The Child and Childhood in Feminist Theory December 10-11th 2008 University of Manchester Incest: What Has The

Childs Love Got To With It? Jane Kilby (University of Salford)

Based on the testimony of nine incest survivors, Elizabeth Wards 1984 book FatherDaughter Rape provides a radical feminist account of how easily and ruthlessly fathers decide on sex with their daughters. And, indeed, what is striking when reading the womens testimony is the depressing, dispassionate banality of incest as the fathers exploit their power with a causal impunity and almost groundhog logic. There is no mention of love, and if it were not for formal knowledge of their relationship, the father and daughter might read as strangers rather than kin. Similarly in her 1981 FatherDaughter Incest, Judith Herman presents incest as an abuse and exploitation of power and as having nothing to do with the intimacy suggested by love and the social ties of kinship. Indeed, according to Herman incest is a paradigm of female sexual victimisation, with the relationship between father and daughter, adult male and female child, [] one of the most unequal relationships imaginable (1981: 4). Love does not figure; or rather it is deemed unnecessary for understanding the horror and trauma of incest which according to Herman is linked to the childs loss of autonomy. The question of harm, Herman argues, is the question of power and the way in which there is no way that a child can be in control or exercise free choice when subject to the will of adults (ibid.: 27). The trauma of violence is, in other words, the experience of coercion, domination and exploitation. But according to Judith Butler in her 1997 The Psychic Life of Power, we misstate the character of the exploitation and the reality of sexual abuse when we do not take into account the childs love. Thus she writes It is not simply that a sexuality is unilaterally imposed by the adult, nor that a sexuality is unilaterally fantasised by the child, but that the childs love, a love that is necessary for its existence, is exploited and a passionate

attachment abused (1997: 7-8). Moreover, and as a consequence, as she argues, in her later article The Quandaries of the Incest Taboo, unless we consider what happens to the childs love and desire in the traumatic incestuous relation with an adult, we [will] fail to describe the depth and psychic consequence of that trauma (2004b: 155). And certainly Butler is not alone here. So, for example, Jill Bennett argues in her discussion of incest survivor art, that the affects of fear, humiliation, shock, and so on [accompanying abuse], may be tied to the same objects as those of joy and excitement (2005: 27). In other words, she argues, love may characterise an aspect of the relationship one has with an abuser particularly in an incestuous relationship where the victim has an emotional attachment to the abuser, notwithstanding the pain or trauma that may occupy abuse (ibid.). By taking Butlers article on incest as my focus, I will ask what it means to make incest a question of the childs love. This is an obviously fraught question for feminism, since it once again raises the question of complicity, a provocation originally sparked when feminists began giving importance to the Oedipal drama (with its logic of unconscious desire and fantasy) for understanding the assumption and normalisation of both gender and sexuality. In respect of this debate, which she acknowledges is rife with division, Butlers own position is clear when arguing that The task will be to find out how the incestuous passions that are part of emerging childhood sexuality are exploited precisely through the practice of incest which overrides prohibitive boundaries that ought to be kept firmly in place (2004b: 155). For Butler, there is no doubting the importance of infantile sexuality for understanding both incest and the take up of sexual and gender identity. Critically, however, her recent emphasis on love works as both a supplement and a means of deepening this already intense controversy. With this controversy in mind, it is my aim to clearly establish the nature of Butlers thinking, using Hermans work as a foil. For the most part, this is a careful examination of Butlers article, although reference will be made to her thinking more generally, especially as it has developed over the last ten years with the publication of The Psychic Life of Power (1997), Precarious Life (2004), Undoing Gender (2004), and Giving an Account of Oneself (2005). More critically, though, I hope to show why feminists might remain wary of emphasising the idea of the childs love and desire. This will be no simple condemnation

of Freud as it was for Jeffrey Masson when he argued in his Assault on Truth (1984) that Freud was guilty of betraying women when he abandoned his original seduction theory -whereby hysterics were understood to be suffering from memories of actual assault -- in favour of an account based on the shocking desires and fantasies generated by the Oedipus complex. For as I have argued elsewhere, there is no doubting, as Ann Scott argues in her Feminism and the Seductiveness of the Real Event, that Massons account of Freuds repudiation of the seduction theory as a narrative of turning away from memory toward fantasy and thus an abandoning of the notion of the real event is a misinterpretation of the significance of Freuds insights into the interrelationship of these phenomena. To this end, psychoanalytical feminists are right to claim that the nature and retrieval of traumatic memory is more complex than is suggested by Masson. And I certainly think Scott is right to stress that the value of psychoanalysis is to be found in its challenge to the determinism of a radical feminist account. But while I agree with Scott that there has been a tendency among feminists, such as Herman, to presume the selfevident and manifest nature and consequence of the real event -- an event understood to overwhelm the victim, and yet existing as a experience such that it is subject to understanding --, I depart from Scott when she insists all events become invested with fantasy, conscious and unconscious, and may on occasion be potentiated by fantasy (1988: 91). This is not to deny the reality of the unconscious (however conceived) nor the power of fantasy for renegotiating the terms of sexual trauma, but rather to insist with the psychoanalytical critic Cathy Caruth, for example, that the force of violence is such that it cannot be mediated by fantasy, nor attributed, in various form, to it. Importantly, then, Scott does not entertain the possibility that some events might escape the powers of the unconscious, which is the point being made by Caruth when she insists that the traumatic symptom cannot be interpreted, simply, as a distortion of reality, nor as the lending of unconscious meaning to a reality it wishes to ignore, nor the repression of what once was wished (Caruth 1995: 5). Indeed, Butler acknowledges the cogency of Caruths intervention when arguing (in an advance on the position held by Scott) that while it is tempting to conclude that the event is always psychically registered and as a result not, strictly speaking, separable from the psychic staging of the event, this

approach does not address the nonnarratable, that for which there is no story, no report, no linguistic representation (2004b: 155-6). There is something then, unrepresentable about the violence and trauma of incest. So rather than offer a simple protest, I will attempt, at very least, to interrupt the terms of feminist psychoanalytic debate over incest by showing what exactly is at stake, when feminists, such as Butler, insist on the childs desire and love. However this is no easy task, since Butlers work represents a complex reworking of psychoanalysis and poststructuralism. So while I am keen to endorse Carine M. Mardorossain critique of commentary feminism and the ways in which sexual violence has become the taboo subject of feminist theory today (2002: 743). Her critique of contemporary postmodern feminism, with Butler named as the most prominent exponent, misses the mark when she insists that the problem is an overemphasis on subjectivity and interiority such that it reduces antirape politics to a psychic dimension(ibid.: 747). Butler is not, in anyway, guilty of erasing the social, as Mardorossain implies. Indeed, it is because Butler so thoroughly unsettles the question of interiority and exteriority with respect to violence and subjectivity that her work has proved so challenging to a feminist politics of sexual violence. But Butlers challenge does not end in this respect, but turns more critically on the ways in which violence is understood as constitutive of, if not foundational to, subjectivity and social relations more generally. In ways still yet to be understood by feminism, violence no longer figures as a destructive force, as a force that breaks the subject and the social contract, but figures as a force in the service of the subject and sociality, and for Butler, I will argue, love has a critical part to play in this transfiguration. To this end then, I argue that Butlers thinking on the childs love has implications that go way beyond the explicit terms of both psychoanalysis and poststructuralism as they have been established within feminist debate over incest and sexual violence more generally. This said, however, I will conclude by arguing that Butler, nonetheless, reproduces what Hannah Arendt identifies in her little known pamphlet On Violence as an incredibly old philosophical prejudice: that evil is no more than a privative modus of good, that good can come out of evil; that in short, evil is but a

temporary manifestation of a still-hidden good (1970 [1969]: 56). These are not Butlers terms, but as I will hope to show it is her philosophy. An Impossible Love Of course, it is not true that radical feminists, such as Ward and Herman, completely disregard the question of love. Indeed, there has always been an acknowledgement of the confusions and compromises caused by the fact that the child might love her abusing parent. So while Herman seeks to emphasise the question of power in her early writing, she does address the question of love in her later book, Trauma and Recovery, suggesting alongside Butler that the shift from an overtly politicised analysis to a more express concern with suffering and survival requires an understanding of the complications caused by love. Needless to say, Herman and Butler understand the issues raised by love in very different ways. For Herman, the childs love is an issue only to the extent that it makes it difficult to escape the psychological reality of incest, rendering the child especially captive. Indeed, according to Herman the perpetrator will actively solicit the childs affirmation and expression of love as a means of creating a willing victim and thus expiating guilt (1992: 75). As a consequence then, the child is forced to adapt to the reality of their situation in particularly damaging and self-destructive ways, which include not least a tendency to misread the abuse they experience as expressions of love or sex; and once having learnt to misread violence in this way the child is put at great risk of repeated victimisation (ibid.: 111). Thus Herman quotes one survivor as she reflects on the unrelenting violence in her life as writing: It almost becomes like a self-fulfilling prophecy you start to expect violence, to equate violence with love at an early age. I got raped six times, while I was running away from home, hitchhiking or drinking. It kind of all combined to make me an easy target. [] The crazy thing about it is at first I felt sure [the rapists] would kill me, because if they let me live, how would they get away with it? Finally I realised they had nothing to worry about; nothing would ever be done because I had asked for it.

(Herman 1992: 111-2) In other words, incest destroys the capacity to separate violence and love, and thereby any ability to understand when and what one is asking, to whom and why, which is to say that it destroys the ability to find a love not compromised by violence. Butler, on the other hand, understands the issues very differently; and in this respect her thinking on incest is most readily understood as part of an ongoing riposte to the ways in which writers such as Herman figure incest as a brute imposition on the childs body: an event which insofar as it returns as a memory, Butler argues, returns as a memory that has not been compromised in anyway by the childs own desires. In counterpoint to this dogmatic formulation -- such that for incest to be traumatic and real, it must be an event that is not in any way complicated by either prior or subsequent desire (2004b: 153), Butler insists that the distinction between event and wish is not as clear as it is sometimes held to be (ibid.: 155). Indeed, should not be held as distinct if we are to understand the trauma of [incest] (ibid.). Therefore, and in stark opposition to the position held by Herman, Butler argues that it is neither necessary, possible or indeed adequate to figure parent-child incest as a unilateral impingement on the child by the parent, since whatever impingement takes place will be also registered within the sphere of fantasy (ibid.). Moreover, and with greater provocation, Butler argues that the reification of the childs body as passive surface would thus constitute, at a theoretical level, a further deprivation of the child: the deprivation of psychic life (ibid.). In some respects, Butler appears, at this stage, to be repeating the argument over the reality of incestuous fantasy, whereby radical feminists and psychotherapists such as Herman are taken to task for locating violence and the agency associated with it in a realm of absolute exteriority, and thereby forestalling the possibility, as Ruth Leys also argues of scapegoating [the victim] by denying that the victim participates, or in anyway colludes with, the scene of abjection and humiliation (Leys 2000: 38). For Butler, Leys and many others beside there is no purchase in denying that the child might unknowingly desire the parent, since not only does this render the child asexual, and thus incapable of exercising any sexual agency, no matter how unconscious or ultimately counterproductive. But in refusing the child sexual desire, they also deny that the child

might harbour violence toward those who pose a threat to its satisfaction. Thus the child is robbed, it is argued, of both sexual and violent agency. Although to the extent that desire, whatever its form or object, can be read as inherently aggressive (based on the need for satisfaction, desire is necessarily appropriative, consuming, destructive of its object), the possibility of agency qua the violence of desire is simply ruled out. (Indeed, it is worth noting here that for Butler there is no denying the violence of psychic life, regardless of what importance we might place on the Oedipal complex or incest taboo. For as she argues when discussing our desire for recognition We do not need to accept a drive theory that claims that aggression is there for all times, constitutive of who we are, in order to accept that destructiveness poses itself continually as a risk. That risk is a perennial and irresolvable aspect of human psychic life (2004b: 147). Thus Butler is openly wary as to whether there is anyway that we can overcome the destruction and negation that informs our longing for recognition (ibid.)). The debate concerning the psychic origin of violence is an incredibly contentious debate which turns on whether or not we are willing in this instance to accept the importance of the Oedipal complex to psychic development and life and as such it is one that feminists might chose to ignore when exploring incest as a mind numbing reality. But when Butler emphasises the significance of the childs love she is looking to extend the controversy over the unconscious origins of sexual and violent desire in a way that will make it more difficult to overlook. Hence not only does she argue that feminists deprive the child of psychic life when they figure violence as a unilateral imposition, but they may also be said to perpetrate a deprivation of another order (2004b: 155). For after all, she argues when we try to think of what kind of exploitation incest can be, it is often precisely the childs love that is exploited in the scene of incest (ibid.). If we insist that violence is that which only gains its force by virtue of being an unilateral imposition (backed, according to Herman, by power and in contravention of the right to autonomy, integrity and self-determination), not only do we deprive the child psychic life, but we deprive them the order of love, a love, which for Butler, is necessary for the childs existence. This, however, is not to (mis)read Butler as saying that the child must learn to find and trust love again, a position that would bring her close to Herman, when Herman

argues, for example, that the victims healing depends on the discovery of a restorative love in her own life and on her ability to form loving connections (1992: 190, 194). But rather it is a question of the love a child has no choice but to give to the adult from the very start. Indeed, for Butler a childs love is prior to judgement and decision, although: This is to say, not that the child loves blindly (since from early on there is discernment and knowingness of an important kind), but only that if the child is to persist in a psychic and social sense, there must be dependency and the formation of attachment: there is no possibility of not loving, where love is bound up with the requirements of life (1997: 8). For Butler, the child has to be understood as already given over to the adult, always already subject to a primary love, a scene of love the child cannot turn away from and must not turn away from if there is hope for survival. Of course, she continues we can say that for some this primary scene is extraordinary, loving, and receptive, a warm tissue of relations that support and nurture life in its infancy, while for others it is a scene of abandonment or violence or starvation, where bodies are given over to nothing, or to brutality, or to no sustenance. But no matter what the value of that primary scene the fact remains that infancy constitutes a necessary dependency, one that we never fully leave behind. []. Part of understanding the oppression of lives is precisely to understand that there is no way to argue away this condition of a primary vulnerability, of being given over (2004b: 24). There is no way of not loving and no way of leaving this love behind. There is always a remaining attachment. Thus Butler stresses again and again, and in an attempt to challenge the importance placed on autonomy by writers such as Herman that violence is always a question of the way in which we are given over to others; it is always, she writes, a question of the way in which we are in the thrall of our relations with others (2004b: 19). In a critical sense, we are completely captivated by the other and while this makes us permanently vulnerable to injury and violence, it is a situation we cannot endeavour to rectify. Indeed, it is perhaps foolish, if not dangerous, when we do (ibid.: 23), since being given over to the other is essential to the possibility of persisting as human (ibid.: 33). To be human is to be beside oneself, to always be in a state of ecstasy (ibid.: 19). (Although it should be noted, here, that ecstasy is not simply a case of being emotionally

enthralled or passionately moved by the other, but also a question of our dependency on social norms. 'I cannot be who I am without drawing upon the sociality of norms that precede and exceed me. In this sense, I am outside myself from the outset, and must be in order to survive, and in order to enter into the realm of the possible (ibid.: 32)). So, whether the child literally loves her abusing parent or not, there is always a prior attachment, a profound orientation toward -- if not an unconditional love for -- the other. For Butler then, incest is also paradigmatic, but not of female victimisation and the disparity of power relations as it is for Herman and radical feminists more generally, but rather it is a paradigm for the ways in which we are always turned to the other, passionately attached, and thereby always already susceptible to violence and injury. In all respects, though, it is, for Butler, an impossible love, or at least a love impossible to fully acknowledge for the dependency it signifies. In other words, as Butler argues in The Psychic Life of Power (in which she reflects more generally on the nature of our attachment to power and the condition of our subjection), it is a love we must deny for the subject to emerge (1997: 8). Indeed, for Butler this partly explains the adult sense of humiliation when confronted with the earliest objects of love parents, guardians, siblings, and so on the sense of belated indignation in which one claims, I couldnt possibly love such a person (ibid.). But as Butler goes on to argue this is only the beginning of the problems to be faced. For she writes: The utterance concedes the possibility it denies, establishing the I as predicted on that foreclosure, grounded in and by that firmly imagined impossibility. The I is thus fundamentally threatened by the spectre of this (impossible) loves reappearance and remains condemned to reenact that love unconsciously, repeatedly reliving and displacing that scandal, that impossibility, orchestrating that threat to ones sense of I. I could not be who I am if I were to love in the way that I apparently did, which I must, to persist as myself, continue to deny and unconsciously re-enact in contemporary life with the most terrible suffering as its consequence. (Butler 1997: 8-9)

Here, I should stress that Butler is writing in a very general sense: love is scandalous as a contradictory condition of self identity. But how does the subject experience and negotiate love when as a child it was, indeed, given over to nothing, or to brutality, as Butler argues above? How, more specifically, does the child survive the adult sense of humiliation when confronted with the earliest objects of love, when humiliation is not a gloss for social awkwardness and embarrassment but a designation for crippling shame? Flush With Desire How does the incest survivor survive when the contradictions and paradoxes of love are more acutely violent? is not a question that Butler pursues in any detail. But she does turn it into a question of melancholy, when she writes that In the case of incest, the child whose love is exploited may no longer be able to recover or avow that love as love. [] And not to be able to avow ones love, however, painful it may be, produces its own melancholia, the suppressed and ambivalent alternative to mourning (2004b: 159). At this point it is not entirely clear as to why the child might no longer be able to recover or avow their love as love. Or rather it is not seen as entirely due to the pain caused by the fact that the love has been exploited, for as I have argued above and as Butlers phrasing indicates there is a prior source of difficultly, and as such it is a very different position to one held by Herman. Since for Herman the struggle to survive is a question of mourning only, and then only a question of mourning particular losses including trust, the belief in a good parent and above all that which was never theirs to lose: their childhood (1992: 193). Love is not counted among the losses Herman lists. But for Butler love does figure in the struggle to survive, and while her reasoning is not transparent at this point, it is possible to read Butler as suggesting that the childs love cross[es] and confound[s] the norms of heterosexual kinship (2004b: 159) precisely because it is a love which cannot be everything but flush with desire. For as the logic of her own argument dictates, feminists deny the childs love because they deprive the child psychic life. The order of love follows on the order of desire. Thus, it is possible to assume, that the childs love is shot through with sexual and violent agency; indeed, it is necessarily charged with sexual and violent agency for taking the adult as an object of love, and for this reason it is subject to prohibition and the object of melancholy. And

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while conjecture, it is a reading given support by the fact that she juxtaposes her discussion of the childs struggle to avow their love as love with the homosexuals struggle to avow a love foreclosed by the incest taboo and thus produced in a shadowy realm of love (ibid.). It is certainly left open to reading, but there is a sense in which for Butler the child loves is that which dare not speak its name: a love that has no place in the name of love for the sexuality it speaks (ibid.: 160). Politically and theoretically the gap between Herman and Butler is especially evident here, for while Herman is clearly normative in her claims, Butler is always wary of establishing any such agenda, preferring, instead, to hold open the realm of political signification than close it down with prescribed meaning. Thus she argues whether the point is to legitimate or delegitimate a non-normative form of sexuality [or love], it seems crucial that we have a theoretical framework that does not foreclose vital descriptions in advance. For if we say that, by definition, certain forms of sexuality [and love] are not intelligible or that they could not have existed, we risk duplicating in the very theoretical language we use the kinds of disavowals that it is the task of psychoanalysis[, psychotherapists and feminists] to bring to light. (Butler 2004: 159) The warning is clear: if we deny the legitimacy of the childs love as in some sense ideological and innocent, then we might not only compound the struggle to survive but we will risk our own violence. And yet before conceding this point, which clearly repeats one of the gestures by which radical feminists are silenced on the question of infantile sexuality, might we not ask in what way Butler understands love to be exploited, even if accepting that the childs love is not nearly as innocent as we might imagine? Indeed, while Butler insists that the question of the childs desire and love need not detract from our understanding of parent-child as a violation (ibid.: 155), it is not clear in Butlers terms in what way it is a violation. Why violence, in other words? Unconditional Violence

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Whatever else violence means to Butler, it is phobic reaction to the challenge posed by the other, by difference, by the unknown and the unknowable. It is a response provoked by anxiety and bent on negation with the need to shore up what it knows and expunge what threatens it with not-knowing (2004b: 35). It is one that does not ask, and does not seek to know (ibid.) Theoretically, violence is flushed with the desire to negate the difference posed by the other. But what threat does the child pose to the adult? The answer, and given the way in which Butler poses the question of incest, can only be the childs offer of love, which appears, it would seem, as an abomination to the adult. Here, then, is the scandal of incest as Butler figures it: for while love is normally that which we might expect to stand between us and violence (being the difference that makes all the difference), it becomes here instead the occasion or rationale for violence (the difference that makes no difference). It is not simply that the adult exploits the childs love as part of a strategy aimed at expiating guilt by reducing resistance as Herman argues (1992:75), but that the childs love invites exploitation. And so love is seen here to place the child in a very particular bind, for rather than acting as that which prevents violence, it serves instead or at least paradoxically to solicit it. Indeed, to the extent to which love is the other of violence, it could hardly be otherwise for Butler. This is a deeply troubling logic and just cause for anxiety, but for Butler, following Emmanuel Levinas, violence is, indeed, the one temptation that a subject may feel in the encounter with the precarious life of the other (2007:188), even if at one and the same time that precarity works as a prohibition. Indeed, and this is a critical point, the prohibition communicated by love and vulnerability exists only to the extent that it provokes a violence by which to establish its force. Complicity and collusion is a question that can no longer to be asked of the victim, since love and violence are now engaged in mutual, reciprocal endorsement. Put conversely, making exploitation a question of consent, as even Butler does in conclusion to her article, is redundant, if not a nonsense. There is, no doubting, that Butler is keen to suggest that there is no way of transcending violence, even love is caught up in, if not dependent on, its possibility. There is, in other words, no place of purity; no act, site or subject clean of (the possibility of) violence. So while Butler finds considerable merit in Jessica Benjamins attempt to

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secure a realm of sociality beyond the violent logic of social recognition, Butler nonetheless takes Benjamin to task for imagining that it is possible to transcend or otherwise separate violence from love and life. For love is quite precisely that force by which violence is reckoned; and vice versa: violence is quite precisely that force by which love is reckoned. As Fiona Jenkins puts it in a recent commentary on Butler, violence, appears here as that which bears a perverse kind of witness to the vulnerability [and love] it exploits (2007: 162). If holding with this logic, the adults decision to abuse the childs love, as much as it can be read as decision (and certainly Butler does figure the act of violence as a wilful one) is testimony to that love, even as it is a violation of it. It is not that love confuses the ways in which we read violence, as Herman would argue, but as a reading of violence, love makes Hermans position impossible. There is no way of separating violence from love (and sexual desire), no way of ensuring that love is not compromised by violence for it to be love ( -- as its constitutive outside love must carry the trace of violence, must know violence). In other words, there is no way that the childs love can figure as unconditional love, for violence is its condition of possibility. For Butler, we love and violate by the same terms, terms equal to all, if not equally binding. But this is not the most important conclusion to be drawn from Butlers thinking, for what is significant above all is how we are, for each other, so terribly and forever real. Indeed, what is key here is just how real the child must be for the adult, always asking of the adult who are you?, as Butler insists we always ask (2004b: 35). If Butler is taken for a theorist responsible for turning the vitalism of life into the stuff of arid discourse, then she has been gravely mistaken. There is perhaps no other feminist theorist responsible for having life fraught with the intimacy of love and sexual desire, with violent questions and answers. This is a very different to picture to the one offered by Herman. Since for Herman, the adult is not provoked by the childs love, and certainly not moved to violence in the way inferred by Butlers logic. Put conversely, the child means surprisingly little to the perpetrator, and asking it would seem even less; and certainly this is born out by testimony underpinning Wards project. In a sense not done justice by Butlers logic, the adult really does not care for the childs love, choosing instead to act

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on a decision. There is no love lost, and it is this insight I suggest that requires us to restate the character of exploitation, violence and trauma. Indeed, if we admit how often violence triumphs, becoming more often not its own condition of possibility such that victims are willing in a sense not meant by Butler, or understood by Herman, we might concede an unconditional violence, a violence that cannot be derived from its opposite (Arendt 1970 [1969]: 56). There is no love born of violence, and no violence born of innocence. To imagine otherwise is a comforting myth by which we hope that daughters might mean more to their fathers. Incest is a banal reality (with all that Arendt meant by that term) and it is not served by turning it into a family romance, or a Hegelian play of violent struggle. Whatever violence is, it constitutes a radical, if unannounced, rupture, the name and nature of which is beyond representation and which, as Butlers acknowledges in respect of Caruths work, puts the knowability of truth into an enduring crisis (2004: 156-7). Unfortunately and despite her own counsel (what remains crucial is a form of reading that does not find the truth of what happened (ibid.:156)), Butler ends up turning a crisis into a drama and an old one at that. Violence is not personal, and incest is not a question of love. What has love got to do with it? In short: nothing.

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Bibliography Bennett, J. (2005) Empathic Vision: Affect, Trauma and Contemporary Art, Stanford CA: Stanford University Press. Butler, J. (1997) The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection, Stanford CA: Stanford University Press. Butler, J. (2004a) Precarious Life: The Powers of Violence and Mourning, London: Verso. Butler, J. (2004b) Undoing Gender, London and New York: Routledge. Butler, J. (2005) Giving an Account of Oneself, New York: Fordham University Press. Caruth, C. (1995) (ed.) Trauma: Explorations in Memory, Baltimore and London: John Hopkins University Press. Herman, J. (1981) Father-Daughter Incest, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Herman, J. (1992) Trauma and Recovery, London: Pandora. Jenkins, F. (2007) Toward a Nonviolent Ethics, differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, Volume 18, Number 2, 157-179. Leys, R. (2000) Trauma: A Genealogy, Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press. Mardorossian, C. (2001) Toward a New Theory of Rape, Signs. Journal of Women in Culture and Society, Vol. 27, No. 3: 743-775. Masson, J. (1984) The Assault on Truth: Freud and Child Sexual Abuse, London: Fontana. Scott, A. (1988) Feminism and the Seductiveness of the Real Event, Feminist Review, 28 (Spring), p. 88-102. Ward, E. (1984) Father-Daughter Rape, London: Womens Press.

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