With contributions from Matthew H. Bowker, Amy Buzby, Jack Fong, Evangelia Galanaki, Jill Gentile, Nathan Gerard, Theofilos Gkinopoulos, Dan Livney, Elliott Schwebachand, and Michael J. Thompson.
The prime example or idée clef that unites the chapters of this volume is the experience of the global Covid-19 pandemic from 2019 to 2023, in which we witnessed forms of isolation and withdrawal that meant something more than separation. Withdrawal and isolation work on the self, although they may not do so consciously. Whereas it is possible to be separated from others simply as a matter of fact and from the ‘outside,’ Getting Lost focuses on complex internal and psychopolitical processes involving retreat or removal of selves from the worlds of politics, society, and culture.
When we feel isolated or we withdraw ourselves, something tends to arise in our place: be it a defense system, a constellation of symptoms, or the deeply repressed psychic material giving rise to either or both. Thus, it was not coincidental that, as millions died from Covid, and as millions more experienced severely ‘broken sociality’ in the Covidian world of risk, quarantine, and/or lockdown, we also found ourselves witnessing explosions of extremism in popular discourse, in large-scale border closures, in encroachments on women’s and reproductive rights, in physical attacks on the Capitol Building in Washington, DC, in domestic and spousal violence and youth suicide, in a war of aggression waged by Russia on Ukraine, and much more.
We advance the term ‘psychopolitical isolation and withdrawal’ in order to capture not only temporary periods of isolation but also detachments from reality and perverse attachments to unreality, visible on small and large scales. This partial or perverse facing of our self-experience and shared experience suggests the possibility that the post-Covidian era brings with it altered relationships to both the private and the public home, and, with them, the meanings of citizenship, sociality, publicity, thinking, and being.
Plainly put, the impact of Covid-19 worldwide has damaged people’s relationship to reality and we are still coming to terms with and uncovering the many ways in which this manifests. This book aims to signal an immediate, existential threat to psychosocial and political life and to inspire further thinking, debate, and work on these vital topics that affect us all.
Table of Contents:
About the editors and contributors
Introduction
Matthew H. Bowker and Amy Buzby
Time may change us: The strange temporalities, novel paradoxes, and democratic imaginaries of a pandemic
Jill Gentile
Empty defiance: Antisociality and the loss of hope in the Covidian age
Amy Buzby
From anomia to stasis: Psychic retreat, gangs, and perversion
Matthew H. Bowker
Anxiety, psychic regression, and the demise of the civic self
Michael J. Thompson
The American experience of democracy deserts during the pandemic
Jack Fong
Getting lost without a self to lose: Winnicott and psychic absence in the post-Covidian era
Nathan Gerard
Social-theoretical distancing: Liberatory ambitions in Covidian times
Elliott Schwebach
Ostracism in the era of Covid-19: Intrapersonal, interpersonal, and intergroup perspectives
Theofilos Gkinopoulos and Evangelia Galanaki
Lives in Covid: A relational history of a pandemic
Dan Livney
Index
