Thesis abstracts/ “wow that’s pretty clear”

Abstract

How does the phenomena of self-injury relate to concepts of the political subject? In this essay I seek to give . I begin with an historical gloss of self-injurious behavior as it was recorded and theorized from the modern period (beginning approximately X at the close of the renaissance ) through the rise of the modern nation state, capitalism, imperialism, and industrialization, the world wars, the Kennsian social-democratic era, and finally the neoliberal turn. To do so I draw from a mix of historians and primary sources, including sociological studies and psychiatric diagnostics. Conceptions of self-harm, I argue, are necessarily bound up with by way of presupposing (and reifying) a particular idea of both “self” and “harm”, definitions which are continually contested with explicit reference to political stakes. Self harm can read as a syndoche for human psychology generally, with a focus on the exclusion of the mentally ill subject undergoing a socialization of interests (though not necessarily ontology- -that comes later) before being atomized under the neoliberal pharmaceutical model. 

Having established the political stakes of self-harm, I also read it through a few relevant theorists—particularly Schmitt for his friend/enemy and sovereignty concepts, in order to argue that the subject’s nature is that of a relationship back to itself, and that it is a relationship to such a relationship which is worked out through interests.
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“Wow that’s pretty clear”

The goal is to outline the ways in which self-harm has been understood politically/explicates political ideas, outline the limits of the imagined subject implicit in these understandings, and suggest a counter-idea of the subject through reference to self-harm as a problematic, a political text, that is, the bleeding text. 

History: Self Harm, Madness, Reason as self-interest, historical modes of understanding self-harm, multiple social modes, (neo)liberal responses, the Marxist intervention

Theory: Use Schmitt as...a critic of liberal political thought? as a counter-thinker? use him to show what liberalism obscures, not necessarily to model a political program. Indeed, self-harm is (or would be) a problem for schmitt as well. That said, Schmitt’s work is immanently applicable to self harm, given the question of enemies, especially if we imagine the self less as an atom and more as a microcosmos or micropolis. 

Can the Madman speak--using Spivak’s and Barthe’s ideas of representation and authorization to reframe self-harm into a textual-political act. 

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