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Although I am no longer involved in this kind of work professionally, I still occasionally reflect on such issues as mental health and illness. And being the kind of person I am, I regularly seem to be called upon to answer to and talk with people going through various kinds of (usually existential) stress. This is a little excerpt from something I wrote about depression and lethargic ennui, a little foray into theory that may or may not make an appearance in Amusements vol. II:

Re-reading The Noonday Demon (the first chapter of Giorgio Agamben’s Stanzas: Word and Phantasm in Western Culture) always brings me new insights. It is a deep and complex essay, but woven out of strong argument. The essay is ‘about’, if we can reduce it so superficially, depression, lethargy, sloth, melancholy. It is fascinating to get a historical perspective on states of mind that have always existed, but been dealt with differently in every age.

Before the renaissance romanticised depression as “melancholy” and reintroduced the notion of the melancholic soul, without much consideration of the humours, it was known to the medieval world as Acedia. As in modern times, acedia/depression strikes homines religiosi, that is not necessarily religious people, but people who have some sort of issue with religion, be it a crisis of faith or an atheistic crisis of worldview. Acedia, in one tradition, was the only one of the seven sins that was considered unpardonable, which suggests that its status as a ’sin’ is itself a special case.

A reading from The Noonday Demon well worth considering:

Modern psychology has to such a degree emptied the term acedia of its original meaning, making it a sin against the capitalist work ethic, that it is difficult to discern in the spectacular medieval personification of the noonday demon… the innocent mixture of laziness and unwillingness that we are accustomed to associate with the image of the slothful.

Agamben is suggesting that for the medieval mindset the occurrence of acedia was far more dramatic, involving the appearance of the demon Empusa - one of the retinue of Hecate - who appeared at the liminal crack of time when the sun was at its diurnal solsticium, its midday standstill. All the world seemed to shrink away and the immediate environment appears locked, pointless, useless, an experience that Agamben goes on to compare with Heidegger’s analysis of langweil and the daily submerged banality of das man selbst.

This might suggest that what was striking for the medieval monk is banal, a universal experience, for the modern thinker, but this is not true: what is different is the degree to which one becomes aware of acedia’s pervasiveness. The modern experience is as dramatic and shocking as the medieval theologian’s experience, indeed all the more so, because one realises that one is ordinarily saturated in it, is in active avoidance of it through pursuing “the constant availability of distraction”. In the modern world, artificial and night- lighting ensures that the gesture of Joshua at the siege of Jericho (immortalised in Masonic ritual) intended to “stay the sun in its course” is fully realised. We live in a perpetual midday (whilst the quality of light at dusk and at dawn have been shown to have very significant beneficial effects on the serotonin-regulating glands that are at fault in depression, interesting enough). Agamben is absolutely right to compare this situation of modernity (in which the visitation of the noonday demon becomes the generalised case rather than the exception) with Kierkegaardean despair.

Acedia belongs to the aspirant, to he or she who would achieve the unachievable. It binds you intimately to your goal, but at the same time, in this bondage the path to that goal disappears from view. Acedia is thus a form of pure desire, which communicates with its object precisely through the absence of any way of getting at it. The inaccessible goal fuses with the desire, making it both obvious to awareness and inaccessible to it at the same time. This ambiguity of the desire leads to a dialectic of love-hate, and thus the problem of faith. The notion of god ~ or if you are a secular atheist, love and the good life ~ both inspire you and make you sick at the same time.

Agamben continues Stanzas by developing a way of approaching this impasse (philosophy is ultimately about happiness) and mediating the unbearable desire without getting tangled up in the stupidity of modern essentialist psychologies. The way out of the impasse, he discovers, is in the rekindling of love poetry; not of the romanticist ilk with all its sighs and woes, but of the erotic, joyful and ‘troubadour’ kind. One might even make a comparison with Sufi and other Eastern religious practises. Apparently, the practice of courting, the wooing-of and the sexual consummation with the impossible object of desire, be that a secular ideal, an archetype or a theistic god, is the practice missing from modern psychologies. Not to put too fine a point on it, we need to flirt and fuck with gods. And for those of us for whom god is dead, which will mean pretty much everyone I should imagine, we need to fuck whatever idol we have set in god’s place. But there is no need to be so alpha-male about it, we can also borrow from Derrida’s sensiitivity to the female body in this matter, and talk not just about fucking with the ideal, but invaginating with it.

I like that idea.

Ultimately the conclusion seems to be that the way that leads out of the impasse of depression/acedia is by allowing oneself to be undone, to be made unreal, and made real again in another image. This might go awry, as it so often does when people attempt to be in conscious control of this process, by changing one’s appearance, fiddling about with such trivial matters as one’s style of wardrobe, tastes in music and so on. The change that redeems has to be imposed externally, and one has to submit to it, and come to enjoy it, love it, court it with affection like a lusty troubadour. It is, in properly psychoanalytic terms, the discovery and refinement of one’s own personal fetish. Agamben calls this ‘the treading of the labyrinth’. It becomes a playful, flirtatious dance, a riddle without static answers, that needs to be integrated into a worldview. I can remember the onset of just such a process occurring in my late teens. I was lucky in being able to understand the need to assimilate the irresolvable into my life. Hundreds of thousands of people are not so lucky, nor are aware that to do so would ‘cure’ them, if not of depressive tendencies, then of the impasse at their core.

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That’s quite technical for a blog entry, but it needs to be said.

Abnormal service will be resumed shortly.

~lg