Tag: neoliberalism

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.

Continue reading “The Corona Outbreak and the Real”