Depression: emotion and (or) dis-connection in late modern society

Depression as a mental disorder is nowadays commonly understood – via the DSM – as the flipside of the dominating liberal idea of authentic self-realisation. Depression, this way taken as the emotion of extreme sadness, as lack of motivation and initiative, is considered to be a disorder that needs to be tackled by action techniques of empowerment and remobilisation. However, if one zooms in on the experience of expression, on a deeper level the phenomenon called ‘depressive disorder’ is not so much extreme sadness or radical inhibition but a state of existential isolation. This state of isolation is closely connected to the type of subject that prevails in contemporary ultraliberal culture as the leading idea: a mobile, empowered, autonomous, resilient, isolist subject. This type of subjectivity easily leads – considering the global depression ‘pandemic’ – to a state of existential isolation or elementary distunement. The techniques that are needed on this deeper level are not so much action but passion techniques, aiming not for empowerment and remobilisation but for reconnection and resynchronisation, or in other words, for restoring a basic sense of belonging. In this chapter we will start by examining why the emotion of depression has been colonised by medical thinking. We will then show that depression instead could be perceived as existential isolation in contemporary society – as a sense of disconnection to the world. We will end by discussing what this could entail for the understanding of the emotion of depression in our day and age.