16. The new “opium of the people”
It is no longer religion which is the “opium of the people”, it is money, a version completely current of the “artificial paradises”. See how, in all corners of Europe, people are in the streets, even recently, in Italy they were playing lotto in the hope of winning a huge nest egg (147 million Euros!). Proof that one no longer awaits anything of any happiness “beyond”. People seeks to manufacture an artificial paradise, i.e. a happiness already here. In other words, cash (“dough”): here is a new eschatology. It is Saint Barth, the “dolce vita”, comfort, in short, the anticipated paradise. There is no more paradise which is not taxed, and “our values” do not exist any more but out of the Stock Exchange.
And then, as there is no more adventure anywhere, we get the jitters. We enjoy that. It is as if the whole world gave itself the fun of having the giddiness that it requires. Exactly like a player at the casino. The bank’s broke? Well, the State will have to re-inflate it, otherwise no more casino! Can you believe this! Soon it will be necessary to compensate the losers so that they continue to play! But it is well known where that leads to (read again “the player” by Dostoïevski). That leads to ruin and death, generally by suicide.
And, indeed, what one calls the “financial crisis”, is, indeed the suicide of economism. I say economism, and not the economy, because there always was economy in the world, and there will always be (it is inevitable). Economism, on the other hand is what made it possible for the middle-class to generate, yesterday, the “workers”, and, today, the “players”. In France, it all started in the beginning of the eighties, under Mitterrand who was, as one knows, fascinated by Bernard Tapie (so much so he made him a minister). However, what did Tapie do? He repurchased, for a symbolic franc, companies in bankruptcy and re-inflated them thanks to speculation. Everyone said: “It is formidable! What a genius for business! ”. But, if you think of it, since Tapie, it is not the work any more that is remunerated, it is the play. Before him, play (including football!) was not remunerated. However, look at what sportsmen “are worth”, today. It is not worthwhile any more to study, go and play. You want to win? Speculate! Play the Stock Exchange! Or play “super-lotto”! It is not all for nothing that in our time, the “Française des jeux” multiplies ploughed for the third time, fifths, and other booby-prizes: “That can pay big!”. Yes, but with what? Not with the player, in any case: like all other addictions, the addiction with the play kills the man. Then, is necessary it to detoxicate all the players, alcoholics, compulsive eaters, workaholics, etc If all had to be de-toxicated the “addicts” with the artificial paradises, one would not leave there any more. Certain naive people say: “We should police the banks”. But what happened, in the United States, with the legal prohibition of alcohol?
Therefore, here is still another sign of the times: globalisation, not, this time, of hysteria, but the globalisation of addiction. Under these conditions, what is the addiction? I was going to say: one doesn’t know, quite simply because it is about a pathology of what one calls the “will”, and that these pathologies, in dominating the current system, are terribly disturbing.
We have not even dissociated clearly what, in what one calls the “will”, is of a natural nature (say body or even animal), and what was cultural, therefore properly human. That is, it has never been taken into account, concerning man, the pathologies of nature, which, however, condition emergence with self-control, self-control which is only human.
More generally, as I have shown you in connection with the antagonism of the psychoanalysis and the neurosciences, man is an embodied spirit (or a spiritual body, if you prefer). Consequently, one can never say that there exists a cultural pathology, on one side, and, on another side, natural pathology. It is not as simple in reality because we only very rarely have something of the one without something of the other. It is clear, for example, that when man has aphasia, it is almost always due to a right hemiplegia, in other words, we well know that there exist associated disorders. This is banal and well-known. It goes in the same way, for example, for an alcoholic: it could easily be a person who compensates for an anxiety neurosis (disorder of culture), and, which, at the same time, presents a tendency, more or less neurologically (if not genetically) conditioned, with the addiction (disorder of nature). My two examples are very coarse, but, I believe that they are emotive. In a more general way, being the man, what concern the disorders of the impulse (pathologies of nature) and of the disorders of the standard (pathologies of culture)? It is not tomorrow or the day after that one will find the answer. There is for two centuries of work! It does not matter: the essential is to leave.
One will reach that point on the condition of starting by ceasing to employ this word “will” to all things, without knowing what we’re speaking of. It is one of these many concepts, which prevent us from seizing, through it, the relationship of the self-control (human will) and the “aboulia”, i.e. the will that we have in common with animals (“aboulia” is an old term, drawn from the Greek, meaning “will”). However since I already spoke about neuroses and psychopathies (standard pathologies) in my “Introduction… ”, I would like, today, to complete the picture by delivering some reflexions on the disorders of the will, disorders to you which, once again, condition the access to the standard, even, return this emergence to the moral completely impossible (it is the amoral case that you already know).
Globally, we have blamed these disorders of the will on a vague theory of moods, which goes back to Hippocrates, or that called the “character”. But this word “character” is, from the point of view which occupies us, namely the departure between the animal and the man, deeply ambiguous, as ambiguous as it was, with Hippocrates, the term mood (“thumos”). Coming from this concept of character, the theories of psychiatry are always embarrassed: they speak about “character neuroses”. Obviously, they do the best they can. But why, in this precise case, do they speak about “character”, if not because they feel that there are pathologies of the “psuchè” (of the psyche) which have, despite everything, something to do with physiology, i.e. with a naturalness having no connection to culture, if not from the point of view of traditional morals (Judeo-Christian) according to which one knew that it was nature that was bad and which, to thwart this nature, one had “to only take on oneself”! In other words, by still using the term of “character”, psychiatry, and the common opinion, continued to maintain an ambiguity inherited from a deep past, ambiguity which one finds in “Les caractères” of La Bruyère, and which it is absolutely necessary to leave behind.
These famous “character neuroses” in general have been very closely observed, but labelled under terms which mix everything: one speaks about “instinctive monomania” or “impulsive monomania” (it is the “mono” here which is interesting). One does not know where one is any more: if there is still impulsiveness there, there is still this risk to confuse the disorders of nature and disorders of culture. In addition, it should be well understood that “character neuroses” are not neuroses, neuroses which they, indeed, are disorders of culture (self-control). With proof, these pseudo neuroses known to be “of character” do not have anything inhibiting (quite to the contrary!), and it is there that the disorder resides. The person does not have a brake any more, in other words, they no longer have the capacity of auto-frustration (or of auto-castration). No longer having this capacity, there is generally, in these claimed “neurotics” (often called “disturbed”) a formidable pervasion of the Super-ego. These patients, generally, compensate for their deficiency by resorting to the police. Here is what is important: what is to be seen (an apparent normality) is not, as you now know, what should be observed! And that is valid for all those with “mental” pathologies. The social sciences must always avoid being taken in by “obviousness”, to stick to the processes, processes which, themselves, remain always more or less hidden.
However, while speaking about Super-ego, do not believe it is necessary to adhere to the Freudian theory of Super-ego like a siege of morality (and thus of culpability). Freud completely missed the specific moral principle (of the auto-castration), by confusing it with castration, i.e., at the bottom, the social coercion of Durkheim, even if this castration is, according to him, interiorised. Freud, basically, did sociology without knowing it. However, as for the “character neuroses”, the Super-ego, one must admit its presence, like a substitute for a failing self-control: it is the policeman. The Super-ego is present because the subject is disturbed. For a “normal” man, there is no need of a Super-ego. This Super-ego, on the other hand, in the disturbed patient, becomes a species of foreign body which is essential to him outside, since it is not any more itself able to castrate. And for this reason the psychiatrists could confuse the “character neuroses” with the neuroses: it is that they confused this pathological primacy of the Super-ego with pathological inhibition. In other words the pathological inhibition, which defines the neuroses has nothing to do with the fight against a Super-ego, fights against the presence in oneself of the other, the presence of the third, the presence of the Father if you want, while pathological inhibition, at all. And what shows well that the psychiatrists who observed these pathologies are honest, it is that they had put them aside. In other words, the “character neuroses” form a small closed field, inside the neuroses, and the majority of the treaties of psychiatry say: “Well yes, it is not completely the same thing as the neuroses: let us make them a particular type”.
Today, we speak less and less about “character neuroses”, more of character “disorders”, disorders which pass to the side of neurology. Just like the famous “manic-depressive psychosis” which made the golden days of psychiatry until recently. This “P.M.D.”, as one calls it, does not resemble a “psychosis”, it is entirely animal. If it posed a problem, from the nosographic point of view it is not because of its difficulty: there is really nothing easier to describe. But that did not obstruct the psychiatrists, who produced a whole load of literature on the subject! What annoyed them was in trying to locate it. While speaking about “psychosis”, that did not engage them to anything: that only stated that it was not a disease of the stomach! With this near: we have noted (since 1946, exactly), that it was, among the so-called disorders of the “psyche” (thus psychiatric), most sensitive to chemotherapy (lithium salts), to electrotherapy (seismography, or electric shocks) and to all these things. The difficulty, actually, was due to the complete absence of theory concerning the will. As the word “will” was specific to man and not to the animal, one was not able to distinguish in it that which concerned the impulse and that which concerned the normal, which was turbid naturalness (concerning neurology) and cultural disorder (concerning psychiatry). Very recently the term “psychosis” was abandoned. One refers now to “bipolar disease”. At the bottom, what occurred to the “manic-depressive psychosis” was exactly the same as for the alleged “character neurosis”, the epilepsy… and the aphasia! Until close to the second half of the nineteenth century, indeed, one said of aphasics: “These guys are delirious. They are completely insane, lock up them”. Until the day when a doctor named Broca located, in the cortex, the word centre. At this rate, the psychiatrists will lose all their customers!
Well, if there was trouble with the pseudo “manic-depressive psychosis”, it is that we were not able to oppose a clear theory of the (natural) disorders of the will and the (cultural) disorders of free decision. When there is destruction of the will, if there is no more real impulse, i.e. spontaneity of the taking into account by the animal, that we cease being of an emotional whole, one sinks into a behavioural undulation. At this time, the behaviour concerns purely and simply what one calls “the mood imbalance”. Moreover, when one speaks about cyclothymia, it is of this physiological imbalance that one speaks. The cyclothymia makes you float, since you no longer have an interior engine, one could say, you float with the prevailing winds. Or there is wind, and it is the mania (in Greek, “mania” is frenzy); or there is no wind, and it is depression (abatement). For the good reason that you are not free any more of your “motion”, you can no longer determine yourself.
I will add, coming from depression, which can lead to suicide. However the masochist can also be led to suicide, but the suicide of a masochist is not the same as the suicide of a depressive. The suicide of a masochist has been defined as a “suicide-sign”, a call to the other; “Look at how you made me suffer” (it is the suicide of many starlets). While the depressive suicide has nothing to do with this “suicide-sign”, it is a straightforwardly animal suicide, insofar as the situation is no longer bearable. The suicide, you see, is not a sign of anything, but it can be a sign of all, like all the behaviours, insofar as it should be integrated in syndromes which, only then, enable you to interpret it in the correct way. In other words, no symptom, is really and purely a symptom of something; it needs to be located in the clinical picture, of a syndrome. I again close this bracket.
You understand, then, at the same time the cyclothymiac character (“that” pushes or “that” does not push) disorder and the very large variety of aspects of the same disorder. In other words, the same abulia, clinically definable, will present different aspects according to customers (hyperthymia, hypothymia, athymia, etc), and one of its aspects is precisely the compulsion, renamed lately addiction. Then lithium, electric shocks and all the rest. After all, why not? On condition of thinking of that which is called compulsion (or addiction), and see that it is about a disorder of the animal “will” in certain unhappy people, exactly like cyclothymia. Here, it should be noted that we cruelly miss an impulse theory.
What is impulse? It is the “aboulic” response in the world. But one should not confuse the impulse with the effect, which can be lost by what one calls apathy. This effect, certainly, is not passive. What is the effect is what is common to all living things, including plants. In other words, the effect does not suppose only one sensitivity, but, at the same time a reaction to this sensitivity, so that on the whole the effect includes all tropisms, all “reflexes” with the most vegetative direction of the term. On the contrary, there is impulse only in the animal insofar as there is organization of the effects (of the range of emotional tonalities) and taken into account of this organization which makes that the animal, unlike the plant, emerges with spontaneity, the automatism (or auto-kinesis). It is not a question of machines here: by automatism, it is necessary to hear, in accordance with the etymology of the word, the fact of being driven oneself. They laughed loudly at Descartes and of his theory of “animal machines”, but, finally, it is he who was right, because he had touched his finger on something of a correct theory of freedom, or, more exactly something of the base (natural) on which it could be worked out, this base being defined as the aboulia. One cannot say that one has an aboulia, that one has an impulse towards this or that object that one will enumerate according to their pace: people, things, alcohol, money, even leeks. One cannot classify the “objects”: that has neither head nor tail. The aboulia is defined according to our relationship in the world, i.e. of our impulse, our project. That does not say that there does not exist a tendency, but it should then be said that the tendencies exist only as from the moment when there is rupture of the project. Aboulia goes from there, from the tendencies as elementary movements of the praxis, which always results from the disintegration of the gesture. What exists, which is observable and describable, is the gesture. There are elementary movements only when the gesture flies in arcs, to some extent, i.e. when the movements are hustled because they are not ordered any more in the gesture. In other words, if one were right to criticize the tendency, on the theoretical level, that does not want to say that, pathologically, one does not find examples of them. I.e. the tendency appears only insofar as, precisely, there is no more project and that it is the disorder. The destruction of the project does not create the tendency, but the tendencies, all the tendencies which you will want. The pathology of the project pulverises us truly in elementary tendencies. Then, the abulia, it is the natural of the project, turbid disorder which pulverises us in elementary tendencies. It is that which will make (since there is no more impulse) impulses, compulsions, etc, which will make us feel thrown in all directions, the disorder and so on.
You understand that, just as one is able today to distinguish agnosia (natural pathology) from aphasia (cultural pathology), apraxia (natural disorder) and atechnia (cultural disorder), it will be necessary, one day, to be able to distinguish abulia (natural disorder), neuroses and psychopathies (turbid cultural). In other words we are led to distinguish the disorders from the aboulia and the decision disorders. It is absolutely fundamental, if one wants in particular to understand something about this form of abulia which is addiction, whatever the object on which it is focused. It can be food, money, power, social success, etc
But then, you see that the system of thought that dominates a certain society makes this objective difficult. Why? Because one admires or stigmatizes each addiction according to whether its “contents” are valued or not by the aforementioned society. If you are a work addict, no problem, if you are addicted to money, that’s passable, but if you are addicted to alcohol, then that’s terrible! However, from the point of view of the processes, it is exactly the same thing. See the perfect hypocrisy of our societies. It is the same hypocrisy which appears in the distinction that we make between legal drugs, from which the State takes taxes, and clandestine drugs. However, everyone knows very well that alcohol can, for certain people, be considered a hard drug! The same hypocrisy applies when it comes to the State preserving “La française des jeux”, its monopoly!
However, you see that man is much more complex than it is generally thought, and even more than certain mediationists of the School of Rennes think as well. Here is what I would like to share from two of them (Jean-Claude Quentel and Attie Duval), in an article devoted to “the autonomy of ethics” (review of “the Debate”, n°140, p. 122): “The psychopath, no longer tries, contrary to the neurotic, to slake his desire and becomes, to some extent, the slave of his impulses”. However, it is clear that the neurotic (i.e. the inhibited pathological person) never achieves satisfaction, even regulated, of his desire. Our two authors confuse the inhibition (which is completely normal) with pathological inhibition (on this point, I return to my “Introduction…”, p.97). I will add that our authors confuse the psychopath, which reached the normal, in other words with the self-control that is the foundation of freedom, with the aboulic one (or the congenital amoral), who, can never achieve it. (see my “Introduction… ”, pages 114-115). One should not confuse deterioration and deprivation! Lastly, one wonders what idea the authors have concerning neurosis as they write: “The position of Kant can be described as neurotic”! And what ideas they may have of the “nihilism of Nietzsche” (sic) to judge it as“far too radical”.
I have no further intention here than to warn to you against some alleged mediationists of the “School of Rennes”, to start with, a neurolinguist, with the manner of Changeux (that says it all!), named Sabouraud. He basically said, Sabouraud to Jean Gagnepain,: “Me, I train interns in neurology, quietly: that, that is science. Now you, Jean Gagnepain, bring me your cultural air, make your sweet small talk, which I could, moreover, do much better myself”. That brings back to me the case of one of my former co-eds, today professor of philosophy in the FAC, to whom I preached fine words and to which she answered me: “Fine, if that can be useful to me in my career”. No point in saying to you that a black curtain immediately fell down between her and I!
Well, in our moribund university, we are there. How could you expect that a neurolinguist, a “psychologist clinician” or a teacher of philosophy, who live off their stupidity, accept the Mediation Theory? In all cases, you obtain a juxtaposition of the training, and it is the best way of not training anybody. To claim to be a mediationist supposes that the academics really want a change – a revolution? In fact, they especially want to keep their practices, to be important characters in our university system (it is dying), in short, what they wish above all is inertia. The innate refusal is there. From this point of view, one can say that, like Marx, Freud and Saussure, Jean Gagnepain was betrayed by his heirs (except one or two).
“Under these conditions, would you say, what to do? That obligates you to a total isolation”. Personally, I have never suffered from it, but I understand that there are some who can suffer from it: it is sometimes painful to live, there is no shadow of a doubt. And afterwards? The essential is the advancement of the Social sciences!
And it advances, you can be sure: tomorrow, in London, Beijing, Barcelona or San Francisco, from the schools mediationists will be born: it is absolutely certain!