The politics and philosophy of waiting: a conversation with Laura Salisbury

This conversation between Asijit Datta and Laura Salisbury explores the complex politics, philosophy and temporality of waiting. The discussion investigates how waiting is not simply a passive act, but is loaded with power relations, and class-caste structures. Framed through the lenses of psychoanalysis, medical humanities, phenomenology and critical theory, Salisbury reads waiting as a historically and socially embedded phenomenon that intersects with events of care, violence, inequality and vulnerability. Salisbury draws on thinkers such as Bergson, Heidegger, Minkowski, and Bion to explicate how waiting disrupts linear, reified notions of time, exposing a subjective temporality that is usually marked by anxiety, endurance and dread. The dialogue suggests how waiting could be reimagined as an ethical and political practice that challenges controlling narratives around productivity, speed and immediacy. Salisbury’s primary emphasis is on healthcare systems, where waiting entails both care and neglect – a zone of attentiveness and simultaneously a mechanism of systemic violence (especially when care is delayed or denied). This exchange focuses on the affective and existential registers of waiting, from the everyday to the catastrophic, and proposes ‘waiting with’, rather than ‘waiting for’ under the Anthropocene.