Rachel Kushner on Finally Having a Chance at Lasting Change
From the Quarantine Tapes Podcast with Paul Holdengraber
Hosted by Paul Holdengräber, The Quarantine Tapes chronicles shifting paradigms in the age of social distancing. Each day, Paul calls a guest for a brief discussion about how they are experiencing the global pandemic.
American society was irrevocably altered on May 25th, 2020 with the death of George Floyd. Today on episode 66 of The Quarantine Tapes, Paul Holdengräber is joined by author Rachel Kushner for a discussion around what it means to live in this fractured time and the potential opportunities for lasting change.
From the interview:
Rachel Kushner: Suddenly we both went off of what I would call “traditional calendar time” and into something more like what I would call “kairos,” a non-calendar time, which in continental philosophy is thought of as the kind of event where … historical conditions have been shaped and made and irrevocably altered by something that has taken place that will fracture the calendar time. And it seems that that happened on May 25th.
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Rachel Kushner’s most recent novel, The Mars Room, was a finalist for the Booker Prize and the NBCC Award. A collection of her essays, The Hard Crowd, will be published by Scribner in March 2021.
