Diaries of Quarantine: Reframing the masculine logos through melancholia, nostalgia, and mourning

Abstract

Challenging the bodily-detached logos that qualifies as perfect knowledge in academia, in the current account, I expose diary reflections, which I discuss in the context of critical literature debates, to make sense of how the neoliberal ‘success story’ further exposes academic and broader subjectivities, vulnerable embodied and psychological states, under conditions of worldwide lock-downs related to the COVID-19 pandemic. My diary reflections unveil conflated feelings of melancholia, inadequacy, helplessness, and guilt for not being able to satisfy the ideal of the perfect worker, under this crisis. Yet, they also radiate a hopeful sense of nostalgia, which, I experienced as a creative transition from melancholia towards a regenerative practice of mourning. By interweaving these diary notes with literature insights on the inter-connections between melancholia, nostalgia and mourning, I propose academic writing as a mourning practice, with heightened relational, ethical and aesthetical possibilities.