ABSTRACT

Introduction Descriptions of public health advice as a body of knowledge can be straightforward in the mode of observations of health campaigns or programs influenced by models of knowledge transfer that are directed to facilitate the reception of such information. Attempts at more critical analyses can be done by presuming to unmask ideological presuppositions of health information (for example, idols of medicalization, expertise, or avaricious pharmaceutical agents), and/or as disclosing dependencies on conventions in the manner of descriptions of popular culture and its stereotypes (for example, exposure of assumptions of stigma). Despite the force of such a range of approaches, some conception of the social form of information as an object of desire within the context of a symbolic order is typically an uncounted part in such descriptions. This work has been prepared in part through Debord’s (1994) conception of spectacle, Baudrillard’s (1990) distinction between fascination and seduction, and Benjamin’s (1999) notion of the enthusiasm as a turning point that Foucault developed, and has appeared in the works of others such as Lacan. I will intervene in this discourse in order to workthrough an analysis of the social form of an enthusiasm with particular reference to the relationship integral to the collective fascination with neurology.