Autø/gnøsis: Articulating and Affirming Borderline Experience and its Knowledges

Work undertaken to combat the stigma of Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) can often reproduce the clinical gaze, leading to cultural representations that confine borderline experience to a symbiotic relationship with the DSM. Drawing on my own lived experience with a BPD diagnosis, I think through alternative ways of knowing and affirming borderline experience beyond the clinical. I argue that BPD is just one of many ways of making meaning from borderline experience, one where that experience is read as a set of symptoms of pathology, while other valuable meanings remain under-explored. Building on the concept of counter-diagnosis (Price, 2009), I have developed a methodology I call autø/gnøsis. Autø/gnøsis thinks from and with borderline selves and knowledges, while acknowledging the shifting, unsteady void at the centre of these concepts. Through my diffractive readings (Barad) of the Netflix series Russian Doll (2019), the work of Argentine poet Alejandra Pizarnik (1936-1972), and the late novels of Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector (1920-1977), I think through how borderline experience might produce the knowledge of a diagnostician, a philosopher, and a mystic. I consider how borderline knowledge might draw on queer temporalities, orientations, and perceptions to challenge clinical, social, and epistemological norms. Speaking about mad experience can often create a sense of being in a jar, on display for the eyes of the curious. I aim to show that borderline experience has significant value beyond pathology and spectacle. Ultimately this thesis both argues for and demonstrates the meaningful impact an autø/gnøstic approach could have on those who live with borderline experience as well as on the wider social and epistemological landscape.