In her book, Illness, Havi Carel writes of her own experience, “I quickly learned that when doctors ask ‘How are you?’ they mean ‘How is your body?’” (Illness 48). While this mismatch between the use of ‘you’ here might be excused by most as a mundane confusion of language, this dual role of the self, as both bodily and social, revealed through the doctor/patient relationship, speaks to the heart of a long-lasting intellectual debate within ‘disability studies theory’ regarding how we conceptualise what it means to be disabled. In this paper, I critically evaluate this relationship and look to what the emerging field of ‘disability phenomenology’ can contribute here. In particular, I develop an argument for the reinterpretation and use of Jean-Paul Sartre’s chapter on ‘The Body’ in Being and Nothingness for the field of disability studies. Arguing against Sarah Richmond’s criticisms of his view in her article, “Sartre and the Doctors,” I propose that Sartre provides a foundation for an effective philosophy of disability, explaining the dual role of the body for the disabled subject while being sensitive to their individual conception of selfhood.
