More than a year into the pandemic, the coronavirus remains in circulation, jumping from one host to another, while its signifiers — SARS-COV2, COVID-19, or simply the coronavirus — have already invaded the language of every speaking-being, shaking their perception of the world and distressing their bodies.

The pandemic, an eruption in the indeterminate space we, speaking beings, occupy between nature and culture, has forced us to face our disavowed biological susceptibility, revealing our attachment to the routines that regulate our lives and our volatility to their disruptions.

More than a year into the pandemic, anxiety continues to multiply faster than the virus, traversing both the individual and the group, affecting both the psychic and the material world. From the fear over the lives of our loved ones, gaps in scientific understanding of the virus and its mutations, mistrust in the developed vaccines, economic instabilities, deniers of the virus and its severity, circulating conspiracy theories and existential questions regarding the meaning and solitude of our lives, anxiety appears to be everywhere and afflicting everyone, placing all of us on a quest to either work-through it or somehow seek shelter from it.

In our reading group, we will depart from these actualities to engage broader theoretical and practical questions about the systematic link between anxiety and the functioning of the capitalist economy. We will investigate the structure of anxiety, its manifestation at the level of lived experience, and its pivotal role in the organization of social life. We will give special attention to considering how capitalism can produce, instrumentalize and displace anxiety and its conditions of possibility, whilst continuously inventing temporary shelters from it.

We will do so through regular bi-monthly reading sessions that will engage with a selection of texts from the fields of cultural studies, philosophy, and Lacanian psychoanalysis.