Mikkel Krause Frantzen

The idea to be pursued in the following is that depression constitutes what Raymond Williams, in his influential text “Structures of feeling”, calls “a contemporary structure of feeling” (128) and “an undeniable experience of the present” (134), respectively. In that sense and through the analysis of the critical diagnoses that the aesthetic works unfold themselves this dissertation is intended as a cultural exploration into the so-called Zeitgeist – and once more it is presupposed that the phenomenon of depression lies at the core of this Zeitgeist. It is my contention, however, that such an analysis cannot be an analysis of the time or of the times only (die Zeit); the analysis must be accompanied by an analysis of spirit (der Geist). Despite all the previous conceptualizations and contextualizations, in which some lines of demarcation have been drawn, the concept of spirit and spiritual despair must now be confronted. The thoughts of Søren Kierkegaard are particularly helpful in this regard. In his seminal work Sickness unto Death from 1849, originally published under the pseudonym AntiClimacus, which deals with the notion of despair (fortvivlelse in Danish), Kierkegaard defines the human being as spirit. In a playful (anti-)Hegelian manner he goes on to explain what he means by that: “A human being is spirit. But what is spirit? Spirit is the self. But what is the self? The self is a relation that relates itself to itself or is the relation’s relating itself to itself in the relation; the self is not the relation but is the relation’s relating itself to itself. A human being is a synthesis of the infinite and the finite, of the temporal and the eternal, of freedom and necessity, in short, a synthesis.” (21). As spirit the self is a relation that relates itself to itself, and thus despair is a disorder in this very relation, a mis-relation between necessity and possibility, between what the self is (present) and what it wants to be (future). Despair is, in other words, a sickness in spirit, a sickness unto death as it were. The only antidote to this sickness is a leap of faith, which is also a work of love (the title of one of his books, to which I shall return in the chapter on Wallace, is precisely Works of Love). A few thinkers have elaborated on the idea that existential or spiritual despair can be regarded as a central component of depression, a kind of isotope. Karl Jaspers – who found a great source of inspiration in Kierkegaard – is not the only writer to have devoted some attention to the 21 relation between depression and despair. In his book On Depression. Drugs, Diagnosis, and Despair in the Modern World, Nassir Ghaemi places quite an emphasis on this particular relation, and Ann Cvetkovich seeks “a model for thinking about depression as a spiritual problem” in her book Depression: A Public Feeling (24). The Kierkegaardian notion of despair is one such model, I would argue. Of course, this does not mean that depression can be reduced to a spiritual problem but that the notion of spiritual despair can expand and supplement existing explications of depression. The goal is thus an attempt to think about depression as a spiritual problem and to that end, numerous congenial and complementary concepts will be presented and defined along the way: Belief, despair, faith, spirit. My overall intuition is that a rehabilitation of the somewhat antiquated notion of spirit is necessary if the aim is to capture the spiritual depth of depression in its individual pain and horror. But the concept is likewise invaluable for addressing, more generally, the psychological, spiritual and even religious matrix of capitalism today. For that reason the thinking of Bernard Stiegler will supplement that of Søren Kierkegaard28, as – in a sense – the concept of spirit synthesizes phenomenology and political economy. In The Lost Spirit of Capitalism and Uncontrollable Societies of Disaffected Individuals (both from 2006), Stiegler advances the hypothesis that a spiritual misery penetrates the Western world; indeed he goes so far as to talk about the lost spirit of capitalism. By spirit, Stiegler thus does not intend some abstract factor that determines the course of history, nor a purely individual or mental capacity. In fact spirit is not to be understood in any idealistic or transcendental sense. Following the tradition of Max Weber, Stiegler considers spirit a category that belongs to political economy. But he is not so much concerned with the Protestant ethos of capitalism, as the apparatuses of production, the mechanisms of circulation and the patterns of consumption in contemporary capitalism. Phrasing it in a more technical fashion in phenomenological terms, capitalism is as a whole a protentional system, according to Stiegler. At the beginning of the book The Lost Spirit of Capitalism, he stresses that spirit is just another name for desire, and that the object of desire is an object of (potential) addiction (3; 12). The spirit of capitalism refers to the currents of desire and affect that keep the market alive from

28 It deserves notice that Kierkegaard did in fact partly develop his typology of despair as a critical diagnosis of the society at that time. The spiritual problem Kierkegaard addressed must thus be understood not only as an individual problem but also as a problem of society, a symptom of the Zeitgeist, so to speak. 22 

the outside. But capitalism and in particular financial capitalism are spiritual in another sense as well: The financial markets are based on faith, confidence and trust, and this is what keeps the system functioning from the inside. In this regard, credit is the ultimate protentional figure. 29 What is at stake is thus our very innermost being, our neuronal networks, our beliefs, affects and desires, our brain, our soul.30 Spirit in this context is shorthand for all that, but first and foremost I take spirit – as a protentional figure, a figure of futurity – to denote the exact point of convergence between the self that relates itself to itself as a future self and the capitalist economy. And depression would then come to mean a spiritual, protentional sickness unto death. In any case, in what follows we will come to see how – in the works analyzed – depression is often anatomized as a crisis of faith31 and that the personal spiritual crisis that is part of depression is brought to address a more general and historical spiritual crisis. In an essay on Dostoevsky, David Foster Wallace, for example, writes that we (the contemporaries of Wallace) seem to have lost “motive, feeling, belief” (Consider the Lobster 273). And in another essay Wallace even claimed that “philosophy is first and last about spirit” (“The Empty Plenum” 22032). By implication, the same goes for the aesthetic sphere. An admission of this sort could have far-reaching consequences for how we regard the critical function of contemporary art and literature. This raises a series of interesting, unavoidable and yet perhaps unanswerable questions about the relation between depression and 29 “The capitalist system for creating protentions is a system of credit which brings about a change in the system of belief – by turning belief into something calculable, and by therefore engendering something better than belief (at least in the eyes of negotium): trust [confiance]. Credit in general, in all its forms…is the organization of protentions. Credit is the concrete social expression of protentions which realize themselves, which perform…” (For a New Critique of Political Economy 67). 30 Clearly the concept of spirit is not too dissimilar to Berardi’s concept of soul as presented in The Soul at Work. 31 A passage from the British author Tim Lott’s memoir The Scent of Dried Roses is highly illuminating in this regard: “I have absolutely no faith, in fact, in anything. In a muddy way, I see that depression manifests itself as a crisis of faith. Not religious faith, but the almost born instinct that things are fluid, that they unfold and change, that new kinds of moment are eventually possible, that the future will arrive. I am in a time-locked place, where the moment I am in will stretch on, agonizingly for ever. There is no possibility of redemption or hope. It is a final giving up on everything. It is death.” (quoted in: Ratcliffe 68 – my emphasis). 32 This text is actually a review of David Markson’s novel Wittgenstein’s Mistress. It first appeared in Review of Contemporary Fiction (1990), from which I quote here. Strangely enough, when the essay was reprinted and included in the collection Both Flesh and Not, some changes had been made, including the replacement of the word ”spirit” with the word ”feeling” in the quoted line (see: Both Flesh and Not 78). 23 despair, spirituality and aesthetics, therapy and art. As summarized rather abstractly by Susan Sontag in “The Aesthetics of Silence” (1967): “Every era has to reinvent the project of ‘spirituality’ for itself.” (3). 33 An ongoing ambition of the rest of this dissertation is to try to flesh out what that might possibly mean and look like.