Prof. Michael Salter

This is a hybrid event, held both in-person and online. To watch online: https://uni-sydney.zoom.us/j/84469195427

Title

The antiepistemology of violation and our capacity not to know about human malevolence

Abstract

Recent allegations of sexual abuse in the early childcare sector have been attended by claims that each case, and each offender, is the “worst” the country has ever known. And yet the multitude of such cases, stretching back several decades now, suggests that the exceptionalism attributed to certain forms of sexual violation is symptomatic of a communal refusal to remember or know about them. This paper draws on Susan Grand’s concept of a “malignant dissociative contagion” to consider how sadism triggers a collective dissociative response that perpetuates the conditions for such malevolence. Object relations theory provides a framework for the “anti-epistemology” of malevolence, in which bystanders and the community collude with perpetrators in a shared intolerance for the primal vulnerability of…