https://pacificpilgrim.files.wordpress.com/2016/07/simone-weil-the-love-of-god-and-affliction.pdf

There is a natural alliance between truth and affliction, because both of them appear as mute suppliants, condemned to stand speechless in our presence.

Simone Weil

Memory, it turns out, is one of the major factors mediating the dialogue between sensation and emotional experience. Our memories of past experience become encoded into triggers that act as switchers on the rail of psychoemotional response, directing the incoming train of present experience in the direction of one emotional destination or another.

Sternberg writes:

Mood is not homogeneous like cream soup. It is more like Swiss cheese, filled with holes. The triggers are highly specific, tripped by sudden trails of memory: a faint fragrance, a few bars of a tune, a vague silhouette that tapped into a sad memory buried deep, but not completely erased. These sensory inputs from the moment float through layers of time in the parts of the brain that control memory, and they pull out with them not only reminders of sense but also trails of the emotions that were first connected to the memory. These memories become connected to emotions, which are processed in other parts of the brain: the amygdala for fear, the nucleus accumbens for pleasure — those same parts that the anatomists had named for their shapes. And these emotional brain centers are linked by nerve pathways to the sensory parts of the brain and to the frontal lobe and hippocampus — the coordinating centers of thought and memory. The same sensory input can trigger a negative emotion or a positive one, depending on the memories associated with it. 

This is where stress comes in — much like memory mediates how we interpret and respond to various experiences, a complex set of biological and psychological factors determine how we respond to stress. Some types of stress can be stimulating and invigorating, mobilizing us into action and creative potency; others can be draining and incapacitating, leaving us frustrated and hopeless. This dichotomy of good vs. bad stress, Sternberg notes, is determined by the biology undergirding our feelings — by the dose and duration of the stress hormones secreted by the body in response to the stressful stimulus. She explains the neurobiological machinery behind this response: As soon as the stressful event occurs, it triggers the release of the cascade of hypothalamic, pituitary, and adrenal hormones — the brain’s stress response.

It also triggers the adrenal glands to release epinephrine, or adrenaline, and the sympathetic nerves to squirt out the adrenaline-like chemical norepinephrine all over the body: nerves that wire the heart, and gut, and skin. So, the heart is driven to beat faster, the fine hairs of your skin stand up, you sweat, you may feel nausea or the urge to defecate. But your attention is focused, your vision becomes crystal clear, a surge of power helps you run — these same chemicals released from nerves make blood flow to your muscles, preparing you to sprint. All this occurs quickly. If you were to measure the stress hormones in your blood or saliva, they would already be increased within three minutes of the event. In experimental psychology tests, playing a fast-paced video game will make salivary cortisol increase and norepinephrine spill over into venous blood almost as soon as the virtual battle begins. But if you prolong the stress, by being unable to control it or by making it too potent or long-lived, and these hormones and chemicals still continue to pump out from nerves and glands, then the same molecules that mobilized you for the short haul now debilitate you.

Popova 

Wendy Brown

The new form of power orchestrating the conduct of subjects—and the importance of governance in activating this power—is apparent in the grammar used to describe and enact it. The ugly words “flexibilization” and “responsibilization” have their roots in human capacities associated with modest autonomy. To be flexible or responsible is to have capacities for adaptation or accountability that, as Nietzsche and not only Kant remind us, are nominative signs of sovereignty: only a moral agent understood as willing its actions can bear responsibility for itself. But when the act of being responsible is linguistically converted into the administered condition of being responsibilized, it departs from the domain of agency and instead governs the subject through an external moral injunction—through demands emanating from an invisible elsewhere. The word “responsibilization” takes a step further this move from a substance-based adjective to a process-based transitive verb, shifting it from an individual capacity to a governance project. Responsibilization signals a regime in which the singular human capacity for responsibility is deployed to constitute and govern subjects and through which their conduct is organized and measured, remaking and reorienting them for a neoliberal order. Again, governance facilitates and imposes responsibilization, but the powers orchestrating this process are nowhere in discursive sight, a disappearing act that is both generic to neoliberalism and particular to responsibilization itself. Responsibilization is not an inherent entailment of devolution; there are decidedly more empowering and more democratic potentials for devolved decision making. Demands for local authority and decision making, it is well to remember, may emanate from both the Right and the Left, from anarchists or from religious fundamentalists. However, when conjoined, devolution and responsibilization produce an order in which the social effects of power—constructed and governed subjects—appear as morally burdened agents. Through this bundling of agency and blame, the individual is doubly responsibilized: it is expected to fend for itself (and blamed for its failure to thrive) and expected to act for the well-being of the economy (and blamed for its failure to thrive). Not only, then, are Greek workers, French pensioners, California and Michigan public employees, American Social Security recipients, British university students, European new immigrants, and public goods as a whole made to appear as thieving dependents operating in the old world of entitlement, rather than self-care, they are blamed for sinking states into debt, thwarting growth, and bringing the global economy to the brink of ruin. Perhaps most importantly, even when they are not blamed, even when they have comported properly with the norms of responsibilization, austerity measures taken in the name of macroeconomic health may legitimately devastate their livelihoods or lives. Thus, responsibilized individuals are required to provide for themselves in the context of powers and contingencies radically limiting their ability to do so. But devolution and responsibilization also make individuals expendable and unprotected. This turn in neoliberal political rationality signals more than the dismantling of welfare-state logic or even that of the liberal social contract: once more, it expresses its precise inversion.

Wendy Brown

"The refugees managed to protect themselves from swarms of killers for a couple of days, until April 21, at 3 am, when gendarmes started throwing grenades and shooting at them. Interahamwe and other militia together with their supporters carrying clubs, machetes, spears, and axes started to finish off those who were not killed by bullets.

More than 50,000 Tutsi were killed that morning.

Only a few, suspected to be around 34, survived.On the walls of the main building are photos, testimonies, and quotes. One of the most unforgettable quotes was that of Felicien Ntabengwa: "If you knew me, and if you really knew yourself, you would not have killed me."

 https://www.mobbingportal.com/LeymannV&V1990(2).pdf

"It’s how PTSD feels often — like you don’t fit inside your own body. Like you’ve been malnourished. Like you are retreating back into the ground, back into the tiny seed you first were. Rewinding and unwinding the ribbons of time''.

Kayli Kunkel