The Body's Moments

Abstract

Paradoxically relying on what Jean Starobinski has described as Montaigne's essayistic “writing from the body”, in his 1754 Deformity, an Essay, William Hay grounds his authority in a personal sensibility rendered singular by visible disability. Hay uses the genre he inherits from Montaigne to refute the enduring paradoxes of Francis Bacon's essay ‘of deformity’, performing the inner division of Montaigne's impossible self-identity as the ongoing difference between a unique subjectivity and a deformed body whose monstrosity is the stuff of cultural commonplace. When the American radical intellectual Randolph Bourne turns to the essay form at the beginning of the twentieth century to discuss his own visible disability in “The Handicapped”, he rewrites this difference as a divide between the community enabled by the deformed man's sympathy with the socially disenfranchised, and an individual self-injunction to overcome disability in the name of self-improvement. In each case the essay's writing from the body allows its author to question appearances, to challenge the constraints of a body already written upon by common wisdom. In each case, disability becomes the limit case of the essay form's ongoing experiment with exemplarity, as well as its affinity for and resistance to history.