Laurent de Sutter - Narcocapitalism: Life in the Age of Anaesthesia

Theory Redux

Series editor: Laurent de Sutter

Published Titles

Alfie Bown, The Playstation Dreamworld

Laurent de Sutter, Narcocapitalism:

Life in the Age of Anaesthesia

Roberto Esposito, Persons and Things

Graham Harman, Immaterialism: Objects and

Social Theory

Sreko Horvat, The Radicality of Love

Dominic Pettman, Infinite Distraction:

Paying Attention to Social Media

Nick Srnicek, Platform Capitalism

Laurent de Sutter

Translated by Barnaby Norman

polity

Copyright Laurent de Sutter 2018

The right of Laurent de Sutter to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in 2018 by Polity Press

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ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-0687-3

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Its all about chemicals.

Andy Warhol

Sara Amari, Franco Berardi, Pascal Chabot, Ewen Chardronnet, Gilles Collard, Neil de Cort, Nicholas Deschamps, Marguerite Ferry, Peter Goodrich, Line Hjorth, Geraldine Jacques, Elliott Karstadt, Monique Labrune, Louise Lame, Aude Lancelin, Camille Louis, Sophie Marinopoulos, Lilya At Menguellet, Barnaby Norman, George Owers, Bernard Stiegler, John Thompson, Henri Trubert, Paul Young, and Marion Zilio.

0. Patent US4848. On 12 November 1846, Charles Thompson Jackson and William Green Morton, from Boston, filed a patent with the United States Patent Office. It received the number 4848, and, as its introduction noted, concerned the improvement of surgical operations.reference to Discord, the goddess of Oblivion, daughter of Eris, seemed dubious to Holmes after all, with the inhalation of ether, it was less a question of amnesia than insensibility, less a case of returning from the world of the dead than of staying in that of the living. No matter; the US Patent Office gave Jackson and Morton the patent they had asked for and with this, a new age dawned: the age of anaesthesia.

. See Roger Dachez, Histoire de la mdecine, de lAntiquit nos jours [History of Medicine: From Antiquity to the Present], 2nd edn (Paris: Taillandier, 2012) p. 587. For more detail, see Marguerite Zimmer, Histoire de lanesthsie: Mthodes et techniques au XIXe sicle [History of Anesthesia: Methods and Techniques in the 19th Century] (Les Ulis: EDP Sciences, 2008) p. 64.. Dachez, Histoire de la mdecine, p. 586.. Ibid., p. 588..

1. From symptom to syndrome. When Emil Kraepelin published the sixth edition of his Lehrbuch der Psychiatrie in 1899, he had for some time already been a model of scientific success a model, that is, according to the standards of German science of his day.

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2. When being errs. Unexpectedly, for those unfamiliar with his work, Kraepelin did not provide a definition of manic-depressive psychosis (or manisch-depressiven Irresein in German), contenting himself with describing the features grouped under this name. These were of either a physical or psychic type, with the latter present in greater number in Kraepelins description including sensory disorders and delusional disorders, avolition and logorrhea.it had been accepted that physical characteristics were transmitted from generation to generation, it seemed certain to him that mental illnesses, or at least the predisposition to develop them, were also transmitted, with no hope of recovery or redemption. Madness was not an accident that it was possible to survive; it was part of the very being (Sein) of the sufferer, whose erring (Irre) must continue inevitably, even beyond itself.

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3. What is excitation? Even though he did not risk a definition of manic-depressive psychosis, a disturbing element kept cropping up as Kraepelin went through the symptoms of the illness: excitation. Whatever the symptom described, it was differentiated according to the state of excitation of the patient, which could refer to a physical or psychic agitation, could be positive or negative, and could relate to the manic or the depressive phase. More than the symptom itself, it was its intensification by excitation that should hold the observers attention, and that, combined with other symptoms of the same order, would allow for the classification of the patient as a victim of manic-depressive as sane. To get rid of the illness, therefore, you would have to attack the capacity to be excited which is to say, the bodily element that carried being away into extreme regions that no normal human should be allowed to frequent.

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4. Enter chloral. Kraepelins physicalism could have remained a curiosity, relegated to the margins of the history of psychiatry but, in a few years, it had become the default setting for thinking about mental illnesses in Europe, and then, later, in the United States.it was even, in line with Kraepelins pessimistic doctrine, the only treatment they could hope to receive.

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5. Powers of deflation. A manic-depressive does not get better; all you can do is try to calm them down make sure, that is, that the excitation affecting them is reduced to nothing, in favour of an enforced but harmless stability. In other words, with someone suffering from manic-depressive psychosis, you can only hope to control the manic element including what remains of it during a depressive phase. The only good manic-depressive is a depressive separated from the uncontrollable half of their syndrome, the part that justifies their clinical confinement, with the understanding that the care given is limited to the policing of restless bodies. From the moment it was used predominantly to deaden excitation, chloral hydrates success was assured: if manic excitation was also bodily hyperesthesia, it made sense to remove every sensation that might lead to it. The dynamic of excitation was a dynamic of affection: psychomotor agitation was produced when the sufferers being was overrun by sensations Manic-depressive psychosis meant a kind of disontologization: it was how what affects being separated it from itself, in favour of a play of unpredictable forces which threatened to affect other individuals in turn. To fight it, therefore, you had to be able to reinstate being within its limits, to muffle the call of the outside to which it sought to respond, deafening it to what would otherwise lead it to an experience of excess to an experience that it was assumed was too difficult for it. The sweet anaesthesia afforded by chloral hydrate could fulfil these requirements; where being had inflated out of all proportion, it could bring about its radical deflation through the withdrawal of the affective energies feeding its inflation. Useless sensations were silenced, so that all that was left was a kind of continuous, vaporous and weakened bassline, whose rhythm taught the erring being that the only stroll it could take was around the grounds.