The turning point that COVID-19 has generated in our lives bears fruit with Luce Irigaray inviting us to reflect and to ask ourselves what construction of the world we have established and how we could redirect our loss. Long before the recent restrictions, we in the West have been distanced from what is essential, the air we share with each living being. The most elemental for our survival in community has been —and it is— corrupted and polluted. Moreover, the solution of the virus spreading went through the separation of our bodies and this is an opportunity to question as well the way in which we establish contact, how we relate to each other, especially between men and women, what place do caresses occupy, how much space do we give to touching each other, and how we have been affected throughout history by the mutual contact deprivation or prohibition.
Keywords
psychoanalysis, COVID-19, touching, breathing, sexuate difference
Text
[Automatic translation from Spanish]:
To write about psychoanalysis now seems to me to return to another time in history that a simple virus has called into question. How and in what way could psychoanalytic theory and practice explain and remedy what happens to us as a result of this virus? Is it not the virus that questions psychoanalysis itself and not the opposite? Does this virus not force us to define and resort to another way of thinking and living? Is this not his way to challenge us: either you become a new human being, or do you comply with my dictatorship, a dictatorship that is more radical and effective than any human law so far thought? In fact, what does the «law of the father» (Lacan) mean compared to COVID-19? Does this law not have to resort to the power of the virus to remain effective, above all at a political level? And how can the unconscious’s analysis, as defined by Freud, rescue us from the proof of the reality we face? Should we not free ourselves from it as soon as possible to discover other resources of life, and even another sense of life itself? Could finding a vaccine solve or erase the hardships of our powerlessness in the face of what can, here and now, paralyze our breath and cause our death? Does it not lead to death to ignore and forget this test in a slower but equally inevitable way? It represents COVID-19 a mere setback that science and technology will achieve […]
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