Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

Sexuality and Solitude Foucault and Sennet, 1981

One of the paradoxes of social life in late capitalism is that, even as more and more people abandon certain types of drug -- alcohol, tobacco, ecstasy, sex -- addictions  ar on the rise .  The number of alcoholics, opioid addicts, gamblers , social media addicts, porn addicts and so forth shows a secular increase. In other words, the drugs of sociability are declining, while the drugs of solitude are gaining ground. What kind of problem is this?  Trump says, massacre the dealers . The Duterte option . Liberals, with the soft paternalism of the moral reformer, say treat the disease . So we murder the problem, or we medicalise it. Hard cop or soft cop; either way, the problem is being suppressed . Toxicity in late capitalism

"The psalm is a song of being forsaken. The feeling of being forsaken, an “immense and aching solitude” as William Styron put it, even amid crowds, even among friends, even when no real-world abandonment has taken place, is common in depression. (Styron began to experience melancholic depression late in life, after developing an intolerance of alcohol. But his description, in  The Confessions of Nat Turner , of the hero's feeling of abandonment by his God in the aftermath of his failed uprising, suggests that he might have known this all along.) But if the song is also a dream, we might ask what sort of wish-fulfilment that could be. What sort of satisfaction there is to be had, or avoided, in abandonment. And whether idealisation can also be a defence against consummation." The Night Season