The question of whether we are post-pandemic hinges on some understanding of what the time of the pandemic is. If pandemic time is something like pandemonium – or, etymologically, the place of all (pan) demons (daimons) – we might ask who or what those demons are. The term pandemic, however, does not refer to demons (or daimons in the pre-Christian Greek) but to all (pan) people (demos), which has led some to assume that pandemic temporality disturbs in a global, uniform, or democratizing way. Some imagined the pandemic to be a great equalizer and potential cure to late-industrial entropy and social fragmentation; but, to invoke Plato’s pharmakon – that mythical and medicinal substance that is both cure and poison – the wish for such equalization invariably harbors a certain violence. Political contests ensue over the seemingly magical power that the pharmakon represents (e.g., vax/anti-vax, mask/maskless, etc.), and that representation becomes a totem through which such contestation legitimates itself, sometimes by any means necessary. In short, our desire for a newfound demos may inevitably give way to a hunt for demons, which, in the interest of an imaginary safety, gratifyingly promises – at the very least – to make all demons visible.
Early on, certain intellectuals picked up on the pandemic’s incendiary potential, some of which was realized in activist uprisings and/or terrorist insurgencies on the left and the right. The seeming undecidability of uprising and/or insurgency speaks to the “unpast” character of pandemic time (Scarfone, 2015), or to how the un- or primally repressed thing that both attracts and repels the earliest iterations of the ego is unleashed into the liminal, ritual space of culture. Paranoid-schizoid attempts to transform this enigmatic thing into a repressible object beget a flurry of scapegoating, as if locating and gripping this thing-cum-object would relieve us of the torments and enticements of psychosomatic life, torments which both threaten the psyche-soma’s coherence and yet summon the psyche-soma to cohere. While the notion of post-pandemic might point to an afterlife of the virus as a bio-psycho-political thing, psychically this thing is absolutely negative and thus defies transformation into an object; it never quite ends, as it is never quite an object of history. Such negativity is more like a psychical virus, a virulence, that emanates from the infans, that formless and helpless being who is not, that formlessness from which we emerge and to which, in death, we return. Culture insulates us from the infans, in part by engendering transitional space that transforms tormenting helplessness into (sometimes tormented) play, ritualizing it into becoming a metabolizable affect out of which emotional life is born. For clinicians, such ritual now manifests in hybridized (i.e., virtual and in-person) settings where filters become the norm. For better and worse, filtering is thought to ensure the safety of the patient-clinician microcultures we clinically create. Notions of (sometimes romanticized) intercorporeality are filtered by the screen, and air filters neutralize the (bio-medicalized) virulence of our offices.
Pandemic time highlights how clinical and cultural relationships to the unconscious are changing; the enigmatic and uncanny lure of the primally repressed is becoming even more intolerable to bear. Protection against the virus psychically doubles as annihilation
anxiety in the face of virulence (I can see this in myself). Safety risks becoming a virus of its own, and its excesses, however necessary, demand our ruthless interrogation. Psychic death (or life sans virulence) is increasingly preferable to biological death (Sexton, 2021).
Such is the de facto mission of our late-industrial Entropocene (Stiegler, 2018), and pandemic time – or the unpast of our originary helplessness – has already shown its potential to intensify this entropic mission. Absolute negativity is and has been racialized, classed, gendered, and so on; certain social and biological phenomena become (carriers of) the thing (e.g., black, queer, woman, child, virus, etc.). Such things are not, but instead potentiate being for others. For those kept from normatively being and becoming in civil society, such lawful prevention is not simply social; it is ontological, which is to say that it is less the victimization of a social identity at stake, than it is the command over historical, libidinal, and economic conditions that facilitate the self’s being and becoming. The mirror of selfhood would tell us that those conditions must be unconditionally preserved so that the oppressed might someday benefit from them too, but some of us uncannily sense how the promises of recognizable selfhood are too often a ruse, and how the reassurances of social life only do so much to assuage the self’s constitutive alienation. Such alienation is hard to stomach; hence widespread disavowal that enshrines the self as sovereign, thereby protecting it from the seemingly nihilistic threat of an unapologetic virulence, which, like the drive, operates at the borders of psyche and soma, culture and politics.
Despite real and fantasied progress, ‘humanity’ has yet to escape these aporetic and often insidious loops. As such, the pandemic is a time when calls for a new demos may precipitate the hunt for demons inside and outside the consulting room. Perhaps the psychoanalytic thinker’s challenge is (not to forego safety but) to play at the edges of virulence, where helplessness augurs a demonic threat and the uncertain potential of a newfound demos, and where the primally repressed thing must somehow penetrate every filter, haunting and enchanting life from the cradle to the grave.
References
Scarfone, D. (2015). The Unpast: The Actual Unconscious. New York: UiT Press.
Sexton, J. (2021). Antidoting. The Journal of Black Studies and Research, 51(3): 5-24.
Stiegler, B. (2018). The Neganthropocene (Critical Climate Chaos). Atopic: Open Humanities Press.
