Fatigue as the unconscious refusal of the demands of late capitalism, 2021, Diserholt

Diserholt, A. Fatigue as an unconscious refusal of the demands of late capitalism. Psychoanal Cult Soc (2021). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41282-021-00240-6

Abstract

This paper explores the function of fatigue in today’s society by drawing on popular culture and interviews conducted as part of a doctoral research study with nine people suffering from chronic fatigue.

With a focus on the ideology of late capitalism, it examines how the emergence of fatigue might be one way of unconsciously refusing the demand for constant activity and presence found therein.

To this end, the paper relies on Lacanian psychoanalytic theory, turning around the notions of anorexia (as a refusal of a demand and an embodied disappearance), the drive, desire and mourning — showing how the subject’s refusal emerges on the intersection between the body and the social.

Keywords: fatigue; capitalism; refusal; anorexia; mourning

Free full text:
https://repository.canterbury.ac.uk...e/226666/Blinded Manuscript Version 3 PDF.pdf

 

Thread on her PhD thesis, "Fatigue and the mind-body relation: A Lacanian exploration":
https://www.s4me.info/threads/fatig...-exploration-diserholt-2020-phd-thesis.18073/

 

This paper is almost word salad. I bet an AI could write a better paper about ME.

Actually, I attempted this is GPT-J 6B. In fact, it did. The prompt was "myalgic encephalomyelitis" and the computer wrote the rest. I bolded some phrases where the rhetoric is quote biomedical.

Edit: This was the output from the first run. I didn't cherry-pick anything. I did tell it to write more after seeing the first half.

 

So I'm not sure how my refusal as a child to engage in the demands of late capitalism then matches with the relatively successful career I had in sales which I then had to give up as my ME got worse. I guess their view would be that in unconsciously denying my unconscious refusal led me to unconsciously ruin my career which was built on the idea of embracing, and benefiting from, the demands of late capitalism.

 

Agreed. Skimmed a few pages before I reached the limit of how much I could roll my eyes . This paper is such garbage it should be retracted. I should dig into the sleep section to see how laughable it is. We all know it's not wanting to sleep. It's sleeping 10 hours and feeling like you slept one. If only I could sleep for *pulls out calculator* 80 hours a day! Then I'd be fine!

 

My apparent completely repressed childhood trauma somehow caught up with me 12 years into my career after I had been running my own business for 4 years very successfully. I gave up a very successful career I loved to live in poverty because of that darn completely unknown trauma. Its powerful stuff this psychiatrist is pedaling its good they can explain why my brain and body failed me. Shame the CBT didn't manage to help, or the exercise, now I think about it the exercise did really make me a lot worse!

 

I read the chapters on sleep. I can't comment much on it because I don't even understand it! It's incomprehensible.

 

This is a Lacanian exploration ! Which means the work only exists within the terms of Lacan's set of theories about how the world, including the human mind, is. That Diserholt doesn't concern herself with the reality of ME/CFS for patients, nor with medical science is of no consequence for the Lacanian perspective because those are just artifacts to be interpreted. We are talking about Freudian interpretations of illness and illness behaviour matched with er um ... sub Marxist Historic-Dialetic Materialism ???

Jacques Marie Émile Lacan and if you want a really painful exploration: Lacan, psychoanalysis and the left

 

She did this youtube interview about it a while ago...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pCrnUGvstXA

There's a thread on it here: https://www.s4me.info/threads/fatig...-diserholt-2020-phd-thesis.18073/#post-306595

 

I'm surprised. I remember talking to a friend, who was doing his phd in psychology at Cambridge Uni, about Lacan (I studied Lacan in quite a lot of depth as part of my English Lit studies), he said that Lacan had no place in modern psychology and hadn't done for years. I thought psychology had moved on.

 

Diserholt's Linked In page says she lecturing at Strathclyde but her name doesn't come up on the staff lists there, although she has a couple of shared authorships with current staff.

There is this: Lacan in Scotland

 

Why does it say 2022 in the title to this thread? It looks like the paper came out in 2021?

 

Previous discussion on Diserholt’s PhD thesis (2020) and Lacanian theory: https://www.s4me.info/threads/fatig...-exploration-diserholt-2020-phd-thesis.18073/

 

Ah, yes, fatigue, famously did not exist before capitalism. Of course. Very smart analysis. You feel the genius radiating from it.