Sexuality Beyond Consent

Avgi Saketopoulou is a psychoanalyst in private practice in NYC and a member of the faculty of NYU's Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis. She is the author of Sexuality Beyond Consent: Risk, Race, Traumatophilia and in critical conversation with Dominique Scarfone in The Reality of the Message: Psychoanalysis in the Wake of Jean Laplanche.

"Lavishly brilliant. Rarely has a book so daringly startled me. Clarity, nuance, pain, even tenderness here braid uniquely, keyed to sexual collisions with race. A series of showstopping claims result, glistening with seduction. Never have I felt so welcomed into trauma as a mode of doing, a mode of expanding, a mode of greeting what is foreign in oneself. Take this invitation laced with surprise." (Kathryn Bond Stockton, author of Gender(s)) "Making a vibrant argument for psychoanalysis's importance in grappling with our modern racial dramas, Sexuality Beyond Consent weaves together insights from queer theory, performance studies, and critical race theory to explore overwhelm. Saketopoulou's clear and compelling prose brings together clinical case studies, Laplanche, and Slave Play to arrive at an ethics for dealing with power and difference now—the result is a dazzling, brilliant read." (Amber Jamilla Musser, author of Sensual Excess: Queer Femininity and Brown Jouissance) "Offers nothing less than a theory of sexuality, one that refuses contemporary pieties. In a series of profound and sometimes personal reflections, Saketopoulou subjects our reigning models of consent to close scrutiny, and asks what happens when fantasy—intractable, recalcitrant, but also protean and surprising—belies our most dearly held political and ethical commitments. The result is a work that excavates the complex enmeshments of the sexed body, race, and history, and demonstrates theongoing salience of psychoanalytic concepts to feminist and anti-racist cultural analysis. Saketopoulou's critique of the liberal sexual subject is politically necessary and intellectually thrilling." (Damon Ross Young, University of California, Berkeley) "This brilliant, often counter-intuitive examination of sexuality, race, and consent explores how we might yield to the opacity in ourselves. Saketopoulou unpacks with startling insight moments beyond the politics of identity and trauma to imagine how the surrendering of consent might lead to an ethical expansion rather than diminishment of the self." (David L. Eng, University of Pennsylvania) "Saketopoulou's book... harness[es] anarchic sexual vertigo into the thoroughly bourgeois frame of psychoanalysis. The result is refreshingly ambivalent and enigmatic...The equally laudable stance of consolidating (despite the tears of Eros) the psychoanalytic frame, bent and stretched so as to bear witness to the struggles and joys of limit experiences." (Existential Analysis) "Among the many words I could use to describe this exceptional work-riveting, original, provocative, incandescent, virtuoso-the word "exquisite" is the one that appeared in my mind repeatedly during my reading." - JyotiI M. Rao (Parapraxis) "Any analyst could learn something important from this work, and most could learn a lot" - Jason A. Wheeler Vega (Taylor and Francis Online) "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 to ourselves and in the other-a political and ethical dynamic foregrounding the entanglement of sexuality, race, and a kind of sadism." - Jenn Joy (Taylor and Francis Online)