Assembling Justice: Reviving Nonhuman Subjectivities to Examine Institutional Betrayal Around Sexual Misconduct

Abstract

While some colleges have adopted bystander intervention and restorative justice practices to address sexual misconduct as a community issue, psychoanalytic institutes facing crises of sexual misconduct have typically relied on the tried-and-true tactic of identifying the neoliberal individual as the sole site of trouble. Successful strategies used in colleges can be applied to the psychoanalytic setting by focusing on institutional betrayal. This systemic, community-based approach decenters not only individual bodies but human subjectivities. Here institutions become not just containers for group or networked affect, as if affect itself emanates from individuals into an institution. Agency and affect emerge through networks, not individual bodies, and institutions are active agents in violent betrayal. Acknowledging the ways the nonhuman and the human co-emerge creates the space to hold the vitalities and agencies of both, including multiple potentialities for (re)traumatization, resistance, and transformation.