1

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. Taylors 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.

2
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 naus 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 Taylors
admirable wide-ranging and sharply focused outlook. Is there in the end really a
problem, one might wonder after reading Taylors 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.

3
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 Ehrenbergs 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
dtre 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.

4
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 20
th

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 Ehrenbergs 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 SSRIs, 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 SSRIs 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 Socit du Malaise (2010).
18
Ehrenberg 1998: 10.
19
Ehrenberg 1998: 203. Cf Ehrenberg 2010: 215 ; pills of performance.
20
Ehrenberg 1998: 189. Cf. Nikolas Roses essay Becoming Neurochemical Selves (Rose 2004).
21
Ehrenberg 2010: 230.

5
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,

6
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 LIndividu Qui Vient Aprs le Libralisme: 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 Sennetts The Corrosion of Character, a text to which
Rosa refers, classifying it as pessimistic. Oddly enough the ending of Rosas 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 ber die Beschleunigung, by the German writer and translator
Lothar Baier (2000).
34
Dufour 2011: 11.

7
become a reality is a sham individual
35
, 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 Dufour
38
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 Lindividu 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 Dufours studies: Le Divin March. La Rvolution Culturelle Librale (2007).
41
Dufour 2009: 113.
42
Dufour 2009: 56.

8
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 Mandevilles footsteps, made his ideas acceptable
43
, 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 quotation
44
:

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 Sades.
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 markets 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 Lindividu 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.

9
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 doesnt 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 ones 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 Lindividu qui vient Dufour also uses the term pleonexia to characterize the spirit of
our times. It is a term that figures in Platos 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 Platos 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.

10
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 Rosas 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 psychiatry
55
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 Schottes 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 pr-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 Heideggers rethinking of affectivity in Sein und Zeit into psychiatric thought.
57
Schotte 1982: 648
58
Schotte 1982: 667

11
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
Heideggers 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 Schottes 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
Schottes 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 Schottes
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
presubjects 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 Schottes 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

12
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.




14/05/12



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