The Gay Science

Towards a Unified Theory of Health-Disease: I. Health as a complex model-object

“…19,23,45,47,72 This set of concepts and methods has been designated as complexity theory. 38,44,59,60 Although fashionable as a new strategy for producing knowledge in contemporary science, complexity theory is not new. It is a direct evolution of General Systems Theory, 64 a remarkable conceptual framework infl uential in the scientifi c panorama during the 1960s.…”

“…In other words, how to deal with a complex object that is simultaneously one and many, part and whole, parcel and totality, singularity and plurality? 60 Complex model-objects must be conceived with distinct facets and multiple dimensions, leaving room for the recognition of various planes of emergence, structural and functional hierarchies, and simultaneous levels of integration in complex adaptive processes. The phenomenological domain defi ned as the empirical fi eld of a given science can be modeled in terms of complexity theory with planes of emergence, layers of occurrence or "levels of anchorage".…”

“…Several partial and full examples of such model-objects can be found in biological and social sciences in a perspective that, generally designated as "structuralism", stands in opposition to complexity theory. 60 The multidimensional contextual modeling of population HIV/AIDS incidence proposed by Poundstone et al, 63 Bowen's multilevel ecological model of HIV risk context 24 and the classical RootBernstein's HIV pathogenesis model 65 are examples of hierarchical structures that converge, respectively, to supra-individual and sub-individual model-states.…”

Of Excrementality: Ecanomie, Signification, and Autoimmunity

“…Though such a new reconfiguration of suicide may still then form a (albeit thinner) barrier or threshold beyond which ecanomie cannot wholly or confidently step over the edge of, the ecanomic marketplace holds such bare death as its strangest natural resource. As such, this is the age where the news of the death of God is now finally percolating through into the earshot of Nietzsche's (1991) famous marketplace (and it is no accident that this news was indeed intoned within the uncanny twilight of an early morning marketplace that had itself distributedly contributed toward a killing that it itself knew nothing about and so was not as yet a marketplace available for mourning). In a strange autoimmune logic then, which now looks not so abjectly irresponsible to the eye and the equipower of economy reconfigured as ecanomie, suicide still stands out as a certain gold standard of the excess of excess.…”

“…No longer then is suicide a sovereign exception to the economy, the oikos, or the marketplace/agora, but analogous to that famous plight of Jesus in the inane age of the world picture, it is now a more mutable dashboard form of autoimmunity. To recoin the famous Smith (2009) dictum and brazenly splicing it with Nietzsche (1991): Ecanomie is the invisible hand of Godlessness.…”