«Morbid States». A necropolitical analysis of fibromyalgia in contemporary societies

Abstract

Each society has its own particular diseases and those diseases speak the truth of each society. The scenario we are living today locates life, any life, “between the explosion and the outbreak” (López Petit, 2015), where there is no distinction between life and death, but instead there is debility as a continuum. Between the explosion and the outbreak there are bodies in exhaustion. Bodies that show not only the debilitating aspects of neoliberalism but the economies that sustain it. This article introduces the concept of «Morbid States» as a twofold condition of living that incorporates, on the one hand, contemporary affective regimes of self-precariousness and self-responsibility that situate disease as an individual state («morbid states» in lower letters); on the other hand, the concept («Morbid States» in capital letters) refers to the necro-administration and use of morbidity through State structures I call «morbopolitics», which enable the production of the disease itself. In this concentric circle, fibromyalgia is introduced as a gendered disease that has become the ultimate source for the extraction of human vitality.