ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book analyses three of the most prevalent illnesses of late modernity: anxiety, depression and Alzheimer's disease, in terms of their relation to cultural pathologies of the social body and mutations of subjectivity. Multidisciplinary in approach, the book addresses questions of how these conditions are manifest at the level of individual bodies and minds, as well as how the 'bodies politic' are related to the hegemony of reductive biomedical and psychologistic perspectives. The book explores broader cultural context by discussing the anthropological mutation of the subject which has taken place in the transition from modern to post-modern times. This mutation entails the emergence of an isolist precarious subject faced with the task of creating a self, though deprived of the conditions of possibility of successfully undertaking such a project under conditions of the neoliberal revolution.
