Difficult Patients, Difficult Poems

This article contends that the social diagnosis of “difficulty,” especially visible and harmful in the figure of the “difficult patient,” renders the object of description as mentally and rhetorically disabled through implication of mental state and social illegibility. In a different rhetorical environment, that of poetics and literary criticism, the notion of difficulty arises as a critical category invoked to describe an interpretive resistance or blockage. Through a mad studies rhetorical analysis of these two distinct linguistic contexts for the term “difficulty,” this article explores the slipperiness of difficulty, and how all forms of the term rely on ideologies of normalization and saneism, even if in literary contexts these are sometimes obscured through metaphorization. This illustrates how mad literary criticism may mobilize literary theory to engage ableist rhetorics with creativity and flexibility to find positions of rhetoricity. Ultimately, the hope of difficulty is not of recuperation into systems of understanding, but its use as a reclaimed and resistant orientation always beyond the boundary of acceptability and legibility.