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Rosanna Mclaughlin
Rosanna Mclaughlin is an editor at The White Review.

Articles Available Online


The Pious and the Pommery

Essay

Issue No. 18

Rosanna Mclaughlin

Essay

Issue No. 18

I.   Where is the champagne? On second thoughts this is not entirely the right question. The champagne is in the ice trough, on...

Essay

April 2019

Ariana and the Lesbian Narcissus

Rosanna Mclaughlin

Essay

April 2019

‘Avoid me not!’ ‘Avoid me not!’                                   Narcissus   Let me describe a GIF I’ve been watching. A lot....

On 19 March 2020, a video recorded by 39-year-old Tara Jane Langston from an intensive care bed in London’s Hillingdon Hospital went viral Visibly breathless, she urged her colleagues – for whom the message was originally intended – to put down the cigarettes and not to take any chances with COVID-19 – which, at that time, had killed 144 people in the UK ‘I’m telling you now’ she warned, ‘you need your fucking lungs’   Langston’s testimony was powerful The footage conveyed a rawness that had, at that time, been exclusive to foreign news dispatches Though much was made of Langston’s status as a healthy, gym-going mother of two, the directness with which she called out the public’s complacency was striking It also proved prescient to the UK’s own imminent spiral, demonstrating the (at times voyeuristic) need from the general population for subjective accounts of the experience of others in order for threat to be comprehended   With COVID-19, we exist in a world of experience which is, to a certain extent, prior to science We are often left attempting to understand this new life condition through the prism of emotion, as opposed to verified information   To situate these impulses we might turn towards philosopher Havi Carel’s phenomenology Carel is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Bristol, where she also teaches Medical Humanities Her research is a mixture of cross-disciplinary activism and applied continental philosophy, which regularly draws on evidence from physicians, psychologists, and bioethicists Her most notable work to date is a 2016 monograph, Phenomenology of Illness, which uses Edmund Husserl’s existential phenomenology to refocus the study of illness and medical treatment onto patients, placing emphasis on embodied subjectivity She uses the distinctions between the ‘objective body’ and the ‘body as lived’ – provided by Jean-Paul Sartre – to map her own distinction between disease and illness: ‘The objective body is the physical body, the object of medicine: it is what becomes diseased The body as lived is the first-person experience of this objective body, the body as experienced by the person whose body it is And it is on this level

Contributor

July 2016

Rosanna Mclaughlin

Contributor

July 2016

Rosanna Mclaughlin is an editor at The White Review.

Ten Years at Garage Moscow

Art Review

November 2018

Rosanna Mclaughlin

Art Review

November 2018

When I arrive in Moscow, I am picked up from the airport by Roman, a patriotic taxi driver sent to collect me courtesy of...
Becoming Alice Neel

Art

August 2017

Rosanna Mclaughlin

Art

August 2017

From the first time I saw Alice Neel’s portraits, I wanted to see the world as she did. Neel was the Matisse of the...

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Prize Entry

April 2017

Two Adventures

Ari Braverman

Prize Entry

April 2017

I. A Cosmopolitan Avenue   …where a girl pretends the whole city is dead. She is too old for...

fiction

July 2014

Zone

Mathias Enard

TR. Charlotte Mandell

fiction

July 2014

I remember the day Andrija the invincible collapsed for the first time, the warrior of warriors whom we’d never...

fiction

January 2016

Eight Minutes and Nineteen Seconds

Georgi Gospodinov

TR. Angela Rodel

fiction

January 2016

The minute you start reading this, the sun may already have gone out, but you won’t know it yet....

 

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