Paranoia and the coronavirus: how Eve Sedgwick's affect theory persists through quarantine and self-isolation
“We’ve entered a break in time, where the old world before the disease becomes irretrievable. The event moves forward with such an intensity that it seems hard to believe we’ll be able to make it through without abandoning some of our old selves. For Klein, the paranoid-schizoid mode leads to a splitting or fragmenting of the self and the other (the object of the conspiracy, however broad that may be).”
“The paranoia inspired by coronavirus – of under-reported numbers, of both a state ready to exercise draconian measure and a state that may not be able to withstand a crisis of this measure – is helping to shift the conditions of political possibility. On the national scale that includes Italy’s decision to suspend mortgage payments and the Trump administration’s considerations to suspend student debt. These are part of a longer story of paranoid reading: since the 2008 crash, financialisation has conjured its own paranoid reading, where theorists seek to untangle the web of legal mechanisms and offshore accounts that allow the financial system to dominate all other modes of life. This sudden openness to forgiving large swathes of debt, at least temporarily, has exposed a new ideological frailty”
“Anne Boyer writes about coronavirus in a recent newsletter: “These are the same types who say the only thing to fear is fear, which of course is not true, because fear educates our care for each other -- we fear a sick person might be made sicker, or that a poor person's life might be made even more miserable, and we do whatever we can to protect them because we fear a version of human life in which everyone lives for themselves only.”