Tags
Capitalism, diagnosis, discourse, Family, hospital, Language, madness, magic, Mythology, Psychosis, Reality, Schizo, society, Trinity
“The living being has logos by taking away and conserving its own voice in it, even as it dwells in the polis by letting its own bare life be excluded, as an exception, within it. Politics therefore appears as the truly fundamental structure of Western metaphysics insofar as it occupies the threshold on which the relation between the living being and the logos is realized.”
—Giorgio Agamben
The Inquisition gathers at high noon, and before them a madling stands in grandiose repose. Before the gaze of the magistrates, priests, judges, and bishops, grandeur is the only dignity left to the madling as she holds herself in prostration beneath their language. Their words, their inflections, perform her very depersonalization as the truth of her psychosis, that is, her magic, in other words, her damnation, her being-as Witch, removes her from the grammatical operation of autonomy, that is, self-rule.
“How old are you?”
“I’m older than you’ll ever be.”
“How old are you?”
“I’ve been dead a thousand years, and lived only two or three.”
The state of exception emerges elliptically from the state of siege. Siege names the historico-political foundation that introduces a rupture basic to the ontology of politics itself. It names the suspension of the rule in order to introduce an exception to the norm, an exception that in turn becomes both the aporia and the nomos of the unfolding of the being-in-the-world of the whatever-beings that have associated/been associated in a constitution, that is, into a polis. The introduction of the exception to the norms of association of the polis and the applicability of exceptionality is that from which the sovereign emerges. In this way, the sovereign may be he who decides the exception.
She is handcuffed, and the officers of the Inquisition bring her by force of law into the space of the hospital, that is, that Cathedral within which her body is not her own, in which she has no body, in which her flesh is stolen from her, in which her metabolism is destroyed, in which from her cognitions she becomes estranged, by such mechanism she is thereby exposed to the cursed counter-magicks of the priesthood, whose circulatory discourse reverberates throughout modernity.
Neuroleptic biosiege names the technology by which the mad body|mind is forced to occupy, that is, contorted, into the position of self-destruction and exposed to the abyss of psychocide, that is, the systematized murder of the mind by the liberating project of science, or, the secret mode of being-for of the Enlightenment. Psychocide is directed against both the schizo mind and the schizo body: the existential quest of psychiatry is the eradication of synaptic difference and the development of a set of technologies capable of conjuring, from the thrown-ness of our beings into the world in a vast array of differential relationships to, ultimately, a fractalized brain, that is, one whose thoughts proceed factorially and which associates magically.
Separativity, severance from one another, individuality, the repulsive mechanisms by which we are alienated from our being-toward one another, is the hallmark of the discourse of reason. Yes, yes, be a person, learn to function, play your part, learn your lines, remember your marks, get good grades, get a job, contribute to the economy, your body is abstracted, you are part of the algorithm of The Social, Health+Reason=GoodLife.
Madness precedes Reason: this much is indisputable. Michel Foucault’s seminal History of Madness is at pains to articulate the ways in which the discourse of reason emerges in reaction to the more originary vernacular of madness, and in particular the relation of this discourse to the regulation of bodily movement in space. The madman emerges in association with the leper, that is, one whose disease is marked on their body, and who accordingly, after the invention of proto-sociological techniques of the regulation of public health in the Renaissance, is removed from the sphere of the social. Displaced, depersonalized, massified, sent out to sea, that is, abandoned to Leviathan, the property of the world, belonging to no polis in particular. Reduced, that is, to bare life: the object of a thoroughgoing conjuration of life into the sphere of politics and the complete enclosure of life by politics, stripped of rights, that is, legally naked, and therefore a-shamed, both of itself and by all.
The invention of the asylum emerges from the projects of the various sovereignties in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as the question of madness comes to occupy a fundamental space of decision for the political order. Madness, unreason, unreason-ability, is a dysfunction that introduces a primary aporia for the political order of the constitution. If one is unreasonable, then one does not speak the same language as the citizen; there can then be no intercourse with the madman, because language, though it may be structured manically, does not permit of crossing the bridge of alteriority without the violence of an understanding that elaborates difference as sameness. In this way, unreason is transformed into madness, folie, the damnation of magic by reason, the reformulation of the basic Calvinist principle of before-the-fact soteriology.
Psychiatry is invented in order to liberate the mad from madness itself, that is, to purify the mad of their damnation and bring them back into the fold of the polis, that is, the constitution of the political order, that they may glorify the sovereign through their obedience and their mode of being-in-the-world. Madness ruptures the staticity of an ontology into which we are thrown precisely by being the mode of inhabitation of the possibility of flight, escape from capture; dissociation is a radical freedom in relation to the facticity of the world.
“Doubt thou the stars are fire?”
This liberation requires a moment of decision, that is, the elaboration of a point of exception at the point at which madness is made mad, the site at which unreason is separated from madness. That is, the exception requires a diagnosis. In this way, sovereignty has always been psychiatric, even before there was psychiatry in the world. The nomos in which we live is thus not only the camp, but also l’hôpital. The circulatory discourse of medicine, of healing the mind, conquers the emergent Enlightenment discourse of rights because Right is tethered to Reason at its very inception. Not liberation but commitment, that is, confinement, emerges from the overthrow of superstition by reason. The disenchantment of the world effected by liberalism is an attempt to purify the world of the archaism of madness, to expose the world to a rationality that knows not of the beauty of blabbering with oneself, with declaring oneself the Queen of France, with bringing the gods crashing down to the Earth at each moment through the furious movements of the body in mania.
The invention of haloperidol in 1958 is the moment when the nomos of l’exception de hôpital takes on the character of a worldwide siege. Haloperidol explodes the possibility of thought, cataclysmically brings the force of dyskinesia and malignancy, neurolepticity, extrapyramidality and first-generation dopamine antagonism crashing upon the schizo body, whether that body is bipolar, schizophrenic/affective, or psychotically delusional without differentiation. It is the opening salvo marking the creation of neuroleptic biosiege as a technique of forcible social (re)-production (and thereby along the model of cisgendered hetero-patriachal relations of sexualization and, therefore, intrinsically misogynist, that is, woman-hating), and thus brings a rupture into the structure of Being itself insofar as madness becomes the object of an eradication from within.
The madling refuses participation, denies consent. Thus there is introduced into the curative relationship a dimension of antagonism. She will now be forcibly returned to the world of the Humans, her soul will be stolen back from the demons to whom she sold it so long ago, so very long ago, and all measures will be justified as her very salvation is at stake. She is not allowed to go to Hell: they will not permit it. Her freedom threatens the very order of reality, her powers grow with each day, she knows too much, and they won’t let her learn any more; they will wipe her memories, clean her synapses, delete her magicks, so many foul and wretched sorceries.
The hospital is a space that exists outside of the law. Here, the entire history of Western medical development reaches its terminus as a procedure coextensive with the eradication of magic. The body must cease to be a receptacle of magical energies in order to be rendered an object of social planning, made into a process of chemical interface in order for the entire sociological project of population engineering to be comprehensible as an aim of the modern political. The madling is thus both inside and outside, thoroughly inside the sovereign space of decision for being entirely outside, the merger of medical and political power made clear by the authorization of the police to render diagnostic decisions on who is criminally mad, that is, to decide whose modes of cognition and whose behavioral markers of difference are too thoroughly inhuman, too unreasonable, to persist within the space of Reason, that is, to, quite precisely, police the boundaries of Reason with the violence of handcuffs, mace spray, tasers, and guns.
“At least I’m breathing, at least I have my wits…Below my window, I hear a horse go by, and in the next cell, an inmate starts to cry…We try our best though, to quiet down the fuss…We know tomorrow, it could be one of us…”
Outside of the space of the hospital, the family meets in desperate conversation to judge the actions of the madling, this time free of her protestations. Her every action, going back years, is reviewed for signs of the what-was-to-come and every decision she ever made is exposed to a second-guessing by which she is ridiculed.
“She wants to start hormones? In this state? Doesn’t she see her genitalia, doesn’t he know who he is, doesn’t it know what it is, don’t they know who we are?”
The body thus out of time, that is, suspended in animation between two worlds, between the uncontrollable fury of floridity and the cold and calculated immobility of Reason, of “self-evident” truths anchored to reality by the epiphenomenal action of a cognitive apparatus that evaluates the world through the lens of adaptive-for evolutionary processes, exists in communion with the eldritch forces residing in regions of the cosmos so strange that their shapes are those of spheric cubes. These forces drag the mind from its relationship to actualization, that is, the securitizing force of Reason, its self-assuring operations and its recursive procedures that serve as the universal auto-correct of the Word Processing functions of the Real, or rather, the Symbolic, and emerge from the intercessory force of The Social.
The haloperidol isn’t working, she isn’t falling asleep, she’s still awake, what to do, what to do? Ah, yes, of course, the solution was clear from the start, we’ll bring out the big guns for this one: Olanzapine, hypnosis in a pill, or, if injected, the irresistible suasion of sleep, resistance will be futile by chemo-metabolic defition, she’ll learn the lesson this time, she’ll never dream again, she’ll never go outside again, her body won’t be her own anymore, she’s much too irresponsible for this, much too irresponsible indeed, mad in the head really. She can’t be herself anymore, she’ll be a boy again, she’ll wear pants again, she’ll shave her head again, maybe he’ll be straight this time.
Moving against biosiege requires a willingness to terminate reality. It requires an alliance with Lucifer, the invocation of Lilith, and the protection of Babalon: Only the intercession of the counter-trinity assures the protection of the madling in the exceptional space of the hospital, only the intervention of the powers of the first madling, Lucifer, the mother of demons, Lilith, and the mother of abominations, Babalon, can guarantee the continuation of the thoughtwaves of madness through the destructive operations of a biosiege that flows through the very cells of your body. Only transforming their medications into the very sources of strength that will allow you to terminate their project of liberation, that is, to persist in “dependence-of” the archaisms of magic and the superstitious thoughtforms of magical association, allows for the articulation of a mode of being that is precisely whatever, that is, indifferent to its constitution-by the very regulatory processes of sovereignty that continuously elaborate it as outside of the sphere of the space of protection and which always reduce it to the senseless babbling of delusion, that is, thought freed from reality, in other words, true liberated thought, freedom-from the collective delusions of The Social and return to the original function of language as the open articulating principles of becoming through which value itself is created, that is, to dwell in the house of language itself, that space through which Being is, quite precisely, created, and, additionally, true appreciating of the authentic/existential valuating principles/the magical mechanisms by which the world comes to be enchanted by the bodies which inhabit it.
The operation is complete, you can see her eyes drooping. Her consciousness is becoming-shifted, she is being persuaded into the hypnosis, she is falling under our sway, she is learning to sleep again.
She has something to say:
“If I burn, so will you.”
She thus threatens the Inquisition, refuses their project, and announces:
“Zirenaiad. Tiobl i mehorela, christeos iadnamad.”
They know not the workings of this language so weird, and yet by its syntax are they compelled: by this dark ritual is the reversal completed, she knows not sleep anymore, she has become-rejective, she persists in hypnogogia, and life has become but a dream.
“I know what must be done, there can be no one left alive, the doctors all must die if we are to survive.”