The COVID-19 pandemic and current political upheavals have triggered a general state of anxious ‘doomscrolling’ of social media and 24-hour online news. Reading this experience alongside Don DeLillo’s The Silence (2020), Professor Salisbury’s talk takes as its starting point the insight of the phenomenological psychiatrist Eugene Minkowski (1933) that much mental distress can be understood as a distortion of the flow of lived time. Whereas in depressive experiences time might be felt to be repetitively stuck and the future cancelled, in anxiety time threatens to overwhelm the individual, as if an unwelcome future is already swamping a helpless, hopeless present.
For registration information, please contact Professor Stephanie Hilger (hilger@illinois.edu)
