Neither Victim nor Survivor: Thinking Toward a New Humanity

Author(s): Marilyn Nissim-Sabat
Release Date: Jul 16, 2009
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN-10: 0739128221
ISBN-13: 978-0739128220
Buy from Amazon

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.

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. (Patricia Huntington, Arizona State University)

The slow, careful, and committed reader will be rewarded by thoughtful arguments that add to the debate and address very real and important issues in the care we give to others. (Metapsychology Online)

Neither Victim nor Survivor is useful particularly as an intervention into the discourse about the concepts of victim and survivor, and is of special interest to those who may share Nissim-Sabat’s passionate commitment to developing phenomenological psychoanalysis. (Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy)