Communicable Disease

In McCormick's conceptual genealogy of everyday talk, "communicable disease" functions as the structuring medical metaphor through which Kierkegaard—and the broader tradition from Plutarch through Heidegger—theorizes the pathological spread of chatter (snak/Geschwätz/adoleschia). The metaphor works on two interlocking levels: first, the individual sufferer of talkativeness is not merely a passive victim but an unwitting vector who transmits the affliction to barbers, journalists, audiences, and public life at large; second, the disease is self-perpetuating and collective, meaning no single origin or agent can be identified. Chatter is thus not a personal vice but a civic pathology whose "communicability" is the very mechanism by which it reproduces itself. The critical insight the metaphor delivers is that the sufferer lacks insight into their own condition (they do not "realize" they carry the disease), which makes the spread structurally guaranteed — one cannot voluntarily quarantine what one cannot see.

This aligns with a logic familiar from Lacanian theory: the subject's constitutive méconnaissance (misrecognition) ensures that the very activity perpetuating the pathology remains opaque to its agents. The "communicable disease" concept therefore names something more than contagion in a naive biological sense. It names a self-occulting, self-replicating symbolic disorder in which the medium of transmission — everyday speech, gossip, public discourse — is identical to the pathogen itself. Talk spreads the disease of talk. The medical framing elevates this from moralism to structural diagnosis, positioning Kierkegaard's critique not as a denunciation of bad individuals but as an analysis of a collective, anonymous, self-sustaining pathology of language-in-the-public-sphere.

This concept appears in samuel-mccormick-the-chattering-mind-a-conceptual-history-of-everyday-talk-unive (p. 44), within a genealogical argument tracing the critique of idle talk from classical antiquity through Kierkegaard to Heidegger and Lacan. It is a conceptual pivot in that genealogy: the medical metaphor of communicability is what allows Kierkegaard to shift the critique of talkativeness from individual moral failure to collective structural pathology, anticipating Heidegger's das Man and Lacan's account of the alienating function of the signifying Other.

Among the cross-referenced canonical concepts, "communicable disease" resonates most directly with Repetition and Hysteria. Like Lacanian repetition, the spread of chatter is not volitional but structural — it operates through the automaton of everyday discourse, insisting and reproducing independently of any subject's intention, circling around a missed encounter with genuine communication. Like hysteria understood as a collective identificatory structure (Freud's third type of identification — identification via a shared situation), the chatter-disease spreads through shared participation in a common pathological medium rather than through any direct subject-to-subject transmission. The concept also touches Narcissism insofar as the sufferer's blindness to their own condition mirrors the méconnaissance constitutive of narcissistic imaginary capture: the infected speaker, like the narcissist before the mirror, cannot see that the image they project — lively, sociable discourse — is the very thing disfiguring the social bond. Finally, the self-reproducing, anonymous quality of the "communicable disease" rhymes with the concept of Jouissance in its later social-critical register: Lacan's insight that modernity commands enjoyment finds a historical antecedent here, where the compulsive repetition of chatter yields a kind of collective surplus-satisfaction that no individual subject controls or fully owns.

The Chattering Mind: A Conceptual History of Everyday TalkSamuel McCormick · 2020 (p.44)

Both fail to realize that the chatter disease from which they suffer is also, in effect, a communicable disease they spread to others.

The phrase "chatter disease from which they suffer" makes the speaker simultaneously victim and agent, while "communicable disease they spread to others" installs an epidemiological logic in which the medium of transmission (talk itself) is indistinguishable from the pathogen — a formulation that collapses the distinction between speaker and symptom, making ignorance ("fail to realize") the very condition of the disease's reproduction.