COVID-19 and Temporality

“The time is out of joint”: time is disarticulated, dis- located, dislodged, time is run down, on the run and run down [traque et detraque], deranged, both out of order and mad. Time is off its hinges, time is off course, besides itself, disadjusted.
Specters of Marx by Jacques Derrida; 2006; p.20.

There are, of course, different dimensions to the problem of the sweeping pandemic and its consequences. Many of the commentators’ & analysts’ inquiries were explicitly concerned with the inherent contradictions of capitalism itself. However illuminating some of them were, there’s still not enough said about the most obvious problematics that the COVID-19 pandemics bring towards us and which, in my opinion, are the first preconditions of the shift in our consciousness of historicity within any previous epoch so far—namely the shift in our understanding of both time and space. In this first article, I’ll deal explicitly—even though in rough strokes—with the problem of temporality and it’s relation to COVID-19, while in the next from these series my subject would be space. Read the rest of this entry »

Onanistic Subject’s Death

In his book Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power, the German philosopher Byung-Chul Han argues, that the new surveillance society that has arisen since 1984 is more “elegantly totalitarian and oppressive than anything described by Orwell or Bentham”. According to him, the neoliberal era made capitalism realise that seduction is a better way of dealing with its subjects than toughness. He calls this “smartpolitics”. I would call it seductivepolitics and understood it as an exterior and distinct feature of his concept of psychopolitics. Read the rest of this entry »