Á rebours is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 1 times across 1 issues between August 05, 2022 and August 05, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as "Huysmans’s Á rebours ( Against Nature) , which described the final, exhausted, idle throes". It most often appears alongside acedia, Against Nature, Anna Schaffner.
- Reference entry
- Á rebours
- Mention count
- 1
- Issue count
- 1
- First seen
- August 05, 2022
- Last seen
- August 05, 2022
- Book title
- Á rebours
Outbound links
Issue trail
Related pages
Source context
This led to the development in the 19th century of a new, vaguely defined illness known as neurasthenia. It was, in the conception of the time, an illness of overworked and played out nerves due to their overstimulation at the hands of industrialisation and modern society. A neat rhetorical trick was employed by physicians at the time, who claimed that sensitive and creative people doing brain work were more susceptible than those in the working classes. This is an important change, as it begins the move away from the moralistic conception of exhaustion and produces a blame-free, stigma-free conception of an illness which has a tendency to strike the special and the smart. It is no coincidence that many of the writers and thinkers I mentioned earlier that suffered from exhaustion (James, Woolf, Mann, Wilde et al) are all concentrated in this era – they all were diagnosed with neurasthenia. As Darwin announces and elaborates on the theory of evolution, more attention is paid to the idea of inherited weaknesses in nerves, culminating in cultural accounts like Huysmans’s Á rebours (Against Nature), which described the final, exhausted, idle throes of generations of inbreeding in the person of a decadent, hypersensitive and exhausted noble recluse.
Inline links: Á rebours