Weaponized Time and the Machinery of Misrecognition

Depression, in the model that Thomas Fuchs outlines, is in part a rupture in interpersonal time—a desynchronization, a slipping out of the rhythms that structure recognition, attunement, and participation in the world. The depressive becomes illegible to the social order, their body refusing its tempo, their gestures losing their expected modulation. But this rupture is not merely an edge case; it is often an internalization of the same disjuncture imposed by structures of violence, exclusion, and abandonment.

To be cast out of social time is not simply to be forgotten but to be made excess—to be surplus life, disposable yet inconvenient in its persistence. Necropolitics does not only determine who may live and who must die; it also determines how time itself is distributed, how some are permitted futurity while others are trapped in recursive suffering. The slow violence of poverty, disability, and racialized dispossession operates through a temporal logic: deprivation accumulates, exhaustion deepens, and suffering becomes self-perpetuating.

Historically, these forms of suffering have been pathologized rather than contextualized. In the antebellum South and Jim Crow America, Black Americans were seldom seen as suffering from the conditions imposed upon them but were instead described in terms that conveniently mirrored those conditions: intellectually deficient, emotionally unstable, lethargic, prone to hysteria. These same descriptors appear, mutatis mutandis, in the form of mood disorders and the like. Those subjected to deprivation are then accused of being inadequate to the demands of the world.

This looping logic—where suffering is created and then weaponized as evidence of inferiority—forms the ideological core of eugenics, whether overt or covert. The eugenic imagination sorts life into wheat and chaff, discarding the latter not just through direct extermination but through attrition, through the careful management of neglect, through the denial of treatment. Mike Davis' Late Victorian Holocausts maps how famine, often blamed on Malthusian overpopulation, was in fact structured by colonial policy. Victoria Brignell details how eugenics in Britain sought not only to eliminate the disabled but to erase their histories, to make the violence done to them disappear into a narrative of natural selection. Sunaura Taylor insists that disability is not an aberration but a function of the environments we create—a social, economic, and ecological entanglement.

This is the world we inherit: one where the degradation of life is mistaken for proof of its inadequacy, where those subjected to relentless diminishment are accused of failing to thrive. The modern poor, as Chesterton observed in Eugenics and Other Evils, are not a breed but a dustbin—the excess produced by a system that first incapacitates and then punishes the consequent lack of ability.

The ideological sleight-of-hand is complete when suffering itself is rendered invisible—when the experience of being broken by the world is mistaken for a personal failing, when depression is understood as a mere biochemical misfire not the natural consequence of social violence. Weltschmerz, world-pain, is unrecognizable to those who have arranged the world to protect themselves from its consequences. But the unrecognized do not disappear; they are merely disavowed.

To reckon with this requires more than critique. It requires a confrontation with the structure of time itself—the tempos of exclusion, the recursive loops of suffering, the slow deaths imposed under the guise of progress. It means seeing that depression, despair, and exhaustion are not just individual afflictions but the signs of a world that makes them necessary. And it means recognizing that the machinery of misrecognition will continue until it is forced to break.