Sublime

Asperger created the controversial distinction between “high-functioning autism” and “low-functioning autism.” This is Asperger’s legacy: lifting up a small group of neuroatypical children as supposedly superior to all the others, while being part of an apparatus that sent children without that competitive edge to their deaths.

Parents of autistic girls who keep it together at school speak of difficulties simply getting school representatives to believe in the diagnosis. The teachers don’t see the girls breaking down at home after the end of the school day.

In the scientific literature, it’s arguable whether the disability should even be defined by the presence of clear behavioral signs, such as trouble reading social cues or hesitating to initiate contact with other people.[8] Instead of looking to the external signals of Autism that others might pick up on, it’s important that we instead focus on th

Autism, I have argued, functions as a never-quite rhetoricity, and thereby a non-rhetoricity in these constructions. The autistic are in continuous, residual motion; rhetoric never arrives.

What of autos, the self that so consumes the presumably autistic?

Theories about ToM often function as a metanarrative for this antifuturistic logic. Autism might be better termed an autpocalypse.