Today’s post begins the draft of the next chapter of what I eventually plan to be a book on philosophy and trauma. I am calling the chapter begun below “Trauma and Repesentation II: The Image of Sovereignty.” It is meant to form a pair with the preceding chapter, called “Trauma and Representation I: The Sovereignty of the Image.”
* * * * *
Trauma and Representation II: The Image of Sovereignty
Modern political theory—whether in the form of the “social contract” theories in the tradition of classic liberalism from Thomas Hobbes and Jean Jacques Rousseau in the seventeenth century to John Rawls in the twentieth, or in the form of reactions against liberalism, especially in such decisionistic theories as, emblematically, that of right-wing twentieth century legal theorist Carl Schmitt –consistently grounds sovereignty in trauma. Like the great, ancient myths of cosmic creation, in both its social-contract its decisionistic forms, modern political theory tells a story in accordance with which evil is older than good. Evil is there at the very beginning. Or, rather, it is there even before the beginning, at least if the beginning is taken to mean the point at which the story of modern sovereignty starts to be told.
In turn, the story of the emergence, expansion, and eventual crisis of sovereignty in the modern form, the very sovereignty for which both social contract and decisionistic theorists attempt to provide rational grounds, is inseparable from the story of the nation-state in its rise, development, and eventual decline, or at least apparent decline, in the face of the spread of global capitalism. Trauma is no less there at the very beginning of the nation-state than it is at the beginning of modern sovereignty. It is to the former, the inaugural, inaugurating relationship between trauma and the idea of the nation that I will turn first in this chapter.
Founding Trauma and the Birth of the Nation
In “Notes on the Memory Boom: War, Remembrance and the Uses of the Past,” one of the essays in the collection Memory, Trauma, and World Politics, edited by Duncan Bell (New York: Pallgrave Macmillan, 2006, pages 58-59), historian Jay Winter quotes Ernst Renan, from a series of lectures Renan gave in Paris in 1882, entitled “What is a nation?” Renan answers his own question as follows:
A nation is a soul, a spiritual principle. Two things, which, in truth, are really one, constitute this soul, this spiritual principle. One is in the past, the other in the present. One is the possessing in common of a rich legacy of memories, the other is the present-day consent, the desire to live together, the will to continue to value the individual heritage one has received . . . To have the glory of the past in common, a shared will in the present; to have done great deeds together, and want to do more of them, are the essential conditions for the constitution of a people . . . One loves the house which one has built and passes on.
“Such ideas and images were commonplace in late nineteenth century Europe,” comments Winter on that passage from Renan. “What was much newer,” he continues, “were powerful means to disseminate them.” According to Winter, in the 19th century “[w]riters on memory reached a much wider audience than ever before,” precisely because “[t]he expansion of the print trade, the art market, the leisure industry, and the mass circulation press allied to developments first in photography and then in cinematography, created powerful conduits for the dissemination of texts, images and narratives of the past in every part of Europe and beyond.”
At any rate, at least when they relate to what Indian psychoanalyst Sudhir Kakar calls “founding traumas,” an idea which I will discuss in more detail shortly, the sorts of “collective” or “community” memories at issue in Renan’s original remarks and in Winter’s reflections on those remarks become falsifying memories in a special sense that sets them apart from the sort of “screen memories” discussed in the preceding chapter, and most especially from the sorts of memories that come under attack by the proponents of so called “false memory syndrome.” Unlike screen memories or those at issue in the controversy around “false memory syndrome,” the sorts of “memories” Renan spoke about in 1882 are based on and involve the manipulation of memories of trauma and of the emotions those memories can trigger—a manipulation for some purpose formulated by the manipulator, however “collective” that manipulator may be, and irrespective of whether the manipulation is deliberate or not.
For ease of reference, I will call the sorts of memories—or at least the sorts of images that give themselves out as memories—with which Renan was concerned “national” memories, because of the role Renan and others attribute to them, the role of being midwives to the births of nations. In contrast to such national memories, screen memories, properly so called, issue from trauma itself, as part of the mechanism of repression. As I discussed in the preceding chapter, such memories “screen” in the double sense of (1) hiding or covering- over, while at the same time (2) providing a surface, as it were, upon which trauma may project and thereby reveal itself.
Sometimes, paradoxically, and as was also touched upon in the preceding chapter, the very phenomenon of a sort of hyper-real image of a traumatic occurrence compulsively recurs to those who have been traumatized. Such recurrence of such images is, in fact, a common sign of the “dissociation” so often reported as accompanying traumatic experiences. Such hyper-real images, however, do not constitute a counter-example to screen memories. Rather, as compulsively recurring yet in all their recurrence remaining inseparable from dissociation, they continue, precisely as hyper-real, to fulfill the double role of screen memories, by both masking and indicating, at one and the same time, the underlying trauma, serving the overall process of the “repression” of the trauma at issue. What gets effectively masked by the hyper-reality of the images is the very traumatic—the disturbing, emotion-ladened—character of the traumatic event they present themselves as imaging. The very vividness of the images, their being so real and more than real, fosters the dissociation whereby one remains blinded and numbed in the face of what otherwise would be, or is at least feared to be, altogether overwhelming.
The key distinction that needs to be drawn here is that between repressing the trauma and manipulating it. Therein lies the difference between screen memories, on the one side, and national memories on the other. To be precise, the differentiation at issue need not involve two different sets of images. Rather, one and the same image can come to serve both masters. That is, one and the same image—let it be an image of two people holding hands and jumping to their deaths from the Twin Towers on the morning of Septmeber 11, 2001, after the attacks took place—can serve as a screen memory when it vividly and compulsively recurs to someone who was traumatized by the attacks on the Towers; but it can also serve at the same time as something to be directly and even cynically manipulated, say by a politician with a vested interest in using it to justify pursuing a “war on terror.”
Trauma memories that are supposedly “false”, in the sense at issue in so called “false memory syndrome,” are more properly viewed as a form of “screen” memory in the double sense of simultaneously hiding a traumatic event yet providing a surface upon which what is so hidden can project and thereby reveal itself. So, too, are the supposedly “accurate,” hyper-real memory images that recur, for example, in nightmares or “flashbacks” experienced by those who have been traumatized.
The sort of collective memory—or collective use of memory, if one is dealing with such an example of one and the same image functioning in two different yet interconnected ways, only one of which ways is that of “collective memory”–Renan describes, however, is not any such “screen.” Rather, it is manufactured as a supposedly collective memory, through a process of production involving the manipulation of trauma and the images of it for external ends of the manipulator.
It should come as no surprise to anyone who has read to this point that I consider the use of the images of 9/11 for the sake of justifying the American invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq to be examples of just such manufacturing and manipulation of supposedly collective images. However, for my purposes here it does not matter whether I am right in that judgment or not. All that matters is that the conceptual distinction between the two very different possible ways of deploying a memory image, or at least of what presents itself or is presented as a memory image, in relation to trauma be granted. That is, all I ask here is that one understand the difference between a memory image (or even pseudo-memory image, if one likes) that functions both to conceal and to reveal, at one and the same time, a trauma undergone by the person to whom that image occurs, on the one hand, and, on the other, the manipulation, consciously or unconsciously, of an image of trauma and of the fear and insecurity engendered by it, to achieve goals of the manipulator external to the processes of traumatization itself.
The latter, the at least unconscious manipulative use of images of trauma and the emotions those images trigger for the sake of creating, sustaining, and heightening collective identity, is central to what Sudhir Kakar calls “founding traumas” in The Colors of Violence: Cultural Identities, Religion, and Conflict (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), an insightful and influential analysis of Hindu-Muslim violence in his native India. Especially important for my purposes here is Kakar’s idea of how such “founding traumas” function in establishing religion-based cultural identities in conflict with other such identities based on the very same “founding trauma,” only vastly differently interpreted. To give another example to add to his own Indian one, I would argue that it is easy to discern just such a shared “founding trauma” differently interpreted at work in the way “September 11, 2001,” functions in the conflictual genesis of both Arab “Jihadist” and American “anti-terrorist” extremist identities. At any rate, what Kakar has to say about Hindu-Muslim violence in India clearly has relevance for the analysis of other cases elsewhere as well.
From my perspective–which considerably overlaps Kakar’s own, in my judgment—it is important to make explicit that the (no doubt largely “unconscious”) use of trauma to serve as the foundation for such religious/cultural identity formation as Kakar addresses is actually a matter of the manipulative avoidance of trauma, as opposed both to the dissociative repression of trauma and to the potentially healing overcoming of that repression in subsequent processing. It is, in short, a coercive move to block trauma from traumatizing–and, therefore, a reactionary effort at forestalling the transformative and healing action that can occur only through letting such traumatization work itself through.
“Cultural identity, like its individual counterpart,” writes Kakar (page 150), “is an unconscious human acquirement which becomes consciously salient only when there is a perceived threat to its integrity. Identity, both individual and collective, lives itself for the most part, unfettered and unworried by obsessive and excessive scrutiny.” Yet what if identity, either cultural or individual, is itself something that must, so to speak, be struck in the first place–in the same sense as one “strikes” (that is, mints) a coin–by the trauma at issue, such that the appearance of identity having already been there all along (but only “unconsciously,” as “lived”) becomes visible as a fiction: a fiction founding identity, a founding fiction that itself forms identity in the first place?
Kakar himself, it seems to me, touches on something of the sort when, after making the remark cited above, he immediately continues as follows: “Everyday living incorporates a zone of indifference with regard to one’s culture, including one’s language, ethnic origin, or religion.” What is such indifference, if it is not indifference toward one’s “cultural identity”? And if it is that, then it would be an indifference toward, precisely, an “identity” not one’s own, which is to say an identity that is, paradoxically, not one’s identity at all. Then only in and as reaction to trauma would any “cultural identity,” any self-identification, any identifying of one’s self with one’s “culture,” form–get cast or created: fictioned in the original sense of that term–at all. Then “cultural identity”–or, for that matter, even “individual identity”–would be a reactive formation designed to ward off the “founding” trauma at issue. And then, too, only the collapse of that reaction, that reactive formation or fiction, would at last let the trauma traumatize: let the truth that flashes there “materialize.”