Fissures in Time: An Essay on Feverish Existence, Genuine Expression, and Healing

This essay attempts to articulate the temporal character of existential distress and anxiety (feverishness). With the help of phenomenological and existential thinkers like Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Martin Heidegger, and Jean-Paul Sartre, I present a phenomenological account of temporalization, which understands time as stretching-open of a meaningful world. I demonstrate how, in feverishness, our ordinary experience of time is disrupted as time over-stretches or collapses on itself, and existence gets stuck. Further, I show what kind of expressions and actions allow an existence to come to terms with itself and move beyond its stuckness. These genuine existential expressions bring an existence beyond itself, and open up to new possibilities as they re-organize one’s existence in a creative manner. Finally, I give an account of healing, which emerges out of genuine expressions, and show what kind of affective conditions need to be re-established for healing to take place.