Introduction

Taking up the themes of Lisa Baraitser’s recent book Enduring Time, this talk will offer some reflections on the relations between time and care. Care is often assumed to be a set of practices that take the form of an affective engagement with others, so that the world can be maintained, sustained, and repaired. Yet care can also be thought about as a political and ethical decision to remain in what Christina Sharpe calls ‘the wake’: the ongoing disastrous time of the persistent effects of slavery. Remaining, for Sharpe, involves inhabiting and rupturing the wake’s elongated temporality. From this perspective, Baraitser will argue that care is bound up with histories of the antithesis of care, or failures of care, that bring on ways of thinking that may also need to be taken care of and involve the temporal practices of staying alongside others and ideas when care has failed; waiting, staying, delaying, enduring, repeating, and returning as the temporal forms that care takes.  Some psychoanalytic resources will help to think about the chronic and interminable, and the repetitive and developmental, in order to better understand the intersections between time, care, and not moving on.

Lisa Baraitser is Professor of Psychosocial Theory in the Department of Psychosocial Studies at Birkbeck, University of London. She was awarded a collaborative award (with Laura Salisbury) from the Wellcome Trust for ‘Waiting Times’, a five-year cycle of research on temporality and care in health contexts (mental health treatment, the GP encounter, and end of life care). She is the author of an award-winning monograph, Maternal Encounters: The Ethics of Interruption (2009) and Enduring Time (2017), and the editor of A Feeling for Things, a collection of essays on the work of Jane Bennett (forthcoming). She is co-editor of the online, peer-reviewed journal Studies in the Maternal. She is co-convener of ‘Mapping Maternal Subjectivities, Identities and Ethics’ (MAMSIE), an international interdisciplinary research network on motherhood. Lisa Baraitser is a psychodynamic psychotherapist in independent practice and a candidate at the Institute of Psychoanalysis, London. She was previously the artistic director of an experimental theatre collective known as PUR.