Afraid of Being Body? Biophobia Rethought as Concept of the Physical

Afraid of Being Body?

Biophobia Rethought as Concept of the Physical

Tonia Trappe - 11316187 -

Research Master Thesis

Arts & Culture: Cultural Analysis

Graduate School of Humanities

University of Amsterdam

Supervisor: Dr. Marija Cetinic

Content

Introduction ... 1

Chapter I: The embodied subject – biophobia as fear of organic agency ... 7

I.I Biophobia – a concept of the body? ... 7

I.I.I Genetic testing for breast cancer patients: organs as rejected objects ... 7

I.I.II Bio as independent force: the female body and nature ... 8

I.I.III Terminological history: biophobia as aversion against nature and life ... 9

I.II Phobia in the medical discourse: biophobia as phobic disease? ... 10

I.II.I The affective mechanism of a medical phobic reaction ... 10

I.II.II Rejecting one‘s own body: a medical phobic reaction? ... 11

I.III Biophobia as a cultural concept ... 14

I.III.I Biophobia as aversion against bodily matter ... 14

I.III.II The biophobic reaction as expression of the Cartesian divide ... 14

I.III.III The organic body as agent: cancer and incalculability ... 16

I.IV Preliminary Conclusion ... 17

Chapter II: Subject and environment I – the bodily reflection of disrupted experience ... 19

II.I Biophobia and Resignation Syndrome ... 19

II.I.I “The Trauma of Facing Deportation” ... 19

II.I.II Georgi’s story ... 20

II.I.III Georgi and the split in phobia: fear vs. aversion ... 21

II.II Proposition: biophobia as reaction to traumatic experience ... 22

II.II.I The habitual as foundation of identity ... 22

II.II.II The blocking of habits – an individual trauma ... 24

II.II.III Bio as object of aversion – rejecting the body as medium of life experience ... 27

II.III Preliminary Conclusion ... 30

Chapter III: Subject and environment II – the other as object of aversion ... 33

III.I Biophobia and the posure of a dying person ... 33

III.I.I Gregor Schneider’s death room ... 33

III.I.II The artistic concept: death made accessible ... 35

III.II Object of phobia: the body marked by death ... 36

III.II.II Entering the death room: becoming the corpse ... 39

III.II.III The Western body – an inorganic machine ... 40

III.II.IV Dismantling the machine-body: biophobia and Schneider’s death room ... 41

III.III Preliminary Conclusion ... 44

Conclusion ... 47

1

Introduction

“Soak in nature – luxuriating in the forest lowers stress levels, increases creativity, improves immunity, and makes you more content and clear. We provide preventative healthcare for the mind, body, and spirit”. These are the introductory lines on the American forest bathing club’s website, describing their activity. Forest bathing – or nature therapy – was invented in Japan in the 1980’s and is a newly discovered trend in Western societies. It is supposed to help people release the stress from work and re-connect to nature. Forest bathing is only one example of the

back to nature movement developing in many countries of the West. It is also expressed, for

example, in the ever-growing market of natural organic food or popular projects like urban gardening. What comes to mind, here, is a concept introduced by psychologist Erich Fromm in 1973: biophilia, “the passionate love of live and of all that is alive” (Fromm 1973:365-66). In 1984 it was popularised – even though with a slightly different meaning – by biologist Edward O. Wilson in order to substantiate his claim for the conservation ethic, an ideology promoting the protection and maintaining of the natural world (cf. Wilson 1993:131). Today, biophilia in the sense of a positive attitude concerning nature seems to have a revival.

However, the emergence of a particular trend is often the reaction to a certain status quo. The experience of being part of a neatly culturalised environment, with its effects clearly perceived as negative, motivates the drive to affiliate with what is understood as nature and the natural as opposed to culture. The best example is the Fridays for Future international protests, where groups of pupils skip school to demand new politics against climate change and the destruction of nature.

In contrast to the biophilic uprisings, what may mark our society is a widespread

biophobia, a negative or dismissive attitude towards what we understand as nature. My own

experience of today’s biophilic movements is what directed my attention to the aspects in our society which immediately position our culture in opposition to nature and suggested me to concentrate on the concept of biophobia. Derived from biophilia, biophobia was introduced by David W. Orr to describe a discomfort “with the nature that lies beyond our direct control”and a “culturally acquired urge to affiliate with technology, human artifacts and solely with human interests regarding the natural world” (Orr 1994:38). Nature is here understood as defining the realm of living beings beyond the human, and due to ongoing culturalisation, humans see themselves less and less a part of it with ongoing culturalisation. Western societies view their cultural life as something so distant from that idea of a natural world that, in certain aspects,

2

they feel threatened by their own cultural structures of managing life. Even if culture has succeeded in enabling us to meet our needs, we seem to perceive the cultural world as turning against us.

The aim of this thesis is to explore the concept of biophobia as an epistemological tool that may help us disentangle the social phenomena we perceive as separating us from the world of nature and which have for us a negative connotation. How does biophobia have to be conceptualised?

Above, to the term nature I allocated the meaning of realm beyond the human. This understanding might be included into its use by theorists like Wilson (1984) and Orr (1994), but in their works they do not offer clear definitions of nature and life. Despite this lacking conceptualisation, they use both terms in defining biophilia and biophobia. Moreover, there is no clear conceptual outline concerning the meaning of bio in any of their works. As a result, the concepts of biophilia and biophobia have never reached an academic consent. The definitions by both Fromm (1973) and Wilson (1984) illustrate the various ways in which biophilia is being understood and used. The same applies to biophobia. Orr (1994) is not the only one who attempted to define the term. Another, for example, is made by Roger S. Ulrich (1993) who understands it as a genetic predisposition to reject certain natural stimuli.

In Chapter I, I refer back to these writers and elaborate on the terminological history of biophobia. I compare and contrast the main definitions in order to level out the epistemological ground on which biophobia as a concept has grown. Because of their lack of clear and concise definition, biophobia and its partner concept biophilia are rather pushed at the very margins of scholarly discourses and are seen as relics of obsolete theory. In this thesis it is my aim to develop a new and concrete understanding of biophobia as aversion to the non-cultural. I endeavour at reusing it in order to make it a useful conceptual tool for scholarly analysis in the field of sociology, cultural analysis, or art studies.

In the beginning, I introduced the subject of contemporary inclination to and rejection of nature with the example of forest bathing. This trend of re-connecting to nature presents the latter in the form of the forest as spatial entity where the subjects immerse themselves. Nature as physical space is met and experienced by humans as embodied entities. The presupposition for forest bathing is the bodily contact between people and the forest. Biophilia as the positive relation between humans and nature is expressed, here, on a very physical level. In this light, interesting for me is in what way the physical plays a role in the rejection of nature. How is body, especially the human body, significant in the experience of biophobia?

3

Around the time I started researching the topic, female health and breast cancer were common topics of discussion, also gaining a mediatic weight thanks to Angelina Jolie’s awareness campaigns of the years 2013 to 2015. The actress had publicly spoken out about her mother’s death of cancer and her fear of falling ill herself. Jolie had undergone tests for mutations on the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes, which promote the development of breast and ovarian cancer. After having received a positive result, she had performed a double mastectomy, a removal of the breasts, and two years later a laparoscopic bilateral salpingo-oophorectomy, the removal of ovaries and fallopian tubes. She published articles in The New York Times about her experience, in order to encourage other women to get tested to perform pre-emptive surgery, and thus to protect themselves from cancer. Having the biophobia concept in mind, I began asking myself whether the human body itself could become the object of biophobia. Could biophobia be a bodyphobia? In what way could there be an epistemological relation equating

bio and body?

As the example of forest bathing shows, nature is essentially experienced as a physical entity. When bio encompasses nature in its meaning, at the same time it encompasses the bodily sphere. Therefore, what nature and the human body share, is their physical materiality. As bio traditionally also encompasses life as foundational semantic element, it is interesting to focus on the bodily material which makes up bodies considered to be alive: biotic, organic matter. This is the new meaning I assign to bio in biophobia.

In my thesis I re-define biophobia as fearful aversion to human bodies as made from organic cellular substance. This re-definition, however, is still done in relation to culture. Throughout the study, biophobia is considered a phenomenon springing from cultural conditions. The hypothesis is that culture generates certain concepts of our bodies, their materiality, and their successful functioning. For a subject experiencing biophobia as bodyphobia, her own or another human body or parts thereof are suddenly perceived as being alien from that cultural scheme and are forced out from the realm of culture altogether. Suddenly, they are experienced as uncultivated and as sharing associations and epistemes with nature which, again, are opposed to the cultural ideal. In turn, this experience arouses in the subject negative feelings.

That means that in this analysis I do not concretely define nature and life in order to define bio in biophobia, and then associate this definition with body. Instead, I solely proceed from matter which constitutes both living nature and the living human body and analyse in what

4

way that matter connects to ideas traditionally associated with nature. Then, I examine how these ideas disrupt the cultural image of the human body in relation to traditional epistemology. After having composed the meaning of biophobia form the re-definition of bio as organic matter and from the concretised understanding of phobia as reaction to the disruption of habitual cultural epistemes, I will establish a dialogue between biophobia and different phenomena thematising a rejection of the human body. In each of the three chapters of this thesis, I engage in the content analysis of a cultural object and deduce which cultural ideas about the human body cease to be valid and why. In order to theorise the concept of biophobia as bodyphobia, it is important to examine which concepts are culturally and traditionally ascribed to the human body and physical matter. In this way, we can first develop an idea about which epistemes our culture attributes to bio and second, we can become aware of the disruption of which epistemes leads to the emergence of biophobia. Therefore, I will relate the objects to existing literature which seems relevant to their understanding. In this respect, of particular significance is Anthony Synnott’s essay Tomb, Temple, Machine and Self (1992) where he illustrates the social development of a mechanised notion of the body. Chris Shilling gives valuable insights about the relation between habits and the physical in Changing Bodies (2008). Furthermore, Georges Bataille’s Death and Sensuality (1962) enables us to understand the Western conceptualisation of dead bodies, in a theoretical move continuing with Mary Douglas’

Purity and Danger (1966), where the ethnologist examines tabooing as social practice.

The object analysis enables us to recognise the boundaries of our culture’s epistemology. At what point and how does it stop reverberating in the texture of the world it attempts to describe? Moreover, we become aware of conceptualisations of our bodies which are silenced by more dominant epistemes: at what point do opposite conceptualisations emerge? The analysis concerning biophobia of the physical enables us to comprehend the complex – and partly paradoxical – body image we uphold in our culture.

In Chapter I, my theorisation of biophobia as bodyphobia starts with the attempt to create a relation between bio and body. My object of analysis is a text written by The Guardian journalist Paula Cocozza. She portrays four women who have their breasts and ovaries removed after having been tested positive on a BRCA1/2 mutation. To substantiate my claim that the case is indeed a biophobic phenomenon, this research establishes an epistemological connection between the cultural conceptualisation of nature associated with bio and the conceptualisation of the female body. What cultural association do they share? Next, this study discusses the insufficient conceptualisation of biophobia. After focusing on its terminological history, I try

5

to clarify the elements bio and phobia. I begin with the latter and examine, on the basis of Cocozza’s text, whether phobia must be defined according to the classical medical concept or whether it needs a different conceptualisation. Building upon Brian Massumi’s affect theory, the chapter analyses how the case described by Cocozza can fit the affective mechanism in medical phobia. The next part of the chapter focuses on bio. In my attempt to define biophobia as a phenomenon caused by cultural mechanisms, I try to answer how the concepts of life,

nature, and body as elements of bio share certain cultural attributions. It will be suggested to

give bio the meaning of organic matter, so that we may analyse why, in a cultural sense and seen as biophobic reaction, Cocozza’s women reject their breasts and ovaries. Which cultural episteme loses validity when confronting the body’s potential to develop cancer? Does this disruption of cultural ideas constitute a ground for biophobia?

Chapter II also discusses the case of a subject rejecting his own body, but the matter becomes more complicated here. Journalist Rachel Aviv tells the story of Georgi, a 12-year-old boy from Russia who fled to Sweden with his parents at the age of five. After having lived in Stockholm illegally for seven years, but going to school and having integrated into the Swedish community, Georgi and his parents learn that they will be deported back to Russia. Consequently, Georgi slowly falls into a coma and becomes diagnosed with Resignation Syndrome. In what way can we classify his passive rejection of his body as biophobia? The challenge is that Georgi is not averse to his physical matter because of a disruption in the cultural conceptualisation of the body. Instead, what triggers his reaction is the idea of experiencing his body becoming extracted from his habitual environment. In this light, he rejects his bodily matter for its inextricable involvement into the experiential sphere where what he fears is located. Against this background, I make a case for splitting phobia into both an

object of fear and an object of aversion. In biophobia as bodyphobia, the body is always

connected in some way to the feared object. Thus, the discussion can demonstrate the interplay of fear and aversion and the involvement of physical matter. Additionally, Chapter II provides the first clue to considering biophobia a supra-individual phenomenon. In Cocozza’s text, Georgi experiences the embeddedness of his body into his environment as contributing to his identification as individual. Nevertheless, Georgi’s biophobia can still be described as a reaction to cultural mechanisms. To outline that, I investigate in what way the emergence of his object of fear comes down to a disruption of cultural epistemes.

Chapter III further elaborates on biophobia as a supra-individual phenomenon. Here, the rejected object is not the body of the experiencing subject, but the body of another person. In

6

2008, German artist Gregor Schneider publicly announced his plans to install a room to host a dead or dying person which could be accessible for the general public. What followed was a vast outcry of people scandalised by his idea. The aversion to publicly display a dying body or a corpse was intense. In this chapter, I take as a case study Schneider’s artistic concept of the death room. I will relate it to our Western society’s ideas of death and analyse its potential for causing aversion. Against the background of Western epistemology, why and how is a dying body repulsive? How could this repulsion be described as biophobic? In this light, I specifically focus on the relation between the potentially experiencing subject’s body and the dead or dying body. For the subject, the object of fear is located precisely in that relation between her own body and the corpse. Therefore, Chapter III makes clear that the experience of biophobia is always in some way related to one’s own body. It shows the extent to which we perceive and judge everything surrounding us from the viewpoint of our own body and based on our physical self.

7

Chapter I:

The embodied subject – biophobia as fear of organic agency

I.I Biophobia – a concept of the body?

I.I.I Genetic testing for breast cancer patients: organs as rejected objects

In 2015, The Guardian journalist Paula Cocozza published an article covering women who had their breasts, ovaries, and fallopian tubes removed after having been found positive for the BRCA1/2 mutation. Some of the women already had a personal cancer history. In Cocozza’s portrayal, however, they express discomfort about healthy body parts based on the test result. Such unease is conveyed, for example, in a quote of patient Rachel Ferry: “I thought, my breasts are trying to kill me. […] I felt like I had a ticking time bomb inside me. I thought, I’m not going to sit around waiting for my ovaries to turn on me” (Cocozza 2015). Cocozza describes Ferry as having been diagnosed with breast cancer but as successfully undergoing chemotherapy. She is said to have made the decision to remove breasts, ovaries and fallopian tubes after having received a positive BRCA1 mutation result. About Vivian Bartlett, another woman presented in the article, Cocozza explains that she had her ovaries removed purely as an outcome of the test. She describes Bartlett as “still not entirely clear” about the reason for her choice, but after examination of her uterus for fibroids and precancerous cells she just “got to the point, ‘Oh, get it out of me!” (ibid.). Having learnt of the result, Barlett intuitively opted for surgery: after the testing, “she was too shocked to ask questions, the operation deemed too urgent to give her time to reflect” (ibid.). In light of the shock for a mutation associated with a high risk of cancer, Cocozza’s article reports a seeming openness of patients towards interfering into their own bodily structure, having healthy parts of it removed based upon conceptions of the future offered by a genetic test.

In this Chapter I introduce the concept of biophobia and – equating bio with body – try to relate it to a specific aspect of experiencing body in the contemporary West. As a case in point, Paula Cocozza’s article provides a lens to think about subjects who reject their own bodies.

In my effort of reconceptualizing biophobia as concept of the body, I illustrate a concretely renewed meaning of bio, with the aim to demonstrate why and how bio and body

8

can be equated. As I will show, the traditional discourse of biophobia equates bio mainly with

life and nature. As human life is incarnated in the body, the latter becomes part of the semantics

of bio = life. But epistemologically, the body also possesses a special connection to the concept of nature. In this respect, Cocozza offers insights on how to conceptualise body parts in the situation of positive testing for BRCA1: to metaphorically equate ovaries with a “ticking time bomb” (ibid.) which could “turn on” (ibid.) its owner means to open a direct confrontation between a subject and parts of her body which are experienced as an incalculable danger. Historically, exactly such incalculability was attributed to the female human body, which shaped an affinity of its female organs to the realm of nature.

I.I.II Bio as independent force: the female body and nature

In central European societies, early modern thinking held up the idea of a different value of male and female bodies. Literary scholar Lori Schroder Haslem, for instance, identifies as significant episteme “the Aristotelian notion of the female body as an aberration of nature” (Schroder Haslem 2011:41). Because it was poorly understood by medicine, the female reproductive body was thought of as “a mystery that is finally to be understood, unveiled” (ibid. 39) and “as a potentially independent or nearly uncontainable force” (ibid. 36) which demands control.

Under advancing capitalism in the 19th and 20th century, that notion of the unruly female body was further differentiated. According to sociologist Maria Mies, the ideal of the “domesticated housewife” emerged as counterpart to the working man (Mies 1988:5). As a capitalist concept, it especially referred to head and hands as “bodily means of production” (ibid. 69). This ideal, however, was at odds with women’s “labour that goes into the production of life, including the labour of childbirth”, which was not seen “as (…) a truly human activity, but rather as an activity of nature” (ibid. 68). Mies deduces an epistemological division of the female body “into truly ‘human’ parts (…) and ‘natural’ or purely ‘animal’ parts” (ibid. 69). Breasts and ovaries, accordingly, belong to those animal parts of the female body and are especially related to its historical notion of being a potentially independent force. The concepts of animal and nature are semantically closely related. Their meaning is influenced by the epistemological nature-culture divide and is associated with a non-human wilderness. At the same time, it is opposed to the civilised world structured by man. The distinct female body parts are defined as animal parts fulfilling an activity of nature, thus ascribing the female body as such to the semantic field of unintelligible non-civilisation. This association was used to

9

legitimate the relegation of women away from social positions of power to the realm of home and family. The subordination of nature to culture can be equated with a subordination of female to male bodies. The parallel between nature and females reveals that the concept of biophobia may describe both an aversion to nature and to the female body.

I.I.III Terminological history: biophobia as aversion against nature and life

Before setting out to re-conceptualise biophobia with respect to the female body, it is important to shed light on biophobia’s terminological history and how its definitions are evaluated by today’s research. First, it is to be said that biophobia as a concept emerged in the 1990’s in antithesis to social psychologist Erich Fromm’s term biophilia, which he had coined already in 1973. However, here biophilia served as antonym to the concept of necrophilia. According to Fromm: “Biophilia is the passionate love of live and of all that is alive; it is the wish to further growth, whether in a person, a plant, an idea, or a social group” (Fromm 1973:365-66). Fromm describes the distinction as such: “Biophilia […] is understood to refer to a biologically given normal impulse, while necrophilia is understood as a psycho-pathological phenomenon” (ibid. 366). He defines necrophilia following Hans von Hentig as “the passionate attraction to all that is dead, decayed, putrid, sickly; it is the passion to transform that which is alive into something unalive” (Fromm 1973:332).

Biologist Edward O. Wilson took up Fromm’s biophilia in his book from 1984. He defines it as “the innate tendency to focus on life and lifelike processes” (Wilson 1984:1) and explains: “From infancy (on) … (w)e learn to distinguish life from the inanimate and move toward it like moths to a porch light” (ibid.). For Wilson, biophilia is a human instinct that refers to states ranging “from attraction to aversion, from awe to indifference, from peacefulness to fear driven anxiety” (Wilson 1993:31), that is, he understands it as a rather neutral term describing the relation between humans and what is considered alive as such.

Building on Fromm and Wilson, scholars use the concept of biophobia mostly in two ways. First, as a culturally produced malfunction in the human notion of nature. Sociologist David W. Orr describes it as such: “More than ever we dwell in and among our own creations and are increasingly uncomfortable with the nature that lies beyond our direct control. Biophobia ranges from discomfort in ‘natural’ places to active scorn for whatever is not man-made, managed or air-conditioned. Biophobia, in short, is the culturally acquired urge to affiliate with technology, human artifacts and solely with human interests regarding the natural

10

world” (Orr 1994:38). The second view sees biophobia as a “genetic predisposition for adaptive biophobic responses to certain natural stimuli that presumably have constituted survival-related threats throughout human evolution” (Ulrich 1993:75). Roger S. Ulrich, professor for medical architecture, equates biophobia with affective aversion. In this light, his notion is harmonious with the medical discourse of evolutionary psychiatry, which considers “biologically prepared learning” as “the best explanation for the content of current phobias” (de Block & Joye 2011:203).

In contemporary literature, however, the scientific value of the biophilia/biophobia theory is questioned. Focusing on Wilson’s theory, Joye and de Block criticise the discourse as being nurtured by assumptions: they dismiss especially Wilson’s definition of biophilia as insufficient. In his text, the expressions life or life-like processes and natural are vaguely defined and differ in their meanings. They observe that “there is a wide gap between a life-like process and life itself, and that something that is life-like is not necessarily natural either” (ibid. 191). Their second major critique is the notion of biophilia as being innate and, rather, consider it as “the result of culture and (social) learning” (ibid. 199).

Therefore, in my project of re-defining biophobia as a bodily concept I have to take their objections seriously and reassess the meaning of bio in biophobia in relation to nature, life, and

the (female) body. Likewise, I have to concretise the meaning of phobia: can a phobia be innate

in the way it is experienced by Cocozza’s women or is it a cultural phenomenon? Before I focus again on the meaning of bio, I approach this question in the next chapter, describing Cocozza’s portrayal of the women’s reaction to the test result leading to the decision to do surgery as aversive affective mechanism. I compare the affective structure indicated by that portrayal to the affective structure described by medicine concerning a classical phobia as medical concept. The aim is to figure out whether or not biophobia as conceptualising a reaction against the body in the way Cocozza presents it can be understood according to the medical definition of phobia and whether it can be innate or, rather, is sociocultural phenomenon.

I.II Phobia in the medical discourse: biophobia as phobic disease?

I.II.I The affective mechanism of a medical phobic reaction

To begin with, whether culturally learned or genetically fixed, phobias are considered as anxiety disorders. Medical theorist Marshelle Thobaben posits, “clients who are phobic experience a persistent irrational fear of an object or a situation, anxiety when they come into contact with

11

it, and a strong desire to avoid it” (Thobaben 2004:414). Hence, the objects of phobia “pose little or no actual danger” to the experiencing subject. Nevertheless, an encounter is marked by intense emotional and bodily reactions. To mention a classical phobic case: in the moment of coming upon a spider, an arachnophobic1 subject’s body is filled with anxiety and, frequently, experiences a drive of realising spatial distance to the other in physical impulses of motoric retreat. After such an emo-physical outbreak, the body is soothing as soon as the object is not felt as being in reach anymore.

What comes to bear in this moment of phobic reaction is the mechanism of affect. Brian Massumi, generally, defines it as an experience of intensity inside the body “prior to action and expression” (Massumi 1995:90). It is immediately initiated by encountering an external stimulus facilitated through the sensual channels of the experiencing body. Concerning the process of affection as the act of transforming the external encounter into internal stimulation Massumi explains: the body “infolds contexts” (ibid. 90-91) which “include[s] social elements, but mix[es] them up with elements belonging to other levels of functioning” (ibid. 91). In this process, memorial contents – no matter whether part of genetic heritage or individual experiences – are activated by and identificatorily connected to in the now sensually experienced stimuli, providing them with interpretative contexts. The combination of those contexts plays into the specific outcome of affective reaction. Based on Thobaben’s and Massumi’s explanations, a classical, phobic reaction we can describe as an affective reaction having as outcome an emotion which the experiencing subject labels, in hindsight, as negative. Does this also apply to Cocozza’s women and to biophobia as bodyphobia?

I.II.II Rejecting one‘s own body: a medical phobic reaction?

In this paragraph it will be discussed whether the medical understanding of the term phobic applies in its affective structure to the reactions described by Cocozza, which I consider as biophobic. Therefore, the elements involved in the biophobic reaction must be described first: whereas the affected body is the woman, the result of the gene test is considered to be the

1 _{The example of arachnophobia serves here as counterexample for biophobia. According to the understanding of}

medicine, arachnophobia is a classical phobia. However, there is no reason why spiders per se should not be able to be considered objects of biophobia; the concept of biophobia may also encompass phobias in the traditional sense. The affective mechanisms displayed in the case studies of this thesis, however, do not apply to the classical medical conceptualisation of phobic affect. In order to make clear that they shall still be considered as phobic and in order to clearly define biophobia as concept arising from cultural processes, I contrast the case studies to medical phobias. Consequently, I can show that in biophobia, the phobia concept needs a broader understanding than the medical concept provides.

12

affecting stimulus. Thus, when a woman receives a positive test for BRCA1, her body reacts with the impulse of fear, as an emotion produced in a process of affection. Of course, the encounter between the woman and the test result unfolds differently from the arachnophobic example illustrated above. Instead of a spontaneous, unexpected encounter, the woman underwent a process of decision-making to do the testing. Thus, she was aware of the probability of a positive result. For instance, Vivien Bartlett, one of the women portrayed by Cocozza, was tested after having been diagnosed with fibroids. Beside such an emotionally negative context of the testing, the medical discourse surrounding a positive test result crucially plays into the way the patient experiences both expectation and factual reception of it. Bartlett’s doctor is very concerned about the mutation’s probability of facilitating the development of cancer in the ovaries: “If you get ovarian cancer we can’t do anything about it and you’ll die” (Cocozza 2015). We may interpret this statement as having negatively shaped Bartlett’s affective reaction to the news. Fearing death by ovarian cancer, she “was too shocked to ask questions, the operation deemed too urgent to give her time to reflect” (ibid.). Part of affection was the unleashing of emotions that turn against the body. Accordingly, Bartlett just wanted to have the potential cancer nidi removed. A similar experience underwent another patient, Rachel Ferry, who did not want to sit around waiting for her “ovaries to turn on” (ibid.) her.

In Bartlett’s example we clearly see that, unlike in medical phobic reactions, the binary relation between affecting and affected body suddenly expands on – it is here counted as such – a third entity: parts of the affected body itself become, in turn, an affecting element. This means that the subject’s fear is reflected from the test result as actual trigger back onto her breasts and ovaries so that these body parts become triggers of constant anxiety. What is happening here is not a dualistic phobic affection, but a mediated release of anxiety by a body turned against itself.

Additionally, compared to the medical phobia, in Bartlett’s case also the construction of temporality is different concerning the very emergence and the duration of fear. First, varying according to cases and perspectives, a medical phobia’s origin is found, either, in the affected subject’s genetic heritage or in a traumatic experience, where a certain body turns into an affecting entity. In the case at hand, Bartlett immediately transformed her learning of the test result, which is the event providing the originary ground for the phobia’s emergence, into the expression of chronic anxiety as a phobic manifestation. Unlike in the case of learned phobia, her fear did not need a second encounter to unfold. In the development of learned phobia, the experience of fear is described as phobic when it is activated by certain stimuli, after it has been

13

programmed into the subject by a traumatic event. Unlike in the case of genetic phobia, Bartlett’s fear of her body has not always been part of her behaviour pattern. Her body as trigger of anxiety is not inherently an object of fear nor has it always been. Certainly, Bartlett’s fibroids as cause for testing show that she had been suspicious of her body already beforehand. However, what turned it into the feared object is her learning of the test result. Second, after Bartlett’s body had become the object of anxiety, instead of a degeneration, Bartlett experienced a constant phobic feeling defining an uncomfortable, fearful, and mistrusting relation to her body. This is contrary to the medical concept which defines a phobia as a negative, affective reaction, whose effects degenerate after the trigger is considered out of reach.

The most significant difference to medical phobia, however, is the paradoxical relationship between Cocozza’s women and their bodies: the latter are both the object of fear (the body as a threat against one’s life), but also that what is feared for. This tension is the actual root of anxiety behind each of the test results.

Facing those divergences, the notion of phobia in the medical sense does not do justice to the phenomenon that is considered here to be biophobic. In this respect, my project has to diverge from the more medical notion of biophobia conceptualised by Ulrich (1993) and evolutionary psychiatry. Rather, it must be given a new meaning to the phobia-part of the term. In order to express the kind of permanent fear Bartlett experiences of her body, when speaking of phobic from now on I do not indicate its medical signification but rather its semantic meaning of aversion or fear (greek “phóbos”), building upon Orr’s notion of general discomfort (Orr 1994:38).

Together with the concept of medical phobia, also the notion of innateness – upheld by Ulrich (1993) but criticised by de Block and Joye (2011) – proves inapplicable: the body as the object of fear how it is outlined in Cocozza’s article is not due to genetic fixation. Instead, we could identify the experience of learning the test result as initially having introduced fear. Therefore, based on this case, the next chapter specifically theorises biophobia as a product of cultural and social learning.

14

I.III Biophobia as a cultural concept

I.III.I Biophobia as aversion against bodily matter

Above, I talked about why bio and body can be equated: first, bio encompasses the concept of

nature which shares the trait of incalculability with the Western concept of the female body.

The aspect of incalculability is also adopted by Orr in his definition of biophobia as human discomfort with the nature that lies beyond our direct control. Second, the body is our medium of human life, or even human life itself. Bio as conceptually comprising nature, the female

body, and life is presented in this paper as object of phobia. De Block’s and Joye (2011),

however, criticise that Wilson’s definition of bio as life and life-like processes is insufficient. What does it mean to call life – in connection to body and nature – an object of fear, especially against the backdrop of incalculability?

In consideration of body and nature we can specify life best when asking: what makes the female, nature-associated and unintelligible body alive? The answer is, what is the source of life in female bodies, in any nature-body, generally, what is the substantial ground for any

living body being perceived as incalculable, is the living biotic body itself with all its distinct functional structures and material elements. Therefore, life becomes an object of phobia

because of its underlying materiality with its functional structures. What does that mean for the definition of biophobia”?

The answer is: what bio as encompassing the concepts of incalculable life, nature, and

(female) body refers to is the material substantiality of what bio consists: the common

denominator of all forms of bio as living/natural/bodily entities is their structure of organic cellular biomass being operated, for example, by a system of organs. Biophobia, in relation to Paula Cocozza’s portrayal of the women, is understood as the fear of or aversion to organic

substances, organisms, and – primarily – of their as independent and often as non-transparent, inaccessible perceived internal processes.

I.III.II The biophobic reaction as expression of the Cartesian divide

In paragraph I.II.II, on grounds of the comparison of affective mechanisms between Cocozza’s women and medical phobia, I came to the conclusion that if we want to call a phenomenon like the one described by Cocozza biophobic, I can conceptualise biophobia neither as innate nor as medical phobia. Instead, I describe it as general fear/aversion. In opposition to innateness, I

15

consider the women’s rejection of their bodies in the light of knowing about a BRCA1/2 mutation as culturally caused phenomenon. A biophobia in this sense should be rooted in Western cultural epistemology. What cultural epistemes influencing Cocozza’s portrayal of the women can give rise to a confrontation between a conscious subject and some of its body parts? What epistemes position bodies as biotic material organisms as objects of conscious aversion, giving rise to a phenomenon called biophobia?

Above, I highlight the connection between the concepts of nature and the female body in historical epistemology. For mediaeval and Renaissance thinkers, both concepts were unintelligible in the perspective of logical analytical strategies of the mind. This incalculability opposes the idea of nature and of female bodies to the civilised world of logic and reason. This dichotomy in confronting female associated realms of body and nature with the realm of male rationality is a basic element in any conception of biophobia as bodyphobia. Reflected in this kind of confrontation between mind and body is the concept of the general epistemology of Cartesianism anchored in Renaissance thinking. In Cocozza’s description, the women as conscious subjects turn against their bodies with their decision for surgery, based on their negative feelings after having learnt of positive BRCA1/2. They seem to reflect the duality of mind versus body which Descartes’ ideology proposes.

But what does it mean to ascribe Cartesian ideology to the women as main affective force in their emotional and conscious reaction? How can the Cartesian divide become manifest in their subjective awareness and facilitate a bodyphobic reaction? The women may feel their own body as material matter “from the inside”, in the sense that they can come “to be aware of events in her body or the state of various body parts” (Martin 1995:267); but by doing bodily-sensual introspection, especially women without any history of cancer but also those healed cannot detect the actual reason of fear in their breasts and ovaries because there is no tumour. However, the knowledge instilled into Cocozza’s women by the genetic test is replacing an actual physical perception. Therefore, since in their feelings they are aware of something abstract, we can speak here of an imaginary awareness of the physical. The object of fear is not the actual breasts and ovaries, but a representation of it imagined as affected by sickness, which is projected into the body.

16

I.III.III The organic body as agent: cancer and incalculability

In the hypothesis that the object of fear is a cancerous representation of breasts and ovaries, generated by the test, it is important to ask how that representation is qualitatively imagined so that it becomes the object of biophobia. How does the representation relate to the logic of incalculability of organic matter, deconstructing Cartesian ideas?

In order to describe the representation of cancerous breasts and ovaries we have to focus on the way cancer itself is imagined as a sickness. The way Cocozza’s women perceive that representation is the answer to why breasts and ovaries become their phobic objects. Cocozza’s quote of Rachel Ferry is very telling: “I thought my breasts are trying to kill me” (2015). So is the quotation of Katherine Marsland about the removal of her ovaries: “I will feel that the main source of fuel has been removed” (2015). In both statements, the body parts identified by the gene test as possible hosts of cancer cells are, first, themselves equated with cancer and, second, described in a very active way: the patients see them as organically turning against the body as a whole, as turning down their tasks in the machinery of physical structures which keep the body alive, or even as actively attacking the body. Cancer and its associated organs are seen as a kind of counter-agent to the subject and the body in its totality. Such a perspective is reflected by sociologist Deborah Lupton, who has studied the popular imagination of cancer. She quotes the self-help book “Your Cancer, Your Life” by Trish Reynolds, who “describes cancer cells as disorderly and out-of-control: ‘Cancer growths are made up of cells which belong to our body but which have stopped behaving in a co-operative and orderly fashion’. […] The multiplication of cancer cells ‘has no purpose - it is not in order to replace or repair’” (Reynolds 1987:26-27 in Lupton 2012:71). Obviously, the image of the body functioning in a non-cancerous, healthy way is intertwined with the idea of sense-making. However, the cancerous body, whose processes seem to turn against itself, appears as lacking any rationality and control.

Posing cancer as out-of-control cell material which is rejected by the subject owning it makes the notion of cancer a fitting example for – and cancerous organs the perfect object of – biophobia as fear of organic substances, organisms, and their independent internal processes. According to this notion of cancer, what the women project into their breasts and ovaries is a representation of bodily matter acting autonomously against the body as a whole and against the subjects’ wellbeing. The autonomous acting of their own bodily matter, unintelligible by the women’s will, is what provokes the biophobic confrontation between the conscious subjects and their affected organs, rendering them the object of aversion. As cancerous imagined breasts

17

and ovaries are experienced as incalculable bio. They share in the associative incalculability of the female body and of nature as objects of biophobia.

In the logic of biophobia, the actual object of the women’s aversion in Paula Cocozza’s article is not their organs, not even their potentially cancerous organs, but their imagination of cancer in these organs as an inimical, inner agent acting against the way they expect their body and its parts to function, and against their condition as functional human beings.

I.IV Preliminary Conclusion

In this chapter, I introduced biophobia as a concept and the overarching topic of my thesis. I presented its origins as lying mainly in ecological discourses, describing an aversion to life and to nature. However, the traditional understanding of nature shares an associative feature with the female body: the notion of incalculability, which is a main factor in its being the aim of fear and aversion in biophobia. In cultural conceptualisation, women’s body and nature are closely related. Against this background, we can consider it a semantic element of bio.

With regard to phobia, the analysis of affect inherent in the reaction of the women portrayed by Cocozza suggests that it is no classical medical phobia. Crucial is that their body is not only what is feared of but also what is feared for. I can clearly identify it as a phenomenon which is not innate but culturally learned. These aspects legitimise it to define phobia as general aversion.

But what does bio mean? What is that culturally learned aversion aimed at, beside that it encompasses the concepts of nature, life and the female body, which share the trait of incalculability? Cocozza’s article may give an answer when I locate what defines the need to test the female body for genetic mutations and legitimated a surgical removal of breasts and ovaries: in short, it is the imagined incalculability of its physical materiality. The idea of incalculable matter connects the female body with nature and life. What makes the body and nature as living entities incalculable is, in the first place, their biotic substantiality with its diversity of unintelligible cellular processes. Therefore, I define biophobia as aversion to and

fear of biotic, organic matter and bodies.

The rejection of incalculable biotic matter and female body parts is a cultural mechanism. The conceptualisation of nature and the female body as incalculable depends on the mind-body confrontation of Cartesianism which relegated both concepts to the realm of

18

illogicality and provides the epistemological motivation for Cocozza’s women to have undergone the genetic test. With regard to its positive result, the Renaissance conceptualisation seems to be supported: the incalculability of the female body becomes a calculable factor. In this light, biophobia as the mere mistrust against breasts and ovaries comes down to Cartesianism.

However, what Cocozza’s women are afraid of – even though they act in the present – is an incalculability of their breasts and ovaries with respect to what happens in the future. Therefore, I identify as concrete object of fear a mentally created cancerous representation of these organs projected into the actual body.

Coming back to the question of the women’s aversion to their bodies being a cultural mechanism: in what way is their decision to surgically remove breasts and ovaries culturally caused? In popular discourse, cancerous cells are seen as out-of-control agents opted out of

healthy physical regulations and acting actively against the body as totality. Even if female

bodies are conceptualised as incalculable, there seems to be a parallel conceptualisation according to which they are, paradoxically, still seen as subject to the reign of logic and of the mind. The cancerous representation imagined as agentic matter in the now attacks the Cartesian ideal of solely mental agency. In the disruption of that ideal, the women’s biophobia has developed on the ground of cultural mechanisms.

19

Chapter II:

Subject and environment I – the bodily reflection of disrupted

experience

II.I Biophobia and Resignation Syndrome

II.I.I “The Trauma of Facing Deportation”

In Chapter I, I developed a concept of biophobia as bodyphobia in reference to a text that described an aversive, fearful relation between female subjects and their own bodies. The sphere of events was an individual one – beside the fact, however, that the epistemological aspects determining their biophobic reaction as any cultural phenomenon are instilled into the subject by society. In this Chapter, I would like to more closely examine the relation between an individual and its surroundings with reference to biophobia. My aim is to examine to what extent a biophobia defined as the fearful aversion to biotic bodies and their inner structures can represent a supra-individual phenomenon.

As an object, I use Rachel Aviv’s article about the Resignation Syndrome (RS) featured by The New Yorker in 2017. “The Trauma of Facing Deportation” reports about a peculiar condition among refugee children that seems to exist only in Sweden. Accordingly, “the patients have no underlying physical or neurological disease, but they seem to have lost the will to live” (Aviv 2017). Children who have fled with their families to Sweden for refuge fall into a coma after having received the news that their families were denied residency in Sweden, with the prospect of having to leave for their country of origin. “They are like Snow White. They just fall away from the world”, a doctor suggests. Another physician describes the typical patient as “totally passive, immobile, lacks tonus, withdrawn, mute, unable to eat and drink, incontinent and not reacting to physical stimuli or pain” (ibid.). The condition started to appear in the early 2000s. “Nearly all children had emigrated from former Soviet and Yugoslav states, and a disproportionate number were Roma or Uighur”, writes Aviv.

Cure is possible only after the children’s families have received a residence permit. According to psychiatrist Björn Axel Johansson that it takes weeks, and sometimes months, for an apathetic patient to grasp that his milieu has changed: “It is in the mother’s voice – her

20

decisiveness, the way she talks to her spouse. The subtext is transferred to the sick child. It gives him the courage to slowly look into the future” (ibid.).

My intention here is to describe the children’s rejection and closing down of their own bodily living functions as biophobic and analyse how such cases make an imprint on the understanding of biophobia itself. Aviv suggests to regard Resignation Syndrome as a socio-cultural phenomenon. For example, she quotes a government report proposing “that the apathetic children were from ‘holistic cultures’ where it is ‘difficult to draw boundaries between the individual’s private sphere and the collective domain’” (ibid.). I use this suggestion about the illness as an element for my investigations and regard Resignation Syndrome as a culturally anchored individual reaction to social conditions.

My conceptualisation of biophobia presented in Chatpter I will be contrasted to Aviv’s description of the case of a boy called Georgi. I will first introduce his story, then locate the fixpoints in his affective reaction of biophobia and finally, based on a dialogue with the boy’s individual case and an analysis of epistemes at play, show in what way Georgi’s biophobia can be regarded as a cultural concept.

II.I.II Georgi’s story

Georgi and his family fled to Sweden from the Russian North Ossetia in 2007. The boy was 5 years old at that time. Security forces had threatened to kill Georgi’s father if he did not disband a sect rejecting the collaboration between the Russian Orthodox church and the Russian government. Georgi’s father refused. However, since the family could not prove that they were in danger in Russia, the Swedish Migration Board denied their claim for asylum. Henceforth, the family lived hidden in Stockholm for six more years. In the meantime, Georgi had attended school and found his place in the Swedish society. In 2014, the family applied for asylum again. This time, they were even supported by the headmaster of Georgi’s school, who wrote a letter to the board: “It would be devastating if Georgi were forced to leave his community, his friends, his school, and his life” (ibid.). Aviv also quotes him describing the boy as “an example to all classmates”, a student who spoke in “mature and nuanced language” and showed a “deep gratitude for the school”. Against all efforts, in 2015 the family received a rejection letter again. That was when Georgi became sullen. “He withdrew from his parents, whom he accused of having failed to assimilate” (ibid.). In December, his family was informed about the deportation being scheduled for April 2016. After having read the letter Georgi laid down on his bed and

21

refused to get up and eat in the morning. Aviv paraphrases: “His body began to feel as if it were entirely liquid. His limbs felt soft and porous. All he wanted to do was close his eyes. Even swallowing required an effort that he didn’t feel he could muster. He felt a deep pressure in his brain and in his ears”.

When Georgi’s external vital signs were completely drawn back and he constantly appeared to sleep, the boy was delivered into hospital where he was diagnosed with resignation syndrome. After three nights he was sent home with his parents, who were supposed to care for him with special facilities like a feeding tube and a wheelchair. His doctor wrote a letter to the immigration board, saying that Georgi “suddenly fell into a deep sleep when he perceived that his final hope for the future was taken from him. If the boy can get secure residency with his entire family, the prognosis is good and you can expect a full continuous recovery within one year. If the boy does not have security, he will not wake up in whatever country he is in” (ibid.). Finally, the family received another letter from the board in May 2016 granting them permanent residence in Sweden because of Georgi’s condition. For two weeks, Georgi’s family tried to get him to absorb the good news, before he opened his eyes and slowly started to recover. In autumn, he was ready to go back to school.

II.I.III Georgi and the split in phobia: fear vs. aversion

Georgi’s shutting down of his bodily functions is not a self-evident biophobic reaction according to how I defined biophobia in Chapter I. This becomes obvious when comparing Cocozza’s portrayal of the women’s reactive meachanism with Aviv’s display of Georgi’s.

For the women, the object of fear was a cancerous representation of their organs projected into their actual bodies. The fear was directed at their organs as biotic entities perceived as having incalculable and uncontrollable inner structures. In the decision to surgically remove breasts and ovaries, the women exercised a rejective act against these body parts which can be seen as objects both of fear and of aversion. For this reason, phobia in biophobia encompasses both the meanings of fear of and aversion to physical matter.

However, identifying the affective elements in Aviv’s presentation of Georgi, it becomes obvious that the relations between trigger, object of fear, and object of aversion are different from the way they can be recognised in Cocozza’s portrayal. The trigger for Georgi is learning of his and his family’s deportation from Sweden. So far, the triggering element can be regarded in parallel to the women’s trigger: both learn information concerning future

22

conditions. But turning to the objects of fear and aversion, differences occur. What Georgi fears is his deportation from Sweden as his home country, where he has been living; the object of aversion, nevertheless, is his body which he shuts down. Bio as marking biotic entities is Georgi’s rejected object of aversion but not his object of fear.

Here, I will try to answer the following questions: Why does the subject reject bio as his material body? How is it connected to the object of fear? Can the object of fear be identified as the expectation of becoming deported from Sweden?

First, we may find a clue about the object of fear in Aviv’s quote of Georgi: “The only country I know – the only country where I can have a life – is here in Sweden” (Aviv 2017). With the perspective of leaving Sweden, for Georgi even what he learns in school “doesn’t have meaning in the future” (ibid.). This statement transmits the feeling that even the future itself and with it the present become meaningless for him. Clearly, negative for Georgi is that he would be forcefully extracted from the society he felt part of, and whose structures and habits were part of the boy’s life. In his headmaster’s words: he had “to leave his community, his friends, his school, and his life” (ibid.). The way Aviv’s text presents Georgi to understand the imminent deportation and what he fears about it is the future loss of people close to him, of social structures he is familiar to and the experience of future uncertainty being in the midst of people he does not know, embedded in a foreign surroundings and political system. Georgi’s object of fear is the expectation of his future life as an experience, marked by the loss of the habitual and an estrangement with the new. How does this experience relate to his body? As already highlighted in Chapter I, the physical body is our medium of human life and of life experience. For this reason, the body as material carrier is closely associated, if not equated, with conscious experiencing. In this light, we may suggest that Georgi rejects bio as his own body because he fears the expectation of future life experiences, for this expectation of the future and his bodily matter in the present are felt as one.

II.II Proposition: biophobia as reaction to traumatic experience

II.II.I The habitual as foundation of identity

In my analysis, I am suggesting that Georgi’s object of fear is his future life as experience. The aim of this paragraph is to show how Georgi fears a future loss of experiential everyday life, and how this fear motivates the rejection of his bodily matter. Therefore, I describe the ordinary

23

life Georgi is leading in Sweden with the concept of habit and, as a first step, examine what the habitual means for a subject. What does it mean for the expected loss of what is habitual to be the object of fear? What is the significance of the way habit is conceptualised?

According to sociologist Chris Shilling, habits are “associated with a relative equilibrium in the relationship between the social and physical environment, biological need and bodily potentialities” (Shilling 2008:12). They constitute “routinised modes of behaviour” discovered by embodied subjects that enable them to manage their surroundings. The habitual emerges in the interplay of a subject’s external and internal environment and involves both body and mind. For Georgi, the habitual is mostly formed by school as the major routine in his life and his friends and family who form a web of social stability and security. Such routinisation is “vital for humans to operate effectively” (ibid.). He refers to John Dewey, warning that “the embodied subject cannot be engaged constantly with what is novel and indeterminate” (Dewey 1980:15 in Shilling 2008:12), which “would be biologically disastrous and socially unproductive”. Furthermore, “the very ‘structure of the relation between organism and environment (…) typical for human beings’ entails that a certain ‘stability’ in action is ‘essential to living’” (ibid.). That is, in order to function and productively engage in life, Georgi depends on those elements which have become habitual for him. They provide the stable ground for him to act creatively and engage with events out of the ordinary. As the foundation of his life, they can not only be summarised as a group of external factors, rather they should be acknowledged as having been internalised by Georgi. In this light, Shilling describes habits as involving more than “the bare recurrence of acts” of the embodied subject: they “have significant consequences for physical being and identity” (Shilling 2008:13). Habits “help to ‘constitute the self’ by forming ‘our effective desires’ and ‘working capacities’ and determining which of our thoughts ‘shall appear’” (Dewey 2002:25 in ibid.). A habit lies “at the very base of our sense of self” (Shilling 2008:13) and has great influence “because we are the habit’” (Dewey 2002:24 in ibid.). To a certain extent, then, Georgi himself is his school, his friends, and his family. “Habits incorporate within themselves social expectations, physical objects, tools, and technologies in the natural and social environment” (Shilling 2008:15). They “are

modes of connection to the world, shaping us and the environment according to their specific

logic and affordances” (ibid.) and “unify the body with the natural and social world in particular ways” (ibid.).

The phrase “we are the habit” strengthens the allocation of habits to the realm of identity. “One’s sense of self”, Shilling states, “emerges and develops on the basis of one’s

24

repeated interactions with the environment” (Shilling 2008:21). To individuals he allocates the main intention of “seeking to organise their actions and experiences on a basis that is consistent with their self-identity by standing over, controlling, and dominating their social and material surroundings” (ibid. 21). Georgi as a self and a subject did not only develop his habitual ways in the interplay with his environment, but likewise the habitual took part in developing and forming his very identity, anchoring itself into it as a fundamental element, affecting his body and mind and involving abstract and material conditions.

II.II.II The blocking of habits – an individual trauma

The habitual life and its elements form a central part of Georgi’s self. However, Aviv reports that when in the official letter Georgi learned of his and his family’s deportation from Sweden, he started to reject his body. What does his learning of having to leave Sweden mean for his habitual life, or rather, for Georgi’s idea of it?

Shilling describes that habits can become “blocked, when the flow of routinised actions of embodied subjects is interrupted by personal conflict, physical obstacles, social circumstances, and shown to be inadequate to the task at hand” (ibid. 16). Then, subjects can slither into a crisis, which “occurs when there develops a significant mismatch or conflict between the social and physical surroundings in which individuals live and their biological needs and bodily potentialities” (ibid.). Then “certain routine ways of acting become impossible or ineffective. (…) The routines of action based on our belief in a world of self-evidently given facts can be shattered by experience” (ibid.). For Georgi, the idea of having to leave Sweden implicates a complete change in his social and physical surroundings. He would have to start over in Russia where the political and social system functions in a very different way, where the language is different and where he does not know anyone beside his parents. Russia, must be said, is the country his family had to flee from for jeopardy of their safety. Georgi’s view that he could not have a life there expresses a believe in the complete collapse of his needs and potentialities in the Russian environment, in the impossibility to keep himself alive and to be himself on an existential level.

Furthermore, Shilling explains that blocked habits can have an impact “on the embodied subject’s identity” (Shilling 2008:17) and challenge it “by destroying [his] confidence in [his] body and [his] world”. The “continuity and coherence of the embodied subject” (ibid. 18) is threatened, the individual’s “entire habitual mode of orientation to the world is shown to be

25

fragile and impermanent”, and “our routinised ways of dealing with the environment” are disrupted. Accordingly, Shilling describes as a result a fragmentation of the subject. Instead of “the creative ‘I’ element of embodied identity [being] developed and enhanced (…) through the individual’s actions in the social and physical environment” (ibid. 22), the I finds itself “‘broken off, discrete’ and ‘at odds’ with [its] surroundings”. For the fractured subject, “experience remains fragmented” (James 1982:169 in ibid.) and “without the integrative force of a unified character”, he is “unlikely to be harnessed to individual growth” (cf. Dewey 1980:156 in ibid.). Fractured subjects “either surrender and conform to their surroundings and (…) become ‘a parasitical subordinate’, or indulge ‘in egoistic solitude’” (Dewey 1980:245 in ibid.). The intensity of Georgi’s verbal reaction against moving to Russia indicates that already the mere idea of a future breaking down of his habitual life introduces a fracture into his self. Georgi stops nurturing himself and falls away from the world, dwelling in a comatose solitude, thus escaping from a future world of failed habits.

Georgi’s falling into coma symptomatically fits a concept related to the negation of habit: it could be seen as tantamount to the “absolute numbing”, as literary theorist Cathy Caruth (1995:6) describes it, of the reaction of having experienced a traumatic event. Trauma is defined by her as the response to an overwhelming “event outside the range of usual human experience” (ibid. 3), which can take “the form of repeated, intrusive hallucinations [or] dreams” (ibid. 4) and which can often be initiated by certain stimuli recalling the event. Similar to the clinical picture of phobia outlined in Chapter I, the clinical description of traumatic responses involves the mere experience of punctual pathologic symptoms often initiated by certain stimuli. Freud describes this as a period of latency during which no effects are perceived. He defines trauma as marked by the “successive movement from an event to its repression to its return” (cf. Freud 1939:84 in Caruth 1995:7). Of course, this clinical picture cannot apply to Georgi who, similarly to Cocozza’s women from Chapter I, does, according to Aviv, not experience periods of latency and traumatic fits but, after having learnt of his deportation, enters a continually deteriorating state of bodily and psychic shut-down. That is, whereas Caruth describes the “repeated suffering of the [traumatic] event” as a “continual leaving of its site” (Caruth 1995:10), Georgi seems to dwell on it. This also applies to the continual experience of himself during his comatose state. Aviv describes a very specific imaginary experience of Georgi concerning the feeling of his own physicality:

“It felt like I was deep under water. (…) My whole body was like water. Slowly, after some weeks or a month, I understood that it wasn’t real. The glass wasn’t real. And now – now I