Sex Alters
On Avgi Saketopoulou’s Sexuality Beyond Consent
Jyoti m. Rao
What do we wish for when we open a book? What do we fantasize will be revealed inside? What pleasures pass through us as we slide off the dust jacket, inhale the gloss of the cover, arch the spine to fit our hand, move a lingering finger over a silken page? (What measure of these treasures leave their perfumed trace on the wanting with which we approach a book review?) Perhaps the small shock of a paper cut, drawing bright blood and a soft gasp, will pierce our reading and heighten our senses, recalling us to our skin and its nerve endings. We may find our hurt finger in our mouth. If we are fortunate, our book will draw us in, and we will be enthralled, ravished. We will find ourselves turning each page hungrily, led further on a quest for “more and more.”
The potent seduction of “more and more” in the context of an unconscious life whose contours are rendered molten by the heat of sexuality and its overwhelmingly heightened sensations is key to Avgi Saketopoulou’s volume Sexuality beyond Consent. Among the many words I could use to describe this exceptional work—riveting, original, provocative, incandescent, virtuoso—the word “exquisite” is one that appeared in my mind repeatedly during my reading. It applies to the artistry of the language employed, which is a delight to read in its meticulous exposition of complex arguments. It describes the dexterity with which Saketopoulou accessibly introduces Laplanchian metapsychology, then proceeds to apply this lens to address a range of formidable topics with satisfying depth. “Exquisite” might describe the slap delivered by a lover, destabilizing in its unexpected perfection; it could refer to the snap of a whip that unravels one with a dizzying pleasure.
The word “exquisite” houses within it a telling dilemma.
The word “exquisite” houses within it a telling dilemma. The Latin exquisitus refers to something “chosen, carefully sought out, selected,” yet the word also holds quaerere, the curious, open query, from the root “to seek.” When we are seeking, we are uncertain about what we will find; seeking is not a process of choosing and selecting. The ambivalence of the exquisite has been diminished over time: its earlier usage encompassed the exquisiteness of torture and disease as well as art and beauty. In an essay on the work of creative writers, Freud seems to believe he knows exactly what we want from a piece we read; moreover, he asserts that we will get what we want. He concludes that “all the aesthetic pleasure” given to us by a writer is a “fore-pleasure” to “the release of still greater pleasures” promised to arise from our psychic depths, a result of wish fulfilment facilitated through literature. But, as writing scholar Kevin Brophy asks, what do we make of prose that shakes us by the collar, disrupting us with what we did not want or expect? Brophy describes his own encounter with a novel that faced him with a daunting array of “insoluble dilemmas,” “disturbing ideas,” “messy questions,” “obscenity,” and sources of possible harm; he writes that the problems raised by the book were of such magnitude that they unsettled his life. It is precisely this terrain that Saketopoulou has mapped in her expansive cartography, but, as we shall see, the paradox is that there can be no map of the truly exquisite.
I must interrupt myself at this juncture. It is unusual to issue a spoiler alert when reviewing a scholarly work, but then, it is rare for a scholarly work to unveil itself in the manner of this one. If there is a book whose reading has potential to be enhanced by approaching it as one would a daring tryst with a mysteriously alluring stranger, it is Sexuality beyond Consent. Indeed, if you are sufficiently intrigued, I urge you to abandon this review now and immediately turn your attention to the text itself. (I’ll wait while you struggle with your competing impulses.) For those who continue to read on, I regret to inform you that you are violating Saketopoulou’s psychoanalytic ethic of surprise, which prizes the potency of the unprecedented, unimagined, unfathomable, unformulated . . . and unreviewed. A book review, after all, traffics in notions of consent and desire; one reads a review and imagines one can anticipate whether or not a book will bring a wanted experience. We determine whether or not we will agree to the emotional, intellectual, and imaginative risks involved, weighing them against the enjoyable rewards we fantasize about. For Saketopoulou, the very concept of consent is troubled by the presence of the unconscious, drenched with sexuality in various degrees of ripeness. To imagine we may know in advance what we want or how we will experience what we think we want is a hollow self-deceit, a denial of the opacity we continually navigate within and in relationship with others.
Reading this review, in other words, cannot prepare you for the experience of reading Sexuality beyond Consent, for how you may be transformed by your encounter with it. Saketopoulou explains that it is impossible to conventionally consent—an affirmative consent belonging to the domain of the ego—to the ways in which we may be undone and fundamentally reordered by psychoanalytic exploration, works of art, and sexual experience. Experiences of depth in the aesthetic, the sexual, and the psychoanalytic registers are potentiated by their capacities to overwhelm our existing ways of arranging ourselves, capacities which inhere to the erotic charge and unpredictability held within them. Spoiler alerts, intended to protect our surprise, exist because of a tacit acknowledgment of the value in the jolt of being caught off guard by a twist in the plot. Yet, consenting to having one’s surprise ruined, through the painstaking future-tripping that constitutes so many of our ostensibly informed choices, is a logical fallacy. We are perpetually surprised by how our surprise is not up to us.
*
Sex, psychoanalysis, and aesthetic experiences, including those held within the folds of certain books, carry charges that can rattle us, confuse us, transfix us, devastate us, and, thus, alter us. These valences are held in common with traumatic experiences. Within the broader therapeutic landscape, psychoanalysis is relatively welcoming of the parts of life that deal traumatic injury. Early in my training as a psychotherapist, a medically trained member of the supervisory team advised me to strictly avoid talking with my patient about her experiences of physical violence and intimidation because my patient was “traumatized.” This counsel was incomprehensible to me, and, with the support of a psychoanalytic mentor, I promptly disobeyed. This defiance was much to my patient’s benefit, as well as my own in my development as a clinician. I came to understand what is required to make oneself fit to accompany a patient in their visits to the underworld, how to neither court overwhelm nor rebuff its advances once it has emerged of its own accord. In life, traumatic experiences fall upon us; in clinical psychoanalysis, we fall into them. Clinicians must prepare ourselves to be steady and reliable companions to our patients even while stumbling into the sinkholes of the unbearable.
I found in the psychoanalytic world a welcome respite from the anxiety-ridden approach to injury the supervisor had shown; it seemed that we in psychoanalysis were at least willing to let our patients tell us what they have lived through without undue interference from the clinician. At its best, a psychoanalytic ethos prizes an unflinching, patient-led openness to the deepest of wounds, demonstrating an abiding trust in the psyche’s inscrutable methods throughout. The intensive consistency of the psychoanalytic frame and the rejection of scripted interventions and structured interviews allow for traumatic material to emerge on its own terms, in its own guttural—sometimes brutal—idiom. Yet, psychoanalysis and psychoanalytically informed clinical work are not immune to phobic trends, some of which result in self-perpetuating misconceptions about our discipline’s purported limitations. In a graduate course I taught on the topic of therapeutic approaches to trauma, some of my students informed me that they had been given to understand that psychoanalysis is ineffective, even contraindicated, as a trauma therapy. This idea is partly based on concepts of verbalization: because trauma is somatically held and often unworded, the logic goes, talking about trauma in therapy is unhelpful. Such a formulation vastly underestimates the complexity of psychoanalytic communication; anyone who has had an analytic encounter knows that psychoanalytic dialogue extends far beyond mere talking. My students were surprised to learn that psychoanalysis as a discipline extensively theorizes the nature and impact of trauma on the psyche, that it had in fact done so beginning with Freud. They were even more startled when I told them that psychoanalysis is most often my treatment of choice for those who have endured the unendurable.
Psychoanalysis is most often my treatment of choice for those who have endured the unendurable.
When encountering the bewildering disorientation of traumatic terrain in a therapeutic hour, a clinician may be tempted to ask, “But what do I do?,” abandoning the exquisite nature of analytic forbearance in an attempt to convert shifting ground into the deceptive clarity of a plan. We increasingly hear suggestions to try to regulate our patients, or to “keep” them within a window of tolerance; some clinicians advocate for a highly directive technique with severely traumatized patients, in an attempt to exert control over what a patient might draw near or withdraw from within a session. Therapists contend with the daunting and sometimes petrifying prospect of accompanying someone to the chasm caused by an earthquake, and we are tasked with growing our capacity to move toward the site and peer inside, lest we leave survivors alone at the brink. Making use of upheaval demands a commitment to self-inquiry and a cultivated sensitivity within the clinician. The hope of meeting this commitment, for better or worse, is mostly housed in the largely agreed-upon necessity of personal analysis for psychoanalysts. We cannot hope to accompany another without subjecting ourselves to the rigors of self-confrontation, ideally facilitated by repeated exposure to a healthy dose of what Saketopoulou terms “exigent sadism,” which deals a helpful violence to our ego’s mendacious machinations. Skillful clinical work also demands the development of a sense for the long, bending arcs of psychoanalytic time, which readily tangle in the jagged points of traumatized time when they are made to share a clock.
Saketopoulou zeroes in on the nature and function of the volta in the epic poem of psychic life.
We may easily identify psychologically defensive motivations for our proclivities to avoid traumatic overwhelm within ourselves and our mental health disciplines, including the tendency to effectively refuse psychoanalytic exploration of trauma even within psychoanalysis. We may also imagine capitalistic, neoliberal, and other political motives for such avoidance. Those who successfully quell the perturbations of the traumatic parts of life and suppress the profound disruption wrought by traumatic injuries are more likely to be efficient, mechanized workers—more quiescent, compliant citizens. Therapist-led avoidance of the physical and emotional abuse my patient endured would have made our treatment more superficial and likely much shorter in duration, less costly to the federal funding that allowed my patient to access any sort of care at all. It would have also precluded inquiry into the oppressive ubiquity of the gendered violence visited upon my patient, a shirking betrayal justified on spurious clinical grounds—the patient is traumatized, so it will be overly disturbing [to someone] to meaningfully address her trauma.
This expedient formulation is a fitting description of our current attitude toward the traumatic damage sustained by our polis; our current political climate turns away from authentically taking stock of our collective injuries, much to our collective detriment. The banning of books and courses that address enslavement and anti-Black racism, for example, is motivated in part by a desire to tightly guard against disequilibrating exposure to traumatic suffering that could be mobilizing, internally and externally, psychologically and politically. It is not a coincidence that, alongside books about racism, other books targeted for banning are those that touch upon sexuality, especially queer life. Nor is it a happenstance that we are compelled to talk about book banning at all at this historical moment.
Per the analytic dictum, the greater the anxiety, the greater the defense. Our eagerness to maintain the psychic status quo is continuous with our enthusiasm for maintaining the oppressive social structures that steady our selfhood. As Saketopoulou writes, “our very sense of the self and of our functional stability is, to varying degrees, also reliant on problematic social values,” because of the ways these values are “threaded through the ego” in its formation. This formation combines bolts of bodily excitation with a received social matrix that predates our existence, a matrix riddled with idiosyncratic prejudices and hierarchies we use to create our sense of identity and cope with that which threatens to disorganize us. When the inconvenient quaerere posed by critical thinking is an intolerable threat to the ego’s structure, which is threaded through with homophobia, transphobia, and racism, we may reject a liaison with intellectual curiosity, lest we be tempted by the prospect of being shaken to the core by what we learn. We will ban the most exquisite of books.
Attempts to evade trauma and the aftermath of traumatic injury are symptoms of what Saketopoulou terms “traumatophobia,” which casts a wary eye upon the subjective experience of traumatic overwhelm and its presence within us. Such a stance treats trauma as something to be recovered from, in a narrative arc of healing that is fantasied to return us to a time of intact wholeness, before we were shattered by that which shatters us. For Jean Laplanche and Saketopoulou, this fantasy is a fiction because we are shaped by our shattering from the start: we are traumatized into the possession of an unconscious, whose function is to hold sexual mysteries we cannot decode. These enigmatic messages are transmitted to us in infancy, originating in the sexual unconscious of the adults in our lives, leaving us in formative relationship with an unconscious that is populated with a sexuality from the other, now within us, that we cannot contemplate. The primary task of our ego is to work against awareness of what is unknown within us, to attempt to smooth over the tidal dynamicity of the enigma within.
When we approach trauma from a phobic position, quickly closing off opportunities to explore what has been revealed by the wound that has been opened, we keep fixed meanings in place. Psychic stagnation takes hold. Saketopoulou instead advocates for a traumatophilic disposition, one that encourages creative ways of living with trauma by allowing our shattering to presage novel reassembly of ourselves. Allowing these regenerative forces to take hold requires that we counter the ego’s self-preserving qualities, which pull on us to restore a safe distance from what is opaque. Saketopoulou refers to the inner struggle against the ego’s conserving mechanisms as “bending one’s will”: “not a durable capacity that one develops but a receptivity that has to be wrested each time, again and again, against the objections of the ego.” In the tension between binding the chaos—imposing order to cohere the ego—and unbinding—leaning into the structure collapsed by trauma and entering into the inchoate—Saketopoulou finds psychoanalytic treasure in the unbinding and its apparent rubble.
Saketopoulou’s authorial voice is remarkably versatile, coloratura in its reaches. As the scholarly doyen, she guides the reader through her theorization with an authoritative competence that is like a seatbelt on a roller coaster; her grasp of theory is the sure grip of wheels on rail. One feels paradoxically secure even while hurtling through the most harrowing psychological curves, an experience that mirrors the best sort of analytic companionship. As the trusting confidant, she shares her helpless obsession with Slave Play, a theater production that possesses her with its forceful provocations that intermingle sex, race, consent, trauma, and the unconscious. Saketopoulou brings the reader along in her journey of repeating, disconcerting inundation, which in turn awes, terrifies, delights, and exhausts her with its fierce aliveness that renders her “throbbingly present.” She describes her treasuring the play’s capacity to elicit in her “a rousing of an energy” that she intuits is beyond her reach, indeed, unreachable despite it being within her. In sharing with us the fruits of her painstaking internal labor, which we are made to feel through vivid articulation of her gradual, yet thorough meaning making, Saketopoulou demonstrates that persuasive theory is intensely personal, borne out of inquiries so disturbing and perplexing that they make our mind pliant with the pressing demand for answers from the inside.
The most startling voice Saketopoulou employs is this one, in which she addresses the reader early in her book with poetic sagacity and breathtaking intimacy:
“You do not know what you will experience, what you will encounter, how it may disturb you, what it might set in motion in you. But if you stay with me, if you go slowly, if you linger in the interstitial spaces between reach and grasp, this book can give you more: it can demand something of you. . . . For readers willing to be pulled out of reason to tread into something raw and tender, for readers who yearn to go beyond the sensible, there is an elsewhere in yourself to which these pages may take you. I have, in fact, written this book imagining you giving yourself over to me, which is a strange thing to say given that I do not know you. Neither do you.”
(You may feel understandable regret that you did not heed my earlier counsel to stop reading this review to allow yourself the astonishment of first encountering this passage in its original placement. This is the severe cost of refusing to bend one’s will.) In delivering this bracing invitation to travel to the inner “elsewhere,” Saketopoulou again parallels the psychoanalytic clinical situation, which is entered knowing and not knowing all that is unknown about ourselves and the other. We cannot possibly imagine what is ahead, we may only arrange ourselves in an unready preparedness for what may be required of us. Saketopoulou is disinclined to offer any reassurances, but one is nonetheless discoverable within the sheer relentlessness of inquiry on display throughout her text. It is comforting to know that you are with someone who will consistently unsettle herself and you, even unsettle herself with you, in an utter refusal to be content with easy answers to difficult questions.
The range of this author’s voice is matched by the breadth of her erudition. Saketopoulou’s theorization draws deeply from the wells of interdisciplinary scholarship, demonstrating what Salman Akhtar has termed “promiscuity of sources as a virtue for learning.” She harmonizes Freud and Laplanche with the tones of numerous other disciplines that have had their way with psychoanalysis: “performance theory, philosophy, critical theory, queer studies, and queer of color critique.” Sexuality beyond Consent does rather a lot of work between its covers, with something new to offer everyone. Those who are unfamiliar with Laplanche will find a primer that is easily understandable without compromising sophistication; Saketopoulou is an enviable teacher who builds concepts upon concepts to arrive at revelatory conclusions. The subcultures of BDSM and kink are treated with careful psychoanalytic attentiveness that assists both novice and expert; the discipline of performance studies is brought before a larger audience and demonstrated to great effect; the concepts of sadism and masochism are illuminatingly reformulated, including the immensely useful theorization of exigent sadism; and the erotics of race and the trauma of racism are thoroughly explored from fresh vantage points that derive insights by shedding light on desires that are often obscured and sometimes condemned.
These topics may seem to some readers to be niche areas of interest, but Saketopoulou’s work is anything but provincial. Sexuality beyond Consent is essential reading for psychoanalytic clinicians, offering urgent understandings of trauma, race, sexuality, and unconscious process that stand to benefit all who enter into analytically informed work, from either end of the dyad, or other points of entry. Refreshingly, and in the tradition of many great analytic theorists, she eschews discussion of clinical technique, respecting the living edge of each analytic hour and entrusting the clinician reader with the work of discovering their own novel methods, uniquely called forth by each pair. This spaciousness also encourages the clinician to consider the numerous political reverberations within the therapeutic situation and the lives of those who come into it. In the epilogue, Saketopoulou writes that one throughline in her book is the highlighting of the “exciting and capacious possibilities” within “the gutter, the detritus, and the debased,” modeling a radical inclusion, through probing investigation, of subjective experiences that are frequently cast aside. This inclusion yields unfamiliar insights into the dynamic life of the oppression, marginalization, abjection, and subjugation inherent to certain types of traumatic experiences, including those that are socially and intergenerationally located. Despite its abundant offerings to clinicians, this is a book whose readership is not delimited by practice or discipline. Rather, it is a book written for anyone willing to go on the adventure Saketopoulou generously offers. The sole prerequisite for a lush encounter with Sexuality beyond Consent is appetite.
In poetry, the volta is the pivotal moment in a sonnet upon which everything rests, because it is the moment of change, “the turn.” In her volume, Saketopoulou zeroes in on the nature and function of the volta in the epic poem of psychic life, deconstructing the stanza this way and that. Perhaps the most compelling impression that is left upon the reader after their journey with this author is this: Sexuality beyond Consent is impressively wise about life. Particularly in her work on traumatophilia and its elaborations, Saketopoulou’s offerings are resonant and revealing to anyone who has observed closely what occurs when life has become unnavigable and our dearest wishes have been rendered meaningless. Like pyrophile plants, which find in forest fires the opportunity to generate the future, the searing pain of our apparent ruination has potential to release seeds of new beginnings and new self-theorizations. Saketopoulou points us to the improbable places where these seeds flower, exquisitely.