ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the deeper and more fruitful aspects of Emile Durkheim's well-known but still poorly understood sociological classic as it pertains to the postmodernist dilemmas and contradictions that are being discussed. For Durkheim, everyone in an anomic society suffers to some degree, even if only few individuals commit suicide in the strict, positivistic sense of suicide. He wandered far from the positivistic program, and treated suicide as the vehicle for a far-ranging discussion of human morale in relation to societal communication. The unleashed will to life, which offends and disturbs the neo-enlightenment critics of postmodernism, holds a benign as well as a malignant aspect in Durkheim's complicated social theory. The primary trait of modernity and civilization is anomie, and it produces symptoms that Durkheim describes with a vocabulary of human suffering: souffrance, tourment, douleur, frenzy, impatience, restlessness, feverishness, disenchantment, fatigue, agitation, distress, exasperation, misery, and insatiability, among other similar psychophysiological states.
