Abstract

This article aims to highlight the relevance of Bernhard Waldenfels’ responsive phenomenology for questions related to normality and to the different kinds of deviation from what is taken tobe normal. The article begins with a discussion of two limit cases in the understanding of the concepts of normality and deviation: a strictly normative understanding, according to which each deviation is norm-deviation, and a descriptive understanding, according to which deviation is what underlies individuality. Considering Waldenfels’ responsive philosophy in connection with Kurt Goldstein’s and George Canguilhem’s philosophies of the organism, both understandings are critically discussed. In particular, the article shows how both views turn out to be one-sided and should be revised on the basis of a responsive account of the organism (particularly of the human organism) and its situated relation to circumstances, events, and affordances in the world it inhabits. The analysis of the different forms of responsiveness of the human organism, and notably the distinction between ‘catastrophic’ or pathological and ‘creative’ or organising kinds of responsiveness, can allow us to develop a relational and dynamic account of normality and deviation. Accordingly, neither normality nor deviation should be taken as univocally defined states; they should rather be reassessed on the basis of the processes in and through which order is interrupted, disturbed, and possibly reshaped or newly instituted.