All diseased things are critics

Abstract

This essay argues that pathology as an analytical form functions as the ethical critique of mutual vulnerability. In the broad sense of assessing what is life-giving and life-taking, a sustained critical engagement with pathological forms circulating through public life positions the study of rhetoric as a kind of immunotherapy for democracy. In that sense, embracing pathology as a critical analytic accepts biopower (expansively construed) as the operative framework for politics, which would seem like a kind of surrender to life-under-assault as the landscape of power. However, if wounds and their pathologies are understood as ethically ambiguous, it is possible to envision the critical potential of pathologia not only as immunotherapeutic but also as constitutive of new configurations of being together. Contrasted with a conception of pathology that presupposes a fixed difference between vital and morbid conditions, it is suggested that pathology be more precisely considered as the ethically ambiguous project of defining vitality and life that is “more than normal.”

Is democracy really dying? Sure feels like it. Open societies are so sick here and abroad that there is dread they may never recover. Proposals to expand and protect voting rights and even Trump’s impeachment by the House of the 116th U.S. Congress, however welcome, feel like taking aspirin for Alzheimer’s. It is hard to tell if what is really killing democracy is one systemic condition masked by chronic ailments or if the lesions are so many that the host is being overcome. Hyperconcentration of wealth, murderous police lynching Black life after Black life, inflamed White nationalism, paralytic ecological crises, aggravated toxic masculinity, extreme digital exposure, psychotic distrust of knowledge, waves of mass shootings, and hatred-as-style are all contenders for the trauma that will prove final. Pathology’s relevance for understanding rhetoric during the eclipse of democracy is all the more salient at this precise moment when a pandemic grips the world and when always again-anti-Black violence sparks outraged, weeks-long protest and crackdowns. What should we do, we professional analysts of discourse and democracy? Trapped in a miasma, asking “what” to do is dispiriting and requires discussion of “how” to formulate the “what.”

Rice (2015) raises this very problem—how to approach the pathologies shredding communal life? She suggests valuing the pain that we feel. Her essay “Pathologia” recounts an interview with a 9/11-truther who asked if she was Jewish before explaining that he was being framed as anti-Semitic by Jews for promoting the theory that Jews planned 9/11. “Words failed me, as I felt like an intense wound was opening up on my body. I felt that wound viscerally, sickeningly.” Rice then resurrects pathology for rhetoric not as “speech defect” but “sensorial defect,” the sign that “something has gone off the rails in a discernable way”. Her reason is that “pathology does not only or always reveal something broken. Rather, the experience of pathology also reminds us that rhetoric’s sensorium is working—really working.” Somewhere in the “sense that something is defective or misaligned” lies proof that we are connected and that things can and should be otherwise (p. 35, original emphasis).

Yet descriptions of wounds, Rice (2015) observes, routinely go unescorted by claims of what to do about them. Why “normative and prescriptive goals do not always emerge in our critical work” is complicated, but reliance on critical methods that equate normativity with pathology plays a part. Regardless of why, “normative ambivalence haunts our work” (pp. 36, 37). Contemplating the wounds of public life, one must confront what brings democracy low to revitalize it, but a therapeutic responsibility remains after diagnosis. Grasping what is pathological is difficult, however, so Rice starts with pain as an orientation to pathogenic material. “In experiencing the commonality of being wounded together . . . we are gathered” (p. 42, original emphasis).

I want to sit with this last point and consider pathology as a critical framework. Pathology is distinguished by being explicitly normative yet contingent, so rhetoricians donning the mantle of public life’s pathologists would undertake the critique of vulnerabilities in order “to cultivate new forms of being-together” (Rice, 2015, p. 44). Before COVID-19 remade public life, such as it was, and before George Floyd’s murder ignited earth shaking Black Lives Matter protests and activism, gathering through woundedness seemed like an orientation. As I revise this essay, those events make it acutely clear that pathology is not a lens; it is incumbent to living. It is the ethical derivation of how to live better from what sickness teaches, with the dumfounding caveat that what wounds, what conditions harm, and even what constitutes disease (communal or biotic) are not secured by the concept of pathology. Given that, I suggest that pathology is an inescapable yet indeterminate mode of critique. To ground claims of what ought we do under the authority of the wound, rhetoricians must get comfortable with the ambiguity fueling pathology’s critical power and, furthermore, make a tenuous, conditional peace with immunitary politics. The historic dangers of seeking immunities to perceived threats warrants opposition, but the irony is that such opposition only turns immunitary thinking against itself, so better understanding of the risks of immunitary politics seems the only responsible option.

In what follows, I first problematize the pathological as a relative critique of value. Starting with pain as a way of knowing, I argue that the ambiguity of pathology is the source of its critical power. Then, I consider what it would mean to approach the study of rhetoric as civic immunotherapy, noting that to develop pathology for emancipatory purposes requires a careful re-orientation to biopolitics.

The critical ambiguity of pathology

If pathology teaches what is wrong while showing the value of different ways of living, prime issues to sort out for pathogenic analyses are “who or what learns from what or who?” and “what is it that can be learned?” These questions take us from Rice’s (2015) provocation into the relational ontology of disease and health, especially within open societies. Yet, following Rice, one begins with pain as way of knowing. Pathology supposes beings learn of themselves and their worlds through harm that befalls them, so pain is a feeling and a thread running through being.

In The Body in Pain, Scarry (1985) describes pain as human knowledge reflected in the world and argues that designed spaces or artifacts tell a story of pain:

The naturally existing external world . . . is wholly ignorant of the “hurtability” of human beings. Immune, inanimate, inhuman, it indifferently manifests itself in the thunderbolt and hailstorm, rabid rat, smallpox microbe, and ice crystal. The human imagination reconceived the external world, divesting it of its immunity and irresponsibility not by literally putting it in pain or making it animate, but by, quite literally, “making it” as knowledgable about human pain as if it were animate and in pain. . . . the world outside the body is made compassionately effective as if every line and nuance of its materialized design were speaking those words. (pp. 288–289, original emphasis)

I find this a brilliant discernment of pain as an environmental milieu, but the dualities are worrisome in that Scarry depicts things not reflecting a certain knowledge of pain as inanimate and inhuman. Chen (2012) might note the hierarchy of animacy is all too human.

Chen (2012), who lives with mercury poisoning and fatigue, questions the inanimacy of things that afflict their fragile body as well as those that lift it up: “[w]hat is lost when we hold tightly to that exceptionalism which says that couches are dead and we are live?” (pp. 197, 210). The question holds not just for heavy metals or furnishings. One should ask of that exceptionalism which says Black life is socially dead; a pervasive anti-Black climate is a daily reminder of what is lost to lift up fragile White life (Sharpe, 2016, loc. 1981-2051). Still, suffering is an unsteady idea because there are “myriad physical, emotional, social, and cultural causes of pain and an equally myriad number of physical and emotional symptoms and manifestations,” so there are “many natures of pain” (Graham, 2015, pp. 23, 24). That the inhuman might be defined as lacking a human sense of pain presupposes a singular humanity manifested by suffering.

Flatten the hierarchy, though, and the insight becomes more robust. Divest those humans hoarding agency for themselves and distribute it instead throughout the affectivity weaving together all kinds of beings. In a less bifurcated world, humanity is also the thunderbolt to non-humanity and Humanity as a racial, colonial project inhumanly destroys Others—like, and with, smallpox microbes (Lethabo King, 2019). The human is knowledgeable of the pain of the inhuman and vice versa because it is the same world, not two worlds. There is no “we” and “it,” only different things that cannot help but harm themselves even in the act of healing, which does not make harm innocent or unaccountable. Rather not; harm is a pliable fact of existence forged into far-from-innocent segregations between living and dying, from which Man emerged (Wynter, 2003, pp. 270–283).

This world is not made to know “our” pain but becomes itself through pain inflicted in every direction, living knowledge of vulnerability through wounds prevented and wounds occurred. A revision of Scarry finds that every surface, every space, every sequence expresses vulnerability by avoiding or allowing wounds. Immanent knowledge is as fully suspended in the “effective compassion” of smooth edges and non-toxic materials as it is in the “effective heartlessness” of sharp objects and poisonous mixtures; as it is in the effective compassion of free assembly and the effective heartlessness of militarized policing. “In this sense, knowledge is a form of life, belongs to life, but then life, human and nonhuman, cannot be considered a ‘blind and stupid’ force” (Marrati & Meyers, 2008, p. viii, original emphasis).

Pathology is a living memory of relative vitality and morbidity, and it is helpful to consider pathology in medicine to grasp that relativity (though the detour feels ironically bloodless as the world convulses). Canguilhem (1991), in The Normal and the Pathological, argued that medically, health is constitutively ambiguous; vitality and morbidity have no essential character. However, pathologia provide functional clarity by critically disambiguating vulnerabilities into diseased and normal—for specific beings in particular environs. He concluded that the pathological

“implies pathos, the direct and concrete feeling of suffering and impotence, the feeling of life gone wrong” within the milieu of living things, which renders a “judgment of virtual value” about forms of life (pp. 137, 121, original emphasis). “Disease is the behavior of negative value for a concrete individual living being in a relation of polarized activity with [their] environment.” (p. 223)

Pathogens demarcate agents of relative divergence from wellbeing (wellbeing also being relative, so relativity squared). He wrote that one “cannot say that the concept of the ‘pathological’ is the logical contradictory to the concept of the ‘normal,’ for life in the pathological state is not the absence of norms but the presence of other norms” (Canguilhem, 2008, p. 130). As Chen (2012) put it when discussing the pathogenic character of toxins, “[t]oxicity’s ‘first’ (under threat) and ‘second’ (threatening) bodies are thus in the eye of the beholder” (p. 192).

Given the relative relativity of pathology, Canguilhem (1991) argued, “Diseases are new ways of life” that reveal “normal functions to us at the precise moment” we are deprived “of their exercise.” In that regard, “[h]ealth is organic innocence” that “must be lost, like all innocence, so that knowledge may be possible” (pp. 100–101). Foucault (1963/1994) went further, noting life’s habit of dying: “Disease is a deviation within life . . . So the idea of disease attacking life must be replaced by a much denser notion of pathological life” (p. 153, original emphasis). Pathological life cuts away the capacities and qualities of other ways of life. As so often noted, Spinoza said we do not know what the body can do. For Canguilhem, pathology discloses knowledge through what the body can no longer do.

Disclosure through privation is central to making sense of pathology’s rhetoricity because disease is life become critique. Or, “the pathological spontaneously anatomizes” (Foucault, 1963/1994, p. 131). COVID-19 teaches about cell biology as it sickens, after all, as it does about governmental incompetence and life’s worth under narcissistic autocrats. Also often noted, Burke (1984) claimed that all living things are critics, but his example of all living things is a trout that learns to avoid the hook (p. 5). The trout identifies pathogenic humanity via the injurious lure, a symptom of the human deviation, and responds. Imagine if all fish evolved sufficiently to avoid being fished. This would be pathogenic to humans. Pathology is an authorless finger tracing normalcy’s virtual values in the detritus of life’s enervating, damaging pathways. “The thought of the living must take from the living the idea of the living” (Canguilhem, 2008, p. xx), with the proviso that life and not-life are always being reworked as a result. A twisted mash-up of Burke and Canguilhem might read: “all diseased things are critics,” a motto for gathering in woundedness.

Realizing pathology’s critical promise is challenging because it requires staring down a history of normalcy that is inflexible and rife with exceptionalism. Chen (2012) offers their experience of suffering from metal poisoning to illuminate that exceptionalism, taking us inside a walk about their neighborhood where ableism, heteronormativity, environment, and race coalesce in their “toxicity.” They navigate the street wearing a mask, on alert for perfumes and smoke, which are intolerable, catching expressions of “disgust at my Asian off-gendered form” and “seeking ways to effect a smile behind my mask . . . with whatever energy I have to connect with a person on loving terms” (pp. 199–200). Noting that masks perform exaggerated disability, the “question then becomes which bodies can bear the fiction of independence and of uninterruptability” (p. 199). Which bodies are normal? “I must constantly renegotiate, and recalibrate, my embodied experiences of intimacy, altered affect, and the porousness of the body. The nature of metal poisoning, accumulated over decades, is that any and every organ, including my brain, can bear damage” (p. 201). Chen’s toxicity is normal in that anybody can be so affected, yet their transness, race, and heightened vulnerability are grist for the normal’s many exceptions.

However, as was the case during the 1918 pandemic, that exceptionalism is modestly, briefly, put under pressure due to COVID-19 and masking which bodies can bear the fiction of independence and of uninterruptability, indeed. The virus challenges established orders of who or what is toxic as masking mirrors the “spontaneous anatomization” of the coronavirus, marking an apparent, collective disabling of humanity rather than shearing away toxic others from normals. Going unmasked is, for a moment, an exaggerated performance of independence as a new viral way of life establishes other norms.

Meanwhile, intense racial violence exposes a society torn apart at the joints by systemic privation and ruthlessness and makes brutally clear what Chen’s experience quietly demonstrates: pathologies unpredictably amplify their critical power in combination. Race has always been deeply linked with disease and a quick gesture toward that depth is admittedly risible, but racism has been long discussed as a moral sickness of coloniality and slavery (for example, see Powell in Moody et al., 1925, pp. 430–431). Racial otherness has been relentlessly cast as diseased (Gilman, 1985, pp. 129–138). Black bodies have been repeatedly abused in medical experiments (Washington, 2008), and racism today is considered a public health crisis (American Public Health Association, n.d.). Maya Wiley (2020), a legal analyst for MSNBC, recently noted that when 1 in 1000 Black men and boys are killed by police, racism is a pandemic. Labeling “essential workers” during lockdown is a less dramatic but trenchant example. Essential workers, disproportionately poor and people of color in food industries and frontline health care, are contradictorily inessential in that their exposure lifts up other, clearly more essential lives. The drastic over-representation of people of color in COVID hospitalizations and deaths is not random—an apparent human collective disclosed through masking combines with racial and economic pathologies to show what in life matters and whose lives matter (“COVID-19 in Racial and Ethnic Minority Groups,” 2020). The pandemic, like environmental racism, traces the color line through the people’s anatomy.

It is worth lingering, then, on the uncustomary critique embedded in a “dense notion of pathological life,” which derives axiological difference from being sick. Canguilhem (2008) writes,

If what is normal here can be pathological there, it is tempting to conclude that there is no boundary between the normal and the pathological. . . . But this does not mean that for a given individual the distinction is not absolute. When an individual begins to feel sick, to call [themself] sick, to comport [themself] as a sick person, [they have] passed into a different universe and become a different [person]. (p. 130)

That is, the “borderline between the normal and the pathological is imprecise for several individuals considered simultaneously but it is perfectly precise for one and the same individual considered successively” (Canguilhem, 1991, p. 182). Pathological life is contingently critical collectively but absolutely so individually. Chen (2012) writes, a “‘normal’ world’s order is lost when, for instance, things that can harm you permanently are not even visible to the naked eye,” whether racism or a virus, such that normalcy becomes momentary freedom, a “return to former ways of inhabiting space when I was in better health” (pp. 203, 198). The individual experiences wounds concretely. The collective, however, has no absolute sense of woundedness to ground normalcy.

It follows that the “normal is not a static or peaceful, but a dynamic and polemical concept” and “every value must be earned against an anti-value” (Canguilhem, 1991, p. 239). Pathological life performs the anti-value of “norms . . . that oblige the organism to henceforth live in a ‘shrunken’ milieu, which differs qualitatively, structurally, from its former milieu,” and which compel the organism “by its incapacity” to respond to new challenges in a reduced state (Canguilhem, 2008, p. 132). Passage into sickness teaches the difference between worlds and fuels visions of more capacious life. More than that, passage into sickness obligates response because “pathogenic stimuli or agents are never received by the organism as brute physical facts, but are lived by the consciousness as signs of tasks or tests” (Canguilhem, 1991, p. 270). Scanning the crowd to maintain 6 ft. of distance. Reading the eyes of police for the potential of violence. Learning to gesture facially while masked. For power anchored by life’s value, pathology is the rhetorica franca of critique because “recourse to disease” is “the only touchstone which this consciousness recognizes and thus demands” (p. 285). If so, it is not will we organize around the wound but how we do it.

Rhetorical critique as civic immunotherapy

Put differently, how far can rhetoric travel in the scrubs of medicine before it faces the responsibility of healing? What becomes of rhetorical analysis if it embraces pathology as a critical paradigm as compared to a critical object of scientific discourse? In the rhetorics of health and medicine, scholars consider the history and practice of caregiving and medically adjacent concerns like biosecurity or genetics or health policy (Melonçon & Scott, 2018). Disease is not often the governing analytic for studies of medical rhetoric although it is usually central to the analysis of a rhetoric. Considering democracy’s febrile present, pathology as a critical paradigm includes but is not constrained by biophysical or psychological notions of harm. There are many natures of pain. Rhetoric scholars would find “recourse to disease” a way of evaluating vulnerabilities disclosed by “shrunken milieus” so as to expand capacities and restore newly valued qualities of being.

That is surely difficult and requires a careful re-orientation to biopolitics to address questions of “which wounds matter and how.” It is beyond this essay to fully develop, but there are factors I think must be faced if one is to try. First among them is that rhetorical critique operates as a sort of immunotherapy for public life, which leads to two other, self-contradictory factors: this is old and yet it is new, and this embraces biopower yet it rejects it all the same.

A pathological paradigm is necessarily an immunitary paradigm. Esposito (2002/2013) explains that “there is no community without some kind of immunitary apparatus” (p. 16). Community develops partly by identifying and neutralizing pathological life because being together is sustained by adaptations to what diminishes togetherness. Chen (2012) explains, “Immune systems are themselves constituted by the intertwinings of scientific, public, and political cultures” (p. 194). What makes something immunitary is the way that it absorbs pathological life, turning it back on itself, to build and protect community. The world becomes itself by knowing pain. Esposito (2002/2013) writes, “there can be no regeneration that does not begin from, and within, a prior degeneration” (p. 118). Communal life is pathological and pathological life communal, yet pathology and community are not synonyms.

From an immunitary standpoint, biopolitics looks like this:

By placing the body at the center of politics and disease at the center of the body, it makes sickness, on the one hand, the outer margin from which life must continually distance itself, and, on the other, the internal fold that continually brings it back to itself. (Esposito, 2002/2013, p. 15).

Examples are not hard to find today. On 4 June 2020, Senator Kamala Harris demonstrated as much when justly, righteously rebuking Senator Rand Paul for blocking passage of the first Federal anti-lynching law, named in memory of Emmett Till:

For eight minutes and forty-six seconds, George Floyd plead for his life, called for his late mother, and said he could not breathe. The pain experienced not only by that man, that human being, and his family and his children, but the pain of the people of America, witnessing what we have witnessed since the founding of this country, which is that Black lives have not been taken seriously, as being fully human . . . So it is remarkable and it is painful to be standing here right now, especially when people of all races are marching in the streets of America outraged by the hate and the violence and the murder that has been fueled by racism during the span of this country’s life. And America is raw right now, her wounds exposed, raw from the fact that in the history of our country Black people have been treated as less than human. (KhaynesCspan, 2020)

Identifying suffocating racism in the polity simultaneously establishes a normalized “outer margin” that must be abandoned and a normative “internal fold” that returns us to questions of values.

Building community within a “prior degeneration” means that pathologies are sustaining. They are touchstones for the normative ought that founds claims of what a better world looks like. Rice might say the anti-lynching law, the demonstrations, and Harris’s rebuke are forms of gathering through wounds to build that world. Sharpe (2016) might add that “I can’t breathe” captures the wounds of “virulent antiblackness” with agonizing brevity. She considers “what it takes . . . to keep breath in the Black body” and, in a perfect turn of anti-Black pathology against itself, makes the “necessity of breath” the focal point for valuing Black life (loc. 2085). “Aspiration is the word that I arrived at for keeping and putting breath in the Black body,” where attending to the breath and breathlessness of Black individuals combats the morbidity of Whiteness/anti-Blackness (loc. 2454, original emphasis).

So, immunitary politics are old, yet they are new. They are old in that responsibility for building a good society has been the scandal of rhetoric since the ancients. If rhetoric is the lifeblood of togetherness, it has been damned for being incurably fickle, bringing vitality and morbidity, while also being charged with creating immunities to itself. Forms of rhetoric can or ideally try to operate as an immune system, except that protections can themselves become disordered (often profoundly). For example, rhetoric in religion is tasked with protecting community when called on to exhort moralities that “allow life to live, as long as [life] submits to that which protects it” (Esposito, 2002/2013, p. 56). Yet when pastors eschew public health guidance and exhort churchgoing during a deadly pandemic they moralize risking disease as spiritual health—submission before a broken promise of protection. Rhetoric also protects in law, not “from conflicts, but, on the contrary, through them” (p. 49, original emphasis). But as broken promises go, justice is nothing but rubble that ignores anti-Black police violence while tolerating armed White militants threatening legislators and governors. And rhetoric is deployed in culture for the “weakening of functional strength to strengthen a weakness, and vice versa,” which nevertheless can be turned inside out as when the strength of White supremacy is cast as hanging by a thread (p. 83).

The novelty of an immunitary paradigm for rhetorical critique today, following from Rice (2015), lies in turning pain back on itself to build new immune systems. Efforts to combat pathogenic norms are themselves normative regimes, which means the business of helping create new ways of being does so of necessity by diminishing other, dangerous ones. “[L]ife can be protected from what negates it only be means of a further negation” (Esposito, 2002/2013, p. 16). To build immunity requires a constancy of negative, anti-pathogenic action that is also affirmative (promoting some norms over others). Because immunities are fundamentally communication systems, not innate abilities, this should not alienate rhetoricians (Haraway, 1992, pp. 322–323). Indeed, “nothing is more dedicated to communication than the immune system” (Esposito, 2002/2013, p. 174). Immunities are capacitative, though, not instrumental, so there is need for rhetorical analyses of the capacities maintaining pathogenic norms over analyses that isolate characteristic techné because it is those capacities which actualize immunities. Concern for rhetoric in words, deeds, relations, and things that stokes the murderous immunities of Black lives—which surely constitutes a “shrunken milieu”—would task one to learn from Black pain, not to stare at its spectacle, to capacitate immunities. It especially tasks people like me whose White protections are designed to immunize me from that pain and to captivate me with its spectacle. Building immunity to pathogenic forms of public life means creating systems of rhetoric, in a richly material sense, that respond to and frustrate those forms.

Immunities are vitalizing, protective capacities, then, and not individual states of being as COVID-19 reminds us. Immunities are relative, never complete, and always temporary. Immunity is not invulnerability and those who see protections as some form of evolved superpower that eradicates a threat are already exhibiting the signs of an autoimmune disorder, as with those who advocate letting the coronavirus infect everyone, killing the vulnerable. With the moral sickness of racism, we know what such disordered immunity means: genocide.

But if pathology-as-paradigm obligates developing immunities despite the dangers of their own disorder, then another self-contradiction presents itself: one accepts biopower as the framework for politics while rejecting its history. The great fear of biopower is that it “sacrifices one part of [life] to the violent domination of the other” through sexualized racial/ethnic formations that coerce bodies through micro-regulation of corporeality and outright slaughter. Yet biopolitics’ relation to life “is to save it, protect it, develop it as a whole,” which paradoxically “involves the use of an instrument that is bound to it through the negative” (Esposito, 2002/2013, p. 139). Immunitary politics are inherently risky, with the potential “inscribed at the heart of modern biopolitics” for protections to be worse than the disease or to be diseases themselves. Autoimmune disorders are, thus, “a limit-point beyond which the entire horizon of biopower is likely to come in deadly conflict with itself” (p. 41), as when biopower valorizes “normal” human life but “refuses to tarry in death or outside the folds of the human” (Lethabo King, 2019, p. 70). The question is how do forms of life diminish others and why? “But this can happen in mutually opposing forms that brings into play the very meaning of biopolitics: either the self-destructive revolt of immunity against itself or an opening into its converse, community” (Esposito, 2002/2013, p. 141). Biopower has no fixed identity because “[a]ll pathology is subjective with regard to tomorrow” (Canguilhem, 1991, p. 212).

Taking up pathology’s critical potential means confronting biopower’s autoimmune disorders, which are effectively pre-existing conditions of the normative self-recognition of human life over and against otherness (Haraway, 1992, pp. 320–324). Chen (2012) carefully draws out the many ways that White, ableist, heteronormative human life defines normalcy, which means that pathology historically disposes threat through syntheses of disability, queerness, non-Whiteness, and animality. Beginning with wounds is a way to use pathology to undo pathology’s history, but that carries the risk of re-naturalizing those pre-existing conditions that stabilize what is sick and what is not, what hurts and what does not. Drawing on the history of treating queerness as disease, Chen (2012) argues that

an uptake, rather than a denial of, toxicity seems to have the power to turn a lens on the anxieties that produce it and allow for a queer knowledge production that gives some means for structural remedy while not abandoning a claim to being just a little bit “off.” (p. 220)

If rhetoric is to appropriate pathology as mode of critique, it must do so by queering the historic relations of the pathological and the normal, retaining the uncanny difference of “life gone wrong” while repurposing the critical potential for new normative work that contests historic formations of pathology (race, disability, sexuality) so that immunity no longer means “repelling alien invaders from an unspoiled organic eden called the autonomous self” (Haraway, 1992, p. 324).

More than normal

I return to Scarry (1985) at the end because pulling biopower from the grip of its history means removing White, privileged humanity as the measure for what is wounding and what is living. To do that, pathological analysis must reject the division of animate and inanimate things, human and inhuman, that underlies the value reserved for wounds that count. Once more from Chen (2012): “To loosen the pathologizing ties that bind normalcy to normalcy, or nonnormalcy to nonnormalcy, in human object worlds is to reassert the status mobilities of ‘humans,’ ‘animals,’ and ‘objects’ in the many worlds they populate” (p. 216). Pathology does not offer or secure a general theory of difference; it is a mode of valuing through woundedness. It becomes itself pathological when it is used as a general theory of difference. A more democratic biopolitics would understand that

health is a capacity to tolerate variations in norms on which only the stability of situations and milieus—seemingly guaranteed yet in fact always necessarily precarious—confers a deceptive value of definitive normalcy. [Humanity] is truly healthy only when [it] is capable of several norms, when [it] is more than normal. (Canguilhem, 2008, p. 132)

Liberating life, a very particular kind of life, from its perch as the ultimate value allows the critical ambiguity of pathology to work in new directions but the indeterminacy of pathology makes that risky. What if today’s immunity is tomorrow’s monster? Rhetoricians should find that risk tolerable since we have been the disease to truth’s health from some time now. Gathering through woundedness is not something that can be escaped, but it can be turned against unjust deployments of health and normalcy. Critique that takes civic immunotherapy as its purpose would not only describe democracy’s wounds, but also devise from those wounds protections for life that is “several.” Doing that embraces pathology but not life’s pre-existing political conditions so that pathology might be freed to teach us of life that is more than “normal.”