Malaise, from the French mal a l’aise, means uneasy, not quite home in your body or in yourself. Malaise is not suffering, which is worse and a lot more sophisticated. Malaise is a one-note Johnny, closer to the diffuse fog of boredom, a displacement, like a filter that needs to be perfectly seated in its frame to make an appliance work. It’s misalignment. It is a slippery notion that vanishes on contact with an interesting person or an unexpected event.
It can discreetly get out of the way when another body, an impossible coincidence or an erupting landscape capture one’s attention. Interesting persons, erupting landscapes and impossible coincidences return you to the ease of being unaware of either your body or yourself.
Notice how “one” becomes “you.”
Malaise is not curable, but its symptoms disappear when something or somebody startle. Malaise-removing requires acquiring another self and body for the duration of the event. This exit, replacement, and apparent alienation is temporary, but it is not misalignment. On the contrary, it is an action that realigns the ill-at-ease person with its social context.
Socially, our current malaise was born from the after-the-war emotional state of a society that Sartre called “nausea.” The unsettling nature of war was followed by a dizzying collective reset, a complex anthology of feelings that experienced the transition like a fall into the void, a collapse of self, an abrupt move into new bodies. In that vertigo there were solutions. The personal malaise of survivors was presented with many paths for reconnecting with the collective.
For Sartre, it ended up being a murderous Maoist choice, the “murderous” part being the callousness of war slow to disappear from people who had felt rejuvenated by violence, even if they claimed the opposite. Ideology is a dead-end, as Sartre found out.
All ideologies promote a false cure for malaise: optimism. Communism even made optimism compulsory, creating societies where every human was ill at ease. That was equality. The American Constitution was right to phrase its program as the search for happiness. If you don’t find it it’s because you looked for it in the wrong places.
At the end of the 20th century ideologies became technologies. Collective nausea dissipated again into individual malaise. Machines don’t give a fuck about how you feel.
It is going to get a lot worse.
The human animal is only slightly out of wack now. In a few minutes, we will experience the fusion of loneliness, the alienation of workers from production, sinking libidinal flows, physical distance, the corruption of archives, and the theft of language.
At that point, malaise will be the equal of suffering.
