Abstract
This chapter is the “Introduction” of Part II of the present book. It is centered on three quotes (by Marx, Lacan and Foucault) that serve as anchor points for the main questions that will be discussed. These quotes are interrelated through three signifiers: capitalism, crisis, subject. A comment on the genealogy and etymology of the signifier “humanism” accompanies them, in order to show the thread that links these signifiers throughout modernity.
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Notes
- 1.
As Rose pertinently describes, “diagnosis itself has today become a matter of probabilities. It is no longer solely a question of the identification of a condition according to a fixed and categoric taxonomy. Diagnosis itself becomes statistical: a matter of describing a concatenation of indicators, co-occurring in certain regular patterns […] with a view to developing expert strategies for administering the subjects in a way that minimizes their riskiness” (1996: 21).
- 2.
That the body, in the industrialised society, should function as a machine, is evident very clearly in Modern Times, as the factory owner watches, through a Panopticon mechanism, even inside the restroom, and appears on a screen ordering the worker to return immediately to work (Potter 2013;; Stewart 1976).
- 3.
“Thanks to an innovative technology for encoding data in DNA strands, two items of world heritage—songs recorded at the Montreux Jazz Festival and digitised by EPFL—have been safeguarded for eternity. This marks the first time that cultural artifacts granted UNESCO heritage status have been saved in such a manner, ensuring they are preserved for thousands of years. The method was developed by US company Twist Bioscience and is being unveiled today in a demonstrator created at the EPFL+ECAL Lab” (Barraud 2017).
- 4.
The etymology shows the common root of crisis and critique and is rather enlightening for the fact that critique has as its presupposition a crisis: crisis (n.) early 15c., from Latinised form of Greek krisis “turning point in a disease” (used as such by Hippocrates and Galen), literally “judgment, result of a trial, selection”, from krinein “to separate, decide, judge”, from PIE root *krei- “to sieve”, thus “discriminate, distinguish”. Transferred non-medical sense is 1620s in English (Online Etymology Dictionary: “Crisis”).
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Lagios, T., Lekka, V., Panoutsopoulos, G. (2018). Exergum. In: Borders, Bodies and Narratives of Crisis in Europe. Palgrave Pivot, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-75586-1_7
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