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THE MALAISE OF LATE MODERNITY

Depression as fatigue, deadlock, revolt and distunement

Bert van den Bergh

The Hague University / Erasmus University Rotterdam

’We have discovered happiness’ – say the last men, and blink thereby

Friedrich Nietzsche Thus Spake Zarathustra

Modernity and late modernity According to the World Health Organization we are contending today with a true pandemic of despondency. The mental disorder termed depression is expected very soon to be the second leading cause of disability worldwide.1 Although these figures do not go unchallenged, from a cultural viewpoint they inevitably lead to the question what this global discontent reveals about the state of late modern individuality. Is this state an alarming one? Are we in deep trouble perhaps? Are we not as liberated as we thought? Has the alleged autonomous individual fallen into some sort of trap? It seems that the promising idea of self-fulfilment has turned out ever more massively and inescapably as a gloomy reality of self-corrosion. Truly food for thought. The so-called ‘depression epidemic’ urges us to unfold a number of fundamental questions. We need to trace the hidden roots or sources of this ‘malaise of late modernity’.

The title of this paper obviously alludes to the work of the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor, who, just after publishing his magnum opus Sources of the Self, gave a series of lectures for CBC-radio under the title of The Malaise of Modernity. The outcome of these talks, a booklet with the very same title, was later rechristened into The Ethics of Authenticity, a change that indicates the actual focus of the lectures: not so much the malaise but the achievements of our civilisation. Taylor’s aim is to draw attention to the acquired spiritual power of modern Western existence. He considers its history as that of the gradual development of the ideal of authenticity. ‘In articulating this ideal over the last two centuries,’ Taylor writes, ‘Western culture has identified one of the important potentialities of human life.’2 In our times the derailment of this ideal, narcissism, can be amply found – Taylor does not deny that – but according to him this deviation does not make up the core of our contemporary culture. This core – individualism, self-fulfilment, authenticity – is something we should bring to mind, re-consider, re-collect, by taking a deep dive into the ‘sources of the self’, in order to (re)activate their moral power, partly indeed as a weapon against narcissist aberrations that repudiate these sources, although

1 http://www.who.int/mental health/management/depression/definition/en, viewed 11 May 2012. 2 Taylor 2003: 74.

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in the end they draw on them as well. ‘What we need to understand here’, states Taylor, ‘is the moral force behind notions like self-fulfilment.’3

Notable is that neither in this malaise-book, nor in Sources of the Self and The Secular Age, Taylor is tempted to dwell on the phenomenon we know today as the ‘depression epidemic’. ‘The malaises of modernity’ – in the plural, and the title of the eighth chapter of The Secular Age – are brought up by Taylor mainly in the abstract. Sources of the Self is concluded with ‘The conflicts of modernity’4, a chapter in which Taylor once again recapitulates the main tensions of modern Western culture, tensions between the principal ‘sources of the self’: Christian theism, Enlightenment and Romanticism. Precisely the charged balance in this ‘struggle’ Taylor deems to be typical of our culture, and according to him this balance is not profoundly disturbed. In The Malaise of Modernity then, the attention is completely focused on the stand against Allan Bloom, Christopher Lasch and company, and their over-simplified cultural pessimism, thus, as already stated, in defence of cherished key achievements of modernity: the primary ideals of individualism, self-fulfilment and authenticity. Being on the defensive, Taylor presents only abstract indications of certain ‘dangers’ that are related to these ideals, for instance when he writes: ‘They tend to centre fulfilment on the individual, making his or her affiliations purely instrumental’ and ‘they tend to see fulfilment as just of the self, neglecting or delegitimating the demands that come from beyond our own desires or aspirations, be they from history, tradition, society, nature, or God’.5 In The Secular Age, finally, it is the orientation on the process of secularization that seems to keep Taylor from a concretization of the discontents in contemporary civilisation. The modern malaises pass by as part of a ‘summary over-view’ of the controversy around ‘belief and unbelief’.6 In the chapter concerned Taylor for a brief moment considers melancholy as a ‘predecessor condition’ of the contemporary feeling of ’a threatened loss of meaning’. Especially youth are supposed to suffer from ‘a lack of strong purposes in their lives’. This malaise, Taylor continues, is that of the modern ‘buffered identity’, which, in contrast to the pre-modern ‘porous self’, is exposed to the danger of becoming insensitive to everything that is not part of its own circle and project. In that secluded condition of the self ‘nothing significant will stand out for it’.7 So, the crisis that is at stake here is a ‘malaise of immanence’, which Taylor chops into three pieces: fragility of meaning, unsuccessful attempts to solemnize crucial moments in our lives, flatness and emptiness of daily life. In the explanation of these sorrows he does not give more concrete indications than the following: ‘a kind of “nauséé” before this meaningless world’; ‘some people sense a terrible flatness in the everyday, and this experience has been identified particularly with commercial, industrial, or consumer society.’8

This way the present-day malaise remains nebulous, in spite of Taylor’s admirable wide-ranging and sharply focused outlook. Is there in the end really a problem, one might wonder after reading Taylor’s texts. According to the authors that are at the centre of this paper – the French sociologist Alain Ehrenberg, the German sociologist Hartmut Rosa and the French philosopher Dany-Robert Dufour – there most certainly is a problem, and it is at the heart of our current, late modern culture. What I

3 Taylor 2003: 16. 4 Taylor 1998: 495ff. 5 Taylor 2003: 58. 6 Taylor 2007: 299. 7 Taylor 2007: 303. Cf. 37ff. In this last passage Taylor briefly also touches on the phenomenon of

melancholy, but again without really grasping it. 8 Taylor 2007: 308f.

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intend to show in the following sections is how these authors, in sharp contrast to Taylor, radically problematize the regime of self-fulfilment, more or less following on Lasch, but without his conservatism, and in analyses that reach much further. The threat to the late modern individual is not the ‘buffered’ nature of his identity, so is the key thought here, but on the contrary his susceptibility, or, in Taylorian terms, precisely his ‘porosity’. Ehrenberg speaks of ‘the uncertain individual’, whose identity according to Rosa has become ‘situative’, which leads to a condition that Dufour calls ‘psychotisizing’. The thematization of the gradual growth of the modern ‘self’, as in Taylor, thus gives way to that of the rising corrosion of its late modern shape. In the work of the said authors a sharp distinction is made between classic modernity and late modernity. Today we live in post-neurotic times, in which no longer prohibition but incitement rules (Ehrenberg); it is an era of extreme social acceleration and mobilisation, rendering the individual radically context-oriented (Rosa); this threatens to turn him into a plaything, from which he tends to protect himself by withdrawing into a depression (Dufour).

These three authors put the late modern subject on stage as a ‘porous’, that is precarious and problematic creature, with the phenomenon of depression at the centre of the portrayal. However, what in their interpretations stays underexposed is depression as experience, by which also the possibility of depressive passivity as a form of re-activity remains hidden in the dark. Though Dufour touches upon this possibility when he writes that the rise of the phenomenon of depression might be ‘an obvious sign of resistance of the subject to the economy of the generalised market’9, he leaves the option undiscussed. Rosa bestows upon the depressed person the status of ‘most sensitive seismograph of current and coming transformations’10, without coming to an understanding of this sensibility. And Ehrenberg’s analyses, finally, are in the end always focused on ‘a certain tonality of our collective psychology’11 and not on the response of the concrete individual to this ‘tonality’. Furthermore, it concerns a ‘tonality of loss’12, and so depression appears wholly as a token of deficiency, as ‘fatigue of being oneself’, ‘pathology of acting’, as ‘lack of project, lack of motivation, lack of communication’, in brief, as ‘lack of initiative’.13 Is there something hidden behind this deficiency? What causes someone to fail? In what way is this incapacity to act still a way of acting? Is there any defence or resistance in it? In order to take a first step in elucidating depression ‘from the inside’ the final part of this paper will be devoted to a phenomenological interpretation of this disorder: that of the Belgian psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Jacques Schotte. In his ‘pathoanalytical’ perspective depression occupies a central place. He calls the disorder ‘the most ubiquitously important one of the whole of psychiatry’.14 The weariness of self-fulfilment In 1991 Alain Ehrenberg published the first volume of a trilogy in which the contours of late modern subjectivity are marked. The third volume of this trilogy, entitled La Fatigue d’Être Soi, or The Weariness of the Self, is entirely devoted to the phenomenon of

9 Dufour 2007a : 325-326. Cf Dufour 2007b : 107, and 2011: 125, 279. 10 Rosa 2005: 390. 11 Ehrenberg 2010: 20. 12 Ehrenberg 2010: 309. 13 Ehrenberg 1998: 157, 251, 182. 14 Schotte 1989: 79.

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depression.15 On the first page Ehrenberg presents the two leading questions of his study: ‘Why and how has depression asserted itself as our main inner misery? In what way is it revealing with regard to the mutations of individuality at the end of the 20th century?’16 These questions are answered via an extensive exploration of the French context around the phenomenon of depression.17 Depression, Ehrenberg states, is the pathology of a society with a new normativity. Since the fifties of the former century economic competition, sporting rivalry and consumption are the moulds that shape the subject, his lifestyle and his mode of self-realization. Traditional bonds and fixed values no longer make up the basis from which the individual develops. One needs to rely on oneself and has to expand, be successful, excel and display oneself as a happy consumer. We therefore live in postneurotic times: the late modern subject is no longer destined by prohibition, conflict and guilt but by summons, shortcoming and shame. It is the ethos of self-realization and responsibility that moves him. What is expected from him is not restriction and sublimation but mobilisation and expression of his passions. He must show initiative, motivation, determination, purposefulness, versatility and communicability. And depression in this context appears as exactly the opposite, as failure in what is being called for. Being depressed means not being able or willing to have a project, be enterprising, assertive, on the move. It means being unwilling or unable to realize oneself. Depression, in Ehrenberg’s words, is ‘the disease of responsibility’, or ‘the fatigue of becoming oneself’.18

What happened in psychiatry in the course of the previous century corresponds to this transformation of normativity. Gradually the reference to conflict subsided and made way for a model of failure or weakness. Concerning depression the symptoms of sadness and distress pulled back in favour of weariness. Lack of initiative became the principal defect of the depressed person. And the new anti-depressants that were launched in the 1970s and 1980s and became highly successful in the 1990s, the so-called SSRI’s, aim at reverting this, at restoring the enterprising spirit of the disheartened. Prozac, writes Ehrenberg, ‘is not the pill of happiness, but that of initiative’.19 This rise of the SSRI’s went hand in hand with a (neuro)biological turn in psychiatry. The idea, taken root in the eighties, that mental and behavioural disorders could be treated solely with biological remedies, became the norm. ‘Sick nerves today are a neurochemical imbalance’, Ehrenberg recaps sharply.20

So depressiveness is no longer a matter of weakening because of mental distress, henceforth it is mental disorder because of a certain weakness. And the main weakness today is the lack of initiative. This is in Ehrenberg the central contradiction concerning depression as key experience of late modernity: showing enterprise versus lacking enterprise. Depression is failure, deficiency, insufficance.21 It is privatively defined as

15 The full English title of the book is The Weariness of the Self. Diagnosing the History of Depression in the

Contemporary Age. During a lecture in Denmark Ehrenberg explained that in this translation of the French title something essential is lost, namely the emphasis on the self as an active state, a process or a task: the ‘becoming oneself’. A more suitable translation then would be ‘The weariness of self-realization’ or ‘The weariness of self-fulfilment’. http://vimeo.com/16530794, viewed 11 May 2012. The English quotations here, incidentally, are my translations of extracts from the French book.

16 Ehrenberg 1998: 9. 17 Lately Ehrenberg published a study in which the French context of mental disorders is contrasted with

the American one: La Société du Malaise (2010). 18 Ehrenberg 1998: 10. 19 Ehrenberg 1998: 203. Cf Ehrenberg 2010: 215 ; ‘pills of performance’. 20 Ehrenberg 1998: 189. Cf. Nikolas Rose’s essay Becoming Neurochemical Selves (Rose 2004). 21 Ehrenberg 2010: 230.

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lack, shortage, gap, after which it is linked to addiction as response to impotence or apathy: ‘Addiction is a means of fighting against depression’22, Ehrenberg writes. This fight ‘fills the depressive emptiness’; it is ‘a way of withdrawing from the world’23. Addiction in short, is a re-action against ultimate passivity. Pathology of time Getting into a depression means reaching an impasse. A depressed person decelerates, slackens, stagnates, halts. What exactly does this temporal switch involve? Depression and time: it is a classic connection in psychiatry and psychology.24 It is also a central link in the acceleration study of Hartmut Rosa, Beschleunigung. Depression there appears as ‘pathology of time’, a pathological twist of a ‘fundamental experience’ of the late modern subject.25 Rosa starts his book by pointing out the big temporal paradox of our times: we have a chronic lack of time, whereas prosperity and technological progress provided us with a profusion of it. In order to explain this paradox, says Rosa, we need to unscramble the acceleration logic that dominates our late modern society. Time structures are not at our disposal, they determine individual thinking and acting and that way have ‘an unavoidable normative character’.26 The time structures that control modernity are marked by acceleration. In late modernity – roughly the last forty years – this ‘social acceleration’ has turned into a self-driven mechanism. This process has reached a point after which the claim to social synchronisation and integration no longer can be substantiated. The consequence of this is a fundamental shift in the forms of social control and individual self-relation: these become ‘situative’, that is to say, they are determined each time anew on the basis of the context concerned. One lives ‘in the moment’, in a present that tends to shrink because it is less and less destined by the past and tailored to the future, since the past has lost its binding power and the future is experienced as utterly unpredictable. One lives context-oriented and relates to oneself in a very flexible way. The late modern individual therefore has a ‘situative’ or ‘transitive’ identity.27 It is a reduced identity: Rosa speaks of ‘identity shrinking’, the reduction of the individual identity to a pointed self that no longer identifies with its roles, relations or potential designations, but has a more or less instrumental attitude towards these. This flexibility involves a ‘temporalisation of time’, because no longer a preceding time schedule organizes activities; decisions on duration, order, rhythm and tempo are made during their execution, or in other words ‘in time itself’.28 The modern ‘time manager’ is 22 Ehrenberg 1998: 16. 23 Ehrenberg 1998: 145; Ehrenberg 2010: 232. 24 See for example Kobayashi 1998, Theunissen 1991. 25 Rosa 2005: 387, 40. 26 Rosa 2005: 26. 27 Rosa 2005: 373, 364. 28 Rosa 2005: 365. In all sorts of ways Rosa tries to show how late modernity gives a twist to key aspects

of modernity. Distinctive of modernity was a ‘temporalisation of life’, that is a temporal design of it as a project. In late modernity this preceding time design more and more loses significance and is exchanged for a situative organization, an arrangement ‘of the moment’. This detemporalisation of life paradoxically is termed ‘temporalisation of time’ by Rosa. In doing this, he refers to the concept of ‘timeless time’ as used by Manuel Castells in The Rise of the Network Society. In this first volume of his famous trilogy on the ‘information age’ the Spanish sociologist writes: ‘Compressing time to the limit is tantamount to make time sequence, and thus time, disappear.’ Castells 2000: 464. Intensified time compression (temporalisation of time, situative orientation) involves the loss of linear, irreversible, measurable,

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thus replaced by the late modern ‘time-juggling player’. The linear, calculating and planning time-orientation makes way for a situation-sensitive and event-focused time practice.29 This new time-orientation goes hand in hand with a systematic social stimulation of individual flexibility and readiness for change. Those who do not go along with this run the risk of deep frustration ‘if their stability-focused identity designs are threatened to be made into a failure by a rapidly changing environment’.30

The transition to a situative identity and situative politics is a very fundamental turn, Rosa emphasizes, since what is abandoned in it is nothing less than the normative core of the modernity project: the claim to individual and collective autonomy. Life goes off course, it can no longer be understood and narratively reconstructed as a directed movement; ‘in the end it comes at a high speed (of change) to a halt’.31 In the thick of all acceleration a structural and cultural stagnation manifests itself. Rosa speaks of a conflicting ‘fundamental experience’ and a ‘structural unavoidable general experience’ and borrows from acceleration philosopher Paul Virilio the concept of ‘raging standstill’.32 In clinical depression this key experience becomes pathological as the sensation of a ‘stopping time’. It is a disturbance on the rise, in a time in which growing uncertainty is linked to an increasing incitement to plan and acquire stability. Depression, in brief, is the ‘pathology of time’, that is, firstly: the key disorder of late modernity, secondly: an outcome of the time pressure that marks this epoch, and thirdly: a sensation of stagnation and futurelessness which announces itself in the middle of all dynamism. If we look upon depression like that, the depressed person no longer appears merely as ‘disturbed’ or ‘disordered’ but acquires the status of ‘most sensitive seismograph of present and coming transformations’.33 Ultra-liberalism as ultimate slavery Do we indeed live in the era of individualism? And has this individualism intensified itself in the course of time? Neither of these two, writes Dany-Robert Dufour on the first page of L’Individu Qui Vient … Après le Libéralisme: ‘That our epoch is that of egoism, is certain; but that of individualism, not at all. For a good and simple reason: the individual has never existed yet.’34 What modernity had in mind is not realized at all. What has

predictable time (detemporalisation of life, timeless time). Connected to this paradoxical timeless time, we will see below, is the experience of ‘raging standstill’.

29 Rosa 2005: 368. 30 Rosa 2005: 240. This is the key thought in Richard Sennett’s The Corrosion of Character, a text to which

Rosa refers, classifying it as ‘pessimistic’. Oddly enough the ending of Rosa’s book appears to be even more gloomy: our future will probably be ‘the unrestrained moving on into an abyss’ (Rosa 2005: 489). This final pessismism however, Rosa cannot reconcile with his sociological conscience, so he ends his book – quoting his French colleague Pierre Bourdieu – with the desperate suspicion that possibly one day a more positive option will appear: ‘If it is profound and consistent, sociology cannot consent with a bare conclusion that can be called deterministic, pessimistic or demoralizing.’ Rosa 2005: 490. To my mind this is a somewhat unsatisfactory because deus ex machina ending to an intriguing study.

31 Rosa 2005: 384 32 Rosa 2005: 40, 388; 41, 385, 437 33 Rosa 2005: 387, 390. Rosa takes this term from another interesting, and very different, book on

acceleration: Keine Zeit! 18 Versuche über die Beschleunigung, by the German writer and translator Lothar Baier (2000).

34 Dufour 2011: 11.

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become a reality is a sham individual35, without true autonomy and without real commitment to the other, a being that is reduced to its passions by the global market. The individualism that is coming on the other hand, or could be coming – and the book results in an Annexe with thirty ‘emergency measures’ to stimulate this entry – is a ‘sympathetic’ individualism, because it is open to the other and does not have the chilliness of the now dominant self-seeking subjectivity.

An ‘anthropological mutation’ has taken place, says Dufour.36 The late modern subject has revealed itself as a self-referential being, exhorted to create himself, without a real basis to take the plunge. ‘Exchanges are no longer valid insofar as they are guaranteed by some higher power (either transcendental or ethical); they are valid by virtue of the direct relationship they establish as commodities. Commodity exchanges are, in a word, beginning to desymbolize the world. (....) Human beings no longer have to agree about transcendent symbolic values; they simply have to go along with the never-ending and expanded circulation of commodities.’37 This pliability, cloaked as self-fulfilment, makes us go adrift. The former modern subject, who had a critical and neurotic nature – two characteristics that complemented each other perfectly according to Dufour38 – transformed into a creature that smoothly fits in with the flows and pulses of the global market. Dufour speaks of ‘a precarious, acritical, psychotisizing subject’ and specifies the latter term as follows: ‘by “psychotisizing” I mean a subject that is open to all identity fluctuations and thereby is susceptible to all commercial bifurcations’.39 This late modern subject imagines himself to be free, because he experiences himself as self-referential, self-determining, self-realizing. But the only thing in fact that is really free, says Dufour, is the ‘divine market’,40 in the sense that its worshipped dynamics in the end are decisive, also for the constitution of the subject. ‘Neo-liberalism’ and ‘consumerism’ as terms to describe this late modern context are inadequate because they tell only a part of the story. It is ‘producerism’ as well, in the sense that the modern professional is supposed to be a flexi-worker, a position which matches with the pliability of the trendwatching consumer. And secondly, the ‘neo’ is not new but an intensification of something that goes way back to Adam Smith, and even further, to Blaise Pascal.

Liberalism according to Dufour means primarily a liberation of the passions.41 And this liberation has puritan roots. It was Pascal who halfway through the seventeenth century started to tamper with the classical Augustinian hierarchy of Amor Dei and Amor sui, divine love and self-love. In a letter written in 1651 Pascal admits the following on self-love: ‘It was natural to Adam, and just in its innocence; but it became criminal as well as intemperate due to his sin.’42 This small concession started a development of gradual revaluation of self-love, making the puritan more and more

35 On the second page of L’individu Qui Vient Dufour defines the true individual: a being that detached

himself from the herd, thinks and acts free from his passions, can govern himself, has an interest in the other and is aware of his relative place in the universe. Dufour 2011: 12.

36 Dufour 2008: 5, 13. Dufour 2007b: 104. 37 Dufour 2008: 4-5. 38 Dufour 2008: 42. Adam Smith versus Immanuel Kant, deregulation versus regulation: Dufour postulates

a key struggle within our culture between the ‘English Enlightenment’ and the ‘German Enlightenment’. For the time being, he states, this struggle is decided in favour of the first. Dufour 2011: 52-54, 213, 233, 324, 332; Dufour 2009: 169-172. See also note 53.

39 Dufour 2008: 12 (slightly altered translation), 92ff. 40 Title of one of Dufour’s studies: Le Divin Marché. La Révolution Culturelle Libérale (2007). 41 Dufour 2009: 113. 42 Dufour 2009: 56.

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‘perverse’, that is inverting the original hierarchy. Via the Jansenist Pierre Nicole and the Calvinist Pierre Bayle, Dufour arrives at the Calvinist physician and economist Bernard de Mandeville and his famous Fable of the Bees of 1714, the text in which private vices are declared to bring public benefits. Liberation of the passions produces affluence, their restriction brings on misery. Half a century later economist and theologian Adam Smith followed in Mandeville’s footsteps, made his ideas acceptable43, and via his Wealth of Nations founded liberalism and its religion of the free market guided by a divine ‘invisible hand’. Private vices, that is private interests, should have a free hand, because they lead to public happiness. Amor sui is the main road to glory.

After Smith another liberalizing step had to be taken, Dufour continues, and this was done in a very radical way by the libertine writer Marquis de Sade, also at the end of the eighteenth century. Sade made the perversion, that is to say the reversal, complete by staging, in literary space, the radicalization of certain basic elements of liberalism, which led to his notion of ‘isolism’, an extremist combination of egoism and hedonism. Showing immediately what the key thought of the book is, Dufour starts The Perverse City with the following revealing parallel quotation44:

Give me that which I want, and you shall have this which you want. Give me that part of your body which is capable of giving me a moment's satisfaction, and, if you desire, amuse yourself with whatever part of mine that may be agreeable to you.

The first line is by Adam Smith, the second is De Sade’s.45 ‘Liberalism means Smith together with Sade,’ Dufour states provocatively; today the infamous Marquis has us firmly in his grasp: ‘We live in an increasingly Sadean world.’46 Our contemporary world is monadic; we are a collection of islands in an ocean of commodities. The global market releases us, but not to set us free. It ties us to our roles of consumer and flex-worker. It initiates and stimulates the production of ‘individuals who are supple, insecure, mobile and open to all the market’s modes and variations’.47 It summons us to ‘be ourselves’, but tempts us to do the opposite by offering all sorts of artificial identities. The

43 Initially Mandeville was considered to be a heretic and was therefore nicknamed Man Devil. The neutral,

scientific adaptation of his thought by Smith made it acceptable and respectable. Dufour 2009: 112, and Dufour 2011: 77.

44 Dufour 2009: 9. 45 From The Wealth of Nations resp Juliette. At the end of L’individu qui vient, with the aim of a

‘sympathetic individualism’, Dufour presents the following reversal of the ultraliberal reversal : ‘What I have received, I should be able to return.’ Dufour 2011: 347.

46 Dufour 2009: 172, 11. Dufour also typifies our world as ‘Deleuzian’. According to him it was the capital mistake of ‘postmodern’ philosophers like Gilles Deleuze to let themselves be seduced by the revolutionary machinations of capitalism and join enthusiastically, because blinded, in the demolition process, and more than that, aim at radicalizing it: ‘Deleuze, who thought he could pass the Market on the left, actually was taken over by the Market on the right. In sum, by believing he was challenging the Market, he was serving its cause.’ Dufour 2011: 236. The Sadean world is a Deleuzian one, but Deleuzian in a sense that probably would have baffled Deleuze himself. Total capitalism is much more total, that is absorbing and versatile, than Deleuze suspected. Dufour 2008: 93. Referring to the young Marx, Dufour states that the only regime that is truly revolutionary is the capitalist system. The thing now is to resist this perpetual turnover and develop a ‘neo-resistant’ and ‘conserving’ mode of thinking. Dufour 2011: 303ff. In this way the tradition of disciplining the passions that was demolished by ultra-liberalism can be recovered and regained.

47 Dufour 2008: 157.

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´liberated´ passions are permanently mobilized, addressed and exploited, on the basis of a dominant discourse of ´self-fulfilment´. The English sociologist Nikolas Rose therefore, following Michel Foucault, speaks of a ‘regime of the self’, ‘technologies of the self’ and ‘technologies of subjectification’. The concepts of autonomy, responsibility and self-realization, says Rose, function as instruments of ‘the conduct of conduct’.48 Passivity or re-activity? We are in danger of becoming playthings. The late modern individual, writes Dufour, hovers between megalomania and its opposite, depression; he is ‘evolving towards a subjective condition defined by a borderline neurotic-psychotic state’ and is ‘increasingly trapped between a latent melancholy (the depression we hear so much about), the impossibility of speaking in the first person, the illusion of omnipotence, and the flight forward into a false self, a borrowed personality or even the multiple personalities that are made so widely available by the market.’49 With regard to this melancholy or depression, however, Dufour is ambivalent and ambiguous. On the one hand he suggests that the depression epidemic might be ‘one of the most evident signs of resistance of the subject to the economy of the generalised market’,50 yet without explaining what kind of resistance this might be; there is only the minor indication of ‘a form of retreat’ and ‘the withdrawal of desire in order not to fall into a trap or traps’.51 On the other hand he presents depression as nothing more than a shadow of perversion: ‘the depressed person is a subject that doesn’t get round to becoming perverse,’ or rather, ‘the depressed person is a pervert that ignores himself.’52 Such indications ought to be expounded. Dufour regrettably stops here.

For Ehrenberg, as indicated earlier, addiction is a re-action against the ultimate passivity of depression, ‘a way of withdrawing from the world’. In Dufour it is the other way around, he understands depression itself as a (possible) form of retreat or moving back: one withdraws one’s desire in order to protect oneself against the identity games played on the global market of ‘total capitalism’, or in other words, one turns away from the ultraliberal sham liberty which in fact is a new slavery, the servitude of ‘anti-authoritarian totalitarianism’.53 This slavery is our addiction: ‘We have become our own proper tyrants, we have become the slaves of our passions/pulsations’.54 So in Dufour,

48 Rose 1998: 2, 78, 186 and 150ff. Cf his essay Becoming neurochemical selves (2004). 49 Dufour 2008: 71 (slightly altered translation). 50 Dufour 2007b: 107, and 2007a: 325/326. 51 Dufour 2011: 125, 279. 52 Dufour 2009: 297. 53 Dufour 2011: 14. 54 Dufour 2011: 277. In L’individu qui vient Dufour also uses the term pleonexia to characterize the spirit of

our times. It is a term that figures in Plato’s Politheia, referes to the unsatiable desire to have more (than other people) and is regarded as dangerous hubris, haughtiness. According to the Spanish philosopher Nemrod Carrasco this concept is part of the centre of Plato’s thought: justice flows from the permanent fight against the temptation of pleonexia. Currently however this haughtiness makes up the heart of our ultraliberal culture, says Dufour, and the numerous scandals in the news concerning bribery, excessive bonuses, sexual splurges and so on are only its most blatant offshoots. When Mandeville publishes his Fable of the Bees, writes Dufour, a direct heir of Glaucon from Politheia seemes to raise his voice. The English Enlightenment resumes the debate precisely at the point where Plato had closed it two millennia earlier. Dufour 2011: 95-98 ; cf 117, 361.

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addiction (in the narrow sense) is not a defence against depression, but in reverse depression is a defence against addiction (in a very broad sense).

Now what does this imply for the theme of our conference: the idea of an ‘interactive metal fatigue’ as the flipside of a successful emancipation? In the eyes of Dufour the modern liberation process was not successful at all. The current pressure on the individual is not that of an accomplished but that of a staged and faked emancipation. The malaise of (late) modernity extends much further than Taylorian thought can imagine, because it takes as a reality what has not arrived at all: ‘true’ individualism. The projected autonomous individual and the actual fabricated one are in fact drifting further and further apart. We are in much deeper trouble than we are willing or able to admit. The contemporary individual is ‘psychotisizing’ and, as a protective move, tends to withdraw into a state which the dominant DSM-oriented discourse labels as ‘major depressive disorder’ or ‘dysthymic disorder’. How should we respond to this situation? It is imperative, I think, to expand on Rosa’s idea of the depressed person as a ‘sensitive seismograph’ and try to record what the latter registers. We need to counteract the prevailing DSM-based reductionism and seek to get access to the phenomenon from the phenomenon itself. Our situation, in sum, calls for a phenomenology of depression. Attunement and arrhythmia Such a phenomenology was developed by Jacques Schotte. He advocated a psychiatric approach that resists the ‘Kraepelinian spirit’ of present-day psychiatry55 and does justice to the whole human being (‘anthropopsychiatry’). He took the view that via pathology the sources of human existence could be unlocked (‘pathoanalysis’). In his perspective on mood and pathology Schotte based himself, among other texts, on the famous study Classical and Christian Ideas of World Harmony. Prolegomena to an Interpretation of the Word ‘Stimmung’ by Leo Spitzer (1963).56 The German word Stimmung, mood, is close to Abstimmung, attunement, and this latter concept is the starting point for Schotte’s reinterpretation of mood. Being in a mood means being tuned in one-way or another. It is not so much an internal state but a way of relating to or being in the world. It is an ac-cordance with the environment or ambiance, and so the possibility of a dis-cordance. ‘Environment’ is understood here as the ancient Greek periechon, which meant something like ‘the encompassing-bearing’.57 It is not an extension of us, we take part in it. A basic, primordial dimension, to which the term ‘relation’ does not apply; it concerns an affective being-in-the-world before any subject-object opposition. The affectivity at stake here is a pathos in the original sense: ‘primary passion of the soul, through which this soul starts to appear in the world, to the others, and via these to itself’.58

Affective attunement or distunement, taking place at a pre-intentional, pre-subjective, participative level. The being at issue here is not a subject yet but a pre-subject, a pré-moi participatif, a participating pre-ego: ‘Presubject feeling-itself moving

55 Schotte 1989: 66 56 Another important source of Schotte of course is the work of Martin Heidegger. One could say that he is

incorporating Heidegger’s rethinking of affectivity in Sein und Zeit into psychiatric thought. 57 Schotte 1982: 648 58 Schotte 1982: 667

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and so living-itself dying, participating rhythmically in the coming-and-going of nature and of life.’59 Correspondence that involves a continuous adjustment, ‘in a sort of reciprocal interiority of “self” and a world constituted by others as well, who together with this “self” (re)find themselves already on their way in the coming-and-going and the general anonymity of a primary participation.’60 It is se trouver in the double sense of the French word: be somewhere and find oneself. Schotte refers to a key term from Heidegger’s Being and Time: Befindlichkeit, translated by the way by Stambaugh as ‘attunement’.61 Primordial sphere of contact, typified with the musical terms ‘tone’ and ‘rhythm’: in the mood a correspondence is executed with the environment ‘according to the tone of a situation and according to the rhythm of an exchange which already on this elementary-primordial “level” can realize themselves as harmonious or, on the contrary, be analyzed as more or less disharmonious’.62 Correspondence that must be realized, so it involves as it were a ‘task’ that must be acquitted, and during this discharge problems might occur: the participation can be in dis-cordance, the Stimmung can turn into a Verstimmung, a mood disturbance or dis-tunement.

These mood disturbances are in Schotte’s eyes basic problems since they touch the basis of human existence. ‘Pathoanalysis’ thus means investigating the human condition through the prism of psychiatry, which involves, first of all, gaining an insight into the movement of human existence. Mood disorders should be considered as ‘moments of this movement’, as disturbances of the ‘primordial dialectics of feeling and moving’; the ‘feeling presubject’ has problems with ‘participating productively-receptively in the global ambient coming-and-going of nature and life’.63 Schotte’s use of dense language is an attempt to find words that do justice to this unspeakable sphere of primordial interwovenness. ‘Environment’ for instance suggests a separation that has not yet happened; inside/outside, passivity/activity, receptivity/productivity, be tuned/tune in, and so on, converge here.

To be in tune or to be untuned, that is the question. Mood disturbances are the via regia to the sources of human existence, says Schotte, and on that road depression is the sovereign to follow. Three main characteristics of the latter disorder are pointed out by Schotte: anhormia, lack of drive or zest, anhedonia, lack of interest or pleasure, and arrhythmia, disturbance of the rhythm of life.64 There is a strong suggestion in Schotte’s text that this arhythmicity or dysrhythmicity is the source of the other two. Schotte points in that direction when he writes about the temporal dimension as ‘the true primordial dimension of all living functioning’. And when he refers to the elementary sphere of contact with the words ‘tone’ and ‘rhythm’. Or when he writes on the presubject’s ‘participating rhythmically in the coming-and-going of nature and of life.’65 Could it be that our highly demanding, hyperdynamic late modern culture more and more, and increasingly intense, brings about a disturbance of that basic ‘rhythm’? Is it in the end this primary bond which is in dis-order?

Connecting Schotte’s thoughts on primordial distunement with the findings and predictions of the World Health Organization seems to be rather a mission impossible. I would say that it is a mission inescapable. Not primarily because depression is projected

59 Schotte 1982: 670, 665f 60 Schotte 1982: 668 61 Heidegger 1996: 126 62 Schotte 1982: 623, 673 63 Schotte 1982: 637, 643, 638 64 Schotte 1989: 72 65 Schotte 1982: 644, 623, 665f

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to be shortly the second leading cause of disability. The most urgent question is not how we should deal with this problem, but what exactly is the problem. We are still far from having a satisfying answer to this primary question. And in the meantime on all sides the problem is tackled with a rampant reductionist spirit. The stagnated trendfollower/flexi-worker is relentlessly reactivated and remobilized, by ruling him out as an individual, by passing him by so to speak, with the help of medication, electrodes, electroshocks, or other technological means.66 How can we do it differently? How can we do justice to depression as an individual experience? How can we gain access to this experience as a multi-layered phenomenon? In what way is depression more than just defect? In what way should we understand it as a form of defence or revolt, or an obscure desire to resist? And how can we connect such an understanding with the thought of depression as pre-subjective, pre-intentional distunement? The answers to these far-reaching questions eventually presuppose an extensive and thorough reflection on the primordial sphere of affectivity, of pathos in the original sense. A challenging task, and a primary one indeed.

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