University of Amsterdam
MA Comparative and Cultural Analysis 21 June 2017
Master’s Thesis
Supervised by dr. Aylin Kuryel
A N O T H E R S T O R Y
REWRITING VULNERABILITY IN
ETHICS AND ONTOLOGY
Mirthe van Popering mirthevanpopering@gmail.com Student number: 11371781
INTRODUCTION 4
Thinking Vulnerability 7
Vulnerability: Ethics and Ontology 11
Some Final Opening Words 13
1. “RAPEFUGEES”, HOSPITALITY, VULNERABILITY 15
I. Performativity: The Inauguration of a Penetrant Other 18
II. Hostipitality: Penetrating a Proper Body 23
III. Mythology, Virility and Vulnerable Encounters 29
IV. To Become Undone 32
2. WONDROUS BORDERLINE EXPERIENCES 35
I. Unfolding the Dialogue: Who Gets to Speak? 37
II. Sanity and Insanity: A Carnival Mirror Image 44
III. Cultivating Wonderful Ethics 48
3. SUSTAINING A SELF IN FLUX 55
I. I Am The River and the River Is Me 57
II. Fluidity and Flow 60
III. Mapmaking and Conquest 67
IV. Sustaining (in) a World in Flux 70
CONCLUSION 75
LIST OF FIGURES 79
INTRODUCTION
Do not ask who I am and do not ask me to remain the same.
– Michel Foucault, TheArchaeology of Knowledge
This thesis represents a narrative built upon three frail acts. All three gather around the concept of vulnerability and are set somewhere in the dimness of the side wings; they are vulnerable encounters played out in variously spotlighted borderlands. The stories told unfold around a “hostipitable” encounter with foreignness, a wondrous encounter with madness, and a troubling encounter with wilderness. All three share a tension that goes back to experiences of selfhood and otherness and consist in an exploration of vulnerability within and between alleged opposites.
The first chapter zooms in on a six-word phrase and, more specific still, the word “rapefugees” appearing among these six words. It was voiced in response to an encounter between a German student and her Afghan rapist and murderer: two human subjects, who perform variously as host and guest, as White woman and Islamic man and as weak national body and forces seen to penetrate that body. My engagement with the performance of this small phrase suggests a re-articulation of the concept of vulnerability. The second chapter chooses the thin border between the sane and the insane as its point of convergence. It analyzes a carnivalesque dialogue and tells an uncommonsensical tale about sane madness and mad sanity, about wondrous borderline experiences. It questions the always-already vulnerability of and between psychiatric patient and doctor, between the normal and the abnormal, or
between a self-contained rational subject and a disintegrated, confused self, while cultivating an ethics of wonder. The third chapter turns to a human encounter with nature, cast in the figures of a mapmaker and a river-beast, assessing their alleged ontological separation while radicalizing their mutual exposure. It epistemologically and ontologically disseminates the human/nonhuman binary with a focus on fluidity and flow – concepts I will show to be closely related to vulnerability – and works towards an ethics of sustenance in flux.
These three acts perform tales different and similar at the same time. All share a tension between “good” and “bad” and all focus on transformative qualities present in experiences that at first sight might seem stained by abuse, estrangement and loss. On closer look, however, in a move from common sense to uncommon sense, other elements are revealed that act precisely the other way around, namely as means to connect, to en-joy, and to vitalize. They are existent plots that have their scripts rewritten, thus becoming “other” stories. Running concepts that are felt throughout the three chapters are touch, wonder and sustenance. These prepare the soft uncommon ground, the gentle stage starring a self that is radically vulnerable; a self, also, that is necessarily more than one-self. Once coherent, this self takes on the respective guises of the legitimate national subject, the coherent or sane subject, and the human(ist) subject, appearing on stage together with its illegal, insane, and nonhuman counterpart. Together they perform their unsettling duets in the form of a speech act, a guide, and a poem. In the progression of their joint performance the self will become ever stranger, un-known, before dissolving altogether.
Between the opening and the falling of the curtain, my thesis thinks through vulnerability, asking questions on how three differently embodied selves are affected
by the vulnerable encounters played out in its subsequent parts – encounters that get to be potentially harmful, or, alternatively, loci of possible (positive) transformation – and, in a slightly more ambitious scenario, on how we, selves, are affected by our radical ethico-ontological vulnerability at large. I thus aspire to unveil vulnerability’s lineament as both a moral disposition and an ontological trait and will do so in a in a setting both contemporary and timeless. While ultimately gathering around the concept of vulnerability, the questions I ask leave room to branch out through closely related notions flowing from the objects of analysis, such as hospitality, intimacy, confusion, wonder, fluidity and flow. What does it mean to be vulnerable, to become undone by the touch of another or of something other? Are we vulnerable by condition and if so, what would this ontology of vulnerability look like? What implications would an understanding of living and being as radically vulnerable have for notions of self and otherness and, in view of the particular stories I tell, for Euro- or geopolitics, mental health care and sustainability? Or, how may the interpersonal, sometimes intrapersonal, or even impersonal fleeting vulnerable space that the encounter with someone or something other consists of – a space teeming with the risk of the wound or the prospect of the touch – be engaged in the best possible way, and engender the best possible world as co-existence? What is being as being-vulnerable, or the perpetual becoming in the encounter between oneself and the world?
My aim, then, is to imagine, articulate and evaluate a radical, critical, and politically informed conceptualization of vulnerability and to disclose undiscovered paths towards co-existence on the world stage that “we” share. This coincides with my ambition to reconcile the apparent rival identities of resident-refugee, sane-insane
and cultured-wild, that take center space in the narrated encounters and fit together under the primary opposition of self-other. I will offer an “other” story, a story that allows for creative and joint ways of thinking that foreground the beauty of contemporary life’s somewhat labyrinthic qualities and that make the absence of orientation or finality not just bearable, but a vital and celebratory component of life in its perpetual becoming.
THINKING VULNERABILITY
The word vulnerable comes from the Latin vulnerare, meaning to wound, and we associate being vulnerable with openness to the risk of injury. My conceptualization of vulnerability involves this negative association, while complementing it with a positive one, creating space for its transformative potential. In this section I will address previous uses of the concept, most importantly of feminist scholars Margrit Shildrick, Judith Butler and Sarah Ahmed, and show how my use of the concept has been touched by theirs.
I consider (re)thinking vulnerability a vital task, as the concept’s sparse adoptions within contemporary critical theory have been repeatedly inscribed with a one-sided, and, I find, unproductive definition. Vulnerability is narrated, time and again, as a proneness to injury, as the risk of the wound. Whereas this is arguably fitting with regard to the word’s etymology, when opening it up for a slightly different and more vulnerable use, it carries the promise of becoming a vital analytical tool. Sarah Ahmed, whose interdisciplinary work in many respects has proven indispensible for my project, is one of the scholars upholding the one-sided
association of vulnerability with imminent harm or abuse. In The Cultural Politics of Emotions, she puts up an intriguing metaphor of borders like skin, but fails to articulate the vulnerability of that skin other than liable to abuse inflicted by the proximity of others: “the nation’s borders and defences [sic] are like skin; they are soft, weak, porous and easily shaped or even bruised by the proximity of others. It suggests that the nation is made vulnerable to abuse by its very openness to others” (Ahmed 2). Even when Ahmed’s argument precisely counters exclusionary practices by showing how the body of the other is emotionally inscribed with, say, hostility, instead of being hostile, vulnerability remains steadfastly explicated as proneness to injury throughout her book.
The chapter in which she brings up the concept a little more extensively is devoted to fear. There, Ahmed cites a definition of vulnerability by Sacco and Glackman in terms of “feelings of susceptibility and openness to attack” (68). Building on this definition Ahmed establishes vulnerability as a bodily coming into contact with the world, which is promising, but whether expressly or not she then goes on to litter the concept by inscribing vulnerability’s openness with danger, with anticipated pain or injury, and hence as catalyzing concomitant “evasive action” (69), such as – to stick with her metaphor of borders as skin – denying access to refugees. The assertion that “emotions may involve readings of such openness, as spaces where bodies and worlds meet and leak into each other” (Ahmed 69) seems to open up the possibility for reading vulnerability in contexts different from that of fear as well, but Ahmed fails to make this explicit. What needs to be more readily asserted then, is that vulnerability as an openness to the outside-of-the-body should also be understood in terms of toward-ness instead of merely away-ness. The “desire
to avoid the object of fear” (Ahmed 69) needs to be contrasted with the desire for an object that draws us into its proximity.
The most elaborate conceptualization of vulnerability comes from Margrit Shildrick, and it is mostly her reconfiguration of the concept, raised in her work on monstrous encounters with the vulnerable self, which I will adopt and develop throughout my thesis. She starts from the very compact definition of vulnerability as “an existential state that may belong to any one of us,” and shortly after adds: “what is at issue is the permeability of the boundaries that guarantee the normatively embodied self” (Shildrick 1). Her definition combines an ontological outlook, a being-vulnerable as an always already being unbounded, with an ethical one, focusing on the shared vulnerability within the encounter between self and other that entails the “risk of mutual becoming” (Shildrick 102), engendering responsibility that equals an openness to the other and an understanding of shared existence. Judith Butler, in “Violence, Mourning, Politics,” shares Shildrick’s view on vulnerability as a conditional exposure, while also putting weight on the neediness she holds inherent to the concept. She claims that vulnerability is a necessary condition for our bodies to open up towards others, as a human commonality that enables attachment. This relational being, according to Butler, entails a being exposed to others that may involve violence as well as physical support. She exemplifies this by referring to the vulnerable exposure of the newborn as a “primary helplessness and need” (“Violence” 20) or the being given over to primary others that come before the subject, prior to subject-formation; a vulnerable exposure that illustrates that all being is relational and moreover demands an ethical response.
Both Shildrick and Butler in their conceptualizations of vulnerability problematize the status of the modern subject, revealing their affiliation with a long line of postmodernist and poststructuralist thought challenging that subject’s secure, closed, autonomous and altogether inviolable status. Shildrick does so by stressing the permeability of the self in the encounter with the other, an other that is also always the other within, not only an exteriority, and Butler by marking all being as relational as opposed to self-sufficient. While Butler reserves the concept of vulnerability for a domain of precarity, Shildrick’s approach, in involving the transformative effects of a vulnerable encounter, acknowledging not only the vulnerability to the other but also the vulnerability of the self, seems to me richer in possibilities and more promising as a tool for rewriting the script of my three stories. While my stories do not fail to tell of precarious situations, they unfold around a vulnerability of the self that involves becoming otherwise, and that implies involving, admitting or awakening the other within. I share with Shildrick the idea that we are connected in conditional openness and that upon encountering one another, both the self and the other may transform, be it in the slightest or in the most enthralling way. More even than Shildrick, I focus on the positive aspects of transformation, on the lure of what is other, and I refuse to conflate my conceptualization of vulnerability with “the willingness to engage in an ethics of risk” (86). Apart from too readily echoing possible harm, risk is something we tend to engage in terms of calculation and prediction, while I believe vulnerability and the encounter with otherness consist precisely in a not knowing that is neither risky nor lucky, but simply a radical openness towards that unknown.
I thus contrast the negative conception of vulnerability that equals deformation and forecloses the possibility of becoming-otherwise, with a more enjoyable encounter as a locus of possible transformation. This does not mean that I deny the possibility of harm; the risk of the wound gets its due part in my stories. However, since that wound has been excavated to the bone already, this thesis takes up the task to counterbalance reactions of violence, intolerance and fear in the face of the other with a more promising openness, with vulnerability as the vital condition of ethical becoming.
VULNERABILITY: ETHICS AND ONTOLOGY
What do I mean when I say I want to think through vulnerability’s ethico-ontological potential? Let me start by saying that I consider ethics and ontology inextricably bound, in the sense that one cannot exist without the other. The first adheres to “thinking being” if the latter adheres to “embodied living”, where I mean by embodied situated in a specific time and place, in a specific body. If a being is thought ontologically, that is, thought as unbecome, it is in the very real arena of ethics that it appears as uniquely moving, put to the test of its shared space-time conditions. This movement equals becoming and becoming in turn equals co-becoming, since ethical life as embodied living necessarily means shared living. It is this duplicity of unbecome and becoming that makes apparent why I consider my project to be both timeless and contemporary.
I do not mean to prioritize ontology over ethics, nor do I propose structuring them the other way around. While operating in different spheres, unbecome and
becoming, this differentiation does not allow their separation in terms of priority and anteriority. On the one hand, when acknowledging that thinking is necessarily embodied, i.e. that the act of thinking requires a living body, it follows not only that thinking is situated, but also that embodied living is prior to thinking being. Then again, ontology comes before the “one” thinking, as ontology is the condition with which this uniquely embodied “one” first entered the time and space from which s/he is seen thinking. This conditionality should however not be confused with pre-determination, as traditional western philosophy would have it. A vulnerable ontology or ontological vulnerability adheres to precisely the un-conditionality of the unbecome by virtue of its vulnerability as radical openness. My project thus rejects ontology as a prefigured proper order of things that conditions ethics, while neither subscribing to a Levinassian perspective of the ethical moment or the encounter as pre-ontological.1
While this thesis narrates three encounters and the shared vulnerability within them, I do not mean to inscribe vulnerability with the necessary presence of an other, which would imply limiting the concept to the arena of the encounter. Rather, while proposing an ethical orientation based on mutual vulnerability, I also unpack vulnerability as an ontological condition of embodied co-becoming, i.e. as a vital uncertainty that comes before any “one” and that is shared by all embodied selves prior to encountering any-thing or any-one else. I propose, again with Shildrick, an ethico-ontological vulnerability, as “a process of becoming that is always relational, always intrinsically ethical” (87-88), while also an “ontological uncertainty for all of us” (78). What arises with this ethico-ontological conceptualization of vulnerability is
a possibility of transformation. When the encounter is engaged with the radical openness-in-being that is the condition to our becoming, that is, when we give permission for a truly vulnerable encounter to happen, then we might never get to know each other. Instead, in touching, in being touched, together we become.
I am well aware that this idea of a radical vulnerability in engaging the other, in unprotecting the self that has been so painstakingly closed and fortified in the modernist paradigm, might seem unfit for practice. Many of today’s spatio-temporal conditions put bodies in situations that would not allow for such openness, as their vulnerability would be met with violence, reinscribing the concept once more with the risk of the wound. However, this makes revisiting some of these situations all the more important. I share with many contemporary thinkers the aim to critique negativity and to cultivate joy, as I put confidence in creativity and propose my ethico-ontology as a means to en-joy the world. My stories are known tales told differently, raised from the hopeful conviction that certain ways of telling a story can make a change for the good. I intend to tell three very real stories that in the worst case make for a good read and in the best case set something in motion, inviting a shared orientation towards a world that is ever-changing, that remains forever to come and is open-ended as is any never-ending story.
SOME FINAL OPENING WORDS
It seems appropriate that a thesis on vulnerability retains a sense of vulnerability itself, of openness to unforeseen connections. The capacity not only to transform, but also to be transformed in every other encounter with a reader, is integral to my project. Moreover, my stories are not exhaustive; no final chapter is written here.
Writing about vulnerability means being able to pick out of countless experiences, events and stories. Any encounter involves a borderland stained by vulnerability. The three stories I tell do not “belong” together, but they do allow me – separately and together – to speak about vulnerability and they represent my contact with the world. These texts have touched me, changed me, made me into who “I” am. As any other, I am vulnerable – to experiences of beauty, to experiences of disgust, to hope, and to fear. This is what brought these stories together, and I cannot think of any truer way of writing about vulnerability, than by drawing from my own.
I also feel I need to say some words on my style of writing here, as some of my readers may find my writing too poetic at times. Yes, I tell stories, and I tend to do so both as a scholar and as a storyteller. I will write on fluidity using oceanic terms and on wonder in a way that might be perplexing at times. This is the freedom I dare take from the quite solid shape of “claim-case-case-case-conclusion-coda” (Berlant 671) which happens to be the way universities choose to test the competence of their students. Any structural immaculacy notwithstanding, my writing allows a certain amount of aesthetic to flow into my thesis as well, hopefully allowing you, my dear reader, to let yourself be touched.
1.
“RAPEFUGEES”, HOSPITALITY, VULNERABILITY
One does not always stay intact. One may want to, or manage to for a while, but despite one’s best efforts, one is undone, in the face of the other, by the touch, by the scent, by the feel.
– Judith Butler, “Violence, Mourning, Politics”
This first of three stories was born in an encounter, a fatal and disruptive encounter that resulted in the rape and murder of a young woman. The body of Maria Ladenburger, a 19-year-old student from Freiburg, Germany, was found near a riverbed on 16 October 2016. On the 3rd of December, Freiburg police announced the
arrest of a 17-year-old asylum seeker from Afghanistan, who was conclusively identified as the perpetrator through DNA evidence. The crime became fuel in an already fierce debate on the inflow of refugees, and alongside sex crimes that had been reported in foregoing months, the rape and murder of Maria Ladenburger sparked a discussion that reverberated within and beyond German borders.2
Accordingly, media coverage, official responses and social media comments on the affair were of a huge scope and varied from voices stressing the crime’s incidental nature, hence disconnecting the tragedy from the wider question of immigration, to furious exclamations doing exactly the opposite.3 It is one of these particularly
2 According to German police reports presenting the effects of the influx of refugees and asylum seekers
on national crime rates over 2016, there was a general decline in criminality among immigrants. Sexual assaults accounted for 1,2% and murder for 0,1% of reported crimes. These percentages were identical in crimes where no immigrants were involved (Bundeslagebild 7). Also noted, however, is a latent radicalization of public discourse and a further division between advocates and opponents of asylum. (Kernaussagen 10).
3 See for example the official response by German chancellor Angela Merkel: Tagesschau,
ferocious comments that takes center space in the present chapter: “Rapefugeesarenotwelcome!!! Verpisst euch!!.”
This comment was posted in reaction to a news report on the Ladenburger case on the Facebook page of the Badische Zeitung (BZ), Freiburg’s local newspaper. After deleting this and many other hostile reactions from its Facebook wall, BZ collated and anonymized the comments and published them in an online article: “Fall Maria L.: Ein Blick in die Abgründe von Facebook.”4 The prime reason for my taking
up this particular quote from the myriad exclamations listed there is the conjunction of rape and refugees that the small phrase harbors. Even though the notion of “rapefugees” in itself is not entirely new, it is in the context of the Ladenburger case that its uncomfortable play on words opened up both the possibility and my desire to assess this implied relation between rape and refugees.5 How does this pairing mark
the bodies involved, both the “trespassed” body and the body of the refugee? It is my inclination that this this particular term and the enveloping comment are symptomatic of a general mood, and ultimately can be seen to work to affect the public disposition towards asylum, amplifying the internationally felt division in the context of the refugee crisis. My engagement with this small phrase, then, calls for taking up discourse on hospitality. It also requires drawing parallels to another avid debate: that of (sexual) violence against women and the unequal and violent
4 It should be noted that BZ declares itself to be an independent, impartial daily newspaper resting on
a Christian foundation. Apart from its overt disapproval of the violent and racist nature of the enlisted comments, BZ stayed notably neutral in its coverage of the Ladenburger case. Whereas many (international) news media pointedly framed the victim as German, Christian, innocent, benevolent, intelligent, and the daughter of a EU official, BZ provided no details apart from her gender, age and occupation.
5 The term was coined by Lutz Bachman, founder of the nationalist, anti-Islam, far-right political
movement Pegida, who posted pictures of himself wearing a T-shirt reading “rapefugees not welcome” to his Twitter stream shortly after the much debated sexual assaults that took place in Cologne on New Years Eve in 2015-16. Bachman’s neologism has since grown into a recurring watchword among Pegida supporters. For further reading: “Grüner zeigt Bachmann wegen Volksverhetzung an.”
distribution of gender roles across geographies. Dealing with vulnerable and highly political matter, the task that lies ahead of me in this chapter asks for a cautious proceeding – cautious yet fearless, as this is a story that needs to be told.
To begin with some bravery, then, let me admit that close reading and providing context for a piece of text as compact as a six-word comment undeniably puts me at risk of enfolding it into narratives too grand. In spite of that risk, I dare say this phrase equals a kernel: it is small, but it carries a world within it. A meticulous textual analysis through speech act theory and the concept of performativity – as originally developed by philosopher of language J.L. Austin and famously adopted by Judith Butler for thinking (gendered) identity – will expose how within the doing of six words “rapefugees” are borne, declared unwelcome and summoned to depart all at once. These gestures of welcome and dismissal subsequently urge the analysis towards a more overtly political outlook focused through the lens of Derridean hospitality, opening up larger questions of immigration and the (im)possibility of a hospitable encounter, as well as asking how individual bodies can become conflated with the larger bodies of a nation or that nation’s “penetrant” others. In a third and final section I will take up a specifically feminist perspective and employ the concept of myth to present yet a sharper differentiation of the bodies – now appearing as gendered – that have been marked and magnified in the dissection of the comment. In line with my larger project, then, an attempt will be made to reconcile the disclosed rival identities, by articulating the vulnerability that shapes the borderland between them otherwise. Vulnerability will be reframed
through the notion of touch, mounting a definition of the concept that allows me to contrast some of the gloom of the prior argument.6
I. PERFORMATIVITY: THE INAUGURATION OF A PENETRANT OTHER
“Rapefugeesarenotwelcome!!! Verpisst euch!!.” This comment does not only conjoin rape and refugees, it also makes clear that “rapefugees” are not welcome and coarsely summons their departure: “Verpisst euch!!” – piss off!! Anger reverberates from its vocabulary and tone, loudly manifested in numerous exclamation marks. Combined with the omitted spaces in between words in the first part of the phrase, these formal elements give the comment the air of being written in a moment of furious frenzy, rather than, say, careful contemplation. It should be noted that even if the comment comes across as un-meditated, it certainly is not unmediated. Its immediacy underlines the phrase’s residency in the space of the Internet: a medium allowing it to circulate quickly and widely, and to associate with other utterances.7 Its pace is fast
rather than slow; it is not awaiting but re-acting, entering in a chain of action-reaction as the action-reaction becomes an action in itself, doing something in itself. To pinpoint this doing, I will take up the notion of the performative utterance as
6 Subtly but persistently lingering throughout this chapter, as the glue between its parts, is Sarah
Ahmed’s concept of stickiness. Ahmed defines this stickiness “as an effect of the histories of contact between bodies, objects, and signs” (90). It is closely related to Butler’s notions of repetition and subjectivation (addressed in more detail below), as signs become sticky through their repeated association with other signs, bodies or objects, allowing them to sticktogether.
7 As Ahmed has pointed out, any reaction always already “involves reading the contact we have with
originally proposed by J.L. Austin, as well as the concept’s later deconstructionist and feminist adaptation by Judith Butler.8
In How to Do Things with Words J.L. Austin articulates his notion of a performative utterance as a type of language that does not report on an action or state of affairs – i.e. a constative utterance – but rather performs the action to which it refers (qtd. in Culler 504). This is no trivial observation, since it acknowledges language’s capacity of actively shaping the world instead of merely representing that world. Once language surpasses a merely referential function that can be evaluated as true or false, and utterances are alternatively seen as creative instances that have the power to actualize the ideas and concepts they deploy, that is, as a “world-making use of language” that “change[s] the world by bringing into being the things that [it names]” (Austin qtd. in Culler 507), utterances gain the capability of doing something. The comment presently at issue entails precisely such a performance. It shapes the real instances that it refers to, as it tells us about “the” world, all the while creating, performing that very world. Indeed, its six words do not simply refer to reality awaiting proper linguistic representation, but, as I will show, actively project and profile its referent.
The phrase consists of two parts, the first grammatically taking the shape of a statement – “Rapefugeesarenotwelcome!!!” – and the second that of an imperative – “Verpisst euch!!.” The first part constatively utters a twofold matter of fact, first and explicitly, the fact that “rapefugees” are not welcome, and second, implicitly, the existence of “rapefugees” per se. This cannot be said to be either a true or false
8 The conceptual itinerary of the performative is skilfully drawn up by literary critic Jonathan Culler
in “Philosophy and Literature: The Fortunes of the Performative.” I mainly draw on Culler’s findings here and it is his text that provided this section’s quotations.
representation of a particular state of affairs. That is because this apparently constative utterance is actually a kind of performative: it proclaims, thus brings into being and ultimately produces the facts that it refers to. Whereas “Verpisst euch!!” is easily explicated as performative due to its grammatical form, on closer look “Rapefugeesarenotwelcome!!!” presents itself as a doing as well. Indeed, the comment summons the departure of “rapefugees”, but only after declaring they are not welcome. Moreover, the (re)iteration of the notion of “rapefugees”, a neologism that observes and produces a classification in which two formerly detached categories – refugees and rape – are conjoined, makes the comment’s inaugural potential all the more powerful.
This brings in another key feature of the performative. Jacques Derrida, to whom I will return in the next section, extended Austin’s argument by marking the “iterability” or “citationality” of the performative as its very condition of possibility (qtd. in Culler 509). He emphasized, or rather, essentialized, the positionality of each speech act within a chain of past and future utterances.9 This idea of citationality
became a central element in Butler’s theory of gender performativity and her conception of subject-formation. Butler argues that prior to subject-formation, that is, prior to coming into being and qualifying as “one”, an operation of “subjectivating norms” is at play (qtd. in Culler 513). Norms that, when repeated (cited) come to “work, animate and constrain” the subject (Butler qtd. in Culler 513). Both citationality and subject-formation, I contend, are vital concepts in laying bare the performative quality of the comment and the notion of “rapefugees” that it harbors
9 As an example, it may be noted that the first part of the comment echoes another sentence prevalent
in the public discourse surrounding the refugee crisis: “Refugees welcome.” In repeating it by negation, the comment actively positions itself vis-à-vis this slogan and its history of iteration, as well as generating its own effects in the yet to come.
in particular. Whereas Butler locates her brand of performativity mainly “at” the subject – that is, at a subject caught up in a “compulsory repetition”, a cyclical performance of the norms that constituted this subject qua subject – an utterance on repeat can in a similar way contribute to, or, indeed, “work, animate and constrain,” a subject-in-formation (qtd. in Culler 513).
It is with the reiteration of the notion of “rapefugees” that the comment performatively brings into being the very “rapefugees” to whom it refers, qualifying them as existent. The comment (re-)instates “rapefugees” as a category of identity, as being(s)-in-the-world. The subjectivation at play here is of such a scope that it is not a single individual, but rather an entire group of people that is made subject to this specific category and it is precisely this generalization that I believe to be part of the comment’s inherent violence. What I would like to argue, then, is that through the comment, refugees become parasitized in a twofold way: they become parasitized by the notion of rape and parasitized as an unwelcome other. First of all, the comment’s in-the-world production of “rapefugees” performatively enfolds refugees in a derogatory identiary category. This subjectivation is befalling not one, but all refugees.10 Even when not all refugees may be “rapefugees”, the literal implication of
rape and refugees into one word allows for the figurative implication that refugees are rapists – and that is indeed a violent act.11 Secondly, the comment does not simply
10 To illustrate this, the comment may be contrasted with an example given by Ahmed. She considers
a politician’s speech that differentiates “between genuine and bogus asylum seekers” (Ahmed, 46) and argues that the nation’s (imagined) hospitality is asserted by generously welcoming the former, while the latter’s rejection sets the limits to this hospitality. By superimposing refugees and rape, even this “nuance” does not apply.
11 One might also say that within the notion of “rapefugees” refugees are affixed to rape, and hence
become fixed as abusive, penetrant and “bad”. Ahmed’s stickiness also deserves another mentioning here, as I would argue that the comment’s sticking together of refugees and rape reduces the chance of them getting unstuck and causes refugees as an identiary category to become “saturated” with negative affective value (11).
transport refugees to a categorical bind of foreign sexual delinquents declared unwelcome and summoned to depart; it also makes them other, transports them to – and preferably beyond – the margin that was once their point of entry.
To clarify the latter claim, one more aspect of performativity needs to be highlighted, namely the separation of intention and meaning or impact that occurs in performative speech. Following Austin, what is acted out in a performative utterance is determined by the conditions in which it is spoken rather than the speaker’s personal intention (qtd. in Culler 507). Butler extends this argument by stating that the performative power of a speech act is not dependent on the intention or authority of the one speaking, but on its repeated citation (qtd. in Culler 514). It is first when a phrase is repeated over and over again, each of its appearances echoing and amplifying its history of articulation, that its mode of speaking acquires volume and force. In citing the notion of “rapefugees”, the comment becomes a shackle in a sticky chain of derogatory name-calling; it is performing in a howling and swelling chorus, as it were, and aligns itself with a xenophobic community that is cultivated in the continuous re-iteration of the term.12 This repetition of subjectivating norms – or
rather, subjectivating deviancies – powerfully deports “rapefugees” to the end of the perverted.The comment thus reinstates a narrative of self-other, where the self is positioned at or as the locus of an unspoken ideal and the other at the rear end of that ideal, as the parasitical other opposing (and defining) this very ideality.
Let me conclude the formal dissection of the comment with a short evaluative note, sticking to Butler for a bit. She states “[the] addressee never quite inhabits the
12 The Ladenburger case is not the only context in which the notion of “rapefugees” was cited after its
enunciation by Pegida frontman Lutz Bachman. On Twitter for example, “#rapefugees” appeared in 500 unique tweets, posted by 426 users.
ideal s/he is compelled to approximate” (Bodies 231) the addressee being the subject converging to a norm considered ideal, or, in this case, the subjected other(s) pushed to the margin. It would be interesting to read this not quite inhabiting not so much as the possibility for active resistance or for refugees to subvert their subjectivation-as-“rapefugees”, but rather as something that can somehow become a backlash on the part of the comment articulating the subject. Then, what if the performative utterance “Rapefugeesarenotwelcome!!!” fails by necessity, due to the very generalization explicating, instantiating its violent nature? What if it fails, because the subject it brings into being by making it converge, not with a legitimating norm, but, quite the opposite, with a delegitimizing exception to that norm, to a position of excess and extremity? Any “one” resists full or final expression: there is always an open space, an undecidability that ultimately exposes the subject as forever to come, and it seems to me that this non-closure, this vulnerability, precisely shields “one” against sweeping generalizations. Moreover, I think it is fair to ask: what if refugees, or people in general, do not gather around, do not aspire to, do not readily align with excess? Even when the impact of the utterance is not changed by that, there is danger in not asking these kinds of questions altogether.
II. HOSTIPITALITY: PENETRATING A PROPER BODY
Zooming out from the comment’s formal qualities, I will now proceed to relocate it in the context to which it is inextricably linked. The comment was originally posted on Facebook in reaction to an article reporting on the Ladenburger case and as such could be seen as channeling its anger to this particular crime. Then again, as I have previously shown, even when the comment was voiced in direct response to the
Ladenburger case, it asserts the perverse nature of “rapefugees” in the plural. The context of the comment can therefore not be solely restricted to the crime that was the most direct cause for its enunciation. Indeed, the comment seems to pertain, not so much to this specific crime, but to the larger trend it apparently sees (re)affirmed by it. The Ladenburger case, thus framed, becomes a tragic instance illustrating or maybe even proving a disconcerting tendency – an emblematic manifestation in a streak of refugee-on-resident, of guest-on-host sexual assaults. Reading the comment in this way means that Maria Ladenburger and Hussein Khavari, two individuals and their deadly encounter, within the small phrase of “Rapefugeesarenotwelcome!!! Verpisst euch!!” become conflated with something larger than themselves. To determine that larger discursive context, invoked by and at the same time enveloping the comment, I will now turn to Derrida and read the comment through the lens of his concept of hospitality.
In “Hostipitality”, a canonical text that originally appeared in 1999, Derrida seeks to articulate hospitality, immediately resulting in the concept’s apparent entanglement in a double bind:
Hospitality is a self-contradictory concept and experience which can only self-destruct <put otherwise, produce itself as impossible, only be possible on the condition of its impossibility> or protect itself from itself, auto-immunize itself in some way, which is to say, deconstruct itself – precisely – in being put to practice. (Derrida 5)
Hospitable practice – the phenomenon of hospitality – is incommensurable with the conceptual essence of hospitality. Hospitality in its ideal, unconditional form is impossible, Derrida argues; as soon as it becomes real, it is undone. Then, in its
practical or actual form, hospitality manifests itself in rights and duties, laid down in treaties or domestic laws, meaning that the gift of hospitality is conditioned and conditional, hence limited, violated. It is hospitality that is no longer (and never will be) truly hospitable, as it “paralyzes itself on the threshold which it is” (Derrida, 14). Unconditional hospitality would imply to unprotect, to take away borders – or to stick with Derrida’s terminology: the threshold – and to become radically vulnerable, but also to lose mastery over the would-be-offered gift and indeed, to lose the possibility of a hospitable encounter altogether, since a space that has no border, no threshold, would no longer require a welcoming gesture for someone to enter.
Anchored within this articulation of hospitality is the conjunction that is the title to Derrida’s text: “hostipitality”, umbilically tying together hospitality and hostility. Derrida pictures hostility as a parasite, as “the undesirable guest which [hospitality] harbors as the self-contradiction in its own body” (3). In the way I suspect Derrida to have envisaged this point, this “undesirable guest” takes on the conceptual shape of the threshold constituting and violating (or rather: auto-mutilating) hospitality, undoing – unconditional, pure – hospitality and at the same time being the condition of its possibility – a possibility that is necessarily infected, impure. Hostility, thus interpreted, seems to be ascribable to the receiving end of hospitality, to the host conditioning the arrival, reception and stay of the guest. However, the comment to the Ladenburger case allows for a second reading of this image of the unsettling presence of an undesirable guest as well, wherein this guest could be explicated more literally as a physical guest: a parasite penetrating a formerly pristine, healthy body, and violating this body by entering it.
On the one hand, the comment itself can be seen to act as a hostile defense over the threshold, violently showing “rapefugees” the door by summoning them to leave and making clear they were not welcome in the first place. The comment marks and thereby reclaims this threshold and fortifies it by making it manifest in a move that says up to here and no further. This threshold, then, materialized in laws of hospitality – national borders, asylum procedures, but also the supply of food and shelter – seems to be no longer oriented towards the ideal law of unconditional hospitality. Quite the contrary, in view of my analysis of the comment thus far, hospitality’s orientation rather seems to have shifted towards that law’s parasitic opposite, towards hostility. Alternatively, when aligning more readily with what the comment seems to want to say for itself, one could position on the end of hostility not the comment’s own performance, but rather the “rapefugees” that it speaks of. Then, it is their overstepping of a threshold that resulted in rape and death, in the violation of a proper body, or to clearly link it back to Derrida, in the breaching of the sovereignty of the host over what “concerns him” (4), of property and properness (15). The undesirable guest, in this reading, is the Islamic stranger who penetrated a body both individual and national, and who violated what might have been a hospitable encounter. It is Hussein Khavari who penetrated and ultimately killed Maria Ladenburger and it is his extrapolated specter that takes the shape of “rapefugees”, penetrating and ultimately endangering the German nation.
To substantiate the latter claim, let me leave Derrida aside for a moment and briefly turn to the work of anthropologist Gabriele Marranci and his concept of “Islamophobia” in particular. In a paper considering the fear of the Islamic other in a post-9/11 European context, he suggests that Islamophobia can be traced back to the
fear of “real” multiculturalism, for real multicultural encounters between Islamic and Western European values might entail a transformation of what is perceived as fundamental to “Western Civilisation” (Marranci 107).13 I think the context Marranci
provides for Islamophobia, invested with the notion of the transformative quality of a strange entity entering and nestling in a body – whether that body be made up of flesh, blood and skin or earth, rivers and territorial borders – is not to be overlooked with regard to the enunciation of the comment that I have been trying to dissect. More specifically, what is interesting in Marranci’s observation of the experience of fear and hostility versus the Islamic other is that it might pinpoint how the crossing of the border by an Islamic refugee can be perceived as a violent act per se. Then, as soon as this other has entered the national body, he (more than she, as next section will prove) comes to act – and here we meet again with Derrida – as a hostile self-contradiction within, feared for his supposed ability to undermine and alter the fundaments of that body.14 Whereas Marranci opts for the concept of transformation,
I think the becoming-Islamic as the object of collective fear is more aptly described in terms of deformation, as it pertains to a strictly negative experienced vulnerability – a vulnerability that is exclusively defined as being wounded.15 I think this particular
context of Islamophobia, sticking together the “Islamic other” with “injury”, is essential for understanding how a singular act of rape and killing can provoke the reiteration of the notion of “rapefugees”, and I think it is within this context that the
13 Islamophobia might also be refracted differently I would say, as xenophobia, racism or economic
fears can be seen to manifest themselves as fear or hatred towards Islam as well.
14 Formulated differently, there is a risk of contagion, articulated by Margit Shildrick as “the
realisation of a contaminatory threat,” figuring “any transgression of the categories of sameness and difference, any breach in the unity of the embodied self” (71).
15 Ahmed touches upon a similar point when she sets herself the question of how our investment in
certain structures (such as “Western Civilization”) causes their demise to be felt “as a kind of living death” and shows how “the nation becomes an object of love precisely by associating the proximity with others with loss, injury and theft” (12).
body of Maria Ladenburger has become aligned with the larger body of the German nation, allegedly penetrated by foreign enemies perverting its soil.
As might be noted by the reader, the commenter has, up until now, been mostly excluded from my analysis. Having speech act theory fresh in mind, I could content myself by citing the import of impact over intention. However, I will not. Even though my analysis so far has proven that the comment speaks for itself – quite loudly so – and that this speech can be evaluated without addressing its speaker, I do wish to say a few words on the commenter, whose identity has remained unrevealed. These few words start with Derrida, who, in parentheses, articulates the master of the house as “(male in the first instance)” (14). It was when I came across this small phrase, parenthesized as if no more than a side note, that I became aware of my own unquestioning assumption that the commenter, like the master of the house, is male. Why is this important? The answer is already present between Derrida’s lines as he states on the same page: “this [the given that the host needs to be the master in his house] seems both the law of laws of hospitality and common sense in our culture [emphasis added]” (14). This commonsensical-ness goes for the condition of mastering a house in order to be able to host, but it also goes for thinking the host’s identity as male in the first instance. Then it is he who is reassuring his sovereignty over the space and goods he offers or opens to the stranger, it is he taking responsibility for what “concerns him,” including, as I will argue in the next section, the female body that he “sees to” (Derrida 4). Apart from uncovering my positionality, then, this unquestioning assumption opens up the possibility of reading the comment as an instance of a virile reclaiming of home, the nation and the female body.
III. MYTHOLOGY, VIRILITY AND VULNERABLE ENCOUNTERS
In this last section, it is the female body as a battlefield of virile forces and, more generally, the problem of systematic violence against women cutting across nations and cultures, that together form the third and last angle in my exploration of the comment and its resonance. Starting with a brief outlook on race and rape discourse originally developed by Angela Davis in the 1980’s and, in a more recent take, by Tracey Patton and Julie Snyder-Yuly, I will take up the myths of the Black rapist and White womanhood and relate both back to the comment, allowing for its continued analysis within a specifically feminist framework and for a deeper account of the self/other-binary and the notions of strangeness and foreignness already touched upon in the above paragraphs.16 The proposed account entails not only a
sharpening of the differences marked and magnified within the comment, but also, in line with my larger project, an attempt to reconcile the hence created rival identities by harnessing the concept of vulnerability. This return to vulnerability will open up the story, not for more bloodshed, but for the more comforting prospect of touch.
“Certainly, the most insidious myth about rape is that it is most likely to be committed by a Black man” (6), wrote political activist and scholar Angela Davis in 1985, in Violence Against Women and the Ongoing Challenge to Racism. Whereas her argument is explicitly linked to the specific social and political context of the Reagan administration, her conjuncture of rape with myth still holds in a present context. Today, refugees – specifically men of Arabic descent – are looked upon with suspicion. When this suspicion gets “confirmed” by a case such as the Ladenburger
16 The concept of myth adopted by these scholars was developed by Roland Barthes in Mythologies,
and adheres to the relations between language and power that help to naturalize particular concepts, beliefs or worldviews as if they were a natural condition of the world.
case, the incident gets cited in almost every possible news medium and is given full attention by politicians and civilians alike, whereas “regular” white-on-white or intra-cultural rape cases remain characterized by anonymity, silence and oblivion – just as they did when Davis fought rape and racism over 30 years earlier. Indeed, the myth of the Black rapist, now transformed into a contemporary myth of “rapefugees”, still “renders people oblivious to the realities of rape [emphasis added]” (Davis 6). Then in the end, perceived reality is what is made in the continuous reiteration or performance of the myth.
A more recent American study by Tracey Patton and Julie Snyder-Yuly highlights yet another myth, that shares with the myth of the Black rapist or that of “rapefugees” a relation of mutual support: the myth of “‘White womanhood’ as innocent and helpless against the Black violent brute who desires to rape White women” (861). In a footnote it reads: “White womanhood is a patriarchal notion that refers to the belief that White women need protection from society,” and involves a notion of femininity revolving around the virtues of “piety, purity, submissiveness, and domesticity” (Patton and Snyder-Yuly 861). Whereas these four terms, when brought to resonate with the Ladenburger case and the way Maria Ladenburger was framed in mass media – as Christian and benevolent, or young and innocent, for example – could fill many pages on its own, I will here focus specifically on the construct of the White woman as needing protection from society, or, to bring it back to Derrida once more, from the virile master that safeguards this society: the host dutifully, suspiciously and violently “[seeing] to” what “concerns him” (4).17
17 See for example: Allan Hall, “Family of EU official's teenage daughter who was raped and killed ‘by
Afghan migrant’ ask for well-wishers to donate money to refugee charity as teenage ‘killer’ is revealed.”
The myths of the Black rapist and the White woman tie in with my close reading of the comment presented in the previous paragraphs, which foregrounded a penetrant other borne and marginalized within a mere six words. Indeed, having these myths resonate with the comment further exposes its disruptive character, by adding a gendered layer to the analysis and allowing for a refinement of the subjectivation prompted by it: standing as the embodiment of a weakened national (or European) body is a White woman, whose formerly pristine body is perceived of as endangered by radically strange, penetrant others who are trespassing, violating, altering and ultimately undoing her vulnerable body. 18 They, Islamic men,
“rapefugees”, are discursively subjected to an identity that is inherently violent and abusive of the body that they enter. Seen patrolling at the borders is the white male resident, seeing to a she who he considers his. And what, then, about the female refugee? What is her role in this divisive play? My contention is that the Islamic woman, in the reality performed by the comment, is so marginal that she partakes in the tale only as a residual figure, mutely or maybe latently looming in the shadow of her brutally penetrant male counterpart. It is this nightmarish tale that the six-word comment tells.19
To prevent my reader from assuming that exposing and ultimately trying to subvert this tale implies downplaying the severity of the deed that started the present discussion, let me state very clearly that I am by no means acquitting Hussein Khavari from blame. He is a violent male who abused a vulnerable female body to which he was not granted access and he has undone this body, as he took the
18 Ahmed makes a similar point, as she argues that “the soft national body is a feminised body, which
is “penetrated” or “invaded” by others (2).
life of Maria Ladenburger. This act, so horrendous that I cannot even begin to find words for it, must be fully and unreservedly condemned. What I have pleaded for is that the blame for his act should be reserved for him and for him alone: Hussein Khavari, rapist and murderer of Maria Ladenburger.
IV. TO BECOME UNDONE
Nearing the end of a profound encounter with the doings of six words, it is time to take an unexpected turn. A turn by which I am hoping to find a pathway to what might be called intimacy, within a real story that up until now has narrated a move away from the stranger, whose proximity has been met almost exclusively with fear of injury. Is it wrong, impossible even, to speak of intimacy in a chapter that deals with the public coping with a rape and murder case? It might be said that it takes looking awry – but I think looking awry is precisely what is needed in the present context of geopolitical crisis instantiating hate speech and pervasive fear in the face of the stranger. Could we not, from our social fabric divided in patterns of gender, race, religion, nationality and other categories of identity, imagine worlds that are more open, more vulnerable to others, even when performing such worlds might entail the passing of disastrous events? In a time where Islamophobia materializes in exclamations like “Rapefugeesarenotwelcome!!! Verpisst euch!!” such willingness to openly encounter one another seems hardly possible. However, as Derrida beautifully notes, “it is the impossibility which must be overcome where it is possible to become impossible. It is necessary to do the impossible. If there is hospitality, the impossible must be done” (14).
Yes, being vulnerable is risky and scary. The breaking open of the self, however, need not necessarily be an experience of wounding – it could also mean being touched. This touch differs from the affective “mark” proposed by Sarah Ahmed, which entails two closed surfaces impressing (upon) one another, that is, a superficial touching which is precisely a moment of separation (6).20 The kind of
touch that I want to evoke here does not halt at the skin, at borders, or at any surface for that matter, as it weaves into the fabric of being, or rather, of becoming. This touch involves yet also stretches beyond the sensory and the emotive where it is usually set, and consists of a momentary space of shared vulnerabilities – risky and promising – with an outcome unknown. It is a touch that is part of a touching encounter, moving and affecting as well as effecting both the one touching and the one touched. It is as Judith Butler famously wrote: “We’re undone by each other. And if we’re not, we’re missing something . . . One does not always stay intact” (“Violence” 13). This being undone, the giving over to another, the being broken into, catches the exact and beautiful moment of truest intimacy, of a vulnerable encounter, at the same time that it makes visible, sensible almost, the brutal possibility of involuntarily being “undone”, of being dispossessed – of being raped and killed. Vulnerability encompasses imminent death as much as a promise of life; it is lethal and vital. It is an opening to a space where the abyssal borderland between national subject and refugee, self and other, “shrinks with intimacy,” as Gloria Anzaldúa put it so beautifully in her preface to Borderlands. Being vulnerable entails being eradicated or enamored in an encounter with a perfect stranger. It entails putting one’s body on the line, allowing that body to be touched. It entails aspiring
20 The notion of touch as a moment of separation of the one and the other was coined by Jean-Luc
to unconditional hospitality. When we cease to write the concept of vulnerability in blood alone, and start thinking it for what it is, that is, as the precondition for our contact with the world, or that what allows us to be-in-touch, it discloses itself as a locus not of deformation, but of possible transformation.
This chapter, in close engagement with the doings of six angry words, has created the necessary space for rethinking vulnerability. Undoing the concept’s commonsense definition, reified by its constant reiteration in a negative context of injury and abuse, vulnerability has now started to come off of sticky discourses of fear and hatred. Questions remain, as one is left to wonder what exactly comes from opening the self to or for the other, or what shape the proposed transformative potential might have, and I consider it my remaining task to give the concept new substance. The next chapter, in continuation of the tilting move towards an uncommonsense definition of vulnerability, tells of a wondrous dialogue between the sane and the insane. It invites reflection on the bipolar voices of saneness and madness and wonders at the constructed nature of their polarity, while starting to develop an ethico-ontological vulnerability.
2.
WONDROUS BORDERLINE EXPERIENCES
Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes.)
– Walt Whitman in Leaves of Grass
Upholding an awry perspective, this chapter sets out to drift off of the shores of pure reason and immerses in impure reason as it chooses the thin line between the sane and the insane as its point of convergence, uncomfortably balancing between the two and in constant danger of tipping over to either side. It tells an uncommonsensical tale about sane madness and mad sanity, about wondrous borderline experiences. The analysis unfolds around an encounter between doctor and patient, and entails a confrontation between the self as an autonomous subject of pure reason and the other as subject to and of confusion. The illustrious duo meets in and between the lines of a dialogue, its first of voices embodied by a largely standardized mental health system and its representatives, among whom most notably the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5), and the other voice coming from the former’s ill-behaved object: the psychiatric and specifically the psychotic patient, here theatrically entering the conversation as a no longer muted interlocutor. A dissection of their mutual speech will allow me to pick up where the previous chapter left off, casting the concept of vulnerability in a different scenario while continuing my overarching query into its ethico-ontological potential, assessing the ontological vulnerability between the two interlocutors and proposing a vulnerable ethics that builds upon wonder as a virtuous quality in encountering the “other”.
The object of analysis that guides the dialogue between the rational mind and its obscured counterpart is “A simple Guide to How to be a Good Psychotic,” a handy manual appearing on a Wordpress blog curated by Recovery in the Bin (RitB).21 Just in case you ever wondered what to do when on the verge of losing your
mind, this guide is the much-needed remedy to your worrisome speculations. It claims to have all the answers to protect you from being sent off to the madhouse, or at least it will help you to either become diagnosed with a condition you fancy, or tell you how to look, talk and behave in order to escape your mental health team’s flings. The good thing is that it is all black on white, so it must be true! You are finding this hard to believe? A fair suspicion, since there is a rather large grey area in between this black and white and contrary to what its title invites one to believe, the “simple Guide to How to be a Good Psychotic” is all but simple. This guide constitutes an unruly dialogue between the authoritative mental health specialist and the disobedient psychiatric patient, making strange the position of its interlocutors and the maxims of who gets to speak. Other voices seep through the lines of the guide as well, inviting both a reflection on the bipolar voices of saneness and madness, as well as a keeping one’s ear out for a more polyphonic ensemble.22
In troubling the distinctions between its speakers, initially trapped in an exclusionary vis-à-vis constellation, the dialogue opens up the possibility to imagine a transient figure moving on the border of sanity and insanity, somewhere between the everyday and the imaginary. Could roaming the border between these two poles, an
21 Recovery in the Bin is “a User Led Facebook Group for MH Survivors and Supporters who are
critical of the ‘recovery’ model.” It accommodates discussions on contemporary psychiatric practice as well as organizing various forms of collective action aiming against neoliberal health care systems, specifically the UK National Health Service (NHS).
22 A close look into and between the guide’s lines exposes the fabric of its dialogue to be intricate and
interlaced with “other” voices, most notably gendered, racial and classed. To prevent the scope of this chapter from growing too big, these haunting voices will not be analyzed to a full extent.
in/sane in-betweenness, become an(other) opening to a shared, vibrant, and specifically “wonderful” world? If so, this would take revising or rather revaluating the common understanding that confusion is purely dysfunctional. Without making light the realities of emotional distress and suffering this chapter ultimately makes an argument for confusion, not as a debilitating condition, but as a shared vulnerability.23 After a brief entrance of the guide’s two main interlocutors the
analysis will be built in three main parts. The guide’s dialogic structures are laid bare following literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of dialogism and his concepts of unitary language, heteroglossia, double-voicedness and hybridization. The analysis then zooms in on the guide’s distortive potential, which I cast in the ambiguous shape of a carnival mirror, elucidated by drawing on Bakhtin’s concept of the carnival. I then start building my vulnerable ethics cast as virtuosity in wonder, and conclude with a contextual analysis of contemporary psychiatric practice in the hue of dialogism, carnival and vulnerability. Where the first chapter opened up a fuller conceptualization of vulnerability, reconfiguring it as exposure both to the wound and to the touch, the present chapter sets out to enfold vulnerability straight into the turbulent fabric of life.
I. UNFOLDING THE DIALOGUE: WHO GETS TO SPEAK?
“A simple Guide to How to be a Good Psychotic” consists of a long sequence of bullet point guidelines divided into 5 different paragraphs (“How to avoid a diagnosis”; “How to get a different diagnosis”; “Do’s and dont’s of being a psychotic
23 I am in no position to articulate what this suffering entails, not having experienced it either on my
own body, or from the professional sideline. Still, my outsider perspective might be valuable for that exact reason, as an equal dialogic partner.
– good psychotic?”; “Managing your mental health team’s mental illness”; and “REMEMBER”), roughly corresponding to three diagnostic phases: pre-diagnosis, in-diagnosis and post-in-diagnosis. As said, the guidelines are listed in a sober black on white layout, which at first glance imparts the guide with an air of unambiguous factuality. While combined with a proliferation of abbreviations and specialist terms, this image readily calls to mind another guide. Indeed, by mimicking the formal structures typically upheld in documents crucial for today’s psychiatric diagnostic practice, “A simple Guide” becomes the striking likeness of the DSM-5 and once observed, it is hard to un-see the mirror image (see fig. 1 to 3).
As with most mirroring, the reflection is an inversed one. The formerly mute psychiatric patient now turns into the one literally “guiding” the conversation, while the addressee concordantly shifts from the psychiatrist or psychologist to whomever
