January 20, 2006: Resistance to the Depressive Society
The French historian of psychoanalysis Elisabeth Roudinesco has argued that "modern democratic societies . . . have ceased to privilege conflict as the normative kernel of the formation of subjectivity. In other words, in place of the Freudian conception of the subject of the unconscious, conscious of his or her liberty but haunted by sex, death, and prohibition, there is the more psychological conception of a depressive individual fleeing his or her unconscious and concerned to rub out the essence of all conflict in himself. . . . Condemned to exhaustion by the absence of a revolutionary perspective, he or she seeks in drugs or religion, in devotion to health or the cult of the perfect body, the ideal of an impossible happiness" (Why Psychoanalysis? [Columbia University Press, 2001], p. 8).
How then can we socialists struggle against the terrible sadness that underlies and helps to reproduce what Roudinesco calls the "depressive society"? How can we renew psychic resistance as a condition of possibility for political resistance? How, in short, can we reawaken in ourselves and others the joy of struggling for a better world? Here, I believe, classical Marxism falls short, for we confront a deeper and tougher problem than simply (!) explaining how exploited men and women become conscious of, and begin to act in order to further, their class interests.
As a start, perhaps we should return to and rework the "Freudo-Marxist" project stretching from Reich, Fromm, and Marcuse to Deleuze, Guattari, and Zizek. Perhaps, too, we should at long last seriously engage with, and learn from, the theoretical and practical resources of serious Asian philosophical thinkers and practitioners in the Buddhist, Vedantic, Confucian, and Daoist traditions.
Comments
I don't know the broader answer to these excellent questions. But, I can point to one narrow one. We can begin by digging our way out from under the weight of defeat accumulated by our traditions.
This is the exact opposite of the project of TI-style cadre groups. By now, even the healthiest of them are the product of generations of accumulated disaster. I would argue, the internalized continuers of those disasters. In my opinion it's important for individuals not to allow themselves to become psychological prisoners of these unhealthy organizational and political cultures. I think the technical term for this is "Stockholm Syndrome".
I don't have any recipe for how to do that. Except to say, to begin with, challenge the traditions. Many of them are unhealthy, personally as well as politically.
Posted by: Mark Phillips | January 21, 2006 08:33 AM
Perhaps, we have to conceive liberation as liberation from the self.
Posted by: Wayne Rothschild | January 21, 2006 02:43 PM
Question: what is the political consequences of refusing the mind/body split?
Posted by: Wayne Rothschild | January 21, 2006 05:16 PM
Actually, I'm not interested in liberation from the self but in the creation of new forms of subjectivity. This is why I'm especially interested in how non-Western philosophies conceive of different "practices of the self" (to use Foucault's excellent formulation).
Posted by: Ted | January 23, 2006 07:12 AM
I thought this might interest you. The Pew Research Center has a survey posted on its site re who's happy and who isn't. Not surprisingly, the results correlate most strongly to income. Succinctly put: the comfortably-off are happy, the not-so-comfortably-off aren't.
Now, have a look at this: conservative Post columnist George Will turns these results into a kind of referendum on conservativism and family values. He notes that conservatives are happier, and married people are happier, and a partridge in a pear tree.
Makes you wonder how those guys can type and spin at the same time.
Posted by: Mark Phillips | February 26, 2006 03:47 PM