Caste and Ungrievable Lives: A Conversation Ethical and Clinical

ABSTRACT

Adrienne Harris references two important books from 2020, Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste, and Judith Butler’s The Power of Nonviolence. Here we bring them into conversation, comparing Wilkerson’s reframing of systemic racism as a rigid caste system with Butler’s advocacy of radical equality imagined as antidote to assumptions and practices that perpetuate abandoning lives considered ungrievable.

KEYWORDS:

• Caste
• ungrievability
• violence
• nonviolence
• purity

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Donna M. Orange

Educated in philosophy, clinical psychology and psychoanalysis, Donna M. Orange, Ph.D., Psy.D., teaches at NYU Postdoc (New York); IPSS (Institute for the Psychoanalytic Study of Subjectivity, New York); and in private study groups. She also offers clinical consultation/supervision in these institutes and beyond. Recent books are Thinking for Clinicians: Philosophical Resources for Contemporary Psychoanalysis and the Humanistic Psychotherapies (2010), The Suffering Stranger: Hermeneutics for Everyday Clinical Practice (2011), Nourishing the Inner Life of Clinicians and Humanitarians: The Ethical Turn in Psychoanalysis (2016), Climate Crisis, Psychoanalysis, and Radical Ethics (2016), and most recently, Psychoanalysis, History, and Radical Ethics: Learning to Hear (2020).