ABSTRACT
Six terms from Harold Bloom’s Anxiety of Influence coincidentally define the psychoanalysis of contagion as well as the “disease” that (as Freud admitted) is psychoanalysis. Paired, these terms (clinamen/tesseræ, dæmon/askesis, kenosis/apophrades) teach that the virus is not simply the biological agent but also the measures we take to avoid and fight it. Cinema-lovers indirectly experience this merger in the pandemic’s move from the big screen to the little screen, a logic anticipated 24 years ago in the 1998 film, The Truman Show, a big screen film about the serialised TV production of “The Truman Show”, based on the 24/7 hyper-surveillance of an unwitting subject, Truman. Lacan could not in his wildest dreams have found a better way to exemplify the effects of his “alethosphere”, where desire is curated by the “Che vuoi?” of an invisible Other (Ⱥ). Truman finds an exit at the end of the set, which also concludes the story, showing an outside that is just another inside (Lacan’s extimité, “intimate externality”). Psychoanalysis and the plague celebrate their historical alliance in conversions of the Big Screen to the Small Screen, pandemic to endemic. As Mladen Dolar has claimed, we study the virus to understand the meaning of psychoanalysis.
