Depression as Trial of Ordinary Individuality: Being Unable and Being Unable to Want

Abstract

The painful accounts of people who experienced depression trace the contours of a test, both deeply personal and broadly social, that exceeds the usual categorizations enclosing it in a psychopathological entity, a medical diagnosis or a disease of the brain. This text is based on the sociological analysis of 60 interviews with individuals diagnosed with major depression. Through concrete experiences irreducibly singular, it highlights the societal grammars of depression, that is to say those that bite in both the “social body” and the “social spirit” of individuals who suffer and who attack their ordinary social individuality. Failure of action (not being able to) and motivation (not being able to want) that characterizes the test of depression cannot be understood without analyzing the societal tensions that define their conditions of possibility.