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ABSTRACT
Wounds teach us what we were vulnerable to and what vulnerabilities we may yet bear. But wounds are often met with doubt and disbelief, suggesting that their lessons may be hard to learn. Through an analysis of advocacy movements to believe victims of sexual assault set in conversation with Caravaggio’s Incredulity of Thomas, this paper argues for an understanding of vulnerability as part of a process of learning from wounds that is sometimes marked by emotional incredulity, an expression of doubt or denial of what one knows to be true because of the way its realization feels. Emotional incredulity in these circumstances is not a denial of vulnerability that pretends to mastery, but one that expresses the challenge of learning, together, how much we do not know of ourselves.
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Notes
1 Butler, Precarious Life and Cavarero, Horrorism: Naming Contemporary Violence.
2 Ibid, 19.
3 Ibid, 29.
4 I use “wounds” here in a broad sense, following the custom of recent discussions of vulnerability that emphasize the derivation of the word “vulnerability” from the Latin vulnus, the wound. Wounds are most strictly lacerations and other cuts, punctures, and impacts on the body from outside the skin that penetrate its boundaries. I will use the term here to include other forms of penetration, permeation, and impact of generally harmful kinds, including mental and emotional wounds.
5 Spinoza, Ethics: On the Correction of Understanding, 87. Cited in Seigworth Gregory and Gregg, “An Inventory of Shimmers,” 3. This version of the line is most common in discussions of affect theory, though it obscures some of the concerns of the original context with respect to being “taught by experience” as an “extension” of nature. Consider, for example, RHM Elwes’s translation: “However, no one has hitherto laid down the limits to the powers of the body, that is, no one has yet been taught by experience what the body can accomplish solely by the laws of nature, in so far as she is regarded as an extension. No one hitherto has gained such an accurate knowledge of the bodily mechanism, that he can explain all its functions … The body can by the sole laws of its nature do many things which the mind wonders at.” Spinoza, Ethics, RHM Elwes, trans., Project Guttenberg edition.
6 I borrow the language of process with respect to Spinoza and affect theory from Massumi, Parables for the Virtual. With reference to Deleuze’s use of Spinoza, see Massumi, A User’s Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia.
7 Ibid., 40.
8 Ibid., 41.
9 Ibid., 20.
10 Cavarero, Inclinations.
11 Cavarero, Horrorism, 20 and Butler, 20.
12 For a more detailed analysis of the entanglement of ethics and ontology in vulnerability, see Murphy, “Corporeal Vulnerability and the New Humanism,”.
13 Cavarero, Horrorism, 20.
14 Judith Butler, “Rethinking vulnerability and resistance,” 53.
15 See the distinction between “precarity” and “precariousness” in Frames of War, 25.
16 Butler, Precarious Life, 19.
17 Ibid, 23.
18 Ibid, 28.
19 Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself.
20 Ibid., 100.
21 Ibid., 84.
22 Clark and Piño, We Believe You.
23 Valenti and Friedman, Believe Me: How Trusting Women Can Change the World.
24 End Violence Against Women International, “Home,” http://www.startbybelieving.org/ Last accessed 24 october 2021.
25 Ibid., “Resources,” https://www.startbybelieving.org/resources/ Last accessed 24 october 2021.
26 Fricker, Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing.
27 Brodsky, Sexual Justice.
28 The example is representative of the social assumptions both about the genders of victims and perpetrators and the epistemic prejudice against them. Perpetrators and victims are not always “he” and “she,” respectively, and the persistent assumption of male aggression and female victimization is part of the epistemic problem as well. I will use gender-neutral language for victims and perpetrators to recognize that it is not strictly a problem of men hurting women. Many of my interlocutors do not, as they are trying to discuss the social assumptions that emerge with the greater frequency of male perpetration against female victims. Where relevant to the argument in this way, I will follow their example.
29 Brodsky, 134.
30 Ibid. For more on the construction of debates about sexual assault as between victims’ advocates and advocates for the accused, see Grigoriadis, Blurred Lines: Rethinking Sex, Power, and Consent on Campus.
31 See, for example, references throughout the “Start by Believing” campaign to care through comparisons to other caregiving contexts: a doctor saying that he would “start by believing” a person who presents with a stomachache, so he will start by believing a person who presents with a report of sexual violence; a social worker saying she would “start by believing” economic hardship, so she will start by believing sexual violence as well. End Violence Against Women International, http://www.startbybelieving.org/.
32 Levitt, The Objects that Remain.
33 John 20:29, New Revised Standard Version.
34 The composition of the painting was imitated by Rembrandt in The Anatomy Lesson of Doctor Nicolaes Tulp, with Thomas replaced by doctors dissecting a corpse, prodding the flesh of the dead in some pursuit of truth where others might show respect and care by leaving it untouched. Whether with reference to Rembrandt or Caravaggio, it persists as a common composition for portraits of scientists at work, easy to find in photographs on university websites or accompanying newspaper articles about scientific inquiry.
35 Most, Doubting Thomas, Chapter 1.
36 Some might phrase the question as whether Thomas believes in the divinity and resurrection of Christ, not that Christ is divine and stands resurrected before him. The first takes Christ’s divinity and resurrection as the object of belief; the second takes the proposition that Christ is divine and stands resurrected as the object of belief. Which is more appropriate as a matter of theological and scriptural interpretation is beyond the scope of my discussion here. But in the context of Caravaggio’s painting, I find the propositional version of the question more appropriate. Throughout his work, Caravaggio plays with the project of telling stories in paintings by flattening their narratives into something closer to propositions: that Paul is converted (in The Conversion of St. Paul, 1600/1601), that Peter is crucified (in The Crucifixion of St. Peter, 1600). “We may say of these paintings that they are born of a story,” writes Davide Panagia, commenting on Louis Marin’s famous interpretation of the artist, “but these are also paintings about which no story can be told other than its title; both these paintings are committed to announcing an event (a conversion and a crucifixion) without having to recount it.” The announcement, in this context, is a proposition. Here, the primary announcement is Thomas’s incredulity, that Thomas disbelieves. But it seems consistent with Caravaggio’s work to suggest he doesn’t believe another announcement, that Christ is divine and stands resurrected. Panagia, “The Effects of Viewing: Caravaggio, Bacon, and the Ring” (Theory and Event, 10.4, 2007). See also Marin, To Destroy Painting.
37 I am grateful to Molly Farneth for suggesting these clarifications of the concept.
38 Prejudice often shows itself most clearly at this point. Few people listening to the first-person narrative of a sexual assault are learning for the first time that sexual violence is possible at all, as something that can happen in the world. But they are learning that a person they know, a person proximate enough to them in their community to be telling them the story, and perhaps even someone more closely connected to them, has been violated in this way. Disbelief of the kind I’m describing need not be attached to the event in every circumstance but in some set of its particulars: disbelief that it could happen here, to someone I know, to one of my friends, students, patients, colleagues, or neighbours, and likely by someone I know as well, or at least am relatively near.
39 Consider the common, almost proverbial accusation that a victim of sexual assault was “asking for it” because of something they were wearing, their choice to go to a particular party, or their consumption of alcohol. The phrase expresses a broad condemnation of the victim, often on the basis of misogynistic, racist, or classist prejudices about how a certain sort of person should behave, with the implication that they were assaulted because they didn’t behave as they should: that their violation of norms was an invitation to the further violation of them. The distortion of thinking about blame and responsibility in these statements is extreme, and both prejudicial and punitive—an example of what Kate Manne calls “down girl” logic, the working of misogyny as the “enforcement arm” of patriarchy. But it also represents the kind of separation from the victim by the speaker that I’m describing here, especially where the speaker and victim otherwise share a great deal: “They were asking for it [but I know better]”—I know how to follow the norms that this victim violated, and thus protect myself from her fate. For an entry point to the recent history of the phrase, see Harding, Asking for It. See also discussions of this accusation in Doyle, Campus Sex, Campus Security; Manne, Down Girl; and Srinivasan, The Right to Sex.
40 Bersani and Dutiot, Caravaggio’s Secrets, 38.
41 Linn Tonstad has suggested a critique of discussions of vulnerability along these lines, in work in progress presented at the Political Theology Network Winter Workshop, February 2021, held on Zoom.
42 Bersani and Dutoit, 36.
43 Ibid., 38.
44 Ibid.
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Fannie Bialek
Fannie Bialek is an Assistant Professor at the John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics at Washington University in St. Louis.