Conference with simultaneous translation.
Abstract
In an age of hyperconnectivity, walls appear to be everywhere. Politically, we encounter them in the shape of laws, official documents, or border crossings that regulate the movements of strangers. But we lean on them for psychological reasons too: walls keep us safe on the inside, allowing us, for example, to expel unwanted parts of ourselves onto others who then become the objects of our collective scorn. In this lecture, I focus on three characters whose lives are dominated by walls: the migrant, the Covid-19 survivor, and the conspiracy theorist. Traversing the terrains of shame, melancholia, and paranoia, I diagnose a shared experience of outsider-ness, permeated by an alienated loneliness. I explore, also, the paradoxical utility of walls and how they allow us to think, to metabolize our own strangeness, and-hopefully-to find the Other.
