Sexuality Beyond Consent: Risk, Race, Traumatophilia. By Avgi Saketopoulou. New York:  New York University Press, 2023.  261 pp

Should this book come with a trigger warning? Sexuality Beyond Consent lavishes attention on interracial sadomasochism and slave play; it alludes without censure to women’s rape fantasies; under the rubric of exigent sadism, it advocates for pushing the self into states of overwhelm. Throughout, the author puts tremendous pressure on the hard-won feminist principle of affirmative consent, arguing for a countervailing idea of limit consent. Sexuality Beyond Consent reveals the extraordinary damage that psychoanalysis can wreak on not only the myth of the autonomous subject but also that of the relational subject meant to replace it. From a mainstream liberal perspective, the book is a complete nightmare. Trigger warnings might not be enough: you read this volume at your own risk.

We live in a risk-averse culture, where socially sanctioned risk-taking occurs chiefly on Wall Street. Neoliberal norms encourage a distinct preference for safe spaces, safe sex, safe words, and inoffensive discourse; we put faith in transparency, wishing to know in advance what’s likely to happen. Our culture is not only risk-averse but leery of surprises. Such conditions are hardly conducive to the practice of psychoanalysis, which, mistrusting transparency, focuses on opacity and thus proliferates surprises. Entering psychoanalysis entails relinquishing the false comfort of trigger warnings, which aim to forestall distress by announcing disturbing material well in advance of one’s encountering it. To invoke one of the terms Saketopoulou coins in Sexuality Beyond Consent, we could say that trigger warnings are lic>traumatophobic. They aspire to hold potentially traumatizing (or retraumatizing) images, ideas, and experiences at bay. Trigger warnings form part of our culture’s aversive approach to trauma, which we reflexively assume must be either avoided or overcome, often through narratives of resilience, healing, and closure. In psychoanalysis and psychotherapy, we work through trauma i