The ultimate violation

Two writers -- a philosopher and a working-class Southern man -- describe the horror of violent rape and their long journeys back from darkness.

By Charles Taylor

May 8, 2002 | Of all violent crime, why is it that rape strikes so many of us as particularly horrible? One of the reasons, as Susan J. Brison says in her book "Aftermath: Violence and the Remaking of the Self," is that rape is a form of torture. It's a crime whose purpose is always to inflict suffering. And because it's inflicted on parts of our body that we associate with emotional and physical closeness and pleasure it seems especially cruel.

How do people survive a crime that aims to annihilate their identity? Does a person who is trained in logic have an easier time in making sense of that violation? Can you make sense of it at all? For Brison, a Dartmouth philosophy professor, the answer to the second question is no. The answer to the third isn't so clear.

Ten years ago, Brison, a Dartmouth philosophy professor, was attacked while on vacation in France and left for dead: Her attacker strangled her twice and hit her on the forehead with a rock. She survived; her attacker was apprehended almost immediately and convicted and sentenced to 10 years in prison. After struggling with depression, including days spent so shellshocked and/or tranquilized she could barely get out of bed, Brison is living her life with remarkable strength. She has written and lectured on her experiences, gotten involved with anti-rape activism, and she and her husband Tom have had a son.

"Aftermath" is her attempt to write about her experience within her discipline. She intends the book to be both a first-person account of her rape and its aftermath and an investigation into the philosophy of trauma. She sums up the conflict between those aims by quoting Bertrand Russell, who championed "the abstract and universal knowledge into which the accidents of private history do not enter" -- in other words, what Russell saw as the emotional detachment necessary for philosophy.

But to Brison, the idea that you can separate your experience and its effects on your identity from your apprehension of the world is impossible. As a feminist philosopher, she valued the way experience shaped someone's worldview before she was attacked. Her own rape has only intensified that conviction. She sums up her approach by quoting Nietzsche's statement that every great philosophy is "the personal confession of its author and a kind of involuntary and unconscious memoir."

She's not wrong. Still, that doesn't save "Aftermath" from being conflicted, from lapses of logic in its arguments. (The weakest point is when Brison claims rape victims share the same status as Holocaust survivors.) And how could it be any other way? If any idea comes through strongly in "Aftermath" it's the subjectivity of trauma. Brison doesn't even have the sliver of comfort available to combat veterans or the survivors of last September's terrorist attacks, that is, the ability to know that someone has shared the exact same event you went through.

However, Brison is wrong when she relates the well-intentioned, ineffectual words of compassion she hears from her family and friends as proof that society doesn't care about victims. The hardest thing to do when someone you love has been traumatized is to express your concern in a way that is adequate to their experience -- without piling your own anguish on top of what the person is already suffering. (It's not a failure of compassion but a limit to our imaginations.)

Perhaps unconsciously, though, Brison's anecdotes get at the gulf that opens between a trauma victim and people she once considered to be her most intimate friends. Who could argue that anyone but Brison (or another survivor of as vicious an attack) could grasp what she went through? In terms of philosophy, however, that subjectivity inadvertently winds up supporting Bertrand Russell's appeal for "abstract and universal knowledge." I'm afraid that the intense personal nature of Brison's suffering doesn't suit the rigorous logic required of philosophy, even philosophy grounded in personal experience.

Though they are often presented in a thicket of academese, there are cogent points to be found in "Aftermath." I was particularly interested in Brison's discussion of posttraumatic stress disorder. Brison notes that some feminist writers have held that a diagnosis of that disorder for rape victims is merely a means of turning a woman into a victim all over again. It suggests, they claim, that there is something wrong with women's responses to rape. Brison disagrees. For her, being able to identify the symptoms of PTSD in herself, and being able to control those symptoms with drugs, meant that the depression and fear and zonked-out feeling that followed her attack were not just "in her head," not something she could shake by bucking up and getting on with life. The implication seems to be that rape victims are still, to some extent, thought of in the way that manic-depressives were thought of not that long ago: as people too weak to deal with their problems. For Brison, PTSD is a "mechanical" problem in that it can be treated.

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