Her research focuses on race and whiteness in post-kantian philosophy and on the political uses of the quasi-transcendental. She is working currently on sexual violence and on phenomenological approaches to fear in sexual abuse. She is also a published poet, playwright, and dedicated teacher. In she taught as a temporary lecturer at the University of Johannesburg.
Bez, Micol. I struggled to find the thread, logical or narrative, to talk about the virus and the experience โ perhaps still too raw โ of the multiple modalities in which it has fashioned our lives, our relations, and our subjectivities. It was Anne Cvetkovich who asked it, three or four years ago, during a writing workshop in Belgrade: how does capitalism make you feel? In order to understand the hold of power over the subject, Cvetkovich said, we must catalog its feelings: trace the intimate geography of the collective affects and political feelings that this power generates, as well as those it makes impossible and unlivable.
I asked myself then: what are the feelings of my generation, of those who live, grow, and plan on the brink of extinction?
Is that political loneliness? How do we feel as a generation, as a country, as a people? Do states have feelings? Does Greece feel betrayed by Europe? If thinking about the virus has meant, for me, going back to this critical register, it is in part because there is direct continuity between the questions of the feelings of capital and those raised by the virus, but also because, at this early stage of reflection, with the wound still open, questions of feelings may be the only kind of questions thatI feel capable of answering.
So, what I propose is not a thread, narrative or logical, that we need to retrieve, to make sense of, or to account for the phenomenon of the virus, but rather a libidinal center, to which we need to find an access point; in other words, we must ask ourselves: how does the virus make us feel?
