Digital Tectonics and Cinematic Intimacy: An Epidemiological/Psychoanalytic Perspective

This chapter will develop the basic premise of a paper delivered at the 2021 Irish Psychoanalytic Film Festival entitled “When the disease is misrecognised as the cure: Screen Contagion in the Shadow of COVID-19". The aim, building on Ian Parker’s concluding remarks at the event, is to explore - by way of analytical interventions into the field - the notion of cinematic intimacy in the context of COVID-19 and the lockdown experience. The working hypothesis is that the increased proximity to screens and images during the pandemic is a symptom - in the fundamental Lacanian sense - of a more serious screen contagion at work in the shadows of COVID-19. Using an innovative combination of psychoanalytic and epidemiological tools, this chapter attempts to analyse this phenomenon at the level of what I term the Tektonic Virus: a form of algorithmic desire fuelling the viral spread of a new mode of digitised subjectivity. © 2024 selection and editorial matter, Carol Owens and Sarah Meehan O’Callaghan; individual chapters, the contributors.