Blindness, empathy, and ‘feeling seeing’: Literary and insider accounts of blind experience

This article charts something of the complicated relation between the sighted reader and the articulation of experiences of blindness by the non-sighted and the becoming-blind. This is achieved, firstly, through an analysis of tropes and folk myths derived from Presocratic myths dealing with conceptions of blindness by the sighted, and secondly through related instances of autobiographical writing by blind subjects that explore or explode such tropes. Throughout the article is an underlying notion of empathic vision, or ‘feeling seeing’. For, alongside an enduring fascination with what the blind ‘see’ (e.g. Sacks, 2003), for the sighted reader there is an allied inquisitiveness concerning what the blind feel.