Coda

Modernity can be understood as the cultivation of a fantasy about the past: in the case of choreomania, this ‘past’ was imagined as a rumbling horde, a Bacchic chorus against which purposeful ‘modernity’ positioned itself. Meaningless gesture, after Agamben, epitomized in the nineteenth century in the figure of ‘chorea’, similarly became with the scientific discourse on choreomania a manner of thinking modernity’s double movement, forward and back, between efficient industrialization and the collective archaicity out of which this efficiency imagined itself to arise. Reperforming my own archival return to the still ‘living’ site of the Echternach dancing procession, I discover that the ever more institutionalized event highlights the power of choreopolitical organization displayed by the nation state. As in Meige’s day, the procession has been evacuated of nervous disorder or bodily disruption. My archival reperformance reveals an experience of historicity shorn of a historical encounter.

Controllability Analysis of the Neural Mass Model with Dynamic Parameters

The development of control technology for the brain is of potential significance to the prevention and treatment of neuropsychiatric disorders and the improvement of humans’ mental health. A controllability analysis of the brain is necessary to ensure the feasibility of the brain control. In this letter, we investigate the influences of dynamical parameters on the controllability in the neural mass model by using controllability indices as quantitative indicators. The indices are obtained by computing Lie brackets and condition numbers of the system model. We show how controllability changes with important parameters of our dynamical (neuronal) model. Our results suggest that the underlying dynamical parameters have certain ranges with better controllability. We hope it can play potential roles in therapy for brain nervous disorder disease.

Chapter 34

When Rummschüttel was called, Effi’s condition caused him no little concern. The feverishness, that he had observed in her for some time now, seemed more pronounced than ever, and what was worse, there were also the first signs of a nervous disorder. His calm, friendly...

“Russian nervousness”: Neurasthenia and National Identity in Nineteenth-Century Russia

“Nothing dies so hard as a word”, wrote Harry Quilter in 1892, “—particularly a word nobody understands.” At the end of the nineteenth century, one such word—first uttered in America, but soon reverberating across the Western world—was “neurasthenia”. Popularized by the American neurologist George M Beard, this vaguely defined nervous disorder seemed to crop up everywhere, from medical journals to the popular press to belles lettres. Looking back at the years leading up to the Second World War, Paul Hartenberg recalled its remarkable pervasiveness: “It could be found everywhere, in the salons, at the theatre, in novels, at the Palace. It was used to explain the most disparate individual reactions: suicide and decadent art, fashion and adultery; it became the giant of neuropathology.” Its sufferers included American intellectuals from Beard himself to Theodore Roosevelt, Edith Wharton, and Henry Adams; for European commentators less convinced of the disease's modern American pedigree, the list could be expanded to include everyone from Alcibiades to Tiberius to Napoleon. Anybody who was anybody, it seemed, was neurasthenic.

For a Negative, Normative Model of Consent, With a Comment on Preference-Skepticism

Let me begin by admitting that I am wary of any comprehensive definition of consent. This bias stems from my professional concentration on criminal law, in which nouons of freedom and responsibility play vital roles in a wide range of contexts. In each context, however, one discovers that freedom means something different. A voluntary act is any bodily movement not caused by external force or nervous disorder. On the other hand, a voluntary act, however horrific its results, ordinarily may be punished only if the actor was subjectively aware that the act was wrong. In any event, a voluntary act may be excused as the product of duress if another person procures the actor's cooperation in the crime by an illegal threat that would overcome the resistance of a person of ordinary firmness.