The borderline as diagnostician: an autø/gnøstic reading of a history of binaries

Abstract

This article begins with two situated knowledges drawn from my lived experience as a feminist researcher with a ‘borderline personality disorder’ diagnosis. The first knowledge is that diagnostic and medicalised ways of framing experience (particularly the experience labelled ‘BPD’) can constitute a kind of cruel optimism, which arises ‘when the object that draws your attachment actively impedes the aim that brought you to it initially’ and becomes ‘an obstacle to your flourishing’ (Berlant, 2011). The second knowledge is that while the label ‘BPD’ is stigmatising, pathologising and highly gendered, it refers not only to a real experience but to valuable ways of being/becoming and knowing. Here I make the case for recasting the borderline not as a patient to be diagnosed but, as Gilles Deleuze suggests, as a diagnostician whose ‘symptoms’ are the traces of unjust and harmful frameworks that work upon us all. Building on the important work of Margaret Price, whose writing on psychosocial disabilities and epistemic injustice produced the concept of counter-diagnosis, I have developed a methodology I call autø/gnøsis. Using a new materialist approach (Deleuze, Braidotti, Barad), autø/gnøsis thinks through and with the borderline self and borderline knowledges, while also acknowledging the shifting, unsteady void at the centre of these concepts.