Affliction and its rescues: neuronarratives, reintegration, and minimal rituals

Abstract

This article examines the contemporary hegemony of neuronarratives as a regime for managing affliction characterized by containment without full reintegration. Drawing on the articulation of phenomenology, medical anthropology, and social theory, it proposes a topology of affliction that distinguishes among situated suffering, bodily event, and affliction as a lifeworld. From this perspective, the article examines how neuronarratives, by locating distress within the individual and particularly in the brain, enable its technical and clinical management. However, by detaching the lived body from the biological body, they constrain the possibilities for social and symbolic elaboration of experience. The article engages with Ernesto de Martino’s notion of the crisis of presence to show that contemporary affliction unfolds in contexts where collective devices of rescue have lost their efficacy. In this setting, neurosocialities and minimal rituals emerge as fragmentary responses aimed at producing reintegration, that is, recognition and habitability, where clinical practice primarily offers functional containment.