Projekt depatologizacji uczuć negatywnych O książce Ann Cvetkovich Depression: A Public Feeling

Abstract

In the book Depression: A Public Feeling Ann Cvetkovich uses her own memoir of depression as a research material and organizes around it some scientific ideas presented in a critical essay. Cvetkovich’s voice on the matter of depression, whose task was to (re-)introduce private feelings into the public sphere, can be read as an autopathographic analysis of the illness discourse. However, the critical task of her writing is to depathologize depression (to stop describing it as bad or unproductive) and emphasize that it can be valuable in society as a cause of change. Cvetkovich describes and analyzes her own affective and somatic experiences of depression from the very beginning of her academic career. In this article I analyze Cvetkovich’s book as an interesting affective fusion of the depression journal and speculative (critical) essay. The aim of the article is also to point to the link between late capitalism and depression, especially in the sphere of social moods, made by Lauren Berlant and Ann Cvetkovich.