Giving Death to the Production of Knowledge: Collective Resistance through Testimony
Abstract
This thesis describes the structures an institution, specifically the university, deploys to absorb testimonies of violence in order to strengthen its existing policies, norms, and operations. I consider testimonies by survivors of sexual violence, who demand the end of the current order of the university and its existing policies. Some of these structures are symbolic exchange, the production of knowledge, the logic of repression and liberation, and the work of mourning. I suggest these discursive structures protect the existing boundaries of universities while lending them the authority to speak on behalf of survivors. Therefore, rather than engage in an archeology of violence (creating an archive of violence by speaking on behalf of survivors), this thesis determines the basis for immediate collective action by engaging with Jacques Derrida’s The Gift of Death as well as Derrida’s consideration of the specter in Specters of Marx. I argue that these texts contain collective possibilities for destroying the subject/other dichotomy that positions the subject to know the extent of another’s wounds, to speak in their place, or to offer compensation to them. Moving beyond this dichotomy, I argue that the gift of death signifies a collective space of resistance. By challenging the university’s existing functions of exchange in order to reconstitute how it absorbs testimonies of sexual abuse, this space ensures that those who testify will be listened to and acted for immediately.