Dum Spiro Spero: On Post-Pandemic Hope

Abstract

This paper was originally delivered at The Psychology of Global Crisis: State Surveillance, Solidarity and Everyday Life virtual conference, 2020, at The American University of Paris. I discuss with my own lived experience of surviving COVID-19 as the basis for how the event of a crisis brings into focus hope’s undecidable, ontological nature, thus shattering everyday presumptions about hope as located elsewhere than the here and now in what I call either imagineered prostalgia or salvaged and recycled nostalgia. I also discuss the challenge of the suicidal moment to the idea that hope is ontological. I close with a suggested link to various kinds of pandemics, either virally infective or racially oppressive or genocidal, in the shared, ontological nature of breath as hope, dum spiro spero, where, as I breathe, I hope. I note how this ontology of breath as hope, whether as ruach, pneuma, prana, qi, alruwh, or roho, is incomparably and ontically unique in both the different kinds of asphyxiations faced of breath and in what each is trying to breathe. My hope is that by knowing hope is ontological and inherent to existence, even in despair, and neither coupled to imagineered prostalgia nor salvaged and recycled nostalgia, that one can embrace life as is, knowing we gasp even when we cannot breathe.