Social-Political Resiliency and Unthought Knowns

In this article, an emended version of Christopher Bollas’s notion of “unthought known” provides an explanation for social-political resiliency in the face of systemic oppression and marginalization. The argument is that the unthought known emerges within the context of reliable, good-enough parental attunement in relation to infants’ assertions, which are organized pre-symbolically. These semiotic organizations of unthought knowns comprise embodied senses of self-esteem, self-confidence, and self-respect, which are essential to infants’ burgeoning agency necessary for proto-conversations—speaking and acting together—with caregivers and corresponding semiotic experiences of rapport. These unthought knowns, which later become entwined with more complex, symbolically organized experiences related to good-enough interactions with caring others, function later in childhood and adulthood as a source of social-political (individual and collective) resilience in the face of oppression and marginalization. This resilience can be further understood as rendering inoperative the social-political apparatuses that produce political and economic forms of marginalization.