Description
This was a talk for the Long Covid + conversations, organized by Eva Meijer.‘You just have to learn to live with it’ is a reaction that many people with persistent physical or mental conditions receive. In this talk I took a philosophical-anthropological approach, questioning what possibilities people in late modern, capitalist societies have to meaningfully ‘live with’ a long-term or chronic condition. I showed that the history of the concept of chronic illness in medical and political discourse is intertwined with narratives of progression, capitalist production and crisis. Nowadays, people with chronic illness are often faced with either of these two reactions: they either hear that they have to work hard to get better, or, when ‘nothing can be done’, they hear that they will have to ‘live with’ the fact that the disease will probably never end. I argue that these extremes are in fact two sides of the same coin: both are intertwined with a linear, progressive conception of time which does not allow for other kinds of futures except those that fit on a linear timescale (Hutchings, 2008; Cazdyn, 2012; Baraitser, 2017; Davies, 2023). This makes living with a condition that does not develop progressively seem like an almost impossible task.
Despite the dominance of linear narratives in medical and political discourse, phenomenologists and queer philosophers of time and care show that concrete, embodied daily life experiences of chronic illness involve
meaningful ways of sharing and taking care of non-progressive temporalities (Freeman, 2011; Baraitser, 2017; Wool & Livingston 2017; Wright 2022; Davies, 2023). At the end of this talk, I suggest that taking time for these
embodied, relational practices might open up ways to help people to meaningfully live with a non-progressive condition.
| Period | 4 Feb 2025 |
|---|---|
| Held at | University of Amsterdam, Netherlands |
| Degree of Recognition | International |
Keywords
- chronic illness
- phenomenology
- history
- philosophical anthropology