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This chapter argues that social pathologies, which are the expressed forms of social suffering, cannot only be transferred to the level of the individual. It also explores the social response to social suffering, and describes the concept of aboriginality as part of the fundamental matrix of this response. This chapter notes that aboriginality includes modern political and social relations as Indigenous peoples negotiate their identities within the nation state, and is partly manifested through the acting and telling upon a certain historical identity.

This chapter presents a dialogue with Axel Honneth, professor of philosophy at the Frankfurt School and director of the Institute for Social Research, regarding the status of Critical Theory as a tradition of thought. Honneth attempts to develop a normative foundation for a theory of society, based on his belief that early Critical Theory possessed a flawed sociology. He agrees with many of Habermas' reformulations of Critical Theory except the Habermasian pragmatics of language, opting instead for a theory of recognition. Honneth's discussion further includes the relationship of his theories with French social philosophy, the question of instrumental reason, the reformulation of the Habermasian theory of the public, and his idea of developing a tradition of social philosophy concerned with distinguishing social pathologies.

Moving out of the clinic, chapter 3 considers how the lives, deaths, and bodies of people who have committed suicide were read for signs of mislaid striving. Rumors and speculative tales told by the living about the dead spoke less in the medicalized terms of aberrant neurochemistries or psychiatric illness than in the social terms of misapprehended desires, risk, isolation, and loss. In this sense, they were morality tales, warning listeners against unscrupulous investments—of time, energy, resources, money, and love. Tales of suicide were also accusations about failed families, defective love, neglect, and mislaid care that implicated people and institutions. Drawing on the stories of three families, I explore the ways rumors and speculative tales told about loved ones lost to suicide shaped these families’ capacity to inhabit the present. I emphasize how access to resources and classed fluencies in the bureaucratic language and social knowledge of suicide shaped, in different ways, how each of these families was able to put forth their own story about the death of their loved one to claim the integrity of the remembered past.

This chapter explores the social pathology of medical discourse under Japanese colonial rule and how the Korean press adopted this language to reshape social understandings of mental illness. In contrast to earlier period, colonial authorities resorted to modern forms of surveillance (e.g., what Michel Foucault terms “bio-power”) as they sought to regulate public health. In part, they utilized accounts (from folklorists to psychiatrists, demographers to medical doctors) to conduct studies about the life processes of the Korean people. For the first time, surveys and studies of Korean mental health, crime, genetic illnesses, and other topics proliferated in both the private and state sectors. This chapter examines a wide range of social and institutional discourses in the press featuring new nosological and gendered labels, such as the hysteric and neurotic, as well as other types of social pathologies and abnormalities embedded in the field of psychiatry, which emerged into the field of vision of public opinion. It also examines how the press addressed the social problem of suicide, especially the cultural, political-legal, medical, and socio-economic reasons offered to explain why people kill themselves.

Machine intelligence is a concept that contradicts both the notion of a machine or man’s “other minds” and the notion of intelligence. This contradiction poses a problem that requires going beyond philosophical bounds and, to some degree, study of the “social pathology” of the problem. Descartes’s method of doubt in a way makes us renounce humanity, and this causes the lack of ability to genuinely believe in something. Through clarifying what a “machine” is and what it is not and presenting the relevance of having a purpose, the chapter explains how this problem arises from imaginative play, or from the lack of it.

This chapter defends politics against crises. It argues that the crisis of politics (the erosion of public support for politics and politicians) reflects the politics of crisis (the use of crisis-inflation strategies in order to scare the public into behaving in a specific way). It suggests that we have lost our capacity to discriminate between social pathology or breakdown, on the one side, and social normality and social order on the other. The chapter focuses on four main themes: the notion of liquidity; the changing nature of risk; climate change and the ‘authoritarian alternative’; and the theme of collective confidence. These issues conspire to produce a form of ‘disaster capitalism’ in which threats, disasters, catastrophes, and crises are at one and the same time everywhere and nowhere.

This chapter examines how Pablo Picasso’s status as a cultural icon affects our perception of his work, and so in a sense transforms the work itself. The Picasso retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art is, among other things, a reminder of the convoluted relation between so-called high art and mass culture. It is the best attended art exhibition ever, drawing more than a million people for a definitive collection of works by the man who, in the popular mind, has become synonymous with modernism. Such an event inevitably raises questions about why people are going to it and what they’re seeing. Picasso’s paintings and drawings from the 1930s focus obsessively on the themes of sexual hostility, predatory aggression, and suffering. Whether or not he was aware of Sigmund Freud, Picasso clearly perceived the connection between sexual and social pathology.