How Symptomology Substitutes for Subjectivity

Abstract

For most of my scholarly life, I have studied subjectivity—insisting, through the method of currere , that education is less a noun than an infinitive, an ongoing existential undertaking. In this brief reflection, I turn that longstanding preoccupation toward my own experience of cancer treatment. What I discovered, and what startled me, was not simply illness but the gradual substitution of symptomology for subjectivity: the displacement of inner life by the management of bodily events. At a moment when this themed issue invites minoritized scholars to write from cancer’s dirty margins, I find myself confronting a different marginalization—the quiet eclipse of the self by the clinical accounting of its symptoms. This essay provides glimpses of that substitution and asks what remains of subjectivity when the body becomes an inventory of side effects.