Sexuality Beyond Consent: Risk, Race, Traumatophilia

by Avgi Saketopoulou

Radical alternatives to consent and trauma.

Arguing that we have become culturally obsessed with healing trauma, Sexuality Beyond Consent calls attention to what traumatized subjects do with their pain. The erotics of racism offers a paradigmatic example of how what is proximal to violation may become an unexpected site of flourishing. Central to the transformational possibilities of trauma is a queer form of consent, limit consent, that is not about guarding the self but about risking experience. Saketopoulou thereby shows why sexualities beyond consent may be worth risking-and how risk can solicit the future.

Moving between clinical and cultural case studies, Saketopoulou takes up theatrical and cinematic works such as Slave Play and The Night Porter, to chart how trauma and sexuality join forces to surge through the aesthetic domain. Putting the psychoanalytic theory of Jean Laplanche in conversation with queer of color critique, performance studies, and philosophy, Sexuality Beyond Consent proposes that enduring the strange in ourselves, not to master trauma but to rub up against it, can open us up to encounters with opacity. The book concludes by theorizing currents of sadism that, when pursued ethically, can animate unique forms of interpersonal and social care.

Genres: Nonfiction, Psychoanalysis, Psychology, Sexuality, Queer, Theory, Philosophy

272 pages, Paperback

First published February 7, 2023

Reviews

[Harry · Rating 5 out of 5]

Near its beginning, the author notes that "the risk of reading this book, no less than the risk of writing it, is to experience what happens when we expose ourselves to something unknown, not knowing where it will take us", adding that this will be a book not only about ideas, but one seeking to provide an experience.

A hallmark of recent times has been a focus on consent between individuals, with less focus on our own willingness (or reluctance) to experience what is terrible and beautiful, creative and demonic, within ourselves.

Drawing on the writing of Jean Laplanche and others, "Sexuality Beyond Consent" takes us into the unknowable place deep inside of us where the enigmatic trace resides, given through the inevitable unconscious sexual communications of the other (usually parent), that overwhelm, leaving "that imperious object ... simultaneously undeniable and yet always impossible to grasp completely ... incontestably sexual" (Laplanche).

This site exists in all of us, in some formless manner or another, revealed only through our attempts of translation and binding, which challenge the possibility of growth and change because these origin sites exist always and forever out of reach.

Through our own consent to enter our opacity (a major theme of the book) we can make contact here, through surrendering to desire, and while in contact, there is the possibility of new translations, of self-expressions less rigid and imprisoning. This consent is not a comfortable consent and making contact takes us into acts that involve risk, surrender and immersion in the unfamiliar. Often, here, pain and pleasure are inseparable. Those courageous or daring enough to engage here may emerge with newfound intimacy with their opacity, offering the rich freedoms of aliveness and new iterations of pleasure.

We live in a culture - both within and outside of psychotherapy - that is increasingly uncomfortable exploring the realms of inner unknown, of trauma and of sexuality. By avoiding contact with sexuality and trauma, by attempting to always master and manage (and this is true for more or less all psychotherapy models), we can emerge still rigid and fearful of our own depths, cut off from some of our richest sources of creativity.

With its focus on race, on sexuality, on forms of consent and on trauma, "Sexuality Beyond Consent: Risk, Race, Traumatophilia" invites us to surrender and enter fully into experience and into the embodied mystery of ourselves and of the Other. It leads us into a realm of questioning, of humility and ultimately of expansion.

I'm grateful for this read which was challenging at times, that at points asked more than it answered, and that demanded my own vulnerability as it escorted me through landscapes both painful and beautiful. It invited deep soul-searching about myself. It asked me to consider how we might ultimately - both individual and collectively - meet our never fully knowable natures and one another, consenting to greater intimacies, richer desires and tolerance for touching the unknowable. I thank Avgi Saketopoulou for the challenges and rewards contained in this powerful work.

[Addy Taylor · Rating 2 out of 5]

Unnecessarily wordy and repetitive, this book is not enjoyable to read. The content is thought provoking, and invites readers to consider nuances in consent and human experience- important topics but locked within rambling chapters. Additionally, the use of Freudian concepts goes largely unchecked, which is disappointing from a book that otherwise engages critically with ideas and theory.

[Sanjana]

you don’t know the meaning of the word “freak” until you’ve read a psychoanalyst i fear lol. i liked this and i hated it a little, too. maybe not surprising that most of the reviews are white folks. need to process the later half of the book with a non-white person before i land somewhere on an opinion that isn’t “well. what the fuck”

[Nikki Mitchell · Rating 5 out of 5]

See this and other reviews on https://thebookdragondotblog.wordpres...

Content Warning for Book: Trauma, Sexual Trauma, Adult Language, Graphic Sexual Scenes

This is a highly academic book that analyzes the ideas of race, trauma, and forms of consent in a nontraditional way, mostly from Saketopoulou’s personal and professional experience as a Psychoanalyst. She cites several of her own case studies, as well as expands upon the previous literature–most notably, Jean Laplanche–to create a work that is uniquely her own. Rather than allowing us to hide behind the comfortable ideas of affirmative consent and “healing” of trauma, Saketopoulou forces us readers to push the bounds of what we’ve taken for granted and approach our own Limit Consent–an idea explored at length throughout.

As someone who has experienced sexual trauma, I found this book to be highly enlightening, and even better–freeing. On this topic of trauma, most of our traditional understanding deals with attempting to “heal” this piece of us, asserting that we are in fact broken. And yes, I agree that there are parts of me that were damaged by such experiences. However, by positing that those experiences broke me, I am further pushed aside; who am I is not defined by the trauma I’ve undergone. Saketopoulou gives me a chance to feel empowered and take back my body and my experiences.

Rather than focusing on “healing” trauma, Saketopoulou argues that it cannot be healed, and that such a concept is actually traumatophobic. I am inclined to agree. That experience will always be a part of me and will continually shape the way that I view and act in this world. But does that mean I need to reject that piece of me? Do I need to ignore or try to bury what happened? No. Like a bruise, I want to keep poking it. And so, Saketopoulou brings to light this idea of traumatophilia–we need to continually experience our trauma in safe and consensual ways to truly begin to understand it and its impact on us.

Now, as I mentioned above, this book is highly academic. If you are not well-versed in the current literature on consent and trauma, or do not have formal education on psychological topics, etc… Then this book may be difficult to wade through. I got my BS degree in Psychology, and a Master’s in Education, and it still took me quite a while to truly understand what Saketopoulou was saying–and, I admit that I still may have some pieces of it wrong. But if you are interested in such topics and are prepared for scientific jargon, referencing of multiple theories and previous psychologists, and a deeply analytical look at sex, consent, race, and trauma, then this is absolutely a book for you.

Highly recommended for those who have experienced trauma–specifically sexual trauma. Let’s take our lives back. Extremely thought-provoking, inspiring, and empowering.

[Ayden · Rating 2 out of 5]

I made a post on my Tumblr blog sharing my (very negative) thoughts on this book and figured I might as well post it here as a review because its increasing popularity is bothering me. So that’s what this is and that’s what I wrote (with some grammar correction):

People really discuss Avgi Saketopoulou’s Sexuality Beyond Consent as if it is the thing and that’s really a testament to their obliviousness towards critical studies of race and sexuality because it is not a theoretically competent work in the slightest. What she proves in this book is a good grasp on Laplanche, a rightful critique of affirmative consent and (an assertion of) good intentions as a person of white positionality—I’ll give her this much but other than that? Rudimentary as fuck, pedestrian even and that’s why it is trending so much among the queers. Her (non)engagement with black studies is borderline malicious giving that her whole argument is grounded on the fact that she only acknowledges black anti-humanist critique in order to particularize the field’s rationale without contemplating, refuting or dissecting none of the arguments of the authors she cites while characterizing them as constricted in their (black) particularity—one could say it is in fact a predatorial citational practice in the sense that the only reason these authors are acknowledged is for her to mark (epistemic) territory while following along with the text (and without the burden of proof) as if her notion of the human were actually inclusive of everyone and truly humanistic as opposed to, you know, the ones that aren’t. It is precisely a disregard in relation to the black ontological negation thesis that permits her to deliberately use concepts such as agency, sovereignty and will as if they could be applied (fittingly or not) to the subject whose (sexual) trauma or suffering is black. It is because she moves the question of (sexual) ethics into an interior locus of experience that she can then mobilize an ego that is unraced and without accounting for how (the real of) antiblack violence differs from violence as a transgressive or transformative notion (which is how it is mostly conceptualized in queer theory and kink theory: as jouissance). (It even reminds me of Patrice D. Douglass’s critique of Lee Edelman in Engendering Blackness given that what Saketopoulou does is also to (un)think the particularity of racial slavery and antiblackness or to think them as inessential in order to assess how violence “tout court” meets the subject, which then, in Saketopoulou’s case, gives her the opportunity to ignore a whole academic field for the sake of postulating a transgressiveness that is universal and unbounded in its intimateness.) It is a mediocre theoretical work whose status depends on an already well-established unwillingness of the general public towards engaging with black radical critique. And because its popularity only grows as time passes, and because it dares to defend race/slave play and posit it as politically transformative in its sexual ecstasy, you can be sure that in two or three years we’re going to see (even more) self-identified radical queer people using it to defend race play as the most antiracist thing in the world (and not only white people—that you can be sure).

Well, let’s be more specific:

Saketopoulou tries to approach the murkiness and darkness of the topics she’s discussing but ultimately trembles and stutters in front of the real thing. She extends empathy towards a white gay analysand that did sexual tourism (had sex with an abject non-white stranger from an unspecified foreign country—an ugly man which he describes as filthy and characterize as repulsive but that nonetheless enabled him to experience sexual ecstasy by way of contact with racial otherness) and she states that “because he remained in that friction zone between the opacity of the other and his own” the encounter was ethical. And then literally says that she “feels anxious” on saying this and, almost as a reflex, proceeds with what I previously alluded as a move where the discussion goes from (sexual) ethics as a matter in/of the world (with real, worldly and sometimes physical consequences) to the interior as a zone of opacity where the spontaneity of the encounter is possible—a locus that provides relief from what she describes as “the lacerating demands of relationality”, i.e., the real of power structures. So: the encounter can be determined as ethical because the white gay guy did not recoiled from his own experience of ego-shattering; the encounter is ethical even if we have only one person in this couch; it is ethical even with the absence of the (racial) other. It is because Saketopoulou conceptualizes whiteness as categorically isolationist that erotic encounters with racial otherness can be posited as new, transforming and capable of inaugurating innovative relations through their abject character… as if these weren’t always part of the eros of colonialism and/as antiblackness. Alterity becomes an alibi for (white) sexual access ad æternum. We’re supposed to think, of course, that what (psychically) differentiates her white gay analysand from a colonizer is that he is or can be (if only he allows himself to be vulnerable in relation to his and the others’ opacity) fundamentally changed by an encounter with the racial other—an (ugly, repulsive) other that, I would say, serves merely as an instrument for the (white) subject’s self-effacement that is the experience she names self-sovereignty… and which she acknowledges as always experiential, transient, fleeting (so why are we so sure it could bring change, even if only his change?).

When it comes to Sexuality Beyond Consent, taking refuge on interiority is, in my opinion, equivalent to regressing towards the safe and obvious (…which is ironic coming from a book that wants to deal with sexual risk); it is a movement that saves Saketopoulou’s argument from falling apart because then she does not have to deal with the material consequences of whatever she says. As an example: in order to exemplify what she terms limit consent she establishes an analogy between an actual mother/daughter playful exchange and two adults enacting a play-rape scenario; the daughter is requesting her mother to continue to playfully grab or squeeze her even after she asks for her mother to stop (i.e., she’s asking for her mother to trespass her affirmative consent during play); analogously, rape play asks of you to trespass your partners’ asserted limits: it is its point (as kink). But the problem here is that the analogy only holds together (ethically) because we’re discussing these positionalities in abstraction. The analogy is discursively established through the playfulness of asymmetry and top-bottom power differential; she talks about “the vulnerability of the top”, the fact that “the top [the mother] makes herself passible to the bottom [the daughter] and to the bottom’s desire”; the rhetoric serves to sell Saketopoulou’s concept of limit consent which, for her, “makes for a vision of consent in which power, vulnerability, and responsibility are more complexly distributed, not only between the participants but also in the texture of their encounter.”

Okay, cute. But we’re talking about sex aren’t we? We are always talking about (the) sex(ual). So… can I say that Saketopoulou’s hinting at the possibility of (limit) consent in adult-child sexual relations? No. Because clearly no one would do that right? What she says is that she’s “arguing in favor of such a breach [of one’s boundaries], though not one arrived at through malicious intent and purposeful and/or mindless boundary crossings (which can very much be traumatizing) [i.e. rape] but through limit consent, where boundaries are crossed not out of carelessness or disregard but by way of a paradoxical respect for the other’s wishes that invites a trespass.” So, what I am saying is that there is nothing in her (again, deeply internal and nebulous) understanding of (sexual) ethics that prevents adult-child sexual relations from being encompassed by limit consent as long as the child’s wishes are “paradoxically respected” which, I assume, it could mean: as long as the child asks for it or is (or seems?) willing. What I am saying, in fact, is that the only thing here that prevents rape and violation from being (ethically) justified is that she’s obviously not advocating for sexual abuse, i.e., “malicious intent”, “carelessness” or “disregard” because who would? Who would defend violation?… but if we’re talking about sex, especially from a psychoanalytical perspective… and regardless of whether we’re talking about vanilla or kinky sex… what precisely would be the absence of care? What exactly does being malicious means? If in Sexuality Beyond Consent we’re never actually on the locus of rape (since we only refer to it in order to demonstrate what we are not) is because her discussion of (sexual) ethics only involve subjects who are always well-intentioned from the very beginning; it ultimately functions as self-help for a kink community (or for a kinky-to-be person) that should not feel ashamed about their own appetites (after all, you shouldn’t want for your desires to “yield to the Orwellian censorship of good politics” [her words]), and whose internal (but always political) innocence is discursively established not by anything that they (might) do or say but by a contact with an alterity or opacity that is always-already in them or whose contact can always-already be established (in potentia). It remains a liberal approach to sex and sexuality as long as the lines between rape and sex, maliciousness and benevolence, care and carelessness are so well delineated and as long as that line is taken and discussed as an absolute given.

I will not antagonize Saketopoulou’s interlocutors that are black race/slave play practitioners. The only thing that I will say to them is that pleasure is undeniable—it is there and it makes you cum—but freedom? Freedom’s not a feeling. As Saketopoulou herself goes to great lengths to make it understood: self-sovereignty’s liberation is fleeting, transitive, experiential—its freedom is there until it isn’t. What is not fleeting, transitive or (simply) experiential is the real that strikes—and its strike does not and will not ask for consent or authorization in order to bring subjection; it is itself its own (white) injunction.

As an addendum: something that is… curious to me, and it is not something that I noticed when I first read this book months ago, is that David S. Marriott is absented from the black theorists she cites. Why? It’s not like Saketopoulou would have to engage with Marriottian psychoanalysis in order to acknowledge him—she did not substantially engaged with Fanon, Hartman, Patterson, Sexton, Spillers, Wilderson; none of them!—so why is Marriott specifically absented from citation… considering not only that his work is not unknown in the academy but that he discusses similar topics (such as interracial sex and antiblack violence) even if with a radically different disposition than hers? You’re a psychoanalyst working with questions of racial violence and sexuality in the 2020s and David Marriott somehow escapes you? Well, if you consider that two years before this book was published David S. Marriott’s On Revolutionary Suicide was already dealing with the whiteness of Georges Bataille’s concept of sovereignty (which Saketopoulou takes in order to ground her own (human, universal) notion of self-sovereignty) then it actually makes complete sense. On Bataille’s sovereignty here’s what Marriott has to say (and then I’ll shut myself up):

“If sovereignty is that miraculous moment in which the subject expires before itself, and expires from the enjoyment of expiring, at what point does life become sovereign, and therefore resistant? Bataille never provides us with an answer. Rather life alone is what transgresses (itself), and what resists its own reactive appropriation as death. But from this perspective, let us say: the horror of what separates us from what we are in our anguish is less terrible than the idea of an infinite monotony of non-sovereign being. [my emphasis] Reason cannot make us choose either, and inner experience cannot reveal either as wrong. So at what point can one resolve the difficult question of when sovereignty begins if not either by saying, with Nietzsche, thus I willed it (as chance, as power); or, with Bataille, thus I cede or abandon it (as chance, as sacrificial loss). […] Without retracing the various steps of this Bataillean myth—this violent passion that the ego devotes to itself (or that devotes the ego to itself in its own sundering)—it’s worth pointing out that this myth also serves to reinstate a myth of the (white, western) subject as both destiny and foundation. It designates a subject who can only enter into relationships with others by assuming this abyssal, expiatory, sovereign obliteration-restoration beyond otherness. It is, Bataille tells us, a crime to enjoy chance as will to power. His reasoning is that what resists also transgresses, and it must do so in such a way that it is at once without diminution or ressentiment. On this score, violent sacrifice is taken to be the essence of society but only for those who seemingly have already made the choice, and not just any choice, but the choice to be a non—or absolute—subject, who is thus headless (i.e., sovereign) and always at fault (i.e., transgressive) in their very being, for to be sovereign is to be at fault to any order or system. Hence the need to wager, to mitigate or expiate the egotism of this mitigation. In saying that egotism lives without resistance—for it merely dissimulates it and conceivably takes malign pleasure in doing so—is to say that will still belongs in the category of desire and not that of drive, or its ethics. Yes, we are fated to be. And to establish community myth is needed (Bataille calls it the “sacred”—a word whose own mythic character is never really questioned as such, but endlessly performed as if it were a kind of mana). When the issue is race or power, however, we know that life has already, in a sense, been invaded or intruded upon by a fault that is never simply sacrificial-ontological. […] [I]f suicide is what discloses the religious and ethical truth of sacrifice, then sacrificing has always relied on a white passion to become; as if by becoming white, it were possible for the subject to appropriate the risk of dissolution and to do so irremediably. At one point, Bataille writes as if sovereignty is the miracle of my will, and supposedly because of the pain and torment of being reduced to nothing. But for those who have been nothing, and whose difference is a no longer and a not yet, the political has a different story to tell than the choice of humanization (as the necessary cost of subjection).”

[Marcus · Rating 5 out of 5]

if i can finish my program with even 10% of saketopoulou’s lucidity on perversion i will be complete

[Maxwell · Rating 3 out of 5]

Compelling subject but highly repetitive writing. I probably would of gotten a lot more out of this if I hadn't already read its main references (Laplanche / Bataille, a little side of Bersani / Kristeva / Blanchot), but if you already have that familiarity there isn't a lot here that goes beyond them. The last chapter is potentially the most original in its suggesting thinking about an "exigent sadism" as an ethical sadism that supports a Laplanchian detranslation or Bersanian ego-shattering. The kind of "exigent sadism" that might describe an analyst, certain artists, or the rinzai zen master that beats you with a stick until you're enlightened. And it's interesting to see Laplanche's concepts applied in the concrete contexts of race, colonialism, art, and actual clinical material.

[mar · Rating 3 out of 5]

tbd

[Elizabeth · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sexuality Beyond Consent: Risk, Race, Traumatophilia (Paperback)
by Avgi Saketopoulou

from the library

incredibly interesting



https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast...
Today I talked to Avgi Saketopoulou about her book Sexuality Beyond Consent: Risk, Race, Traumatophilia (NYU Press, 2023).

My conversation with Dr. Saketopoulou begins in the clinic “one of the most scary and difficult places one can find oneself in” she says because it is in the consulting room that sometimes things “become traumatic for the first time.” It is here that Saketopoulou first shares her affection for “early radical psychoanalytic thinking” which

“put a lot of faith on the possibilities that come from that wounding and from the kind of potentialities that can arise in something becoming kind of like opening up in the consulting room into pain, as opposed to what we are mostly turning towards to as a field in ways that I find both distressing and disappointing, like the idea of healing wounds, of closing up injuries, as if we could ever do that anyway, which I think we can't, rather than embracing or giving ourselves over to what I think is both the insurgent and most interesting radical potential of psychoanalytic treatments in in getting to that place where sort of like injury, wound, like the past opens up to become not just something that we lived through or something that we were told about, but something that becomes yours.”



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dsLjN...
Asian Provocation Podcast
Ayoto
9:21
whiteness white people recognize that however they have done and they recognize the historical abuses
9:28
perpetrated about upon people of color and from that perspective assume
9:33
responsibility and make reparations but that in some way positions white people as first of all as being capable of
9:40
doing that which is by no means a given and second is having been outside the relationship of Oppression which they
9:48
have inherited by virtue of their whiteness which people do not choose their race we're born into races and
9:55
histories that we did not select but in the aftermath of which we nevertheless have to craft a life
10:00
and the question is how to assume that responsibility without that turning into
10:05
assuming guilt for things that you have not personally done but from which you benefit anyway
10:10
and that's where questions of Ethics come up that position white people within the trauma of interracial
10:18
violence and interracial abuses as inheritors of these kinds of lineages
10:23
within this Trifecta of risk race and traumatophilia on a kind of parallel
10:29
like the invisible is the discussion of sexuality and how that is also a
10:35
Cornerstone but which you talk very much about but also in a constant parallel
10:41
the relationship and I really want to read this out loud actually the you uh you there's a whole chapter on exigent
10:48
sadism you reference the documentary The Artist and the Pervert and I think I was texting you I thought this was a funny
10:55
detail personally I was staying with my friend in Switzerland and she actually had the poster of this film in the
11:01
toilet and for the week I didn't I just the post is great too but I remember just in the toilet for a week and I
11:08
didn't think much and when I was reading I was like I haven't seen a film at that time I think why does it sound familiar
11:15
I've been staring at it for a week it's funny how the Universe
11:21
um when I've been [ __ ] for a week which is a very big theme in my analysis this theme of [ __ ] that it's a very
11:29
fascinating discussion but I would love to can we do it can we do a little try
11:35
this out where we we take a character each I just I just want to read this I just think this is such a which
11:40
character do you want me to be oh should we try just doing the opposite gender
11:45
are we gonna do it by gender or race oh yeah that's so many different which would you like as a guest on the
11:52
show yeah I think that um it's going to trip some wires whichever way we do it yeah
11:58
which may actually be the point yeah could be Garrick sure yeah so I'll start
12:06
so it's taken straight out but I think it just it's it's such a powerful little
12:11
back and forth so the thing is I'm sure you are not the only person for whom this is an issue
12:17
I'm not saying you have to compromise your Artistic integrity but I'm saying that doing [ __ ] like spending three
12:23
hours on Facebook or getting upset about Austrian politics and I'm like please
12:28
don't do that this I will stop this I will stop darling this is the real
12:34
problem and the only thing frankly why I'm afraid not to get ready is Trump I'll tell you why it's a very egoistic
12:41
point of view I was so happy to live fascist Austria and come back to the States now I know there's no place to
12:48
escape and this situation really puts me down sorry and I have to I'm sorry to be
12:54
cruel but I can't have any empathy for white people right now when it comes to this point of view I can't like I
13:00
understand that you are upset and I get it but the hard truth is welcome to the
13:07
way that most of the people in the world have been living in Forever and you cannot let be an impediment to
13:15
you actually doing your work it's not allowed that is not allowed I did not give up my entire life
13:23
so that you could mope about an election it's just should we contextualize a
13:31
little bit what's happening in this vignette so this is as you were saying from this documentary The Artist and the
13:37
Pervert uh which Chronicles the relationship the Master Slave relationship
13:42
um dominant submissive um relationship between a black woman who is a self-identified submissive in a
13:49
relationship with her white master and these are terms that they use who are in this very complicated Nexus of sexuality
13:57
gender and racial difference which has generated a lot of upset within both the
14:03
Buddhism community and without questions about why would a black woman want to
14:09
submit herself to a white Master what does it mean is this about internalized
14:15
self-hatred this is about some interiorized um kind of like identification with
14:20
whiteness um and this section comes later in the book
14:26
in the fifth chapter where I talk about sadism after having explored a little bit actually quite a bit issues around
14:31
race play and the complications of playing with race and being played by
14:37
race at the site of trauma and around the erotic erotic objection erotic humiliation and so on and so forth
14:44
and this excerpt is found in a documentary in the documentary The Artist and the Pervert where uh gerk
14:52
Haas who we have found out by now is actually the descendant of Nazis
14:58
and has grown up as the descendant of Nazis which really complicates the scene so now you have not just a black woman
15:05
who's a descendant of slaves in a in a neurotic BDSM dominance abusive
15:10
relationship with a white man who's a descendant or Nazi somebody would say oh doesn't that make sense how else would
15:15
it go like that's actually exactly how you expect these two things to get fastened to each other
15:20
but things happen in this documentary that really put a lot of pressure on more conventional understandings or more
15:27
straightforward understandings of this and this particular sequence comes from a moment where he is really struggling
15:33
to do his work she is doing a lot of the supportive work as his submissive and she's
15:39
complaining to him about not doing the things that he's supposed to be doing and you see him say Well look like I
15:45
left Austria and came here and found fascism in Trump and I just feel like
15:51
there's no way to escape and she's not having it like there's this really beautiful moment where she says to him I
15:58
did not give up my life for you so that you could mope about an election so I use this as a starting point to
16:04
think about the ethics of sadism which is a concept that I try to I think it's the most important Concept in the book
16:10
actually the concept that I tried to recuperate for thinking about not destructivity but about the harshness
16:17
that comes with certain kinds of truths and the care that comes in being willing to exercise this harshness over another
16:25
person and that that is actually a relation of care I get goosebumps when just hearing all
16:32
those things and especially the way that this situation is dealt and the kind of cliche of like
16:40
observation of dominant submission who is who's the cliche top bottom idea and
16:46
all of that that's something that I've been deeply fascinated not so much with the
16:53
perversion aspect or the enjoyment of the notion of that but rather just as a
16:59
teacher as a guide to see how much through sexuality through some of these
17:04
explorations that yes that's where the teaching is
17:09
soft so often coming through and through these overwhelming moments I'm curious how did
17:17
you find yourself in where you are today and saying and writing and being the
17:24
voice for some of these ideas what's the driving force for you is on a personal level
17:30
appreciate that question um I think there's a couple of different elements to this
17:37
um the one is that I came here as an immigrant I grew up half in Cyprus half
17:42
in Greece and I came here as a immigrant to understood myself to be white and well that's not true who was white but
17:49
didn't understand myself to be white and that is something that I had to learn and understand much more about race and
17:55
racial difference and racial oppression and learn a lot of history that I frankly was not taught growing up in
18:02
Greece and Cyprus at the same time I also my my mother's
18:07
side of the family comes from Cyprus and Cyprus was a British colony up until 1960 which means that when my mother was
18:14
growing up she grew up under British rule and that when I was growing up the
18:21
I mean even today um the Cyprus is postcoloniality is
18:26
thick like butter in the air it's not just driving on the right side of the
18:31
road of the left side of the road it's not it's not like the cucumber
18:37
sandwiches it's not the tea it's like you feel it everywhere and part of what postcoloniality comes with is a
18:44
racialization but not by virtue of race of skin pigment or kind of like however
18:50
else races mythologized um but by virtue of kind of like
18:55
hierarchies and hegemonies and power relations and in many ways I came even though I
19:03
always knew that history I didn't quite understand its impact on me until I came
19:08
here and started thinking about race and understood my own whiteness and understood also the inflection of my own
19:13
whiteness so I've been um and my preoccupation with slave clay
19:18
was actually very critical to this process you um spoke or wrote about the re


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G7hrG...
RU228: DR AVGI SAKETOPOULOU ON SEXUALITY BEYOND CONSENT – RENDERING UNCONSCIOUS PODCAST


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wz_cU...
Library Talk | Sexuality Beyond Consent | Leon Brenner and Avgi Saketopoulou





unrelated but intriguing:
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast...

[samantha]

Avgi Saketopoulou, Sexuality Beyond Consent: Risk, Race, Traumatophilia (New York University Press, 2023).
• Introduction: Erotics of the Terribly Beautiful
o I lean on the metapsychology of the psychoanalyst Jean Laplanche, who offers a distinctive psychoanalytic theory that is not often encountered by academics or, in fact, by most trained analysts.4 Laplanche brings something novel to the understanding of the unconscious and to the theorizing of the ego, which permits him to ask unusual questions of psychic time and to put generative pressure on repetition
o Pushing back against the fixation with discourses of trauma, I argue that a theorizing of traumatic inscription that assumes trauma to be unchanging and immobile is traumatophobic.
o Traumatophobia keeps trauma inert, and that poses a problem because trauma that is not inserted into circulation does not wither and disappear: it stalls and it controls us. Trauma, I argue, needs to circulate; it needs to be revisited.
o I describe this approach, of maintaining a hospitable attitude to the revisitation of trauma, as “traumatophilic.” Traumatophilia does not overlook or diminish the impact of trauma but offers, instead, a way of working with the recognition that we cannot turn away from our traumata, that we are strangely drawn to them.
o Much as we would want to think otherwise, the impact of traumatic experiences cannot be eliminated or repaired: at best, we live in their aftermath on different terms than when they were inflicted on us. Relinquishing the idea that trauma can be repaired opens paths to thinking about what subjects do with their trauma.
o Another distinctive element in my use of psychoanalysis is that my reading of Laplanche’s work is refracted through my engagement with performance theory, philosophy, critical theory, queer studies, and queer of color critique. Consequently, the Laplanche I bring to you is a bit idiomatic and, in a word, “queer.” This is not to say that you are getting a spoiled Laplanche, only a (re)purposed one that is especially exciting for thinking about erotics and aesthetic experience.
o With his conceptual help, I intervene in ongoing conversations about affirmative consent to argue: while violations of consent are real and deserve our attention, affirmative consent does not.
o There is no such thing as consent, at least not in the way that affirmative consent paradigms imagine it or in the way it is sold to us as a metric that can subtend ethical relations or inform our sexual politics—¬ though there very much is such a thing as its violation. I introduce a different kind of consent paradigm, which I call “limit consent.” Limit consent has ties to the rousing of the sexual drive and entails a nuanced negotiation of limits that belongs neither to the domain of activity nor to the sphere of passivity. Limit consent is not something we “exercise” or something that is “done” to us: it has more to do, rather, with surrendering to an other or, more precisely, with surrendering to the opacity in the other and to the opacity in ourselves. Consent, we will see, is not only something that we offer to another; it is also an internal affai
o If consent is not a way to take control but, within a certain given context, a way to let go of it, we cannot rely on the outcome of an encounter (what happened or how someone felt about it) to decide whether the encounter was ethical. Other variables have to come into play, and aesthetic experience, as I will discuss, is a critical variable in this process with ties to the ethical domain.
o Freud initially theorized the unconscious as a psychic structure that developed in order to house repressed traumatic memory. Recovering these memories, his early thinking went, could empty the unconscious of its contents—which implied that one could be “cured” of one’s unconscious. This idea was eventually abandoned, but it continues to haunt the discourse on trauma to this day—¬ as, for example, when we talk about something being “worked through,” about “processing” one’s trauma, or, more colloquially, about exorcizing one’s demons. The deceptive promise that trauma could be drained from the psyche (through recollection or insight) was drastically revised when Freud (1915a) discovered that the unconscious never stopped flaring up in the embodied relation with the analyst (what we call “transference”).
o Limit consent is a type of consent that is conceptually grounded in negative dialectics.
o Affirmative consent emerges out of the tradition of reading the Hegelian dialectic as giving us an ethic of recognition, wherein wishes and boundaries are communicated and negotiated, recognizing each other’s needs to as to read synthetic conclusion.
o Where affirmative consent imagines a subject that can be fully transparent to herself, the kind of psychoanalysis you will find in this volume acknowledges that the self cannot be fully known, that we are always somewhat opaque to ourselves, and, therefore, that consent negotiations always involve more than we think we bargained for: they involve a confrontation with what is irreducibly alien to us about ourselves.
o opacity is itself a resistance. Thankfully, we might say, something in us always resists being grasped and understood, and in that sense, opacity may be seen as a sturdiness in us—¬ and that, as we will see, connects to self-¬ sovereignty. This sturdiness in us is always there
o Encountering opacity means that we dwell in such spaces without giving in to the impulse of trying to master the experience—¬ for example, by seeking to understand or to interpret or to symbolize what is unfolding—¬ and without trying to turn the experience into a project, as in “the philistine demand that the art- work give [us] something” (Adorno, 1970, p. 17).
o It is only when one resists the possibility of mastery or when the urge to master is taken away by someone else (which, as we will see, is what an exigent sadist does) that one gets to experience—¬ a word that, tellingly, in French also means “experiment.”
o The form of aesthetic experience this book focuses on, in other words, is not something we attain by plan or determination, nor is it arrived at through the formal elements of the artwork.
o In Aesthetic Theory, Theodor Adorno explicitly urges us to refrain from “burdening artworks down with intentions” (1970, p. 27) so that we may let ourselves experiment, instead, with what may await us when “content becomes more opaque.
o My project seeks to map how some art stuns, at times even slaps us, in order to explore how some performance works on us not by kindling the past as memory but by revivifying it in the present as a force in the here and now.
o the aesthetic is neither synonymous with the beautiful nor is it a depoliticized pleasure.
o The ucs is an alterity that can never e integrated into he ego, it is not subjectively ours (that is, we do not possess our unconscious), and yet we are still responsible for its effects in the world.
o Psychoanalysis has treated racial, gendered, and sexual otherness atrociously, so if even the invocation of the term sets off red flags, you are in good company. And even when more inclusive, psychoanalysis remains easily caught in the stranglehold of neoliberal logics, inculcated in prioritizing thinking about productivity or value.
o Writing this way is a risk. More than once, I found myself before something much bigger than myself, towering over me. I have written this book so that you can follow me there.
• 1. To Suffer Pleasure: Limit Experience and Transgression
o The abject trades in repudiation; it traffics in turning away from opacity—¬ and that makes a sustained inquiry into abjection politically necessary.
o Maintaining a hospitable proximity to such experiences involves resisting the more ordinary tendency to drag them out of their opaqueness to shine on them the light of “insight.”
o To be clear, I am not arguing that nothing can be gleaned from querying what enthralls us erotically, just that such inquiries can only produce intelligible answers that have first passed through the bottleneck of what can be psychically represented (“translated,” as we will soon see).
o I argue for perversity as an erotic possibility with political potential, the vicissitudes of which deserve the effort and nuance of our critical attention.
o If the perverse underwrites all sexuality, rather than ask perversity to account for itself, we might, instead, ask after docile, tame, and subdued sexualities that may suffer from having lost their footing in the perverse.31
o TLDR My Laplanchean approach adds to these conversations by showing how some erotic practices build their transformational density, by showing that some types of aesthetic experience have important ties to the perverse, by naming some of the resistances that arise in us in the encounter with the liminal forces of the infantile sexual which turn us away from encountering opacity, and by offering a different approach to perverse pleasures that evades perversion’s conceptual fate of being either pathologized or kneecapped by incurious, liberal acceptance.
 My hope is to whet an appetite for theorizing the alien and the bizarre in sexuality not from within a state of alarm or from the rubric of tolerance (Jakobsen & Pellegrini, 2004) but by sitting with the force of shock that can facilitate (through processes I discuss) an encounter with opacity.
o From a behavioral standpoint, I use the term “perversion” to designate a polymorphous sexual process—¬ rather than circumscribed sex acts—¬ that issue from the materiality of the body, which involve internal experience and which engage, rather than resist, the exigent forces of the infantile sexual. Interembodied, encounters that are experienced as transgressive move toward the “more and more” of experience—¬ and when this escalation becomes unbearable, they can shatter the ego
 What makes one’s sexuality perverse is not the precise script enacted but the imbrication of transgression with the intensities of the body’s libidinal excitability.
o Delving more deeply into such practices can help us sidestep the dipole of perversity as either pathology or benign variation—¬ a concept we find in Freud, who noted “the human need for [sexual] variation” (1905b, p. 151)
o Freud He thus darts back and forth between the notion that sexuality is definitionally polymorphously perverse and the idea that a postpubertal, mature sexuality will eventually remand the perverse to a sexual sidekick
o Freud as quickly passed over.
o The ethical is thus not about legislating what is right or wrong, it is about acknowledging that in the erotic domain there are no universals. Experience so defined stands to bring us into con- tact with our raw being.
o Freud’s sex is about linking and organizing. This fastens the erotic to love, to relationality, and to interpersonal connection—that is, to relating to the other as a whole object even though the sexual drive operates according to part-object logistics.
o Attachment theory Situating the sensual lusciousness of the mother-¬ infant dyad at the constitutive epicenter of psychosexual life (Seligman in Slavin et al., 2004), attachment theory argues for sexuality as an expression of relating that privileges connection, deep bonds, and mutuality. This yielded a rather impoverished theory of sexuality in which the mysteri- ous plenitudes of the erotic, not to mention the erotic frisson of power differentials, go limp
o NORMATIVE STRIVINGS. Attachment teory desexualizes the parent-infant dyad to sidestap difficulties that arise when visceral eroticism surfaces in relationships of care.
o Muriel Dimen also has urged analysts to think alongside arousal (1999) and not to recoil from the excitements of disgust (2005) and perversity (2001). Her work queries the analyst’s squeamishness, noting the multiple ways in which personal anxieties about the intensities of sexual experience get churned into theoretical formulations that are then elevated to orthodoxy.
o When it comes to the erotic, limits of one sort or another always slip in as critical to the preservation of order.
 Pitting the limit against pleasure, however, overlooks that psychosexuality is amplified through prohibition.
o Laplanche: The Fundamental Anthropological Situation
 The unintended and inadvertent “intervention of the other”
 Enigma functions as an internal foreign body.
 A father changing son’s diaper puts less pressure on anus. the infant is not traumatized because he senses the father’s homoeroticism or picks up on the father’s incestuous anxiety (remember, it is I who made the hypothesis that the father struggled with that). What the infant is traumatized by is the implantation of something unknowable (enigmatic) in him
 The infant is impelled to make meaning out of these enigmatic implants to cope with the strain of the way the adult’s perversity has “broken into” his psychic envelope. Laplanche called this meaning-¬ making process “translation,”
 The ego develops out of the cumulative layerings of these translations. Enigma, said differently, is organized into fantasies and representation.
 These translations are neither correct nor incorrect decodoings of the adult’s intentions but sumly efforts to master the unintelligibility of the adult’s communication
 Humans are self-theorizing in this way.
 Translation never quite fully manages to coat enigma with meaning, and so no translation is ever complete. Remainder. “unworked chunks” dwell in us on a somatic register that exceeds psychic organization. Resistant to all metabolization, these become repressed, which is how the unconscious forms.
• The unconscious are persistently and hauntingly other
 Secondary repression of memories, fantasies, and affects.
o Glissant on opacity
 resists enclosure with an impenetrable autarchy.
o The two together allow us to think more critically about psychoanalysis’ seemingly benign preoccupation with “understanding” patients and trying to echaustively account for the patietn’s psychic productions.
o The opaque is not languid but restless, and it is sexual. It is situated in an energetic regime that stands to unsettle the ego’s homeostatic hold
o The necessarily traumatic intervention of the other must entail pain, even when pleasurable.
o When amplified (per BErani), the interimplication of pleasure/pain can leave the subject “momentarily undone” disrupts ego’s coherence and dissolves its boundaries.
o Thinking with, not against, pain and abjection.
o TLDR we saw that the infantile sexual is multiple and polymorphous, more of a force rather than something that appears phenomenally, while sexuality is the set of behaviors, fantasies, acts, and identities that, though inflected by the infantile sexual, are more psychically organized. The infantile sexual, that is, is not locked into sexuality; it gives an account of something else entirely (Fletcher, 2000). Freud’s fundamental discovery, infantile sexuality is “the object of psychoanalysis”
• 2. The Draw to Overwhelm: Limit Consent and the Retranslation of Enigma
o In this chapter infantile sexuality will help us explore states of dysregulation called “overwhelm” (noun not verb)
o Affirmative consent
 DEF: understands consent as issuing from a subject who is fully transparent to themselves and who, in thinking consciously and deciding rationally, can anticipate the probably effects of their assent.
 OP says this is an epistemological project of dubious usefulness. one never knows what one signs up for and what one will get until after the fact, however carefully, dutifully, or earnestly one communicates.
 The affirmative consent model, however, is insufficiently nuanced: it problematically imagines desire to be autonomous, unconstrained, and possible to separate from social inequalities that, in fact, condition who gets to withhold consent and who does not.
 Premised on and trafficking in appetites and erotic acts that are intelligible and socially palatable, it “often buttresses normative sexualities and sexual hierarchies”
 We need a different concept of consent, one that is not predicated on setting and observing limits but on initiating and responding to an invitation to transgress them
o Limit consent
 Can bear more of the weight of the complexities of the sexual
 Does not center on (re)producing an experience of satisfaction but, instead, works to facilitate novelty and surprise.
 Grounded in negative dialectics
 Recognizes that even careful interpersonal negotiations leave behind a remainder that cannot be eliminated
 Limit consent’s interpersonal syntax does not entail the assertion of one’s sovereign boundaries but centers, rather, on surrendering to another—¬ risking coming up against one’s own and the other’s opacity.
 limit consent gives us an understanding of consent in which power is not dichotomously apportioned—¬ as in, one has it and the other does not— but elaborates a vision of consent in which power, vulnerability, and responsibility are more complexly distributed, not only between the participants but also in the texture of their encounter.
 Analysis as e.g. of limit consent
 safety and trust are the very conditions of possibility for limit consent to come into play in the first place.
• The safety in question, however, is not that things will not go wrong but that if they do, which they could, both parties will stick around to process and hold the injury together.
o On overwhelm
 We need to rehabilitate the notion of excess in sexual experience.
 Overwhelm is a dysregulated state; it is not in the purview of repetition compulsion and is not necessarily destructive, though it does court risk
 Can bring about ego shattering, a radical unbinding of the ego, that could unravel previous translations that may be at an impasse, opening up space for new ones.
 But unlike s elf-shattering, which presumes a quick, and better, reconstitution of the subject (Bersani), overwhelm opens us up to actual risk, not just the thrill of it.
o Passibility vs submission
 submission is heavy and weighs one down, whereas surrender occurs more spontaneously
 such surrender cannot be demanded from the other as in sexual harassment and assault, where someone tries to impose their sexual will on the other, as it also involves a succumbing to something in oneself.
• 3 Risking Sexuality Beyond Consent: Overwhelm and Inciting Traumatisms
o I explore in this chapter what, other than being “screwed,” can come from ebing subjected to something to which we did not entirely, or even at all, consent
o Recap Limit Consent TLDR
 In previous chapters, I called consent that lives o

[Theo Dora · Rating 4 out of 5]

“But wounds never fully close. They leave behind marks and scabs that can reopen and we are strangely drawn to touch.”

[Edward · Rating 5 out of 5]

On the book Sexuality Beyond Consent Risk, Race, Traumatophilia by Avgi Saketopoulou

This book is difficult in every way. The material covered is difficult in that it makes us look at relationships and circumstances –race, kink, consent, the unconscious, overwhelm– with an unflinching gaze. As the author herself notes in the conclusion:
In standing behind that sovereign experience is worth what it will cost us and in carving out a conceptual space for exigent sadism, I have taken a risk with you. In some ways I took that risk from the start, when I asked you to give yourselves over to me, which is to some degree what all books ask of the reader, though not all authors make the announcement. (196-97 emphasis in the original)
Then there is the matter of this being a specialist book teeming with specialized vocabulary from Psychoanalysis in general, but especially from Freud and Laplanche as well as a bit of Philosophy especially Batille, Foucault, and Sade. None of this should dissuade the reader though because the payoff is worth it.

This is a well structured and forceful examination of the forces, conscious and unconscious which underly sadism, masochism and the very concept of consent. Anyone with an interest in what is truly happening in relationships with any form of power imbalance would profit from reading this book. Concepts like overwhelm, limit experience and above all traumatophilia are absolutely groundbreaking and essential in understanding these dynamics.

I should say that my own approach to this book has been as a fairly well read non specialist. The suggestion to read this book was given to me by a professional Dominatrix. Though this may have been intended for a small, highly academic audience this book goes well beyond that. Just as with many theories out there this book gives language to felt experiences that are difficult to categorize and highly subjective. These experiences, ideas, points of view make our world whether we admit it or not and having the strength to not look away is vital to our growth and sanity. I would recommend this book to everyone but especially to those interested in power dynamics in society and relationships.

[lfreaton · Rating 5 out of 5]

Necessary and important.

[livewugreactions · Rating 5 out of 5]

You know it's a good book when I say "so true bestie" several times throughout. I have little experience in reading psychoanalytic works or philosophies on eroticism, but I have to say that this was an eminently beautiful and readable experience. The notion that there can be any sexual experience beyond the bounds of affirmative consent is jarring and the author notes as such, but the idea of limit consent, the "exigent sadism" as she calls it that is the permitted transgression of one's knowable boundaries into the touching of past wounds, is such a fascinating approach. The application of it to queer, kink, and racially loaded experiences is masterful and has really provoked a deeper investigation into eroticism and the limits of the ego within myself. The book is difficult at times, but that is part of what the author desires, the piercing of our own ideas and their retranslation into something novel. Great book all in all.

[hauntedandholierthanthou · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the most personally challenging and jaw-droppingly eye-opening books (with insights that are just so relevant to things I'm processing in therapy and shit) I HAVE EVER READ.

[Isidora Stanković · Rating 5 out of 5]

Perfect. Life changing. Ravished by it. Beyond sad to have finished it. Beautifully written, cunningly intellectual. It did precisely what it said it could do - it trickled something opaque, something beyond words in my being. I am so aroused to embrace life with the perspective this book gave me. So deeply thankful to the author for her work.

“The risk of reading this book, no less than the risk of writing it, is to experience what happens when we expose ourselves to something unknown, not knowing where it will take us”

[Shaun · Rating 4 out of 5]

I discovered this text via the New Books Network podcast.

Beautifully written, though perhaps a bit too academically written for my preference.

Would love to come back to expand on my key take aways.

Sadly I cannot access many of the referenced media due to zoned international media publishing regulation.

[Kev Nickells · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm reading this for a reading group so there's a chance I might edit my review further down the line.

There's bits of this that I'm sceptical of but I don't think that's worth going into for a goodreads review. What the book talks about is to do with therapy, kink, trauma, aesthetics and such topics. The premise, I suppose, is around having less of a trauma-averse approach to psychoanalysis. Rather than recognising trauma as (I'm glossing) immutable irruptions of _bad stuff_ the idea is to find more effective ways to reconcile ourselves with our traumas; to situate trauma within complex social relations and complex auto-historiographies.

Theoretically it rests upon a few well-heeled names - Jean Laplanche, George Bataille, Marquis de Sade with a side helping of folk like Jean-Francois Lyotard. If those names aren't familiar, Saketopoulou is dealing with writers whose work is (nominally) 'transgressive', or at least operating at some extreme of non-normative, sexual identities. The case studies have strong, and frequently explicit, associations with queerness and kink, and various overlapping aspects of such areas.

There's a fair amount of discussion of what may be atypical sexual activity and it's worth saying that it's dealt with in a very adult way. No snickering or being judgemental. Certainly one of the more important aspects of this book is that it's offering kink communities a strongly non-judgemental approach and means of discussing / understanding sexual trauma and (importantly) the resolution thereof. It also offers a more complex, sophisticated understanding of the concept of consent - especially sexually - than what is termed 'affirmative consent'. Saketopoulou has a lot of care and attention to her clients and finds ways to reconcile, explain, care for those instances where affirmative consent falls short of adequacy.

I alluded to my skepticism above but I'll probably come back and edit this once my reading group is done with it. I'm not clear that Saketopoulou's criticism of affirmative consent, and her association of that with a neoliberal approach, quite rings true; I say that with the strong caveat that I'm not a therapist, an expert on psychoanalysis, part of a kink scene or particularly queer - so there's every chance I'm missing a bunch of context, or read this too quickly. Her principle of limit consent - one which endeavours to reconcile the mutable nature of events and their translation (in the Laplanchian sense) into 'trauma' (or not) - is fascinating and clearly plugs gaps in existing frameworks of identity and nomenklatural consent; for me I worry that both a) not quite enough context is applied to what this means in practice and b) that my saying that is reflective of, if not kink-phobic, then at least kink-unaware understandings I might have.

It's certainly a fascinating read; I'm perhaps lucky that I don't have a professional / sexual context in which to read it which means that this review is very much one that comes with a large pinch of salt.

[leren_lezen · Rating 5 out of 5]

I can only thank Saketopoulou for her bravery in writing this book. Finally a psychoanalytically informed argument that on the one hand understands the necessity of identity politics and the fucked up racist, sexist, ableist, capitalist (etc.) world that we inhabit, but is also strongly against the repressive kink-shaming, race-shaming and queer-shaming that 'progressive' writers can exhibit against anyone whose singular (sexual) desires - which are out of their control in the first place - do not align with the desired social order, which makes the progressive's critiques and analyses of the causes of deviant desires in form uncomfortably similar to conservative critics of the strangeness of anyone who is not a white heterosexual, able bodied and minded cisgendered man.

The book furthermore shows convincingly shows that trauma is the ontological condition for everyone (although affecting less privileged people much more strongly), and that approaching trauma as something one can live with creatively and intimately instead of fixing it is a much more helpful, friendly and ultimately healing (but not in the teleological sense) perspective on trauma. The book weaves a criticism of neoliberalism and its culture of mastering risk and the enigma of the unknown throughout the pages beautifully, and does so most explicitly with her concept of 'limit consent' that comes with non-predictable, risky and transgressive sexual experiences as opposed to neoliberal affirmative consent that ultimately eliminates all potential for transformative experience.

The most surprising and perhaps risky argument she makes is how she emphasises the vulnerability a sadist must show towards the 'violent' desires in oneself, and that doing so can create a space for empathy and interpersonal care beyond a Hegelian ethics of recognition - in terms of not imposing one's view on another, patience and holding space. This is a brave argument to make in psychoanalytic spaces where pathological views on sadism, masochism, non-monogamy, non-heterosexuality and non-long term/loving sexual encounters are sadly still very much alive and kicking.

Overall this book is a plea for the ethics (in terms of the aesthetics) of gently holding the strangeness and opacity in oneself and the other, which I find a deeply convincing and alluring appeal. It's a book I will reread and look back at for many times to come.

[Sage Nestler · Rating 5 out of 5]

QUICK TAKE
Sexuality Beyond Consent: Risk, Race, Traumatophilia by Avgi Saketopoulou is a thorough and unique addition to the discussion on trauma and methods of what we do with the trauma we experience. Saketopoulou provides readers with a full examination of limit-consent, which encourages risk rather than protection, and explores how sexuality can be used to explore personal trauma. While the book was hard for me to understand at times because I had not heard of many of the terms and needed to research them, it opened my mind to an alternative to healing trauma that is sure to become a new area of exploration in the therapeutic field.

TELL ME MORE
Filled with case studies and examples, Sexuality Beyond Consent: Risk, Race, Traumatophilia by Avgi Saketopoulou opens up the discussion on trauma and how sexuality can be a way of exploring our trauma rather than focusing on healing it. It is a risky addition to the field, but one that is so important.

While the book is deeply academic, Saketopoulou tries to make the terms and discussions accessible. It did take me a few reads to understand what Saketopoulou was trying to portray, and for that I wish that the book was easier to understand to reach a wider reader base. However, I did give this book five stars because the discussion and new ideas on how to handle trauma and how trauma can be connected to sexuality was groundbreaking. It will inform my work in the mental health field.

Academic readers interested in learning about alternative ways to handle trauma and how sexuality can be linked to handling trauma will be enlightened by Sexuality Beyond Consent: Risk, Race, Traumatophilia by Avgi Saketopoulou. It is a heavily researched tome, and one that has the power to change the mental health field.

[Anthony · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Review

This was quite a compelling, thoughtful, and engaging read. The author expertly crafts a philosophical, analytical, and professional examination of the current culture of consent, especially with the rise of the MeToo movement, and the differences between that type of consent and the unknowable, unrecognized experiences during sexual or intimate moments that both shock and pleasure people. The use of case studies and personal conversations with others in her field, as well as the in-depth research the author conducted, allowed the reader to get a sense of the themes the book was dissecting and bringing to life.

Now I will be honest, this is quite a challenging book, in that it challenges the readers to keep an open mind and not only explore new and radical ideas that can flip our ideas on their heads but to explore our own minds and the experiences we have. The idea of not sweeping away trauma but learning to work with it and push ourselves through that trauma to discover new aspects of ourselves was quite an interesting idea, and one of many such notions the author explores in this book.

The Verdict

Memorable, enlightening, and thoughtful, author Avgi Saketopoulou’s “Sexuality Beyond Consent: Risk, Race, Traumatophilia” is a must-read nonfiction book on sexuality and consent. The morality, psychoanalytical, and introspective themes the author explores in this book will push readers to really think about life and the impact that trauma and sexuality can have on a person’s life altogether.

[KT · Rating 3 out of 5]

The book's premise is that a theorisation of sexuality and trauma that understands the unconscious as a container of unbearable affects and intolerable experiences hamstrings our thinking about traumatic experience and race. Pushing back against the fixation with discourses of trauma, the author argues that a theorising of traumatic inscription that assumes trauma to be unchanging and immobile is traumatophobic. This keeps trauma inert, which poses a problem as rather than withering and disappearing, it stalls and controls us when not inserted into circulation.

It aims to think about forms of consent that takes otherness into account and to argue tor consensual paradigms that reach beyond the transparent and the communicable - both of which may be too restricted for sexual politics and minority identities

As opposed to a traumatophobic approach, the book advances a traumatophilic one, knowing that it will be uncomfortable but guided by the belief that the full range of humanity is not reachable through safety, control, or recognition, thus assuming such risks despite not knowing what they will bring yet engaging in the experience nonetheless

[Ashley Floyd · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wow… no piece of writing has fundamentally shifted my understanding of sexuality so profoundly. The last sentence is the closest thing to a short summary of what this book is about. “That the full range of humanity is not reachable through safety, control, or recognition but in daring to risk the excitement of danger, to tread into places that scare yet thrill us - assuming such risks despite not knowing what they will usher in yet throwing ourselves in the experience anyway: this has been the wager of this volume.” I literally cannot explain how impactful this book has been for me.

That being said, the concepts are incredibly dense and inaccessible to many as they are written, requiring a google search for a word’s definition multiple times per page. I want to recommend it to everyone, but the book is clearly written for those decently-versed in psychoanalysis. I would love for this book to be written in a way more people could access these ideas.

[Dusty Bucket · Rating 5 out of 5]

This satisfied the turmoil I have been having about how incomplete current conversations feel to me about consent.

It's a bold claim, that I could never relate to, to assume that one can know oneself well enough to consent to something that they have never experienced. How could we know how we will react? This book addresses this, and more importantly, what happens when we choose to jump in anyway?

I took copious notes, and there was a lot of detail I didn't have access to since I'm not a psychoanalyst, a scholar, or philosopher. But, this didn't interrupt me, and I know I will be taking these theories with me. It will change the kinds of conversations I have, and fortify my relationship to myself and my experiences. I have been learning to honor the mystery, and let go of whatever intellectualization that tries to replace my feelings, in a futile search for truth, so I can simply embrace Feeling.

[ML Character · Rating 5 out of 5]

For several years I've been telling people that Ellen Samuels' Fantasties of Identification is my favorite recent academic book, but this one is my new one. It's psychoanalysis, so surprising that I am into it, but I think I must be Laplanchean rather than Freudian. Looking forward to others of Saketopoulou's work (the co-authored one with Ann Pellegrini is up next I think) and quite sure this is going to show up referenced in my own future writing.
Major points for my reference:
-crtiique of human aspects 'affirmative consent' cannot encompass
-Laplanchean understanding of human "identity" made up of 1) enignma 2) Otherness and 3) the social milieu in which we come into being
-limit consent as an alternative
-discussion of trauma - traumatophobia, traumatophilia - as well as repetition, memory, etc

[Megan · Rating 5 out of 5]

This set my mind whirring -- I kinda skimmed the denser psychoanalytic stuff but the larger concepts of limit consent and traumatophilia have really been sticking with me and I'm finding myself thinking about them a lot. ("Traumatophilia" btw does not mean "being attracted to trauma" but is about adopting a lens that recognizes that trauma needs to circulate: "relinquishing the idea that trauma can be repaired opens paths to thinking about what subjects *do* with their trauma" (2). I loved reading Saketopoulou's case studies and her personal, deep engagement with Jeremy O. Harris's Slave Play especially.

[Robyn · Rating 4 out of 5]

A challenging book both in terms of its particular form as an academic text, but even more so because of the themes it grapples with. I learned a lot from it: how mainstreamed conceptualizations of consent work to reify subject positions and keep things in order, how to take up psychoanalytic concepts from an ethics of liberation and egalitarianism, and how such a project - waging emancipatory political change at the level of ideology, psychology and intimate relations - is an immensely risky but valuable (arguably necessary) one.

[Michelle · Rating 5 out of 5]

It took me over 4 months to read this, in part because I reread the first quarter or so three times. But also because a few days ago I spent 2 hours just reviewing the section I’d read a week earlier. Complex, fascinating, unique, and wholly outside my field of expertise (I knew next to nothing about psychoanalytic theories going in), this was absolutely an experience to read. I’m looking forward to exploring more texts that offer alternatives to the affirmative consent model of consent, and more that explore sadisms.

[Ayoto Ataraxia · Rating 5 out of 5]

No better time to discuss these topics as we are plagued by Orientalist wellness and fascistic measures of scientism and traumatophobia, Avgi Saketopoulou seduces the reader with an examination of consent. That invisible cornerstone traverses fear and apprehension between mental health, sex, desire, and race. I've been waiting for a book like this for so long!

[Niki Rice · Rating 4 out of 5]

stimulating, singular and dangerous– this book is for clinicians willing to take risks and abide some pain in service of deep insight. an important indictment of the avoidant, pacifying, symptom-reduction, emotional-regulation centric culture that is currently dominating therapy and sending our patients the subtextual message that we cannot and will not tolerate the deep dark sticky primordial sludge of their psyches