Living Prior Being

Abstract

This chapter aims to think with and through abortions as phenomena that are deeply entangled with experiences of vulnerability and dependency. It will argue that in order for abortions to be understood and as such accepted as part of human life, a pro-abortions politics is needed that does not require a further strengthening of the idea of the sovereign subject but rather an acknowledgement of its precarious existence. Abortions are a justified and often existential necessity to preserve the subject, yet paradoxically culminate in experiences of the subject’s limits and undoing.

In a second step, the chapter further shows that as events, which sit at the intersection of life and death, abortions require and produce different epistemological conditions, or different ways of knowing and thinking. To be understood and to have an effect on how communal life is regulated, experiences of abortions, I argue, require a psychosocial lens, which pays close attention to the aesthetic and conceptual convolutions of particular experiences and which draws on artistic and trans-disciplinary tools to unpack their meaning in the context of specific sites and times. I therefore examine the experience of abortions along with Tracey Emin’s artwork How it Feels (1996). I read images and thoughts produced by this artwork in relation to personal and conceptual accounts of so-called entangled organisms, and demonstrate how the experiential structure characterizing abortions is akin to artistic events and an artistic form of knowledge, which I call the knowledge of enigma.