Reanimating the plague

Abstract

The idea of ‘plague’ has returned to public consciousness with the arrival of COVID-19. An anachronistic and extremely problematic concept for thinking about biopolitical catastrophe, plague nevertheless offers an enormous historical range and a potentially highly generative metaphorical framework for psychosocial studies to engage with, for example, through Albert Camus’ (2013) The Plague and Sophocles’ (2015) Oedipus The King. It is, moreover, a word that is likely to remain firmly within the remit of public consciousness as we move further into the Anthropocene, to face further pandemics and the spectre of antibiotic resistance. A return to plague also opens up the question of a return to psychoanalysis, which Freud is often cited as having described as a ‘plague’. Psychoanalysis is, like plague, a troubling and problematic discourse for psychosocial studies, but, like plague, it may also help us to work through the disorders and dis-eases of COVID times. In fact, if the recent pandemic has reanimated the notion of plague, the plague metaphor may in turn help to reanimate psychoanalysis, and in this article we suggest some of the analogical, even genealogical, resonances of such an implication.

Psychosocial research in COVID-19 times: an introduction

“…These questions have turned out to be core components of most of the articles, ranging from differentiations of touch and the ethics of neighbourliness in Ruth Sheldon's (Sheldon, 2021) article through the problematics of teletherapy in Leanne Downing's, (Downing, 2021) to the disturbance of bodily immersion in archival research in Lemonia Gianniri's (Gianniri, 2021). It may even be that Tom Fielder's and Lizaveta van Munsteren's (Fielder and van Munsteren, 2021) analysis of the 'reanimation' of the plague metaphor in psychoanalysis and literature points towards a relational approach to the non-human world involving some way of understanding the virus as an agent that is a psychosocial force as much as a biological one, not just in the sense of responding to human interventions (including miscalculations and neglects), but also as something with which humans have relationships. The promised 'new normal' will, we are told, include having to find ways to 'live with' the virus; this appreciation of how we live in a shared world is hard won and probably easily lost, but perhaps this time the exigencies of the emergency will allow some of it to be retained.…”

“…The disruptions of received 'knowledge' by something more truthful, refuting denial, is one psychoanalytic way of looking at it; 'returning' us to the reformed 'ordinary', as Ruth Sheldon (Sheldon, 2021) suggests, might be another. Indeed, images of return abound, from the 'negationism' unpicked by Paulo Beer (Beer, 2021) to the recovery of the plague metaphor as a physical reality descried by Tom Fielder and Lizaveta van Munsteren (Fielder and van Munsteren, 2021), and perhaps also even in Lemonia Gianniri's (Gianniri, 2021) seeming nostalgia for the touch and breath of the archive. Maybe we really do need to go back in order to move forward, this time acknowledging the damage that has been done.…”