“NOTHING ABOUT US WITHOUT COMMON BODY”: ANOTHER PARADIGM FOR INCLUSION IN UNIVERSITY EDUCATION?¹

ABSTRACT:

This article problematizes the ethical dimension ignored by the knowledge on disability and the epistemes used to designate unmeasured power in the body in which it is imprinted, even with the achievements obtained by its political movements in recent decades and its capture by current devices of inclusion in Brazilian higher education. To this end, we resort to the genealogical method and the ethical problematic of the “indignity of speaking for others” enunciated by Michel Foucault to situate, historically, at what moment the political movements of people with disabilities assume this statement in some way and what are the limits of its effects of power in Brazilian higher education. We aim to critically analyze the internal tensions of such movements, the signs of evasion from the medical norm and social normality, intending to problematize the models of knowledge that were based on them, as well as highlighting the emerging powers of a common body like any other in their struggles for inclusive education and social justice. In this sense, we debate for the formation of a “common body” in higher education, constituted from the encounters of knowledge and differences, syndicating for the practice of radical alterity and the mobilization of the becoming -minority of the “people lacking” as a possibility of the emergence of another paradigm of inclusion.

Keywords: disability; encounters with differences; common body; higher education

RESUMO:

O presente artigo problematiza a dimensão ética ignorada pelos saberes sobre a deficiência e as epistemes utilizadas para designar no corpo em que a deficiência se inscreve um poder desmesurado, mesmo com as conquistas obtidas pelos movimentos políticos dos corpos com deficiência, nas últimas décadas, e a sua captura pelos atuais dispositivos de inclusão no ensino superior brasileiro. Recorreu-se, para tanto, ao método genealógico e à problemática ética do enunciado “indignidade de falar pelo outro”, propostos por Michel Foucault (1990), para situar, historicamente, em que momento os movimentos políticos das pessoas com deficiência assumem, de alguma forma, esse enunciado e quais os limites de seus efeitos de poder no ensino superior brasileiro. Objetivou-se, com isso, analisar criticamente as tensões internas de tais movimentos e os indícios do escape à norma médica e à normalidade social, com o intuito de problematizar os modelos de saberes que nestas se pautaram, assim como de assinalar os poderes emergentes de um “corpo comum”, como qualquer outro, em suas lutas por uma educação inclusiva e pela justiça social. Nesse sentido, argumenta-se pela formação de um “corpo comum” no ensino superior, constituído a partir dos encontros dos saberes e das diferenças e agenciado pelo exercício de uma alteridade radical e pela mobilização dos devires minoritários do “povo que falta”, como uma possibilidade de emergência de outro paradigma de inclusão.

Palavras-chave: deficiência; encontros com as diferenças; corpo comum; ensino superior

RESUMEN:

Este artículo problematiza la dimensión ética ignorada por los saberes sobre la discapacidad y las epistemes utilizadas para designar en el cuerpo en el que se inscribe un poder inconmensurable, aún con las conquistas obtenidas por sus movimientos políticos en las últimas décadas, y su captura por los dispositivos actuales de inclusión en la educación superior brasileña. Recurrimos ttanto al método genealógico como a la problemática ética de la “indignidad de hablar por el otro” enunciada por Michel Foucault para situar históricamente en qué momento los movimientos políticos de personas con discapacidad asumen de alguna manera esta afirmación y cuáles son los límites de sus efectos de poder en ese nivel de enseñanza en Brasil. Pretendemos con ello analizar críticamente las tensiones internas de tales movimientos, los signos de evasión de la norma médica y de la normalidad social para problematizar los modelos de saber que se sustentaron en ellos, así como señalar los poderes emergentes de un “cuerpo común” como cualquier otro, en sus luchas por la educación inclusiva y la justicia social. En este sentido, he argumentado por la formación de un “cuerpo común” en la educación universitaria, constituido a partir de los encuentros de saberes y diferencias, actuando a través del ejercicio de una alteridad radical y la movilización de devenires minoritarios del “pueblo que falta” como posibilidad de emergencia de otro paradigma de inclusión.

Palabras clave: discapacidad; encuentros con la diferencia; cuerpo común; enseñanza universitaria

INTRODUCTION

Access for people with disabilities to higher education has been one of the achievements of their political movements' struggles for educational inclusion and social justice. These movements have strengthened in the last four decades, suffering some setbacks in recent years, in Latin American countries, especially in Brazil. These setbacks resulted, on the one hand, from the reconfiguration of forces suffered with the rise to state power of neoconservative ultraliberalism; on the other hand, they resulted from the shadows that accompanied their internal conflicts, which, despite the achievement of a certain historical recognition of the condition of the subject of rights for people with disabilities, gave rise, in the last five years, to a retrograde vision, in the integrative sense, of Brazilian educational inclusion.

It is interesting to get a genealogical view of the paths of these movements, starting from the ethical problem of the “indignity of speaking for the other” - a statement attributed by Gilles Deleuze to Michel Foucault (1990) -, highlighting, in broad strokes, some internal tensions and historically situating the emergence of another point of view on Brazilian educational inclusion. The problem stated by these philosophers of difference is appropriate, at this moment, to question the ethical dimension ignored by the knowledge produced about disability and the epistemes on which it is based, to understand it as a deviation that needs correction, according to medical and some sociological models, to get closer to the norm and social regulation. This ethical point of view challenges the objectification of the disabled body by subjecting it to rehabilitation technologies based on that knowledge and by subjecting it to power devices that ignore its singularity, make its expressiveness invisible and, when possible, silence its discursive statements. In this way, this essay problematizes the knowledge that talks about this body designated as disabled, as well as the practices and technologies that frame this in a normalization, integrating it or even in a social regulation, which is proposed to be inclusive but excluding, because it is made for and not with him.

Even in the transition from an integrative model to an inclusive political-social model, highlighted by well-known literature (SASSAKI, 1997; MANTOAN, 2003), little attention was given to this jointly produced knowledge, to technologies that, instead of subjugating these bodies, highlight their power, to review the current normativity and social regulation, as well as the political movements that have historically undertaken in favor of educational inclusion and social justice, assuming a certain protagonism in their struggles for the affirmation of life and its ways of existing and being in the world. In other words, regarding the movements of people with disabilities, there was a shift from an object of knowledge, powers, and public policies to actors or partners in their construction.

This is the general objective of this essay when considering the origin of the movements of people with disabilities. Specifically, to this end, the internal tensions of such movements and the signs of escape from medical norms and social normality are critically analyzed, to problematize the knowledge models that were based on them; just as the emerging powers of a “common body” like any other are highlighted in their struggles. Through such analysis and such notes, the interest here is to glimpse the “common body”, formed with the presence of multiple inscriptions of disabled bodies: black, gay, among others, in higher education, the potential generated by their encounters and how this body manages the lines of escape to a molarity and social modeling, as well as its clandestinity to the current paradigms of inclusion and university culture. Thus, on this occasion, a genealogical look at these movements of people with disabilities is attempted, as one of their allies, and the possibility of thinking, from the philosophical perspective of difference, the formation of a “common body” in higher education.

By highlighting this “common body”, it is proposed to make visible the edges that escape educational inclusion and the struggles for the affirmation of becoming a minority present in higher education, problematizing the hegemonic university culture and envisioning a greater openness to the acceptance of this common in which they are part of the differences, which, to use Deleuze's (1997) expression, give rise to a “missing people”. This implies that this essay touches on a literary writing that writes for these people, not in their place, but with the intention of a future, or better to say, of a fable that bypasses them, highlighting their presence and existence, since he does not always occupy a speaking position or draw enunciative curves, as is the case with people with disabilities.

BETWEEN THE PROTAGONISM OF THE INDIVIDUAL OF RIGHTS AND THE OBJECTIFICATION OF SPECIALIZED KNOWLEDGE

The movements of people with disabilities in Latin American countries, particularly in Brazil, have played a relevant role in the political struggles of recent decades for educational inclusion and social justice. Júnior and Martins (2010) placed the emergence of these movements in the mid-1980s, with the assumption of the leading role of people with disabilities and their allies - family members and experts - in demands for educational inclusion and social justice in Brazil. Bueno (1993), Januzzi (2012), and other authors in the educational field suggest previous antecedents to these political struggles, linking them to the development of the area of Special Education and a social movement for people with disabilities. To think about the historical genealogy of these movements, from a point of view other than the restriction to a field of knowledge and what was called the transition from an integrative model to an inclusive model, previously mentioned, I will place their emergence in the political context of years of the 1980s, as so-called disabled bodies launched, through some of their actors and allies, onto the debate scene, leading some specific struggles for civil rights and abandoning a position of subalternity to the associations that previously represented them.

The climate created by the political opening of 1984, with the end of the Brazilian Civil Military Dictatorship, mobilized the activists of these political movements, directly or through their legislative representatives, actively collaborating with the National Constituent Assembly, which would be responsible for the drafting of the Federal Constitution of 1988. Together with activists from other union movements, Trabalhadores Sem Terra (Landless Workers), and Afro-descendants, among others, these activists, with their allies, fought for the right to education for all and social security. They were also interested in introducing a chapter on their rights in the Magna Carta. Strategically, given the federalization of specialized institutions for each disability and the impossibility of disabled people coming together in a single confederation, they organized a commission, which played a decisive role in this fight. However, if general rights were guaranteed by the 1988 Constitution, the achievement of specific rights was only regulated with the publication of Law no n^o 13.146, de 06/07/2015 - Brazilian Law on the Inclusion of Persons with Disabilities (BRASIL, 2015), that is, almost three decades later. A series of external factors² contributed to this achievement and, not without some tensions, gradual internal victories of these civil society movements within Brazilian political society ³.

The implementation of an inclusive education plan in Brazil, which was analyzed on another occasion by Pagni (2019b), however, did not occur without internal disputes in these political movements and without a significant clash with their allies, who tactically engaged so that these people constituted individuals of rights. After all, these internal disputes and clashes largely occurred in this context of Brazilian political openness, as revealed in the interviews carried out by Júnior and Martins (2010), with activists from these political movements of people with disabilities. In these interviews, there is common mention of a certain protagonism of people with a certain disability (physically disabled or blind, for example) over others (deaf and intellectually disabled), due to linguistic and cognitive barriers hindering greater exchange for some with the world back to normal. There were also a series of questions about whether those who would represent these people before the public authorities should have the same disability condition or, as allies, be open to the demands they experience.

Discussions about disability generally occurred in a registered situation, that is, based on the way they were conceived in academic fields, such as those related to medical, sociological, psychosociological, and philosophical knowledge, among others. Sometimes, academics referred to the representations of people with disabilities or their recognition, based on this knowledge or that circulating in common sense, when not present in the legal apparatus, in the official documents that regulated the rights of these people or the status of their condition. However, there seems to be a determination of that knowledge and circulating practices in which people with disabilities are recognized in the formulation of inclusive public policies, often elaborated by so-called experts, among others, without the public participating in their elaboration. In this way, a frequent pattern followed in which those who called themselves experts exercised a veiled power over these subjects, ignoring how “unworthy it would be to speak for the other” and how much this would imply an exercise of power over that other if not complete abuse by legitimizing forms of violence and, why not say, exclusion exercised against them.

A sign of reversal of this power game, however, only began to gain significance in Brazil from the 1980s onwards, when a series of social movements, including those of people with disabilities, began to take for themselves the protagonism of their actions and, gradually, demanding their conversion into an attitude, in the enunciation of political agendas related to this public's right to citizenship, in the first decade of 2000.

The phrase “Nothing about us without us”⁴ was the motto that emerged from the militant action of people with disabilities during this period. Its assumption promoted greater participation by this public in the framework of the policies, despite the internal divergences between the various deficiencies and tensions, expressed in a set of interviews organized by Júnior and Martins (2010). Together with the movement for the independent life of these people (SASSAKI, 2004), spread in central capitalist countries, which crossed the demands of the political movement of people with disabilities in Brazil, this political action made these subjects demand greater participation in the elaboration of public policies aimed at them in that period. However, this political movement was still closely allied with a group of specialists, who, guided by a social model and the understanding that the struggles at stake implied recognition, forged a proposal for inclusive education, marked by the scientific paradigm of the norm or normality (PAGNI, 2019b).

In the development of this political movement, a change in the social profile and degree of engagement of people with disabilities was also observed, thanks to the emergence of a series of smaller and dispersed organizations regarding their demands for educational inclusion and social justice. For some of these activists, the issue was to stay alive, and this meant not only greater engagement and political activism but also greater visibility for their common issues and agendas, publicly postulating the condition of being citizens like any other. This way of thinking gave this political movement greater recognition of the conditions of people with disabilities, and its statement gained greater representation from 2000 onwards, with the spread of representation of these people as individuals of rights, through the implementation of a plan state policy inspired by a paradigm of educational inclusion and social justice. This plan, although supported by neoliberal criticism of the Welfare State, sought to restore the latter's security provisions, to repair the structural inequalities of Brazilian society, exacerbated by the globalization of the economy and neoliberalism.

In the political-economic context discussed, the state government implemented security devices for people with disabilities, from mid-2000 to 2016, allowing them, following liberal principles, a certain formal equality before the law and greater opportunity to work in different fields of Brazilian civil society. During the neoliberal globalization, the movement of people with disabilities had, internally, important allies. In the political field, in addition to the civil society movements, previously highlighted, and their representatives in the legislative branch, there were also governments with a social-democratic bias, sensitive to the demands of these people, such as those of Fernando Henrique Cardoso (1995-2003), Luís Inácio Lula da Silva (2003-2011) and Dilma Rousseff (2011-2016) (RECH, 2011). These governments created special secretariats, linked to Human Rights, or their own, such as the National Secretariat for the Rights of People with Disabilities, as well as committing to the agendas of inclusion and social justice. In the academic field, rehabilitation technologies and sciences were accompanied by a tendency towards a social model of disability in the development of some areas of knowledge, such as Special Education. In this way, the medical bias of this field enabled a social model of disability, adopting a broader inclusive paradigm aimed at these people.

The alliance between researchers and specialist educators, trained in this point of view, contributed to the movement's agenda focusing on issues such as the enrollment of people with disabilities in regular education, accessibility in schools and other urban spaces, quotas for these people, together with other so-called “minority” groups (Afro-descendants, indigenous peoples, students in situations of socioeconomic vulnerability), in higher education. The achievements obtained by this political movement were relevant until 2016 - just as they are today -, with the increase in the number of enrollments of people with disabilities in regular schools, the establishment of quotas for the people and for other minorities in some higher education institutions, not to mention the full recognition that people with disabilities would be subjects of rights, not without some discomfort.

When implementing this inclusive education policy, some resistance was expressed, for example, by deaf communities and associations of intellectually disabled people, who did not renounce specialized institutions aimed at students with these disabilities, with autonomy or functioning connected to the regular school. These tensions produced, in some regions of the country, a parallel system of institutions that were more integrative than inclusive, which, contradictorily, obtained state financial support to assist people who were reluctant to enroll in regular education and who demanded specialized educational assistance. Tensions became even greater when attacks on achievements in the field of civil rights for people with disabilities emerged with the ultraliberal and neo-reactionary policies of Michel Temer's government (2016-2018) and neoconservative policies of Jair Bolsonaro (2018-2022).

Along with the dismantling of social security policies, in these governments, the suppression of the National Secretariat for the Rights of Persons with Disabilities and the dismantling of Ministries that served Human Rights indicated a setback in the sector, culminating in Decree 10,502, of 09/30/ 2020 (BRASIL, 2020), which strengthened specialized institutions and the return of special classes to regular schools. Even though it was suspended by the Federal Supreme Court (STF) and revoked (on 01/01/2023) by President Luís Inácio Lula da Silva, this presidential decree signaled how far attacks on the achievements of the rights of people with disabilities could reach in Brazil, as well as the support that these people received from their social movement, which, at times, is still based on a welfare, paternalistic and “ableist” view of outdated disability (BRASIL, 2020). The decree also showed a dispute that accompanied the political movement of people with disabilities in Brazil, judicially reversed, with the support of its majority sectors provisionally, at present, but which still motivates many discussions and disputes in Brazilian society (CARVALHO, MENEZES, PAGNI, 2022).

In addition to the achievements mentioned, the scientific paradigm on which this political movement in search of legitimization was based was permeated by internal tensions that, at times, resulted in conflicts that are still insurmountable today. However, this movement also brought positive achievements, such as increasing the number of enrollments of these people in regular schools, the provision of specialized educational services in basic education, as well as, gradually, the possibility of access to higher education, through quotas (BRAZIL, 2012). The problem is that these achievements are still viewed by school and university cultures with reservations. After all, as mentioned on other occasions (PAGNI, 2021), the presence of these bodies, their minority movements - combined with other things or signs of differences - and common agencies evoke the demand for profound transformations of these institutions.

Overcoming these reservations is one of the challenges that, together with the movements of people with disabilities, we still face, from basic education to higher education. Other questions still arise: how to create inclusion devices with the participation of these bodies, their heterotopic movements, and the agencies they produce in the forms of common life that inhabit these institutions? At the same time, it is necessary to ask how we can visualize, as allies of these people - more than an empty “us” in discursive terms -, the cartography of the expressiveness of the other's subjectivation processes, not yet codified by science. Such challenges are justified as an outcome of the movements of people with disabilities in recent decades.

At present, the announced challenges not only demand the presence of a conflicting “us”, led by people with certain conditions (Physical or Visual Disabilities) to the detriment of others (with Intellectual or Hearing Disabilities), in alliance with experts, family members, and legislative representatives (ROCHA, 1991; SASSAKI, 1997; CRESPO, 2009; JÚNIOR; MARTINS, 2010), but they also demand - perhaps, more by the allies - the formation of a “common body” crossed by heterogeneous becoming minority of gender, race, socioeconomic status, among others, resulting from broader and strategically designed alliances, so that, more than being represented, they directly participate in inclusive policies. This claimed participation is not only done through the legitimized recognition of knowledge and identity guidelines provided by these political movements, which reiterate their condition of registration but it is done through/in/with the body in which the disability is inscribed, of their encounter with other bodies, of the events they give rise to and the common agencies they produce, giving shape to the becoming minority of the aforementioned “missing people”.

Recent literature has tried to give a name to this perspective of the different, which is quite parameterized in the analyzes of Foucault (1990), Butler (2018), queer theories (the different), and intersectionality, among other sources, as suggested by Gavério (2017), when analyzing Disability Studies. Sometimes, these sources were mobilized to attribute certain intersectionality to differences, sometimes to criticize it from the point of view of the CRIP movement⁵ or black feminism (ALMEIDA; ARAÚJO, 2020), of approaches to gender issues (MAGNABOSCO, LEMOS DE SOUZA, 2019), or even the philosophy of difference that evokes both inclusion as a biopolitical governmentality (LOPES, 2004; FABRIS; KLEIN, 2013; LOPES, VEIGA-NETO, 2017; PAGNI, 2019a) and disability in its ontological character (CARVALHO, 2015; PAGNI, 2017), in its ethical designation as a way of life (PAGNI, 2018) and in the power of its agencies to politically challenge common life (PAGNI, 2021)⁶.

From this perspective, the Brazilian movements of people with disabilities have been challenged to rethink based on the potential of these encounters, the alliances with others in which differences are inscribed (of race, gender, sexual orientation, functionality), and a coordinated expression of this policy in the public sphere. To this end, this perspective has drawn attention to the visibility of the presence of these bodies in regular schools and to the cartography of the movements that inhabit it, promoting another organization of inclusive education at different levels of education. More than claiming civil rights through an identity policy, the formation of this “common body”, marked by disability and/or other differences, is seen through its active participation in the improvement of Brazilian democracy, at a time when it is becoming so threatened, resisting the shadows of a patriarchal, culturally hierarchical, and socioeconomically unequal past.

These struggles are still present in higher education, finding as allies, thanks to the previously mentioned quota policy, other bodies crossed by the signs of socioeconomic difference, ethnic-racial diversity, gender conditions, and sexual orientation, which, upon entering this territory, they bring their knowledge, their experiences, and their gestures into it. Symbolically, the presence of such struggles causes unavoidable displacements, as it resists violence mostly exercised by practices of knowledge production, circulation of this knowledge and, why not, its transmission. The latter values a utilitarian culture, regimented by economic and neoliberal rationality, with a certain nostalgia for a classical culture that maintains hierarchical knowledge, considered superior to everything that comes from what is called popular. This elitism arranges, at the same time as it includes, an exclusion of knowledge, experience, and gestures, manifested with the presence of these common bodies as an inclusion device that proposes to formally include a certain public, so that the exclusion takes place in this symbolic terrain, depotentiating and depoliticizing this encounter with differences.

ENCOUNTERS WITH DIFFERENCE, RADICAL ALTERITY AND THE FORMATION OF THE “COMMON BODY”: THREE PLANS FOR HIGHER EDUCATION

Encounters with differences are discussed, in this article, on three distinct and interrelated planes in higher education. The first of these refers to the encounter with the knowledge and practices that arise from the relationship with these bodies in which differences are inscribed and, particularly, the possibility of those called disabled participating in such encounters, their symbolic exchanges, and reversing one of the forms of exclusion in force in the university culture that includes them. The second concerns how coexistence with these trivial bodies gives rise, through radical otherness, to actions that bring together multiple differences and that allow them to be stated as an imprecise and provisional “we”, used to designate points that bring together several social movements in a network and to signify a kind of ontology of what is common to them, because human, in higher education. The third plan relates to how this ontological perspective of differences envisions the formation of a “common body” in which this other could no longer be treated, in the name of an enunciative place, as distant “they” or “them”, nor understood by the indefinite expression “we”, to minimize the becoming minority raised by its expressiveness in each one of us, but by the expression of the communion of this “us”, sewn by what is common between those becoming and those that circulate in a trivial body such as ours, removing it from its triviality to become common.

Encounters of knowledge and strategic alliances for power games in higher education

In some actions, there is good evidence of combating the previously mentioned strategies of biopower in higher education. Among them, some programs stand out, such as, for example, “Encounters of Knowledge - Encontros de Saberes” (CARVALHO, 2020), implemented at the University of Brasília (UnB), which, by valuing the culture of quilombola masters, forest medicines, and indigenous and Afro-descendant people, seeks to reverse the imbalance generated by Brazilian university culture. To this end, even though they are a minority in the Brazilian university, programs like this propose a symbolic exchange and put into circulation other practices that shift the center of gravity and institutionalized power, inviting quilombola masters, the rezadeiras, who know in-depth the forest pharmaceuticals, and the Pai de Santo, capable of offering another look at Western religions, among other practices.

It is not only about proposing a revitalization of popular culture, bringing it into the university but also about a distinct relationship with other traditions and their “classics”, with the oral culture of other peoples, and with a worldview that challenges the Eurocentrism, writing, and metaphysics on which modern science and philosophy were founded. If the latter carried out, in the name of a single, universalizing and determining reason for preconceived judgments, all kinds of violence and exclusion of this other knowledge, of the multiple rationalities and experiences are undertaken, the bodies in which they are inscribed express and assert themselves by complaining a place in the present, not the past, but that produced by its resistance, vibrancy, and critical innovation, in terms of its encounter with current academic production and circulation.

It is possible to glimpse in a program like “Encounters of Knowledge - Encontros de Saberes” the possibility of exchange, tension, and empowerment by these bodies. However, inspired by this program, it is possible to also question whether, after all, disabled bodies, due to their particularity, would support this movement or not. To be clearer, there are cases like that of an entire culture and language of the deaf community. There are also ways of seeing the visually impaired, who, by compensating for their deficit, with their way of coding the world, of imagining it, produce a point of view and, why not, a particular way of seeing it. There is also the accumulated knowledge and shortcuts taken by physically disabled people to get around in a city whose material and attitudinal barriers would be nothing more than knowledge, practices, and experiences resulting from a way of being in the world, ignored by so-called scientific knowledge.

As a father of a person with a disability and a member of a community in which exchanges occur on a different level with those with intellectual disabilities, I question whether there would not be, in these ways of being in the world, the expression of a singularity, of a unique intelligence, very different from ours. Could you go further, asking whether, in this body in which disability is inscribed, in the face of functional, cerebral, instinctual, or social blocks, there would not be the creation of alternative lines of existence, little perceptive to science and our vain wisdom? Ultimately, what is questioned here is: to what extent could this knowledge and practices not be put into circulation in the academic world, since they are expressions of significant modes of existence, independent of the deficits that inhabit these subjects, giving them visibility?

Analogously to the ancestral knowledge mentioned, the hypothesis stated here to answer these questions is that these practices, experiences, and modes of existence, both singular and common, could enter circulation - if they are not already -, due to the entry of these bodies and their presence in higher education. This is because they break with a vision that has them as objects, to make them individuals capable of facing the physical, social, and attitudinal barriers that are imposed on them, with the luxurious help of the sciences that objectify them in this way, but with a “decolonial” tendency” or, simply, “anti-capacityist”. In a university that has bowed to colonization and academic productivism, with the advent of economic globalization and neoliberalism, this tendency seems to be strategically crucial to expanding questions about the epistemes on which current university culture and its production processes are based, circulation, and evaluation of academic knowledge.

Academic production and the circulation of its products in Brazilian universities are still marked, for the most part, by a paradigm of science from the mid-twentieth century, without the support of the epistemological revolution arising, in this field, as part of a broader political process that implies another view at academic research, in the terms designated by Isabelle Stengers (2002) and Patrícia Hill Collins (2020).

This epistemic turn in the field of university research, which is still the subject of many controversies in the global academic context, due to geopolitical issues, and which arises from the effects of social movements like the one analyzed, however, deserves to be better assessed. This is because it not only understands the place of Brazilian university production in the global geopolitical context but also its diversity, respecting the formation of Brazilian society and its effective contributions at a global level, depending, for this purpose, on the adoption of broader political strategies and an indispensable ethical component.

This broader political process and these strategies are not carried out without alliances between the streets and bodies, as suggested by Judith Butler (2018), nor are they fixed only within the scope of representation at the macropolitical level, much less, exclusively, in academic production in fields specialists. On the contrary, tactically, they are made from the encounter of these bodies with others and where the potential of their differences can be productively affirmed, in a battle fought in institutional power relations and in the micropolitical sphere, in which the appropriation of knowledge and singularly lived experiences are confronted with scientific knowledge and experiments. With this, such encounters of bodies rehearse exchanges based on this confrontation of majority power games, mobilizing distinct and multidisciplinary fields to try to codify what these disabled bodies want to subjectify and what their allies, some of them experts, want to objectify.

This seems to be a fruitful ground where we can begin to pave the way for the development of tools for this clash by affirming the differences provided by quota policies in higher education. In this territory, a radical and incisive criticism is refined by the dominant academic culture, in the sense of its revision, so that the university effectively becomes inclusive or, if it does not completely abandon its majority tradition, at least modulate, and place itself in checkmate to reinvent as an institution. This would imply playing a strategic role in political struggles in favor of people placed on the margins of Brazilian society and, by recognizing the particularities of its formation, presenting with another position in the global academic context - perhaps, less colonized, more focused on the explanation of its regional particularity and the assumption of a decisive role in global geopolitics, arising from south-south relations.

The caveat for these encounters of knowledge to occur, concerning people with disabilities at university, however, is the following: if, for the affirmation of some differences inscribed in these bodies that pass through higher education, the accumulation of knowledge production from this point of view is already significant - as demonstrated by the literature on black feminism, which already denotes an intersectional perspective -, for others, it is still quite reduced, as in the case of bodies in which disability is inscribed. Perhaps, this occurs, as shown in the first part of this section, due to how disability was objectified, on an organic body, by medical knowledge and subjectivized as a social representation of a functional apparatus or of a subject of rights upon which a role is copied or a deviation is accused, combating it as a stigma or, simply, fitting it into an ideal social or legal model. The difficulty in leaving this register seems to be greater for this body, particularized due to the historical genealogy, presented previously, the tensions that accompany it, and some current clashes that radicalize these struggles around their bioidentities⁷, produced from a medical model of disability or a fierce dispute with other social singularities, through an identity government of differences (PAGNI, 2023).

Bioidentities accompanied and were constituted in the struggles of political movements of people with disabilities in previous decades, to the point where the physically and visually impaired competed for protagonism with the deaf and intellectually disabled. This is a clear demonstration that these people recognized themselves based on the knowledge conveyed by experts, taken by their allies, assuming and affirming based on these identity records, which, firstly, were conferred on an organic body from medical knowledge, a denomination or a diagnostic chart of the physical condition of that body; subsequently, these records had their social and formal representation, which were given by sociological knowledge and the legal apparatus, respectively. Thus, these political movements fought to gradually recognize people with disabilities as subjects of rights and new figures of social justice, advocating their social inclusion as this organic, individualized body, based on the record of their deviations, with the right to be corrected and normalized, not without an internal dispute, which seems to have governed part of this population, distributed by signs (Hearing Impairment - HI, Visual Impairment - VI, Intellectual Disability - ID, Physical Disability - FD) and individualized in particular bodies, whose meaning of their dysfunctions characterizes them as people with disabilities.

This individualized meaning of these bodies has become radicalized in the present, as Francisco Ortega (2009) has warned, when analyzing the movements of people diagnosed with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) in the United States, producing a dispute between neurodiverse people with high abilities and tutors for those with low skills. The first one refused the state aid essential to the second, in the name of greater autonomy and the release of socially created stigma. This also occurs in Brazil, where we see part of the movements for the rights to the inclusion of deaf people or people with other disabilities advocating the return of special schools and classes, as recently seen with the support for Presidential Decree number 10.502, because their communities would benefit from this measure, freeing them from the suffering to which they were subjected by the educational inclusion that occurred in recent decades, restricting the power of their bodies to a limiting organic condition and revealing the cultural scars of a past, which have not yet been overcome.

The radicalization of a certain identitarianism that occurred in this direction can also be observed in other social and political movements, such as those of African descent, feminists, and quilombolas, among others. In a slightly different way, these movements were also captured by a form of distribution of their identity representations, by signs, and by a government of differences, as many of them are divided when being governed, they come together around normative and individualized standards, reiterating a totalization of this individuation, verticalized with neoliberalism, around which the promises of economic prosperity were based, perhaps as its central inclusion device. An inclusion that, in recent decades, enchants and excites those involved in the struggles of these social and political movements for their insertion in the market and the consumer economy. Such inclusion alludes to this disabled subject as a figure without an organic body, much less libidinal or vital, that is, a machine-body around which all differences would be suppressed by its functionalism, by its usefulness as human capital or by its efficiency in obtaining income - this is a field in which the social result is objectively evaluated, whether or not there was individual prosperity, with this result being a sign of its success or failure.

In higher education, the capture of these signs, their distribution and the identity governance of differences often occur through the process(es) of admission of individuals with disabilities through quotas, with devices such as identification or self-declaration, and also by another stronger mechanism, due to the broader social dispute that qualifies quota holders as privileged and that ignores (in good or bad faith) their historical significance for Brazilian society, placing them in a game of having the imperative to prove, due to their origin, who are at similar or higher levels of academic performance than other players. For any other student, this ordeal - because that is what it is about the extrapolation of traditional exams into the field of ascetic morality - is not as demanding as it is for these bodies that are present in higher education. Something that occurs because overcoming their condition is taken for themselves as a way to prove themselves above average and be recognized in this universe; but it must be said that, although they can even surpass the established indices, and they do so frequently, the signs of “black”, “disabled”, “women”, “gay” are insurmountable, visible and consolidated in the eyes of others, normative, regulatory, with disabled people being monitored because they have these signs, identified as deviations, inscribed on their bodies, assuming them as a record in which they identify. In turn, this identification process is already loaded with stigma, preconceptions, and, symbolically, a load of violence, and, at the same time, an obscured exclusion, which designates them as less valid, lesser beings, outside of more valid beings, ontologically superior, dominant, or majority.

Brazilian higher education, analogously to what occurs worldwide, has been subjected, in the last two decades, to efficiency and productivity indices, internal and external evaluations, and rankings - something that has altered, in the name of quantitative increase, the quality of both production and the circulation of academic knowledge in recent years. Given the paradox previously stated, the perspective that captures these bodies would be that to correct this ontological distortion, at least to be recognized in this more liberal environment than the political liberalism in times of authoritarian liberalism (CHAMAYOU, 2020), they should become more, against everything and everyone, overcoming their deficits, to prove themselves efficient and undertake themselves. This strategy placed many of these bodies on the scene, recognizing in their performativity some economic prosperity, concerning the skills acquired for the formation of human capital, thanks to their entry into a productivist machinery whose currency of exchange is to forget the signs inscribed there to give a more palatable and mostly accepted face. In this way, by obscuring the excavated traces of their differences, or, by opportunistically assuming these bodies as part of that identity government of differences on a micropolitical scale, without interpellating or more actively resisting macropolitical governmental reason, we make the relationship with these bodies with disabilities lead to processes of subjectivation increasingly aligned with majority processes and, therefore, with the machinery of capitalism.

In this case, some studies could be developed towards a state of the art on academic productions, which have mobilized the knowledge and agendas of these political movements originating from the bodies in which differences are inscribed, taking them, however, in this meaning among those who escape this molar line or this minefield, in micropolitical terms. An alignment seems clear that, seen as the only possible path to affirm their lives or their survival, does not provide an escape, or this escape is not seen because it presents other paths for these modes of existence at the university. These paths can be very arduous, but vitally more intense and ethically more vibrant than those of the required moral asceticism and those of the minefield of recognition. This occurs because, in a resistance coming from these bodies that involves them in a constant, daily struggle, not against everything and everyone, there are clear demands for strategies to produce new moves in the game, thanks to contracted alliances, as well as coherence that the people with disabilities live, experience and, potentially, create the inflections of these ways of life in the encounter with others.

As can be seen, these forms of resistance, struggles, and new moves emerging from this micropolitical terrain can provoke macropolitical transformations. However, this is an issue that deserves to be discussed at another time. What is presumed is that there are signs of a movement of these bodies with disabilities about how their presence in higher education puts other knowledge, experiences, and epistemes into circulation. I am talking here about several cultures that are being formed and about the ethos that has not yet been properly mapped and that could be favored if they could be expressed in higher education, going beyond the presence of these bodies, and conveying the practical wisdom of their experiences, partially elaborated and capable of enunciation. In this sense, analogously to what was done with the “Encounters of Knowledge” program, some masters in these arts of existence, such as people with autism, blind, deaf, intellectually disabled, and physically disabled people who work in universities, or their allies, could be invited to report themselves, expressing their cultures and ways of being in the world, as well as sharing their challenges concerning different themes, including some common to all other actors in these institutions.

Radical otherness as an ethical presupposition for another political alliance of bodies in higher education

It is recognized that the actions presented are not sufficient to transform the environment of university institutions into a space for the establishment of political alliances and for the formation of the bodies that occupy it, which is why other actions are necessary, possible but challenging, that favor this space. After all, the actors in these institutions are faced, in their daily lives, with a complex threshold for the emergence of a common life, producing both innovations of meaning and alignment with the social machinery. I am referring here to the threshold at which bodies with disabilities are crossed by questions that objectify them and classify them as “disabled” and are then subjugated, as well as to this record of these bodies in their relationships with themselves and, at least, to an entire technology that aims to compensate for its deficits and aim for their correction. Supposedly, this correction is to normalize them in the name of an organic body scrutinized by science but exercised to dominate their instinctual mechanics and to justify their conduct regarding the flows of their desire, preventing society from its deviations and undermining its irruptive force. or, I prefer, ungovernable (PAGNI, 2021).

If the ontological difference of the so-called disabled person arises from some organic dysfunction, or, as I have argued, from an accident that may or may not become an event for them, their body is also crossed by other signs related to their socioeconomic or class condition, ethnicity or race, gender, and sexuality. From this same body come more complex becoming, whose expression gives rise to meanings in line with how the differences inscribed in it are governed, subjugated, and conducted, asserting themselves in the face of those forms of government, subjugation, and conduct around which a feature, a face, is formed.

The movements originating from this body, irreducible to the organic and the linguistic, can engage, within the scope of these multiple crossings and signs of differences, in struggles that, as I have been recording so far, in the case of people with disabilities, generate a certain distribution across identities in movements, such as those of Afro-descendants, feminists, among others, each trying to assert themselves as individuals of rights on the public scene. It happens, however, more and more, that a chaotic multiplicity is imposed, sometimes placing these struggles almost on the same field, as shown by IBGE data on the extent to which people with disabilities, and being women and black, have an index even lower income or participation in the job market (DESIGUUALDADE..., 2022). This occurrence suggests that the demands of these movements have converged on common agendas, leaving their political identity register to find, in the politics of alliances, other strategies of struggle (BUTLER, 2018). Furthermore, the coexistence of these political movements among themselves and, more particularly, the meeting of these bodies on the streets in schools, and through universities, produce exchanges of political strategies, knowledge, and experiences, glimpsing, in the body of the other, the lines that touch themselves.

In this way, almost the same signs of power and mechanisms of domination resonate on the skin of these bodies, making them feel the vibration of singular intensities, regarding the confluence of becoming a minority produced in their encounters, glimpsing common connections there. For this to occur, a certain otherness between even and odd is crucial to make possible the alliances experienced by the different signs of difference and becoming minority. This otherness, according to this reading key outlined from the philosophies of difference, would presuppose an openness to the multiple minorities becoming raised by the disabled body in the presence of other bodies. These becoming initially produce an estrangement for bodies sensitive to the presence of the disabled body, causing them a certain unique displacement towards themselves, to find the familiar, which seemed strange to them, and the common ties between one and the other, in a kinship relationship that appears as an ontological horizon for humanity (CARVALHO, 2015).

Before moving in this direction, it is worth highlighting that, in higher education, these alliances have been forged and rehearsed, with very fruitful exchanges between Afro-descendant, feminist, and people with disabilities movements, among others. They often occur as these movements realize the limits of their identity struggles, finding, at their threshold, common clashes against a certain Eurocentrism, racism, and ableism of the so-called academic culture. Something only possible in and through the participation of the actors in these struggles in the university community, creating, within them, other communities, and networks, where identities broaden due to the challenges posed, the tactics and strategies developed, especially to alliances that impose themselves in the clashes against these mentioned aspects of academic culture.

In a survey carried out a few years ago, at a university in the State of São Paulo, about accessibility, the students interviewed and even the teachers and staff did not hesitate to highlight how much the barriers imposed are not only physical but also attitudinal and social. Many representations, in the responses of these actors, presented situations of obesity, memory loss, and ethnic-racial, only to remain in a dispersive variety, as well as issues that should be the object of access to education, situating other individuals and demonstrating that they are not only those eventually characterized as people with disabilities who will encounter barriers of these orders. However, as indicated in the brief study by Ciantelli, Pagni, Amorim, and Martins (2021), there is a need to rethink the notion of accessibility from a more comprehensive perspective, indicating the fields of confluence and unrestricted political action to the so-called disabled bodies, as well as to the disparate movements, brought about by the encounter of becoming minority and fed by their differences - brought together under the sign of a strange familiarity.

When reinterpreting the results of the study based on the philosophies of difference, it can be said that, at the time of its completion, the overflow of these bodies into the codes of science and technique in which knowledge about accessibility was constituted was already perceived, as well as the need to re-elaborate them. This considered the possibility of what would go beyond the particularities of these bodies, in addition to some of their singularities, which were mixed with those of other bodies of individuals such as professors, employees, and students at the university institution. This is because, although the students declared to be part of the majority field of subjectivation processes (White, with defined gender and sexual orientation, within the field of so-called “normality”), they were sensitive to these other bodies, being willing to alliances and to jointly rethink inclusion devices at the university.

It is as if, intuitively, these other bodies glimpse in themselves a deficient becoming common to this other, whether because they perceived themselves as having some disability due to some accident or because they project the advancement of vital time, realizing the barriers arising with age, whether since they feel in some minority situation (referring to their ethnic-racial condition, socioeconomic origin, gender, among others), associating it with what this body eventually suffered from. It was not, in this case, a compassion completely detached from oneself, nor, in the other case, a projection onto the other's body of what could happen to oneself, even though both that feeling and this projective resource are useful in making the situation familiar which appears strange. Thus, what was observed empirically, in this preliminary study, were signs of associations without any possible coding or interpretation, not even the enunciation of a “we”; but I return to this study here, following a different path from the Butlerian politics of alliances, supported by the philosophies of differences and the vague notion of a “common body”, which would bring together this “us” beyond all group identity and below all discursive enunciation.

From this perspective, the driving force behind the meeting of these bodies is not only the violence or oppression suffered but also the affective exchange and the power generated by the confluence of their common becoming, promoting the possibility of each one perceiving themselves in the other, learning from their movements and, by turning to their actions, asserting in a different way than they were before this event/encounter. By expressing themselves through this transformation of self, this movement of otherness, and this force of a becoming minority in a body formed by these networks of communion, disabled bodies can converge and rebel against the becoming majority of the social body that subjugates, leads, and excludes.

In higher education, attention to this otherness is evoked by the possibility of finding a provisional “us” in this time and space, sometimes taken as part of the struggle strategy. Sometimes this “we” seems more like an “us”, in which the distance from the “he” that designates the other obscures what brings together these differences. This is not a meeting caused by the common suffering of these bodies, caused by real or symbolic violence, nor is it a process of mimesis that they produce among themselves, in which they see in the other what is theirs, much less that the occurrence of such meeting takes place out of sympathy, empathy or any other notion arising from conscious action. On the contrary, this meeting of differences seems to be brought about by an estrangement from what is familiar in the other, in an ethical effort to make something strange close, by breaking the indifference of consciousness in any identification and, at the same time, in a distancing, so that the desired alterity becomes radical.

This seems to occur due to the impossibility of putting oneself in someone else's shoes, through assimilation. This opening caused by radical alterity evokes the fable of this other, finding in this field the possibility not of representing it, but of touching it in the face of the displacement it produced and the forces around which a structured, normalized, static existence gravitates, to which most of us subject ourselves. It is this otherness without prior representation of the other, in the presence of a face without any transcendence, that makes such familiarity possible and, at the same time, a non-egocentric distance from oneself, in which impersonality emerges, as well as the possibility of a common life to come.

Possibilities for forming a “common body” in higher education.

The “common body” arises from this impersonality in which the body of the other is treated and from the displacement that distends the configuration of a fixed self, expanding both the perception of this subject and desubstantive it, so that, when being rubbed and acted upon by this body trivial, it covers the gravitational axis displaced by this process. However, the axis recovered in this movement of self-transformation would no longer be the same, but that produced by the compensation of forces raised by the other and through common shelter, enabling the coexistence of singular bodies, precisely because of their differences and this search for both by a symmetrical relationship between them. Before enunciating a “we”, these previous movements constitute an unspeakable communion, regardless of the speech capacity of these bodies and even before a linguistic subject, to promote such enunciation. In this way, this feeling, or desire for communion, shelters bodies in their expressiveness and desubstantives this discursive operation, since it occurs through an affective encounter and a composition of forces that aims at a circulation of power, disempowerment of one or the other so that the power of doing things together and of a (non-symbolic?) exchange takes place.

One of the effects of the encounter with this other and this radical alterity is the experience of transformation of oneself; another effect is that, given the non-reducibility of this other to the same, an alliance is made with it and a communion is produced around what emotionally arouses the forces arising from this game of a “common body” in the formation. Before the formation of this “common body”, as suggested by José Gil (2002), a paradox arises between the common sense in which it emerges and the common sense that captures it, as it is virtually inhabited by countless differences and multiple becoming that are updated, bringing unique organizations to the surface of the skin, which sometimes highlight their race, sometimes their functional characteristic, sometimes their gender, and so on. The cartography of this trivial body would focus as a kind of pragmatics of multiplicity on this making of the Body without Organs, according to Deleuze and Guattari (2012), offering us more than a body under the register of the medical or social model, a field of inscription, of “territorialization” and “reterritorialization” in which the other is dispersed in becoming, implying an experience of otherness to be codified. Strategically, the importance of this coding, or even of its fabulation, is to give body to its incorporeal elements, bringing its organizational furniture to the surface of the skin and using this way of making it visible as a possibility of getting rid of one's body, identity, governed by a certain narcissism, dispossessing it to liberate the “common body”.

According to Gil (2002, p. 146), paradoxically, this trivial body runs the risk of falling into a trap of the significance of identities, because “when we are in full possession of our identity body, then we are condemned to inhabit them and - greater perversion - perhaps loving them.” The formation of this “common body” could be a way to free it from identity, from its recognition as its body, as a junction of a becoming minority that embodies it, if not giving it shape, at least bringing together its strengths and aligning the desires of a “missing people”, in the terms highlighted above. This would imply assuming, through the visibility of the lines of force of the “common body”, a people to come, highlighting their presence and existence in spaces such as universities, even if they cannot occupy their place of speech or draw enunciative curves with their speech.

This seems to be the case for some people with disabilities and, particularly, for deaf bodies, intellectually disabled, and other disorders that symbolically limit their communication with the oralized, cognizant, and “normotypical” world. The question is how to map the outline of these and other people who, when entering a universe in which linguistic, cognitive, and rational barriers are institutionalized, such as higher education, perceive them clearly, almost as a prohibition to the training of this “common body”, not finding the previously mentioned shelter and reception, due to the aridity, sedimentation, and predetermination of an established social body. This is a body that only understands the formation in the well-trodden canons of academic production and its circulation, molecularly controlled in its capillarity, which leaves few gaps for the common to emerge, penetrating them and breaking the structures of a culture that sees it as a threat. In this sense, the question that this essay has enunciated between the lines is how to stop seeing this disabled body as a threat, through propagated radical otherness, envisioning allies, and the emergence of a capable “common body”, and maybe to innovate this culture, upending this structure and bringing about profound changes in the sediments of university institutions in Brazil.

This would be the body to be mapped in its lines of flight, a non-organic body, produced, singularly, by its encounters with other bodies, by intensities that would indicate an organicity and lines of expression without any type of lack or functional deficit produced by any normative standard, from which one infers its abnormality, to be overcome, or its stigma, to be circumvented. The triviality of this body is characterized like any other, not by previous diagnoses of disability, by stigmas due to its skin color or gender condition, not even by its ethnic origin or sexual orientation. According to Deleuze and Guattari (2010, 2012), this Body without Organs (BwO) is formed from the encounter with other bodies, in the intersection and creation of zones of intensities that give shape to singular modes of existence. This implies a singularity whose resonance with other singularities awakens a becoming minority and guides the flows of their desire through not only an art that sculpts existence but also through a “common body” that is formed, in which they mix and entangle themselves in the entertainment of the forces that constitute it and the networks formed by otherness with the other.

It is on the surface of the skin that this “common body” organizes the movements originating from the empirical body, according to José Gil (2002), in a direction distinct from that produced by the molar lines of power and current social machinery. These movements, by outlining this line of flight, or wandering, only seen by those who share common experiences and feelings, not identical, but tangential, bring to light the deepest latency of these bodies and entangle it in a surface trivial, common, like any other, around which they feel belonging: like a network that welcomes and protects them.

In higher education, in the absence of a proper name, this “we” that escapes from identity is sometimes called collective. They are a collective that is constituted spontaneously, in a network, in which identification by skin color, a particular disability, or gender issues that demarcate them socially, often merge, and mingle like bodies in search of common expressions or claims. In this way, they arm for shoulder-to-shoulder fights, with differences that resonate in their multiplicity, rather than in the unity necessary for any identification, finding there a network of mutual protection, at the same time a uniting device, which drives and excites them to assume themselves as a margin, asserting themselves by what is common in their differences, especially their ontological disadvantage for the social body. They are not discouraged by this ontological disadvantage, since they have learned to resist in this direction, to assert themselves as a singular mode of existence whose communion with other singularities occurs through encounters and, mainly, brings together a convergence of forces through common agencies produced there. These collective bodies are already there, striving to get out of their triviality and form themselves as a “common body” in higher education.

The singularities of this “common body” are inscribed in bodies that, initially, are treated by “them” and which, gradually, due to the agencies of a becoming minority that arise in one and the other, are assumed as “us”, giving enunciative strength to the “common body” in becoming, in this formative process. It is not a vague “we”, without a body, without common agencies of these becoming minority, but a “we” that enlists, in its multiplicity, a people to come, a “missing people”, beyond the biopolitical government of the population, undertaken by public inclusion policies - analyzed on another occasion by Pagni (2019a) -, as these force it to expand its reach and move its center towards the margin, to the peripheries. This form of organization of the “common body” does not require a “we” to focus on a “we”. This occurs because even the enunciation of this “we” needs a place and an enunciation capacity, since many people affected by deafness, foreigners, intellectually disabled people, those trained in other cultures, or even those socially diminished by their socioeconomic status, gender, or sexual orientation, are located outside the current language games, although they are full participants in the devices of power and governmental reason that manage them.

Considering these bodies in these games and in the university culture they entered, giving shape to bodies called collectives, therefore, is not just listening to them, so that they occupy the place of speech of a “we”, whose discursive enunciation circulates knowledge and other experiences, reiterating the inclusion devices established in higher education. However, it is also about mapping this passage from trivial to common bodies, listening to their becoming minority and their vibrations, which create a “we” of which we are part, like a singular ethnicity that is formed in the presence of the other and that makes us feel part of it, seeing this other as another way of common life.

FINAL QUESTIONS: ANOTHER INCLUSION PARADIGM FOR HIGHER EDUCATION?

The expression “singular ethnicity” is also inspired by the work of Fernand Deligny (2018). The French ethologist created this expression in a monumental work, in which he seeks to designate the relationship interwoven in the relationship between people with autism and their close presence, that is, with the social educators of the Cévennes community, as well as with other beings (water, stone, tree ...) around them, which would be considered in the same way as they are. These other human beings were considered close presences, by the author, because they did not start from prior knowledge about people with autism, nor did they propose to fit them into the technologies of power within their reach to subjugate them, much less subordinate them to a fixed territory but so that the children with autism could generate a bond through the familiarity obtained in the daily relationship with them, drawing maps of their movements and those of the children with autism, to then decipher their minimal gestures and find common errant traits that favored coexistence between them and these and “reterritorialize” the path to follow. Deligny (2015) states that both were entangled due to a certain dispossession of the will to power by the nearby presences, to then be entangled by the webs woven in communion, without paying attention to the content of truth and power at stake, or even paying attention only to the meanings of the intensities and the release of the flows of desire, which weave an anonymous map, because neither of one nor the other, but common to those involved. This relational ontology of the “common body”, philosophically, can be an open perspective for thinking about educational inclusion at the most different levels of education, particularly higher education.

The point is that the author's source of inspiration - the unique ethnicity and how the Cévennes community constituted it - concerns a large territory, limited to the mountains, and practically closed to the outside world, where only the people with autism who lived there and social educators, with sporadic visits from psychiatrists, filmmakers, philosophers, and other educators. The question that I would like to discuss more slowly, at this moment, would be whether this formation of the “common body” would have the possibility of occurring in social institutions where restrictions, culture, and power devices are more accentuated, as is the case of schools and universities. This is because the conditions of the Cévennes community are different from those faced by the relationship between disabled bodies, black people, transgender people, quilombolas, indigenous people, slum residents, or, as mentioned, a multitude of these and other signs of difference that enter higher education, without completely subjugate themselves to their government, as a single social body or as distributed, each with the meaning in which it most identifies.

It is not just a distribution that implies an immense variety that is impossible to be rationalized by the form of “governmentality” in operation, nor is it a unity produced around the latter under a scientific paradigm of inclusion that calls for everyone’s access to the university, to produce opportunities that, as we know in advance, will only be taken advantage of by a few. This distribution also implies resistance to these forms of institutional governance and to a ramification of lines of flight produced by the trivial presence of these bodies whose scope of mapping is infinite, depending on the willingness to alterity and the acceptance of tensions brought by this other, in virtue of both the variation and the speed of these ramifications produced from the encounter of bodies that embody a difference with other differences and with a face that obscures such incarnation, to signal a pale smile, a single, integrally normalized subject.

This theater was certainly not experienced in the Cévennes. There was a zero point, a context in which nearby presences challenged each other, in the sense of becoming inoperative, to then draw maps that were also the responsibility of autistic people, who expressed gestures and screams - minimal for their significance, maximums for its existence -, finding in the common traits the diagrams of a “common body” that inhabits that territory. This other form of artistic expression could, however, inspire us to educate our gaze and direct our traits as close presences that act in higher education - not just as allies -, envisioning a “common body” that is also ours. It is ours, because, mediated by the multiple signs of difference, causing the beginning of a “reterritorialization”, driven by the becoming minority of these people who were missing, as now there is no longer a shortage, they are already populating the universities, transforming their culture and, who knows, bringing new vital breaths to these institutions. Who knows, mapping this “common body” might not be the possibility of finding another way of talking about inclusion!

In this way, we should talk about inclusion that does not refer to something prior that starts from the modeling of an organic body called “disabled”, or a skin called “black”, or a gender called “female”, since it is there that the record of various identity characterizations of difference is constructed, already immersed in a mechanics, or a device of power, and in abstract social machinery that personalizes to exclude; but an inclusion that concerns the body that is shaped based on its immanence in a world, organizing itself based on encounters with other bodies and the organization mechanisms generated by the intensities that act upon it, as pleasure circulates and makes it flow the desire. The fact that these bodies are black, disabled, women, and homosexuals, among others, does not mean that these signs minimize them, disqualify them, or take them as deviations to be corrected, but they only indicate another organization, mechanics, and libidinal economy, demanding greater effort to ensure that these bodies are encoded in their singularity, through the cartographic gesture. Surely, to produce this codification, it is necessary to perceive a “common body” formed between the one who manages the cartography and the enigmatic mapped subject, whose map can only be created with this, as a singular ethnicity to be deciphered only as the former feels belonging to the world inhabited by the latter, which perceives the former as a close presence, an ally with whom he lives, regardless of the differences inscribed in his body.

To achieve this, two actions seem priority and immediate. This inclusion, which, in theory, would form the “common body”, with all the exercise of radical alterity and encounter of knowledge that it presupposes, does not begin at the university and must be expanded to other basic levels of education, starting from early childhood education. To this end, inclusion should not only represent accessibility, curricular adaptation, and school support for those who are proven to need specialized educational assistance but should also propose a reform of the entire school culture, followed by the (continued) training of teachers and a philosophy that deals with difference, not normality, outlining the other perspective and the traits previously evoked. A second action, resulting from the first, would imply basing this educational inclusion on the aesthetic terrain in which it emerges, not avoiding, in the name of ethics - even that of difference - dodging its effects at micro and macropolitical levels, changing the power games in which modern schools and universities are structured. I think it is by committing to these two actions that we would go from allies or experts to close presences, even if not so close..., preparing the ground so that soon the missing people will no longer be missing, but will be among us.

References

• ALMEIDA, Philipe Oliveira de; ARAÚJO, Luana Adriano. DisCrit: os limites da interseccionalidade para pensar sobre a pessoa negra com deficiência. Revista Brasileira de Políticas Públicas, Brasília, v. 10, n. 2, p. 611-643, ago. 2020. DOI: https://doi.org/10.5102/rbpp.v10i2.6861.
  » https://doi.org/10.5102/rbpp.v10i2.6861
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• 1
  Article published with funding from theConselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico- CNPq/Brazil for editing, layout and XML conversion services.
• 2
  Among the external factors, we highlight the decisive role of the United Nations (UN), which, in 1981, with the proclamation of the International Year of Persons with Disabilities (AIPD), contributed to the mobilization of political movements of people with disabilities in Brazil and in other parts of Latin America. On the continent, the Organization of American States (OAS) carried out this mobilization by promoting the Program of World Actions for Persons with Disabilities (UN Resolution 37/52 - 12/03/1982) and implementing it (UN Resolution 45 /91 - 12/14/199), which was called a decade (2006 to 2016) of actions aimed at this people at a global level. These global actions not only mobilized the Brazilian political movement of people with disabilities, but also included the participation of some of its activists, who reciprocally collaborated for this global plan, as well as for its implementation in subsequent decades, inspired by a paradigm of educational inclusion and a social model of disability. Declarations also played a crucial role, such as Salamanca (UNESCO, 1994), which served as a guide for these global actions, with great repercussions for the Brazilian state government to make a commitment to this transnational movement for inclusion of people with disabilities, at the same time as it was pressured by civil society to implement some measures in relation to both this public and inclusive education.
• 3
  Some proposals that preceded the Statute of Persons with Disabilities, in 2015, resulted from commitments with international organizations and Brazilian civil society, such as: the publication of the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities - regulated by Decree 6,949, of August 3 of 2009 (BRASIL, 2009) - and the National Special Education Policy, from the Perspective of Inclusive Education (BRASIL, 2008). Through these regulations, regarding the public and planning for the implementation of inclusive education, this population's access to public spaces, the right to work and leisure and the entry of people with disabilities into regular basic education schools were guaranteed gradually - with the 2003 higher education quota law.
• 4
  Originally, according to Sassaki (2007), this phrase was expressed by William Rowland, a black South African activist, during the fight against Apartheid in that country and adopted by Disabled People South Africa (DPSA), in 1986. A few years later, in 2001, it was taken up by Tom Shakespeare, in a lecture on Disability as an attitude, given at an Australian university, and, in the same year, adopted as a motto by movements such as People First, Mencap, Change and Speaking Up, from Great Britain. Since then, activists from all over the world have adopted the motto and transformed this phrase into a flag of struggle and the leading role of people with disabilities in the development of public policies aimed at this people.
• 5
  The CRIP Theory seeks the intersection between disability, gender, and sexuality, being originally proposed by Robert McRuer, in the book Crip Theory: cultural signs of queerness and disability, published in 2006, with some variations since then, in the sense of admitting other crossings, such as ethnic-racial and social class issues.
• 6
  Particularly, in this current debate, I have positioned myself closer to this last trend, articulating my previous trajectory as a researcher in the field of Philosophy of Education with my experiences as a father and ally in the struggles of the movements of people with disabilities. Perhaps, withdrawn by the indignity of speaking for this other and realizing the exhaustion of the slogan “Nothing about us without us”, I argue that it would be more encouraging and provocative to proclaim, as a statement of this challenge, the phrase “Nothing about us without these singular bodies, without our 'common body' formed from encounters with them”, supported by the arguments expressed in this essay.
• 7
  By appropriating the idea of biosociability (RABINOW, 1999) and its use by Francisco Ortega (2003), to argue that it is formed through an ascetic procedure, Pagni (2019a, p. 77) designated “bioidentities” as “traces physiognomic, genotypic and phenotypic, behavioral characteristics, among others, defined by genetic codes, anticipating the risks we run and anticipating the accidents we will eventually have”. Around these biological traits, various groups or communities come together to demand civil rights in struggles to affirm their differences.

Publication Dates

• Publication in this collection
  10 June 2024
• Date of issue
  2024

History

• Received
  19 Sept 2023
• Accepted
  27 Feb 2024

• This document has a preprint version
  10.1590/SciELOPreprints.4951