistory, but unfit for “more advanced” forms of society. Even before, in 1998, the neuropsychologist Nicholas Humphrey described the mind of prehistoric cave painters as “premodern” through a comparison with the drawings of Nadia, an autistic girl studied by Lorna Selfe in the 1970s.
These three cases are connected by an atavistic representation of neurological differences. Neurodivergent minds are imagined as “living fossils”, characterised by forms of regression to previous stages of human evolution: in other words, as essentially backwards, underdeveloped, premodern, archaic, primitive. As Dipesh Chakrabarty has well highlighted, such representations have commonly concerned colonised people throughout the long history of modernity, in the framework of the most famous justifications of colonialism itself: the “white man’s burden”. It is instead less known that a relationship between neurodivergent and non-European people appears to pervade the history of Western thought at least since John Locke’s An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, where “children”, “savages”, and “idiots” were jointly considered as figures of backwardness par excellence.
In the seminar, a reconstruction of the history of these atavistic representations of neurodivergence will be conducted, analysing how they have influenced modern psychiatry in general (already in Freud) and the constitution of the category of autism in particular (already in Bleuler and Piaget). It will be argued that the common, constitutive exclusion of neurodivergent and non-European people from the definition of modernity is an integral part of the pathologising processes that invested both groups.
Bernardo Paci is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Naples “Federico II” and an Adjunct Professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Milan, where he earned his PhD in Philosophy and Human Sciences. He is a member of the Group of Critical Theory of Society at the University of Milan-Bicocca. His research focuses on the intersection of critical theory, postcolonial studies, and global intellectual history. His latest publication within disability studies is the article Autistici laboriosi, autistici pericolosi. Neurodivergenze mostruose e dove trovarle [Labouring Autistic People, Dangerous Autistic People: Monstruous Neurodivergences and Where to Find Them]
