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

Abstract

Shlomit’s Yadlin-Gadot’s paper, “The Carnivalesque Politics of a Pandemic Body,” carries us into a bit of a wild, carnival-like experience: a dazzling array of images, disguises, and visual metaphors delivered with a powerful immediacy. I will stay as close as I can to what Yadlin-Gadot has presented, while at the same time trying to translate her brilliant conceptual array of terms about Covid-19, carnival and trans-subjectivity in a way that may help us define them while touching on the big questions she poses in her dual ending: What can relational thought offer in times of Covid-19, and what can Covid-19 offer relational thought in terms of a challenge? Or, where does the carnivalesque take us in terms of theory, and where does theory take us in terms of the carnivalesque?

Keywords:

• carnivalesque
• Covid-19 pandemic
• trans-subjectivity
• grieving
• existential
• identity

This article refers to:

The Carnivalesque Politics of a Pandemic Body

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Malcolm Owen Slavin

Malcolm Owen Slavin, PhD, is a founder of The Massachusetts Institute for Psychoanalysis, where he teaches, supervises, and has served as President. He is on the faculty of several other psychoanalytic institutes worldwide, as well as on the International Council for Psychoanalytic Self Psychology (IAPSP), and is a director of IARPP. Slavin is a consulting and associate editor of the journals Psychoanalytic Dialogues, Contemporary Psychoanalysis, and Self and Context. He is the author (with Daniel Kriegman) of The Adaptive Design of the Human Psyche: Psychoanalysis, Evolutionary Biology and the Therapeutic Process. His forthcoming book, Original Loss: Grieving Existential Trauma in the Arts and the Art of Psychoanalysis, explores the human evolutionary loss of a formerly innate, instinctual embeddedness in nature and how it necessitated the vital survival function of the arts as well as the art within psychoanalysis and religion. He is also assembling a volume of his collected papers entitled Why the Analyst Needs to Change, a name drawn from his earlier work of the same title.