Uncomfortable Intimacy and Embodied Vulnerability: a Meditation on COVID-19
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Description
This paper meditates on the interplay between embodiment, ontological security, vulnerability and intimacy in the context of humanity’s confrontation with COVID-19. It employs a politically inflected psychoanalytic approach, which understands one’s habitual experience of the body as inescapably alienated and decentered. This human condition emerges because our embodied being is formed an exists simultaneously in three different registers: symbolical body, the imaginary (or ideal) body, and the Real body. It is mainly through the medium of language and images, which are core elements of societal phantasy formations, that our understanding and experience of the body and perception of existential threats such as COVID-19 emerges. Through such societal phantasy formations, one attempts to organize the chaotic Real body and give it meaning. The paper directs its focus to the various narratives arising to give meaning to experiences associated with COVID-19. Furthermore, it argues that the social trauma triggered by COVID-19 might constitute an opportunity for us to reimagine our existence in terms of embodied vulnerability and intimacy with others. As such, through this existentially traumatic event, we might gain the ability to contest the habitual representations of our individualized bodies’ autonomy in the world and theorize interdependence and reciprocity.
