Franco Berardi (Bifo), After the Future

At the same time, though, depression paralyzes any ability to act, to communicate, to share. It is precisely on this inhibition to act, which is psychically secondary and pragmatically decisive, that the anti-depressants have their effect.

I don’t intend to deny that drugs can be effective in treating the symptoms of depression, nor even that by removing the symptoms we can put back into motion a temporarily paralyzed energy, thereby overcoming the very core of the depression. But I want to emphasize the fact that depression is different from its symptoms, and that the cure for depression can follow no other course than the taking care of the impermanent singularity (or of the impermanence of the singular).

In his book La Fatigue d’être soi, Alain Ehrenberg starts from the idea that depression is a disturbance that has to be understood within a social context.

In today’s highly competitive environment, the depressive syndrome produces an infernal spiral. Depression is caused by a wound to our narcissistic tendencies, and this wound reduces the libidinal energy that we invest in our actions. Consequently, depression is reinforced because it produces a diminution in our activity level and in our ability to compete.

Depression triumphs when the disciplinary model of behavioral management, the rules concerning authority and conformity typical of a time when interdictions assigned their destiny to the different social classes have retreated in favor of norms that encourage everyone to individual achievement, ordering people to become themselves. The consequence of this new normativity is that the entire responsibility of our lives is located not only in ourselves, but also in the collective space. Depression is an illness of responsibility, dominated by a feeling of inadequacy. The depressed subject is not capable, he is tired of being him or herself. (Ehrenberg 1998: 10) It is not surprising that depression is spreading at a time when an entrepreneurial and competitive ideology is becoming dominant. Since the beginning of the 1980s, after the defeat of the working class movements and the affirmation of neoliberal ideology, the idea that we should all be entrepreneurs has gained social recognition. Nobody can conceive his or her own life in a more relaxed and egalitarian manner. S/he who relaxes may very well end up in the streets, in the poorhouse or in jail.

The so-called neoliberal reforms that are continuously imposed on an increasingly fragmented, defeated, impotent society, which has been crushed by the dominant ideologies, are directed toward the destruction of any economic security for the working people, and to expose every worker’s life to the risks of the entrepreneurial profession. In the past, risk was the job of the capitalist, who invested in his or her own abilities, obtaining enormous gains or suffering painful failures. But economic risk was his business. The others 51