Sickness as Thought
“…everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well & the kingdom of the sick.”
A few months ago I was struck by a sentence from Jacques Rancière’s The Aesthetic Unconscious: “The invention of psychoanalysis occurs at the point where philosophy & medicine put each other into question by making thought a matter of sickness & sickness a matter of thought.” Sickness, or the threat of sickness, is always present as a thought until it is experienced. Most of the time the thought of sickness is repressed or in a latent state. When others get sick we acknowledge it but, somehow, disavow the thought & move on with our forward-moving lives, lives that strive inevitably toward a sickness that can’t be cured but has to be confronted: mortality. If we can disavow death what hope has sickness. Coming up on two years of the Covid pandemic, sickness & its threat has never been more present in terms of data. The majority acknowledge this data as a thought, a thought strong enough to foment fear, while the few repress it as a conspiracy. Both modes are academic. If sickness hasn’t happened to you directly (or via family or friends) then it is just a thought unless it ends in The End. We don’t acknowledge sickness until it’s too late. Sickness is not shocking, death is. Even though sickness signifies mortality we don’t dare connect the two. And even when sickness has happened to you, you soon forget its drag & put one foot in front of the other on the road to inevitability. Sickness doesn’t register, death does. Sickness has to be experienced in the body & calculated in the blood before it becomes real, “The Real” being a breakdown of language into abjection in Jacques Lacan’s thought. Sickness is not collective, death is. What follows the acknowledgment of sickness in the body & blood of the individual experiencing it is abject vulnerability, helplessness & a kind of tackiness sweet with nostalgia & a future full of wondrous possibilities without sickness projected onto the nearest & dearest. Treatment cures such tackiness. Sickness shows you the future, the future where desire is out of reach & death is within your grasp. Sickness is a real experience, death the fantasy of experience. “Cannula” is a pretty word.
Image: Peter Hujar, Susan Sontag, 1975 (the same year she was diagnosed with cancer)