Vertiginous Translations: A Review of Sexuality Beyond Consent: Risk, Race, Traumatophilia by Avgi Saketopoulou

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Notes

¹ Laplanche critiques Freud’s conversion of sexuality into Eros and Thanatos, arguing that in this move Freud removes aggression, being-toward-death, and opacity from the sexual (70).

² Galit Atlas writes eloquently of the enigmatic in contrast to pragmatic modes of desire, longing, and loss in The Enigma of Desire: Sex, Longing and Belonging in Psychoanalysis.

³ While not named, there is something of Emmanuel Levinas’s explication of the ethics implicit in the face-to-face encounter, the demand put on us by the other, and as Judith Butler develops further, the ethical imperative to attend to the precariousness of the other on oneself. Levinas’s initial ethical approach to phenomenology faltered in the wake of WWII, which is to say that war casts a long shadow on the coming into being of psychoanalysis and phenomenological relation. See Levinas, “Meaning and Sense” and Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence.

⁴ Citation from Berlant and Edelman’s Sex, or the Unbearable. Berlant and Edelman align with Saketopoulou in their distinction between coming undone and the “self-shattering” that Leo Bersani will describe in sexual becoming. Self-shattering is, importantly, not the same as ego shattering.

⁵ Writing with Ann Pellegrini in Gender without Identity, they argue for a rigorous reckoning with interdisciplinarity, interrogating how psychoanalysis makes “contact” with other disciplinary structures and ideas. Never simply an application or “harmonious relation,” these encounters require that “psychoanalysis will need to let itself be screwed, even to find pleasure in how it can get screwed by such contact” (2023, xvi).

⁶ Refuting Hegel’s phenomenological teleology, Freud’s concept of nachtraglichkeit comes into being in the shadow of Darwin’s evolutionary conception of time and Henri Bergson’s explication of duration. Bergson’s diagram of duration, a cone holding fragments of past balanced yet moving along a plane, imaged the contact between past fragments and a present plane of experience as exposure to a future, distinct from Freud’s temporal unconscious yet related. Later, Laplanche, following Lacan, will reject Bergson. Freud’s economic language owes a debt to Marx, the inveterate gambler, specifically his understanding of history as a series of structural ruptures within the present economy. Another genealogical orientation of time draws on Foucault’s critique of history and his understanding of genealogy as an analysis of dissent which proliferates in the queer thinking of Jack Halberstam’s in a Queer Time and Place; Carolyn Dinshaw’s concept of “touch across time” in Getting Medieval; Elizabeth Grosz’s Space, Time and Perversion; and Gayatri Spivak’s differentiation between “Time and Timing: Law and History,” to begin a very, very incomplete list.

⁷ Of late, much attention is paid to the somatic in relation to trauma. Bessel van der Kolk’s The Body Keeps Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma is one seminal example that has inspired much thinking and practice. Importantly, while Saketopoulou’s patients engage explicitly with the physicality of traumatisms, she and they approach their somatizing from a different perspective. Again, hers is less a developmental or pathological model or narrated in relation to specific historic events.

⁸ She moves against the compulsiveness of Freud’s repetition, where the cryptic past persists again and again in the present until the patient, through the transference with the analyst, might remember otherwise and move into the symbolic, thus aspiring to mastery of past experience. Extending Freud’s thinking into the queer possibilities of repetition, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick offers a reparative, even pleasurable turn. Saketopoulou also notes Bruce Reis’s contributions on creative repetitions (148).

⁹ A claim that could also be extended to writers Samuel Delany and Kathy Acker.

¹⁰ Variations on Themes from Lost and Found: Scenes from a Life and other works by John Bernd was conceived by Ishmael Houston-Jones; co-created by Ishmael Houston-Jones and Miguel Gutierrez based on choreography, texts, drawings by John Bernd; music by Nick Hallett, based on compositions by John Bernd; performed by Raha Behnam, Toni Carlson, Estado Flotante, Charles Gowin, Kris Lee, Johnnie Cruise Mercer, Alex Rodabaugh. I witnessed the performance at Danspace Project at St. Mark’s Church, 3 June 2023 and in 2016.

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Jenn Joy

Jenn Joy, PhD, is an Analytic Candidate at the National Institute for the Psychotherapies (NIP). She has taught at Yale Graduate School of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Pratt, and Parsons/The New School. She is the founder of collective address, a choreographic research space in Brooklyn, and jennjoygallery in San Francisco. She is the author of The Choreographic (MIT Press, 2014); published nonstopping (2023) and visions (2018); and edited Planes of Composition: Dance, Theory and the Global (Seagull Press, 2009) and Diary of an Image and JUDSONOW with Danspace Project, among other projects. Jenn is a Contributing Editor in Performance for BOMB magazine, Assistant Editor for Psychoanalytic Perspectives, and on the Board of Triple Canopy.