Atmospheres, chances and turbulences

Abstract

This article exploits some aspects of the so-called contemporary “somatic” culture as expressed in recent anglo-saxon novels. It analyses the novel Atmospheric Disturbances, written by Rivka Galchen and published in 2008. The increasing cultural and midiatic emphasis on the materiality of the body – specially on the brain, on hormones and genes – tends to be applied to all human experiences, enhancing scripts of subjectivation biologically based. New syndromes described and labeled in a proliferating way medicalize and domesticate ambiguities and weardnesses which have been elaborated for centuries, in different ways, by the Western literate tradition (from literature to psychoanalysis). The critical reading of Galchen’s novel opens up certain crucial ethical, political and philosophical questions implicated in the ongoing process of naturalization, closely related to a progressive despiritualization of the human phenomenum.