TY - JOUR AU - Berlant, Lauren PY - 2014/06/01 Y2 - 2024/03/29 TI - She’s Having an Episode: Patricia Williams and the Writing of Damaged Life JF - Columbia Journal of Gender and Law JA - CJGL VL - 27 IS - 1 SE - Articles DO - 10.7916/cjgl.v27i1.2697 UR - https://journals.library.columbia.edu/index.php/cjgl/article/view/2697 SP - AB - <p>About a work as intense and theatrical as this one, it might be odd to claim that<em>&nbsp;On Being&nbsp;the Object of Property</em>&nbsp;struggles with exemplarity by dedramatizing narrative into episode, epic into moment, and structure into gestures that convey intensities of need for the world&nbsp;to be a certain way. But this diminishing process—the episode as cooling chamber—is key to the work’s aesthetic, political, and ethical ambition to give subordinated bodies in the &nbsp;present a shot at not having the past reproduced in the contemporary nervous system. The&nbsp;interruption by aesthetic virtuality, by counter-form, is key to her strategy—not method—here. (It is not a method insofar as it is inimitable, not-prescriptive, and creative.) But the essay is not only affirmative about the process of aggressively remediating the world.&nbsp;For the labor of imagining a way to build a better good life out of the space of converged negativities and tender attachments is terribly costly, affectively. “As if a slaved or owned psyche could ever be reconciled with mental health,” Williams writes with dry, ironic flatness, noting additionally that cohabiting with her knowledges induces “a schizophrenia of biblical dimension . . . with all the baggage that that connotes.”</p> ER -