The Decline of the Doctors

A double evolution announces the end of the morbid marriage that foments the sick and the doctors. According to the first, the sick man thinks that he needs a doctor, according to the second, that he is, like the doctor himself, a living being that is afraid to live.

Medicine has never so sovereignly imposed its power over death and suffering, and never have its efforts ended up so vain before the specter of incurable illnesses; the sickness of surviving with them obliterates the body. The truth is that medicine can vanquish everything but the essential thing — the fatigue of having to work all the time and everywhere. What a discouragement is cancer, where cells, frenzied in the shadow of death, proliferate in an extravagant life-reaction which kills them! What a defiance is AIDS, which opposes to the triumph of immune-system medicine the absolute collapse of the organism’s immunity!

Medicine was created in the image of commodity civilization. Its apogee has made the fanfare of well-being resonate to the four corners of the world, a world where whole species disappear, where the chemical and nuclear miasmas poison the air, where fertilizers [and genetic engineering] sterilize the soil instead of fertilizing it.

The Power and the Powerlessness of Medicine

Having attained the summits of efficiency and inefficiency, the medical world falls from the heights of its essential pretensions to crouch hidden in an existential reality: the morbid relations between individuals and themselves.

The 19^th century held sacred the science of man and the art of the medicine-man, seeing in them not so much the progress of knowledge but the increase in quotas on the market of human material.

Weathering the years when a thousand people weren’t even worth a coffin-flag, being a doctor was hardly any bigger of a deal than being a barber, clown, or executioner. The avaricious morality of capitalist development had to first begin to consider and examine human beings with as much attention as they’d pay to the carving on a coin before the rough rubbing chiropractics of university jargon elevated the doctors to the status of laborious and effective technicians, in order that they might become, on orders from an accelerated industrialization, the experts on the body at work. While the surplus value torn from the mining towns gave a stipend to the progress of research, it appeared to be clear that the object of choice for the most respectable of sciences is generally the machine, and in particular, the mechanized-man, which quite usefully prolongs the life of the machine.

Judge the popularity of medicine when the production-machine split itself up and became a consumption-machine too as the pharmaceutical industry, having discovered a vast potential market in the proletariat, democratized the use of health concerns products.

Whereas doctors were once merely prestigious, they became indispensable. Their function was bureaucratized for the “well being of all” and its mission is no longer curative but socialist. They militate in a sanitary organism which, in the name of Social Security, makes sure that there are plenty of remedies for those who work everyday just to die a little more.

Nevertheless, the decline of it all announces its coming. Bureaucratic routine, the power of the pharmaceutical monopolies, the crumbling of specialized therapies, coincide with an overprotection of health that contrasts starkly with the malaise in civilization. Mistrust becomes embittered on contact with a pharmacopoeia which heals the stomach by sickening the kidneys, and participates in the same industrial system of power, which denatures the earth and man in the name of happiness.

Add to that the bankruptcy of the protector-state, incapable of assuring anymore a social security that the proletariat of highly-industrialized societies put away over the years with its conquests and acquisitions.

Basically, a growing moroseness has invaded the market of death and sickness, and opinions balance between disturbance and relief at the sight of its disappearance, after the fashion of convalescents who are assured that they can walk without crutches and who don’t dare believe it.

Parallel Medicines

The collapse of the traditional medical market has not failed to stimulate the promotion of parallel markets. In the same way as the marginal development of sustainable industries puts the unsustainable industries’ markets in a growing discredit, an abundance of alternative medicines gets ready to oust surgical and chemical therapies, which are more and more contested.

The phenomenon, which was predicted back in the 60s, is in fact just a part of the commodity logic which the second half of the century popularized the consciousness of; the slipping of frenzied production into accelerated consumption, the passage from authority to seduction, from tyranny to laxity, from sectarianism to openness, from the high cost of transgression to low-priced hedonism.

Illnesses are most often a kind of workplace accident. Once the body sours on being made to function as a machine of production and consumption all the time and in every terrain, it goes wrong, jams, and seizes up. Fleeing the stress of routines and a set of plans that seem suddenly absurd to it, the body seeks refuge, repose, anesthesia, or lethargy in coryza, infarction, fractures, hemiplegia, and cancer. The paradox of medicine is that its intervention is as indispensable as it is noxious. It repairs the machine for new performances on the journey of marketability, where machinelike behavior leads to the decline of Life.

Although they close themselves into the same lucrative traditions as their rivals do, the natural medicines open the door to a freeness which will dismiss those traditions one day. Besides, the techniques now being developed will allow for a new energetic harvesting of the profusion of solar, vegetable, terrestrial, eolian, and thalassic energies.

The contradictions they cultivate by demanding payment for a natural freeness, which itself is demanded elsewhere, act in a revelatory fashion. They underline the morbid duality of healthy and unhealthy, and show concretely how those who long for health also long for sickness.

Therapeutics without violence, in their project of making behavior natural again, have spread the opinion that each person is his or her own source of vitality and of languor, that it intervenes consciously and unconsciously — and in any case, more than has been admitted — in the conflict in which the body is the permanent field of battle and of maneuvers.

Whereas classical medicine uses heavy artillery to annihilate sickness, sometimes annihilating the sick themselves, the guerrilla warfare of natural medicines solicits participation from the patient in the curative effort; it calls upon the patient to fight to get better and shows him that he is the same as the caduceus where the two serpents of health and sickness are coiled around one another.

When doctors believe less and less in medicine, patients come to believe that they are capable of cutting short their own illnesses and healing themselves, using nothing from the healers — certified or not — except as a placebo or preservative against doubt, which could reasonably hide from them their chances of success.

When it comes to knowing if life gains from the change, nothing’s less sure. To become your own doctor — is this not to learn to heal your own illness? To concoct herbal teas, to buy the whole gamut of expensive, organic and pure products, to hold yourself to diets and to abstinence from alcohol, these things make healthy men the enlightened consumers of a latent morbidity. Thinking that this would make way for individual autonomy, they end up only with self-managed prisons for it.

The Language of the Body

For those who accept the pact with daily dying as though it were fate, nothing proves that chemical medicine is worth as much, if not more, than light-therapy. For a patient accustomed to being raped and abused, the medical knuckle-sandwich has more of a chance of convincing and healing than the sickly and sluggish approach of the new practitioners.

Besides, the whole business is concluded in advance, once adults turn to medicine as they would turn towards their mother’s bellies or the male protection of their fathers, once they renounce leading themselves alone down the trail of nascent sickness and sounding out the language of the body with a grammarian’s solicitude. Isn’t it all about giving a ludic, rather than dramatic, turn to such questions as: “why am I starting to get sick?”, “why am I feeling this particular pain in my heart rather than in my kidneys, why this kind of affliction (and this is a remarkable word[2], which can designate both sickness and love, as if it contained sickness born from absent love and love that keeps sickness at bay)?”

Perspicaciousness would be useful for the discovery of the lexicon and syntax by means of which the body expresses itself as long as it is at leisure to speak. Since if we are hardly interested in its manifestations of well-being, wouldn’t it have to cry out in pain to make itself listened to?

What is the meaning of a nascent rheumatism, a migraine, a sharp pain, a dislocation, nausea? Why these awkwardnesses which make us break things as if something was getting knotted up inside us and threatened to break us? Each must respond in his or her own way, since the language of the body differs from one body to the next, and nonetheless the conflict is the same everywhere: it opposes the will to live to the reflex of death that denies it.

The Birth of the Morbid

The fear of death is nothing but an ordinary disguise for the fear of life. All medical profits come from holding up the one and aggravating the other.

With what solicitude, with what fervor do they secretly welcome sickness, persuaded that they were born to pay for a few ephemeral moments of happiness with years and years of unhappiness. Work and bargaining have so totally depreciated the pleasure of living that one can hardly gaze upon them without setting in motion a reflex of death and failure.

In the beginning there was the game, and the game became drama. When it was a question of escaping school, getting out of chores, getting the caresses that it felt deprived of, the child excelled in the art of being sick, with the virtuosity of a chess champion. These are not feigned sicknesses, but sicknesses put into play — to the point that emotional attention takes them out of play, at least if they are employed with the necessary intelligence.

So much energy is invested daily in suicidal resignation that the habit of obsessing over death only awaits a signal from fatigue and confusion to wrap those with that habit up in the cocoons of sickness, where they will justify their regression to the fragile state of existence of childhood by deferring to some infirmity.

Only an amused lucidity seems capable of putting an end to such harmful dispositions, of ridiculing the morbid and dramatic exaltation of the first feelings of faintness and discontent. It is still necessary, in order to accede to the grace of “gai savoir” (happy, relaxed wisdom), that we base our efforts on an irrepressible will to live, without which an intelligence of causes turns into the last words of the condemned beneath the guillotine.

Of course, we live in a state of permanent paradox, stirring up hate to make us love, hounding us to give up this life where each of our gestures cries out the decline, judging it necessary that we be pulled to pieces by work, and judging futile the effort that orgastic enjoyment requires? How close we are to the creation of the living, in spite of the conjurations and evil spells of sickness and boredom! Like a moment of love and joy, dissipating the sickly fog that we have become accustomed to complacency in, has the sovereign power to unmake it all this evening — like a game that the rules don’t apply to anymore — it is the cancer of this society which sketches out the morning.

In the instants when we belong to ourselves completely — rare and exceptional as they may be — is there not more science and intelligence to be extracted from those instants than there are in all the therapies, which extoll their own curative powers on the back of an incurable life-sickness?

Drugs

With the scarcity of wars, riots and revolutions which once served as pretext and expedient for the well-rooted cult of death, there is nothing left now to nourish the refusal of life, ultima ratio, except for the battle of each person against him or herself. And it’s a conflict that is easier to get out of now than it was in the olden days, when it strangely enough appeared quite small before the vast conflagrations of conflict between nations and social classes. On a related subject, however: Let us not underestimate to what point the arms-market has made way for the drug-market, not only of heroin and cocaine, but further still, of the medications that the pharmacists are the very official dealers of; in many ways, the propaganda of death has done nothing but changed the shoulder it rests its rifle on — and now it’s shooting from the left one.[3]

The Devaluation of Suffering

The decreasing credit given to pain assuredly is one of the reassuring signs of our times. It has been a long time that we’ve been waiting for it to stop being considered redemptive. Chased out of the corner-store of positive values, it excites us less to compassion and to purchasable relief now, and makes us more resolved in our will to finish off its deplorable detritus and eradicate it before it starts addicting us like a drug.

How many generations have been exasperated by its moaning, playing the part of the mourners in the funeral procession of desire, opportunism, ascent to honors, ridding itself of its pain by inflicting it upon others, spoiling gastronomy with ulcers and making the thorns the glory of the rose-tree.

Sadly for the dilettantes and supporters of pain, there is no more success, no more prestige, no more power. Work no longer sanctifies the idiots that courageously sacrifice themselves to it, and if it’s still anything more than a sickness, a misery, a misfortune serving as a selling point, then it’s just a ridiculous act, like one might plagiarize from the melodramas of the past.

It goes without saying that the depreciation of pain coincides with the decline of the functioning that was imparted to it economically.

The ideology of suffering as useful and agreeable to the gods, to the State, to morality, came in perfect accord with the indispensable sacrifice of the self on the altar of production. On the other hand, it is a resolutely opposed ideology which has countered the furbelows of seduction with the necessity of consumption. To the ascetic reprimand, “Put up with the pain; no pain, no gain” the cheerful response, “Please yourself” has come. In order to sell off their substitute pleasures, it didn’t seem too frivolous to lend a smiling mask to the anguish, bitterness, and dissatisfaction which double the bill on commodity pleasures.

We have for too long confused natural suffering — such as it comes from the dialectic of life, with its incidentally random distribution of pleasures and displeasures — and denatured suffering, which the prohibitions placed on enjoyment have resulted in, the reductive mechanisms of work, the inherent guilt involved in exchanges, the perspective which aligns beings and things by taking death as its convergence point.

If it is true that sickness fills the voids that frustration creates in the body — since it’s the opposite of a feeling of plenitude — that also means that enjoyment is the absolute guarantee against anguish, morbid states, and precocious agony.

The Curative Powers of Enjoyment

As an example, here is the observation made by a pediatrician while he was making his consultation. To attenuate the pain of having her broken arm put into a cast, a little girl of six years discovered spontaneously the analgesic power of the pleasure she got by caressing her breasts. Her mother, annoyed by this conduct, which she deemed obscene, wanted to make her stop. It is to the merit of the pediatrician that he opposed the mother’s remonstrance, and tried to explain the good basis of such a behavior.

Enjoyment pushes pain away. There’s a truth that deserves attention from the scientists, since it could change the basis of scientific research entirely. If it is admitted that patients who react in a lively way to the pain that overwhelms them (and who react before they’re brought down by it) actually increase by 70 percent their chances of getting better, it must be admitted as well that there is a certain aberration to taking the inverse path, starting from a morbid state, where whether one likes it or not, the enjoyment that is brushed aside from life seeks its satisfaction in suffering, sacrifice, and death to try to restore some kind of health.

When will you give some vacation time to the students of the school of sado-masochism, of education according to the spirit of work, those who are being initiated into the world of forced labor where progress means a lack of emotion, and who have been so educated in that terrible way that the therapists don’t even know to what extent their sicknesses are actually chosen out of nostalgia?

The Will to Live and Its Consciousness

Knowledge in the fields that medicine has abusively reserved control of for itself should consist in dialogue with the body. Sickness speaks, it seems, wherever desire has been forced to shut up and deny itself. It is the task of each of us to discover, if we wish, in what places and how a nascent voluptuousness is cornered, curled up, and shriveled up in painful nodes that medicine can only cut off, since, failing that, it can’t get the body to consent.

However, separate thought, no matter how lucid it is when it concerns itself with the rifts where desires are stuck whining, cannot easily restore the vital equilibrium of the body. Only the passion of life and of self-love can vanquish the doubts and fears slowly installed in the heart from birth; only passion, attentively directed at each of the pleasures of the day and the night, can really transmute the primary impulses into the refinement of desires that is the sole substance of the human.

A new consciousness is discovering its practice. Doctors believe less and less in medicine, the sick sees less and less the effect of the daily repression of the pleasure of living in his sickness, the body refuses slowly its traditional status as a production machine, a consumption machine and a passion-crushing machine, in the whirlwind of compression and decompression. It’s the end of the times when bodies assimilated themselves into a workplace. No suffering is justifiable, since no enjoyment demands renunciation. A living totality discovers the power of creation and of creating oneself. The earth’s dreams and the body’s dreams are the same; they mark the taking back of a desirable reality from the gods of power and money, a reality where suffering, sickness, prohibitions and socially-financed death have no more place.