Athetosis

Your hands move without your willing it. Your fingers curl, stretch, writhe — slowly, fluidly, ceaselessly. These winding, serpentine movements often affect the hands and feet, sometimes the face, sometimes the entire body. Medically, athetosis is a movement disorder caused by damage to the basal ganglia — those brain regions responsible for the fine control of movement. Neurology describes what happens. But it does not answer the question that lies behind the symptom.

For what does a body show when it moves without its inhabitant being able to steer it? What is expressed when control over one's own movement — over one's own capacity for action — no longer rests with the self?

Athetosis is not a disorder. It is a becoming-visible.