Articulating Pain: Writing the Autoimmune Self

This chapter responds to the individualising of pain and suffering, the over-valuation of the cure, and the investment in a certain ableist future that is a growing feature of neoliberal societies. This response is enacted not through turning away from individual personal experience, but rather through a strategic use of the autobiographical as a practice that takes care of/in the risky opening of an individuated self. By attending to the experience of autoimmune disease and its painful effects, the autobiographical address articulates with multiplying relations: Derridean deconstructive autoimmunity, with systems theory’s autopoiesis, affect theorists’ analysis of disability and debility within the neoliberal present, with the situated knowledges, or ‘cripistemologies,’ of a painfully articulated, disjointed past, present, and future to come.