What Makes Life Worth Living: On Pharmacology
What Makes Life Worth Living: On Pharmacology
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是什么让生活变得有价值：论药理学
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发表时间：
2013
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影响因子：
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通讯作者：
David Tkach
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作者：
David Tkach
在第一次世界大战之后，诗人保罗·瓦列里（Paul Valery）写道，知识的工具化和文化对利润的破坏性从属关系带来了“精神危机”。最近的事件非常清楚地表明，思想或精神的存量继续下降。经济是围绕着追求短期利益而组织起来的，得到了一个专业化的、愚蠢的媒体的支持。广告技术对我们的注意力提出了无情的要求，使我们成为愚蠢的野兽，不再能够生活。精神疾病发病率的螺旋式上升表明，脆弱的精神生命正处于崩溃的边缘。
这些多重症状的背后是消费资本主义，它系统地使那些它声称要解放的人陷入贫困。回到马克思的理论，斯蒂格勒认为消费主义标志着无产阶级化历史的一个新阶段。被剥削的不再只是劳动，被推到生存极限之下，而是作为人类精神特征的欲望。
治愈这种疾病的方法是在斯蒂格勒所说的“精神药理学”中找到的。在这里，药理学与制药业开发的化学补充剂无关。pharmakon，被定义为治疗和毒药，指的是技术对象，通过它我们向新的未来开放，从而创造出使我们成为人类的精神。通过引用一系列人物，从苏格拉底、西蒙顿和德里达到儿童精神分析学家唐纳德·温尼科特，斯蒂格勒表明，技术既是我们痛苦的原因，也是使生活有价值的原因。
In the aftermath of the First World War, the poet Paul Valery wrote of a ‘crisis of spirit’, brought about by the instrumentalization of knowledge and the destructive subordination of culture to profit. Recent events demonstrate all too clearly that that the stock of mind, or spirit, continues to fall. The economy is toxically organized around the pursuit of short-term gain, supported by an infantilizing, dumbed-down media. Advertising technologies make relentless demands on our attention, reducing us to idiotic beasts, no longer capable of living. Spiralling rates of mental illness show that the fragile life of the mind is at breaking point.
Underlying these multiple symptoms is consumer capitalism, which systematically immiserates those whom it purports to liberate. Returning to Marx’s theory, Stiegler argues that consumerism marks a new stage in the history of proletarianization. It is no longer just labour that is exploited, pushed below the limits of subsistence, but the desire that is characteristic of human spirit.
The cure to this malaise is to be found in what Stiegler calls a ‘pharmacology of the spirit’. Here, pharmacology has nothing to do with the chemical supplements developed by the pharmaceutical industry. The pharmakon, defined as both cure and poison, refers to the technical objects through which we open ourselves to new futures, and thereby create the spirit that makes us human. By reference to a range of figures, from Socrates, Simondon and Derrida to the child psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott, Stiegler shows that technics are both the cause of our suffering and also what makes life worth living.