“In Sickness and in Health”: Towards a Critical Phenomenology of Sickness in Situation

In this paper, I will investigate “sickness in situation” using a critical phenomenological approach together with two concepts from disability studies—normate and misfit. I will scrutinize the famous distinction that has been made in the phenomenology of illness tradition between “disease” as a “biological property” and “illness” as the “what it is like” of disease and argue that the phenomenology of illness should turn its attention to the purposively neglected half of the illness–disease dyad, namely, disease. I illustrate that third-person descriptions of the body, norms, and assumptions built around normate normality are part of the situation in which sickness unfolds; they steer what we think the body is and determine what its “normal” abilities are. Some ways of being sick are anticipated and accommodated, whereas others are foreclosed. Respectively, these two cases of sickness can be described as normal and abnormal sickness. I will argue that normal sickness, even though it may deviate from normate normality, tends to constitute a fit, whereas abnormal sickness constitutes a misfit. Lastly, I will turn my attention to “disease” as a third-person description of the body. Rather than insisting on the difference between first-person experience and third-person description, I will show how third-person descriptions of the body that are well established in a subject’s lifeworld form their conceptual understanding of their own body. This understanding is part of the body image, thereby shaping embodied experience.