Gil Eyal (On Ehrenburg)

 

If depression is today the most diagnosed mental disorder the world over this is not because it was medicalized and over-diagnosed, as a hasty sociology of professions would lead one to suggest, but because the diagnosis – however imprecise – responds to a real crisis of the individual in post-disciplinary society. At some point around the mid-20th century, the society of discipline and norms that fixed the individual in her place has been destabilized and has given way to a society organized around the sovereign individual, who is free to set her own norms of self-development, who is responsible for her destiny and who therefore finds herself in a void, not knowing how to act, nor even why is it preferable to act. The melancholia once reserved as the privilege of a few great geniuses, has now become a depression available to anybody. To the neo-liberal creed of “everything is permitted”, the depressed individual replies “but nothing is possible”.

Gil Eyal