Introducing Susceptibilities: Toward a Cultural Politics of Consent Under Erasure

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 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.

In a 2024 Opinion for the New York Times, Peggy Orenstein cites Debby Herbenick who, “[f]or the past four years, has been tracking the rapid rise of ‘rough sex’ among college students, particularly sexual strangulation, or what is colloquially referred to as choking” [1]. What the director of Indiana University’s Center for Sexual Health Promotion discovered from surveying 5000 students at a midwestern university campus is that “nearly two-thirds of women said a partner had choked them during sex (one-third in their most recent encounter)”. More alarming still, among girls between 12 and 17, the rate of first-time strangulation “had shot up to 40 percent from one in four” [1]. Orenstein spotlights a few distressing statements gathered from her own interviews with high school students: a “sophomore confided that she enjoyed being choked by her boyfriend, though it was important for a partner to be ‘properly educated’—pressing on the sides of the neck, for example, rather than the trachea”. Of course, “[t]here is no safe way to strangle someone”, as Orenstein points out. A freshman told Orenstein that “‘girls expected’ to be choked and, even though he didn’t want to do it, refusing would make him seem like a ‘simp.’” Orenstein also mentions a senior who was apparently “angry that her friends called her ‘vanilla’ when she complained that her boyfriend had choked her” [1].

Observing how “the stories pile up”, Orenstein offers the following coda: “Sexual strangulation, nearly always of women in heterosexual pornography, has long been a staple on free sites, those default sources of sex ed for teens. As with anything else”, she adds, “repeat exposure can render the once appalling appealing. It’s not uncommon for behaviors to be normalized in porn, move within a few years to mainstream media, then, in what may become a feedback loop, be adopted in the bedroom or the dorm room” [1].

Orenstein’s characterization of free porn sites as “default” sex-ed sources links to “When Did Porn Become Sex Ed?”, a 2016 opinion piece where she discusses a survey of British college students indicating that “60 percent consult pornography, at least in part, as though it were an instruction manual, even as nearly three-quarters say that they know it is as realistic as pro wrestling. (Its depictions of women, meanwhile, are about as accurate as those of the ‘The Real Housewives’ franchise.)” ([2]). To translate Orenstein’s observation into Althusserian and Lacanian terminology, young people are increasingly feeling “hailed” by pornography as the “subject supposed to know”, and its authority empowers it to showcase not only what is possible (and how), but also what is or should be “standard”. As a means of bolstering their social capital, young people (among others) internalize the regulative fiction of “hot sex” as a norm, which spurs some to pressure their partners to perform or submit to sex acts “modelled” in pornography. Orenstein’s interviews demonstrate how this interpellation goes both ways: porn-addled boys might feel entitled to choke unsuspecting sex partners while girls might insist that being strangled is de rigueur—a compulsory benchmark their partners do not necessarily feel comfortable meeting.

The quotations from Orenstein’s interviews with sexually active youngsters display their weaponization of sex positivity against one another; thus, a collusion between peer pressure and easy access to pornography prods susceptible young people to engage in potentially harmful sexual activity as if it were “cutting edge” experimentation. One countermeasure might be to incorporate porn critically into sex education, but it is also worth taking a step back to reflect on potential inconsistencies in public conversations about the endemic susceptibilities of children, teenagers, and young people. Who qualifies as “susceptible” and how does this designation affect our judgments about someone’s right or even their ability to make decisions on their own behalf?

In recent years, culture wars have exposed contradictory assumptions about secondary and post-secondary students’ susceptibilities. Hate-visceralized anxieties about teaching gender as a spectrum and critical histories of ethnic and racial oppression in secondary schools conjure the image of a pre-cognitive child who is constitutionally vulnerable to “untoward” influences. Attacks on curricula and library materials that affirm same-sex couples, complicate cis-gendering binaries, or that depict systematic anti-Black racism before, during, and after slavery are lambasted for seducing the innocent into trans* or queer alignments, or pernicious guilt (if white) for their implication in sedimented histories of violence and inequity as if merely talking about these issues were a form of predation. “Predatory” instructors allegedly target trusting kids who cannot help but look up to the adults “grooming” their students into gender dysphoria, precocious sexual desire, and/or white guilt. In this Manichean imaginary, even university students aged eighteen and older are portrayed as more child than adult, which is to say, too susceptible to professorial authority to consent properly speaking to nefarious adult “seductions”. It is in this respect, then, that paranoia about children’s and young people’s suggestibility assumes not only that they are always at risk of being “seduced”, but that they are incapable of genuine consent.

Instructors’ commitment to respect their students’ self-given names and pronouns obviously does not qualify as predation, but the exaggerated rhetoric of “grooming” nevertheless imputes venal intentions to secondary and post-secondary educators. In this manner, the religious right magnifies anxieties that degenerate liberals will corrupt children unless decent, God-fearing parents and politicians intervene; however, since conservatives must first conjure what they condemn, mobilizations of “grooming” actually allow the religious right to wallow in perverse fantasies about seduced children rather than asking how various modes of identification become intelligible for and compelling to young people in and beyond educational institutions. What psychoanalytic theory offers to critical considerations of this nexus of concerns is a history of discussions about seduction which trouble the impossible ideal of a subject unfailingly capable of resolute decisions in the face of the unknown.

As is well known in psychoanalytic circles, Sigmund Freud notoriously vacillated as to whether his patients’ memories of being molested as children might be fantasies that elucidate the onset of neurotic dispositions. Jean Laplanche subsequently resolved Freud’s competing child seduction theses in contending that infants absorb their adult caretakers’ unconscious desires and aggressions yet lack a framework for understanding these “enigmatic signifiers” as he refers to them, which leave inassimilable affects in their wake. In allowing me to foreground the fulcrum role of seduction plots in adult views about child development, revisiting Laplanche’s revision of Freud will usefully bring the former’s critique of self-sovereignty to bear on the preoccupation with susceptibility in today’s culture wars.

With these paradoxes in mind, the departure point for my entry into debates about susceptibility is twofold: first, I see a need to intervene when consent is presumed to have been erased as if it were a static property that one “owns” rather than an intersubjective event; second, I want to reflect on how a multilayered phenomenology of ambivalence troubles retroactive attributions of conscious consent, or its absence. A theoretical exploration of the precognitive aspects of ambivalence might clarify what is at stake for ethical frameworks that over-emphasize definitions of susceptibility as seducibility while bracketing out its agency as an openness that preconditions sociability.

1. Narrating Susceptibilities in and Beyond #MeToo

The APA Dictionary of Psychology defines susceptibility simply as “vulnerability: readily affected by or at increased risk of acquiring a particular condition, such as an infection, injury, or disorder” [3]. This definition presupposes a hapless subject in whom susceptibility inheres as a risk of being affected and/or harmed. As I briefly detail later on, the contributors to this Special Issue present various accounts of how this potential always develops in response to others who bear the power to wound, exploit, heal, or inspire. Indeed, among the many inspirations for my own preoccupation with susceptibility are the testimonies that arose out of #MeToo describing situations in which men aggressively forced sexual intimacy upon ambivalent and/or rejecting women. A common element in these stories is the narrator’s realization that their consent had been preempted or effaced by aggressions which, in another era, might have been dismissively excused and even admired as the “art of seduction”. What becomes clear from the plotlines, however, is that those who felt coerced and frightened rather than “seduced” were sometimes too overwhelmed or shocked to resist. This paralysis is consonant with certain models of trauma such as Freud’s from Beyond the Pleasure Principle, where he argues that belated stress sets off a systemic compulsion to master a traumatic situation which transpired in the absence of either expectation or consent; in effect, then, the self-preservative anxiety which might allow someone to anticipate and avoid or resist danger occurs afterward rather than when it might have helped ([4], pp. 12–14). In keeping with this model, Cathy Caruth has contended that the shock of an unforeseen event constitutes it as a “missed encounter” that leaves a lingering epistemological gap ([5], pp. 3–12).

#MeToo narratives illustrate variable trauma plots, which sometimes include narrators continuing to act in subsequent encounters as if a perpetrator’s actions were not aggressive, coercive, or violent; or even going so far as to forget what took place, leaving a blank that might fill in unexpectedly and distressingly much later. In 2022, the now grown-up young star of Atom Egoyan’s The Sweet Hereafter, Oscar-nominated screenwriter, and acclaimed director in her own right Sarah Polley published Run Towards the Danger, comprising six essays including one entitled “The Woman Who Stayed Silent”, where she reflects on how she repressed a traumatic encounter with Jian Ghomeshi when he was 28 and she was 16. As Polley recounts it, accusations against the former CBC radio personality began to reverberate in and beyond the Canadian press in “October 2014, three years before the Harvey Weinstein allegations came to light, and before the #MeToo movement became a worldwide phenomenon” ([6] p. 72). The scandal erupted when Jesse Brown and Kevin Donovan reported in the Toronto Star that “three women said they had been punched, hit, bitten, and choked by Ghomeshi” ([6] p. 72 citing [7]). Though initially anonymous, Ghomeshi’s former co-worker Kathryn Borel attested to harassment and assault” by this “respected radio host, who proudly wore the cloak of a sensitive feminist man” up until he “suddenly lost his job at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation” ([6] p. 72 citing [7]). Among the women who responded to the Toronto Star account with similar stories was Lucy DeCoutere, an actor and Canadian Air Force captain who, as Polley notes, subsequently “encouraged more women to come forward to tell their stories and to share their names, if they could” ([6] p. 72). The number of women recounting Ghomeshi’s sadistic aggressions in the Toronto Star doubled from four to eight by October’s end, and he was subsequently “charged with four counts of sexual assault and one count of overcoming resistance to sexual assault” on 26 November 2014, to which three more counts relating to three different women were added two months later.

Polley opens her Ghomeshi chapter with questions about her long silence following the assault. While #MeToo and its attendant injunction to “believe women” certainly did not put an end to the suspicions mounted against those coming forward with long-unreported accounts of sexual coercion and violence, Polley is right to accentuate a prevailing tendency among many women to avoid the police and keep their assault stories secret for years or even decades. Before delving into her own reasons for remaining quiet, Polley illustrates the doubts that deter some women from speaking out by quoting the lawyer Reva Seth’s explanation in the Huffington Post of the double bind that discouraged her from speaking out about sexual violence that did not quite qualify as “rape”. While wanting simply to continue her life without seeing Ghomeshi again, Seth admits to being “well aware” as a lawyer “that the scenario was just a ‘he said/she said’ situation”. Indeed, “as a woman who had had a drink or two, shared a joint, had gone to his house willingly and had a sexual past”, she would likely be “eviscerated” ([6] p. 72 citing [8]).

In Polley’s case, she confesses that, for years, Ghomeshi’s behavior served as fodder for an entertaining story she told at parties, a story about the date from hell that accentuated his perverse foreplay but left out “[her] age, at the time of the date, which was sixteen, and his age, which was around twenty-eight” ([6] p. 78). By her own reckoning, the party story portrays the young Polley as assertive and analytical, when she was actually “intimidated and scared”, answering “I don’t know” rather than “No” when he asked if “she could keep up”. The party version also leaves out the episode of nonconsensual choking. Indeed, she did not even tell her sister and brother at the time that “Jian had ‘hurt [her], that he wouldn’t get his hands off [her] neck, though [she] tried to pry them away”. According to Polley, she “managed to say, while he briefly moved them away from [her] neck, that [she] hated having [her] neck touched like that and [she] didn’t want him to do that again”. He nevertheless “did it again”, as she recalls, “after [she] had clearly expressed that [she] wanted him to stop” ([6] p. 78). She acknowledges that the “funny” party version also ended before intercourse, “which wasn’t at all funny” ([6] p. 78), since her rejection of the choking apparently goaded Ghomeshi to be “petulant and furious”. Thereafter, “the sex became painful” as “[he] bent [her] legs back over [her] head and wouldn’t stop when it felt that muscles were being ripped and [she] cried out” ([6] p. 78). As details of the assault re-emerged, Polley remembers informing Ghomeshi that he was hurting her and asked him to stop, but that he nevertheless “ignored this, looking at me with what looked like abject hatred” ([6] p. 78).

Polley’s narration ends, perhaps surprisingly, with her admission that she actually felt sorry for Ghomeshi, “looking downcast after he was done, as though by expressing pain I had pointed out he was some kind of freak”. She also mentions “how terribly hurt he looked when [she] wouldn’t stay the night” ([6] p. 78). For many years, she nevertheless managed to suppress the violent elements in this memory, so that, when the Toronto Star published accusations about Ghomeshi in 2014, Polley’s older sister Jo had to remind her younger sibling about how Ghomeshi’s brutality had traumatized her—just like his accusers. A key motive for this essay in Run Towards the Danger is Polley’s need to remind readers that trauma leaves blanks limned in silence. As we should be well aware by now, it is this silence that typically misogynist deniers weaponize as sufficient grounds for disbelieving women who do not immediately report sexual assault to the police and who might not speak about their experiences for years and even decades. Post-traumatic silence is, of course, hybrid and intersectionally-inflected by class, race, ethnicity, an individual’s familial and sexual history, and generational norms; it is also overdetermined by multiple and potentially conflicting motivations, not all of which are conscious.

From a feminist standpoint that enjoins empathetic solidarity with sexual assault victims, believing a #MeToo narrative might prod us to push aside speculations about ambivalent and unconscious motivations that would eventuate in cordial behavior toward a Ghomeshi (or a Harvey Weinstein) after an assault as though they could still be valued professional contacts and nothing more—not sadists or rapists who should be ostracized if not jailed. The commitment to solidarity might also prompt us to conjure a scenario in which the narrator’s lack of consent remained unequivocal, unified, and conscious at every moment of the plot, which is not to contradict Polley’s account of how she reacted when Ghomeshi was choking her, but as she herself admits, Polley at sixteen was relatively inexperienced when the 28-year-old celebrity assaulted her. Though the physical pain he inflicted gave her enough clarity in the moment to demand that he stop, as an older and self-reflective author, Polley realizes how susceptible she was at the time to various forms of misrecognition—the adult Ghomeshi was more sexually knowledgeable and more worldly. Did he understand something about sex that she did not? Reading Polley’s description of her insecurity as a sixteen-year-old, I am reminded of Orenstein’s teenagers whose naivety leads them to treat the rough sex they witness in pornography as paradigmatic even as they recognize that it is “fake”. To rearticulate it with a Lacanian spin, they are in transference with pornography as the subject-supposed-to-know.

In view of the ubiquity of sexual coercion along with the skepticism that assault victims continue to face, feminists have grounds to be wary about theories that seem to render consent phenomenal and therefore inherently equivocal; however, the critical lessons presented by these theories should caution us to steer clear of the temptation to attribute consistent self-presence to anyone—a caution that extends to #MeToo narrators. The question is what might be gained if anything by deconstructing self-sovereignty when contemplating sexual coercion.

I am arguing that there is a pedagogical value to acknowledging that consciousness fluctuates and that the stress of reading another’s possibly inscrutable or idiosyncratic behavior might exacerbate this flux. Moreover, sexual encounters comprise more than one act. When a contingent interest in intimacy moves into a limit-crossing interaction among a series of others that might have been acceptable, the initial willingness that enables the encounter might close down or be overtly revoked. Alternatively, as Avgi Saketopoulou has recently contended, an interval might open between an other’s unexpected behavior and a potentially transformative self-awareness that a limit has been undesirably transgressed1. Oscillations in this interval will forestall a resolutely self-preservative response. Moreover, a secondary narcissistic need to deserve the other’s approval undergirds the transferential dimension of intersubjective relations. A transferential captivation ensures that the insecure or unsuspecting will continue to feel “hailed” by the other’s insistence on fulfilling the latter’s desire2. For this reason, while it might feel like betraying #MeToo narrators to reflect on the thresholds of their self-understanding, it is crucial to consider how the phenomenality of unconscious ambivalences might confound self-protective resolve. What is needed is a critical pedagogy that accounts for junctures at which interpellative capture by the other’s desire muddles self-defense.

2. We Have Never Been Self-Sovereign: Jean Laplanche’s “Enigmatic Signifier”

If the confluence between psychoanalysis and deconstruction has taught us anything, it is that the standpoint of the unconscious subtends the metaphysics of presence as it dovetails with an egocentric fantasy of self-sovereignty. While there are many transformational shifts in psychoanalytic considerations of psychic development between a “polymorphous” openness on one end to foreclosure, fixation, and overdetermination on the other, I launch my own entry into this discussion by listing a few famous attempts to theorize susceptibility as a precognitive or “unwitting” malleability, or, if you will, a writing surface: Freud’s theses about infantile sexuality, his seduction hypothesis and subsequent turn toward fantasy; psychoanalytic accounts of transference; Louis Althusser’s definition of interpellation and/as subjectification; Michel Foucault’s account of disciplinary power that produces subjects who internalize their own surveillance; and Laplanche’s concept of primal seduction to theorize the relationship between the enigmatic signifier and afterwardsness as a revision of Freud’s Nachträglichkeit [belatedness]. A single essay does not allow for a detailed treatment of all, but a focus on Laplanche will allow me to connect elements from the other schemata.

Despite its sociohistorical baggage for feminists among others who rightly insist on the transhistorical reality of sexual violence, for the purpose of critiquing the liberal fetishism of consent as a property of self-mastery, I am nevertheless inclined to abide with Laplanche’s emphatic transfiguration of seduction as a fulcrum of the unconscious. As is well known in psychoanalytic circles, when confronted with the apparent ubiquity of forced sexual contact between children (or young women) and adults who typically included male family members and friends, Freud infamously undercut the reality of incest among other coercive sex acts in a letter to Wilhelm Fliess dated 21 September 1897 ([11], pp. 264–266). It is here that Freud inaugurated a theory of fantasy that prioritized the “belated” meaning of a symptom rather than the “truth” of its origin.

While parsing Laplanche’s reinterpretation of Freud, John Fletcher notes how the latter pivots from his idea that “the sexual fantasies underlying hysterical and obsessional symptoms” must be traced back “to actual events of sexed seduction in childhood, that remained unintegrated and inactive until the traumatic activation of their memory traces by later events after puberty” ([12], p. 103). Instead, Freud favors “the apparently universal repetition of the same fantasmatic scenes—castration, paternal seduction and parental coitus” along with their variants. As a result of this shift, the agency imputed to “primal fantasies” need not be grounded in actual events; rather, as Fletcher attests, repetitions of particular scenes indicate “an unconscious nucleus that would act as a template for the psychical productions—symptoms and their underlying fantasies—which Freud encountered in analysis” ([12], p. 103).

This “heterogeneous nucleus” is not reducible to either biological instincts or repressed memories of the subject but operates rather as a precondition “for unconscious meaning, whether conceived as a specific signifying chain, network or combinatory”. Through this activity, Fletcher writes, it opens “the space of a symbolic order and relation to an other that is, if not primordial, then at least already given in advance, and not reducible to either a real event or an imaginary scene” ([12], p. 104). Laplanche will hereafter redefine the “primal” as “an organization made of signifiers anteceding the effect of the event”; alternately phrased, it comprises “a pre-structure inaccessible to the subject, evading his grasp, his initiatives…” ([12], p. 104 citing [13], pp. 17–18).

Of course, the persuasiveness of this theory of fixation depends on our acceptance of a “prestructure” that constitutes a backdrop to Freud’s opposition between the premature and the belated at the same time that it bears the potential to dissolve this very opposition. It is against this backdrop that Freud’s Nachträglichkeit, delineated by Strachey’s “deferred action” and Laplanche’s “afterwardsness”, situates “the trauma of seduction” in the interval between two events: a first which is “sexual for the adult but non-sexual for the child” who, in Freud’s phrase, is “pre-sexually sexual”; and a second which occasions “the traumatic outbreak, a non-sexual and ‘innocent’ event to which the subject’s response seems excessive and unintelligible” ([12], p. 105). As Fletcher summarizes, “there arises”, for a certain Freud, “a sexual and traumatic representation of a scene that was for the subject neither sexual nor traumatic in its happening as an event” ([12], p. 105).

Fletcher reminds us that Freud’s “primal” recourses encompass various elements over time, including “the speculative and untenable doctrine” to the effect that “individual development, ontogeny, repeats the development of the species, phylogeny, through the reactivation of inherited memory traces” ([12], p. 104). In “Notes on Afterwardsness”, Laplanche dwells on how Freud’s ontogenesis recapitulates phylogenesis premise implies a “heavily determinist” understanding of Nachträglichkeit as enjoining an interpretative movement from past to present that is not reversible ([14], p. 262). But as Laplanche observes, Freud makes statements indicating a couple of other uses as in a reference from Studies on Hysteria to the belated dealing with [Erledigung] of traumas ([15], p. 229 and [16], p. 162)3 and, from the 6 April 1897 letter to Fliess ([11], pp. 234-235), his proposition regarding “hysterical fantasies which regularly[…] go back to things that children overhear at an early age and understand only subsequently” ([14], p. 263 citing [11], p. 234).

According to Fletcher, Laplanche’s reconsideration of primal fantasies as a “transcendental” nucleus assimilates the “theoretical labor recasting Freud’s problematic of structure, transmission and enigma, while purging it of its pseudo-biology”. It thereby dispenses with phylogenesis as a figural “displacement of the temporal logic of Nachträglichkeit, the ‘motor’ of primal seduction, reduced to the provision of a ground or ballast in a mythic prehistory” ([12], p. 106). Instead, Laplanche’s primal seduction posits a “fundamental situation in which an adult “proffers” to a child, verbal, non-verbal and even behavioral signifiers which are pregnant with unconscious sexual significations” ([12], p. 107 citing [17], p. 126). These signs are “enigmatic”, as Fletcher contends, “not just because the adult world poses questions that are beyond the child’s power to grasp or answer, but because of the role of the adult and parental unconscious”. In Laplanche’s words, “The enigma is in itself a seduction and its mechanisms are unconscious” ([12], p. 110 citing [16], p. 128).

The enigmatic signifier concept assumes that Mommy’s and Daddy’s desires are “seductive because they are opaque” ([12], p. 110 citing [17], p. 128). By “[transmitting] a sexual excitation with a hidden, unconscious meaning, a lost signified”, the parental unconscious “[poses] a question for the infant which it is constitutionally ill-equipped to answer”, with the “scandalous effect of building a structurally inescapable perversity into the adult-child relation” ([12], p. 110). Particularly notable is how Laplanche brings an inscription metaphor into play. In Fletcher’s paraphrasing of Laplanche, the enigmatic launches “a drive to translate” that will unconsciously script future interactions with others ([18], p. 50). In this respect, Laplanche’s primal seduction alternatively stages Foucault’s “perverse implantation” as the precondition for a “’hollowed out transference’” [18], p. 50 citing [19], p. 229 citing [20], p. 15. According to Laplanche, “[the] subject supposed to know, initially, is the adult for the child”. Once internalized, the other as a “primal repressed” loses its specificity and thereafter operates transcendentally as a fundamental form that contours “intersubjective constellations” in and beyond clinical settings; thus, transference might be said to transpire whenever circumstances “reproduce and renew the situation of primal seduction” ([21], p. 131).

Elucidating Freud’s “unfinished Copernican revolution”4, Laplanche highlights the double decentering that Freudian psychoanalysis begins insofar as “the other thing (das Andere) that is the unconscious is only maintained in its radical alterity by the other person (der Andere): in brief, by seduction” ([22], p. 71). Étrangèreté [translated as “alien-ness”] is Laplanche’s term for the stranger within that primal seduction inaugurates as the “excentric” locus of the unconscious ([22], p. 62). In effect, then, primal seduction is, for Laplanche, interpellative in that it functions as a precedent for later endeavors to grapple with the unknown in and as our internal and external others.

In distinguishing his standpoint from Lacan’s, Laplanche clarifies that what “maintains the alien-ness of the other” is the peculiar agency of the enigmatic signifier as message, which “can just as easily be nonverbal as verbal”, though, to be sure, “it is principally non-verbal” for an infant. A second reason Laplanche prefers message is that Lacan’s “’language’ effaces the alterity of the other in favour of trans-individual structures”. Deriving message from Freud’s reference to Wahrnehmungszeichen [perceptual signs] in his December 6, 1896 letter to Fliess ([11], p. 208) allows Laplanche to evoke the figure of “primal data” which an infant must learn how to “translate” ([22], pp. 73–74). It is of the utmost importance for Laplanche that such data not only originate in a sender but that they are also “addressed to the subject”, which endows the message with the “the force of signs” ([22], p. 74). By extension, the enigmatic signifier might be viewed as “extimate” in Lacan’s sense insofar as it derives from “the coincidence of the intimate and the alien”. But whereas Lacan aligns extimacy “with the order of the Real”, according to Fletcher, “the enigmatic signifier is Laplanche’s displacement of the Lacanian Symbolic” ([12], p. 106).

To summarize, Laplanche has transfigured Freud’s decentering 1897 shift toward seduction fantasies into a theory that accounts for the “structural formation of the Unconscious and the drives through primal repression” ([12], p. 111). Toward this end, the enigmatic signifier concept not only sets aside Freud’s genesis of a split consciousness from the prehistory of organic life; it also resolves the impasses created by the alleged literality of an “originary” trauma that is belatedly and excessively “reactivated” in what appears to be unrelated situations. As Fletcher recognizes, Laplanche’s discussion of primal seduction and the après-coup to some extent finesses the misleading opposition Freud inadvertently instituted when he dispensed with the reality of child seduction to embrace a theory of fantasy. By insisting on the constitutive impact of the other’s sexual aggressions and enjoyments upon an infant, Laplanche also pinpoints an early and ambivalent inscription of the social abiding as an unconscious grid that, if reactivated, will shape subsequent interactions. In privileging the abiding force of prestructural residues of repression proper, Laplanche’s figuration of the enigmatic signifier thus serves to dissolve the “dualism of constitution and event” ([12], p. 106) along with the notion of an “initial or natural opposition between the instinctual and the intersubjective, or between the instinctual and the cultural” ([12], p. 109 citing [17], p. 137). Indeed, if “memory” is at work here, then it operates as a form as much as or more than as a content.

While insisting on the drives’ derivation from “parental or adult messages”, Laplanche, in Fletcher’s reading, also implies that the enigmatic signifier implants as a form that “[masks] or [disguises] the residues of the seductive excitations and transmissions from the other” ([12], p. 109). What intrigues me is how, for Laplanche, the intromission of the parental enigma as a form instills a “primal” susceptibility to future others’ undisclosed desires that might trouble a self-preservative performance of sovereign will. One possible implication of this formalization is that the primally seduced child’s ineluctable openness toward an aggressively caressing caregiver sets the scene for the future adult’s “hollowed out” transferential relationship with others that transpires as a nonvoluntary regression into passivity. This regression might be evinced in adulthood as a failure to resolve ambivalence into self-protective action during situations that demand it. The unintegrated affective detritus leftover from primal seduction reanimates a drive to translate the enigma of the other’s desire.

3. Susceptible Subjects

Laplanche sharpens a theorization of susceptibility as part of a critique of conscious consent fetishism in postulating that infants haplessly absorb adult affects, including unconscious sexual pleasure, which alternately captivates and baffles them, or both at once. Laplanche’s “enigmatic signifier” suggests that infants’ early encounters with the adult unconscious implant a susceptibility to being lured in subjects who, despite their conscious feelings of revulsion or rejection, remain unconsciously compelled by the genre of the seduction plot. The point I wish to bring forward from my readings of Polley and Laplanche is that “our” [feminist] need to view consent or its absence as determinate and unified is a misrecognition: it does not allow for the possibility that even conspicuously unwanted intimacy might nevertheless bear the power to interpellate us into the logic of the lure, for even as I reject the other’s desire, I might feel unconsciously compelled to solve the puzzle it presents.

Though not everyone explicitly cites Laplanche in particular or psychoanalytic theory more generally, the contributors to this Special Issue amplify the critical value of susceptibility as a suspension of self-sovereignty. Putting forward a standpoint closest to the one I elaborate above, Melissa Wright trenchantly inverts the desirability of egoic mastery in trauma discourse by focusing on Michela Coel’s 2020 mini-series I May Destroy You about the interminability of working through sexual violence. Wright cites Erinn Cunniff Gilson’s observation that susceptibility “is a building block of common conceptions of vulnerability in the ‘sociocultural imaginary of the industrialized, capitalist Western parts of the world,’ where ‘susceptibility to harm’ presupposes a specifically sexual form of violence against women” ([25], p. 2 citing [26], p. 75). Drawing on Laplanche’s and Saketopoulou’s psychoanalytic critiques of sovereignty to theorize alternative modes of “working through”, Wright’s innovative reading of Coel’s miniseries advises us not to view susceptibility exclusively “as a risk of harm or influence, but as a receptivity to something strange and enigmatic, and indeed as a slow and iterative exploration of the resistances that prevent the survivor from exploring without judgment everything about their experience” ([25], p. 5).

To augment this understanding, Wright highlights Saketopolou’s definition of exigent sadism “as the creation of a ‘space that can possibly bring in something really opaque, to open us to the wound in the other and to the wound in the self, but also may create, along with it, a form of support that is not in keeping with our usual understanding of consent or sadism’” ([25], p. 10 citing [9], pp. 182–183). As Saketopoulou states, it is “sadistic, in that it taps into the anarchic, unbinding properties of the sexual drive, and it is exigent, in the sense that it has to do with following without reserve the draw toward opacity” ([9], p. 180). Most importantly, perhaps, “[it] entails a recognition that one has to do what is necessary […] to intervene against mastery, exerting a certain violence on the ego’s tendency to bind” ([9], pp. 180–181). This intervention against the compulsion to sustain ego coherence ideally takes place on both sides: the exigent sadist’s “only covenant is that [she] will try not to exploit the other by breaking their will and that they will not try to control, or lay a claim on, the narrative of the other’s experience” ([9], 183–184). “For Saketopoulou”, as Wright affirms, “this is a sadism of the consulting room and theater, not a valorization of the pleasure in cruelty” ([25], p. 10).

Insofar as exigent sadism “does not proceed from the sadist’s ego but from her very dispossession, that is from her capacity to bend her will” ([10], p. 184), what Saketopoulou is advocating for in the name of intersubjective transcendence is a far cry from the pornocratic sadism of the Christian nationalist forced-birth movement in the United States, which harnesses state power to torture rape and incest survivors and to compel the pregnant to endure unnecessary lethal risks and harm to their health while carrying unviable fetuses to term. Since the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2022 Dobbs decision overturned Roe versus Wade and with it, the federal guarantee of bodily autonomy and life-saving care for the pregnant, we have witnessed how child-bearing women’s capacity for consent has fallen increasingly under erasure. In the spirit of deconstructing this erasure, Karen McFadyen revisits an unsettling scene from Torquato Tasso’s Gerusalemme Liberata as Freud interprets it in Beyond the Pleasure Principle. In this famously speculative bricolage, Freud employs the legend of Tancred and Clorinda to illustrate the effect of fatefulness generated by the Crusader’s compulsive repetition when, after killing his beloved “in a duel while she is disguised in the armour of any enemy knight”, he wanders into a magical forest and slashes at a tall tree where Clorinda’s soul is imprisoned. As “blood streams from the cut”, Freud recounts how Clorinda’s voice “is heard complaining that [Tancred] has wounded his beloved once again” ([27], p. 2 citing [4], p. 22).

Emphasizing how Freud encourages his readers to identify with the “unwitting” Tancred whose actions might seem, to us at least, more fateful than fatal, McFadyen’s return to this mythic scene evokes its parallels with the compulsively repeated fantasies of a forced-birth movement that, before and after Dobbs, sacralizes an aborted fetus’s endlessly preempted potential. Just as Clorinda is interned in a tree, vulnerable to Tancred’s sword, the forced-birth movement interns the pregnant subject in the “fatefulness” of their own desire. The question McFadyen’s parallels call to mind is whether the originalist paradigm that supposedly guides the theocrats on John Robert’s Supreme Court does not symptomatically attest to their “death-driven” impulse to arrest the “life” of interpretation as mutability over time by consigning the Constitution to the stasis of a congealed past.

McFadyen’s insinuation that the originalism sometimes claimed by conservative Christian Supreme Court justices is “death-driven” raises questions about this framework as a rationalization for a particular “bad reading” praxis that increasingly distinguishes American right-wing extremism5. It has simply become too obvious to ignore how the fanatical Christian voters, politicians, and institutions that brought the United States to its current juncture fervently believe that they can secure the sovereignty of their oppressive and even dangerous religious beliefs by forcibly demolishing the gap between self and other at the level of the state. Of course, a susceptibility to “bad reading” is not the exclusive domain of a single party, religion, or any other constituency, and there are innumerable charlatans in every corner who readily prey on our misrecognitions because we enjoy them so much6.

In preparation for an analysis of Herman Melville’s The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade, J. Asher Godley highlights “a lexical precision to ‘susceptibility’ that suggests the disposition to deceptive influence without awareness of deceit” ([31] p. 2). In short, “every definition of ‘susceptible’ in the Oxford English Dictionary includes the word ‘capable’, as in ‘capable of receiving and being affected by’, ‘capable of… conceiving, or being inwardly affected by (a thought, feeling or emotion)’, or ‘capable of being… easily moved to feeling; subject to emotional (or mental) impression; impressionable’” ([31] p. 2 citing [32]). At the same time, as Godley notes, the word’s etymology “preserves a vague sense of propensity in subjection: an ontological capability that standard notions of vulnerability and consent tend to overwrite with a more clear-cut opposition between subject and object” ([31], p. 2). Godley hereby reconceptualizes susceptibility crucially as an unacknowledged longing to be duped among the characters that populate The Confidence-Man, a longing that also ensnares fiction’s readers who willingly embrace our own susceptibility when we suspend disbelief upon entering fictional worlds. As Godley recognizes, reading fiction involves “letting ourselves be led”. To say that a book “took us in” is to admit that “for a time we believed… or at least played along” ([31], p. 16).

4. Traumatic Susceptibilities

In his psychoanalytic study of African American racial identity, Sheldon George revises Lacan’s thesis to the effect that to become a subject is to be traumatically “split” upon entering the Symbolic as the domain of language, expectations, norms, and the law. A sense of ontological inadequacy that Lacan calls “lack” is the burden that accompanies this entry in the Imaginary as Lacan’s name for the image- and fantasy-generating register distended between infantile narcissism and an emerging secondary narcissistic longing for the approval of parents among others as a condition for sustaining self-love. Extending the insights on double consciousness put forward by W.E.B. DuBois and Frantz Fanon among others, George argues that racialization not only redoubles the traumatic force of this split but proliferates more fractures as the white “Other’s signifiers afflict the subject with an essential void situated in the place where the subject must fantasize his or her being” ([33], p. 63)7.

Madeleine Reddon’s and Gautam Basu Thakur’s contributions to this issue dramatize George’s elucidation of how dehumanizing encounters repeatedly reactivate an ontological split and thereby undo the psychic work of suturing the gap whence the Real intrudes as a reminder of the risk we bear in losing our meaning for and thereby becoming abject in an uncaring world. Both contributors also draw upon psychoanalytic theory to conceptualize susceptibility as an adrenalized vulnerability that a singular catastrophe leaves in its wake but might just as likely accrue from humiliating interactions that successively reactivate a sense of subordination and rejection. In this vein, Reddon traces the motifs of falling, recoiling, and turning in Chester Himes’ writing “as figurations of Black susceptibility to racial violence” and symptomatic refractions of the “economy of violation” that distinguishes the Black experience of Jim Crow America as such. In accentuating the “traumatic dimension of what Laplanche describes as a child’s fundamental ‘openness’ or ‘passivity’ towards their caregiver”, Reddon employs susceptibility to account for the sedimentation of rejection, disaffection, and rage that racialization inflicts over time ([36], p. 1). Among the insights that Reddon advances from Laplanche’s après-coup as a non-mimetic revision of Freud’s theory of belatedness is that even if we locate a crisis in Himes’ autobiographical account (being turned away by a hospital after his nearly lethal fall through an elevator shaft), the point is not to claim that traumatic events repeat themselves, but rather “that the very shape of action becomes delimited, outlined, by the imprint of these prior scenes”. Playing on the Greek root of trope as “turn”, Reddon remarks how, for Himes, “Memory thus ‘returns’ in a redoubled sense, and the traumatic force of this return derives, in part, from its deferral of an earlier experience of susceptibility” ([36] p. 6).

As an interior susceptibility externalizes into symptoms, Reddon writes, “the echo between the past and the present reveals a persistent residue that reproduces itself through other people” ([36], p. 10). Recalling Laplanche’s reference “to the alternative translation of après-coup as ‘after-blows’” ([37, p. 6 citing [37], p. 17), Reddon remarks how Himes’ autobiography literalizes this association through the series of “blows” punctuating each “turn” of memory that connects his accident to his brother’s blinding. “For a Black man under Jim Crow”, Reddon avers, this reverberation constitutes “the traumatic rhythm of a self pummeled by memory’s blows [which] not only disrupts normative development but also evinces a generalized condition of pervasively violent racial socialization”. Racialization might be thus conceived as the accumulated impact of a systemically induced and exploited susceptibility that shores up “the symbolic order of white supremacy through the disruption or disabling of Black life” ([36], p. 6).

Reddon’s essay eloquently illuminates the social implications of Laplanche’s account of primal seduction for our thinking about the disciplinary role of transference in entrenching racial hierarchies. As Reddon observes with a nod toward Althusser, “[t]ransference allows the child’s susceptibility towards the parent to become co-opted by the interpellative structures of society, linking dissociative experiences of the self as Black to early states of psychic development” ([36], p. 6). In effect, then, the enigmatic residues of primal seduction encode an individual’s vulnerability to social norms and coercions that exacerbate the indignities and risks of surviving while Black in and beyond Jim Crow.

This transferential dynamic comes to the fore in Basu Thakur’s interpretation of Hassan Blasim’s “The Nightmare of Carlos Fuentes” from his 2024 collection entitled The Corpse Exhibition: And Other Stories of Iraq. In this story, the protagonist Salim emigrates to the Netherlands from Iraq, adopts the name “Carlos Fuentes” to pass as Mexican or South American, and then proceeds to become fluent in Dutch, marry, and obtain citizenship “in record time”, as Basu Thakur phrases it. At the same time, as Basu Thakur implies, the intensity of Salim/Carlos’ transferential obsession with the ideal of perfect assimilation seemingly indicates an underlying masochism that recalls Freud’s derivation of the death drive from the repetition compulsion in Beyond the Pleasure Principle. What crystallizes from Basu Thakur’s psychoanalytic interpretation of Salim/Carlos’ nightmares is that, despite his successes, he can neither master the ontological lack that corrodes any dream of self-sovereignty nor completely subdue memories of the war-torn Iraq he has tried to leave behind. According to Basu Thakur, “[t]hese nightmares unravel the true condition of [Carlos/Salim’s] subjectivity, a subjectivity dispersed between his ego invested in forming an imaginary relationship with the (Dutch) symbolic order and the past that he has buried but which returns to haunt him” ([38], p. 4). Basu Thakur hereby breaks down a complexly layered experience of susceptibility through which a diremptive sense of incomplete belonging and otherness that an Iraqi immigrant ineluctably feels in a Northern European nation frays Salim/Carlos’s ability to suppress a traumatic past. For it is the stress of performing an impossible wholeness that renders Salim susceptible “to a tension that pulverizes his ego”, thus reactivating the very wound he has tried to supersede “that speaks back to him through his dreams” ([38], p 4).

Robert Hughes conjures susceptibility from Hélène Cixous’s reminiscence entitled “Savoir” from Veils, in which the narration focalizes a myopic girl’s ambivalent reliance on a statue of Joan of Arc to navigate her Algerian neighborhood. The “disappearance” of this statue in the mist one day derails the girl not just spatially but also ontologically. The third-person limited narration dwells on the protagonist’s sharpening self-awareness about the inescapability of exposure, which, as Hughes insists, deepens into a broader uncertainty not only about the validity of her own perceptions but even the reliability of her ability to recognize her own mother. The intensity of the protagonist’s disorientation, as Hughes infers, likely attests to deeper questions about national belonging in light of Cixous’s childhood as an Algerian Jew born in 1937 in the northern city of Oran where neither local Muslims nor French occupiers accepted Jews.([39], p. 1)8.

Hughes reminds us that Cixous was born three years after the 1934 riots against Jews and their businesses in Constantine, 800 km east of Oran, and he reiterates newspaper headlines reporting the mutilation, burning, and torture of girls while “the French police and security forces stood by and did little or nothing to stop” the attacks ([39], p. 1). After the antisemitic Vichy regime revoked their citizenship on 7 October 1940, “it is not hard to imagine that Algerian Jews at this time felt themselves all too susceptible to outbreaks of political violence”, especially when confronted with the pre-revolutionary Sétif and Guelma massacres and their 1945 reprisals ([39], p. 1). Under these tumultuous circumstances, a statue of Joan of Arc might have served practically as a prominent landmark for a near-sighted girl, but as an alienating national symbol preferred by Catholic integrationalists, anti-Dreyfusards, and Action Française royalists over a revolutionary Marianne ([39], p. 4 citing [40], p. 216), such a figure could not be relied upon by an Algerian Jew for protection. Indeed, the erection of this sword-brandishing Joan in 1931 in the Cathedral Square of Oran ([39], p. 3 citing [41], pp. 3, 6) attests to the peculiar malevolence of French Catholic chauvinism in the face of ethnic and religious difference. It is no wonder, then, that as Hughes’ establishes, Cixous’s protagonist continues to feel disoriented after an operation improves her vision. As we know now, Cixous’s days in Oran were numbered, and it would not be too long before she and her mother were forced to emigrate to the France that had previously rescinded their rights.

Reddon, Basu Thakur, and Hughes focus on the racializing, sociocultural, and political impingements on a sense of belonging that derail the prospect of provisional equilibrium for members of disempowered and otherized groups. Susceptibility as a fundamental openness to the world devolves into an adrenalized and defensive vulnerability in confrontation with self-sanctifying whites who stigmatize and degrade American Blacks in Jim Crow America, Middle Eastern emigrants in the Netherlands, and a Jewish minority in French-occupied Algeria. Though the circumstances and settings differ, what draws these essays together is the question of how freighted mental and physical survival becomes for the marginalized while confronting an onslaught of random and systemic violations bolstered by a national legal apparatus.

As Rebecca Saunders contends, healing might be preempted for individuals forced to struggle in isolation with a “complexity of distress” in the absence of collaboration, alliances, and solidarities ([42], p.11). In her assiduously researched analysis of Elif Shafak’s The Island of Missing Trees, Saunders interrogates the neoliberal-therapeutic rhetoric of resilience as the commonly toted “solution” to the suffering that accompanies traumas, including the iteration of derisions and microaggressions that might eventuate in sociocultural abjection.

According to Saunders, “[t]he island evoked in Shafak’s title is Cyprus, a land ‘slashed through the heart’ as the fig tree puts it, by its partition into Greek and Turkish territories (η Kυ ’πρoς/Kibris)”. ([42], p. 12, note 2 citing [43], p. 11) Saunders explains how the narrative “[shifts] both geographically and temporally” between a present in London and a past in Cyprus ([42], p. 12, note 2). The London home that Ada shares with her father Kostas is “engulfed in a miasma of grief” since Ada’s mother Defne passed away ([42], p. 12, note 2). Following emigration, Defne’s depression, alcoholism, and death attest to the weight of a “Cypriot past” that “remains devastatingly present and deeply engraved in the body of the fig tree” which Kostas has brought with him to London from Nicosia. The fig tree that narrates a third of the novel is, as Saunders observes, remarkable for having “survived war, a bomb attack, fire, neglect, [and] transplantation into foreign soil, the dreadfulness of English weather and being buried alive” ([42], p.1). By caring for the tree, Kostas memorializes a Cyprus as the site of his illicit marriage as a Greek man with a Turkish woman. His daughter, in contrast, “knows little” about this background, yet somehow retains “the sense that she has inherited ‘an intangible and immeasurable sorrow’” ([42], p.12, note 2 citing [42], p. 11 and 18).

The climax of the novel is the sixteen-year-old Ada’s “spectacularly resonant scream” during her history class, which viscerally refracts the inefficacy of a psychological resilience discourse as a response “to complex trauma”; this inadequacy derives from resiliency rhetoric’s “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” ([42], p. 1). Saunders contrasts this neoliberal rhetoric with the novel’s fig tree, which serves, in her reading, as an “ecological model of resilience rooted in interdependence”. This is a model “in which susceptibility is conceived not as a weakness, but as a suite of vital capacities that are constituent of (rather than opposed to) resilience” ([42], p. 2). In place of a neoliberal impetus to download the costs and management of healthcare on individuals, thereby “responsibilizing” the traumatized, Saunders calls for an “eco-psychosocial” politics of susceptibility based on the principles that individuals cannot become resilient on their own, through their own volition or ‘intentionality’; that, rather than focusing on autonomous individuals, discrete groups, or sovereign nations, builds systemic forms of resilience that are inclusive of the multiple and diverse subjects that comprise a community, society, national unit, or ecosystem; and that, rather than fetishizing independence, liberty, and rights, fortifies interdependence and mutual responsibilities ([42], p. 16).

Saunders contends that such a politics “is grievously offensive” not only “to deeply held capitalist values of competition, individual initiative, unbridled accumulation and overconsumption” but also to “the binary gender hierarchies fetishized by patriarchy which devalue cooperation, mutual support and nurturance as signs of effeminacy or weakness” as well as “the racisms, xenophobias, political and religious extremisms that seek to exploit susceptibilities for the benefit of a particular group, party or class” ([42], p. 10). To counter these harms, Saunders embraces “a theoretical framework comprised of conceptually global and pragmatically granular components”. To the extent that this standpoint “acknowledges the complex interrelations among individuals, societies, non-human animals and eco-systems”, it also “respects the network of susceptibilities they comprise[…] as potential sites for capacity-building” ([42], p. 10).

By emphasizing the role of communal supports in bolstering the social–psychological basis for survival among the wounded and vulnerable, Saunders offers a potentially constructive note to end on, even as we might sadly recognize how contemporary political-economic policies that structure institutions and labor conditions consistently corrode solidarity. As a counterpoint to the self-sovereignty fetishism that poisons capitalist societies, susceptibility viewed from the standpoint of the unconscious sheds light on the ephemerality of conscious intentionality which encompasses an ability to consent to or fend off another’s unanticipated coercions and aggressions. The fantasy of a continuously conscious agency is impossible to fulfill, since at every stage and, indeed, at any moment, we potentially face unexpected incidents and circumstances that might forestall our ability to recognize and respond unequivocally to danger. Laplanche’s “primal seduction” thesis troubles the ideal of conscious consent in positing that infants passively absorb unsorted sexual excitations among other affects in their initial encounters with caretakers who are, to be sure, not completely transparent to themselves. Internalized as a behavioral script or lure, the repressed other-as-enigma bears the potential to instigate regressions into passivity, ambivalence, or even paralysis in response to unforeseen situations that derealize or erase our will. To translate Laplanche’s conception of primal seduction into Godley’s identification of a disavowed longing to be duped that is shared among the characters of Melville’s The Confidence-Man along with his readers is to reaffirm the psychoanalytic given that we often misrecognize our own other-driven desires. At the very least, then, remaining humble about our susceptibility—not just as an overdetermined vulnerability but also as an unmasterable openness to the other’s mystery—should mitigate cruel deployments of a metaphysics of presence as a superegoic cudgel against those who narrate lapses of resolve.