The Jargon of Mental Health

Articulating the need for a new language with which to express our misery through Adorno and Nietzsche

Mark Rothko, Four Darks in Red

Adorno's Jargon of Authenticity laboriously quotes and ferociously condemns Heidegger’s Being and Time — the existential ontology everyone knows ‘authenticity’ from, where it appears as resolute and heroic self-determination (in contrast to the bovine anonymity of the inauthentic das Man, chattering away as it ‘maintains itself factically in the averageness which belongs to it’ (BT, 84)). But Adorno is not merely targeting his philosophical and political nemesis, who was a member of the Nazi Party while Adorno was in Californian exile and ash blackened the skies in Europe. Adorno’s polemic extends beyond the (for a time, open) acolyte of Nazism to the entire language of German existentialism, an order of signification in which the authenticity of Heidegger has a privileged position. Adorno asserts that this language — the jargon of authenticity named by his book’s title — has become an ‘ideology’ unto itself (JA, 132). In West Germany, where the ‘relationships of domination’ have receded from direct view, this contagion is everywhere, from lecture halls to marketing departments; on Adorno’s account, the reputed distinction between Heidegger and Jaspers — the princes of German existentialism — and the less regal advertising executive collapses upon examination of their language (JA, 81). Having been prepared for ‘mass consumption’, the jargon of authenticity is the ideology of bourgeois and worker alike (JA, 51). Indeed, it is the ideology of the age which — the world having been turned into a mass grave in the decades prior — officially proclaims a deep suspicion of ideology; knowing ‘no parties’, the jargon of authenticity is worn in ‘buttonholes in place of the currently disreputable party badge’ (JA, 14-15).  

Adorno launches his scathing critique of this ideology by sketching a genealogy of its ‘existential bombast’ (JA, 19). According to this genealogy, the birth of German existentialism as a language — the system of ‘words’ which includes, of course, authenticity, but also ‘existential’, ‘decision’, ‘appeal’, ‘encounter’ and ‘concern’ — was an excretion: in Adorno’s own terms, it was the ‘waste product’ of the deaths (or murders) of God declared by the Nietzschean text (JA, 3, 36). (Or, as Peter Gordon puts it in his Adorno and Existence, ‘the jargon […] only came on the scene once the gods had fled’ (AE, 95).) While repressing their ‘theological origin’ in the discourse of Christianity, the gleaming words of the jargon are ‘cult forms’ that have ‘outlived their mystery’ (JA, 19, 51). In part, Adorno illustrates this genealogical thesis with reference to the word ‘Man’, one of the jargon’s most venerable signs (JA, 51). Man derives from ‘the doctrine of man as an image of God’; with this same God a corpse, the Man which is claimed by German existentialism retains its former grandeur — though this majesty is now ascribed to an eternal essence of ‘powerlessness and nothingness’, rather than resemblance of God (JA, 51-52).

The monstrous ‘poison’ of the ‘dead cells of religiosity’ such as Man (and authenticity and so on) is that they — in contrast to Christianity’s consolation of those marooned upon this terrestrial hell with the ‘promise of an eternal bliss’ — ‘sanctify’ the universal catastrophe and its historically contingent wounds (such as, indeed, powerlessness and nothingness, which Adorno portrays as an impending abomination of totally administered society) (JA, 16, 19, 30). From ‘sermon to advertisement’, this ideology as language displaces Paradise onto hell; it insidiously ‘supplies men with patterns for being human’ in a world that is demonically inhuman (JA, 12, 35). This is, in Adorno’s eyes, the fundamental operation of the jargon of authenticity. The splintering of discourse into the jargon’s relentlessly ‘positive’ words, draining both the ‘propositional force’ and the ‘thought content’ from the sentences in which these words appear, enforces in speaker and listener alike an unthinking participation (or better, complicity) in this affirmation of universal catastrophe (JA, 3, 24). And for Adorno, nothing is more obscene than affirmation — which, under current conditions, can only ever be the love of ‘stone walls and barred windows’ Adorno discovers in Nietzsche’s doctrine of amor fati (MM, 98).¹

Even if it may appear to be an artefact of a lapsed, geographically-specific historical situation, the enduring relevance of Adorno’s blistering polemic against German existentialism lies in its underlying stylistic demand to invent a language which excludes all affirmation of the existing order and, in this sense, refuses to be ideological. This is why Jargon of Authenticity is not simply a relic — this text has a politics whose urgency has not been diminished by the passage of history; the rivers of blood have continued to flow. This politics of style, of course, pervades Adorno’s whole corpus, which — in his own programmatic words — knows only ‘the name of the negative’ (EF, 171). For Adorno, ‘the archaic impulse that first revealed itself in the behavior of human predators when attacking their prey’ (Gordon) achieves its most sublime expression in the ensnarement of the object by the philosophical system; this system is the hysterical rage of a ‘belly turned mind’, as Adorno himself put it in Negative Dialectics (AE, 125; ND, 23).² The anti-system of Adorno’s books and essays and aphorisms and broadcasts nonetheless achieves a stylistic coherence as the truly extraordinary ‘melancholy science’ announced in the first pages of Minima Moralia, the antithesis of the affirmative ecstasy with which Nietzsche greeted the ‘new dawn’ and ‘open sea’ left in the wake of God’s death(s) (MM, 8; GS, 199).³

The pertinence Jargon of Authenticity has retained as a particularly forceful expression of Adorno’s politics of style compels us to consider the ideology of language today — or rather, where the waste of God has rearticulated itself. For biographical reasons, I immediately think of the discourse of mental health. To preface my reflection, though, I would like to introduce Nietzsche’s conception of depression as a profoundly political issue in the third essay of Genealogy of Morals. At the heart of this essay’s genealogy of the ascetic ideal is the rediscovery of it as ‘a trick for the preservation of life’ — its cradle, according to Nietzsche, is ‘the protective and healing instincts’ of life in decline (GM, 88). The ascetic ideal appears as a ‘medicine’ deployed by the priest to treat a physiological condition of ‘inhibition and exhaustion’, a condition of ‘degenerating life’ whose psychic correlates include ‘dull pain’ and ‘lingering misery’ — a condition which Nietzsche repeatedly names depression (GM, 82, 88, 104). The Nietzschean priest’s political genius, the foundation of his dictatorship, is to ‘break’ the sickly, depressed masses ‘on the cruel wheel’ of the bad conscience; the depressed man, the nameless ‘physiological causality’, is trained by the priest to reinterpret his gnawing suffering as divine retribution for the sinfulness of an impure animal existence, as the index of his oceanic guilt (GM, 68, 105). The strategic imposition of this meaning is how the priest enslaves his flock and, in the same movement, constitutes them as subjects — a meaningful depression rescues them from the temptation of suicide.

But the unceasing confirmation of sinfulness and guilt, the cunning strategy by which the priests seized their power, also structures (that is, codifies) desire in a particular way: the mutilated subject of the ascetic ideal ‘screams’ their desire for an infinity of pain, for endless ‘terror, frosts, fires and raptures’ (EH, 94; GM, 103, 105). The monstrously painful consummation of this desire — the scorching mortification of carnal flesh, the excruciating abnegation of animal vitality — is a ‘specific mode or articulation of enjoyment’, a jouissance of the torture chamber (Lacan’s word, Nietzsche’s metaphor) that is radically ‘different from pleasure’, as Zupančič observes; it is ‘something which lies' — in psychoanalytic terms — ‘beyond the pleasure principle’ (TSS, 47; GM, 103). This is the thunderous ‘counter-feeling’ to depression Nietzsche describes — it is not the inflammation of that other pain, a festering wound which is dull and lingering (GM, 103). Nietzsche’s accusation is that the jouissance of the ascetic ideal is ultimately a poison, ‘sapping’ the life of those the priest treats — having become an explicit object of political intervention in the ascetic ideal, life is preserved only by and in its turning against itself (GM, 106). (For Esposito, Nietzsche’s genealogy of the ascetic ideal specifies exactly the ‘aporetic core’ of the ‘immunitary paradigm’ of biopolitics petrified in the juridico-institutional categories of liberal democracy; this ideal ‘negates [life] in order to affirm it, and affirms it only by negating it’ (I, 7, 88-89).) In the end, the ‘mental health' imposed by the biopolitics of the priest — the rescue from suicide — turns into sickness, into death. This is why Nietzsche casts the priest’s biopolitical domination as the ultimate ‘catastrophe’ in the history of the world — it ‘the parasite’s’ perpetration of ‘the greatest crime against humanity’ (GM, 107; AC, 46).

There are no ascetic priests to treat us anymore — as Adorno himself points out, ‘the madness of the profit-economy’ decrees an orgy of consumer hedonism; the ice and the fire of mortification has been overthrown by the stupid enjoyment of endless consumption (MM, 97).⁴ Instead, we have the appointments with a psychologist or psychiatrist or psychoanalyst that Medicare concedes (or we access with the bad conscience of class privilege) and the drugs whose advertised function is the rectification of simple biochemical malfunctions. These drugs often travel under the name ‘anti-depressants’, a particularly diabolical invention of the pharmaceutical cartels’ marketing departments, given their dubious efficacy. (Approximately one in eight Australians, including me, have been prescribed drugs ennobled with this name.) Despite these obvious inadequacies, in contemporary Australia everyone agrees on the importance of ‘mental health’. Choruses of activists and bureaucrats and consultants and lobbyists and marketers sing these exalted words, along with others such as ‘wellbeing’ and ‘resilience’ and ‘fulfillment’. Mental health has even become a site of electoral contestation for the auxiliaries of the ruling class who compete to administer the savage inequality and violence of Australian capitalism, the root of so much of our psychical suffering — the alienation and the despair that hangs over our society, the gloom in which the misanthropic political pathologies of the right-wing thrive.

Of course, the discursive regime of mental health articulates its own positive ideals. The political, social, pharmacological interventions that are the material force of this language, this brand, intend to promote definite cognitive and affective states: ‘being the best version of yourself’, ‘coping with daily stresses’, ‘enjoying life’, ‘establishing meaningful connections with others’ and, inevitably, productivity for the firm, the boss. But this is, in Adorno’s terms, a ‘health unto death’, or, rather, a ‘sickness that consists precisely in normality’ (MM, 53). The hidden doom of the individual who has managed to cultivate ‘healthiness […] in mind’ consists precisely in the fact that he has integrated himself into the 'normal' sickness that prevails under late capitalism (MM, 53). Frozen into the deepest caverns of his psyche is the excruciating pain of this social integration, a repression of desire and of hope so extreme that it cannot even manifest as symptoms resembling those that Dr. Freud — and his hysterical patients — invented psychoanalysis to interpret and dissolve. Indeed, Adorno remarks that the maiming which psychoanalysis names Oedipus — the little human animal’s castration by the discourse of the Other, the traumatic and irrevocable loss of the maternal Thing as the institution of a cursed desire’s endless sliding through the signifying texture of the Symbolic — is mere ‘child’s play’ compared to mental health as the ‘profoundest inner mutilation’ (MM, 53). The gangrene that spreads inside the healthy, the putrefying inner world buried in the ice of repression, can only announce itself to the outside world as ‘cheerfulness, openness, sociability’, the happy adjustment exemplified by the ‘regular guy’ and the ‘popular girl’, the conscientious bourgeois professional’s ‘practical, equable frame of mind’, and — we can ultimately say — the structures of mind and mood in which the discourse of mental health recognises itself (MM, 53-54). Behind the smile of the stranger on the morning train and the friendly chat in the office kitchen, there is the secret of necrotic tissue, corpses lost in the blizzard.

For those of us who have not subsumed ourselves into capitalism’s (mental-)health-unto-death, the language of mental health is ideology — or, more specifically, a species of jargon — to the extent that its endless proliferation creates a mirage of a society that is genuinely responsive to suffering, an illusion of a society that is humane. To utter and hear it is to risk becoming compromised by this mystification, to have oneself swindled into affirming a brutally uncaring social order. But for the socially integrated, the linguistic ideology of mental health — precisely by locating itself in the smiling face of a lethal assimilation — functions politically to forbid any recognition of what the social has done to them, of their slaughtered desire and massacred hope. To give expression to our (and their) psychical suffering, we need to invent a wholly negative language, a style worthy of the melancholy science, that resists any affirmation of and complicity in the ruling order. Not only would this language be able to critically specify the inextricability of the social order from our overt miseries — it would also smell the stench of death, of rotting corpses, in the model of health that social power imposes. I think Nietzsche's genealogy of the ascetic ideal, which takes the politics of ‘mental health' absolutely seriously, achieves this brilliantly; it is merely that it is, in commodity society, historically obsolete. Freud — though he insisted on the coincidence of individual and social psychology — famously remarked that the humble therapeutic telos of psychoanalysis is to ‘transform hysterical misery into ordinary human unhappiness’. This is often considered a statement of his pessimism; as my friend (and occasional collaborator) George remarked, the disastrous social and psychic conditions of the present actually make this a radically utopian notion. But we need the words for the universal realisation of unhappiness that is simply ordinary.

1. Adorno does quip, however, that Nietzsche was fortunate to have perished before he could ‘grow sick in his stomach over the jargon of authenticity’; this is consistent with the Nietzschean program of ‘vanquishing the shadow’ of God, too — for Nietzsche, it is not enough that He is dead (JA, 7; GS, 167).

2. As Gordon indicates, Adorno locates the prehistory of the philosophical system — the mind’s hallucinated splendor — in our primeval animality. The creature whose humanity had not yet been violently constituted lived out its brutish life prowling the wilderness, stalking prey to pounce upon, to clench between jaws dripping with blood. But this creature’s starvation, when exasperated by failure and frustration, transformed into fury towards the prey — this is what ultimately sustained the primordial hunt for flesh, with all its perils (ND, 22). The bloody ‘advance to humanity’, according to Adorno's genealogy, imposed the sublime ‘rationalisation’ of this archaic rage — the human being, the man of reason, now articulates it in the imperialism of his system (ND, 22). The rage that once condemned the terrified animal to be slaughtered and consumed is turned upon the concrete particulars, the material residues of non-identity, that strain to break free from the empire of the 'sovereign mind' (ND, 21). It is in this precise sense that the labyrinthine, majestic abstractions of the philosophical system — whether those of Descartes or Spinoza, Kant or Hegel — is belly turned mind. Interestingly, Nietzsche is identified by Adorno as simultaneously the demystifier of and the alternative to all this; Nietzsche himself famously declares his distrust for ‘all systemisers’ (TI, 33). As I see it, Adorno’s suggestion is that the anti-systematic form of Nietzsche’s philosophy, its expression in fragmentary aphorisms and essays, amounts to a certain antitotalitarian politics of style — one that refuses to submit all of reality to itself. It may be productive to sketch the relationship of this style to not only Nietzsche’s own explicit political commitments, specifically his great politics of domination, but also to the seemingly contradictory phenomenon of ‘left-Nietzscheanism’, whose exemplary representatives are, of course, Adorno, Foucault and Deleuze.

3. Gillian Rose considers Adorno’s ‘ironic inversion’ of Nietzsche’s gay science to be exemplary of his participation in a wider ‘tradition of irony’, which also embraces Nietzsche (MS, 17-18). The negativity of Adorno’s corpus is strategically interwoven with the ironic, such that — in defiance of the discursive idols of the society mercilessly attacked by both Adorno and Nietzsche (though with radically different political aims) — a non-literal reading is periodically authorised; this occurs at certain textual moments to ‘undermine’ the ruling order all the ‘more effectively’ (MS, 26).

4. Of course, this can be rendered as perhaps the decisive manifestation of a great torsion in the edifice of civilisation itself: the absolutely archaic ‘society of prohibition’, the historical achievement of the sons who feasted upon their primal father, has finally decomposed, and a mutant ‘society of enjoyment’ has arisen in its wake (to use Todd McGowan’s terms) (ED, 8-9, 21-22, 194-95). Now, in Seminar XX (1972), Lacan declares that the superego is a ferocious ‘imperative of enjoyment’; it is hardly difficult to coordinate the Lacanian folding of an insatiable compulsion to enjoy into the superego, its transfiguration from Freud’s classic prohibitive model into a vehicle of jouissance, with the fundamentally religious (per Benjamin and Agamben) social formation of consumer capitalism (SXX, 23). However, as is clear from the discussion above, Nietzsche’s dissection of the ascetic ideal as biopolitical strategy — having ruled throughout the history of the (Christian) West — reveals that a regime of ‘commanded enjoyment’ (McGowan) can be historically located far before the bloody emergence of capitalism as a social order (ED, 192). While in the Nietzschean genealogy of the ascetic ideal jouissance is wrenched from the mortified, scorched body, socially mandated enjoyment in late capitalism is the pale derivative of idiotic, and essentially pornographic, consumption. Still, the political problem here — in addition to the pacification inflicted by commodity society, turning us into mindless sponges — is that all traces of the social relations that produced our commodities, the enslavement, torture, starvation and disease of others, dissolve into the tepid waters of our commanded enjoyment. As Schopenhauer says somewhere, the pain of the slaughtered lamb is always greater than the joy of the person on whose plate the poor animal ends up.