Writing under the martial law regime and reparative reading : origins and benefits of literary fragility

This article presents a theoretical framework and a network of concepts that could be useful in analyzing illness narratives. As a relatively new field of the humanities, the cultural discourse of health and illness is still in need of an appropriate methodology and a set of handy concepts, i.e. a foundational cultural theory fit to deal with texts concerned with the specific experience of health and illness. Here the key concepts are fragility, reparability, vulnerability and harm. While drawing on the idea of ‘writing in a state of emergency’, based on Giorgio Agamben’s discussion in The State of Exception, the article also offers the author’s own conceptions of a ‘fragile alliance’ and of reading illness narratives as a therapeutic (restorative) activity.