Simone Drichel | University of Otago (original) (raw)

Papers by Simone Drichel

The Palgrave Handbook of Psychosocial Studies,, 2024

Building on the assumption, advanced by psychosocial studies, that psychic and social processes a... more Building on the assumption, advanced by psychosocial studies, that psychic and social processes are intimately intertwined, this chapter’s key contribution is to enquire into the psychosocial conditions of possibility – and impossibility – for social justice: Who must we be, if social justice is to become possible? And what conditions must be in place for us to be able to be the who we must be? The chapter utilizes the resources afforded by Levinasian ethics to suggest that our capacity for ethical responsiveness – upon which practices of social justice implicitly rely – is grounded in a primordial vulnerability to the other’s most profound appeal not to let them face death alone, “or else risk becoming the accomplice of that death.” Turning to Judith Butler’s work on the unequal distribution of precarity and grievability, the chapter suggests, however, that, inasmuch as we routinely refuse to respond to the appeal that issues forth from (some) others’ precarious existence, we do indeed repeatedly become “accomplice[s] of that death.” What accounts for these refusals of responsibility? The chapter suggests that Butler’s consideration of the “structural” or “systemic” character of social violence is insufficient on its own and must be supplemented by an analysis of the psychic forces that are inevitably also always in play. Jessica Benjamin’s recent discussion of what she calls the core fantasy of “only one can live” is helpful in moving us toward an understanding of these psychic forces, as is Stephen Frosh’s suggestion that a capacity to endure – as “a way of facing things without fear” – is a vital component of ethical responsiveness.

Over the last couple of decades, the emergence of neoliberalism as the dominant organizing impera... more Over the last couple of decades, the emergence of neoliberalism as the dominant organizing imperative across social and public spaces and institutions, coupled with the exceptionalism of imperial and often violent, authoritarian forms of 'democracy,' has fostered a rethinking of politics across a wide range of contexts. Rethinking politics through critical intervention necessitates an engagement with conceptual forms, even epistemes, of an earlier theorisation of politics. The essays in this issue of Borderlands offer ways of rethinking not only politics but also ways of retheorising sites and subjects of the epistemological and the political-Guantanamo Bay, Disneyland, conservative female politicians, migration and multiculturalism, disciplines and the academy, and mass protest movements. borderlands 8:3

A Companion to the Works of J. M. Coetzee, Dec 8, 2011

American Imago, 2018

Abstract:In The Writing of the Disaster, Maurice Blanchot includes a brief discussion of the Narc... more Abstract:In The Writing of the Disaster, Maurice Blanchot includes a brief discussion of the Narcissus myth, implicitly inviting us to ask, as Claire Nouvet notes, "what is 'disastrous' in Narcissus's story." Translating this question into a postcolonial context, this essay argues that what is "disastrous" in colonial narcissism is the profound disturbance the story reveals in Narcissus's capacity to relate to others: a disturbance which imprisons Narcissus in a "crippling solipsism." In seeking to sow the seeds for an effective response, the paper draws on contemporary psychoanalytic theories of narcissism to propose that Narcissus's "grandiose" disavowal of relationality is a mere smokescreen to cover up his profound vulnerability and fear: a fear of the other which originates in relational trauma. Making reference to the settler colonial context, I argue that this traumatic core of the narcissistic condition has remained largely occluded because trauma studies' dominant event-based model of trauma is ill-equipped to recognise colonialism's relational trauma. To break with colonial narcissism's toxic legacy, I therefore propose, a relational trauma theory—such as it is developed in the work of D. W. Winnicott and Masud Khan—is needed.

Psychoanalysis, Self and Context, 2017

The blurb on the back cover promotes Black Body as a book that “interrogates theories produced in... more The blurb on the back cover promotes Black Body as a book that “interrogates theories produced in the Northern hemisphere and questions their value and significance for the Southern hemisphere”. Such a book would indeed be a very useful addition to the rather limited corpus of books and articles produced within New Zealand Studies that are unafraid of tackling theoretical questions and explicitly situate themselves as postcolonial. But is Black Body that book? Does its analysis of theoretical issues manage to shed muchneeded light on the postcolonial situation of the Antipodes? Or does it not rather leave the Antipodes where they have been for far too long — at the fringe of important theoretical discussions and in the shadow of other (more prominently ‘postcolonial’) countries? In an analysis of key texts by writers as wide-ranging as Claude LéviStrauss, Alfred Crosby, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, John Locke, Sigmund Freud and Frantz Fanon in part I — "In Theory" — Mohanram tra...

Acknowledgements Introduction I: Meta-Critical Frame(s) Jan Cronin: Through a Glass Darkly: Readi... more Acknowledgements Introduction I: Meta-Critical Frame(s) Jan Cronin: Through a Glass Darkly: Reading the Enigmatic Frame Jennifer Lawn: Playing with Freud: Radical Narcissism and Intertextuality in Frame's Intensive Care and Daughter Buffalo II: Metaphysical Frame(s) Lydia Wevers: Self Possession: 'Things' and Janet Frame's Autobiography Anna Smaill: Beyond Analogy: Janet Frame and Existential Thought Valerie Basnee: A Home in Language: The (Meta)Physical World of Janet Frame's Poetry Isabel Michell: "Turning the stone of being": Janet Frame's Migrant Poetic III: Beyond the Frame(s) of Representation Marc Delrez: "Conquest of surfaces": Aesthetic and Political Violence in the Work of Janet Frame Chris Prentice: Janet Frame's Radical Thought: Symbolic Exchange and Seduction in Living in the Maniototo and The Carpathians Simone Drichel: "Signposts to a world that is not even mentioned": Janet Frame's Ethical Transcendence No...

This issue of borderlands takes its title, ‘Politics of Transgression and Small Gestures’, from L... more This issue of borderlands takes its title, ‘Politics of Transgression and Small Gestures’, from Leela Gandhi’s Affective Communities. Although focused on very different geopolitical scenes from those that are of interest to Gandhi, the contributing essays to this issue share her diagnosis of pervasive Manichaeanisms that infiltrate and deform relationality in their respective locations, and are similarly invested in exploring what Gandhi calls ‘innovative border crossing’. For Gandhi, as for our contributors, such border crossing sheds light on what Jean-Luc Nancy calls the space of ‘the between as such’—and it is from this space that the ‘crisis of nonrelation’ encoded in Manichaean structures is simultaneously disclosed and refused (Gandhi 2006, p. 184). It is in the ‘small, defiant flights from the fetters of belonging (Gandhi 2006, p. 7)—flights, in other words, that are part and parcel of the kind of ‘politics of transgression and small gestures’ that the contributions to this ...