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Abstract
What, other than being “screwed,” may come of being subjected to something we did not entirely, or even at all, consent to? This essay explores what awaits sexual urges that risk pushing beyond the confines of affirmative consent and into limit consent. Taking up why one might court experiences that chafe against the limit, I suggest that such courting draws on the sexual drive. Via Aulagnier, Laplanche, and Zaltzman I track how the sexual drive may annex traumatic history. These annexations present themselves as traumatic repetitions but may work, at times, to spin compulsive recursions into traumatisms that can incite transformative psychic labor. To probe these ideas more deeply and flesh out the mechanics of why experiences that occur at the border of our consent can have transformative potential, I turn to Jeremy O. Harris's searingly beautiful theatrical work, Slave Play, to propose that pleasure suffered at the especially strained intersection of sexuality and racial trauma may produce traumatisms that dissolve ego structures in growth-inducing ways. While seemingly merely repeating ghastly historical crimes, erotic humiliation and racialized sexual abjection, work here to yield and make overatures to expanded psychic freedoms. Because there is no return to a pre-traumatic state for traumatized subjects, I propose that we become less preoccupied as analysts with what can be done about trauma and more curious about what can be done with trauma shifting, thus, psychoanalysis’s attitude towards trauma from traumatophobia to traumatophilia.
Notes
Notes
2 This awkward-sounding term refers to the assignation of gender at birth on the basis of observed genitals. It is widely used in trans studies to mark the fact that such assignments presume that gender is determined by anatomical sex when, in fact, only time will tell if the child’s gender identity will match or not that initial reading.
3 I am playing here with Stockton’s felicitous description of the queer child as growing up sideways (2009).
4 Briefly, the word “lesbian” does not just index the gender of one’s erotic object choice but denotes a homology between the genders of the person desiring and the person desired. In that sense, sexual orientation is not only about one’s desire but also about one's own gender identity. For more on the mechanics of such interpellations, see Saketopoulou, Citation2015a.
5 The play ran at the New York Theatre Workshop between November 19, 2018 to January 13, 2019 and, subsequently, on Broadway where it ran from October 6, 2019 to January 19, 2020.
6 On most Sundays throughout the play’s run, the production held open-ended conversations between members of the cast/production and anyone interested in attending them. While new people joined the conversation at each meeting, a core group of theatergoers soon emerged that returned to the space week after week to revisit, with the cast and with each other, some of the most bracing parts of the play.
7 To clarify, the notion of the “primal” does not refer to what comes chronologically first. While indeed, the primal “is present from the beginning, concretely, at the origin of the human being, in other words: in the nursling” for Laplanche it is “what is ineluctable, what is truly independent of all contingencies, even the most general…The primal situation is the confrontation of the newborn—of the infant, the infans in the etymological sense of the term: the one who does not yet speak—with the adult world” (1987, pp. 101-102).
8 We know, of course, that this can also occur, e.g. when the caretaker suffers from pathology or is traumatized. In this case, we’d be closer to what Aulagnier described as secondary violence, and to what Laplanche called intromission. Secondary violence and intromission are traumatic because they impose meaning, prohibiting the infant from carrying out its independent, creative meaning-making work.
9 In that respect, while for Laplanche, it is the term intromission that denotes violence insofar as intromission imposes meaning (Laplanche Citation1987, Citation2011; House Citation2017), I maintain that, of the two, it is actually implantation that is more durably traumatic. This is because implantation is an ordinary, routine and non-contingent occurrence. Intromission has a chance of being identified as being of foreign origin, as having infiltrated us from the outside whereas implantations, because they are constitutive to the sense of self, can never be marked as having invaded the subject from without.
10 A world without discourse, myths, or symbols is unimaginable. If, in some imaginary universe it existed, it would be catastrophic. Not only would it not provide greater translational freedom but, on the contrary, it would deprive the psyche of the much-needed tools for meaning-making.
11 For a fuller review of Laplanche’s ideas, see Scarfone’s (Citation2013) and Fletcher’s (Citation2007) excellent introductions.
12 Early psychoanalysts exploring the polymorphous pleasures of urethral eroticism reached varied insights that would take us too far afield to explore here (see Coriat Citation1924; Freud Citation1905, 1932; Hitschmann Citation1923). My focus will be on mining Dean’s vignette for what it can tell us about sexuality that operates against one’s consent but in accord with one’s desire.
13 Let’s not forget also that the absence of consent is not isomorphic with a violation of consent.
14 Passibility’s ties to Ghent’s concept of surrender (Citation1990), have been explored elsewhere (Saketopoulou Citation2019).
15 For Freud, it is psychic trauma that is of interest to psychoanalysis in its distinctive quality of the après-coup (House Citation2017). I take this into account shortly.
16 We know (and Freud likely did too) that The Project’s physiological models are mistaken. Nevertheless, the insights yielded in The Project, later reworked in The Interpretation of Dreams, are foundational to Freudian metapsychology (Laplanche Citation1987).
17 The ego, of course, does not offer or withhold consent. But I hope that the reader will permit me this anthropomorphizing locution for reasons that will become clear later.
18 I have selected the noun form to draw it apart from its more ordinary use as a verb (e.g. “x overwhelmed me”) or adjective (e.g. “I found y overwhelming”).
19 The reader will recognize here the allusion to Freud’s definition of the drive: “. . . the psychical representative of the stimuli originating from within the organism and reaching the mind, as a measure of the demand made upon the mind for work in consequence of its connection with the body” (Citation1915, p. 122). I use drive throughout this paper in its meaning as a demand for work as opposed to its alternate usage as the drive being the fuel of psychic operations.
20 I am grateful to my friend and colleague Dominique Scarfone for alerting me to this passage, and to Jonathan House for generously sharing with me the original French text, which has yet to appear in English.
21 I don’t have space here to explain my selective use of her concept of the anarchic, which Zaltzman conceived as a drive unto itself but which I see as more related to Laplache’s sexual drives of life and death (2011). Such a project awaits a forthcoming paper.
22 Zaltzman’s notion of a “taste for change” shouldn’t be confused with neoliberal ruses and capitalist plugs that advertise the consumption of new experiences sold to us as expansive and life-changing. Zaltzman refers to something much more nuanced than that: to changes that may take us to places we didn’t anticipate when choosing a particular path. These changes are not accretive and supportive of what we already know, and are not of the sort promoted by campaigns that seek to buttress our narcissism (e.g. “be your best self,” etc.). They are, rather, about experiences that open us up to the surprising and to the strange in ourselves.
23 Ferro (Citation2005) and Oldoini (Citation2019) have also used the concept of traumatophilia, but with a differently emphasis. I am granting here a more enlarged scope to traumatophilia in that I see it as working to enliven overly rigid ego structures, instead of repairing intromitted traumata.
24 I have explained elsewhere my commitment to preserving the historically discrediting appellation perversion. Briefly, I use it in a non-pathologizing way and granting it its original, ordinary status as marking polymorphous sexuality that attaches itself to objects opportunistically and which is not organized hetero-procreatively (Freud Citation1905; Van Haute and Westerink Citation2016, Citation2017). I like the term because it conveys an intensity and an edge the economic implications of which are not captured by benign-sounding descriptors like “non-normative sexual practices,” “sexual play,” and “atypical sexual practices” (Dimen Citation2001, Citation2017; Stein Citation1998, Citation2008). I remain strongly opposed to these dignified and respectable phrases because they domesticate the otherness in perversion by registering “erotic strangeness but then [promptly] repress[ing it] via normalization” (Dean Citationforthcoming). For further explanations and important qualifiers, see Saketopoulou Citation2014, Citation2019.
25 See Lyng (Citation2004) for discussions of how extreme sports, art, use of psychedelics, and other non-sexual activities may also be such pathways; see also Newmahr 2010.
26 Samuel Delany’s work is a particularly good illustration of work that rides the sexual drive not to jar or disturb (Citation1973, Citation1974), but to describe, instead, the plenitudes of the sexual (see Jeremy O. Harris’s interview of Samuel Delany in Fernandez, Citation2020).
27 “The danger” Dean continues “lies in how progressive politics encourages us to understand sexuality as a vital component of identity, thereby allowing us conveniently to forget . . .[that u]nderstood psychoanalytically rather than psychologically, sexuality remains alien to selfhood: sex is not the expression of identity but its undoing. Identity politics is no friends of psychoanalysis” (2014, p. 270).
28 This, again, emphasizes that limit consent is not about inviting violation but about a loosening of one’s defenses so that one can be transported to an elsewhere.
29 It is one of Whiteness’s operations to understand everything as self-referential, but this play is not aimed at educating White people. Its goal is to problematize collective living in the shadow of America’s original sin, chattel slavery (Dershowitz Citation2019). This lack of address is not specific to Slave Play; the aesthetic is not addressed to us but to an other (Lyotard Citation2002). While the artist may have an imaginary interlocutor in mind, the work is not intended to them personally. It is the us, the audience, that imagines that the message is specifically addressed to, and crafted for, us.
30 See Frank, Romano and Grady 2010; MacDonald Citation2019 for rare exceptions.
31 The implication that Black men are well-hung and the historical fact that Black men were “hung from trees for being, well, hung” (Poulson-Bryant 2005, p. 57) highlights that racialized violence is both brutal and erotic at the same time. While on the level of the ego, being reduced to a part object can feel offensive and injurious, in the domain of the sexual, it can be an erotic elixir, arousing enthralling appetites (Dean Citation2008; Dimen 2015).
32 Dustin’s mocking monologue is one of the most hilarious parts of the play. And as we, the audience, laugh, we are implicitly shown, and asked to (re)consider, what precisely we are laughing at when we unselfconsciously join in the hilarity of a “proper” Blackness from which Gary ostensibly deviates.
33 From “lynching” to “calling the police” on “suspicious” Black people, Dustin’s threat unmistakably parallels the present, referencing how easily White (and White-passing) people can endanger Black people’s lives by involving law enforcement.
34 The lack of an intermission did not, of course, prevent it: offended theatergoers still got up and left during the First Act, and did so broadcasting their displeasure by passive aggressively gathering their belongings as if in slow motion before heading for the exit (see Daniels Citation2019; Harris Citation2019). For the most part, audience members who walked away were Black, a point to which I return later in this essay.
35 In kinky communities, race play is considered to belong to a subgenre called edgeplay. The term edgeplay is used to denote sexualities that are risky and that court forces of sexuality and of memory, the force and impact of which cannot be anticipated ahead of time.
36 The white members of the audience are implicated in this dynamic too; “[n]o one has forced anyone to see a play called Slave Play” O’Hara points out, “[it’s] your own interest, your own curiosity, other things bring you through the door” (Kai Citation2019). Being told “you, after all, came to watch” is a searing indictment. And with the back wall of the set a giant mirror, we watch ourselves watch, our faces reflected from the stage, implying that we, too, are part of this slave play, as much as we might prefer to think otherwise.
37 A safeword is a code word agreed upon in advance by both parties to signal one’s need to stop a BDSM scene. Harris’s choice of “Starbucks” as the play’s safeword deserves an essay unto itself.
38 I borrow this phrase (“The shock of Gary Fisher) from Reid-Pharr’s (Citation2001) chapter of the same title.
39 While Slave Play was playing on Broadway, the playwright wrote, produced, and performed in a new play under the handle @GaryXXXFisher. That play, Black Exhibition, turned the heat even higher than Slave Play and included Harris reading excerpts from Gary Fisher’s work (1996).
40 Here are two characteristic excerpts: “I want to be a slave, a sex slave, a slave underneath another man’s (… a big white man) power. I want to relinquish responsibility and at the same time give up all power” (1996, p. 187), and; “[s]exually I want (desire, fantasize myself) to be/being used. I want to be a slave, sexually and perhaps otherwise” (p. 199).
41 Second-wave feminism struggled with a form of this question as well, heatedly debating in the 1980s desires that involved one’s own sexual subjugation (Vance Citation1992). Why would a lesbian, for instance, engage in a butch-femme relationship or participate in sexual sadomasochism when these dynamics, the argument went, draw on the inequality of gender roles mapped onto patriarchal cruelties? See Musser Citation2014 for a detailed accounting of these debates.
42 Jennifer Nash’s exquisitely careful and beautiful work on this precise tension point should be on our psychoanalytic radar (Citation2014).
45 I have argued throughout this essay that a liberal form of agency (e.g. affirmative consent), that is unconstrained by trauma, is impossible for any subject since the unconscious is constituted to begin with through the trauma of implantation (Laplanche Citation1987). This is even more pronounced for subjects who have also toiled through historical and structural trauma; Musser has aptly called such fantasies of liberal agency “white fantasies” to mark how they are always already racialized (Citation2016).
46 Protesting too much, thus, Jim stumbles against another racial stereotype. A psychoanalytically informed theatergoer sees this coming.
47 See Skerrett (Citation2011ab) and Saketopoulou (Citation2011) for a discussion regarding sexuality, dignity, and consent.
48 This is what Scarfone (Citation2015b) calls the unpast.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Avgi Saketopoulou
Avgi Saketopoulou trained at the NYU Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis, where she now teaches. She is also on faculty at the William Allanson White Institute, the New York Psychoanalytic Institute, the Stephen Mitchell Relational Center and the National Institute for the Psychotherapies and serves on the editorial boards of several analytic journals. The recipient of several awards, including the annual essay prize from JAPA, the Ruth Stein prize, and the Ralph Roughton Award, she is currently at work on a solicited book manuscript provisionally titled: “Overwhelm: Risking Sexuality Beyond Consent.”