MA Psychosocial Studies Annual Lecture: Professor Samir Gandesha Director of the Institute of Humanities at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver: The Trauma of Thinking
When:
—
Venue:
Birkbeck Main Building, Malet Street
Venue: Room G14, Birkbeck Main Building, Malet Street, London WC1E 7HX
The German word for poison is das Gift. Switching between the German and English denotations brings to mind the close association between the two meanings, also suggesting the Greek word “didonai” (to give) and “dosis” (gift), the root of the English “dose,” signifying something that is given. In this talk, Prof Samir Gandesha suggests that the Covid-19 virus can be regarded as a dose of poison (das Gift); a kind of an offering or gift. The pandemic brings into view the relation between the trauma, undoubtedly induced around the world, to individual and public physical and mental health, social relations, forms of governance and the ‘economy’ on the one hand, and the nature of thinking on the other. The offering of das Gift is that it gives us another way of thinking about the origins of philosophy. Perhaps philosophy doesn’t begin in thaumázein or the wonder or the “question of Being” (Seinsfrage), of “why there is something rather than nothing,” at all. Maybe it begins, rather, in trauma as in the effect of Socrates' trial and execution on Plato's philosophy against politics? Trauma shatters our received and accepted frameworks of intelligibility and, in the process, provides the opening for competing fantasies of both domination and emancipation? The humanities could be said to play a key political role in providing badly needed modes of orientation in light of such contradictory fantasies.
Contact name:
Psychosocial Studies