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Solitude and Things in the Time that Remains – A talk by John Paul Ricco

October 11, 2021, LARCA seminar
Anne Sweet Fédé

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1In his emotionally moving talk, “Solitude and Things in the Time that Remains,” visual studies professor John Paul Ricco contemplated questions of time—in art and in life—of solitude, of mourning, and also of hope, at a University of Paris seminar on October 11, 2021, in Paris, France. This in-person event, which was jointly organized by the Gender and Sexuality Section and the Arts and Visual Cultures Section of the Laboratory LARCA CNRS UMR 8225, was originally scheduled to take place in May 2021, as part of Rocco’s planned sojourn as a visiting professor from the University of Toronto, in order to allow him to meet and interact with faculty and colleagues. However, it was postponed when Ricco was unable to travel to France due to the pandemic. LARCA members were thus very happy to finally welcome him as a visiting professor at this on-site talk, which was also broadcast by videoconference for those who could not be present.

  • 1 John Paul Ricco, The Decision Between Us: Art and Ethics in the Time of Scenes (Chicago, University (...)
  • 2 John Paul Ricco, The Logic of the Lure (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002).
  • 3 John Paul Ricco, “Isolation, Loneliness, Solitude: The COVID-19 Pandemic Has Brought Us Too Close T (...)

2Ricco is a full professor at the University of Toronto, as well as an artist, whose work was recently featured in the exhibit “Intimacy: New Queer Art from Berlin and Beyond” at the Schwules Museum in Berlin, Germany. Ricco’s interdisciplinary research is at the intersection of art, architecture, philosophy, queer theory, and visual studies. He is well-known for his work on gender, eroticism and pornography, and books such as The Decision Between Us: Art and Ethics in the Time of Scenes1 and The Logic of the Lure.2 His talk at the LARCA seminar was more particularly an offshoot and prolongation of his paper, “Isolation, Loneliness, Solitude: The COVID-19 Pandemic Has Brought Us Too Close Together.”3

  • 4 Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five (New York: Delacorte, 1969).

3The pandemic has led Ricco to profoundly reflect on questions of time, not only on the finitude of time, but also how the pandemic has created the effect of feeling like we are living in suspended time, or out of time, a bit like how the character Billy Pilgrim in Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five becomes unstuck in time.4 A sense of unreality descended upon the world as we were forced into quarantine and into lockdown, in suspended lives and in suspended time, confronted with our own mortality, and wishing we could go backward or forward to a “better” time—even doing so in our minds, in our imaginations, in our art and in our dreams. We often felt as if we both had all the time in the world and yet time was running out.

  • 5 Gabriel García Márquez, Love in the Time of Cholera (New York City: Alfred A. Knopf, 1985).

4For those who grew up in this century in the West, pandemics were something that had been relegated to the past and that we had only experienced through the media, for example, through reading books like Gabriel García Márquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera,5 a novel about love, life, and death, loss, and especially unrequited love, punctuated the loneliness of the main character. In the context of the current pandemic, Ricco also ponders such questions—of solitude, loneliness, intimacy, sex, and death—but especially of the time that remains to us, how we manage that time and how that time is managed for us, and the moral and ethical questions therein.

5Ricco defines solitude, isolation, loneliness, and being alone as very different and distinct concepts. He defines solitude the way the individual negotiates being alone or with other people, their private and public space, and the “betweenness,” or the space between. Loneliness, however, involves being involuntarily left alone, a state of being that Ricco notes is often imposed upon those considered “undesirable” in a society where people are valued for their productivity and usefulness, like the tragic loneliness that is often the fate of very elderly, for example. Moreover, perhaps one of the most distressing aspects of the pandemic was the way in which our relationships with others changed when our solitude was negotiated and controlled for us by sets of rules and government laws and edicts. Many were forced into isolation, which created a sense of loneliness.

  • 6 Stephen King, The Stand, (New York: Doubleday, 1978).
  • 7 Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale (Toronto, McClelland & Stewart, 1985).
  • 8 Ricco, “Isolation, Loneliness, Solitude,” 165-166.

6The last few years of the COVID epidemic have felt surreal for many, like we have been living in a science fiction work, like Stephen King’s The Stand,6 or one with a tyrannical government and a dystopia, something like Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale.7 And in his work, Ricco points out the tyranny in the ways that governments have regulated the space between us. Basing his ideas upon those of Hannah Arendt, he links it to a form of totalitarianism: “Against conventional understanding, it is the law, according to Arendt, that totalitarianism exploits, and by which it destroys the space between people.”8 Yet he also notes that people found new ways to negotiate their solitude and to interact, even as physical isolation was imposed upon them, and that the pandemic also brought people together, even if the way in which it happened was due to the tyranny that also kept them apart.

7In the name of the pandemic, freedom was often given up willingly by individuals while governments—who, in a neo-liberal context, are more interested in people’s productivity than their humanity—dictated the space between them. After reading Ricco’s works or hearing him talk, it is difficult to consider the concept of “social distancing,” or a forced separation between us, in as positive a manner as it is touted in the news media. As Ricco indicates,

  • 9 Ricco, “Isolation, Loneliness, Solitude,” 165.

Shared separation is not only the zone of ethical sociality; it is also the space of freedom. Free, that is, to move, and to do so in a space that is never wholly mine, yours, nor ours to claim. Instead, it is space that is left open, in-appropriable and to be decided—not once and for all but with each experience between.9

8The pandemic gave us time to reflect on the fickleness and finitude of time, and while Ricco’s ideas are rooted in grieving, loss and death, they are not completely tenebrous, because there is also hope, and the beauty and the pleasure that can be found in the time that remains, especially for those of us fortunate enough to have the freedom to manage that time.

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Notes

1 John Paul Ricco, The Decision Between Us: Art and Ethics in the Time of Scenes (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2014).

2 John Paul Ricco, The Logic of the Lure (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002).

3 John Paul Ricco, “Isolation, Loneliness, Solitude: The COVID-19 Pandemic Has Brought Us Too Close Together,” TOPIA: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies 41 (Fall 2020): 164-172.

4 Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five (New York: Delacorte, 1969).

5 Gabriel García Márquez, Love in the Time of Cholera (New York City: Alfred A. Knopf, 1985).

6 Stephen King, The Stand, (New York: Doubleday, 1978).

7 Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale (Toronto, McClelland & Stewart, 1985).

8 Ricco, “Isolation, Loneliness, Solitude,” 165-166.

9 Ricco, “Isolation, Loneliness, Solitude,” 165.

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References

Electronic reference

Anne Sweet Fédé, “Solitude and Things in the Time that Remains – A talk by John Paul Ricco ”InMedia [Online], 10 | 2025, Online since 15 May 2025, connection on 17 July 2025. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/inmedia/3271; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/145d8

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About the author

Anne Sweet Fédé

Anne Sweet Fédé holds a Master of Arts from Columbia University, and a doctorate from the Université Sorbonne Nouvelle. She is a lecturer in American Civilization and Cinema Studies at the Institut Catholique de Paris, and a contributing editor and member of the editorial board of MAI: Feminism and Visual Culture. Her doctoral research examined the cultural and commercial phenomenon of Girl Power that promoted media products featuring empowered women to young media consumers. In her recent research, she has branched out and begun examining questions of TV addiction, transmedia, fan cultures, intersectionality and fourth-wave feminism.

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