All trauma is characterized by what Freud labeled “latency” (Nachträgichkeit).  That is, to put it paradoxically, traumas don’t happen when they happen, but only happen sometime later, belatedly, after a period during which things seem to have returned to normal, leaving everything intact.  In effect, it takes time for trauma to sink in—for the wounding cut to go deep enough to be felt, the traumatic shock to be registered.  Freud’s classic example is of someone who appears to go through a railroad accident unscathed, but who later, some time after the accident, begins to show signs of its impact, signs in the form of symptoms, such as nervous tics, nightmares, or the like.

It is in the form of such symptoms that what Freud called “the return of the repressed” first manifests itself.  Even after such initial, symptomatic manifestation, however, it takes yet more time before the symptoms become severe enough—if they ever do—to bring the trauma survivor finally to address the trauma directly, as must occur to make recovery, in any significant sense, possible.

This two-stage latency period has no set duration.  It lasts for different stretches of time from one trauma–or trauma sufferer, if the trauma strikes more than one person–to another.  Sometimes, it may last for years.   Indeed–and however counter-intuitive it may sound to say so–the greater the trauma, the longer the latency period may become.

Today, ten years after the calendar date of September 11, 2001, we are still in the latency period for the trauma that bears that date as its name.   Insofar as trauma can be said truly to have “happened” only once the latency period has passed, it is still the case today, even ten years after 9/11/01, that “9/11/01” has not happened yet.  Furthermore, since recovery from “9/11,” in any meaningful sense, can only begin once it has happened, we can only pray, to borrow a line from former President George W. Bush, “Bring it on!”

It seems to me that there is some ground for hope that our prayer to that effect is finally beginning to be answered.  That is, there is some evidence, in my judgment, that we are beginning to pass from the stage where the repressed returns only indirectly, in the form of symptoms, to the second stage, in which it returns directly, to face us–and we it.  At least I have begun to have some hope with regard to that possibility.

A sense of such hope came to me this morning, the very morning of the tenth anniversary of September 11, 2001, while reading the two daily newspapers I routinely read on Sundays—the New York Times and the Denver Post .  I will begin with the former, as I always do in my Sunday morning reading.

In the leading column of the opinion section of the New York Times for today, under the title “And Hate Begat Hate,” Pakistani journalist Ahmed Rashid writes that it is now Pakistanis and Afghans, especially, who are asking the question that, according to him, “Americans frequently asked” (I think he’s being overly optimistic about the frequency, by the way) right after 9/11/01, the question, “Why do they hate us so much?”  Just who“they” were for the Americans who asked that question ten years ago, Rashid writes, was never exactly clear (“Muslims, Arabs, or simply anyone who was not American”?).  However, who “they” are when the same question asked by Pakistanis and Afghans today, ten years later, is all too clear, at least to the Pakistanis and Afghans doing the asking.  For Pakistanis and Afghans today, the “they” is “Americans.”  After ten years of disastrous war waged by America in their two countries, ten years of failure to build “democracy”–or, for that matter, any other even merely apparently viable institutional political structure—it is hardly surprising that such a reversal of roles between those who ask that question and those about whom the askers ask it should have occurred.  If Americans did not hate Pakistanis and Afghans, then how could one explain what “they,” Americans, have done to both during the last ten years, and are still continuing to do today?

What gives me hope from Rashid’s analysis is not so much that analysis itself, though I find it persuasive overall.  Rather, it is more the fact that such an analysis is being fore-grounded in such a place as the New York Times.  That fact gives me hope because—and only because—it suggests that even Americans are now at last beginning to realize how utterly futile and specifically counter-productive the American reaction to the events of 9/11/01 has so far been.  It suggests that even Americans are now in significant numbers beginning to realize how the whole American reaction so far has tried to avoid facing what happened, or laid claim on happening, on that date—to avoid it, and not to face it.

What laid claim to happen on 9/11/01–as Jean Baudrillard was perhaps the first to see and say with full clarity, not long after that date–is what is also behind yet another thing I read this morning in my Sunday newspapers, another thing that, coupled with Rashid’s analysis, gives me some grounds for hope that the latency period of “September 11, 2001” may be entering its final phase, the phase that alone could presage a genuine recovery from the trauma of that name.  This second piece was in my other Sunday paper, the Denver Post.  It was a line in the lead editorial for the editorial section of today’s Post, just as Rashid’s piece was the lead for the same section of today’s Times.  Relatively early in a long column under the lead of “What Remains from a Lost Decade,” Denver Post columnist Mike Littwin wrote:  “If there’s a legacy from 9/11, it’s the lack of faith in American institutions.”  If Littwin is right, and that is indeed the legacy that it is at last becoming apparent to us Americans we have been bequeathed by “9/11,” then that is good grounds for my hope.

To try to bring out just why that line might give me hope that the latency period of “9/11” may be entering its end-phase, I will couple it with yet another piece I read this morning in the Post –or, actually, in the two-page “Wall Street Journal Sunday” insertion that the Post always includes in its own Sunday business section.  That was a piece by Al Lewis, a columnist for Dow Jones Newswires in Denver.  In his “Al’s Emporium” column for today, Lewis begins by advising President Obama, presumably, “Take this jobs plan and shove it.”   The reason Lewis gives the President such advice is because, as he makes clear in the closing lines of his column, “yet another Washington spending spree,” such as Lewis apparently thinks the jobs plan President Obama delivered in his speech to Congress last Thursday evening to be, is altogether incapable of addressing the truth that Lewis articulates in his next to last sentence.  In that sentence Lewis writes that the contemporary global economic reality is that “[t]he world has devolved into an oligarchy of corporate fiefdoms that decide where the money goes.”

To put the point of my hope for “9/11” as clearly and concisely as I can:  If there is growing awareness today that the global reality today is what Lewis says it is, and that the legacy of “9/11″ is what Littwin says it is, then there is good ground for hope that, at last, Americans are becoming aware that what passes for “politics” today, especially in the United States, but also globally, is altogether irrelevant.  In turn, if that is beginning to become common knowledge—so common that it even appears in the daily newspapers—then “9/11” is finally beginning to emerge from its latency and to complete its happening, since that is the meaning of “9/11,” the message the delivery of which is what really happened–or at least began to happen–that day, ten years ago, on September 11, 2001.  If so, then perhaps we can even at last begin to learn to live after “9/11/01,” rather than once more trying to crawl back into the womb from which we were all expelled on that day.

*  *  *  *  *

Confession of an American Patriot

(Osama bin Laden in Memoriam)

The death of Osama bin Laden reawakened in me, to my own great surprise, a long dormant American patriotism.  That patriotism, however, takes no pride in the success of America in finally killing him–at long last, after nearly a decade’s sustained effort, and at incredible financial, moral, and human expense.  Far from it, as I hope to explain.

After the death of Osama bin Laden was announced, spontaneous public celebrations broke out in the streets of Washington, D. C., and some other cities in the United States.  Many more Americans who did not literally dance in the streets were nevertheless gladdened by the news to varying degrees.  On the other hand, there were at least some Americans, myself included, whose emotional response to the news of bin Laden’s death was altogether different.  It carried no air of celebration but instead came closer, in fact, to despondency—a despondency, in effect, that with his death the door of an important opportunity had somehow been closed.

I want to add immediately, that my despondency had nothing to do with sharing bin Laden’s goals or methods, or in any other way identifying with him positively.  That was not at all the issue.

Nor did my sense of despondency in the face of bin Laden’s death have anything to do with his death closing the door on the possibility of any sort of eventual “reconciliation” between him, or at least those around the world for whom he may have stood, to one degree or another, as an expression of their own deep discontent with all they had come to associate with “America,” including any claim to American global hegemony after the end of the Cold War.  I entertain no such idealistic illusions, and that was not the option over the loss of which I felt despondent when I learned bin Laden had been killed.

Finally, coupled with that illusory idea of some such general “reconciliation” being possible, my despondency also had nothing to do with any notion of some sort of American “forgiveness” being eventually extended to bin Laden or what his name had come to represent.  With regard to all such notions of forgiveness, as well as those of reconciliation, I emphatically agree with Auschwitz survivor Jean Améry that there are some crimes and violations that are never to be forgiven, and some loses to which one is never to be reconciled is possible.  In the face of such crimes and such loses, in fact, the very ideas of “forgiveness” and “reconciliation” even become morally offensive.*

At any rate, I do not regard any such forgiveness or reconciliation as a genuine option in the case of al-Qaeda, bin Laden, and September 11.  Rather than being a matter either of some sort of rehabilitation or of some sort of forgiveness, the option I experienced as unfortunately closed off by the killing of bin Laden was a matter precisely of not substituting either of those pseudo-options for genuine healing, but instead insisting on keeping the wound open.  In effect, what I experienced as regrettable was that exactly by killing bin Laden a sham “closure” was put forward as the only possible way to try to “heal” the wounds he, or all that his name had been made to stand for, had inflicted on so many.  What somehow offended me his killing and the celebrations of his death, or at least offended whatever it was in me that, to my own surprise, responded affectively to the news of that death and those celebrations, was the very idea that by the American success in killing him the whole horrible story of “September 11” had somehow been brought closer to some sort of eventual closur.

So far as I was or am able to see, the very idea that such stories ever do end—that such wounds can ever be closed—is what is truly offensive.  Killing bin Laden, given the entire social-historical context in which it took place, perpetrated the lie that the story of what he had done was now at last “over,” or at least nearer to being over than it could ever be if he had not been killed.  In truth, in the most important sense that story will never be over, most certainly and most especially for anyone who genuinely cared for or about those who died on September 11, 2001.  The very idea that there should be some eventual “closure” around the deep wounds opened on that day is a dishonoring of those dead loved ones themselves, in my own conviction.

For me, then, celebrating the death of Osama bin Laden as though that death somehow brings “closure” to the wounds inflicted upon Americans by the attacks he launched against the United States on September 11, 2001, dishonors the very victims of those attacks, and most especially the memory of those who died in them.  Insofar as the success of the American mission to kill bin Laden fosters just such an illusion that we have attained any such “closure” around September 11, 2001, that success effectively shuts and bars the door of opportunity for any genuine healing around the wounds inflicted on so many that day to occur.

Any genuine healing could only come from facing squarely–at long last, nearly a decade later—what September 11, 2001, gave us to face, rather than just continuing to avoid it in one way or another.  However, just such avoidance is exactly what all the official American governmental responses since that day have practiced.  That process, in turn, has not only brought in its train a still ongoing, progressive erosion of all Americans’ civil rights, but has also squandered the international good will towards America that the attacks themselves initially engendered.  Most destructively of all, it has strengthened–as it still continues to this day to do–the very American exclusionary, unilateral particularism that, in the eyes of many around the world who experience themselves as being thereby excluded and “marginalized,” lends an air of legitimacy precisely to such acts as al-Qaeda and bin Laden perpetrated against America on that day, nearly a decade ago now.   It thereby betrays America itself, in its own name.  Objectively considered, it gives aid and comfort to the enemy–and so does celebrating its success.

Some commentators have maintained that the celebrations that broke out in Washington, D. C., and other American cities when the death of Osama bin Laden was announced should be read not so much as ghoulish celebrations of that death itself, but rather as affirmations of American solidarity across all the divisions that all too often and too easily separate us Americans from one another.  In that interpretation, those celebrations of bin Laden’s death are actually the same in intent and meaning as the various spontaneous affirmations of American solidarity after the September 11 attacks—and, for that matter, all the affirmations of solidarity with America on the part of others, such as all the French citizens who enthusiastically agreed with the cover headline “We are all Americans now” that appeared in Le Monde the morning after the attacks.

Surely, such commentators argued, any “objective” assessment of American celebrations at hearing the news of bin Laden’s death must acknowledge that such affirmation of American solidarity was what was really being celebrated, and not anyone’s death as such, not even the well-deserved death of such a terrorist killer as Osama bin Laden.  Surely we should not lose sight of that positive core of such celebrations, in our professed moral abhorrence of dancing on anyone’s grave, no matter how legitimate such abhorrence may be on its own terms.

In fact, I have myself argued along similar lines, especially in my post before this one, the second post in this series of three that I am now completing.  It is important, I there argued, not to confuse rejection of the excesses and other distortions that can so easily emerge in the wake of such events as the French Revolution of 1789 or the recent popular overthrow of the Mubarak dictatorship in Egypt, on the one hand, with rejection of the spontaneous impulse to celebrate the genuinely positive and liberatory aspects at the core of those very same events, on the other.  Such moments of the liberation and positive self-affirmation of peoples truly and loudly do call out for celebration.  We should celebrate them, even and especially when we are careful to reject the negative excesses and distortions that all too often follow such acts of positive liberation.  So I argued, and so I still strongly maintain.

Thus, to use the example at the heart of my preceding post, the legitimacy of the public celebration in the streets of Cairo when the popular Egyptian uprising succeeded in overthrowing Mubarak is not diminished by the fact that television journalist Laura Logan was brutally sexually assaulted by some of the celebrants in the crowds that evening.  Similarly, as Kant observed, the spontaneous upsurge of joy that he and others of like mind experienced when hearing of the French Revolution in 1789 was not invalidated by his horror at the subsequent bloodshed that momentous event occasioned, including that of the Terror.   In sum, to repeat, such moments of liberation as the French Revolution or the popular uprising against Mubarak should be celebrated, and it is important never to lose sight of that fact, even and especially when the event of liberation unleashes subsequent violence that deserves and even demands condemnation.

Accordingly, someone might object to my despondency in the face of the spontaneous celebratory demonstrations with which many Americans greeted the news of the death of Osama bin Laden, isn’t it legitimate and important to celebrate American solidarity and pride in America, even if that celebration is occasioned by news of some death?  Shouldn’t Americans take pride in their country, and be glad to affirm their solidarity with one another as Americans, by celebrating America’s successes after long national efforts?  And isn’t it important always to keep that in mind, even and especially in those cases where Americans themselves find much to criticize in specific American policies and actions?  Wasn’t it just such pride and solidarity that were really being affirmed in the celebrations of bin Laden’s death, as more than one commentator explicitly argued at the time, as already observed?

The analogy, however, does not hold.  The appearance that it does arises from overlooking a crucial difference between the two cases of celebration of the popular uprising against Mubarak and the French Revolution, on the one hand, and that of the celebration of the death of bin Laden, on the other.  The common ground for celebration in the first two cases was joy at the assertion of human freedom through resistance against oppression.  It was the spontaneous upsurge of affirmative feeling toward that assertion that united all the celebrants with one another.  The experience of sharing a strong, important bond with one another, regardless of how close or distant each individually may have been to the scene of the events being celebrated, regardless of how directly or indirectly each was affected by those events, and, finally, regardless of the intensity of the impact of the events on each individual’s personal life, was the very heart and meaning of those two celebrations.  Thus, for example, the feeling of joy and affirmation Kant felt in distant Königsberg, East Prussia, when he heard the news of the French Revolution united him not only with those who had actively revolted in Paris and elsewhere in France, but also with all those other individuals anywhere, known or unknown to Kant, who registered like him the event of the French Revolution in the same sort of spontaneously affirmative affect he experienced himself in the face of that event.  The quick dance of Kant’s heart at the news of the Revolution revealed concretely his membership in the universal human community, the community of all persons anywhere who still have hearts to be affected with joy at the news of any event of human liberation, regardless of where it may be or whom it may directly benefit materially.  In effect, the leaping for joy of Kant’s old heart at the news of the French Revolution was Kant’s declaration that, on the day of the Revolution, that old Prussian Kant was a Frenchman too.

It was that same genuinely universal human community—a community that excludes no one, but is open to all individual human beings without exception—that affirmed itself whenever and wherever someone’s heart leapt for joy, even if only for the briefest instant and with the lowest intensity, at the news of the success of the popular Egyptian uprising against Mubarak.   Such leaps of the heart were affective declarations, at the end of that fine day in which the people of Egypt overthrew Mubarak, of solidarity with those Egyptian people.  It was the declaration by all those so affected that they were all Egyptians now too.

In effect, the French people who celebrated their successful revolt in 1789 invited everyone of good will everywhere to be French too on that now distant day.  The Egyptian people who celebrated their successful revolt in 2011 invited everyone of good will everywhere to be Egyptian too that much more recent day.

In sharp contrast, the Americans who came together with one another to celebrate the death of Osama bin Laden issued a very different invitation.  First of all, the invitation they issues was not one addressed to everyone of good will everywhere, but only to those who, regardless of how good or ill their will might be overall, “identified” with “America,” and who, so identifying, supported the American “war on terror” and the attendant driven, compulsive mission to kill bin Laden that had at last been accomplished, thereby killing the number one American public terrorist of them all, Osama bin Laden himself.

It is, of course, understandable and perfectly reasonable that many Americans may have experienced a sense of relief at the news of bin Laden’s death.   After all, ever since September 11, 2001, American governmental and the mainstream mass media had indeed consistently and dunningly repeated the characterization of   bin Laden as the very personification of evil, fanatic anti-American “terrorism,” and as the very embodiment of everything that threatened American “security.”  To the extent one accepted that depiction, the killing of bin Laden would naturally have brought the sense of relief that invariably comes when one experiences the sudden, unexpected removal of what has long been perceived as a horrible threat.  Nor is it in the least unreasonable or unusual that anyone experiencing such joyous relief would want to join with others who have lived under the same threat to celebrate their common deliverance.

Precisely such spontaneous joy and gratitude for having survived a serious, long term threat is the undeniably legitimate aspect of the celebrations with which many Americans greeted the news of bin Laden’s death.  To that degree, in fact, those celebrations belong to the same general category as do spontaneous celebrations at surviving some natural catastrophe such as a hurricane or a tsunami.   They do not, however, belong to the same category as do such celebrations of newly gained liberty and assertion of common human dignity as took place in Cairo at the overthrow of Mubarak.

Even more importantly, joy at surviving a shared threat or catastrophe, and affirmation of solidarity with all other survivors, near or far, does not as such exclude anyone.  Rather, it invites even those who were not directly threatened to celebrate with and for those survivors who were directly affected, and to experience solidarity with them.  To that degree, such celebrations at sheer survival are indeed like those in which it is liberty and resistance to oppression that are celebrated, insofar as celebrations of both kinds foster the same sense of genuinely universal human community.  To just that same degree, however, celebrations at surviving threat or catastrophe as such have nothing to do with forging exclusionary nationalistic bonds, or exclusionary bonds of any sort, for that matter.  Insofar as they come to be used for such purposes, they get co-opted and badly distorted by external forces.

That is exactly what happened in the case of the perfectly reasonable relief—perfectly reasonable within the context of nearly a decade’s worth of dunning propaganda whipping up feelings of threat and danger in connection with his very name–that many Americans and friends or allies of America around the world experienced at hearing of the death of bin Laden.    Thanks in large part to that very same propaganda, that spontaneous sense of relief was distorted away from its own inherent tendency to breach borders and boundaries, and diverted into serving further to rigidify an exclusive sense of American entitlement.

It is at this point that I can at last come back to where I began this long post.  That is, I am now in position to explain why it was the very news that bin Laden had been killed that reawakened me, to my own surprise, to patriotism and pride in America.   Years of anger and shame at official American governmental actions and policies had managed to bury that patriotism and pride so deeply that I did not really think I still had any of it, until my visceral reaction to the news of bin Laden’s death made me realize it was indeed still there.

It lay, in fact, at the heart of the unexpected mix of despondency for an option squandered, on the one hand, and anger in the face of so many Americans celebrating gleefully, on the other, that spontaneously arose in me when I opened the daily paper on the morning after the announcement that bin Laden had been killed, and saw the headline proclaiming him dead coupled with a picture of the gleeful celebrants who had gathered outside the Whitehouse after that announcement.

Though I was not able to articulate it clearly to myself at that same moment, later reflection showed me that what was surfacing in the mix of despondency and anger I felt then was precisely my long buried American patriotism.  My anger, especially, was directed, not at those Americans who had spontaneously celebrated bin Laden’s death, but rather at how deeply the official American governmental response to September 11, 2001, a response encapsulated in the killing of bin Laden, and the gleeful celebrations the announced success of the long (and long frustrated) American mission to kill him, actually defiled America, in America’s very name, and then compounded the offense by duping Americans into celebrating that very defilement.

My despondency, in turn, was over the lost opportunity for America to live up to its own promise—despondency, in effect, at America’s betrayal of its own best self.  In turn, how deeply and viscerally that defilement and that betrayal, to my own great surprise, still moved me bore testimony to the continued strength, despite everything, of my underlying self-identification as an American.

Put just a bit differently, what hit me that morning was exactly how contrary the fanatical mission against bin Laden and the whole fanatical “war on terror” really was to everything I had been taught from my very birth to expect of my own country.  It ran flatly and egregiously contrary most especially to my own country, America, precisely because that very country had been founded in the first place in the very name of universal human dignity and freedom.  So, at least, I had been taught.  I was struck viscerally that morning–and only later, upon reflection, intellectually–by how truly unpatriotic the whole compulsive mission to kill Osama bin Laden, and all the celebration when that mission finally succeeded, at such unimaginably great financial, moral, and human cost, really was.

No country would be dignified by such destructive, self-centered, obsessive behavior.  Such things should be beneath the dignity of every country, and shameful to each and every one.  However, to perpetrate such behavior in the name of America, which is my country, makes it most especially offensive, given the very idea and image of America that I and virtually all other Americans of my generation were brought up to believe.  It flies directly in the face of everything we were ever taught America stands for, and that every American has the right not only to expect but also even to demand of his or her country.  If America does not struggle to remain “the last best hope of mankind” as Lincoln claimed it to be—“mankind” as such, humanity universally, not just this or that supposedly exceptional, privileged subset of men–then America betrays not only Lincoln but also all other Americans, including me:  It betrays itself.

Anyone proud to be an American, any patriotic American, owes it to America not to let that happen, at least without strong, principled, enduring protest.  “American exceptionalism,” “American exclusivism,” and “American nationalism” are all oxymoronic.  All such offensive, divisive, discriminatory things as exceptionalism, exclusivism, and nationalism are, in truth, radically un-American by their very nature.  Any patriot who takes pride in being an American must condemn them, especially whenever and wherever they are put forth in the very name of America itself.  Our patriotic duty as Americans requires nothing less of us.

I have been surprised to discover how deeply I am still proud to be an American, and that discovery in turn has reawakened my patriotism, which I thought had been altogether extinguished long ago.  As a result, I am no longer willing to let bogus patriots, whose sham patriotism defiles my country, lay claim to that title, robbing genuine Americans such as myself of it.  I claim it back from them.

Thus, it was the death of Osama bin Laden that finally, after many years, has now allowed me to reclaim my own patriotism and pride in being American, reclaim both at long last from those who for so long have worked to rob me of them.  For that, I honor his memory.  

*  *  *  *  *

Mourning and Celebration:  Embracing Our Dear Departed

Which dead are mine, among all the dead?  Must I not first identify my dead, before I can properly mourn them?  And, once identified, do not my dead, in the proper mourning they require of me, not also require that even in my very mourning itself I never forget to celebrate the lives they lived, and sacrificed for me, that I might live in turn?  Do I not owe my dead such celebration in my mourning, owe it even to those among my dead who died too young, before having lived much at all—such as my cousin, youngest of my mother’s nephews and nieces, who died of leukemia when she was only 11, and I was near the same age?  Don’t even those of my dead who died before they’d been properly born at all–such as my father’s first son, who died in being born of his mother, my father’s first wife, who also died at the same time, at that same child’s childbirth—ordain such celebratory mourning and mournful celebration?

Which dead are truly mine?  And how am I to mourn them?

*  *  *

Those were the sorts of questions that were already on my mind on the recent morning of Monday, May 2, 2011, even before I opened that morning’s newspaper and found out that Osama Bin Laden was dead.  They were on my mind because of my having just the day before reread Jean-Paul Sartre’s play The Flies—written and first performed in Paris under the German occupation during World War II, and a ringing call for resistance against oppression.  I had been rereading that play–in preparation for teaching my first class of the coming week (as I explained in my preceding post), for which The Flies was the reading assignment.  One of the questions Sartre raises in the play is precisely that of whom we should mourn and how, and I was already planning to discuss those aspects of the play with my class.

In addition to the rereading of Sartre’s play having thus already reawakened my concern with the question of proper mourning, so that it was already on my mind the morning I learned of Bin Laden’s death, the day before I had also done something else that had an effect on how news of his death affected me when I opened the paper that morning.  In the evening of that same day before, my wife and I had watched a DVR recording of the 60 Minutes broadcast from a bit earlier that same evening.  In fact, it was precisely because we were watching that recorded program rather than live TV, which we might otherwise have been watching, that we did not come to know about Bin Laden’s death until the next day.  When news of that death was first being released by the White House and then quickly finding its way to circulation through the mass media, my wife and I were watching that recording of 60 Minutes, and then we went to bed for the night, not to learn that Bin Laden was dead till the next morning.

My wife and I had both been especially affected by one particular segment of 60 Minutes, which consisted of a lengthy interview with television journalist Laura Logan about her horrendous ordeal, on an earlier evening this same spring, when she was subjected to vicious and brutal sexual violence and violation at the hands–literally—of some in the crowd that filled the streets of downtown Cairo in wild celebration of the success of the popular uprising that had that very day succeeded in overthrowing Mubarak.  Laura Logan was with her camera crew in the midst of that wildly celebrating crowd when she was suddenly and repeatedly sexually assaulted and brutally raped by multiple perpetrators.  She had been able to survive the ordeal only thanks to the eventual intervention of some Arab women, who were almost completely veiled, in accordance with the Arab tradition to which they belonged.  Risking themselves regardless of any tradition, however, these women actively and directly intervened on Laura Logan’s behalf.  They literally reached out and took her into their own hands, taking her out of and away from the hands of her captors, rapists, and would-be murderers.   

Though undergoing the interview was obviously very difficult for her, given the trauma she had experienced still so very recently, Laura Logan courageously revealed her deep personal woundedness, as she told, in clear, linear, narrative fashion, and in all its deeply disturbing details, the story of what had happened to her.  In the process she explained why she had decided to do the interview itself, despite how difficult it was for her to do so.  She had agreed to do the interview, she clearly and emphatically claimed, explained, and insisted, for the sake of all female journalists everywhere, who are constantly put at risk of suffering the same sort of abuse she suffered, for the simple reason that they are women, and who, compounding the abuse, are almost never granted a forum for articulating and protesting their situation.  Precisely because she had herself actually and publicly endured the devastating, degrading abuse she had endured, however, Laura Logan had been placed in a unique position.  That position allowed her—and her own responsibility demanded of her—to give her voice at last to all those otherwise still voiceless women.  All those women spoke with one voice in her deeply wounded, often breaking, singular voice—a voice that carried the unquestionable power and authority given it by all the bitterness, profundity, pain, and horror of the agony she was made to undergo at the hands of her assailants among the crowd at Cairo that night of the celebration of the toppling of Mubarak.

With regard to that last, Logan also went out of her way in the interview to insist that the Egyptians who crowded into the streets of Cairo to celebrate the newfound freedom they had won in their triumph over Mubarak and all his vestiges of coercive power were by all means right to celebrate.  What they had done for and by themselves deserved to be celebrated, she insisted, and nothing in or about her own horrendous ordeal said anything to the contrary.  Indeed, as she also indicated herself, all around the world men and women of any decency celebrated with and for Egypt and the Egyptian people that night.  She did so herself, and still felt the same way, as she strongly affirmed in the interview.

Immanuel Kant said much the same thing about the French Revolution.  Kant remarked that, despite all its excesses, which he and other decent persons should reject and bemoan, nevertheless what lay at the very heart of the French Revolution deserved universal approbation.  That was the unqualified or unreserved assertion and affirmation of universal human freedom, universal human equality, and universal human solidarity.  All human hearts still capable of beating at all had to beat a bit more quickly when the French Revolution happened to them—that is, when news of it reached their ears.  Every human heart had to beat a bit more quickly at that news –as Kant says his own heart did—in joyful celebration.

Both Immanuel Kant and Laura Logan are indisputably right in what they say.  There is a corollary, however, that neither Kant nor Logan expressly states.   That may be simply because it is so obvious to them both that neither ever thought to state it explicitly.  At any rate, the corollary is that the same human heart that beats a little faster in celebration when it first hears about the French Revolution is also necessarily a heart that also beats a little faster once more again, each time it hears yet again of that same Revolution, however many times it may have heard of it before:  No matter how many times it may have heard of that Revolution before, each time the still-human heart hears of it again, that heart leaps again in celebration.  That is true, at least, so long as the heart does not grow jaded, so that it can no longer hear what it is being told, when it is told yet again of the French Revolution.  Indeed, that leap of joy is rekindled yet again, however faintly, but still truly, even—perhaps especially (there are certain reasons for thinking so, at any rate)—when it is the heart itself that reminds itself of that Revolution, calling it back to mind, remembering it.

In that sense, which I would say is the single most important sense, whenever anyone anywhere recalls the French Revolution–reminds herself or himself of it, remembers it–then the French Revolution happens again, in and as the very leap of the heart in celebration at the merest memory of that glorious event.  Then once again, yet literally re-newed, made new again—so that no matter how many times it happens, every time it happens again it happens again for the very first time—the French Revolution happens.  In that same sense, “1789” is not a year that, though it may once have been, is no longer, and with each “new” year retreats by yet one more year more distantly into the distant past.

Not only may, but also in a certain crucial sense must, the future be “now.”  So must the past.  And in the past that is still now–that past that, as William Faulkner famously said, isn’t over yet, it’s not even past—“1789” is not a year that was.  Rather, this year—the very “calendar year” 2011– is still “1789.”  The time of such events, the real events of a real history–all that finally counts once all the counting and recounting is finally over–does not fly by with the ticks of the clock, like the dead time when nothing ever really happens and there is never anything new under the sun.  Rather, in the real time of real history, all years are simultaneous, and every year is every other.  That is the time “it is” eternally– eternal time, when, regardless of what year the chronically still-born clock of the calendar may say it is, it is always really still “1789,” but also no less “1776,” and “1812,” and “1848,” and “1914,” and “December the 7^th, 1941” (that “day that will live in infamy”), and “May 1968” (in Paris, in the spring), and, for that matter, “September 11, 2001.”

To “mourn” means to keep the dead alive in memory.  That does not in the least mean to keep little pictures of our “dear departed” in lockets on chains worn around our necks, or in family photo albums, or in supposed memory-images in our supposed minds or our demonstrably convoluted brains.  Not that there is anything wrong with such things, with lockets, and albums, and images, and engrams, or the like.  But to cling to such images, as though to lose them would be to lose our memory of the dead themselves, is one sure way to bury our dead beyond recall, substituting an idol for the holy, an illusion for reality.  If we so treasure our images of the dead that we lapse into such a substitution, then what we are doing is not mourning at all, we are avoiding mourning, like the father in the story such as Freud often liked to tell about his patients, the father who shows no signs of grief when his wife dies, but who later breaks down sobbing helplessly when the pet hamster to which he has devoted himself to avoid having to face his real loss gives up the ghost.

The verb mourn derives, according to my dictionary, from the Middle English mournen, which itself derives from the Old English murnan.  That latter, my dictionary further informs me, is akin to the Gothic moúrnan, which means to be anxious, and itself derives from the hypothetical Indo-European base (s)mer-, meaning to remember, think of, whence comes, for example, the Sanskrit smárati, (he) remembers, or the Latin memor, mindful of.  That etymology just reinforces the reality of what the verb mourn still says today, if we just let ourselves have the ears we’ve been given to hear it:  To mourn is no more and no less than—because it is the same as—to stay mindful of whatever and/or whomever we have lost, that is, to stay mindful of our dead.

Properly to mourn our dead, then, is ever to remember them, to be ever mindful of them, never to forget them.  That is the mourning we owe the dead, and that they demand of us:  That we never forget them.  Thus are we told never to forget those who died in “Auschwitz”—that is, the Jewish victims of the Nazi “final solution.”  So we are told, too, each September, when bumper stickers and window-decals remind us we should “never forget” those who died on “September 11, 2001.  Thus does even the psalmist sing in Psalm 137 (136), verses 6-7 (Grail translation), adding notes and tones that underscore both the seriousness of our responsibility to remember, and what we will deserve if we don’t:

O how could we sing

the song of the Lord

on alien soil?

If I forget you, Jerusalem,

let my right hand wither!

O let my tongue

Cleave to my mouth

If I remember you not,

if I prize not Jerusalem

above all my joys!

To mourn truly—that is, fully and deeply and with full propriety, as only accords with the heavy debt of mourning we owe to our dead—is to keep ourselves ever mindful of them.  That, however, means that we owe it to our dead to keep the wound of our pain at the loss of them to death open, keeping ourselves vulnerable to that pain and that wounding.  That is the mourning the dead require of us, and not the cherishing of any images or other idols we are tempted to make of them.

To mourn our dead is to hold to our ongoing pain at our loss of them to death, to hold to that pain as what itself holds us to them, by a bond unbreakable even by death itself.  To mourn our dead is to refuse to be “reconciled” to their absence, to “get over it,” as we are told we inevitably will by all the well-intentioned folk who keep telling us so.  They tell us that we will, with time, be “consoled,” and will then find ourselves again able to get on with our lives “despite” our presently shattering pain at our loss and our present bereavements.   “Time,” we are reminded, “heals all wounds.”

Our mourning itself knows better.  What it dreads and eschews as the worst thing that could possibly happen is to be deprived of the sharpness of our pain at the death of those to whom we are bound, so tightly that even the grave cannot unbind us.  Like love, of which it is really a modality, our mourning is stronger than death, and reaches beyond the grave.  It recognizes that even to want to “get over” our pain at our loss is already to betray the dead, not to honor them.  It is to let them fall our of memory and be forgotten, rather than cherishing the memory of them and  never forgetting them, not even if we forget their names—and even our own.  Mourning refuses such betrayal of the dead, and insists upon remaining un-consoled and un-consolable.  Mourning recognizes time, that time that would tempt us into “healing” of our wounds, rather than holding to them, as the dead indebt us to do—that dead, chronic time of the clock, of Chronos, who devours its own children—as its greatest enemy; and it rejects scornfully any suggestion of eventual “reconciliation.”

In such defiance of all messages of consolation, and revolt against any movement toward reconciliation, mourning knows with clear, unshakeable certainty that it is our very pain itself that is our memory of our dead, our holdoing on to those to whom we owe it never to forget them, as we have vowed never to do.  Mourning insists upon keeping the wound of the death of our dead open, the pain intense, because anything less or other than that would be blasphemy against the dead, the uttering of which would enact our own final, irrevocable self-condemnation.

Our bereft pain and its irrevocable rejection of all reconciliation with the brutality of the death of our dead is itself what keeps our connection to our dead, binding us forever to them, keeping the memory of them always alive in our hearts.  It is our very pain, our always still-open wound, that unites us with all our dead.  For that very reason, mourning as such—and not just sometimes or in some cases–is itself, without ever ceasing to be anything but pure mourning, is celebratory:  All mourning is, as mourning, already celebration.

My dictionary also tells me about that word, too.  It tells me that celebrate comes from Middle English celebraten, from the Latin celebratus, the past participle of the verb celebrare, which means to frequent, go in great numbers, honor, and is itself derived from celeber, meaning frequented, or populous.  Keeping that derivation in mind, we may say that “celebrating” is joining with others in honoring what’s honorable—what deserves to be honored.  In short, celebrating is joining the crowd at the celebration.  Furthermore, the greater the honor due what is honorable, the larger grows the community of those who should render it honor—the greater, that is, grows the crowd.

All mourning, whatever form it may take, from dancing a jig at a drunken Irish wake, to gnashing one’s teeth and tearing one’s hair in the agony of one’s loss, is celebration.  That is because in mourning—all mourning—we join the crowd.  We join, in fact, the crowd of crowds, that crowd than which no greater crowd can be, nor even be conceived, because it is a crowd literally without end, a crowd the number of which is beyond all counting.  In mourning we join, by our pain itself, that pain which is our very bond, our very ligature or junction to those for whom we mourn, the throng that travels ceaselessly along the most frequented, most densely populated road of all—the only road along which absolutely all human beings without exception must travel together, even and especially because each must travel altogether alone.  That is the road of death, of our mortality.

In mourning, all mourning of whatever kind, we join the largest crowd of all, and therefore join into the celebration of all celebrations:  the crowd of all the living, and the dead—living and dead both named and unnamed, known and unknown, but always all alike in the final, inexorable, holy anonymity of the grave itself.  In mourning, the soul swoons in celebration, in adoration.

At the end of “The Dead,” the long story with which he, in turn, ends Dubliners, James Joyce describes the experience of his character Gabriel Conroy, the narrative center of the story, as Gabriel sits looking out the window of the Dublin hotel room where his wife is already asleep in the bed beside his chair.  It is Christmas Eve, the end of a day and a night during which Gabriel has had his own solitude and mortality unexpectedly revealed to him in what would pass by all regular accounts as some thoroughly commonplace, trivial events of that day, but the accumulation of which finally shatters Gabriel and his complacency completely.   As he sits in the darkness and the silence beside his sleeping wife, Gabriel gazes out the window of their hotel room at the snow gently falling outside.  Joyce brings “The Dead,” and with it the entirety of Dubliners, the collection of stories wherein he tells “the moral history of his community,” to an end by writing:  “His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.”

In mourning our own dead properly, we, too, let our own souls swoon, as we join that same community—the one and only universal human community of “all the living and the dead.”

As for just what all this has to do with the death of Osama Bin Laden, I will try to answer that question at the start of my next and final post in this series of three occasioned by his death.

“The King is Dead! Long Live the King!”

On the morning of September 11, 2001, as I was driving the forty miles from my home to the campus of the university where I teach, then preparing for my first class of that day, which began early, at 8:00 a.m. that quarter, what we have grown accustomed to calling just “September 11” or “9/11,” was taking place two time-zones to the east, in Manhattan.  Though “September 11” was already happening as I was going about my normal routine that morning, “September 11” did not happen for me until some time later, after it had already happened back in Manhattan, and anywhere else where someone was watching television or listening to the radio or in some other way keeping up with the happenings around the world that morning as they happened.  For me, though, “9/11” did not happen when it happened to such others.  For me it didn’t happen till after it had already happened elsewhere, to others.  It only happened for me when I went off to teach my early morning class, which happened to be one of my own devising that I have often regularly taught over many years now, a course called “The Addictive Self.”

When I went into class that morning at 8:00 a.m. local time, I could tell immediately that something had happened to my students.  There was a low buzz of voices as I entered the classroom, which slowly quieted as I walked down to the front of the class (the class that term was in an auditorium-style room, where the students sat in rows at various elevations in front of the teacher, who stood down there at the bottom of the pit to teach—to me, teaching in such rooms always makes me feel like a Christian thrown to the lions in the Roman Coliseum).  Here and there, a few students were crying.  Others looked to be on the verge of tears.  Some may not have had tears, already or pending, but had blanched faces.  So I knew immediately that something was wrong.  However, since I had no idea what that might be, I asked the class.  Then one young man who always sat in the last, highest, row of the student chairs, at the furthest possible remove from me down in front of the class as the teacher, told me.  He said that two planes had flown into the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in New York, and that both towers were “down.”  I did not comprehend what he meant at first, by saying the Towers were both “down,” so I asked him what he meant, they were “down.”  He then explained it to me.

That is when “September 11” happened to me—well after it was already over, as it were.

As is common enough—there is nothing at all in the least special or unusual about it—I was momentarily non-plussed.  For a few seconds at least I did not know what to say or do, in the face of such news.  But then my sense of responsibility kicked in, and I felt that, as the teacher of the class those students were in that morning, it was my job to say and do something.  At the moment, when I was still recovering from my own initial shock at “9/11” having just the moment before happened to me, the only thing I knew to do was just to go on with my lesson plan for that day’s class, and teach the rest of that day’s class session as planned.

So that, of course, is what I did.  And then, almost immediately after class that day, I started to feel guilty about it, that is, about what I had done—or, better, failed to do—that morning of September 11, 2001, when “September 11” happened.

As I soon learned, other teachers, even many at the same university where I teach, had managed that very same day, September 11, 2001, not to be caught as flat-footed by the events of that day as I had proven myself to be.  They had all had the simple common sense and simple common human decency to realize what a trauma the whole thing—that is, “September 11”–was for their own students in their own classes.  Accordingly, they had made it a point to deviate from their lesson plans for that day, to allow the students the opportunity during class-time just to talk about it with one another and with the teacher, freely and openly just saying whatever they felt they wanted or needed to say.  I, however, was such a selfish and self-centered person that all I could think to do was . . . well, nothing—and that in a class, one I’d designed myself, called “The Addictive Self,” of all things, where I should have been modeling how to escape compulsive behavior patterns, rather than modeling how to escape into them, which was what I told myself I had done!

“Bummer!” as those of my generation of Americans were once wont to say.

*  *  *

Last Monday morning, May 2, 2011, I woke up early, as I usually do, even on days when I am not teaching, as I was not that day.  As not infrequently happens, I had my breakfast and my morning coffee ready and waiting for me, before the daily newspaper had been delivered.  My wife and I, being of the generation to which we belong, still like to have the old-style paper version of the daily news, to digest with our breakfast, if it’s been delivered by the time that breakfast is ready.  When the paper is not there by that time, as it was not that morning when I sat down for my breakfast (alone, since my wife was still asleep), creature of habit that I am, I invariably pick up something else to read as I drink my coffee and eat whatever I’ve prepared for myself.

What I picked up last Monday morning was something I had started to read—or, to be accurate, to reread for the umpteenth time since I first read it back when I was still in high school—the day before.  No matter how many times I may have already read it myself, it is a matter of pride for me to reread all the readings I assign students in my classes, to reread those assigned readings yet again just before they come due in the class.  That way, I have them fresh in mind—or as fresh, at least, as my aging mind still permits—for class.

Accordingly, that Monday morning I picked up Sartre’s play The Flies, which is his retelling of the old Greek myth of the House of Atreus, as that myth itself was already retold in the great days of ancient Greek tragic drama, in Aeschylus’s great   Orestia trilogy.  Sartre’s play was written and first performed in Paris under the German Nazi occupation during World War II.  It is his retelling not of the whole story of the Orestia, but only of the third and final play of Aeschylus’ great trilogy, The Eumenides.

In Aeschylus’ retelling of the story in the form of a tragic drama, as in the earlier tellings and re-tellings of the same story as myth, Orestes’ slaying of his own mother and step-father is itself just another episode of the carrying out of an ancient curse of the entire House of Atreus that has already spelled doom for Orestes line through a number of generations.  That original curse itself, whereby the divine turned away from and against the House of Atreus, came in the first place as divine retribution for the disobedience whereby a patriarch of the Atreides first turned away from and against the divine.  The Furies are the figures from Greek mythology through and in whom the divine curse passes on through and to Orestes in his crime of slaying Clytemnestra, his own mother, and Aegisthus, her husband and Orestes’ step-father.  Orestes carries out his violent act itself in retaliation for an earlier crime committed by his two victims.  In their own, earlier crime, Clytemnestra and Aegisthus conspire together to kill Agamemnon, Orestes’s father and his mother Clytemnestra’s first husband, when he finally returns from long years of war at Troy.  That earlier crime, in turn, was itself Clytemnestra’s exacting of vengeance against Agamemnon for his act of sacrificing his and Clytemnestra’s first-born daughter, Iphegenia, a sacrifice demanded of him by the god Poseidon before the latter will allow the Greek forces under Agamemnon’s leadership to pass over the sea to besiege Troy.

This seemingly endless cycle of vengeance and retribution initiated by the original patriarchal act whereby the House of Atreus turns away from the divine is finally broken, the proper balance between the House of Atreus and the divine is finally restored, and the peace of order is at last reestablished when, at the end of the story, Orestes redresses the balance by re-turning to the divine, as represented by his seeking asylum in the temple of the god Apollo.  Thus, by the end of the whole story, the wrathful Furies who have theretofore vengefully pursued Orestes turn into the benevolent Eumenides or Kindly Ones who will keep him safe thereafter.*

Sartre retells that same old story to suit his own purposes as an “existentialist”–a term he would later eschew, well after virtually everyone else (including Heidegger and Camus) whom others wanted to call by that name had already done so.  First, the Kindly Ones of Aeschylus’s renditions become the Flies in Sartre.  They swarm everywhere around Argos, the seat of the House of Atreus, an embodiment of the sense of irremediable guilt and perpetual regret that Aegisthus and Clytemnestra have imposed upon the entire town over which they rule.  Annually, in a ceremony led by Aegisthus and Clytemnestra, the people of Argos, gather around a large cave of a tomb on a hillside, to mourn the dead.  The boulder which is on all other days firmly in place to close the mouth of the cave is rolled aside once a year, and the dead are let loose for the day to roam among the living, wrecking vengeance on any who may have harmed them when they were still alive.

Most of the action of Sartre’s play takes place on that day of the dead in the very year that Orestes, who as an infant had been carried away to safety by benign hands to be kept safe from his mother and her lover, the two regicides, returns to his home town.  Orestes meets his sister Electra as soon as he returns to Argos, to find her filled with hostility and rage toward Clytemnestra and Aegisthus for having murdered her father, and waiting impatiently for her brother, whom she fervently insists is still alive and will someday return to wreck due vengeance on the murderers of their father.  Orestes, however, does not reveal his true identity to her right away.  He waits till  later, at the official ceremony in front of the cave of the dead the next day.

At that ceremony, Aegisthus, Clytemnestra, and all the other townsfolk are attired in the drab and somber clothing so widely and customarily taken to be the proper mode of dress to don when one is in mourning for the dead.  Electra, however, who has been ordered to attend, shows up in her best white dress of celebration.  Aegisthus, of course, upbraids her for her dress and her demeanor, and admonishes her to show due respect and mourning.  Electra replies that she believes her display of gaiety and happiness may well be more pleasing to her dead father Agamemnon—after all, what truly loving father does wish to see his beloved daughter gay and happy?—than all the sackcloth and ashes with which Aegisthus and the others ostentatiously call attention to themselves in their supposed mourning.

As I came to that part of Sartre’s play in my rereading of it on Sunday, May 1, a week or so ago, in preparation for discussing it with my class in two days’ time, I made a note to myself in the margin of my copy.  In upshot, my note was a reminder that I wanted the class to look at that passage together, then discuss with me and with one another the question of just what is the right way to remember and mourn one’s dead.  In that context, I went on in my note to myself, I wanted to help the discussion along by asking them another, related question, which was whether Electra’s own mocking account of her behavior to Aegisthus and the crowd was the truth of the matter or not.  That is, I wanted the students to ask themselves whether Electra’s gay dress really reflected her own gaiety, or whether she was instead just using the conventional garb of gaiety to enact, not her own buoyancy, happiness, and ebullience, but, rather, her deep-seated, simmering—indeed, boiling—rage and wrathfulness.

By raising that question I wanted to get the students to see how Electra’s behavior may well have been no less disrespectful of the dead and mocking of whatever we really do owe the dead by way of genuine mourning of them, than was –as Electra herself sees clearly, and gives us to see clearly, too—the behavior of Aegisthus.  I wanted them to see that neither Aegisthus  and the approach to mourning he represents, nor Electra and what she represents, are really mourning properly or genuinely at all, at least if mourning is taken to be a matter of rendering the dead what we, the living, may owe them.  Rather, both end up, despite and beneath all the obvious, surface differences between them, doing the same thing:  using the show and pretense of mourning—the putting on of the uniform or costume of mourning, in effect—to serve their own interests, and not the interest of rendering justice to the dead.

Both Aegisthus and Electra, each in his or her own way, play upon and manipulate the good and expansive impulses at work in genuine mourning, the impulses toward rendering the dead their due, or, alternately worded, toward doing justice toward the dead.  Aegisthus manipulates the impulse toward feeling and expressing sorrow in grieving for those one has lost to serve his own selfish purpose of preserving his position of political power and sovereignty.   Electra manipulates the positive, appreciative impulse toward joyful gratitude for, and celebration of, the gifts that the dead have given us to serve her own selfish interest by enacting her rage against those she experiences as having wronged her, and inciting acts of retaliation against them.

It was just such matters that I was concerned to raise with my students.  In my judgment, it is also Sartre’s own concern to raise the same such matters with audiences seeing performances of The Flies or readers reading it.  They were therefore still fresh in my memory on the Monday morning of May 2 this year, the morning after I had reread and marked the passages at issue in Sartre’s play.  On that morning of May 2, then, the question of just what it is, to show proper mourning to the dead was very much on my mind, at least as background.

In that sense, I was already predisposed and open toward what happened to me that Monday morning when my morning newspaper eventually arrived and I went outside to get it, then sat back down to finish my coffee while I read it.

As soon as I opened the paper and looked down, the death of Osama Bin Laden happened to me.

The name “September 11,” the name by which we soon came to know the event that happened in Manhattan on the day of September 11, 2001, has ever since that day been inseparably connected with that other name, “Osama Bin Laden,” who died on Sunday, May 1, 2011.  Appropriately, just as “September 11” did not happen to me until after it had already happened in New York, and to the millions of people worldwide who had already heard the news of that event before I did, so did the death of Osama Bin Laden only happen to me some time after it already happened in Pakistan, and to millions of people worldwide who knew about it before I did.  What is more, just as my first class after “September 11” first happened (in New York) was at 8:00 on a Tuesday morning, so also was my first class after the death of Osama Bin Laden (in Pakistan) on a Tuesday morning at 8:00.

Unlike when “September 11” finally happened to me, however, which was while I was actually in my 8:00 class that term, giving me no time to prepare before my first class after that traumatic event first happened in New York, when the traumatic event of the death of Bin Laden finally happened to me I was graciously granted a bit over one full day to prepare.  I took advantage of that opportunity to prepare myself in the best way I knew how.  Accordingly, when it went to my first class after Osama Bin Laden died for me, I did what I had not had the chance to prepare to do when “September 11” happened to me:  I made the traumatic event of the death of Bin Laden the topic for class that day—in fact, I made it the topic for the day in both my classes, the first being my lower division undergraduate “existentialism” class at 8:00 a.m., the second my seminar in the later Heidegger at noon.

What I have already said about the reading assigned for that day in my 8:00 existentialism class is enough to show what a seamless fit there was in that class between what we were scheduled to talk about—namely, Sartre’s The Flies—and talking about the death of Bin Laden.  In fact, I could not have asked for a more perfect fit, because what the death of Osama Bin Laden faced us with was exactly the same thing Sartre’s play faced my class with in the crucial passage I had marked two days before, about Aeschylus and Electra and the question of the proper way to mourn our dead.   To talk about what Sartre puts before us to talk about in the scene outside the tomb between Aeschylus and Electra, and to talk about what the death of Osama Bin Laden put before me and my class and, in fact, everyone anywhere to whom the death of Osama Bin Laden has happened, is happening now, or will happen in the future, is to talk about the same thing twice.  To talk about those “two” things is really to talk about one and the same thing, just in two different ways.

Whom are we to mourn, and how?

That is the question that the death of Osama Bin Laden puts to anyone to whom that event happens.  In exactly the same way, that is the question Sartre’s The Flies puts to anyone who reads it, or who sees the play he wrote performed.  Of course, whether we will be able on any given occasion to see or hear what either the death or the play, or both, give us to see or hear, is an altogether different matter.  Whether we are given the ears to hear what Sartre’s play says, or the eyes to see what Bin Laden’s death gives us to see, depends on many, many things, only a relatively small number of which are to any significant degree subject to our own control.

Sartre’s play has continued to circulate and reverberate in my experience through all the readings I have given it to date, and will no doubt continue to circulate and reverberate in any subsequent readings I may give to it.  All I can do is try to sum up what that play has had to say to me so far–or, alternately worded, try to sum up what I have been given the ears to hear so far in my encounter with it.  And that, it turns out, is one and the same thing as that which the death of Osama Bin Laden has had to show me so far, or, to word it alternately too, what the death of Osama has given me eyes to see so far in my encounter with it.  Thus, the ears with which Sartre’s play has to date equipped me function in perfect harmony with the eyes with which the death of Osama Bin Laden has to date equipped me.

What both the ears and the eyes that the conjunction of Sartre’s play and Osama Bin Laden’s death have given me to hear and see, and challenged me to try to come to understand, is the question I have already asked above:

Whom are we to mourn, and how?

Alternatively worded:

Just which dead are our dead, given to us to mourn?  And, given that it is just those dead who are truly given to us as our own to mourn, just how are we to mourn them rightly?

That is, indeed, the question, so far as I can see, with whatever eyes I’ve been given so far, that I have myself been given to ask—and then, even more importantly to listen as best I can to the answer I am given when I do ask it.  In my next post, I will try to articulate what I hear when I so listen.

* * * * *

In the meantime–which is to say, in “the time that remains” until “then,” until, that is, time has at last been found for what has so far been postponed and stays pending–in the meantime, however, some way must be foundto “kill time,” as we say. The time that must be “killed” is precisely the dead and deadening time of rage:  All that dead time, that “down-time,” we could say, that remains until then must itself be filled in somehow, with some manner of busyness or business.  To bide time in the meantime, distractions from how much time remains must be found, then repeated compulsively until all that time no longer remains.

It doesn’t really matter just what manner of time-killing activity fills up that time that remains till then, just so long as some manner does.  Whatever manner of activity is available will work, provided only it is distracting enough to take up all the interminable dead-time that stretches itself out before us.     When the storm rages, any port will do.

The dead time that spreads and stretches forth interminably is the time when nothing really happens, but in which time just keeps ticking on in endless indifference to what may come to fill it.  Precisely because it is thus dead, devoid of event or liveliness, that dead time itself is just what must in turn itself be “killed” again, and then again and again on an everyday basis, through all the empty, everyday distractions with the endless repetition of which we do indeed fill every endless day.  We must fill in and kill all the dead time when nothing really happens until another time itself returns, until a lively, eventful time of life, a time for living–what we might well call life time–at last strikes again.

However, the empty, dead time that always remains to be killed until such life time finally strikes again does not, as it were, take place at “another” time than that at which the latter time, the time of life, takes place.   That is, there is no sort of mediating, third time, besides the two times of dead time and life-time, that would provide some common standard in terms of which those two times could be measured, so that, for example, we might compare their two durations.  The two times do not happen at different time as measured in some such third time that is supposed to be common to them both:  There is no time common to both dead time and life time.

Indeed, in one sense we could say that, far from happening at two different times, dead time and life time happen at the same time.  Better:  They are one and the same time.  There is finally only one time.  However, that is not in any sense that would erase the doubling or bifurcation of time into dead time and life time, turning them into just “one and the same time.”   Time always does so bifurcate itself “simultaneously” into dead time and life time, but only in the sense that the bifurcation yields two wholly incommensurable times “at once,” and precisely not in the sense of occurring together at one point by some standard that would be common to both—that is, in terms of which both could be measured and, thereby, made commensurable.

Dead time and life time are “not-two,” in the sense at issue in Advaita or “non-dual” Hinduism, whereby to say that x and y are “not-two” does not at all mean to erase the difference between x and y, such that they become simply “one”—“one and the same thing.”  By the teachings of Advaita or “non-duality,” mind and matter, for instance, are “not-two.”  Nevertheless, Bertrand Russell’s old quip still holds:  “What’s mind?  Never matter!  What’s matter?  Never mind!”

In fact, it is only because they are not-two that Russell’s joke will work at all.  It is really only insofar as mind and matter are not-two, that they can be absolutely, radically different—so different as to be strictly “incommensurable.”  In order for x and y to be two—“two things,” such that one could count each in turn to find their total number (namely, 2)—x and y  must, of course, have something in common, in relation to which they can count as two different instances or particularizations of that third, common thing, that is, two things “of the same kind”:  “two men,” “two birds,” “two moons,” “two pious acts,” or whatever.  It is just because mind and matter are not two things of the same kind but are, rather, strictly incommensurable, that, for example, Descartes’ endeavor to locate the point of their interaction in the pineal gland has so frequently provided grounds for ridicule.

Dead time and life time are not-two.  That says both that they are not two things of the same kind, and that they are nevertheless not at all one and the same thing.  It says that the two are truly incommensurable.

What could be more different than avoidance and return, distancing from and drawing near, denying and affirming?  Yet Freud is right to insist that his “negative” effects of trauma and his “positive” effects are not really two different sorts of effect, but always go inseparably together and, as so bound, constitute the traumatic impact as such.  They are, in short, “not-two.”  Trauma itself is just the simultaneous bifurcation of an impact, a shock, into the non-dual duality of such “negative” and “positive” effects.  Avoiding a traumatic impact or shock, numbing oneself in the face of it, is itself the putting off, the postponing of that impact, which postponement keeps the impact constantly pending.  The former does not just accompany the latter; it accomplishes it; it is it.  The very “registering” of the trauma, its very “impacting” upon the traumatized organism, is exactly the numbing wherein the traumatic impact put itself off, postpones itself, and, thereby, keeps itself constantly and inescapably impending.

The figure of death is synecdochic for trauma in general.   In that regard, it is worth recalling at this point how Heidegger depicts the “certainty” of death for Dasein, “that being which each of us is,” in the famous analysis of Being-toward-death in the first chapter of the second division of Being and Time.   It is certain, he writes there, that death will come.  Yet that very certainty of death is inseparable from the fact that just “when” it will come always remains indefinite.    My death may come “at any time.”  It may not come for many years yet, but it may just as easily come in the very next instant, while I am still typing this sentence.  It is just that indefiniteness of its coming that makes my death so constant and pervasive a threat to me throughout the whole span of my life, from birth all the way up to death itself.  Indefinite and, therefore, equally and fully pending at every moment, the constant threat of my death is one from which I am constantly fleeing, only to find that my death has always run on ahead of me, and is already there waiting for me in any place to which I flee to escape it.  Death always keeps its “appointment at Samarkand” with me, wherever my own “Samarkand” may happen to be.

It is so not only with the trauma of death, but also with all other trauma, for which death serves as the exemplar.  Once trauma has struck its first blow, it is certain to strike again, one never knows just when or where.  It is the very indefiniteness of its “when” that makes that second blow so certain, and gives it its constantly impending, intensely threatening inexorability. Wherever one may run to try to escape it, trauma will always have run on ahead already, to coil itself there in waiting, biding its time until, in its own good time, it strikes again.  Indifferent to all our efforts to avoid it, trauma waits patiently; and by its own indifference toward them it reduces all those efforts themselves, no matter what they may be, to indifference in turn.  They all become no more than pointless distractions, one no better or worse than another, to fill all the time that remains until what is constantly threatening to happen at last does happen, and all that dead time itself dies away.

As Peter Sloterdijk writes in the first line of “Rage as Project:  Revenge,” a section of “Rage Transactions,” the first chapter of his Rage and Time:  A Psychopolitical Investigation (translated by Mario Wenning, New York:  Columbia University Press, 2010):  “The creation of a qualified or existential time, that is, a lived time with a retrospective and anticipatory character, occurs through the deferral of discharge.”  It may be that, as Sloterdijk’s remark suggests when re-contextualized into the general argument of his book, the “rage” of his title may play a special role in the original opening up of  “existential” or “lived” time, as he calls it.  However, even if what Sloterdijk’s calls rage does somehow, for whatever “psychopolitical” reasons, take precedence in that regard over such other fundamental passions or emotions as, say, the anxiety or the boredom to which Heidegger assigns a similar role, it is because Sloterdijk’s rage, no less than Heidegger’s anxiety or boredom, itself has a traumatic structure.

Rage–and the spirit of revenge with which Sloterdijk, following Nietzsche, quite properly connects it—can arise only from the “deferral of discharge” to which Sloterdijk refers in the remark I have just cited.  That deferral, in turn, is ultimately imposed, at least at the “existential” or “lived” level, to use Sloterdijk’s own terms—which is to say, as actually experienced by anyone “overcome,” as we tellingly put it, by the rage that springs up of itself, from the deferral at issue.  Indeed, as Nietzsche well knew, rage might be defined precisely as what wells up of itself in the organism whenever that organism encounters an obstacle to the discharge of any charge (that is, any pulse, impulse, urge, drive, instinct, energy, or the like, anything whatever that would seek to “discharge” itself in the first place), an obstacle imposing a deferral or postponement of such discharge.  The organism will experience any such obstacle as a thwarting of the organism’s will, as it were.  In turn, the thwarted will is the enraged will.  Encountering an obstacle to its own will, the will rages–and rage it will, like Achilles on the plains before Troy.

Nor, as Sloterdijk’s title for his book shows he also is happy to acknowledge, was Nietzsche ignorant of what it is that the enraged will really rages at.  The very spirit of revenge, as he has his Zarathustra say, is (in Walter Kaufman’s well known translation) “the will’s ill-will” against time—“against time,” he says, “and its ‘It was!’”  From the point of view of rage, what’s so objectionable about time, so enraging about it, is expressed precisely by the past tense, the tense of that which is no longer subject to alteration, no longer malleable to the will.  The will can work upon the present to change the future, but what has already been, the past itself, is no longer anything that can be changed.  In its very being past, the past thus places itself past the reach of the will.  The past as such, in its simple past-ness and altogether independent of its actual contents, which may be wholly pleasing to the will, wholly according to its will, defies the will, thwarts it.

What is more, for a thwarted will, in its enraged frustration, time as a whole, the whole business of “past, present, and future,” manifests itself as nothing more than the inexorable mechanism of turning everything into something that “was.”  Time as such manifests to rage as nothing more than the ever more enraging, ever ongoing, never changing, never changeable transformation of everything into the past, into what “was,” but which, precisely as what was, is what still is now and ever will be the one absolutely insuperable limit to the will.  So experienced, time is, in effect, a vast engine for devouring everything it touches, all it brings forth—all its children, as Chronos, old Father Time, devours his children in Greek mythology—and turning it all into the pure waste of what is, for the will, deserving only of being discarded, cast away as a useless remnant, what remains after the will has taken all it can from it.  For rage, then, there is no need to wait for Auschwitz and Adorno, time itself has always already turned everything into excrement.

Nietzsche can also offer guidance concerning just what rage itself contributes to the very process against which it rages so—the very process of the primordial timing of time as such, the original-originating “temporalization of temporality,” in the language of Heidegger’s Being and Time.  “The spirit of revenge,” of which Nietzsche’s Zarathustra speaks—that spirit of revenge “against time and its “It was!”—is also, he says, “the will’s ill-will against itself.”  As Heidegger, for one, is good at elucidating in his own Nietzsche interpretations, it is, in effect, the will itself that drives time, that propels and sustains the chronological machine of time, that machine that makes time pass into the past and its “was,” turning everything into shit, so far as the will is concerned, at least.  The will itself is that very machine.  It is the clock itself, in its very  ticking, obscene in the inexorability with which it keeps counting off the moments as they click by from what is not yet, through what is, but, unable to abide, no sooner is than it is gone on by, to become the pure waste of what once was, but as such is no longer.

The will as such is, for Nietzsche, no mere will to preserve itself, as though it were Spinoza’s conatus, the striving of any being to maintain itself at its present level, which eventually becomes, in Freud, the death-drive whereby the organic defines itself in and as the striving to return to the inorganic.   If the will were any such thing, then it would not be pure will.  It would be, instead, the will to the very thing, whatever it may be (even if nothing), that stills the will—that satisfies it, satiates it, brings it to cease its striving, its willing.  No, the will as will is no such will to put the will at rest.  It is, rather, the will always to keep willing, the will never to be satisfied, the will to will itself.  (As Lacan a century after Nietzsche will observe, above all what desire desires, is to desire.  That is why desire is never satisfied, never has “enough.”  Or, as Norman Mailer around the same time as Lacan will observe, in regard to sex and money:  Only too much is enough.)

Thus, Nietzsche insists that the will is always the will to increase itself, to subject ever more to its own will, its own power.  The will as will is just that, the will to power.   Furthermore, as Heidegger especially emphasizes in his interpretations of Nietzsche, as will to power the will as such is always will to more power.  Otherwise, it would once again become a will that wills to be brought to rest, a will that wills to stop willing.  The insatiability of the will to power is just that:  insatiability itself.

Accordingly, it is the will itself, as insatiable will to power, the very will to will, that condemns everything that is—condemns it, precisely, to pass on.  The will to power itself judges every “now” as deserving to pass, to get out of the way so the will can keep on going, keep on willing.  By announcing that sentence of condemnation, the will enacts the very sentence being pronounced:  The will is just that “speech-act,” the “performative” utterance of the curse of all that is, which utterance as such effects the very cursing, the consigning of what is to its doom.  The will as such passes the very sentence that sentences everything to pass—to turn to shit, against the stench of which the will itself recoils.  However, no more than one can recoil from one’s own shadow, which continues to shadow one in the very recoil, can the will succeed in escaping the stench of the past from which it recoils.  It is, indeed, that very recoil itself that passes the past behind it, as the bowel passes the waste it is designed to pass by spasmodically recoiling itself away from it.

Rage is the form the will itself takes as the recoil that passes the very sentence in the pronouncing of which the very impassable form of passing itself (as Husserl taught time to be in The Phenomenology of Internal Time-Consciousness) gets enacted.  Yet unless the will pronounces such a sentence, it is no will at all.  To will is to pronounce that sentence.  Thus, the will’s rage–the burning rage of the will’s spirit of revenge against time and its “It was!”—is rage against itself, the “will’s ill-will against itself,” as Nietzsche has his Zarathustra also say.

Furthermore, insofar as time or temporality temporalizes itself into the very passing of the sentence of what passes on to passing on, time itself is rage.

According to one of Heidgger’s famous analyses in Being and Time, the emotion, mood, or attunement (Befindlichkeit) of what he calls anxiety (Angst) temporalizes itself into and as the adventing of advent, the coming-to of the to-come (the authentic “future,” German Zukunft), that retrieves or repeats what has been (das Gewesene, the authentic past) in the bare blink of an eye (the authentic moment, now, or present:  Augenblick, which the old, standard English translation of Being and Time by John MacQuarrie and Edward Robinson renders as “moment of vision”).  So too, according to Heidegger, does every “state-of-mind” (MacQuarrie and Robinson’s translation of Heidegger’s German term Befindlichkeit) temporalize itself in one way or another—and, crucially, always as a version either of authentic time, or of inauthentic time, but either way “simultaneously” in all three of time’s dimensions.

Just so does the state of mind called rage, too, temporalize itself.  Indeed, read as the very spirit of what Nietzsche calls revenge, rage, like what Heidegger calls anxiety, is not just one way among others in which temporality temporalizes itself, but is, instead, a form of fundamental temporalization.  Rage, conceived along Nietzschean lines, is like Heideggerian anxiety in being what Heidegger will soon enough after Being and Time come to call a “fundamental mood” or “fundamental attunement”–a Grundstimmung.

However, whereas in the case of the fundamental attunement that is anxiety, time times itself authentically, the time of rage—the temporality that temporalizes itself in and as rage, taken as an alternate fundamental attunement—is inauthentic time.  It is dead time—and as such it is also always deadening time:  that time of the clock that always keeps ticking, time as the never passing, un-transformable, everything-deadening deadness of the very form of passing itself, Nietzsche’s rage-inducing time of “It was!”

As deadening dead time, the enraging time of rage, time has no time for itself.  It is time as what kills the time that stretches itself so monotonously from now till later, the time that kills the time that must be killed until what’s still pending, what has been put off until later–that “later” that never seems to come– finally does come “at last,” after all the endlessly dead and deadening time of passing on has finally itself passed on.

One lesson to be learned from Heidegger is that time “is” not–as though it were some sort of container for other things, for example.  Time “is” not at all, in that sense.  Rather, it “temporalizes”:  Time times, we might say, more closely to mirror Heidegger’s German (“Die Zeit zeitigt”).

Time doesn’t time events in the sense that we speak, for example, of “timing” a race, or the boiling of an egg.  That latter sense of “timing” means “keeping time,” as we also say.  It means, often quite literally,  “clocking” the duration of some event—that is, measuring that duration in terms of some “time-keeping device” such as a clock or stop-watch.  To “time” an event, in that sense, already presupposes that the time being measured is itself already there, already given, and given as just the sort of thing that can be measured by the units at issue in such time-keeping devices.  To time an event in that sense does not mean, then, to open up time or temporality itself for the first time, but rather to count the units of a stretch or segment of an already given time, a counting that counts on that pre-given time’s amenability to be measured by such units of chronometry (literally, time-measurement).

Time times, but not in that sense–the sense of giving the count for the units of some measurable duration.  Instead, time times in the sense that it yields the very e-venting, the very coming forth, of events themselves.  Indeed, following Heidegger, we might even say that time yields the event itself: the original, originating coming forth of coming forth as such.  Times brings forth or lets come forth coming-forth itself, such that time itself becomes what Heidegger calls “the eventing of the event” (“das Ereignen des Ereignisses”):  Time events the event.

As the eventing of the event, time itself is trauma.  What is more, that is reversible:  Trauma itself is time.  That, at any rate, is the perspective I shall try to articulate in what follows.

* * *

Freud taught, in Moses and Monotheism, that trauma manifests simultaneously and inescapably both in what he calls its “positive” effect, and in what he calls its “negative” effect.  “The former,” he writes (page 95 of the Vintage Books edition of the English translation by Katherine Jones), “are endeavors to revive the trauma, to remember the forgotten experience, or, better still, to make it real . . . These endeavors are summed up in the terms ‘fixation to the trauma’ and ‘repetition-compulsion.’”   On the other hand, [“t]he negative reactions pursue the opposite aim; here nothing is to be remembered or repeated of the forgotten traumata.  They may be grouped together as defensive reactions.”

What Freud calls the “negative” effect of, or “defensive” reaction to, trauma, induces, in general, a sort of numbness of the traumatized organism toward the traumatic event.  The organism as it were numbs itself in the face of trauma and thereby avoids, or at least postpones (a point to which I will return shortly), its impact.  The physical reaction to trauma of “going into shock,” in which the organism switches itself off, so to speak, in the face of such trauma as sexual abuse or a serious automobile accident, can serve as a model.

By calling such effects “negative,” Freud did not mean to indicate that they were somehow harmful for the organism that enacted and/or experienced them in reaction to trauma–far from it.  In fact, it is only such numbing, such “going into shock,” that allows the organism to survive the traumatic “shock” itself, the delivery of the wounding blow that otherwise would kill the organism so struck.  In that sense, the “negative” effects of trauma are entirely positive for the organism as such.  They are what allow the organism to survive the traumatic blow for which it is unprepared and which, as so unprepared, it cannot process.  Without its “negative” effect, the trauma would prove deadly.  Without such negative effects, the trauma would no longer truly be a trauma at all.  It would no longer traumatize.  It would simply kill.

Freud’s “negative” effects of trauma, accordingly, are actually positive for the traumatized organism:  They are life preserving.  Those effects are “negative,” not in relation to the traumatized organism, but only in relation to the trauma itself, so to speak.  They are negative in relation to the trauma, in the sense that they block or impede the impact of the traumatizing blow upon the organism.  Alternatively put, they are ways, as Freud himself says, that allow the organism to avoid the trauma, at least in its full impact.  As already indicated, such avoidance is absolutely essential, if the organism is to survive the blow at all, rather than completely succumb to it.  To put it in paradoxical fashion, going into shock– in the sense, for example, of the expression “shell shock,” as used during World War I to name what later came to be called “post-traumatic stress disorder”–buffers the organism against shock, the very shock of the trauma, the traumatic blow, itself, which otherwise threatens to prove fatal.

Indeed, it is only by deadening the organism through such negative effect that trauma achieves the quality of “belatedness” (Nachträlichkeit) that, as Freud came to see with great clarity, defines trauma as such.  A blow that can be fully experienced at the moment of initial impact is one that the organism, precisely in fully experiencing it, just as fully processes.  No sooner has such a fully manageable blow been struck, than it comes to be fully managed.  It is already behind the organism just as soon as it has struck at all, rather than still awaiting the organism somewhere in front of it.

But that, once again, would mean that such a blow would not really have been traumatic at all.  This time, however, that would not be because the blow would have been fatal.  The opposite, in effect, would have been the case.  Instead of being fatal, the blow would have been no more than just one more routine occurrence in the endlessly ongoing string of routine occurrences that make up the day of the everyday, none of which occurrences ever really rises above the gray, monotonous plain it shares with all the rest—and, in which, then, nothing ever really happens at all.  Thus, without its belatedness, without its having to come reach us across what Freud labeled its period of “latency,” trauma would have nothing traumatic about it.  It would no longer be any trauma at all.

Equally well, however, trauma would no longer be trauma without what Freud called its “positive” effect, which he defined, above all, in terms of the compulsion to repeat the traumatic incident itself.  Such repetition compulsion is “positive” in relation to the trauma that “effects” it in a sense paired with that in accordance with which numbing or deadening against the blow is “negative” in relation to that same trauma.  Just as the negativity of the negative effect of trauma does not as such mean being detrimental to the traumatized organism, so does the positivity of the positive effect not as such lie in somehow benefitting that same organism.

In fact, both the negative and the positive effects could be said to be positive in relation to the organism, allowing it the opportunity not only to survive but also to “fight another day,” as we say.  At any rate, however that may be, the positivity of Freud’s “positive” effect of trauma lies in the relation of that effect not to the organism but to the trauma, just as did the negativity of Freud’s “negative” effect.

The negative effect is negative in that it distances the organism from the trauma that strikes it.  The root negative effect of trauma, the root negative impact of the traumatic shock, is to engender the flattening, damping-down, numbing, or deadening of the impact itself.  By its negative impact trauma in effect establishes a distance between the traumatized organism and the traumatic blow or shock, and casts the traumatized organism into that distance, away from the blow.  Only such distancing allows the organism to undergo the impact, and not simply be destroyed by it.  Indeed, to undergo a traumatic impact, as opposed to being eliminated by it, is to be cast in such a way into a distance from it.  Only by distancing those it strikes from the impact it delivers does a blow constitute a trauma.  As Freud knew, the “latency” period of the unfolding of a trauma was always necessary, not something that could somehow be dispensed with, supposedly to face the trauma directly.  At least in that sense, trauma can never be met head-on, at the very point of impact.  Rather, it can only be approached from the side, and only after the fact, “belatedly.”  In short, what Freud calls the “negative” effect of trauma is inescapable.  It is definitive of trauma as such.

In contrast, but in exact parallel, to the way that the negative effect of trauma distances the organism from the trauma, the positive effect keeps the trauma close to that same organism.  The root positive effect of trauma, the root positive impact of the traumatic shock–namely, the compulsion to keep repeating the traumatic encounter—assures that the trauma remains pending.  As pending, the traumatic event continues to exert pressure, continually demanding to be allowed finally, truly to happen, that is, to be allowed fully and truly to strike the organism.  The trauma remains pending in its demand to “strike” the organism,  both in the sense of striking at it, and in the deeper, more crucial sense of striking the very traumatized organism itself, striking it into that very thing, the traumatized organism, in the same sense that we say of a minting process that it strikes coins. 

Without continuing to be impending through that “positive” effect, trauma would no more be trauma than it would if it lost its “negative” effect of deadening the traumatized organism in face of the traumatic blow, distancing the organism from it.  Similarly, a blow without Freud’s “positive” effect—one that was, then, no longer pending—would simply continue to drop ever further behind whomever it struck, as that one continued on along her way unscarred, untouched in any significant degree by what would have been at most a minor, glancing blow with no lasting impact at all.  Trauma, in contrast, is not merely lasting in its effects.  It is everlasting—everlasting precisely as ever-pending and ever-impending.  What Freud calls the “positive” effect of trauma is no less definitive of trauma as such than is what he calls its “negative” effect.

What is more, though it may sound paradoxical before a quick reflection, it is only by postponing the full impact of the traumatic blow that that blow can be kept pending.  Thus, the two—the negative and the positive effects of trauma–go together inseparably.  That is why Freud himself in Moses and Monotheism, right after distinguishing between the “negative” and the “positive” effects of trauma, suggests that the distinction is not to be pushed too far, by writing of what he is calling the “negative” reactions:   “Actually they represent fixations on the trauma no less than do the positive reactions, but they follow the opposite tendency.”

If being a Christian is the sort of thing John Howard Yoder conceived it to be, then at least for Christians today–a day of the between-time, what Agamben, following Paul, calls “the time that remains,” and which we might also call “the time of the cross,” both in the sense of the cross of Christ and in that of the crossing-point between two times–the polis, the place where truly human habitation in community can occur, has already been definitively opened.  What is more (at least for the Christian), humankind has already moved into that place and begun to build there.  It did so already (at least for the Christian) in the raising up of Jesus on the cross.  That raising up of the cross of Jesus was itself already (once again, at least for the Christian) an act of edification, that is, of building-up.  The raising of that cross was, then, the raising of the first building (or at least the first Christian one) in the newly opened or reopened polis.   Accordingly, to “follow” Jesus on “the way of the cross” is simply to keep on living, and that means building, there, in that place so opened or reopened up.  In turn, so to live and build is the only way truly to keep the cross itself always in mind.  Only so can one (or Christians, at least) remember the cross, that trauma of traumas (for the last time:  at least for the Christian), which teaches the irreality of what passes for politics under the sign of Caesar—that is, the state and its sovereignty as such (an irreality which is there for everyone, not just for Christians).

Nor is it only in the school of Christ and his particular cross that one can learn that particular lesson.  Rather, a significant convergence of diverse perspectives across a wide variety of traditions of thought occurs here, at this “crucial point,” so to speak.  Indeed, insofar as every trauma is all trauma, as I have put it before, every trauma can be seen ultimately to teach that crucial lesson.  To give one example, one important for my present purposes, British international relations scholar Jenny Edkins, whom I cited before, arrives along her own very different way at the same point to which Yoder arrived before her, by way of Christ and his cross.

“Trauma,” writes Edkins in one passage I have already cited –a passage from “Remembering Relationality:  Trauma Time and Politics,” her contribution to Memory, Trauma, and World Politics, edited by Duncan Bell (Pallgrave Macmillan, 2006), page 107–”is clearly disruptive of settled stories.  Centralized, sovereign political authority is particularly threatened by this.  After a traumatic event what we call the state moves quickly to close down any openings produced by putting in place as fast as possible a linear narrative of origins.”

That remark points to the insight that “sovereign political authority,” as Edkins names it, is itself founded in and as the covering over of trauma, covering it over by projecting an illusion of origin and ground, in order to salvage “sovereign political authority” itself from its own groundless violence and violent groundlessness.  Thus, for example, Hobbes traced the emergence of the sovereign back to the trauma of the war of all against all wherein “man is wolf to man,” thus masking the war of violence the sovereign himself perpetually wages and must wage against his own “subjects.”  The pseudo-justificatory movement at issue is essentially the same one the wife-abuser makes when he “justifies” the abuse he inflicts on his wife by projecting blame for the abuse back onto the supposed misbehavior of that wife, the very victim of the abuse.  What occurs in both cases is, in effect, the rationalization of violence, a rationalization that entails, in turn, a denial or at least gross minimization—and therefore a compounding–of the trauma the abuse-victim has suffered.

Edkins follows such French thinkers as Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy in drawing a distinction between politics, on the one hand, and the political, on the other.  She reserves to “politics” everything usually called by that name within state-dominated society.  ”Politics,” she thus writes (page 108), “is the regular operation of state institutions, elections, and such like within the framework of the status quo.”  In contrast, by “the political” she means what, in the preceding chapter, I called “politics elsewhere”—politics as the building of the genuine polis, the place of genuine human life in community—for example, such a place as, for Yoder’s Christians, the place opened up or reopened up by the crucifixion of Christ.

It is politics, in Edkins’ sense of the term, that is “threatened” by trauma; and it is politics that, to counter the threat trauma poses to it, manipulates trauma for the sake of securing sovereign authority against that threat.  “The political,” in contrast to politics so conceived, “. . . is the moment where established ways of carrying on do not tell us what to do, or where they are challenged and ruptured:  in traumatic moments, for example.”

Edkins argues that trauma always involves betrayal, in a double sense of that term.  As she sees it, that doubling of sense goes to the very heart of the matter of how trauma opens the new, multi-dimensional space of “the political” in the midst of the one-dimensional space occupied by the “politics” of sovereignty and the state.  On the one hand, to betray is to break trust, as when we say that someone we trusted has “betrayed” us by acting contrary to that trust.   On the other hand, to betray is to reveal, as we might speak of someone’s awkward behavior “betraying” a lack of self-confidence.  Trauma is the inextricable interweaving of the two, breaking-trust and revelation:  The revelation of the breaking of trust is precisely what is traumatic in the fullest sense.

Considered with regard to politics and the political, trauma is just such betrayal of the political, in that double sense of “betrayal”:  Political trauma is the revelation that politics has broken trust with the political and as such also the revelation of the radical alterity of the political to all politics.  Thus, Edkins writes (page 109) that

what traumatic encounter does . . . is reveal the way in which the social order is radically incomplete and fragile . . . nothing more than a fantasy–it’s our invention, and it is one that does not ‘hold up’ under stress.  When it comes down to it, for example, what we call the state is not a protector, the guardian of people’s security.  On the contrary, it is the very organization that can send people to their deaths, by conscripting them in times the state is under threat and sending them to fight its wars.  First, there is a betrayal of trust that threatens [ordinary national or family] relationality:  relationality expressed as national or family belonging turns out to be unreliable, for example.  Second, the radical relationality that is normally forgotten is revealed or made apparent.

Given that trauma thus reveals the betrayal of the polis by the state, it is of the utmost importance to the state to do whatever it can to assure itself that trauma, which dispels the illusion on which the state is based and opens a place outside the state where genuine human community is both once again possible and already actual, will be—and will stay–forgotten.  “Politics,” and the state that defines it, thereby fulfills its own vested interest in keeping the very revelation that comes with trauma from occurring, from taking place, as we put it in a telling expression.  Politics thus attempts to force the polis, the place of the political as such closed again, re-securing the enclosure of the political within politics.  By that enclosure the polis is “privatized,” in effect.  Or at least it is “property-ized,” that is, turned into just one form of “property,” so called “public property,” which itself is progressively reduced to what is left over after all the “private” property that private interests can lay hands on has been stolen away.

“However,” as Edkins herself goes on to observe (page 108), in contrast to the state and its contentedly safe citizens, “some people want to try to hold on to the openness that trauma produces.”  Such people, already inhabiting the genuinely political place trauma opens up, having migrated there from the state as the place of politics as usual, “do not want to forget, or to express the trauma in standard narratives that entail a form of forgetting.”  Rather, they see clearly that trauma is “something that unsettles authority,” and something that, furthermore, “should make settled stories” such as the Hobbesian sorts of tales sovereignty tells on itself, “impossible in the future.”

The narrative time that is temporalized by and in such settled, stately stories—the time constituted by such forgetting of the traumatic past and such rendering impossible of any open future—might well be called dead time.  It is the time of time’s corpse, the time when there is no more time for time.

In such a time, there is also no room for place any longer, no place for it to take place.  Instead, all that is left is the placeless space in which no point differs from any other, the indifferent space of global geometry.  Most especially, in such a dead time there is no place for the polis, the place of human cohabitation.  In the dead time of settled, stately narrative, where nothing ever happens, the political cannot happen either.

Such dead time, in which nothing happens and nothing is allowed to happen, is precisely the time of politics and the state.  In contrast, “it might be useful,” as Edkins proposes, “to call th[e] form of time that provides an opening for the political ‘trauma time’, as distinct from the linear, narrative time that suits state or sovereign politics.”  So conceived, trauma time is the time of the place–altogether elsewhere than the place called the state, which is the place of what she calls politics—of what Edkins calls the political.

Trauma time is the time of the political, as opposed to politics.  It is the elsewhen of the elsewhere of the polis, the only place where human habitation, which is always a co-habitation, can truly take place at all.

The Blog-Health-o-Meter™ reads Fresher than ever.

Crunchy numbers

A Boeing 747-400 passenger jet can hold 416 passengers. This blog was viewed about 6,100 times in 2010. That’s about 15 full 747s.

In 2010, there were 30 new posts, growing the total archive of this blog to 157 posts.

The busiest day of the year was August 12th with 102 views. The most popular post that day was Table Of Contents.

Where did they come from?

The top referring sites in 2010 were en.wordpress.com, pervegalit.wordpress.com, memorypolitics.blogspot.com, postmodernquaker.wordpress.com, and Google Reader.

Some visitors came searching, mostly for frank seeburger, bauman modernity and the holocaust, trauma philosophy, heidegger guilt, and jean-luc nancy corpus.

Attractions in 2010

These are the posts and pages that got the most views in 2010.

Table Of Contents March 2009

Zymunt Bauman, Modernity, and the Holocaust May 2009
2 comments

Witnessing Trauma: Reflections on the Work of Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, #2 of 5 April 2009

The Body of Trauma: Some Thoughts on Jean-Luc Nancy May 2009

Book Index March 2009

Classical theodicy attempts to reconcile the doctrine of the conjunction of omnipotence and omni-benevolence in God with the existence of evil.  However, in the face of such 20^th century horrors as Auschwitz, classical theodicy ran up against its limits.  Consequently, process theologians, following Whitehead’s suggestions, attempted to revise the terms of the problem by abandoning the ideas of divine omnipotence.  By Gottschalk’s analysis, however, both classical theodicy and the critique of it in process theology shared a common assumption that was never subjected to critical assessment.  The assumption in question is (page 79) “that God and evil both exist in the same sense in fact and as fact.”  Both classical theodicy and its critical modifications in process theory “presume that the experience of evil is just what it appears to be:  an unchallenged reality against which other realities are to be measured.”

It is just this assumption that Gottschalk challenges:  “Yet is the same factical quality, as quality of unmistakeable authenticity and concreteness, attributed to humanity’s experience of God?  Here is the crux of the problem, which turns out to be not so much the problem of evil in the classic formulation as that of the immediacy of this God-experience and the evaluation of its meaning.”

Against such an assumption of the unquestioned claim of evil to be reality itself, Gottschalk cites Karl Barth’s discussion, in the third volume of Church Dogmatics, of the purely nugatory nature of evil.  “Barth’s treatment of the problem has been subject to strong criticism,” writes Gottschalk (page 81), “largely on logical grounds, when appraised alongside other ‘solutions’ to the dilemma of theodicy.  Such criticisms,” however, Gottschalk replies,

while understandable, miss the vital point that Barth is not “doing” theodicy from a purely logical standpoint.  He simply will not concede some privileged position without a commitment to (or against) the truth of the Gospel—a commitment that must decisively affect one’s conclusions. . . .  He does not move from the problem of theodicy back to the understanding of God; rather, he moves out from the conviction that in the light of the revealed and experienceable reality of a sovereign [in a radically different sense of “sovereignty” than that at play in the ordinary way of understanding that concept, we should add] and good God, evil must be described—both with respect to its ontological status and its operative character—in terms of its sheer negation [that is, its sheer negating power:  its status as pure “anti-power,” we might call it, at least if the cross of Christ is to be given the credence Gottschalk and Yoder both affirm it to deserve, to set the true standard of what constitutes genuine power], as what he calls “das Nichtige” [from the German Nichts, “nothing”].

As Gottschalk interprets her work, Mary Baker Eddy, the founder of Christian Science, followed the same path as Barth in her response to evil.  “Her aim,” writes Gottschalk (page 85),

was not to account for the origin of evil in a logically satisfactory way but to define a new standpoint from which it could be overcome, or reduced, as she once put it, “to its nature of nothingness.” . . .  For her, the question of evil could only be answered at the existential level of the demonstration of the sovereignty [perhaps it would be less potentially misleading to say simply the “reality”] of God through the act of reducing evil to its “native nothingness.”  The only terms in which the problem of evil can be resolved are therefore inseparable from the actual process through which evil is destroyed [or, in accordance with what Gottschalk has been arguing throughout his article, rendered transparent in its nugatory irreality]. . . .  The means of redemption must therefore include the recognition of evil as nothing other than the sinful error of life and mind apart from God—an error Christians needed not to account for, but to overcome.

A few pages later (page 91), Gottschalk returns to the issue of Auschwitz, and what response can be adequate to it.  In the final line of his article, he sums his whole argument up nicely, by writing that the only way ultimately and adequately to deal with the Holocaust and its effects “would be to reverse all that its magnification of evil would accomplish by moving, not back, but forward into a magnified understanding of the reality of God.”

I submit that it is precisely the opening up of the possibility of just that forward movement—a going forth actually and concretely to live and to build in the only true reality–that was accomplished by the rebellion at Auschwitz.  At least it was accomplished at the level of the historical truth, as Laub revealingly and accurately named it, of that rebellion, the truth captured by Ruth’s supposedly “inaccurate” memory.  Indeed, Ruth’s own coming alive, as Laub recounts, when she recalled the rebellion, with an entirely new vitality, reflected in the sudden change of her entire tone of voice and body posture, bears eloquent witness to the power of that so “failed” rebellion—“failed” as judged by the standards of the evil that, at Auschwitz, lays claim to being reality itself—to seal the failure, instead, of that very evil.

Gottschalk and Yoder would agree, in my judgment, that it was exactly in that same sense that the apparent failure of Jesus’ mission in his crucifixion was in truth already of itself the raising up of Jesus to complete victory over the power that hung him on the cross.  What is more, what Jesus accomplished in and by his death was an absolutely, definitively political act—an act of the clearing and ordering of the polis, the place wherein alone a genuinely human life with and for one another in community can be lived.  Accordingly, Yoder, to return directly to him, concludes the twelfth chapter of The Politics of Jesus, and therewith the whole first edition of the book, with these words—with the ring of which I will also end this chapter of my own, on the politics, not just of Jesus, but of trauma as such:

A social style characterized by the creation of a new community and the rejection of violence of any kind is the theme of the New Testament proclamation from beginning to end, from right to left.  The cross of Christ is the model of Christian social efficacy, the power of God for Those who believe.

Vincit agnus noster, eum sequamur.

Our Lamb has conquered; him let us follow.