ABSTRACT.
The advancement of national and international laws has contributed to reassuring the dignity and fundamental rights of people with disabilities. Even so, the effective sociocultural participation of these people is jeopardized by discriminatory barriers imposed across multiple spheres of society. Therefore, it is necessary to promote reflections about ‘normality culture’ and its consequences in situations of exclusion, oppression, and discrimination of people with disabilities. This study aimed to analyze the contemporary concept of disability in the light of Emmanuel Levinas’s philosophy, author responsible for criticizing Western philosophy affirming that the exclusion of alterity stems from it. To this end, a State of the Art analysis was done, and 12 papers, 11 master’s theses, and 4 doctoral dissertations were found. The works were classified by quantitative characteristics and were later analyzed in the light of Levinas’s major work, Totalidade e infinito, and the contemporary studies on disability, ethics, and responsibility. It was observed that the works had done critical analyses about governmental actions and interventions destined to people with disabilities, showing the insufficiency in ensuring fundamental rights of these people. We also identified the need to substitute conceptions that totalize and universalize the differences with perspectives that recognise the Other in its singularity. This article concludes that the Ethics of Alterity proposed by Levinas invites one to infinite commitment of the Self to the Other, who does not expect anything in return to the aid provided. Therefore, it is relevant to politics and the academic field as an ethical, theoretical, practical, and analytical principle to interpret questions relating to the field of disability studies.
Keywords:
State of the art; disabled people; ethics of alterity