[...]
wartime and postwar therapeutics ==> conceptions of the body
Geroulanos and Meyers (=/= Foucauldian) show “how particular kinds of injury emerged during World War I, and how such injuries found their place in the bodies and lifeworlds of wounded soldiers and doctors, and in the thinking and actions of theorists and policy makers.” (ethnography of the interwar period)
=/= proposing a counter-body or counter epistemology or resistance knowledge
“in this world, we do not play chess with eternal figures like the king and the fool; the figures are what the successive configurations of the chessboard make of them.” -Veyne
([*]integration:) taxonomy of disorder ==> administrative ends (an idea of entire system of organic functioning --> homeostasis = "the wisdom of the body” ==> theories of norms, normality, disintegration, catastrophe)
•the idea of a damaged world in need of meticulous care
•the idea of the injured body that seeks to stabilize itself
#integration
the interwoven data recovered from the study of systemic and functional aspects of the broken organism ==> totality ~ establishment of a nonliberal individualism (+ social welfare) ==> **society = an integrated and fragile whole in need of care**
today's integrative medicine --> conceptualizations of the whole body ==> picture of the patient:
•neoliberal in character
•(always) future tense in orientation
destiny = personalized medicine (a project to anticipate and guide the patient's destiny)
welfare state's widest possible inclusion of its citizens clashes with the realities of the marketplace
to reconcile the individual's cognitive and physical realities with the particular demands of their world
...sociological quest to understand the locus of injury
[title]
duet of integration-crisis (==> whole-body ideals)
(Geroulanos and Meyers argue that) understanding integration and crisis in medicine ==> to wrap our heads around the way later-dominant cybernetic and structuralist theories located the individual in the world
bodily metaphor [in] integrations of domestic societies
the integrated, disintegrating human body:
•a new site of meaning and care
•subject for new analogies of body biological and body politic
•object of direct experimentation
story of the human body (at once social & biological)
...................................
question of technology
--locational--> where does the technological take place?
(and when?)
Heidegger --> (latecomers were) addicted to technology
“under what conditions we could arrive at a free relation to technology?”
Heidegger problem with addicted --> *addiction is content with what is merely available* (it never surpasses this limit) =/= anxiety
Avital focus on the *chemical prosthesis*
in war, drugs become another piece of equipment --> taking the pill: technologizing oneself into the war machine
heroin comes from heroisch
technically calibrated culture
drug --> hallucinated exteriority
electronic/drug culture --> (Nancy + Blanchot's) désœuvrement: without an end or program, an unworking that nonetheless occurs
how the *prosthetic subject* is constituted
(Junger's drug, Heidegger's tech, Benjamin's hashish, de Quincey's opium, Duras's alcoholizations:) a saturated text, pushing beyond the materiality of the book though not into any ideality
the right to drugs + the supplementary interiority that they produce
there has never been a war on drugs that is not carried by another type of drug (religion, patriotism, oil, TV)
history of narcotica ~= history of culture
[*]intoxication: (names) a method of mental labor that is responsible for making phantoms appear --> mnemonic apparatus
“you have something in you that must be killed” ==> ambivalent stimulant/tranquilizer
body proper regains its corruptible organic status
self-medication and vitamins become the occupation of every singularity
drugs explore fractal interiorities (=/= seeking an exterior transcendental dimension)
renunciation چشم پوشی، ترک، کناره گیری، قطع علاقه
(addict = nonrenouncer)
virtual reality
cyberprojections
(Dasein's) dependency: a state in which anxiety is still bound
*mimetic poisoning* (of pharmacodependency associated with literature, as sedative, as cure, as escape, etc.) --?--> relationship to law
(our French heritage --> Flaubert: “a thinker should have neither religion nor fatherland nor even any social conviction”) *thinking = radically rupturing*
drugs forced decision upon the subject --> de Quincey
opium: the transparency upon which one could review the internal conflict of freedom (+ encounters the abyss of destructive jouissance)
war against pain
higher forms of drug
*(like any good parasite) drugs travel both inside and out of the boundaries of a narcissistically defended politics* ==producing==> a lexicon of body control and a private property of self
drug's virtual and fugitive patterns
they have a secret communications network with the internalized order
Madame Bovary = clinic of phantasms
everything said about technology can be applied to drugs: acceleration, speed, inertia, the third interval
drug/medicine ==>
•deaden the pain
•separate from a poisonous maternal flux
...
•hallucinated plenitude
•pure communication ~= transcendental telepathy
(have in mind that) any substance can function as a drug
“It wasn't clear then whether the body was private property or not, whether the authorities could legislate zoning ordinances, or whether pleasure and liberty were values freely exercised upon a coded body.”
-Avital
my work over the etymology of the signifier --> moon index
(i shoot up trash fiction)
(Freud) *pain is imperious* متکبر
(failing) to meet the requirements of an authentic alterity
(we are) into forgetting and the simulacrum (=/= truth)
•hallucinator: the creature of the simulacrum (par excellence)
(trafficking in) abstract forms of forgetting
the poor
the body-broken
the racially hallucinated other
chemical prosthesis (mushroom or plant) responds to a fundamental structure
drug addict --> a mystical transport going nowhere
drug addict offers her body to the production of hallucination, vision, or trance
--> going nowhere fast
being exposed to existence = placing one's body in the grips of a temporality that pains --> addictive = artificial, beside oneself
drugs --linked-to--> a mode of departing, to desocialization [without the assurance of arriving anywhere] (~= activity of writing) =/= production of real value
...movement of the simulacrum without address (or, in another idiom, without purpose, point)
Nietzsche was the first philosopher who --Avital-->
1. to think with his body
2. to put out the call for a supramoral imperative
...................................
we are implicated inscribed disarticulated and reresignifed by technological prosthesis
there is no outside to technology
there is no off switch to technology
wonderological tracks of technology
...................................
how much nature has to change before our descendants cease to be human?
about when in the course of evolution our ancestors became human?
(unanswerable good questions)
if the human is not the one consuming, who is?
animals consume
(numinous agentic status of) dead consumer
human aspects of consumption: learning, decision making, reason, perception, ethics, agency, desire and choice --arise--> *between humans and intelligent machines*
[*]posthuman: a move that seeks to locate being, or aliveness, or meaning in the not-quite-human-as-we-know-it
(humanist) epistemology: how we investigate and describe the world
(humanist) ontology: how we [...]