The Corona Outbreak and the Real

The Corona crisis lays bare the asymmetries in global capitalist production [Photo: GettyImages]

It is not surprising that in capitalist societies, especially with their neoliberal inflections, different forms of work have unequal worth. This inequity existed before the Corona outbreak and is only becoming more acute during it. Taking psychoanalysis’s reality principle – which emphasizes the need to be suspicious of any reality presenting itself as natural ((Zupancic cited in Fisher M 2009, Capitalist Realism: Is there no Alternative?, Zero Books, England, p. 17)) – and a Lacanian understanding of the Real, which argues that the Real is what any ‘reality’ must suppress ((ibid., p. 18)), one must see the Corona outbreak with all its articulations in the demand for certain workers over others as a crack – a fracture and inconsistency in the field of apparent reality under capitalism. This outbreak, therefore, invokes the Real, which is essentially a void that is usually unrepresented but can be glimpsed in the fractures underlying the reality that capitalism so wonderfully orchestrates and presents to us.

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Interview: Siddharth Mallavarapu on postcolonial approaches in International Relations and the politics of knowledge

In this episode of our interview series, Lynda Iroulo talks to Prof. Siddharth Mallavarapu from the Department of International Relations and Governance Studies at Shiv Nadar University, Uttar Pradesh, India.

Listen in, as Prof. Mallavarapu shares his thoughts on the current state of International Relations, how global the discipline really is and how IR can profit from incorporating perspectives from the Global South.

[Photo: Siddharth Mallavarapu]

Find a short abridged transcription of the interview below or listen to the full one here:

Continue reading “Interview: Siddharth Mallavarapu on postcolonial approaches in International Relations and the politics of knowledge”

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