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As we are in the fourth week of social-distancing in Toronto in tandem with numerous other countries across the globe, we have time to reflect on what is surprisingly frightening in our current state of affairs Indeed, it would have been unimaginable for many of us a mere month ago to conceive of the issue of panic shopping for Toilet Paper and canned legumes, let alone imagine that this response would occupy a considerable amount of our social and political conversation The perplexing panic and restlessness over toilet paper, when considered as a response to the larger political failure, seem to be a creative act The mania over toilet paper can be understood as a crude solution of the overwhelmed and fragmented subject in the absence of a symbolic authority The acts of the suspicious seem to generate an enclosed space where one can imagine a future in which one finds a sense of control and safety The act of panic shopping, among other paranoid acts, is the way individuals create a sense of time and space In the psychoanalytic story, it is an inventive way of turning passive into active (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved)
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