Disabling the Laodikeian Assembly: Power of Sight as Site of Power in Revelation 3:14-22

This chapter analyzes Revelation's oracle to the Laodikeian assembly to consider how its discourses of sight and blindness play upon ideas of disablement to authorize John's message over and against competing visions of assembly praxis. The chapter argues that John of Patmos legitimates his authority as a prophetic seer by deploying discourses of disability alongside other means of social marginalization, linking blindness with ignorance, poverty, and moral deviance and thereby reenforcing the authority of his power to see vis-à-vis the assemblies' (purportedly inferior) ability to hear. The chapter reevaluates the formation of logics of disablement in the message to Laodikeia as, in part, a corrective to the pervasive habit among biblical scholars which assumes an easy elision between sight and knowledge, blindness and ignorance and mistakes this idea as a natural or innate feature of human experience rather than the result of a contingent and socially mediated discourse of disablement.