Aftermath: Violence and the Remaking of a Self

By Susan J. Brison

A powerful personal narrative of recovery and an illuminating philosophical exploration of trauma

On July 4, 1990, while on a morning walk in southern France, Susan Brison was attacked from behind, severely beaten, sexually assaulted, strangled to unconsciousness, and left for dead. She survived, but her world was destroyed. Her training as a philosopher could not help her make sense of things, and many of her fundamental assumptions about the nature of the self and the world it inhabits were shattered.

At once a personal narrative of recovery and a philosophical exploration of trauma, this bravely and beautifully written book examines the undoing and remaking of a self in the aftermath of violence. It explores, from an interdisciplinary perspective, memory and truth, identity and self, autonomy and community. It offers imaginative access to the experience of a rape survivor as well as a reflective critique of a society in which women routinely fear and suffer sexual violence.

As Brison observes, trauma disrupts memory, severs past from present, and incapacitates the ability to envision a future. Yet the act of bearing witness, she argues, facilitates recovery by integrating the experience into the survivor's life's story. She also argues for the importance, as well as the hazards, of using first-person narratives in understanding not only trauma, but also larger philosophical questions about what we can know and how we should live.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Release date: Jan 3, 2023
• ISBN: 9780691245744

Susan J. Brison

Susan J. Brison is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Dartmouth College, where she also teaches in the Women's Studies Program. She is the coeditor of Contemporary Perspectives on Constitutional Interpretation and the author of the forthcoming Speech, Harm, and Conflicts of Rights (Princeton).

Book preview

AFTERMATH

Violence and the Remaking of a Self

With a new preface by the author

AFTERMATH

SUSAN J. BRISON

Princeton University Press

Princeton and Oxford

Copyright © 2002 by Princeton University Press

Preface to the new paperback edition, copyright © 2022 by Princeton University Press

Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New

Jersey 08540

In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press,

99 Banbury Road, Oxford OX2 6JX

All Rights Reserved

Earlier versions of material from chapters 1 through 4 originally appeared in the following articles: Surviving Sexual Violence: A Philosophical Perspective, Journal of Social Philosophy 24, no. 1 (Spring 1993): 5–22; On the Personal as Philosophical, American Philosophical Association Newsletter on Feminisim and Philosophy 95, no. 1 (1995): 37–40; Outliving Oneself: Trauma, Memory and Personal Identity, in Feminists Rethink the Self, ed. Diana T. Meyers (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1997), 13–39; Trauma Narratives and the Remaking of the Self, in Acts of Memory, ed. Mieke Bal, Jonathan Crewe, and Leo Spitzer (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1999), 39–54; The Uses of Narrative in the Aftermath of Violence, in On Feminist Ethics and Politics, ed. Claudia Card (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1999), 210–255.

First published by Princeton University Press in 2002

New paperback edition, with a new preface by the author, 2022

Paperback ISBN 9780691244679

ISBN (e-book) 9780691245744

Library of Congress Control Number: 2022942328

Version 1.1

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available

Cover image: Close-up of Blades of Grass. EyeEm / Alamy Stock Photo

Cover design by Katie Osborne

press.princeton.edu

For Gabriel,

who arrived,

and Tom,

who stayed

Contents

Preface to the 2022 Edition ix

Preface xv

ONE

Surviving Sexual Violence 1

TWO

On the Personal as Philosophical 23

THREE

Outliving Oneself 37

FOUR

Acts of Memory 67

FIVE

The Politics of Forgetting 85

SIX

Retellings 101

Afterword 119

Acknowledgments 125

Notes 129

Bibliography 147

Index 157

Preface to the 2022 Edition

I wrote this book over a ten-year period, after surviving a near-fatal rape and attempted murder in France on July 4, 1990. I was impelled to write it, as a survivor who desperately needed to figure out how to carry on in a terrifying and unpredictable world that no longer made sense and as a philosopher who found my disciplinary training to be of little use in that endeavor. Twenty years after its original publication, I’m both gratified and disheartened to know that it is still in demand. I’m gratified that philosophers, as well as scholars in other fields, continue to use it in their research and teaching and that survivors of various kinds of violence find it helpful in coming to terms with the aftereffects of trauma. I’m disheartened, though not surprised, that there continues to be a need for it.

I still stand by most of what I wrote: my account of lived experience as a source of knowledge and my defense of first-person narratives in philosophy; my discussion of relational autonomy and the narrative view of the self; my account of trauma and its importance for understanding the precariousness of all life; my view that gendered violence is neither natural nor inevitable, but political; and my conviction that recovery from sexual violence is possible, but that it requires something more than grit or resilience or any other individual characteristic. It requires the support of empathetic others, as well as social and cultural change.

This book interweaves a personal narrative of recovering from sexual violence with philosophical investigations of trauma and the nature of the self, but my primary motivation in writing it was political. I wanted to persuade people who viewed male sexual violence against women as a private, personal matter or as a rare and random event perpetrated only by monsters to see it as a larger, politically significant, group-based phenomenon that is a function of socially constructed gender roles. I wanted to show that, although gender-based violence is so prevalent as to seem natural and inevitable, it is something we could, and must, do everything we can to eliminate.

Seven months before my assault, on December 6, 1989, I walked out of the library at Princeton after teaching a seminar and saw a small circle of people standing in the falling snow, holding candles. I learned then that, a few hours earlier, a man with a rifle had walked into a classroom at the École Polytechnique in Montreal, separated the male and the female students, and ordered the men to leave the room. Before he opened fire, he shouted You’re all a bunch of feminists, and I hate feminists. Then he fired thirty rounds at the women students, killing fourteen and injuring another fourteen, before killing himself. He left a three-page antifeminist screed that contained a list of nineteen other Quebec women he planned to kill. At the time, many reporters and politicians, predominantly men, viewed the mass shooting as totally random and the shooter as an inhuman monster, but quite a few women saw it as an act of misogyny, more extreme than, but not unrelated to, everyday instances of sexual harassment and assault that were all too familiar.

Now more of us seem to get it. Every year, on the anniversary of the Montreal massacre, there are tributes across Canada to the fourteen women who were killed. At last year’s commemoration, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau condemned the murders and added, As we remember the victims of this hateful, cowardly act, we are also reminded that, for countless women, girls, and gender diverse people in Canada and around the world, violence is a daily reality.

Nevertheless, mass shootings (and mass murders by other means), perpetrated almost entirely by White men, have continued apace, with accelerating frequency. Yet these are rarely reported as instances of gendered and racialized violence, even when the killers leave ample evidence that they are motivated by misogynistic, White supremacist, homophobic, and anti-immigrant ideologies. We still tend to view them as isolated acts committed by deranged individuals, rather than as instances of a larger race- and gender-based phenomenon connected to the norms of White masculinity prevalent in our society.

Several years ago, a philosopher I had just met told me that he regularly assigned Aftermath in his course on crime and punishment, to give students a victim’s perspective on the effects of violent crime. He said that, although some students thought I was an advocate of our criminal justice system, he suspected that I was not. I told him he was right, that I’m opposed to it, and that I don’t think the criminal law is an effective way of addressing gender-based violence.

I wrote the first chapter of this book over thirty years ago, while awaiting my assailant’s trial, which took place two and a half years after my assault. Although I stressed the plight of victims and spoke unapologetically of my role in getting my assailant convicted of rape and attempted murder, I didn’t consider victims’ rights to be at odds with defendants’ rights. I never felt the need for revenge. I didn’t even feel anger toward my attacker. I simply didn’t want what happened to me to happen to anyone else. I was convinced my assailant had attacked women before and that he would do it again. I confess I wasn’t thinking of what he might do to other men in prison. I was thinking of what he could do to another unsuspecting woman walking down that road.

Even then, I did not think the criminal law was the best way to address sexual violence. The problem is structural and ideological—not one our system of policing and criminal punishment can solve. I am an anti-carceral anti-racist feminist, and I want to be an effective anti-rape activist without perpetuating and reinforcing what Mariame Kaba aptly calls the criminal injustice system.

Race isn’t a central theme of Aftermath, primarily because it wasn’t a factor in my assault; my assailant and I are both White, and the assault and subsequent trial took place in France. I now think the most important and urgent issues for me to address when writing and speaking about rape are our nation’s ongoing history of White supremacy, rampant and largely neglected violence against Black and Indigenous women and girls, and the irredeemably racist prison industrial complex in the United States. The rape of Black women by White slave owners, as a means of producing labor for plantations, was an undeniable, though still largely unacknowledged, part of our nation’s founding. And the lynching of Black men who were falsely accused of raping White women continued long after slavery was abolished.

For the past several years, I have, in my teaching, speaking, and organizing, centered and amplified the voices of Black women who work on racialized sexual violence. I’ve been more focused on reading and listening than on writing and publishing. At the same time, I have an obligation—as a White American and as an anti-rape activist—to denounce and work to dismantle a system of law enforcement that began, at least in the southern United States, with slave patrols and that continues to disproportionately incarcerate and kill Black people. I have much work yet to do.

As long as the problem of gendered violence continues unabated, I will continue to bear witness to it. I hope that by telling my story I make it easier for other survivors to tell theirs. But my assault doesn’t define me. It didn’t turn me into a victim or ruin my life. Yes, the aftermath was longer and more painful than I imagined it would be. Now, though, when I remember the woman who led my rape survivors support group telling us, You will never be the same. But you can be better, I agree with my whole heart. I’m filled with gratitude for the new life I was forced to make, a life that feels less like something following a disastrous event and more like a new growth of grass, following one or more mowings—the original meaning of aftermath.

Princeton, New Jersey

May 2022

af·ter·math, n. 1. Something that results or follows from

an event, esp. one of a disastrous or unfortunate

nature…2. a new growth of grass following one or

more mowings.¹

Preface

Ten years ago, a few months after I had survived a nearly fatal sexual assault and attempted murder in the south of France, I sat down at my computer to write about it for the first time and all I could come up with was a list of paradoxes. Things had stopped making sense. I thought it was quite possible that I was brain-damaged as a result of the head injuries I had sustained. Or perhaps the heightened lucidity I had experienced during the assault remained, giving me a clearer, although profoundly disorienting, picture of the world. I turned to philosophy for meaning and consolation and could find neither. Had my reasoning broken down? Or was it the breakdown of reason? I couldn’t explain what had happened to me. I was attacked for no reason. I had ventured outside the human community, landed beyond the moral universe, beyond the realm of predictable events and comprehensible actions, and I didn’t know how to get back.

As a philosopher, I was used to taking something apparently obvious and familiar—the nature of time, say, or the relation between words and things—and making it into something quite puzzling and strange. But now, when I was confronted with the utterly strange and paradoxical, philosophy was of no use in making me feel at home in the world.

After I was rescued and taken to the Grenoble hospital, I was told repeatedly how lucky I was to be alive, and for a short while I even believed this myself. At the time I did not yet know how trauma not only haunts the conscious and unconscious mind, but also remains in the body, in each of the senses, ready to resurface whenever something triggers a reliving of the traumatic event. I didn’t know that the worst—the unimaginably painful aftermath of violence—was yet to come.

One of the most difficult aspects of my recovery from the assault was the seeming inability of others to remember what had happened, accompanied by their habit of exhorting me, too, to forget. Although I was initially surprised by this response, once I discovered how typical it was, I became more aware of the intense psychological pressures that make it difficult for all of us to empathize with victims of trauma. The prevalent lack of empathy with trauma victims, which is reinforced by the cultural repression of memories of violence and victimization (for example, in the United States about slavery, in Germany and Poland and elsewhere about the Holocaust), results, I realized, not merely from ignorance or indifference, but also from an active fear of identifying with those whose terrifying fate forces us to acknowledge that we are not in control of our own.

Nonetheless, the trauma survivor must find empathic listeners in order to carry on. Piecing together a shattered self requires a process of remembering and working through in which speech and affect converge in a trauma narrative. In this book I explore the performative aspect of speech in testimonies of trauma: how saying something about the memory does something to it. The communicative act of bearing witness to traumatic events not only transforms traumatic memories into narratives that can then be integrated into the survivor’s sense of self and view of the world, but it also reintegrates the survivor into a community, reestablishing bonds of trust and faith in others.

The challenge of finding language that is true to traumatic experience is, however, a daunting one. How can we speak about the unspeakable without attempting to render it intelligible and sayable? The paradoxes of traumatic memory may seem to defy analysis. Our ordinary concepts of time and identity cease to apply, as in the French writer Charlotte Delbo’s statement, I died in Auschwitz, but no one knows it (1995, 267). For months after my assault, I had to stop myself before saying (what seemed accurate at the time), I was murdered in France last summer. In this book, I attempt to explain these cryptic observations, and, in so doing, I develop and defend a view of the self as fundamentally relational—capable of being undone by violence, but also of being remade in connection with others.

Since I have found that writing about trauma challenges not only accepted views of the limits of language and logic, but also current assumptions about appropriate scholarly methodology, I have employed a range of what I consider to be complementary methodologies: my own process of working through, cultural analysis, feminist criticism, philosophical theorizing about the self, and an examination of clinical and neurological studies of trauma. The result is a record of my thinking about trauma and recovery over the past ten years. The chronology of this period, however, is fractured in the telling. Time may be linear (who knows?) but the aftermath was not. There have been many periods of progress and of decline, victories and setbacks, both major and minor. I have changed during this time and so have my views, but, rather than revise my earlier writings in light of more recent understandings, I have tried to convey the trajectory of my ideas. As Ursula Le Guin writes, It doesn’t seem right or wise to revise an old text severely, as if trying to obliterate it, hiding the evidence that one had to go there to get here. It is rather in the feminist mode to let one’s changes of mind, and the processes of change, stand as evidence.²

Interwoven with a philosophical examination of violence and its aftermath is a first-person narrative of remaking a self shattered by trauma. Chapter 1, an account of philosophical issues raised by my assault and the immediate aftermath, was written during the two years after my assault. It is an examination of the way trauma shatters one’s most fundamental assumptions about the world, including beliefs about our ability to control what happens to us. This chapter would be different in many ways were I to write it now—less angry, less urgent, and somewhat more detached. But I have left it in its original form (except for a few

Reviews for Aftermath

[whitewavedarling · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

As much memoir and narrative as psychology or theory, this work (perhaps best called a long essay) presents various sides of surviving trauma and violence through narration, therapy, anti-depressants, political activism, and other avenues entirely. Brison's personal approach to the subject, based in her own survival of a rape and attempted murder, makes the book come across as a dialogue-in-progress, something for readers to interact with and question even as she questions the experience of being made a victim (and understood as a victim).Including careful discussions of memory (and forms thereof) and depression, the book provides a readable overview on what (must?) occur after someone experiences trauma, particularly of personally directed violence (Brison distinguishes between trauma caused by humans, and that caused by other forces such as natural disasters, accidents, etc., and the distinction is important to maintain for much of the psychological material in the essay).Certainly, this is a serious book, and portions of it are difficult to read--however, it is also extremely readable compared to most theory or writing on trauma and personal philosophy, reading more like a personal narrative/memoir than an essay. Also, it is a necessary look at violence, and at the "aftermath" victims of violence end up facing. I can only think that this is a powerful book that might help victims of violence look forward to a path of recovery, and it's a book that I think should be widely circulating, and widely discussed. So, in closing, this is one of those necessary reads--even if you're not interested, this might well be worth your time.