Abject Sociology and the Social Life of Testimony

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  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 8

Abstract

Testimonies of abjection, specifically those emergent in the wake of recent war and genocide in Gaza and Sudan, are treated in this paper as a limit case to sociological inquiry of abjection and suffering. Drawing on Adorno’s Negative Dialectics, I critique the implicit Concept Fetishism in sociological examination of abject testimonies. I define the fetishism as the tendency to treat the category (the "Concept") of refugee, survivor, victim, as identical with the lived experience of abjection it aims to render intelligible. I ask about the the unclassifiable experience, the 'excess' that rejects conceptualization, and argue that the problem with testimonies of abjection lies not in a crisis of intelligibility, but in the demand that concepts must stand for experience as a whole: a total and complete identification. I argue that sociology itself is at risk of this fetishism. By successfully "theorizing" abjection, we risk fully assimilating the "excess" of suffering into sociological intelligibility or ignoring it altogether, thereby replicating the erasure we seek to critique. This realization invites us to rethink sociology. It is no longer a science that understands human experience; it is the science that explores its limits of rendering human experience intelligible.

Author

• Ibtesam Al-Atiyat, St. Olaf College