The Grammar of Leprosy: Temporal Politics & An Impossible Subject

Abstract

In this talk, I will critically interrogate the World Health Organization’s commitment to the elimination of leprosy. I will argue that leprosy has been portrayed (for nearly a century) as something from the past, recalcitrantly lingering on into the present, but surely about to be gone—a temporal framing which I call the ‘grammar of leprosy’. First, I will analyze a series of correspondences published by scientists in the Lancet: Infectious Diseases in which researchers working for Novartis (the supplier of antibiotics for leprosy) continue pushing for an always-immanent “elimination”, while field researchers in Brazil repeatedly caution about the potential problems of this approach. Next, I will discuss how some of these issues congealed in the experience of Luka, one of my interlocuters in Tanzania, whose existence became a problem for his doctors, one that they ultimately resolved by fabricating negative test results in order to record what they already knew: leprosy has been eliminated. Finally, I reveal how the grammar of leprosy operates through a complex set of converging and diverging temporal politics, pulling into its orbit and being enabled by multiple interwoven temporalities. I conclude that—due to this grammar, the impossible subjects it produces, and the temporal politics through which it operates—leprosy elimination campaigns may have dire consequences for the lives of people with leprosy today, impeding rather than enabling the disappearance of the disease.