The Unseeing Eye: Disability and the Hauntology of Derrida’s Ghost—An Analysis in Three Parts

Abstract

Through the employment of the three stanzas of Thomas Hardy’s poem “The Self-Unseeing,” this article seeks to tremble the picture of disability located in the pedagogical materials in English schools. By mobilizing, and then reversing, Derrida’s concept of the visor and the ghost, as well as Bentham’s Panopticon, this story reveals the power of the them, the their, and the they. In materializing the ghost of the real of disability within a utopia of hope, this story deconstructs the power of their transparent house by revealing people with disabilities as magnificent beings.