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Susceptibilities: Toward a Cultural Politics of Consent under Erasure
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Susceptibilities: Toward a Cultural Politics of Consent under Erasure

A special issue of Philosophies (ISSN 2409-9287).

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (30 August 2023) | Viewed by 11734

Special Issue Editor

Prof. Dr. Karyn Ball

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
Faculty of Arts, English & Film Studies Department, University of Alberta, Edmonton, AB, Canada
Interests: trauma, violence, memory, and affect studies; critical theory; psychoanalysis; narratology

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

In the late twentieth-century, post-Marxist thinkers influenced by the linguistic turn, anti-liberal critiques of the humanist subject advanced by Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger, and the psychoanalytic emphasis on the unconscious have trenchantly countered a Western fetishism of sovereignty, continuity, coherence, presence, and self-transparency in their engagements with the intellectual lineages that comprise a “history” of consciousness. To the extent that some models of trauma based on Sigmund Freud’s canonical Beyond the Pleasure Principle assume that “working through” post-traumatic affects entails converting a passively experienced event into an active and conscious symbolization that integrates and, thereby, defuses the traumatic “charge” or cathexis, this Special Issue will explore depictions or scenes of susceptibility (traumatic or otherwise) that frustrate an over-emphasis in mainstream news and confessional accounts on conscious agency and resiliency. Contributors to this Special Issue will share an interest in reflecting on how narrations and visualizations of trauma, grievance, and injustice project or fail to project a coherent self-image back into situations where ambivalence, passivity, and confusion influenced action or inaction. Without necessarily rehearsing older critiques of the conception of ideology as false consciousness, contributors to this Special Issue will further them by considering susceptibility as a regression of intention, or, more precisely, of an “intentional consciousness” that wills or consents, as it complicates our understandings of situations that eventuate in a diagnosis of trauma or dysphoria, and/or precipitate grievance politics. 

Prof. Dr. Karyn Ball
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a double-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Philosophies is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Keywords

  • susceptibility
  • consent fetishism
  • intentional consciousness
  • sovereignty
  • trauma
  • dysphoria
  • grievance
  • passivity
  • am-bivalence
  • working through

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Published Papers (8 papers)

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Editorial

Jump to: Research

16 pages, 289 KiB  
Editorial
Introducing Susceptibilities: Toward a Cultural Politics of Consent Under Erasure
by Karyn Ball
Philosophies 2024, 9(6), 184; https://doi.org/10.3390/philosophies9060184 - 5 Dec 2024
Viewed by 599
Abstract
The broad aim of this introduction to a Special Issue on “Susceptibilities: Toward a Cultural Politics of Consent under Erasure” is to broach key questions and research directions that illuminate contemporary public debates about the conditions and limits of conscious intention (and consent [...] Read more.
The broad aim of this introduction to a Special Issue on “Susceptibilities: Toward a Cultural Politics of Consent under Erasure” is to broach key questions and research directions that illuminate contemporary public debates about the conditions and limits of conscious intention (and consent as a byproduct thereof), which is typically treated as a “property” that can be “underdeveloped”, “given”, or “taken away”. In keeping with Jacques Derrida’s repudiation of the metaphysics of presence, the perspective animating this essay is that the psychoanalytic standpoint of the unconscious deconstructs the epistemological privilege of determinacy, consistency, and wholeness in treatments of intentional consciousness. Given Jean Laplanche’s attention to the residues of coherent ego fetishism in Sigmund Freud’s oeuvre, the former’s critique of self-sovereignty as evinced in his theorization of the “enigmatic signifier”, “primal repression”, and “afterwardsness” assumes a pivotal role in the analysis of how writers as represented here by Sarah Polley in Run Towards the Danger narrate the vicissitudes of their traumatic memories of sexual assault. Ultimately, then, the implications of this analysis will carry over to brief discussions of this Special Issue’s seven contributions by Melissa Wright, Karen McFadyen, J. Asher Godley, Madeleine Reddon, Gautam Basu Thakur, Robert Hughes, and Rebecca Saunders. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Susceptibilities: Toward a Cultural Politics of Consent under Erasure)

Research

Jump to: Editorial

16 pages, 314 KiB  
Article
Susceptibility and Resilience, a Fig Tree and a Scream
by Rebecca Saunders
Philosophies 2024, 9(3), 68; https://doi.org/10.3390/philosophies9030068 - 14 May 2024
Viewed by 1348
Abstract
Analyzing two key figures in Elif Shafak’s novel The Island of Missing Trees—a schoolgirl’s scream and a narrating fig tree—this essay analyzes the intersection between susceptibility and resilience, particularly as these terms are developed in psychology, trauma studies, and ecology. I argue [...] Read more.
Analyzing two key figures in Elif Shafak’s novel The Island of Missing Trees—a schoolgirl’s scream and a narrating fig tree—this essay analyzes the intersection between susceptibility and resilience, particularly as these terms are developed in psychology, trauma studies, and ecology. I argue that the novel’s resonant scream critiques the discourse of psychological resilience on multiple counts: its inadequacy as a response to complex trauma, its focus on autonomous individuals, its assumption that responsibility for resilience rests on victims rather than perpetrators of harm, its construction of a “resistance imperative” and its disavowal of the inequalities in access to resilience-building resources. By contrast, the novel’s fig tree, I contend, exemplifies an ecological model of resilience rooted in a recognition of the interdependence of the multiple and diverse organisms that comprise an ecosystem, and of susceptibility as an advantageous suite of capacities that are crucial to resilience. These contrasting conceptions of resilience lead me to advocate for a politics of susceptibility, an eco-psychosocial politics based on the recognition that individuals cannot become resilient on their own, through their own volition, intention, or “self-efficacy”, and that focuses instead on building systemic and sustainable forms of resilience inclusive of the diverse subjects that comprise a community, society or ecosystem; that, rather than fetishizing independence, liberty and rights, fortifies interdependence and reinforces mutual responsibilities; and that rather than exploiting susceptibility as a weakness, nurtures it as the soul of resilience itself. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Susceptibilities: Toward a Cultural Politics of Consent under Erasure)
11 pages, 236 KiB  
Article
Susceptibility and Cixous’s Self-Strange Subject
by Robert Hughes
Philosophies 2024, 9(3), 65; https://doi.org/10.3390/philosophies9030065 - 6 May 2024
Viewed by 1280
Abstract
This essay reads a short narrative, “Savoir” by Hélène Cixous, to describe susceptibility as a problem organized around two lines of impingement: between subject and world and between consciousness and the wayward impulses of interior life. The young girl in Cixous’s text suffers [...] Read more.
This essay reads a short narrative, “Savoir” by Hélène Cixous, to describe susceptibility as a problem organized around two lines of impingement: between subject and world and between consciousness and the wayward impulses of interior life. The young girl in Cixous’s text suffers a moment of disorientation and distress one misty morning and, against presumptions of inviolability and ideals of subjective consistency, this unhappy event comes to resonate with her disappointed trust in the generosity of the world, her anxious sense of betrayal with respect to those who ought to protect her and her insecurity about her own role in this complex of associations. The frame of susceptibility thus opens up a space for Cixous’s reader and this essay to think the subject in her inconsistency and self-strangeness. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Susceptibilities: Toward a Cultural Politics of Consent under Erasure)
16 pages, 235 KiB  
Article
Burning “Between Two Fires”: The Individual under Erasure in Hassan Blasim’s “The Nightmares of Carlos Fuentes”
by Gautam Basu Thakur
Philosophies 2024, 9(3), 56; https://doi.org/10.3390/philosophies9030056 - 26 Apr 2024
Viewed by 1242
Abstract
This essay uses Freudian–Lacanian psychoanalytic theory to interpret Hassan Blasim’s short story “The Nightmares of Carlos Fuentes”. Blasim’s story depicts the psychological struggles of an Iraqi emigrant relating to his embattled sense of belonging in a Dutch society due to the recurrent nightmares [...] Read more.
This essay uses Freudian–Lacanian psychoanalytic theory to interpret Hassan Blasim’s short story “The Nightmares of Carlos Fuentes”. Blasim’s story depicts the psychological struggles of an Iraqi emigrant relating to his embattled sense of belonging in a Dutch society due to the recurrent nightmares of his “traumatic” past. It challenges his assimilationist fantasies. I develop Lacan’s idea of ontological lack as a structural susceptibility that is exacerbated by actual experiences of trauma to underline how racialized refugees from the war-torn global South are doubly vulnerable to experiencing subjective dehiscence between their efforts to forget past war traumas and the challenges of assimilating into (white) host nations. This essay uses Blasim’s story to illustrate a serious psychological issue experienced by racialized minority subjects in white/European host countries. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Susceptibilities: Toward a Cultural Politics of Consent under Erasure)
14 pages, 277 KiB  
Article
Art after the Untreatable: Psychoanalysis, Sexual Violence, and the Ethics of Looking in Michaela Coel’s I May Destroy You
by Melissa A. Wright
Philosophies 2024, 9(3), 53; https://doi.org/10.3390/philosophies9030053 - 23 Apr 2024
Viewed by 1318
Abstract
This essay brings psychoanalytic theory on trauma together with film and television criticism on rape narrative in an analysis of Michael Coel’s 2020 series I May Destroy You. Beyond the limited carceral framework of the police procedural, which dislocates the act of [...] Read more.
This essay brings psychoanalytic theory on trauma together with film and television criticism on rape narrative in an analysis of Michael Coel’s 2020 series I May Destroy You. Beyond the limited carceral framework of the police procedural, which dislocates the act of violence from the survivor’s history and context, Coel’s polyvalent, looping narrative metabolizes rape television’s forms and genres in order to stage and restage both trauma and genre again and anew. Contesting common conceptions of vulnerability and susceptibility that prefigure a violent breach of autonomy, Coel’s series and her interviews about it invite an ethics of looking that embraces a curiosity in the unknowable and untreatable kernel of subjective experience and defies and resists a policing of the survivor’s thoughts and emotions. By emphasizing and exploring what psychoanalysis calls the “afterwardness” of trauma, Coel foregrounds her main character’s subjectivity prior to her victimization, widens the sphere of consequence beyond the victim and criminal justice system to the survivor’s larger community, and entreats that community to preserve a space for her to look and look again at everything, without judgment. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Susceptibilities: Toward a Cultural Politics of Consent under Erasure)
19 pages, 274 KiB  
Article
The Enjoyment of Being Had: The Aesthetics of Masquerade in The Confidence-Man
by J. Asher Godley
Philosophies 2024, 9(2), 51; https://doi.org/10.3390/philosophies9020051 - 15 Apr 2024
Viewed by 1805
Abstract
Impostors, confidence artists, and artful deceivers seem to have achieved a strange kind of popularity and even prestige in our contemporary political landscape, for reasons that remain elusive, especially given how harmful and socially unwanted such behaviors ostensibly are. Herman Melville’s 1857 novel, [...] Read more.
Impostors, confidence artists, and artful deceivers seem to have achieved a strange kind of popularity and even prestige in our contemporary political landscape, for reasons that remain elusive, especially given how harmful and socially unwanted such behaviors ostensibly are. Herman Melville’s 1857 novel, The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade, helps us shift our perspective on this seemingly irrational phenomenon because it points out how being susceptible to dupery is linked to the enjoyment of fiction itself. This insight also highlights the importance of epistemological failure in the recent “return to aesthetics” in literary studies, where the positive dimension of unconsciously “willing one’s dupery” directly links aesthetic form to politics. The logic that connects aesthetics to unconscious enjoyment is then elaborated in the work of psychoanalytic thinkers such as Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, Helene Deutsch and others to raise particular questions about how and why the enjoyment of being duped has been associated with feminine sexuality. Reading Melville’s novel while considering psychoanalytic concepts such as the “as if” personality, imposture, and interpassivity illuminates how confidence games play upon the ruses of sexuality, which have profound implications for why the public remains in thrall to the workings of known deceivers. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Susceptibilities: Toward a Cultural Politics of Consent under Erasure)
12 pages, 234 KiB  
Article
Turned in and Away: The Convolutions of Impossible Incorporation in the Narratives of Chester Himes
by Madeleine Reddon
Philosophies 2024, 9(2), 47; https://doi.org/10.3390/philosophies9020047 - 9 Apr 2024
Viewed by 1195
Abstract
This article examines motifs of falling, recoiling, and turning across Chester Himes’ oeuvre as figurations of Black susceptibility to racial violence. These images reference and reconstruct an event from Himes’ early adulthood: his catastrophic fall down an elevator shaft. Taking a psychoanalytically oriented [...] Read more.
This article examines motifs of falling, recoiling, and turning across Chester Himes’ oeuvre as figurations of Black susceptibility to racial violence. These images reference and reconstruct an event from Himes’ early adulthood: his catastrophic fall down an elevator shaft. Taking a psychoanalytically oriented approach, I analyze the metonymic connections between these motifs, rather than reading them in their chronological order, using Jean Laplanche’s theory of après-coup. I argue that the recursive quality of these images in Himes’ work is not merely an unconscious repetition or conscious working through of a traumatic biographical event but part of an endeavor to imagine different ways to inhabit and survive the structural trauma of Jim Crow America. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Susceptibilities: Toward a Cultural Politics of Consent under Erasure)
9 pages, 215 KiB  
Article
Beyond Choice: Reading Sigmund Freud at the End of Roe
by Karen McFadyen
Philosophies 2023, 8(6), 100; https://doi.org/10.3390/philosophies8060100 - 29 Oct 2023
Viewed by 1989
Abstract
After Roe v. Wade was overturned by the Supreme Court, pregnant people lost their Constitutional protection of abortion. The new, visible politics of susceptibility have invited a revisitation to the psychoanalytic work of Sigmund Freud. This article examines the trauma narrative of Freud’s [...] Read more.
After Roe v. Wade was overturned by the Supreme Court, pregnant people lost their Constitutional protection of abortion. The new, visible politics of susceptibility have invited a revisitation to the psychoanalytic work of Sigmund Freud. This article examines the trauma narrative of Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle and the theory of the death drive in elaborating the enduring cultural investment in protecting fetal life while examining its implications for pregnant subjects. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Susceptibilities: Toward a Cultural Politics of Consent under Erasure)
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