Vertiginous Translations: A Review of Sexuality Beyond Consent: Risk, Race, Traumatophilia, by Agvi Saketopoulou, (2023),  New York University Press: New York,  261 pages.

Ecstatic images can betray you. Only fright can totally measure what is there.

I have, in fact, written this book imagining you giving yourself over to me, which is a strange thing to say given that I do not know you. Neither do you.

Let us begin.

Avgi Saketopoulou’s Sexuality Beyond Consent: Risk, Race, Traumatophilia, demands an urgent reorientation of thinking; thinking must embrace a chaotic journey along the vertiginous interstices of culture, of race, of desire, to propose an eviscerating confrontation with our own internal opacity through a surrender to what is not yet known in ourselves and in the other—a political and ethical dynamic foregrounding the entanglement of sexuality, race, and a kind of sadism. I read Saketopoulou’s proposal as a redefining of these terms, as well as a critique of trauma theories that elide narratives of trauma for fear of retraumatizing the subject, or aspire to a curative possibility or return to some illusory pretraumatized origin. Instead, in place of “traumatophobia,” she argues