There are many ways to talk about “personhood,” and many of them are discourses about what isn’t personhood, or more sinisterly, who does not qualify to be part of that category. DP/DR falls into this kind of discourse on personhood: the kind that defines who is not. The suffix “–hood” as it is attached to the word “person” is important here: “–hood” means “a state of condition or being.” So, when we’re talking about personhood, by definition, the state of the condition or the being of a person can be said to be different than the person. In other words, personhood is apart from the person, personhood is not the person.
There is another way of looking at “–hood”: the Proto-Germanic etymology of “–hood” can literally be translated to mean “bright appearance.” I am moved by this at the same time that I’m antagonistic to what it arrogates—the implication that to “be” anything one must not only appear, but also be bright.
I had a dissociative panic attack for the first time in three years...in the Copenhagen aquarium called Den Blå Planet, which has been designed to make one feel as though underwater—stupid of me to forget my meds, especially because for twenty years I’ve had the recurring nightmare of being underwater in an ocean of black...
One enters Den Blå Planet as though being submerged into a sea cave. Inside, there is only dim, blue light. Silhouetted shadows of fish, sharks, and whales are projected onto the ceiling. One can peer up at them circling overhead. The lapping, sloshing sounds of water stream from hidden speakers, but they are mostly drowned out by the voices of children running around, darting like little fishes.
In the bathroom, where I waited for the attack to pass, the only thoughts in my brain were “thing, thing, thing” (a fog, dream, or bubble). There was blue—blue paint on the wall of the stall?—which equaled “thing.” Each time the door slammed, it was with such ferocity that “my” body felt ripped—into two things, then three, then many. The sound of the hand dryer, even more ferocious and splitting—thing, thing, thing.
Language breaks down (I cannot speak, or understand what is being spoken to me, during these states) but not because it never existed, or because it is nothing, or because it seems inadequate in a postmodern way, but because it uncreates. As Simone Weil puts it, decreation is “to make something created pass into the uncreated.” Something that had been created—something that had created me—has passed into its twinned shadow state. No longer is the first-person intact, the “I” dissolves, and all the boundaries around everything that have hitherto contained them, are drained of their solidity.
Down-from-ness. Not-ness.
How many people, as I write this, have been declared—politically, legally, medically, culturally, economically, racially, socially, and gender-binarily—to be “de-persons”?
(as if there were a veil or a glass wall between the individual and world)
How many are struggling against such declarations? And how might we ever know the answer to this question?
How many are resisting? What does that resistance look like, what does it do?
I’d like to ask the APA: What about depersonalization when the state has made you that way, has removed your agency...has taken over the control of how you are identified and thus legitimized? What about derealization when the state has detached your environment from you, dispossessed you of your land, or turned your surroundings into something unbearable, something that cannot possibly be real?
In neoliberalism, “wellness” is a prevarication: it usually stands in for “life,” but life in terms of wealth, race, power, and, primarily, ability. Wellness in this context is paradoxically both an innate moral virtue and an individual’s own responsibility to maintain—and is soaked in ableism.
The aporia of Sick Woman Theory is that it requires a cruelly optimistic humanism: to construct and nurture a version of a human against a version of the human—and it still relies upon the master’s tools of enforcing discrete selfhood and self-possession. This universalizing move is what Ahmed would call a “melancholic universalism”: “the requirement to identify with the universal that repudiates you.”
Remember, bad thinking. Messiness. Being haunted.
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