In our final session of the fall Reading Group, Psychopathology of Work, we sat with a disturbing but necessary question, what does it mean when the workplace becomes the scene through which suffering is communicated? That question shaped our discussion of Christophe Dejours’ chapter on political stakes of work-related suffering, alongside Jean-Philippe Deranty’s reading of Dejours’ broader psychodynamics of work.
One of the clearest signals from the discussion was the significance of the location for workplace suicides. In Dejours’ account, the fact that the act occurs at, or in relation to, the workplace is not incidental. It suggests that work has become more than a site of employment; it has become the scene where humiliation, submission, and abandonment are organized and experienced. Rather than treating suicide as a purely individual act or work as a purely external stressor, these texts pushed us toward a harder question, what kind of social world has a workplace become when death at work begins to function as a message?
The big idea in these readings is not simply that work can be stressful. It is that contemporary workplaces can produce a specific kind of suffering: affective solitude in the middle of the crowd. Workplace suicide, in this framework, is not only a personal tragedy. It is also a social symptom.
Question of the week: What kinds of belonging at work are actually protective - and which ones only make isolation look more social?
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