Susceptibilities: Toward a Cultural Politics of Consent under Erasure

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

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