time
Pandemic times. A conversation with Lisa Baraitser about the temporal politics of COVID-19
Introduction
Lisa Baraitser is Professor of Psychosocial Theory at Birkbeck, University of London. In her research, she combines psychoanalytic and social theories to address the temporal, ethical and affective dimensions of care. In this interview, Prof. Baraitser helps us think through the temporal politics of COVID-19 and the ways in which pandemic conditions transform the affective dimensions of care work in Europe and US-America.
Subverting capital’s temporality: A critical reappraisal of laziness
Introduction
Pulcinella, or Punch, the famous Neapolitan puppet-buffoon of commedia dell’arte, has hanging on his bedroom wall a notice stating ‘Do it tomorrow’. It is the first thing he sees when he rises from bed each morning. When faced with a new days’ demands of successive ‘things to do’, simply reading this notice is enough to short-circuit any attempt at doing what Pulcinella has to do, is supposed to do, or has been asked to do, in an eternal postponement of his daily tasks.
Textual flâneurie: Writing management with Walter Benjamin
The world’s an untranslatable language
without words or parts of speech.
It’s a language of objects
Our tongues can’t master,
but which we are the ardent subjects of.
If tree is tree in English,
and albero in Italian,
That’s as close as we can come
To divinity, the language that circles the earth
and which we’ll never speak. (Wright, 2010)