Saketopoulou - Risking Sexuality Beyond Consent

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Risking sexuality beyond consent: overwhelm and

traumatisms that incite
Avgi Saketopoulou
To cite this article: Avgi Saketopoulou (2020) Risking sexuality beyond consent:
overwhelm and traumatisms that incite , The Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 89:4, 771-811, DOI:
10.1080/00332828.2020.1807268
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/00332828.2020.1807268
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# The Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 2020
Volume LXXXIX, Number 4
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00332828.2020.1807268
RISKING SEXUALITY BEYOND CONSENT:

OVERWHELM AND TRAUMATISMS
THAT INCITE1
BY AVGI SAKETOPOULOU
What, other than being “screwed,” may come of being sub-

jected to something we did not entirely, or even at all, consent
to? This essay explores what awaits sexual urges that risk
pushing beyond the confines of affirmative consent and into
limit consent. Taking up why one might court experiences
that chafe against the limit, I suggest that such courting
draws on the sexual drive. Via Aulagnier, Laplanche, and
Zaltzman I track how the sexual drive may annex traumatic
history. These annexations present themselves as traumatic
repetitions but may work, at times, to spin compulsive recur-
sions into traumatisms that can incite transformative psychic
labor. To probe these ideas more deeply and flesh out the
mechanics of why experiences that occur at the border of our
consent can have transformative potential, I turn to Jeremy
1
I am thankful to Tim Dean, Andrew Druck and Ann Pellegrini for their incisive
and tireless critical comments on earlier drafts of this essay. My colleague Dominique
Scarfone offered several challenging queries that helped deepen my thinking, for which
I am grateful. Last, my deep appreciation to Jay Greenberg for his invitation to
contribute my essay to this special issue.
Avgi Saketopoulou trained at the NYU Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and

Psychoanalysis, where she now teaches. She is also on faculty at the William Allanson
White Institute, the New York Psychoanalytic Institute, the Stephen Mitchell Relational
Center and the National Institute for the Psychotherapies and serves on the editorial
boards of several analytic journals. The recipient of several awards, including the annual
essay prize from JAPA, the Ruth Stein prize, and the Ralph Roughton Award, she is
currently at work on a solicited book manuscript provisionally titled: “Overwhelm:
Risking Sexuality Beyond Consent.”
771
772 AVGI SAKETOPOULOU
O. Harris's searingly beautiful theatrical work, Slave Play, to

propose that pleasure suffered at the especially strained inter-
section of sexuality and racial trauma may produce trauma-
tisms that dissolve ego structures in growth-inducing ways.
While seemingly merely repeating ghastly historical crimes,
erotic humiliation and racialized sexual abjection, work here
to yield and make overatures to expanded psychic freedoms.
Because there is no return to a pre-traumatic state for trau-
matized subjects, I propose that we become less preoccupied as
analysts with what can be done about trauma and more curi-
ous about what can be done with trauma shifting, thus, psy-
choanalysis’s attitude towards trauma from traumatophobia
to traumatophilia.
Keywords: Jean Laplanche, Nathalie Zaltzman, inciting
traumatism, limit consent, overwhelm, sadomasochism,
traumatophilia, BDSM, Slave Play.
“I was female-assigned at birth”2 writes the queer theorist

Kathryn Bond Stockton:
though [my own sense was that] I was a boy … mistaken for a
girl. And though I was, to my mind, the ultimate straight man
seeking normally feminine women, I turned out a “lesbian,”
against my will — though in accord with my desires. As for my
girlfriend she grew up, to her mind, normally feminine, as a
rural Mormon raised in rural Utah. In her twenties, after her
male fiance died, after she didn’t go on a mission, after she
walked across the US for nuclear disarmament, she met
lesbians and wished she could be one, so cool did they seem
to her. But, she figured, she wasn’t a lesbian. Long story short:
I didn’t want the sign [“lesbian”] but was pierced by it; she
quite wanted it but didn’t think she’d gain it. We have [both]
been dildoed by th[at] sign. We’ve been pleasured by it, as it’s
2
This awkward-sounding term refers to the assignation of gender at birth on the
basis of observed genitals. It is widely used in trans studies to mark the fact that such
assignments presume that gender is determined by anatomical sex when, in fact, only
time will tell if the child’s gender identity will match or not that initial reading.
RISKING SEXUALITY BEYOND CONSENT 773
come inside us—I’ve had to try to take it like a man.
[2015, online]
Stockton’s surprising, albeit sideways,3 treatment of consent is easy to

miss. Her delectable phrase (“against my will-though in accord with my
desire”) is followed by a provocative, queer claim: that she has been
“dildoed” by the word lesbian. The word “dildoed” does some heavy lift-
ing here: being described as a lesbian interpellated Stockton as a woman;4
because she had thought herself to be a boy, this “screwed” her; this screw-
ing is something she’s tried to take “like a man.” Is this wordplay meant to
convey the stoicism with which men, as the story goes, are expected to
endure hardship? Or is Stockton gesturing to a queer masculinity of anal
pleasures? Whatever the case may be, Stockton claims a peculiar relation-
ship to being screwed: it is against her will, but in accord with her desires.
In this essay, I will explore what, other than being “screwed,” may
come of being subjected—by discourse, history, or through the interven-
tion of the other—to something to which we did not entirely, or even at
all, consent. Elsewhere, I have called experiences that live on the border
of our consent limit consent (Saketopoulou 2019). Unlike affirmative con-
sent, limit consent doesn’t concern itself with roadmaps that specify what
the other is/isn’t allowed to do but pertains, instead, to what we open our-
selves up to when we surrender to an other. In that sense, limit consent
doesn’t aim to (re)stage an experience of satisfaction, but, instead, invites
fresh experience and surprise. As such, it also risks injury; that injury
would be inadvertent, issuing from sexual urges that have gone too far. In
this paper I ask after limit consent’s psychic life and its possible futures to
probe why one might court experiences that chafe against the limit. I will
suggest that such courting draws on the sexual drive, and travels on the
carrier wave of repetition to create states of overwhelm, which may cata-
lyze psychic transformations. In the second half of this essay, I turn to
Jeremy O. Harris’ painfully beautiful work, Slave Play. I discuss it at length
3
I am playing here with Stockton’s felicitous description of the queer child as
growing up sideways (2009).
4
Briefly, the word “lesbian” does not just index the gender of one’s erotic object
choice but denotes a homology between the genders of the person desiring and the
person desired. In that sense, sexual orientation is not only about one’s desire but also
about one's own gender identity. For more on the mechanics of such interpellations, see
Saketopoulou, 2015a.
because watching it several times and across two productions,5 and attend-
ing ongoing conversations about it over several months,6 helped me clar-
ify the workings of overwhelm. Slave Play suggests that pleasure that is
suffered at the especially strained intersection of sexuality and racial trauma
may produce traumatisms that dissolve ego structures in growth-inducing
ways. Slave Play helped me ferret out the specific mechanisms through
which erotic humiliation and racialized sexual abjection, while seemingly
merely repeating ghastly historical crimes, may, in fact, work to help some
of the play’s characters bring more into their possession that which
“screwed” them. The concept of overwhelm helps explain psychoanalytic-
ally the mechanics of how such psychic work may be accomplished, and
what its yield may be: not utopian reparation but a bid for expanded psy-
chic freedom. While there is indeed no “strategy of redress” or complete
redemption for Black suffering (Wilderson 2020, p. 15) and even as such
expansions are only partial solutions, they may ultimately be better ones.
Because there is no return to a pre-traumatic state for traumatized subjects,
I propose that we become less preoccupied as analysts with what can be
done about trauma and more curious about what can be done with trauma.
PART ONE
1. To be Dildoed by the Signifier: Aulagnier and Primary Violence, Laplanche
and Translation
Let us first return to Stockton’s having been dildoed by the sign. To
reflect on her ideas, I will draw on Piera Aulagnier, a French psychoana-
lyst whose work uniquely addresses how the psychic process of coming
into being tangles from the getgo the non-consensual with pleasure.
Signs or, to migrate to analytic terminology, the signifiers by which
the infant’s early psychic life can be churned into experience precede us
5
The play ran at the New York Theatre Workshop between November 19, 2018 to
January 13, 2019 and, subsequently, on Broadway where it ran from October 6, 2019 to
January 19, 2020.
6
On most Sundays throughout the play’s run, the production held open-ended
conversations between members of the cast/production and anyone interested in
attending them. While new people joined the conversation at each meeting, a core
group of theatergoers soon emerged that returned to the space week after week to
revisit, with the cast and with each other, some of the most bracing parts of the play.
and are not of our choosing. Embedded in a network of other signifiers,
they are linked with each other through the connective tissue of dis-
course. For Aulagnier, discourse does not refer to language per se, but to
the aggregate effects of how the social is structured and how, in turn, it
structures us (1975). Discourse inflects the adult’s ongoing stream of ges-
tures, facial expressions, affect, acts, and words, thus infiltrating the
adult’s responses to the child. The adult symbolizes the infant’s experi-
ence in verbal and non-verbal ways and, in so doing, formats and gives it a
shape. This is how the primal,7 that is, the raw material of the infant’s
early life before the “I” becomes organized into a self, gets forged into
usable units of experience. The shape given to the primal is, in part, influ-
enced by the parent’s own dynamics, early history, and psychic conflicts.
But Aulagnier’s point is that caretakers are not independent or sovereign
agents; they are themselves subject—and answerable—to external regimes
of organized meanings which furnish them with their meaning-making
templates. The infant’s ego, in effect, draws on these parental templates
for its constitutive, meaning-making efforts. Discourse thus offers the
much-needed midwifing tools the young psyche needs to come into
being. By implication, the ego is an assemblage of psychic representations
that are largely delimited by what is socially representable and intelligible.
Aulagnier is especially sensitive to the implications of the infant’s
meaning-making endeavors. Although forming representations (bind-
ing) is a pleasurable activity, she sees it as also exerting on the infant a
form of violence that she calls primary violence. To be clear, Aulagnier
does not refer to physical violence, or to the caretaker’s intention to pro-
hibit, control, or oppress the infant’s meaning-making efforts.8 The
7
To clarify, the notion of the “primal” does not refer to what comes
chronologically first. While indeed, the primal “is present from the beginning,
concretely, at the origin of the human being, in other words: in the nursling” for
Laplanche it is “what is ineluctable, what is truly independent of all contingencies, even
the most general … The primal situation is the confrontation of the newborn—of the
infant, the infans in the etymological sense of the term: the one who does not yet
speak—with the adult world” (1987, pp. 101-102).
8
We know, of course, that this can also occur, e.g. when the caretaker suffers from
pathology or is traumatized. In this case, we’d be closer to what Aulagnier described as
secondary violence, and to what Laplanche called intromission. Secondary violence and
intromission are traumatic because they impose meaning, prohibiting the infant from
carrying out its independent, creative meaning-making work.
concept of primary violence draws attention to the fact that the raw
materials available for the infant to craft representations are definition-
ally restricted-and therefore, restrictive. No one, after all, accepts the
plague of the other’s sexual unconscious willingly; a certain degree of
force, not a physical force but the force of primal seduction (Laplanche
1987), is necessary. Even when the infant is free to improvise in forging
her translations, primary violence delimits, from the get-go, how some-
thing will become psychically represented.9 Put differently, primary vio-
lence places constraints on the most elemental level of human
becoming, even though its mediation is indispensable for the infant to
generate meaning at all.10 This is the psychic landscape of limit consent;
even before the “I” is inaugurated, a lot has already happened without
one’s agreement but which, nevertheless, yields pleasure.
Aulagnier’s ideas are highly compatible with Laplanche’s. For him,
briefly,11 conscious messages conveyed during caretaking are always sur-
charged by the caretaker’s sexual unconscious. These indecipherable
messages (enigma) are implanted, like an irritant, on the infant’s psycho-
physiological skin (primal seduction). The infant is compelled to interpret
these enigmatic implantations. But because enigma obtains from the
caretaker’s unrepresented unconscious, it can never be accurately
decoded. Meaning can only be ascribed to it (translation), which is how
we form representations. Translations are remembered as memories
(Scarfone 2015a), yet we should not forget that these memories are not
veridical but built through the infant’s fantasizing (Scarfone 2016). As
for the enigmatic remnants that haven’t become meaning-full, those
9
In that respect, while for Laplanche, it is the term intromission that denotes
violence insofar as intromission imposes meaning (Laplanche 1987, 2011; House 2017),
I maintain that, of the two, it is actually implantation that is more durably traumatic.
This is because implantation is an ordinary, routine and non-contingent occurrence.
Intromission has a chance of being identified as being of foreign origin, as having
infiltrated us from the outside whereas implantations, because they are constitutive to
the sense of self, can never be marked as having invaded the subject from without.
10
A world without discourse, myths, or symbols is unimaginable. If, in some
imaginary universe it existed, it would be catastrophic. Not only would it not provide
greater translational freedom but, on the contrary, it would deprive the psyche of the
much-needed tools for meaning-making.
11
For a fuller review of Laplanche’s ideas, see Scarfone’s (2013) and Fletcher’s
(2007) excellent introductions.
become repressed, forming, in effect, the sexual unconscious-with
infantile sexuality at its core. There, they persist as question marks with-
out answers but which press for answers anyway, a pressure that consti-
tutes the sexual drive. Like Aulagnier, Laplanche also believes that
translation occurs through interpretative codes used to represent the
press of the sexual drive. For its translational endeavors the infant
resorts to a cultural reservoir of “objets trouves” (Saketopoulou 2017b),
namely the socius and its “rules, myths, ideologies and ideals” (mythosym-
bolic) (Laplanche 1987, p. 87).
I will return in Part Two to an accounting of signifiers, to their dil-
doing effects, and to their overtures to enlarged psychic freedom. But,
for now, I want to stay with the sexual implications of what it means to
be screwed against one’s wishes, but in accord with one’s desire. Enter
the queer theorist Tim Dean whom we will follow to a gay men’s sex
club to hear about his experience with piss play, the erotic practice of
urination for sexual pleasure (2015).12 In his dabbles in the world of
piss play, Dean had been, up until this particular encounter, “happy to
give but unwilling to receive” (2015, p. 122). Things changed, however,
one night when, following a leather-capped stranger into the shadows:
… [he] pushed me to my knees … encouraging me to work

his soft cock through the mesh of his jockstrap. My mouth
registered that the jockstrap was already damp … [W]hen I
became aware that he was gently pissing through the jock, the
tasteless warm fluid flooding my lips, I spontaneously
ejaculated. Both his piss and my body’s response took me
completely by surprise. I did not consent—and would not have
consented—to being pissed on; yet I loved it. That night the
man in the leather cap, whose face I never saw, gave me the
gift of erotic astonishment. [2015, p. 125, italics added]
I read Dean’s vignette to propose a different way of thinking about

sexual consent, and use it to help me theorize the workings of sexuality
12
Early psychoanalysts exploring the polymorphous pleasures of urethral eroticism
reached varied insights that would take us too far afield to explore here (see Coriat
1924; Freud 1905, 1932; Hitschmann 1923). My focus will be on mining Dean’s
vignette for what it can tell us about sexuality that operates against one’s consent but in
accord with one’s desire.
beyond consent. How do we understand “erotic astonishment” analytic-

ally and why should psychoanalysts care? Is Dean’s erotic astonishment,
which, I’ll argue, amounts to more than just physical pleasure, related to
the absence of his consent13? I think that it is. Of course, even intimating
that a sexuality beyond consent is worth theorizing—let alone
“having”—will raise concerns. Affirmative consent, we are told, is the key
ingredient to ethical sexual relations; it ensures that power differentials
are well-tended and sees to it that ongoing and enthusiastic agreement is
secured. It promises mutual sexual pleasure and a protection from
trauma, not to mention legal liability. Affirmative consent, consent the-
orist Joe Fischel argues, has “magnetized us” (2019, p. 176), it has been
established as the sole acceptable ethical rudder. Today, according to
Dufourmantelle, “the principle of precaution has become the norm”
(2019, p. 1). Not just the lawman, but the actuary now oversee sex-
ual encounters.
And yet, Fischel continues, affirmative consent is too conceptually
limp to deliver on its promises of mutual pleasure and safety, or to adju-
dicate desire (2016, 2019). From a psychoanalytic angle, it is easy to see
why: the affirmative consent model presumes a fully conscious subject
when desire is often unconsciously conflicted; traumatic irruptions com-
plicate agency and incite repetitions; psychic time, especially the time of
psychic trauma, is non-linear, introducing perilous asynchronies
between consent negotiations and internal experience. Mostly, affirma-
tive consent seeks to reproduce known pleasures, or, at least, pleasures
that can be hoped for or envisioned (meaning, already psychically repre-
sented ones)—when the sexual courts the strange (Dean forthcoming),
and the ineffable (Dimen 2001, 2017; Fonagy 2008; Stein 1998, 2008).
These critiques notwithstanding, speaking about consent that con-
gregates to the limit is scary territory. Limit consent may have animated
the encounter that generated Dean’s erotic astonishment, but someone
less able to give oneself over to a new and startling experience might
have felt injured by the novelty, or even experienced it as a form of rape.
Obviously, in veering away from the contractualized reciprocity
demanded by affirmative consent, my point is not to endorse violation:
13
Let’s not forget also that the absence of consent is not isomorphic with a
violation of consent.
what I want to do, is explore the psychic processes set in motion when
one lets oneself become passible to an other, coming up against the lim-
its of the ego. Lyotard’s notion of passibility (passibilite ), to which I’ll
return shortly, is a border concept, hovering between activity and passiv-
ity. It involves giving oneself over to the other, not in capitulation or
masochistic surrender, but in a state of receptivity akin to a state of dis-
possession (1988; see also Scarfone 2011).14
To go forward from here, let’s turn back the clock by a hun-
dred years.
2. A Hundred Years Ago Today

In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud described:
… as ‘traumatic’ any excitations from outside … powerful enough

to break through the protective shield … the concept of trauma
necessarily implies a connection of this kind with a breach in an
otherwise efficacious barrier against stimuli. Such an event as an
external trauma is bound to provoke a disturbance on a large
scale in the functioning of the organism's energy … There is no
longer any possibility of preventing the mental apparatus from
being flooded with large amounts of stimulus, and another
problem arises … mastering the amounts of stimulus which have
broken in and of binding them, in the psychical sense, so that
they can then be disposed of. [1920, p. 102]
Trauma, in this account,15 arises when external excitations breach

the protective shield, leaving the overwhelmed ego scurrying to try to
bind them. But the problem of how the organism manages the influx of
energy preoccupied Freud from much earlier. In The Project (1895),16
Freud first proposed the following model of the ego: outside energy
excites neurones whose job it is to conduct and discharge it.
14
Passibility’s ties to Ghent’s concept of surrender (1990), have been explored
elsewhere (Saketopoulou 2019).
15
For Freud, it is psychic trauma that is of interest to psychoanalysis in its
es-coup (House 2017). I take this into account shortly.
distinctive quality of the apr
16
We know (and Freud likely did too) that The Project’s physiological models are
mistaken. Nevertheless, the insights yielded in The Project, later reworked in The
Interpretation of Dreams, are foundational to Freudian metapsychology (Laplanche 1987).
Impermeable neurones (w) are unable to let energy course through

them; if the amount of energy reaching them is substantial enough, their
contact barrier is broken. Repeated breaches produce facilitation, which,
simply put, means that a set route is established through which stimuli
have previously passed. Neurones that have been broken through together
now begin to fire in unison, creating pathways that direct the free flow of
energy into what we might think of as a trough. The ego is the aggregate
of these neuronal facilitations, a permanently cathected ensemble that
ensures discharge does not proceed chaotically. When new kinds of stimu-
lations occur, the ego protects the organism from the unpleasure of freely
circulating energy by attracting newly excited neurones, which simply
means that the ego assimilates them into its structure. By directing the
commerce of psychic energy along established grooves (binding) to pre-
serve the organism from an influx of energy spikes (unbound energy), the
well-functioning ego, thus, appropriates unto itself everything that’s new
and foreign. This enterprise, of course, can never be declared
fully successful.
This process has two implications: on the one hand, binding spares
the organism from damage. The ego prevents excitation from spreading
in unforeseeable and unregulated ways, by doing away with any “excess
of reality” (Scarfone 2015a, p. 30), granting the psyche a sense of stabil-
ity, and an ongoingness of being free from constant threat. On the other
hand, the fact that the ego works to assimilate new experience into pre-
existing frameworks means that new events will be resisted and inhib-
ited. In that respect, the ego is not just a stabilizing agent but, also, a
conservative and inhibiting force (Laplanche 2011; Scarfone 2015a); it
never fully relinquishes its resistance to novelty. As such, we should
expect that nothing new happens with the ego’s consent.17 The ego contorts
the alien and the unfamiliar into what is already known, and this gob-
bling up of freshness and surprise, can calcify it. Of course, the ego’s
resistance, its refusal to consent to novelty if you will, does not mean that
nothing new actually occurs. This would be an absurd, easily falsifiable
17
The ego, of course, does not offer or withhold consent. But I hope that the
reader will permit me this anthropomorphizing locution for reasons that will become
clear later.
claim. It’s incumbent on us, however, to reconcile the ego’s stakes in its
durable structures with the fact that change does occur.
Our thinking may be helped along by turning to a largely overlooked
point made by Freud (1895, 1920) who, in discussing breaches of unlim-
ited degree (trauma), also mentions others, of lower intensity which are
not incapacitating. Producing “a breach in continuity” (1895, p. 307),
they cause pain-physical and, perhaps psychic. This intermediary state lies
between the steady, well-regulated space of the ego and the disabling
effects of trauma. I have elsewhere used the term overwhelm18 to describe
states that arise in these interstices between the ego’s concerted invest-
ment to keep things stable/knowable/bound, and traumatic territory
where the ego is undone. In the psychic topos of overwhelm the ego shat-
ters (Bersani 1986) in the sense that it surrenders its overly tight hold over
its translations (binding) (Saketopoulou 2019). The disaggregation of
previously bound enigma from its psychic coatings is pleasurable, impel-
ling the psyche to do renewed work,19 but it is also anguishing. And it is a
transient condition, something that flashes into experience but which can-
not be sustained (Bataille, 1957). A radical state of unbinding will urgently
seek stability through fresh bindings (new translations) and repression. If
neither occurs, we may then encounter psychotic phenomena.
Overwhelm’s transiently dysregulated states may be pleasurable but
they are also crisis points: in other words, while they are sites of potential
they offer no reassurances. We can’t know in advance “whether the unbind-
ing, which creates the uncertainty, will lead to restoration of previous bind-
ing or to a new binding or to neither” (House 2019, p. 181). Hence the
risk but, also, the potential reward, which is that freed-up enigma (unbound
energy) may become differently translated. This opening up of the psyche
to the forging of new representations may be nothing less than transforma-
tive. Note, however, that new translations do not help “recover … [or]
18
I have selected the noun form to draw it apart from its more ordinary use as a
verb (e.g. “x overwhelmed me”) or adjective (e.g. “I found y overwhelming”).
19
The reader will recognize here the allusion to Freud’s definition of the drive:
“. . . the psychical representative of the stimuli originating from within the organism
and reaching the mind, as a measure of the demand made upon the mind for work in
consequence of its connection with the body” (1915, p. 122). I use drive throughout
this paper in its meaning as a demand for work as opposed to its alternate usage as the
drive being the fuel of psychic operations.
regain contact with … our essence” (Foucault 1997, p. 282). Enigma is

always a question mark without an answer. What overwhelm offers is far
more consequential than “the truth”: through the breakdown of old struc-
tures, one may emerge reconfigured.
Its potential aside, overwhelm should not be romanticized. Even
though pleasurable, the ego’s breach is an intense state that may be
experienced as painful, disorganizing, even dangerous. Alternatively,
the ego’s disinvestment of its representations may lead to depersonaliza-
tion (de M’Uzan 2013). Remember, though, that overwhelm shatters, it
does not pulverize. It does not attack the psyche itself, but liquidates,
instead, the ego’s obdurate links. As analysts, unbound states do, and
should, worry us: because of the risk for decompensation, severe acting
out, etc., and because we sense that its pleasures can have magnetic
effects of detrimental impact. But the distinction between trauma and
overwhelm may help us work better with patients who have a propensity
to pursue experiences that can breach the ego’s barrier, who search for
trauma-like experiences. Those can take many forms: performance art,
BDSM, extreme sports, etc. At its most formidable, even the psychoana-
lytic process itself can bring about the ego’s unraveling (Laplanche
2006; see Saketopoulou 2019 for a clinical example).
In a text that has not yet had wide circulation,20 Laplanche (1980)
takes this up in relation to traumatophilia, a concept proposed by
Abraham (1907) but developed by Lowenfeld (1941). Lowenfeld
observed that some of his patients, “hunger for experiences and excite-
ment, [showing] a ‘greed for impressions’” (pp. 117-118), “provok[ing]
situations which … become traumatic” (p. 121). The traumas they
sought out, though, did not behave as trauma ordinarily does: they were
neither ruinous nor detrimental. Instead, they produced generative cri-
ses akin to overwhelm. To uphold the distinction between trauma and
intense trauma-like excitations that may incite growth-inducing work, I
will henceforth use Laplanche’s phrase inciting traumatism (traumatisme
incitateur) (1980, p. 195). For Lowenfeld’s patients, inciting trauma-
tisms, that is, the particular behaviors and actions that can lead to
20
I am grateful to my friend and colleague Dominique Scarfone for alerting me to
this passage, and to Jonathan House for generously sharing with me the original French
text, which has yet to appear in English.
overwhelm, generated aliveness, and creativity by disrupting structures
that had become too stale. This process is akin to Zaltzman’s description
of the workings of the anarchic drive. For her, excessive binding can
make reality too banal, rousing cravings for an encounter with novelty or
surprise in order “to create new drive movements” (1979, p. 57). She,
too, described patients who, smothered by too much cathexis—what
Laplanche called “death by the ego” (1987, p. 171)—and suffocated by
their ego’s inertia, needed to expose themselves to risky and extreme sit-
uations. Zaltzman, more than any other analyst, brought attention to the
generative possibilities of unbinding and to the enlivening properties of
the drive’s anarchy.21 For her, the need to put one’s life at risk or to go
to extremes may salvage psychological processes from stalemate or stag-
nation. Despite appearances to the contrary, the anarchic impulse is in
the service of living, a force that “induces a taste for change22” (p. 77).
Zaltzman called upon analysts to pay attention to patients who pursue
limit experiences that push the subject to the limit of what’s bearable
(Bataille 1954, 1957; Blanchot 1969; Foucault 1997, 2001;
Saketopoulou 2014). The limit, I maintain, may be thought of as the sur-
face of the organized ego, a surface that, as we have seen, is constituted
through primary violence and the mythosymbolic, structurizing culture
into the psyche. Beyond this threshold the subject feels untethered,
helplessly subject to the drives. The processes described by Lowenfeld,
Laplanche, and Zaltzman share an emphasis on the transformational
heft of moving past sluggish, inert structures.23 The concept of over-
whelm adds a granular theorizing of the specific mechanisms by which
21
I don’t have space here to explain my selective use of her concept of the
anarchic, which Zaltzman conceived as a drive unto itself but which I see as more
related to Laplache’s sexual drives of life and death (2011). Such a project awaits a
forthcoming paper.
22
Zaltzman’s notion of a “taste for change” shouldn’t be confused with neoliberal
ruses and capitalist plugs that advertise the consumption of new experiences sold to us
as expansive and life-changing. Zaltzman refers to something much more nuanced than
that: to changes that may take us to places we didn’t anticipate when choosing a
particular path. These changes are not accretive and supportive of what we already
know, and are not of the sort promoted by campaigns that seek to buttress our
narcissism (e.g. “be your best self,” etc.). They are, rather, about experiences that open
us up to the surprising and to the strange in ourselves.
23
Ferro (2005) and Oldoini (2019) have also used the concept of traumatophilia,
but with a differently emphasis. I am granting here a more enlarged scope to
inciting traumatisms can shatter the ego (Bersani 1986), disassembling

it and thus re-exposing the subject to enigma.
3. Sexuality, the Limit and the Perverse24

Foucault, among others, famously proposed that limit experience could
be achieved through various means, e.g. ascetic practices, art, medita-
tion, etc. (Martin, Gutman, and Hutton 1988).25 For specificity’s sake, I
should clarify, though, that, in my view, what nominates some acts for
limit work is not their particular complexion but their economic charge. To
have the potential to become an inciting traumatism, the behaviors/acts
in question need to have been commandeered by the sexual drive, to
run on an economy of escalating excitations. Why? Because, from the
perspective of Laplanchean metapsychology, it will take a force that
large to come up against the limits of the ego’s fortifications: to contest
the ego’s consent and its investment in itself (Blanchot 1980)—and to
do so without letting up when resistance is mounted and without becom-
ing appropriated into the ego’s structure. Since the infantile sexual is at
the core of the sexual drive (Scarfone 2019a), such a force puts us in
the domain of sadomasochism, “the most common and the most signifi-
cant of all … [the infantile sexual] perversions” (Freud 1905, p. 157).
Not all experiences, however, can meet this economic criterion.
Those that readily match the economy of the sexual drive are more
likely candidates for such work. I want to highlight three here that are
traumatophilia in that I see it as working to enliven overly rigid ego structures, instead
of repairing intromitted traumata.
24
I have explained elsewhere my commitment to preserving the historically
discrediting appellation perversion. Briefly, I use it in a non-pathologizing way and
granting it its original, ordinary status as marking polymorphous sexuality that attaches
itself to objects opportunistically and which is not organized hetero-procreatively (Freud
1905; Van Haute and Westerink 2016, 2017). I like the term because it conveys an
intensity and an edge the economic implications of which are not captured by benign-
sounding descriptors like “non-normative sexual practices,” “sexual play,” and “atypical
sexual practices” (Dimen 2001, 2017; Stein 1998, 2008). I remain strongly opposed to
these dignified and respectable phrases because they domesticate the otherness in
perversion by registering “erotic strangeness but then [promptly] repress[ing it] via
normalization” (Dean forthcoming). For further explanations and important qualifiers,
see Saketopoulou 2014, 2019.
25
See Lyng (2004) for discussions of how extreme sports, art, use of psychedelics,
and other non-sexual activities may also be such pathways; see also Newmahr 2010.
especially likely to be recruited by the sexual drive. First, sexuality in gen-
eral is well suited for pursuing bodily thrills that come up against the
limit because, even though sexuality is distinct from the sexual drive
itself, it is also always infiltrated by it (Laplanche 2011; Saketopoulou
2017a; Scarfone 2019ab). Sexual pleasure, as Bataillle puts it, “attains a
wild intensity, an insanity” (1956, p. 137), that opens “directly out upon
a certain vista of anguish, upon a certain lacerating consciousness of dis-
tress” (p. 139). Second, sexualities that are behaviorally perverse [that
deviate, that is, in object (e.g. fetishism), or aim (e.g. sadomasochistic
variants like BDSM) (Freud 1905; Van Haute and Westerink 2016,
2017)) may be more likely for limit work because of their exquisite por-
osity to the rogue, deviant, and savage properties of the infantile sexual.
Let me emphasize, though, this: the point of limit experience is not to
shock or to omnipotently triumph over limits (Nigro 1995).
Triumphing, after all, would be about mastering (binding) when the
aim is not to buttress but to contest the ego (unbinding). If the practices
more likely to perform limit work are scandalous or subversive, this is
not for the sake of shocking itself, but because such exuberant sexual-
ities are more likely to kindle the escalating economy of the sexual
drive.26 As such, we expect sexualities that twine arousal, humiliation,
pleasure, risk-taking, subordination, abjection, dominance, and pain to
be especially apposite contenders for limit work (Saketopoulou 2015b).
On this point we should heed Dean’s caution, however, that “simply
accept[ing] or, indeed, celebrat[ing] perverse sexuality” by folding it
into an ego/identity structure, “may be a way of avoiding what is so
intransigently difficult about [perversion]” (2014, p. 269).27
Third, the kinds of repetitions secreted by trauma (Freud 1914)
have the potential to innervate inciting traumatisms because of their
economic affinity with the sexual drive. Freud, let’s recall, described
26
Samuel Delany’s work is a particularly good illustration of work that rides the
sexual drive not to jar or disturb (1973, 1974), but to describe, instead, the plenitudes
of the sexual (see Jeremy O. Harris’s interview of Samuel Delany in Fernandez, 2020).
27
“The danger” Dean continues “lies in how progressive politics encourages us to
understand sexuality as a vital component of identity, thereby allowing us conveniently
to forget . . .[that u]nderstood psychoanalytically rather than psychologically, sexuality
remains alien to selfhood: sex is not the expression of identity but its undoing. Identity
politics is no friends of psychoanalysis” (2014, p. 270).
their economy as “more primitive, more elementary, more instinctual

than the pleasure principle” (1920, p. 23), as if watching “some
‘daemonic’ force at work” (p. 35; also, 1914, 1933). As inciting trauma-
tisms, these repetitions no longer escalate out of compulsive frenzy but,
rather, out of an acquired taste for the more and more of experience.
Instead of being driven to reproduce themselves mechanically, they
repeat for pleasure’s sake routing them back to the pleasure principle.
This is a consequential development because repetition that falls under
the aegis of the pleasure principle is repetition that is rescued from the
hopeless hamster wheel of recursion (Nyong’o 2010). Something new
can be wrested out of it (Scarfone unpublished manuscript). Repetitions
that become inciting traumatisms, thus, can offer paths to fresh experi-
ence. Animated by a taste for more (excitement, curiosity, etc.) they can
be pleasurable and, indeed, usable; inserted into a scene of address
(Reis 2009; Scarfone 2011; 2019a) they may become “vehicle[s] of
[their] own transcendence” (Reis 2020, p. 101). In this sense, clinical
interventions that treat perverse pleasures as pathological can hamper
repetition compulsions’ momentum towards being span into trauma-
tisms that incite useful psychic work because they impede the building
of momentum towards overwhelm. We will encounter the daemonic
force of such repetitions in Slave Play and explore in depth in Part II
how they can—or fail to—be spun into inciting traumatisms.
Blanchot (1980) was especially interested in the contestation of the
ego produced by limit experience, where things cannot be regulated or
foreseen, where one’s very existence may be felt to be at stake (Bataille
1928, 1954; Foucault 1991). He cautioned, however, against exaggerat-
ing our ability to exhaustively narrate what happens in these psychic
spaces. A principled stance would require us to admit that we can’t
exhaustively describe it. In fact, for psychoanalysis to think and speak
about such experiences, we, as analysts, will have to relinquish the gratifi-
cation offered by precise description (binding)-which would amount to
our own act of passibility. “Our efforts” wrote Foucault, who experi-
mented with limit experience himself (Miller, 1993; Wade 2019), “are
undoubtedly better spent in trying to … mak[e this experience] speak
from the depths of where its language fails … where the subject who
speaks has just vanished” (1963, p. 77). If, as analysts, we permit our-
selves the imprecision of speaking in approximations, we might say that
in limit experience/overwhelm, one finds oneself in the presence of the
drive. Divested of its representational coating—the vesting, I remind us,
having occurred through primary violence and translation—this is as
bare and unmediated as the drive can be.
Overwhelm and limit experience cannot be planned or orches-
trated. For Bataillle, they become “accessible through excess, not
through want” (1954, p. 22), which means that the situation has to carry
one over. To be carried over entails letting oneself become passible to
the other (Lyotard 1988) and to the unknown.28 Passibility “is the
opposite of action” (Bataille 1954, p. 46), more like a lowering of an
internal defensive, resistive barrier that seeks to keep things stable than
something one actively does or implements. One enters such experien-
ces without knowing where they will lead, but nevertheless involving one-
self as a full participant, taking responsibility for oneself and for what
the experience will rouse. What will ensue cannot be anticipated: that is
the condition of possibility for overwhelm, and it is also the risk that
comes with overwhelm.
Let us now return to Dean and his leather-capped stranger, whose
intentions we never learn and Dean likely didn’t either. As noted, their
unscripted piss play scene could have gone off the rails, becoming trau-
matic. It didn’t. Now, Dean does not tell us what followed this scene, so
it may look like we can’t know if his erotic astonishment developed the
density of overwhelm. But we do know something of consequence. In
“an arena of experimentation in which I was exclusively top” (p. 125),
this stranger “made me his piss bottom” (p. 125). This is consequential:
the breaking down of one’s ordinary way of being in favor of something
new and unexpected is akin to the ego’s contestation. Dean’s readiness
to surrender himself to his stranger, the stranger who without consent
urinated in Dean’s mouth, but also to the stranger and to the strange in
himself exposed him to something surprising. “I did not and would not
have consented” he writes, and it is precisely what occurred beyond,
though not against, his consent that animates his erotic astonishment.
In being made into a “piss bottom” what matters most is not identity (i.e.
that he bottomed as opposed to topped) but the quality of transitiveness.
28
This, again, emphasizes that limit consent is not about inviting violation but
about a loosening of one’s defenses so that one can be transported to an elsewhere.
In polymorphous perversity pleasure “countermands the claims of iden-

tity” (Dean 2012, p. 480), the key is not perversity but polymorphous-
ness (Scarfone 2014). When “identity becomes the law,” explains
Foucault, “[when] the perennial question is ‘Does this thing conform to
my identity?” (1984, p. 166), the ego speaks in banalities, seeking the
reassurances of conforming to identity mandates rather than letting
itself be carried into the unknown. In such instances, the ego cannot
become “a source of initiative, [with] a capacity to intervene in a unique
and original manner” (Scarfone, unpublished manuscript), but
becomes, instead, an ossifying structure.
Polymorphousness seems to reign as well in Stockton who was
able to pluck a queer pleasure from the signifier that dildoed her by
inventively trying to take it “like a man.” Stockton may have felt the
pain of being screwed, but she related to it not through masochistic
submission or rageful grievance but by crafting her own, idiomatic
relationship to the signifier “lesbian,” by crafting, that is, a new trans-
lation. She did so by lifting the signifier out of the conventional gen-
dered frameworks in which it had been given to her through primary
violence, and by establishing her own, polysemic meanings to it. We
may, thus, go so far as to say that Stockton took the signifier more
into her possession-even as the signifier will never fully belong to her,
any more than any signifier ever fully belongs to any of us
(Stockton 2019).
Stockton’s and Dean’s vignettes are too brief for us to track over-
whelm in its full excitement, impetus, or duress. While we know
something about Dean’s erotic astonishment, we are not privy to
whether his or Stockton’s experiences came “as close as possible to
… that which can’t be lived through” (Foucault 1997, p. 241). For
that, we’ll have to turn to Slave Play, and to the brilliant mind of
Jeremy O. Harris.
PART TWO
1. Slave Play
You should not work to make the audience

comfortable with what they are witnessing at all.
–Jeremy O. Harris, Slave Play playwright, Notes on Style
So they fucked up and gave us a Broadway theater.

–Closing night, Slave Play Director Robert O’Hara
Slave Play landed on the New York theater scene with a thunderclap
igniting a panegyric round of reviews and a tide of celebratory appreciation
for Jeremy O. Harris, its gifted 30-year-old, queer, Black playwright.
Deemed “one of the best and most provocative” new plays (Green 2019),
Slave Play delivered a “shot across the bow of the Great White Way” (New
York Daily Review 2019). The extensive commentary (see Holdren 2019)
focused on its artful portrayal of how White supremacy grates in the every-
day29 (Marks 2019). But critics left mostly untouched the controversial
aspects of the play regarding the erotics of interracial desire, and the impli-
cation that racism carries an erotic charge for all involved.30 This isn’t sur-
prising: Slave Play engaged consent at its most gnarled site, at the especially
difficult junction between sexuality and the traumas of the antebellum past.
Unfolding on a Southern plantation, the opening act stuns the audience
with three interracial, psychosexual encounters involving nudity and vigor-
ously simulated, on-stage sex. In the First Act, Kaneisha, a dark-skinned Black
enslaved woman, is subjected to an erotically tinged scene of racial denigra-
tion by Jim, the White plantation overseer. Jim humiliates her calling her a
“useless heffer” (p. 21), making her eat off the floor “like a dog” (p. 23),
describing her twerking as “jigabooing” (p. 27), and referring to her as a
“negress” (p. 51). Kaneisha does as he says while also challenging his author-
ity, by asking questions like, “you actually want an answer to that?” (p. 22),
making pronouncements like, “it ain’t dirty in my estimation” (p. 23), and
dissing him for being unable to tell apart a watermelon from a cantaloupe.
Their exchange toggles between debasement and softs acts of irreverence.
29
It is one of Whiteness’s operations to understand everything as self-referential,
but this play is not aimed at educating White people. Its goal is to problematize
collective living in the shadow of America’s original sin, chattel slavery (Dershowitz
2019). This lack of address is not specific to Slave Play; the aesthetic is not addressed to
us but to an other (Lyotard 2002). While the artist may have an imaginary interlocutor
in mind, the work is not intended to them personally. It is the us, the audience, that
imagines that the message is specifically addressed to, and crafted for, us.
30
See Frank, Romano and Grady 2010; MacDonald 2019 for rare exceptions.
Tension escalates, culminating in Jim forcing himself on her sexually. As the

scene progresses, arousal mounts, and racial epithets multiply.
The second encounter depicts Alana, a White, dim-witted, and
funny Southern mistress, commanding a handsome, mix-raced enslaved
man, Philip, to play on “his little fiddle” (p. 30) some of that “mulatto
magic” (p. 31) that makes the female slaves “hoot and holla … waiting
to run on ya later” (p. 34). The word “fiddle” and Alana’s intonation of
it imply that the real instrument of Philip’s magic is his penis. This marks
the complex space Jeremy O. Harris wants his audience in: depersonaliz-
ing violence and eroticism don’t belong to competing registers but are
of kin.31 Philip dutifully complies. Before long he finds himself face
down on her bed. Alana proceeds to forcibly sodomize him with a sizable
black dildo, an heirloom from her mother which, we find out, was given
to her on her wedding night, her mother anticipating that her White
husband would be unable to sexually please her.
In the third encounter, Gary, a Black plantation overseer, orders
around Dustin, the White-passing indentured servant. When Gary oddly
insists that he be referred to as “Nigger Gary” (p. 41), Dustin mocks citing
his overseer’s “White” comportment and manners.32 The insinuation that
Gary is not black enough leads to a physical altercation. As the two men
wrestle, things veer erotic. Sexually inflamed, they strip each other down to
their underwear. Dustin’s already-thin servility falls off as he threatens Gary,
“[I c]ould have you lynched for deigning to touch me like that … You can
talk to me anyway you please. But when it comes to touch … I am Dustin The
White” (p. 44).33 Flexing his authority as overseer, Gary climbs atop a cotton
31
The implication that Black men are well-hung and the historical fact that Black
men were “hung from trees for being, well, hung” (Poulson-Bryant 2005, p. 57)
highlights that racialized violence is both brutal and erotic at the same time. While on
the level of the ego, being reduced to a part object can feel offensive and injurious, in
the domain of the sexual, it can be an erotic elixir, arousing enthralling appetites (Dean
2008; Dimen 2015).
32
Dustin’s mocking monologue is one of the most hilarious parts of the play. And
as we, the audience, laugh, we are implicitly shown, and asked to (re)consider, what
precisely we are laughing at when we unselfconsciously join in the hilarity of a “proper”
Blackness from which Gary ostensibly deviates.
33
From “lynching” to “calling the police” on “suspicious” Black people, Dustin’s
threat unmistakably parallels the present, referencing how easily White (and White-
passing) people can endanger Black people’s lives by involving law enforcement.
cart. Towering over Dustin, he orders him to get on his knees and lick his
boot. Dustin readily complies, delivering a sensuous boot-licking that drives
Gary to a spectacular orgasm. But then, vertiginously, and to Dustin’s (and
the audience’s) surprise, Gary starts shaking, first slightly, then intensely.
Gary eventually collapses into a tearful, hyperventilating puddle.
Briefly, we return to Jim who is raping Kaneisha. Momentum is
building when Jim strangely mutters that he can’t go on, and begins to
lose his erection. Kaneisha is nearing climax when Jim interrupts her
momentum, calls out “Starbucks”—first tentatively, then loudly and
repetitively. We, the characters and the audience, hear a loud horn blast.
Everything stops, ending the First Act.
Racial trauma and colorism pulsate through Slave Play’s first act under
the heavy burden of history and to the garish, clamorous accompaniment
of guttural sexual moans. It’s no wonder director Robert O’Hara decided
to withhold an intermission, rightly anticipating that anyone made uncom-
fortable by the demanding horrors of the first act (that is, almost anyone
with a pulse), would be tempted to walk away.34 The pairing of sex, trauma,
and degradation played out through racial tropes is not easy to bear but,
O’Hara explains, if you go to see a play that calls itself Slave Play, “it should
cost [you] something to watch it and to experience it” (Kai 2019).
In the Second Act, we find the three couples sitting in the plantation
home with two therapists and discover that what we just watched was day
four of a therapy dubbed “Antebellum Sexual Performance Therapy.”
The Second Act has an immediate retroactive effect on our understand-
ing of the First Act leading us to reshuffle its meaning. These consensual
sexual encounters were intended to heal the Black partners’ sexual anhe-
donia: Kaneisha has lost sexual interest in Jim, Philip suffers from erectile
dysfunction, and Gary has not orgasmed in months. The therapy, we are
led to conclude, required the couples to act as if one were a master and
as if the other were a slave. Scripted by the Black partners themselves, the
sexual acts were meant for their pleasure—not the White partners’, who
spend the remainder of the play protesting having been made to do
34
The lack of an intermission did not, of course, prevent it: offended theatergoers
still got up and left during the First Act, and did so broadcasting their displeasure by
passive aggressively gathering their belongings as if in slow motion before heading for
the exit (see Daniels 2019; Harris 2019). For the most part, audience members who
walked away were Black, a point to which I return later in this essay.
racist things against their will (but, as we will see, in accord with their
desire). To those familiar with kink communities, this is a reference to
race play, a controversial, albeit well-established, BDSM practice (Cruz
2016; Weiss 2013; Woolfe 2016)—though not everyone in the audience
is aware of this citation.35 For the second act’s remainder, the therapists
help the couples explore the racialized dynamics in their erotic
relationships.
The transition from the first act’s pornodrama to the second act’s
jargon-filled metalevel—psychoanalysis, queer theory, and queer of
color critique all play central roles—calms the agitation roused in the
first act. This is because the move from the erotics of racist iconography
to the language of psychotherapy and to the interrogation of race rela-
tions amounts to an economic shift: from less bound energy to a more
bound state. Even as race is absolutely critical in America today, this re-
situating of the conversation in the sphere of racial identity moves us to
more respectable and familiar territory. Further, the reveal that this was
part of “therapy” allays the anxiety that someone has been violated
against their will-restoring the sovereignty of affirmative consent.
The second act illustrates how the not-me quality (Sullivan 1953) of
desirous disavowal rhymes with the logics of White supremacy. Despite
their protestations, the second act reveals, the White and White-passing
partners were not simply acting or “in role.” Anyone paying attention
notices that Jim, Alana, and Dustin were excited by the racialized/racist
feelings they were asked to “perform.”36 Jim, for example, who keeps
announcing that he didn’t find the roleplay arousing at all and protests
being “made to call [my wife] a negress” (p. 70), sported a visible hard-
on through some of the first act. Of course, Jim’s disavowing his arousal
is also why he couldn’t fully participate in the erotic play: his passionate
35
In kinky communities, race play is considered to belong to a subgenre called
edgeplay. The term edgeplay is used to denote sexualities that are risky and that court
forces of sexuality and of memory, the force and impact of which cannot be anticipated
ahead of time.
36
The white members of the audience are implicated in this dynamic too; “[n]o one
has forced anyone to see a play called Slave Play” O’Hara points out, “[it’s] your own
interest, your own curiosity, other things bring you through the door” (Kai 2019). Being
told “you, after all, came to watch” is a searing indictment. And with the back wall of the set
a giant mirror, we watch ourselves watch, our faces reflected from the stage, implying that
we, too, are part of this slave play, as much as we might prefer to think otherwise.
thrusts became more inhibited after his racial slur (calling Kaneisha a
“[n]egress” [p. 51]) sent her into a psychosexual intoxication. Losing
his erection, he eventually safeworded37 halting the sexual encounter just
as Kaneisha was about to climax. In contrast, Alana announces that
(play-)raping Philip “was just hot to me, really hot … ” (p. 62), that her
character “unlocked some doors, let me tell ya” (p. 63). Unlike Jim, Alana
owns her arousal—but not that race was at play. Hence, her subsequent
operatic outburst when Philip recalls that they met on FetLife – “like
Tinder for fetish fiends” (p. 104)—to roleplay a cucking fantasy where
Alana’s White husband would “get off watching a black man fucking his
white wife” (p. 105). “It wasn’t racial, I swear” (p. 106) Alana wails, her
histrionics escalating as she tries to draw a line between the FetLife role-
play and that of the therapy; the roleplay, she claims, “had NOTHING to
do with race, it was just what got him off” (p. 105). Dustin, too, strenuously
protests post facto “what [Gary] made me do today” (p. 72), even as he
clearly enjoyed the sex that drew its titillating charge from Gary being
asked to be addressed as “Nigger Gary.” The racial epithet, and Dustin’s
threat of lynching, played a key role in Dustin’s arousal.
2. The Slave Play in Slave Play

That racism has an erotic charge for White people is not really new
news. One need only reflect on the sexual undercurrents subtending
the American history of lynching (Dray 2003). But offering up this diffi-
cult but known fact is merely Jeremy O. Harris’s theatrical feint; it is
what allows him to move to what he is really after, which is something
much more incandescent than calling Whiteness to task-the fact that the
Black partners solicited these erotic indignations and the racial fetishiza-
tion. The controversial claim mounted by Slave Play is that the erotic life
of racism inflects not just the oppressors’ psychosexuality but also the
oppressed’s (Holland 2012; Lindsey and Johnson 2014; Musser 2016;
Stockton 2006). These Black partners don’t want to be respected, at
least not in the conventional sense of the word. To the contrary,
Kaneisha, Philip, and Gary are seeking experiences that mimic the
37
A safeword is a code word agreed upon in advance by both parties to signal
one’s need to stop a BDSM scene. Harris’s choice of “Starbucks” as the play’s safeword
deserves an essay unto itself.
atrocious history of chattel slavery in the past, to fuel spectacularly com-

plicated intimacies in the present. These sexual pleasures don’t readily
line up with the logic of recognition, equivalence, and value
(Mu~ noz 2013).
It is not difficult to see why Harris’ detour via Whiteness was expe-
dient: it is painful, if not explosive, to discuss a desire for sexual abjec-
tion, especially in the flammable territory of race. In this regard, Slave
Play uses race as the proverbial Trojan horse through which charged,
queer forms of desire are surreptitiously imported into dignified dis-
cursive spaces that would otherwise negate them. Here is queerness at
its most complex, not as identity, but as affect and as aesthetic, queer-
ness as pertaining not only to lust or intimacy but also to sexual desir-
ing that conducts shame, injury, contempt, defiance, despair, and hate
(Reid-Pharr 2001). Here, we might say from a psychoanalytic perspec-
tive, is a combustible example of how the sexual drive’s polymorphous
perversity may annex traumatic history as its representational coating.
The darker set of desires volitionally enacted by the Black partners
marks how the then is conducted into the now and it is on this very
thin strip between past and present that the slave play in Slave Play ric-
ochets. Jeremy O. Harris offers, thus, an extended visitation, if not a
vertiginous descent, into taboo and forbidden sexual appetites, into
perversity that is “capable of stressing nearly every boundary required
for the order of ‘civilized society’ to hold” (English 2010, p. 73).
Kaneisha, Gary, and Philip are not hoping to be recognized or to be
offered what analysts problematically, as Khan (2018) has suggested,
understand as empathic witnessing; they want something else entirely,
something that has more to do with pleasure and with the more and
more of experience.
“The Shock of Gary Fisher”: From Repetition Compulsion to Inciting

Traumatism38
Jeremy O. Harris does not explicitly link Gary’s character in Slave Play to
the actual person of Gary Fisher, but the connection is too obvious to
38
I borrow this phrase (“The shock of Gary Fisher) from Reid-Pharr’s (2001)
chapter of the same title.
ignore.39 Gary Fisher was a Black gay man who died of AIDS-related
complications. His notebooks were published posthumously, and at his
request, by his teacher, the famous queer theorist Eve Sedgwick. This
strange compendium included extensive narrations of erotic fantasies/
experiences revolving around his wish to be sexually dominated by a
“white master.”40 His writings were received with unease, shock, and con-
sternation. Fisher’s enjoyment at wanting to be a White man’s “nigger,
your property and worshipping not just you, but your whiteness” (p.
231) confused and puzzled his readers. The strangeness of such desires
operated like an enigmatic message, spurring many authors to theorize
how the folding of the haunting traumas of slavery into someone’s sex-
ual complexion might extend beyond repetition compulsion (Musser
2017; Nyong’o 2019; Scott 2010; Sinfield 2004; Stallings 2015; Stockton
2009; Woodard 2014). 41
Stretching to make sense of Fisher’s desires, Jose Mu~ noz (2013)
described the impossibility of adjudicating between Black subjects seen
as either frozen at the traumatic standstill of slavery’s aftermath (what
we would analytically understand as repetition compulsion) and a racial-
ized sexuality that is fully of one’s own accord (simply put, just what gets
one off).42 The incommensurable, he suggested, may be one site where
sexuality twines with racial trauma. Of course, this is not to suggest that
Fisher’s (or Kaneisha’s, Phillip’s, and Gary’s) desires for racial
39
While Slave Play was playing on Broadway, the playwright wrote, produced, and
performed in a new play under the handle @GaryXXXFisher. That play, Black Exhibition,
turned the heat even higher than Slave Play and included Harris reading excerpts from
Gary Fisher’s work (1996).
40
Here are two characteristic excerpts: “I want to be a slave, a sex slave, a slave
underneath another man’s ( … a big white man) power. I want to relinquish
responsibility and at the same time give up all power” (1996, p. 187), and; “[s]exually I
want (desire, fantasize myself) to be/being used. I want to be a slave, sexually and
perhaps otherwise” (p. 199).
41
Second-wave feminism struggled with a form of this question as well, heatedly
debating in the 1980s desires that involved one’s own sexual subjugation (Vance 1992).
Why would a lesbian, for instance, engage in a butch-femme relationship or participate
in sexual sadomasochism when these dynamics, the argument went, draw on the
inequality of gender roles mapped onto patriarchal cruelties? See Musser 2014 for a
detailed accounting of these debates.
42
Jennifer Nash’s exquisitely careful and beautiful work on this precise tension
point should be on our psychoanalytic radar (2014).
debasement are universal to all, or even many, Black people. Slave Play
makes no such homogenizing move. That these desires exist—among
some real people and not just theatrical characters (see Cruz 2016;
Johnson 1999; Weiss 2011; Woolfe 2016), including in our practices
(Saketopoulou, 2018)—merely speaks to how they draw on the material-
ity of the crimes of slavery.
Such sexual appetites, Slave Play insists, do not necessarily leave “the
historical bitterness of the past” on “the other side of the leather door
(Johnson 1999). Jeremy O. Harris shows, instead, that erotic excitement
can become painfully and pleasurably interdigitated with the signifiers
of slavery’s traumas. “It is to our detriment,” Dean writes, “that we
remain skeptical about pleasures that we regard as contaminated by
power, as if … there are pleasures that are not contaminated by power”
(2012, p. 481). Not just power, but abuses of power, I would add, also
get readily folded into sexual appetites (see Allison 1995; Angot 2017;
Anonymous 2017). In Slave Play racial fetishism is shown to draw its
erotic heft from the materiality of antebellum scars (Perez 2015)
prompting us to ask: when the past blisters through present-day desire –
i.e. when Gary asks Dustin to address him as “Nigger Gary,” or when
Kaneisha goes into sexual convulsions upon being called “a lazy, nasty
Negress” — are we in the deadness of strict, traumatic repetition? Or
might we, perhaps, be observing an inciting traumatism that is trying to
build up momentum beyond a mere restaging of trauma towards a
potentially transformative state of overwhelm? The pivotal difference, as
discussed earlier, is the presence of pleasure. This pleasure may be insuf-
ferable but when it is suffered anyway, it may render the sexual slave play
into something more than just a recursion orbiting around an intergen-
erational traumatic center marking, instead, something driven and
unwilled (Bataille 1954) that swells beyond containment to acquire
escape velocity, rendering it into a motor for fresh psychic work. To
have a chance to become an inciting traumatism, such scenarios need to
escalate even to the point of the monstrously extreme (as we’ll see hap-
pening in the play’s Third Act), to develop enough energetic momen-
tum to rupture the ego’s self-investment.
In this sense, we may understand psychoanalytically the racial fetish-
ism in Slave Play as a point of high density, a highly represented sexual
fantasy where the impersonal nature of the drive (Dean 2009)—
impersonal in the sense that the drive lacks a preordained aim, has a
penchant for exchangeable objects, and lacks an addressee—gets
churned into sexuality. Sexuality, let’s remember, is the set of behav-
iors/acts/fantasies that we may think of as the representational ambassa-
dors of the sexual drive (Scarfone 2019a) and which, to acquire its
psychic coating (representation) has to draw from the objets trouves in
the socius (Aulagnier 1975; Laplanche 1987, 2015). Racial oppression
and racist iconography can be taken up as translational codes, a take-up
that is not random but meaningful and serendipitous at once. The signi-
fying nexus of racial exploitation, rape, and, degradation can turn the
impersonal property of the sexual drive into sexuality, rendering racial
fetishization a site where the impersonal may get sutured to history’s
material effects. Racial fetishism, in that sense, does not just represent
the past (i.e. it does not merely point to the history of abduction, exploit-
ation, rape, and systematic dehumanization) but it re-presents it, in the
sense that it presents again in actual time (Scarfone 2015b). In the sex-
ual present, this fusion, and the irresolvable tension on which it hinges,
produce sexualities of the incommensurable, sexualities, that is, that
solicit the future (Mu~ noz 2013; Sinfield 2004).
For some audience members—those who petitioned the play to be
shut down,43 and who vociferously voiced their upset on social
media44—the play felt traumatic. For others it functioned as an inciting
traumatism that put theatergoers in an especially demanding position,
as we, too, are subjected to the repetition simply by observing it. This is
akin to the position the analyst finds herself in the consulting room as
well; not just observing but being subjected to, and thus, to some degree
participating in, the patient’s repetitions. At such junctures, it can be
tempting to dismiss the iterative quality of inciting traumatisms. What
would such dismissals look like? Trying, for example, to assimilate it into
familiar understandings, deciding, for instance, that these desires are
pathological or by resisting the disturbance the play creates. Or by resist-
ing the novelty suggested by the play by, for instance, getting up and
walking out of the theatre or “cancelling” the playwright. Assimilating
the new into the old is, as we have seen, how the ego barricades itself
43
https://www.change.org/p/abernalwbrc-yahoo-com-shutdown-slave-play
44
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LMw5Jm5o3gM&feature=youtu.be&t=1253
against the turbulences that come with novelty. Turning away from nov-
elty also issues from the wish to spare the other—Philip, Gary, and
Kaneisha—from the horrors of repetition. However well-meaning, this
impulse obtains from liberal notions of agency, notions that are rooted
in the fantasy that a subject scarred by trauma can be restored to its pre-
traumatic state. Interventions that stem from such liberalism may prob-
lematically interrupt the momentum required to reach the overwhelm
state, stripping repetition from its quest for pleasure, consigning it to a
mere re-cycling of trauma. This is, in fact, what occurs when Jim safe-
words and why Kaneisha is both heartbroken and enraged with him. His
halting their sexual encounter seemed motivated, at least consciously, by
seeing only the woundedness in Kaneisha’s desire. Jim was unable to
appreciate was that her wound had also acquired a taste for pleasure.
His inability to see that her excitement as anything but historical injury
detracted from her creative endeavor to do racial pleasure differently
constituting, in effect, its own violence.
How do we know, though, that in Slave Play we may be in the domain
of a potential inciting traumatism and not of rote, mechanical repeti-
tion? Because Dustin and Philip were deeply and uniquely pleasured by
their lustful encounters. During the “forced” sodomy slave scene, Philip
overcomes his erectile dysfunction, “[n]ot with a pill but with,
um … [w]ell our improv … ” (p. 64). Notably, the sexual scene with
Alana triggers Philip’s memory of having met first met her to enact a sex-
ual cucking fantasy. “I could feel his eyes,” Philip says, about Alana’s hus-
band “seeing me as a nigger, a big ol’ nigger on top of his white wife”
(p. 107). In the apres-coup, Alana’s husband’s gaze becomes traumatic
for Philip; it feels racial in a way it didn’t before. This spawns a trans-
formation of Philip’s relationship to himself. Where he earlier saw him-
self as “just a hot guy who’s not exactly black or white” (p. 93), Philip
comes to inhabit his Blackness differently: “[h]ow am I just hearing
myself say this?” (p. 106), he exclaims in surprise. Although on the level
of identity, this clarifies things, on the level of the sexual, things are no
less vexed or tangled. An earlier memory emerges: White classmates see
Philip naked in the shower, his penis “swinging,” and call Philip “donkey
dick” (p. 93). This moment of racial objectification, of reducing a per-
son to a body part, trailed by a long racist history, is wounding. And yet,
insofar as it simultaneously gestures to a corporeal sexuality
overbrimming with potency and virility, these denigrations also establish
Philip’s sexual superiority, and splendor (see Poulson-Bryant 2005).
This is the both/and of sexualized racial humiliation. “[M]aybe,” Philip
says, straining at this tense pairing, “that’s why my dick worked more.
Maybe my dick only works when I know I am black” (p. 106).
Similarly, Gary so enjoyed the encounter that he climaxed for the
first time in months. The phrase “Gary came” is, in fact, the laugh line
on a loop throughout Act Two, as if Harris wants to ensure we don’t lose
sight of the sexual play’s yield. Gary’s orgasm, like Dean’s experience of
erotic astonishment, is gorged with pleasure. But insofar as it’s followed
by a hyperventilating collapse, it is more like the experience of over-
whelm: pleasuring and anguishing at once. It is this state that galvanizes
the psychic work we watch Gary do in Act Two, leading him to a power-
ful insight: “for almost a decade I’ve given myself over to you” he says to
Dustin, “who acts like he is the prize and I am the lucky recipient. No
motherfucker, I am the prize” (p. 113). In this powerful elongated
moment, we witness a hard-earned transformation that required the suf-
fering of pleasure leaving Gary with a reconfigured sense of self-and
questioning his relationship with Dustin.
Sites of Woundedness as Sexual Sites

For the traumatized subject there is no return to a pre-traumatic state, to
a liberal form of agency that is not constrained by the past’s wounding
effects (Keizer 2004; Musser 2014, 2017).45 Projects of restored free-
dom and of radical psychic emancipation are fantastical constructions
existing only in the minds of those unwilling to concede that trauma has
irremediable scarring effects. I make a plea, thus, to us as analysts to be
less preoccupied with what to do about trauma and to become more
interested in what subjects can do with trauma, to shift, that is, psycho-
analysis’ traumato-phobic stance to a traumato-philic one. What is, at
best, on offer for traumatized subjects are not liberatory outcomes but
45
I have argued throughout this essay that a liberal form of agency (e.g.
affirmative consent), that is unconstrained by trauma, is impossible for any subject since
the unconscious is constituted to begin with through the trauma of implantation
(Laplanche 1987). This is even more pronounced for subjects who have also toiled
through historical and structural trauma; Musser has aptly called such fantasies of liberal
agency “white fantasies” to mark how they are always already racialized (2016).
more degrees of freedoms. Attaining them involves crafting one’s own,

personal relationship to the terms the socius has made available to us
through primary violence and the mythosymbolic (remember here
Stockton’s revamped relationship to the signifier that screwed her). For
Black people and for people of color, such self-defining includes not
having to conform to White people’s narratives about them, and under-
standing themselves despite White people’s charitable and, thus, poten-
tially condescending “concerns” about what’s “really” agentic. In Slave
Play we see how such protectionism is fueled by White liberalism, which
is nothing more than the ego’s investment in how it is perceived (i.e.,
the “good white person” [Sullivan 2004]). Jim, for example, interrupt-
ing the racially humiliating scenario that Kaneisha wanted and, more
precisely, needed, protests having been made to “call her a negress
[when]” he emphasizes, “she is my queen”46 (p. 70). On the conscious
level, he is defending her dignity, but in appointing himself as her
defender, he is also steadfastly holding onto the power of being the one
who determines the precise coordinates of what is, and is not, dignifying
to her as a Black woman.47 Kaneisha is, thus, disallowed from her own
relationship to her sexuality, and impeded in her invest her trauma with
pleasure, which could spin it into an inciting traumatism. Jim’s refusal
follows on a long history of Black people being refused the prerogative,
and the pleasure, of their own self-understandings and is, in large part,
how enslaved Black people were made into chattel; by being told, for
instance, that their bodies were too unruly, their music too devilish and
that both were in need of White peoples’ civilizing influence. Efforts to
wrest something new from repetition, to make something old and trau-
matic one’s own, involve taking the signifiers more into one’s possession.
This is how a word as loaded and as historically distended as a racial slur
can paradoxically become a site of enlarged freedom-work (such use, of
course, can only be mobilized by those against whom the word has been leveled).
The sexual, unwilled and overbrimming, pushes beyond identity catego-
ries, beyond the ego’s binding and beyond its consent, engaging desires
46
Protesting too much, thus, Jim stumbles against another racial stereotype. A
psychoanalytically informed theatergoer sees this coming.
47
See Skerrett (2011ab) and Saketopoulou (2011) for a discussion regarding
sexuality, dignity, and consent.
that do not yield to the mandates of political correctness or to the
Orwellian censorship of good politics.
Enlarged freedoms also involve not having to carry the burden of
representing one’s entire race, to not succumbing to the “flattening”
effects (Musser 2014) of speaking for all Black people (see also Collins
2000; Nash 2014, 2019). Note, for example, that in reading Gary Fisher,
McBride reports that what made him cringe was not Fisher’s desires, but
“the public nature of his declarations, the fact that they … did not
ascribe to the ‘positive’ representation of black life, or of black gay life,
that we have been so thoroughly programmed to respect, revere,
and … produce” (2005, p. 98). We would do well to keep in mind
Dean’s (2008) reminder here that sexual fantasy, and, I would add, sex-
ual arousal, do not answer to political politics, however progressive and
advancing of human rights they may be. BDSM race play activist mike
bond makes a similar point: “When walking into a BDSM club” he high-
lights, “black people are always black first … our behavior is always meas-
ured against those definitions of what a black person is supposed to do”
(personal communication). Mollena Williams, a Black submissive
woman who calls herself a “perverted negress” (mollena.com) and who
lives in a 24/7 dominant/submissive relationship with a White man
(Wolfe 2016), writes: “My vagina isn’t really interested in uplifting the
race … what pussy wants is really dark stuff to test the boundaries and
cut with an exhilarating level of danger” (quoted in Cruz 2016, p. 62).
Such transformative moves involve stepping away from what Aulagnier
calls “ambient discourses” (1975) where one says what one is expected
to say; they involve assuming responsibility for what one wants even
though that want is underwritten by the press of the sexual unconscious,
a force one neither chooses nor controls, and indifferent to our consent.
For someone to say about their sexuality: “I want what I want,” or “I
belong to a group but I am not answerable to it” is a frightening step,
especially when the group shares a collective past of exploitation and
oppression that continues to the present.
Engaging such complex dynamics is no small ask. It can be a roaring
success and an excruciating failure, often both at once. In the Third Act,
we find ourselves in Kaneisha’s and Jim’s bedroom, with Kaneisha pack-
ing her bags about to leave him. His refusal to engage her, (his safeword-
ing) has made the relationship untenable. On the level of affirmative
consent, her charge is unacceptable; Jim should not have to do some-

thing he doesn’t want to. But we are not in the terrain of safety. We are
“in the wake” of trauma (Sharpe 2016), in the terrain of risk, in the
weeds of crafting something new: in the territory, that is, of limit con-
sent. Jim’s unwillingness to become passible to Kaneisha, to let himself
be carried by his own racialized sadomasochism and by the situation will
no longer do; he has been more invested in being a “good white
partner” than to visiting with her the harrowing vaults of their shared
ancestral history. Let me clear that Jim is not being asked to kindly help
Kaneisha with her trauma. Antebellum (and colonial) history is not the
history of the trauma of Black people (or people of color) alone, but the
history of the traumatic relationship between White people (and/or colo-
nizers) and Black people (and/or the colonized). What is ultimately
required of Jim, thus, is to lower his defenses to come into contact with
the fact of his own ancestral past, which is that he comes from a lineage
of oppressors. It is this history that Jim resists, a history to which he did
not consent but with the ramifications he, nevertheless, has to live. And
it is the rousing of this history that courses through him in what
comes next.
While Kaneisha angrily recounts to him how he failed her Jim, for
the first time, really listens. Giving himself over to the moment, he star-
tles her—and us. “Shut up, you dirty negress” (p. 130) he screams at her
in a thick Southern accent. Spoken in a stentorian voice, the offensive
command pierces the theatrical space and the gravity of what’s occur-
ring astounds the audience: Jim is no longer just playing along. He has
allowed something to be roused in him. “You are a nasty little bed wench
who’s been asking for this all day, ain’tcha?” (p. 130) he says, pulling
out a whip. His sadism, which is paradoxically conditioned by his having
surrendered to Kaneisha, involves his relinquishing his identity stakes
(on being the good White partner). Grabbing her violently he climbs on
top of her, spreads her legs and plunges forward. The as-if rape that fol-
lows, and to which Kaneisha signals her agreement, is delivered to the
pitch of an actual violation. Entirely uninhibited now in his racial slurs,
Jim clutches her throat as he thrusts into her. Is this what Kaneisha really
wanted, one wonders from the audience. Kaneisha starts resisting,
scratches him, forcefully pushes him back, and lets out a chilling shriek.
As she calls out her safeword, “Starbucks, Starbucks,” she is wrecked, her
entire body convulsing in tears. The encounter is extraordinarily
intense, disturbing, and confusing to watch. The dynamics of over-
whelm, the not not-rape (Schechner 1985) scene suggests, are not easily
worked out. And they do not reward Jim, Kaneisha, or the audience,
with some exceptional clarity. Startled by Kaneisha’s reaction, and
uncertain about why he did what he did, Jim appears ruined. He takes a
look at himself in the mirror and, upon encountering his reflection,
vomits. Kaneisha strangely composes herself. It’s not clear what is hap-
pening when, just before the play ends, she looks at the audience and
says—to us? to him? to herself?—“Thank you for listening” (p. 132). It is
left to the audience to try to discern whether this is genuine gratitude,
bitter irony, or sardonic rage.
The stage directions regarding the delivery of this closing line read:
“The actress playing Kaneisha does whatever she feels is right before
looking at him [Jim]” (p. 132). This is the only place in the script where
the actress playing Kaneisha is distinguished from the character of
Kaneisha. And it is Jeremy O. Harris at his most brilliant. Why? Because
in this moment, as the play ends, he recognizes that the human being
playing Kaneisha’s role needs a way out of being crushed by the scene.
The instruction to deliver these lines doing whatever she feels is right for her
in that particular moment incites the actress to translate—in the
Laplanchean sense—the work of the last line in the way she needs to,
bringing the anguishing scene to a close in her own emotional idiom.
The Third Act brings the audience as well to a state of overwhelm
from which, we too, have to work to recover. Having already seduced us
into lowering our defenses, the play exacts from the audience a strange
kind of participation, working on us at the limits of our consent, press-
ing us into discomfort while also having transfixed us through its humor
and its aggression, an aggression that has been specifically sexual. One
leaves the theatre confused as to what one has just watched, disturbed by
the intensity of the affect, and unclear as to what happens next. Did we
witness a redemptive victory over a historical trauma? A successful sub-
limation? A pathetic reenactment of something ultimately unacceptable?
The closing act refuses to soothe us. The play comes to a screeching halt
at the place of maximum tension, that of the audience’s unbinding. This
is an offering of great integrity that only art and traumatic life can
muster: bodies, trauma, and the sexual produce inconsistencies and

incoherencies of messy origins and of uncertain futures.
Slave Play stages one iteration of how sexuality can coagulate in rela-
tion to traumatic history. By repurposing history’s iconographies to be
repeated not in stale recursion but in the service of pleasure, sexuality
can yield risky states of overwhelm that may transform previously inert
and static meanings. Are Kaneisha, Gary, and Philip, ultimately better
off? What have they gained through their seeming consensual mistreat-
ment? Philip and Gary seem to have gained something, but we can’t be
certain for Kaneisha. Still, for none of them is some fantastical restor-
ation at work, there is no redress or purging of the injurious past. To
imagine that Kaneisha, Philip, or Gary would find a way out of racism’s
press through their sexualities’ overwhelm is overreach; slavery’s inter-
generational hauntings cannot be repaired. But they also need not only
admit of singular narratives. What we can hope for is an upcycling of sig-
nifying materials already in circulation so that they be may reassembled
into new configurations. “Probably any sexuality,” writes Sedgwick, “is a
matter of sorting, displacing, reassigning singleness or plurality, literality
or figurativeness to a very limited number of signifiers … [to] a small
repertoire of organs, orifices and bodily products” (1996, p. 284). This
is another way of saying that new translations will still traffic in the same
signifiers, they will still draw on the same restricted and, thus, restrictive,
repertory of materials for their re-translations (Aulagnier 1975;
Laplanche 1987). Even if not redemptive, such partial solutions are
likely vitalizing because they are of one's own crafting, bringing them
more into the subject’s possession.
The idea that the woundedness of the flesh (Spillers 1987) can
recruit the spasms of desire and, in so doing, move someone from being
bound in the past48 to becoming a subject with a past may feel counterin-
tuitive. So, too, might the proposition that a desire for intimate subjuga-
tion may open up transformative possibilities. The wild and savage
elements of the sexual unconscious pair up with atrocious history, mani-
festing in a series of interlocked contradictions: humiliating but dignify-
ing, selfish but generous, explicit but veiled, daring but cowardly, tender
but cruel. The matter of how traumatized bodies can make bids to soften
48
This is what Scarfone (2015b) calls the unpast.
the grasp of histories to which they did not consent, but to which they
are nevertheless subject, is that complex. And it is that urgent.
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Risking sexuality beyond consent: overwhelm and

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RISKING SEXUALITY BEYOND CONSENT:

What, other than being “screwed,” may come of being sub-

Avgi Saketopoulou trained at the NYU Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and

O. Harris's searingly beautiful theatrical work, Slave Play, to

“I was female-assigned at birth”2 writes the queer theorist

Stockton’s surprising, albeit sideways,3 treatment of consent is easy to

… [he] pushed me to my knees … encouraging me to work

I read Dean’s vignette to propose a different way of thinking about

beyond consent. How do we understand “erotic astonishment” analytic-

2. A Hundred Years Ago Today

… as ‘traumatic’ any excitations from outside … powerful enough

Trauma, in this account,15 arises when external excitations breach

Impermeable neurones (w) are unable to let energy course through

regain contact with … our essence” (Foucault 1997, p. 282). Enigma is

inciting traumatisms can shatter the ego (Bersani 1986), disassembling

3. Sexuality, the Limit and the Perverse24

their economy as “more primitive, more elementary, more instinctual

In polymorphous perversity pleasure “countermands the claims of iden-

You should not work to make the audience

So they fucked up and gave us a Broadway theater.

Tension escalates, culminating in Jim forcing himself on her sexually. As the

2. The Slave Play in Slave Play

atrocious history of chattel slavery in the past, to fuel spectacularly com-

“The Shock of Gary Fisher”: From Repetition Compulsion to Inciting

Sites of Woundedness as Sexual Sites

more degrees of freedoms. Attaining them involves crafting one’s own,

consent, her charge is unacceptable; Jim should not have to do some-

muster: bodies, trauma, and the sexual produce inconsistencies and

ABRAHAM, K. (1907). The experience of sexual traumas as a form of sexual

——— (1974). Dahlgren. NY: Vintage Books.

KHAN, L. (2018). Psychoanalysis, Apathy, and the Postmodern Patient.

——— (2017b). Structured like Culture: Laplanche on the Translation of

80 University Place, #5C

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