Neither Victim nor Survivor

Thinking toward a New Humanity

By (author) Marilyn Nissim-Sabat

Publication date:

16 July 2009

Length of book:

232 pages

Publisher

Lexington Books

Dimensions:

240x162mm
6x9"

ISBN-13: 9780739128220

In Neither Victim nor Survivor: Thinking toward a New Humanity, Marilyn Nissim-Sabat offers a comprehensive critique of the interrelated concepts of "victim" and "survivor" as they have been ideologically distorted in Western thought. Framed by the phenomenological perspective of Edmund Husserl, Nissim-Sabat carries out her argument through an intense engagement with current scholarly work on Toni Morrison's Beloved, Sophocles' Antigone, akrasia, psychoanalysis, critical race theory, feminist philosophy of science, and Marxism.

Nissim-Sabat ultimately proposes that a new consciousness, enabled by the phenomenological attitude, of the way in which ideological distortion of the concepts of 'victim' and 'survivor' helps to perpetuate victimization will empower us to find ways to end victimization and its anti-human consequences. The book's interdisciplinary approach will make it appealing to a broad range of students and scholars alike.

Chapter 1 Foreword
Chapter 2 Introduction
Chapter 3 Chapter 1: What is a Victim?
Chapter 4 Chapter 2: Freud, Gender, and the Epigenesis of Morality: A Critique
Chapter 5 Chapter 3: The Crisis in Psychoanalysis: Resolution Through Husserlian Phenomenology and Feminism
Chapter 6 Chapter 4: Addictions, Akrasia, and Self Psychology: A Socratic and Psychoanalytic View of Akrasia as Victim Blaming.
Chapter 7 Chapter 5: Fanon, Phenomenology, And the Decentering Of Philosophy: Lewis Gordon's Her Majesty's Other Children: Sketches of Racism From a Neocolonial Age
Chapter 8 Chapter 6: Race And Culture: Victim Blaming in Psychology, Psychiatry, and Psychoanalysis
Chapter 9 Chapter 7: Autonomy, Empathy, and Transcendence in Sophocles' Antigone, with an Epilogue: On Lacan's Antigone
Chapter 10 Chapter 8: Neither Victim Nor Survivor Be: Who Is Beloved's Baby?

With compassion and rigor, Marilyn Nissim-Sabat offers unprecedented insight into victim blaming. By intervening in postmodern philosophical trends and inaugurating a paradigm shift in psychoanalytic theory, she shows that even liberal theoreticians, clinicians, and activists confine the victims of history to mere survival and undermine the humanistic and transcendental ideal of human flourishing. This book is a must-read for philosophers, psychoanalysts and therapists, feminists and critical race theorists.