I can't imagine many of you made it through to the 40 minute mark, but I was pitting cherries and so time passed. There were a couple of passages just after 40 minutes that I thought were worth recording here:
Diserholt:
a very complex area, where fatigue is both this sort of trying to use attention to signal the presence of the body or the subject and, but then also just trying to disappear into this hole of nothingness, numbing into this hole of nothingness.
So, so, I find it is difficult but it's very fascinating.
Um, and I'm kind looking at that through, also, like, mourning, the concept of mourning. Ah, and I guess just the demand for a biomedical diagnosis as well. Sort of, how certain impossibilities play out through those, ah, things.
Interviewer:
It's a really good point, like what you brought up earlier with [condensation?] and how things are so multiply determined, um, and that they're usually, well always, symptoms fulfilling many functions at once. So, this idea that you can have a diagnosis or, like, solve like a biologically condoned problem. Like 'this is it' and 'that is the solution'. It doesn't work.
Diserholt:
Yes. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. People want it but they don't want it as well. And that's kind of another thing that I'm also kind of seeing in interviews and especially maybe some more than others. That, you know, it's very prevalent with, ah, those that are diagnosed with it that they have campaigns for people to take it seriously and to be recognised as a medical condition, something that is real and deserves, you know, attention and appropriate treatments and stuff. But, ah, then, yeah. It's like there's a demand for this but there is also the impossibility, when you are refusing, like, if there is a refusal of the symbolic world, you know, and society, and life. It kind of presents an impossible situation when you're demanding something from a system of knowledge, which, ah, you're, ah, well you are refusing the system of knowledge that you are relying on for recognition. So it's kind of like this consciously demanding an answer, but unconsciously not really tolerating it, or not wanting it. So, that also seems to be, ah, something going on.
And yeah, just the quick fixes today, ah, people think that, people just want to get rid of problems quickly, ah, and they do, but there is also that other uncomfortable area where they don't really want to, ah, to a certain extent, you know.
Interviewer:
Yeah, it's serving a purpose. How do you see it tied in to mourning?
Diserholt:
Ahm, so that's a, um, how do I explain that? Um, well I notice like all, pretty much all, of the participants I interviewed, that they had some sort of loss, a death of a loved one or a separation, or ah, you know, something. Um. Well, they lost something kind of at the onset or around the onset of their condition, ah, so I was kind of like, ah, playing around with the possibility that it might be a failure of mourning. Um, where, ah, which would, which would shed light on the contradiction that, you know, trying to ah signal the presence in a way to keep the person alive, but at the same time... Well, I need to explain the concept of mourning in Freudian Lacan, which is, ah, not dealing with a loss, an absence as we would normally think of it. ah, but it's dealing with, yeah, as Freud said, it's not the person that we lost but the ideas related to the person. You know, they come to play a huge role in our identities, but that we don't know what these ideas were, and we don't know what we lost in the other person.
Ah, which then Lacan comes to emphasise that it is a presence we are dealing with, um, the presence of these ideas and, but which are ultimately incomprehensible. So it's a presence of an absence, ah, just the way he is putting it. Ah, so I think that, I just thought that was kind of appropriate and, kind of, that does shed light on that contradiction that, trying to keep the person alive and then trying to get rid of this incomprehensible too muchness tension, ah, because it just doesn't make sense.
