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<h4>Diagnostic note</h4> In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, “hysteria” and “epilepsy” were closely tied, their etiologies delineated not only in parallel but in conversation. But self-awareness was the key point at which these diagnoses diverged. Patients were more likely to be labeled hysteric when they were capable of retrospectively narrating their own “fits” to a degree that epileptics could not.<sup><a href="#fn1" id="ref1">1</a></sup> As Jeannette Stirling notes, “of all the voices that articulate epilepsy” in both medical and literary language, the voice “that cannot register … is the voice of the subject with epilepsy.”<sup><a href="#fn2" id="ref2">2</a></sup> As clinicians disentangled epilepsy and hysteria, the hysteric moved to Freud's domain of personal narrative,<sup><a href="#fn3" id="ref3">3</a></sup> while the voiceless epileptic remained captured by Charcot's visio-centric lens. In contemporary study of hysteria across fields there is a reoccurring effort to (re)attribute agency to the hysteric, sometimes even to the point of partially recuperating Charcot’s system of signs. The projects of Lisa Cartwright, Felicia McCarren, Georges Didi-Huberman and Jonathan W. Marshall seek out instances of autonomous self-expression in the archives of hysteria. Arguing that the “capacity of the hysterical body to generate forms, poses, and gestures renders hysterics as consummate artists, and their bodies as media,"<sup><a href="#fn4" id="ref4">4</a></sup> Marshall’s attempt to restore the agency of the hysteric in the archive depends on insisting upon the voluntariness of a hysteric’s convulsive movements. The hysteric in the archive may be recuperated, even elevated, by attributing to her movement some agential intent -- whether self-expressive or cannily performative. For the epileptic in the archive this is impossible. <iframe src="http://majnoon.hosting.nyu.edu/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/Dancers-and-Epileptics-Emily-Rose-Cut2.mp4" width="640" height="267" frameborder="0" allow="autoplay; fullscreen; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe> <h4>Whose body language?</h4> Not in spite of but because of the epileptic's voicelessness, the choreography of seizures remains a cultural touchstone grounding the idea that gesture is innately expressive. If a body that cannot possibly be <i>communicating</i> still <i>says something,</i> the subjective testimony of the person to whom that body belongs can be marginalized as, at best, a supplement to the innate meaning of nonagential movement. Convulsion is invested with meaning at the discretion of the clinician-filmmaker. As a result the seizure is an overdetermined sign. But my concern here is not the interpretation of the system of signs, as pathology or possession, but rather the interception of seizure movement as a system of signs in the first place. <iframe src="http://majnoon.hosting.nyu.edu/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/Dancers-and-Epileptics-Maud-Rough.mp4" width="640" height="267" frameborder="0" allow="autoplay; fullscreen; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe> Epileptiform convulsion constituted the raw material of the gestural vocabulary of hysteria, and from these gestures the cultural image of the epileptic seizure was choreographed. The tonic clonic seizure is not really constructed from a fixed vocabulary of gestures, of course. Nor does it originate in the improvisational creativity of the individual. It is therefore non-choreographic movement, by most uses of the term "choreography." The seizure itself cannot be construed as “invented” in the same way Didi-Huberman construes of hysteria as invented. However, in order to be translatable to both the medical and the larger cultural gaze, the movements of the tonic clonic seizure had to first be regimented into a vocabulary. Each seizure is actually a totally unique event, not connected to others even by a universal interior cause, far less a universal underlying logic of body movement. But under the clinical gaze these cohesive and unique events were overlaid with each other and parceled out into gestures. Consequently the <i>icon</i> of the seizure can be conjured through a set of gestures that are remarkably consistent across individual instances in media, although they are inconsistent across individual instances of seizures. To coherently establish <i>the seizure</i> as an identifiable visual spectacle, the real incoherence of <i>seizures</i> had to be replaced with an underlying logic that is the opposite of that reality. This replacement was accomplished systematically and actively through the clinician’s use of the mediating technology of the camera, and continues to be cemented culturally through that same medium, in spite of medical knowledge that contradicts this medical-cultural ideal. Cartwright argues that the unruliness of tonic-clonic seizures thwarts the neurological gaze’s attempts to rationalize body movement.<sup><a href="#fn5" id="ref5">5</a></sup> However, this analysis fails to recognize that neurology defined–and continues to define–epilepsy by that very unruliness; the chaos of the seizure is circumscribed by the diagnosis. Critical interpretations of disorderliness and opacity as agential resistance to control fall short in analyses of seizure movement, which is unavoidably nonagential. Interpreting the seizing body’s movements as resistance to the medical gaze is itself a rhetorical exploitation of those movements. The disorderliness of seizure movement cannot pose a challenge to medical institutional control when that disorderliness is the very justification for that control. In these analyses there remains a reluctance to allow bodies to be bodies, rather than works of critical theory, poetry, autobiography, or radical polemic. <h5><b>References</b></h5> <sup id="fn1">1. Faber, Diana P. "Jean-Martin Charcot and the epilepsy/hysteria relationship." <i>Journal of the History of the Neurosciences,</i> 6.3 (1997): 275-90. <a href="#ref1" title="Jump back to footnote 1 in the text.">↩</a></sup> <sup id="fn2">2. Stirling, Jeannette. <i>Representing Epilepsy: Myth and Matter.</i> Liverpool: Liverpool University Press (2010). <a href="#ref2" title="Jump back to footnote 2 in the text.">↩</a></sup> <sup id="fn3">3. McCarren, Felicia M. <i>Dance Pathologies: performance, poetics, medicine.</i> Redwood City: Stanford University Press (1998): 31 <a href="#ref3" title="Jump back to footnote 3 in the text.">↩</a></sup> <sup id="fn4">4. Marshall, Jonathan W. "Traumatic Dances of 'The Non-Self.'" <i>Performing Hysteria: Images and Imaginations of Hysteria</i>, ed. Johanna Braun. Leuven: Leuven University Press (2020): 69. <a href="#ref4" title="Jump back to footnote 4 in the text.">↩</a> <sup id="fn5">5. Cartwright, Lisa. "An Etiology of the Neurological Gaze." <i>Screening the Body: Tracing Medicine's Visual Culture.</i> Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press (1995): 47-80. <a href="#ref5" title="Jump back to footnote 5 in the text.">↩</a></sup> <h4><b>Images in Videos</b></h4> <sup>1. "Hystéro-Épilepsie: Contorsions. Planche XXXVIII." Albumen print. <i>Iconographie photographique de la Salpêtrière,</i> vol. 1 of 3. Paul Régnard and Jean-Martin Charcot (1877), via Wellcome Collection, University of London. <a href="https://wellcomecollection.org/works/r6mngdsr" title="External link to source">↗</a> 2. "Attaque Hystéro-Épileptique: Arc-de-cercle. Planche III." Photolithograph. <i>Iconographie photographique de la Salpêtrière,</i> vol. 3 of 3. Paul Régnard and Jean-Martin Charcot (1880), via Cushing-Whitney Medical Library, Yale University. <a href="https://collections.library.yale.edu/catalog/15831557" title="External link to source">↗</a> 3. "Les planches du Dr. Charcot à la Salpêtrière." Contact print. Albert Londe (c. 1880), via baudoin lebon Gallery. <a href="http://www.baudoin-lebon.com/en/expositions/presentation/92/hysteria" title="External link to source">↗</a> 4. <i>Leçons du mardi à la Salpêtrière.</i> Photographic reproduction. Jean-Martin Charcot (1887), via Duke University Libraries. <a href="https://archive.org/details/leonsdumardilasa01char/" title="External link to source">↗</a> </sup>