Bridging Fellow Nicola Simonetti has been invited to deliver a seminar at the Interacting Minds Centre, Aarhus University on 4 February (11-12:30 CET).
This talk will explore 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, Nicola will 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, he will 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, Nicola proposes 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 his talk will 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.
The event is hybrid and a Teams link will be circulated closer to the time, so do keep an eye on the event page on the Interacting Minds Centre website for further updates.
