Today’s article, like the previous one, starts from a Deleuzian concept, but may drift apart from it. Someone who is hypochondriac is someone who keeps asking Why do I have? “Why do I have a spleen, why do I have a liver, why do I have organs?” (Abécédaire, J for Joy). In his seminar about Cinema in 1985 at the University of Vincennes, Deleuze evokes the microscopic death of thousands of cells that occurs at the same time and that the hypochondriac could theoretically feel. The state of hypochondria would be an acute perception of one’s body micro-deterioration. Of course, there are limits to conscious perception but, just like Deleuze explains the concept of micro-perception in Leibniz’s philosophy (see past article) by describing the macro-perception of the wave as the totality of micro-perceptions provoked by the quasi-infinity of water droplets, he seems to attribute the feeling of hypochondria to a macro-perception including the totality of micro-perceptions caused by the simultaneous death of all these cells.
Being a little bit of a hypochondriac myself (the luxury of the healthy man), I have the intuition that we should go further than this analysis Deleuze – who was far from being healthy himself – gives us. We experience our body on an absolutely continuous basis, and yet we are used not to conscientiously feel it. I can feel my legs crossing each other – such a gesture already provoke a conflict of perception if you pay attention to it – I can feel my nose scratching a little, I can feel the pressure of my fingers against my keyboard but, ultimately I don’t really feel my body and the trillions of microscopic operations that allows the maintaining of vitality. When I do feel something more, the “event” that it manifests makes me think that something “in me” is dysfuntionning. In those moments, I am wrong twice. Firstly, there is no “inside” of the body. The skin is not a wall protecting a fortress; it is fully part of an assemblage of matter that forms a body. Talking of an event “inside the body” is therefore one more way to dissociate our self from our body when these two things are only one. Secondly, and that is why hypochondriac are often mocked for the illusionary status of their pain, the feeling that one experiences is not the symptom of a dysfunction but rather, the acute perception of the body actually functioning.
