Trauma, Home, and Geopolitical Bordering: A Lacanian Approach to the COVID-19 Crisis

In this article, we read the COVID-19 pandemic from a Lacanian perspective, in which trauma and ontological insecurity are at the heart of the analysis. Using a psychoanalytical approach allows us to grasp why the most common response to the pandemic consisted of intensified commitments to home, nationalism, and exclusionary bordering practices and, in effect, a return to geopolitical notions of “sovereignty.” This can be read in light of Lacan’s discussion of memory as a form of repetition, implying that any attempt to construe history in terms of a coherent narrative misses the unconscious, traumatic compulsion to repeat. In light of this, we consider populist responses to the pandemic as well as how the pandemic has worked as a “great unequalizer.” Such developments, we argue, must be read as representing a fragmentation of the national body and as heightening the vulnerabilities and asymmetric structures of power that inhere in what Lacan refers to as the symbolic order. Here, we propose that a postcolonial re-conceptualization of Lacan’s understanding of the mirror image and the Real is necessary if we wish to establish how the pandemic has reinforced existing patterns of abjectification and marginalization.