Coronavirus has bridged the gap between life and death. A distant death has become a near actuality. We are challenged to live with an imminent death. The undoing of life has entered our biological life and disrupted our ways of being human. All inequalities melt in front of covid-19. It has become like death a great equalizer. It provides...
Enjoyment and the Corona Moment of Humanity
There is a joy of breaking the law. This law-breaking happens behind the eyes of the law. It happens in a hiding way. One enjoys breaking the law behind the back of God so to say. Humans like a kind of rupture of God’s gaze when they enjoy it. Psychoanalysis teaches that the possibility of enjoyment depends on breaking...
Structure, Play, and Indian Society
The rising second wave of Covid-19 in our country has become a Tsunami. We are facing what Jacques Derrida might call a rapture event. Etymologically, the word event has a disruptive meaning. It has a sense that implies: ‘to come out or fall out’. We have to agree that we are in a state of collapse. Our medical infrastructure...
Critical Lessons from the Corona Moment of Humanity
Existentialists taught us that we are all thrown into the world. It means that we are not at home in the world but have to adapt and make ourselves at home. Martin Heidegger says that our thrown-ness does not close our fate but opens possibilities of being in the world. Religious language mellows or tones down these rather harsh...
The Loss of the Right Choice: Ethical Quandary in the Wake of the Pandemic of Coronavirus
The fact that one can almost cough one another to death has opened a moral quandary in the wake of the global pandemic of coronavirus. Every human person has to face the possibility of being both the victim as well as the vector of a lethal infection. Hence, we are robbed of our ability to do the right thing...
Learning, Unlearning and Relearning
Coronavirus has put us all into catastrophic and heart-rending conditions. People are dying gasping for breath. But we saw a blatant unpreparedness of the Government and appalling insensitivity of the ruling benches that seem to direct all energies into winning elections forgetting the sufferings and deaths of the people. If this attitude to win elections and even to build...
Coronavirus as a Discourse
Coronavirus is not simply a sign. It has become a discourse. A set of discursive practices are being assembled around it. One can easily spot these practices on the television. The lethal virus has steadily become a complex site where battles for knowledge, power, and safety are fought, lost and won. Although the virus is democratic and does not...
The Haunting Presence of Absences
The heart breaking crises that hit both rural and urban India cannot be described with words. On one side we can see cries of ailing people due to lack of bed space, oxygen, medicines, doctors, nurses etc., and on the other side we find people struggling to give dignified final rites to their beloved whom they have lost to...
Being Real in the Time of Coronavirus – III
What if we cough the end of humanity on this planet earth? This is exactly our predicament for today. We can clearly see the crack in our consistent universe that we had built around us. It is as if the Cartesian evil genius is operating behind our backs. The virus has disrupted our reality. The wound is refusing to...
Being Real at the time of Coronavirus – I
Numbers at the time of coronavirus pandemic are keeping us on our toes. Numbers do all the talking. They update us about the number of people that are affected, the number of people who are healed as well as the number of people who died because of the infection. The practice of mathematics and numbers teaches us several things...
