The Annihilations of “Knowing” Moral Collapse: A Discussion of Papers by Deborah Sherman, Sandy Silverman, and Malin Fors

ABSTRACT

This discussion expands on the themes of annihilation and what Apprey terms the “no place” of racial- and gender-based violence. Taking examples from their clinical work, all of the authors here reflect on the terror that was instilled in the wake of the White supremacist march in Charlottesville, Virginia. The terror was not just sparked by the event but by the response of President Trump declaring there were “good people on both sides,” that is, that White supremacists were “good” people. This shift indicates a profound sense of institutional betrayal that, as Malin Fors’s paper points out, has been central to the United States since the beginning. Integrating ideas from critical race theory, this discussion asks whether psychoanalysis can function to create what Best and Hartman, reflecting on the U.S. history of slavery, termed a “fugitive justice” in the face of what this author considers to be, a foretelling of human extinction.

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Notes on contributors

Katie Gentile

Katie Gentile, PhD, is a professor of gender studies and Chair of the Department of Interdisciplinary Studies at John Jay College of Criminal Justice (City University of New York). She is the author of Creating Bodies: Eating Disorders as Self-Destructive Survival and the 2017 Gradiva Award-winning The Business of Being Made: The Temporalities of Reproductive Technologies, in Psychoanalysis and Cultures, both from Routledge. She is the editor of the Routledge book series Genders & Sexualities in Minds & Culture and a co-editor of the journal Studies in Gender and Sexuality. She is on the faculty of New York University’s Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis and the Critical Social Psychology program at the CUNY Graduate Center.