ABSTRACT
Retracing the tropological history of the wound and the scar in modern philosophy, Jack Reynolds has noticed a significant shift in the prevailing rhetorics from Hegel and the phenomenologists to post-phenomenology. With remarkable consonance, Kennedy's story thematises "the wound that refuses mediation and recuperation" as something foreign to "those who scratch at their sores—the creatures of bitterness and ressentiment". The wounding analogy between duelling and the potential for injury carried by any authentic encounter with the other underscores the novel's "exercise in love". Its trajectory would seem to affirm "the necessity of a theory of love" lived out as the deliberate shattering of the individual self. Kennedy's third novel, Everything You Need, further expands the imaginative scope of her engagement with the masochistic ethics and aesthetics of the wound through what Victor Sage has effectively called "the 'visceral' aspect of the writing".
