Enduring Unpredictability (Losing the Present)

Abstract

This thesis, for the most part, attends to various experiences of epilepsy in order to trace the enduring unpredictability that a diagnosis of epilepsy engenders.

But, beginning first with an exploration of doubt, this thesis oftentimes goes astray. It intends, in other words, to get lost.

Drawing on queer theory, phenomenology, and critical disability studies, it asks: what is it to lose one’s way and what might such a loss produce? What is it to lose one’s body, to be temporarily divested, that is, of one’s material engagement with the world? And what is it to lose the present, to be “suspended” in time, “fallen” from time, or unavailable to oneself in the present tense?

In a tangential fashion, this thesis goes beyond the epileptic encounter to other realms of experience, such as grief, ecstasy, desire, fear, precarity, time, and more. In this sense, epilepsy becomes the catalyst from which these other explorations are made manifest.

Ultimately, “Enduring Unpredictability (Losing the Present)” opens up questions relating to agency, intentionality, relationality, and autonomy as it seeks to make apparent what it is to endure unpredictability.