The Carnivalesque Politics of a Pandemic Body

Abstract

Covid-19 has affected our lives in innumerable and formerly unimaginable ways. Among its effects is the threat to our identity in terms of broken bodily boundaries, severed social contacts, and a blurring of our group belongings. A response to this mingled physio-social threat has been an unprecedented surge of trans-subjectivity, as a form of intersubjectivity that is both elevated and reduced. In this paper, this phenomenon is explored in its carnivalesque manifestation, expressing itself as both a revolt against state control and an effort to re-appropriate a sense of bodily self and other. I illustrate these ideas with theoretical, visual and clinical materials.

Keywords:

• trans-subjective
• pandemic
• carnival
• protest
• the Real

This article is referred to by:

Mortality, Identity & Trans-Subjectivity: A Discussion of Shlomit Yadlin-Gadot’s “The Carnivalesque Politics of a Pandemic Body”

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Nirit Mitrany, Ha’aretz’s Archive Manager, for her help, generosity and patience, and Michel Suraski, pre-press expert, for his brilliant expertise and for the love of his art. My thanks to the gifted photographers presented here, and to my friend and colleague Dr. Gad Ben Sheffer for years of shared walks and ideas.

Notes

¹ This article was written in December, 2020 for the IARPP Symposium. At the time, Israel was at a political impasse. Four elections were held in Israel between March 2019 and March 2021. All four ended with Netanyahu leading the largest party in the Knesset as Prime Minister, yet failing to create a stable coalition. Between the second and third election, on December 2019, the Balfour protest began. This protest influenced a shift in Israeli politics: the regular right-left divide transformed into a pro- and con-Netanyahu divide. At the time of publication (Fall, 2021), Netanyahu, after acting as Israel’s Prime minister for 12 years, has been ousted by an unusual coalition that brings together parties left, right and center, and for the first time in Israel’s history, an Arab party, Mansour Abbas’s Ra’am. The mostly secular coalition is headed by a religious PM. The coalition’s heterogeneity reflects the spirit of Balfour.

² A bath used for immersion in Judaism to achieve ritual purity.

³ A bipartisan movement protesting corruption and the right to serve as PM under criminal charges.

⁴ For discussion of official and unofficial aspects of consciousness see: V. N. Volosinov, (1927/1987). Freudianism: A Critical Sketch, tr. I. R. Titunik and ed. in collab. with N. H. Bruss, Indiana University Press: Bloomington. And Bakhtin (1965/1984). Rabelais and His World, tr. H. Iswolsky, Indiana University Press: Bloomington.

⁵ The original photograph recreated in Figure 15 may be viewed at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ink_Flag.

⁶ See: Butler 1997, pp. 8-9: “No subject can emerge without this attachment, formed in dependency, but no subject, in the course of its formation, can ever afford fully to “see” it. This attachment in its primary forms must both come to be and be denied, its coming to be must consist in its partial denial, for the subject to emerge.”

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Shlomit Yadlin-Gadot

Shlomit Yadlin-Gadot, PhD, is clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst at the Tel Aviv Institute of Contemporary Psychoanalysis (TAICP). She teaches and supervises in the General Humanities Studies Department and in the Doctoral and Psychotherapy tracks in the School of Psychotherapy, Sackler School of Medicine, Tel- Aviv University. She writes and lectures on the interface of psychoanalysis, philosophy, and cultural studies. She is a member of the IARPP Board of Directors and author of the book Truth Matters: Theory and Practice in Psychoanalysis. She lives and practices in Ramat-Hasharon, Israel.