The Paranormative
updated:
Tuesday, April 6, 2021 - 4:44pm
Qui Parle: Critical Humanities and Social Sciences
deadline for submissions:
Friday, April 30, 2021
One year later, a “return to normal” remains the pandemic’s most enduring political promise, a token of hope to hedge against continued death and precarity. Held within this recursive promise, however, is a prima facie condition that deserves interrogation. What, exactly, is the “normal” to which we will return? Will capitalism and its attendant crises no longer demand our attention absent a continual state of emergency? The coherence and stability of the “normal” eludes us; Georges Canguilhem sees the normal as itself a chimeric category, one which, from the perspective of medicine and science, is not so distant from the “pathological” it is meant to foil.