ABSTRACT
Accordingly, our inquiry examines the dynamics of pseudo-controversy within a constellation of concerns we label the politics of the supplement , by which we mean a fi eld of contestation concerning the risks and benefi ts of new technologies of the self aimed at redressing defects in one’s human nature. Supplements are material and symbolic surpluses that promise to: overcome lack through improving the security of living, aid in coping with chronic impairment, or retard undignifi ed outcomes of mortality. The politics of the supplement fi t into the larger category of what Giddens (1991) called life politics, “a politics of selfactualization in a refl exively ordered environment, where that refl exivity links self and body to systems of global scope,” in which the meaning of risk and its associated burdens of proof are contested, and where market forces, scientifi c expertise, and other intersecting institutional infl uences “intrude deeply into the refl exive project of the self” as it is carried out at the material level (p. 214). We argue that the politics of the supplement rhetorically entwine
desire, risk-engagement, and satisfaction in individual and collective contexts of morbidity and mortality. In the following section, we provide an overview of the antidepressantsuicidality controversy and the historical and institutional contexts in which it developed. We then take up the question of whether the debate should be understood as an example of pseudo-controversy. Finally, we resituate the (pseudo-)controversy in terms of the politics of the supplement and show that the peculiar dynamics of the controversy are structured around a logic of risk-management that appears in a wide variety of contemporary argumentative contexts.
