Displacing Incommunicability: Autism as an Epistemological Boundary

Abstract:

This paper examines perhaps the ultimate manifestation of a communicational boundary: autism. It explores how autism has become an object of knowledge in disciplines concerned with mental and social life and identifies modes of communicability and incommunicability that have been deployed in clinical, scientific and social research. Such polarized demarcation works to purify conceptual zones of communication from refractory elements and, hence, from alterity. The paper draws on speculations by Jacques Derrida and Emmanuel Levinas to suggest that, rather than marking the end of interactive potential, incommunicability is in fact internal to and constitutive of communicability.

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