Abstract

This talk explores obsessive-compulsive time through a novel nonclinical lens, proposing a speculative time complex that challenges obsessive-compulsive presentist frameworks. Drawing on first-person lived experience, epistemologies of time, and Critical Disability Studies, I argue that obsessive-compulsive distress is not rooted in the present but originates in an ‘elsewhen’ shaped by an uncertain past and a speculative future. To conceptualise this temporal dynamic, I engage with Armen Avanessian and Suhail Malik’s theory of the postcontemporary, which deprioritises the present by demonstrating how time is increasingly structured by the past and, especially, the future. Like the postcontemporary, I propose that obsessive-compulsive temporality can be approached in a way that no longer requires explaining the movement of the past and the future on the basis of the present, and I reflect on the importance of language – particularly its tense and modal structures – as a critical site for articulating the speculative time complex of obsessive-compulsive disorder.

About the speaker

Nicola Simonetti, Bridging Fellow in Medical Humanities, Department of English Studies, Durham University

Free of charge - All are welcome