Risking sexuality beyond consent: overwhelm and traumatisms that incite

Abstract

What, other than being “screwed,” may come of being subjected 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 recursions 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 O. Harris's searingly beautiful theatrical work, Slave Play, to propose that pleasure suffered at the especially strained intersection of sexuality and racial trauma may produce traumatisms 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 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 shifting, thus, psychoanalysis’s attitude towards trauma from traumatophobia to traumatophilia.