Welcome back, guys. If you haven't watched
my video on the discourse of suicide, you
should click up here somewhere because you
kinda need that in order to get the full scope
of this particular video I'm filming right
now. And under the cool, surveilling male
gaze of Michel Foucault, from the Panopticon,
I think we're ready to talk about the negation
of negation itself. Marxist critical theory
is one of the best ways to understand negation
of negation itself. Capitalism needs people
to function. It needs someone to feed on.
The fact that we're seven billion people on
this planet, even though the vast majority
of us live in complete and utter poverty,
is good for capitalism. Because it exploits
everyone differently. If an acknowledgement
of the negation of life should seep into our
collective consciousness, this would have
bad consequences for the logic of capitalism.
The fewer people to exploit, the fewer people
to create alienated labour. And the fewer
people to consume overall. The capitalist
ideology's best shown through the ad campaign
"Do It for Denmark" by the travel agency,
SPIES. In the campaign, SPIES urges people
to procreate, monetising the sexual act, even
going as far as saying directly that a drop
in the birth rate would make a drop overall
in their business, as well. Now, this doesn't
pertain to suicide per se, but it does pertain
to the affirmation of life, to the geist of
affirmation. Psychoanalysis says something
about this, too. There's this theory of basic
and surplus repression but forth by Herbert
Marcuse in his 1955 book, "Eros and Civilization".
The book synthesises the ideas of Karl Marx
and the ideas of Sigmund Freud. Freud talks
about the reality principle. This principle
governs our ego, and what that means is that
our ego tries to please the urges of our id
in realistic, socially acceptable ways. Marcuse
then adds to this, saying that the prevailing
form of the reality principle is what he calls
the performance principle. That’s when we’re
being manipulated to conformity by the capitalist
mechanisms. As humans in societies, we must
define ourselves the way the capitalist logic
defines us. We’re manipulated in such a
way that the restrictions of our libidos,
of our desires, seem entirely normal. Out
of the performance principle comes basic and
surplus repression. Basic repression is what
allows us to enter communities and societies
with each other. Surplus repression is the
excess repression; this is what can manipulate
us. This is what makes us capitalist-loving
bourgeois people. The constant repression
of negation seems like a viable thing. Negation
is not necessarily a basic thing of our human
constitution, but it is a thing that can be
manipulated. By constantly affirming life,
we’re repressing something in excess, allowing
us to stay in the circuits of capitalism.
Another feature of psychoanalysis would be
Julia Kristeva’s notion of abjection. She
wrote about it in her 1980 book, Powers of
Horror. Abjection is a collapse in meaning
between you and “the Other”. We abject
many things in our lives such as piss, vomit,
pus, and shit. Julia Kristeva mentions the
presence of a corpse as a particularly strong
object of abjection. And that’s because
it shifts the abject role. We abject, or push
something away, as something strange to ourselves,
and usually we are the ones doing that. But
in the situation of a corpse, that’s the
thing doing it now. We're confronted with
the fragility of our own existence when we
think about ourselves being dead, when we
think about ourselves as being corpses. And
that could lead to a complete dismissal of
negation on a societal level. And lastly,
Michel Foucault. Foucault's notion of power
is different than the one we just talked about
in the Marxian sense. Power is now something
you do, it's not something you have. We enter
power relationships with everyone, and they
shape our decisions. So, you seeing your family
members or friends be sad, or react badly,
whenever something life-negating comes up
may motivate you not to be in the idea of
negation, and power emerges in those relationships.
According to Foucault, whenever something
influences you, it would be exerting power
over you. At the end of “Discipline and
Punish”, Michel Foucault asks, “Is it
really a wonder that our institutions look
the same?” Our factories, hospitals, schools,
psychiatric wards, etc., and he’s referring
to discipline, which is a specific type of
power. And discipline over people, rulers
and being ruled, is distributed differently
than it used to. The institution of media
could be said to be working with the institution
of the psychiatric ward when it comes to suicide.
Whenever suicide, and the negation of life,
is brought up, it’s in the context of mental
disorders, depression, anxiety, bipolarity,
and in the context of terror attacks. The
two institutions could be exerting power over
us via discipline; we internalise people’s
expectations and demands through media. Through
the psychiatric system, suicidal people may
be confined, surveilled, and analysed. From
a Foucauldian point of view, we've created
this rupture in dialogue between the suicidal
people, and the non-suicidal people, between
negation and affirmation. I hope you liked
these two videos, and if you did, please remember
to like and subscribe. And I'll see you all
next time, bye.
