ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author explores the thesis that of depression as a basic disconnectedness or distunement, which happens on a primordial, affective, pre-reflective, pre-intentional, pre-subjective level, that is, a level that precedes a separation of subject and object, individual and world. Furthermore, the author links this primordial distunement to the 'post-modern condition' of the contemporary subject, its 'isolist' or 'Sadean' position, as analysed by French philosopher Dany-Robert Dufour in his works on what he terms the 'liberal cultural revolution'. Depression is 'staged' in late modern culture as the flipside of the dominant normativity of self-realization. Both 'somatization' and 'psychologization', one could say, are masked manifestations of depression, in the sense that the socio-cultural context forces this basic reality in a certain direction, which led in China, as the Kleinmans show, to an 'idiom of bodily complaints and medical helpseeking' and in the West, but only since Victorian times, to an 'increasingly psychological idiom of distress'.
