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In her book on ‘the problem of domination,’ Jessica Benjamin argues, “The decisive problem remains recognizing the other” (1988, p. 36). Achieving mutual recognition between equal subjects sounds like a clear and important goal, if a difficult one. In this new book on the problems of “the currents of sadism” (p. 195), Avgi Saketopolou writes in explicit opposition to Benjamin that recognition and related consent practices are dangerously homeostatic, supporting the status quo, and obstructing progressive risk. There is an intriguing, unfinished dialectic here.
The book comprises a dense, thorough Introduction, followed by five chapters, an Epilogue, several pages of informative Acknowledgements, and 20 pages of careful endnotes. The Introduction, titled The Erotics of the Terribly Beautiful, sets the tone for the rest of the book: integrating moving examples with theory from inside psychoanalysis and from intersecting domains of esthetics, literature, and philosophy, as well as an intense concern for social justice and the mistreatment of minoritarian identities by psychoanalysis and other fields. It is uncompromisingly complex and challenges the reader right away at intellectual and ethical levels. I will quote liberally from the book in this review so that the reader may hear something of Saketopolou’s voice.
Chapter 1, To Suffer Pleasure: Limit Experience and Transgression, is a revision of an earlier paper, in which the author (2014) encourages a Freudian/Laplanchean reading of the perverse, reclaiming the word in the way that other terms like queer have been reclaimed from
pathologization, as the powerful center of human sexuality, not its shameful periphery.
Chapter 2, The Draw to Overwhelm: Limit Consent and the Retranslation of Enigma, revisits another article by the author (2019) centering on the concept Saketopolou calls limit consent, as an alternative to more conventional forms of affirmative consent or informed consent. I will return to these ideas belo