What Makes Life Worth Living: On Pharmacology by Stiegler Bernard

Author:Stiegler, Bernard [Stiegler, Bernard]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2013-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

30. As for the self – the pharmacology of the soul

As transitional support, every object is a pharmakon that induces the pharmacological constitution of those who live pharmaco-logically (us, affected by the Thing), so that it may stretch and sometimes tear the soul that is the psychic individual, with the result that, participating in collective individuation, it may disindividuate itself and in so doing disindividuate the collective, that is, damage it [abîmer], drive it towards the abyss [vers l'abîme]. For if there can be no psychic individuation without collective individuation, the converse is also true: there is no psychic disindividuation without collective disindividuation. This is what Winnicott called the false self. And this is in turn related to those questions that Plato raised in the Gorgias.

Does the false self presuppose a true self that would be ‘authentic’ or ‘proper’? Clearly not: it is a transitional self, a relation woven beyond inside and outside, and that must be thought on the basis of a pharmacology of the soul. This is Simondon's central question in L'individuation psychique et collective: in that work, this question is presented as that of the indefinite dyad, that is, of a bipolarity that constitutes the play of tendencies throughout the psychic as well as the social individual, which in Simondon is presented as the ordeal of temptation.14

It is impossible to understand either the goodness or the evil of the soul, which are constitutive and dynamic tendencies (the dynamic of the drives, which supply energy to the libido, energy which is then dynamically ‘diverted’), without taking these pharmaka into consideration, insofar as they can become either poisonous or curative and beneficial. Good and evil, goodness and wickedness, are pharmacological arrangements, and a person ‘is’ not good or evil – but all of us become, every day, by turns, according to fortune and mood (Stimmung), good or evil, representatives of goodness (that is, of nobility) or of wickedness (that is, of ignobility: vile).

The pharmacology of the soul is what Winnicott described as its originally transitional dimension, the transitional object being also the means of falsification of the self as circuit, that is, of the self as a relation for which the transitional object is the mediating factor. The human situation is essentially relational, and the psyche is formed relationally – that is, by inscribing itself on to circuits of transindividuation – on the basis of transitional (that is, technical and pharmacological) facilitations,15 which presuppose mediators, curators, priests [curés] and therapists of all kinds.

As I have already emphasized, what Winnicott referred to as the environment, that is, transitional relational space, is here the crucial question:

Freud used the word ‘sublimation’ to point the way to a place where cultural experience is meaningful, but perhaps he did not get so far as to tell us where in the mind cultural experience is.16

Freud and Klein avoided […] the full implication of dependence and therefore of the environmental factor.17

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