Living Against and Persistence of Being: Poetic Sharing of Being Sensitive Within Antagonistic Worlds

Abstract

The lived reality of people with a special liminality for enacting sensorial responses to stimuli is linked to so-called highly sensitive persons. Here, rather than looking at high sensitivity as a diagnostic label, the authors explore the poetic experience of being highly sensitive and growing up in a semiosphere marked by social directions and values that establish potentially antagonistic vectors. The analysis is based on diary entries shared by two friends, focusing on the affective-semiotic strategies constructed to cope with ambivalent and antagonistic cultural orientations—namely, those ones established by racism against African descendants, in two countries. The results are discussed through the concept of living against, defined as the development of positionings and strategies to favor the persistence of being.