Trauma Time #1

Trauma Time

 

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 Image of Sovereignty #8: Making a Myth of Trauma (continued)

What follows is a continuation of what I started in my preceding post, called “Making a Myth of Trauma,” which is a chapter-section for what I hope will eventually be a book on trauma and philosophy.  I hope to complete the section in my next post.

* * * * *

In a sense, what disaster capitalism, to use Naomi Klein’s term, ends up doing when it bars the door against any political interruption of economic business as usual is really a matter of just coming back around, after a long journey, to the same point from which it and, in juncture with it, the twin ideas of the nation-state and modern sovereignty first started out, in the social contract theories of the seventeenth century.  Only insofar as a mythical “state of nature” identical to a state of war, or at least the constant threat of war, in which each individual struggles with all others to claim ownership over limited resources, is postulated as “original,” does any need arise in the first place for the contending parties to enter into contract with one another, establishing peace between themselves by voluntarily relinquishing some of their freedom and autonomy to create a common sovereign of one sort or another, whose charge it is to keep that peace.  Thus, for the benefits of security against the rapacity of their fellows, each individual party to the contract gives up the free exercise of his or her own rapacity against those same fellows.  As is the all too common and recurrent pattern, security trumps freedom in such a narrative.

The clear interest of whoever would claim sovereignty, or even just to be acting in sovereignty’s name, is to convince those over whom the claim is made that their very security depends upon granting that same claim.  That is, the interest of sovereignty is keep its subjects persuaded that, save for that very sovereignty itself, they would be thrown back into a traumatic insecurity in which, as Hobbes said, every person is a wolf to every other, and in which, no matter how big a wolf one may be, there is always a bigger wolf on the way, at least in one’s own wolfish imagination—which is all it takes, as Milton Friedman in effect saw with regard to what he called “shock” capitalism.  That there really be wolves as the door is not necessary, in order to make the case for establishing and perpetuating sovereignty as supposedly the only sure way to keep the door barred against them.  In fact, it is not even necessary that the subjects of the sovereign, whoever or whatever that sovereign may be (monarch, dictator, president, directory, political bureau, committee, parliament, “the people,” God, etc.), believe that such wolves are at the collective door.  All that is necessary is that they believe that wolves would be at the door, save for there being some sovereign keeping them at bay.

Franklin Roosevelt may have been right that there is nothing to fear but fear itself.  However, that mere fear of fear itself, he might well have added—at least to himself, if not to those whom he was addressing, since to say it to them would have risked undercutting his own claim to Presidential authority—is more than enough fear, all on its own, for the purpose of keeping the powerful in power.

We might put the point by saying that it is not so much trauma itself that sovereignty exploits in order to justify itself, as it is the fear of trauma.  Alternatively, we could say that sovereignty founds itself only indirectly on trauma, insofar as it founds itself directly on the avoidance of trauma.  Sovereignty makes a myth of trauma for the very purpose of assuring that trauma never be allowed to carry itself to term, as it were—never be allowed to complete its traumatization.  Sovereignty just cannot afford to let trauma really happen, to let it “take place,” as we say.  Most especially, sovereignty cannot afford to let trauma take over its own place and set itself up there, establishing its own occupancy of the space over which it contests with sovereignty itself.

As international relations scholar Jenny Edkins observes in “Remembering Relationality:  Trauma Time and Politics,” her contribution to editor Duncan Bell’s anthology Memory, Trauma, and World Politics:  Reflections on the Relationship between Past and Present (New York and London:  Pallgrave Macmillan, 2006, page 107):  “Trauma 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.”  What her own discussion of that point suggests, although she does not go so far as to say it herself, at least in the same terms, is that the trauma that most threatens “sovereign political authority” is the very trauma of its own groundlessly violent birth.  Sovereignty itself is founded in and as the “putting in place” of a “linear narrative” of its own origins, a narrative in which a fictitious trauma is, to put it paradoxically, retrospectively projected back before the emergence of sovereignty, creating the illusion that sovereignty arises as the only satisfactory response to such supposedly original trauma.

Structurally, the movement at issue is the same as that made by the abusive husband who attempts to “justify” abusing his wife by projecting blame for the abuse back onto that wife herself, who supposedly “asked for it” by her own earlier non-compliance to his wishes.   In both cases, the abusive husband  justifying abuse or the ruling sovereign justifying rule, what occurs is really no more than the rationalization of an earlier act of violence.  Indeed, that movement of rationalization actually compounds the violence further, by robbing those who have been violated of even the space to voice any protest.  Thus, for example, Hobbes’s tracing of the legitimacy of sovereignty back to the supposed need to defend against the trauma of the war of all against all, where “man is wolf to man,” effectively not only masks the very violence whereby a supposed sovereign first imposes itself on its subjects—that it, subjects them to itself—but also subjects those same subjects to the illusion that their subjection is really for their own good, so that even any complaint about the whole arrangement just serves to demonstrate ingratitude, even in the plaintiffs’ own minds.

At issue in such making-myth of trauma is what literary theorist Paul Eisenstein, whose specialty is German literature, argues in his valuable work Traumatic Encounters:  Holocaust Representation and the Hegelian Subject (Buffalo:  State University of New York Press, 2003) allows us to align classic liberalism with fascism.  By Eisenstein’s analysis liberalism shares with fascism the endeavor to avoid trauma, just as I have been arguing above with regard to modern sovereignty as such.  The argument he advances is that both liberalism and fascism, especially in its German variant as National Socialism, end up “disavowing” the “traumatic kernel”—the Lacanian point de caption or “quilting point”—that is “internal” to any political order.  Both disavow the “traumatic instability/inconsistency” that is internal to social order as such, by turning it into a definite historical something or other, rather than keeping cognizant of what Eisenstein calls its “transcendence,” which is to say its structural role in the very constitution of any social order whatever.  They both disavow the “transcendence” of that traumatic kernel of all social order by telling a story wherein that kernel is given (page 45) “a context, a history, from the beginning.” Eisenstein makes that remark in discussing the example of “the figure of the Jew” in National Socialism, but his analysis makes clear that it applies just as well to such figures in classic liberalism as that of “the state of nature.”

Remnant Communities and the Trauma of Sovereignty

2/13/08

Today’s brief entry from my philosophical journal, an entry which I first wrote last May, concerns once again the thought  of Jenny Edkins, whose field is international relations, and about whom I have written before in this blog.  What is at issue in the entry below, as it is at issue in the essay by Edkins I address, is a question raised by the work of contemporary Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben on the concept of sovereignty.  Agamben argues that modern sovereignty grows from a seed planted long before modernity by the ancient Greeks when they distinguished–in Aristotle’s thought especially–between bios, or life in the fully human sense, such as can be captured in “biographies,” which literally means “life-writings,” on the one hand, and zoe, or life in the purely “zoological” sense, on the other.  

Following Carl Schmitt, the right-wing political theorist who eventually used his thought to provide the Nazi state with legal justification, Agamben defines modern sovereignty as that power that draws the line between supposedly fully human life and what Agamben calls “bare life.”  Agamben goes on to argue that the emergence under the Nazis of the concentration camp system, above all the death-camps where the Nazis carried out the “extermination” of the Jews, was the culmination and flowering of sovereignty, so defined.  What is more, he argues that insofar as everyone today is subject to  such sovereignty everyone today is at least potentially, by virtue of the decisions of whoever holds the position of sovereign over one–the position of being “the decider,’ as George W. Bush notoriously identified himself in his role as President–an inmate in “the camps.”

The question that Professor Edkins raises in the article I am considering in the entry below is, in short, that of the form that resistance to such sovereignty can take.  If resistance to sovereignty, as Agamben analyzes sovereignty, is still possible at all, then just how might we make our resistance effective?  Or are we in fact doomed henceforth to trying merely to continue surviving, eking out as best we can one day at a time the “bare life,” as Agamben names it,  to which sovereignty reduces life in “Auschwitz,” ”the camps”?

My own very brief remarks interspersed below within and between citations from Edkins point toward what I have come to call “remnant communities” as places where such effective resistance may occur.  My selection of that name is indebted to Agamben, Franz Rosenzweig, and German and Jewish studies scholar Eric L. Santner, each of whom makes use of the term remnant in a way that has become important for me in my own thought.

One of the  key books in which Agamben himself works his thought of sovereignty and “bare life” is tellingly called Remnants of Auschwitz.  Not only were the inmates of Auschwitz remnants–cast off by-products, as it were–of the Nazi state, but all we have for testimony from those inmates themselves are remnants of what would constitute full testimony to the horror in which so many perished, a testimony that could only be made by those who so perished themselves, but who in being exterminated were denied any possibility of bear their own witness.

Then in The Psychotheology of Everyday Life:  Reflections on Freud and Rosenzweig (University of Chicago Press, 2001) Santner makes central use of the idea of the “remnant,” the “useless,” “good for nothing” cast-off remainder of the processes wherein we establish our “identity.”   It is only as such remnants, or at that level of ourselves where each of us is just such a good-for-nothing, ready-to-be-discarded remnant, that we can be encountered in our pure singularity, our “ipseity” as Santner calls it, to distinguish it from our “identity,” which is always a matter of social construction and what he calls “symbolic investiture” (for example, such investitures as establish my own  identity as a philosophy professor, father, husband, etc.). 

Santner’s use of the idea of the remnant is itself based in part on Agamben’s just mentioned text.  Even more crucially however, Santner’s thought and terminology is grounded in Franz Rosenzweig’s The Star of Redemption.  In that work Rosenzweig traces what he argues is an essential connection between Judaism and the  idea of “the remnant.” For him, the Jewish diaspora community is just a “remnant community” as I have in mind:  a community alongside and within the dominant–we can say the “sovereign”–society, one which does not set itself up as any alternative to that society, any competitor for sovereign power, but which instead lives out its own rich life as a community without reference, we might say, to that environing, dominant,  sovereign society, outside its laws, in that sense, though the individual members of that remnant community continue to play their various roles in that same sovereign society. 

Another model of a “remnant” community is provided by Benedictine monasticism, which is an insistently ”cenobitic” form of monasticism–that is, the monastic life lived out in communities of monks, which is to say communities of solitaries, who live ”alone together,” to use a formulation I find helpful.  Each Benedictine monastic community lives out its communal life in a certain, definite “withdrawal” from “the world,” yet a withdrawal in which the monastery–in the sense of the monastic community as such–always remains connected to, and interactive with, that same ”world” in various complex ways.  The monastery is a community “in the world, but not of the world,” as one common formulation has it.  It is a place where the irrelevancy of what in medieval Christian discourse is called “the world” is made known, simply by the fact of communal  life being lived at such a place “outside” yet “in” that same ”world.”

Yet a third example of what I would call  a “remnant community,” providing yet a third model of the formation and continuance of such a community, would be a “Twelve Step fellowship,” such as Alcoholics Anonymous, as I suggest at the end of the entry below.  Interested readers might wish to refer back to some of my earlier posts, in which I offer further remarks, all relevant to the topic of today’s post, about AA and other such fellowships.

 This is a topic that, in one way or another, will occupy me in many of the entries I will be posting here in the future.

 

Monday, May 19, 2008

Jenny Edkins, “Whatever Politics,” in Matthew Calarco and Steven DeCaroli, editors, Giorgio Agamben:  Sovereignty and Life (Stanford University Press, 2007), pp. 70-91.  Page 73:  “Sovereign distinctions [especially between bios and zoe] do not hold; to refuse them, and to demonstrate being in common, is  not to make a new move but only, yet most importantly, to embrace that insight [namely, the insight that such sovereign distinctions do not hold], and to call sovereignty’s bluff.”  Then, page 76:  “Sovereign power is happy to negotiate the boundaries of the distinctions that it makes; what it could  not tolerate would be the refusal to  make any distinctions of this sort.”

Compare [Alain] Badiou’s summation of the truth that comes to pass/takes place as the Sparticist uprising [in ancient Rome--which Badiou discusses in Logiques des mondes]:  [the simple but incontrovertible truth--incontrovertible even by the eventual rout of the Sparticist troops by the Roman legions sent against them, and the crucifixion of Sparticist and his followers--that, as Spartacus was just the first among the slaves of Rome to realize,] “We can go home.”

Compare, also, Yossarian in [Joseph Heller's novel] Catch 22 [who finally just does "go home," which in his  case means to check out of the insanity of the World War II Allied war enterprise by deserting to a neutral country].

Reflections on Memory, Trauma, and Politics, #2

2/4/09

The two entries below, a brief one I first wrote in my philosophical journal in April of last year followed by a longer one I wrote two days later, is the second of a series of seven addressing various essays from the collection Memory, Trauma, and World Politics, edited by Duncan Bell (Pallgrave Macmillan, 2006). 

The first entry consists solely of the citation of a line from Bell, plus some lines from a speech Bell cites by George W. Bush.  The conjunction of the two speaks for itself.

 The second entry addresses a piece by political scientist Jenny Edkins, whose thought I respect highly and have already reflected upon in more than one earlier post.

 

Monday, April 28, 2008

Bell [in his introductory essay to the volume], p. 14:  “In post 9/11 public life memories of both Vietnam and the attack on Pear Harbor have been invoked repeatedly and for multiple and often contradictory reasons.”  E.g., Bush in speech to Air Force Academy 6/24/04 [as Bell quotes him]:  “Like the Second World War, our present conflict began with a ruthless surprise attack on the united States.  We will not forget that treachery and we will accept nothing less than victory over the enemy.  Like the murderous ideologies of the 20th century, the ideology of terrorism reaches across borders, and seeks recruits in every country.  So we’re fighting these enemies wherever they hide across the earth.”

 

Wednesday, April 30, 2008

In Bell’s anthology, Jenny Edkins, “Remembering Relationality:  Trauma Time and Politics” (pp.99-115 [in Bell]), p. 106:  “Already, in both these thinkers [French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan and French philosopher Jacques Derrida], we can discern the idea of trauma:  as the traumatic lack around which [as a "quilting point"] the subject is structured in Lacan, and as the aporetic or traumatic moment of decision at the heart of the political in Derrida.  We also find in these approaches the idea of traumatic memory, or, rather, the way in which the traumatic moment is forgotten, or indeed invisible.”

The trauma is “forgotten” only at/as representable, however.  At/as the level of affect, it is “remembered.”  This gap between representation and affect is itself the act of/which is the trauma:  trauma is the opening of a gap between representational understanding and the affectivity ([Heideggerian] Befindlichkeit) that accompanies it, is  equiprimordial with it.  That trauma–which is the trauma, “structural trauma” [as Paul Eisenstein calls it], trauma itself–opens the space into which political sovereignty and theoretical science and technology can rush, to set themselves into play there (a “shadow play”?).

Edkins, p. 107:  “Trauma 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.  We have seen already how this happens after a non-founded founding moment.”

Thus, as she all but says herself (just not, so far as I can tell, drawing the final implications of her own analysis), “sovereign political authority” is itself founded in and as the  covering over of trauma in the projection of an illusion of origin and ground to salvage itself from its own violent groundlessness.  The movement is the same as the abuser “justifying” his abuse by projecting it back onto the “badness” of the victim of the abuse.  What, in effect, occurs is the rationalization of violence, which is, in turn, the denial of the trauma of the victim of violent abuse.  Thus, for example, Hobbes traces sovereignty back to the  trauma of the war of all against all, where “man is wolf to man,” thus masking the war/violence that the sovereign perpetrates upon his/her “subjects.”

Edkins, p. 108, follows up:  “However,  some people want [unlike the sovereign} to try to hold on to the openness that trauma produces.  They do not want to forget, or to express the  trauma in standard narratives that entail a form of  forgetting.  They see trauma as something that unsettles authority and that should make settled stories impossible in the future. I have proposed that it might be useful to call this 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."  (Her footnote 30 to this, on p. 251, says "the time of the state is similar to Benjamin's 'empty, homogeneous time'" in Illuminations, p. 252.)

Later on p. 108:  "Politics is the regular operation of state institutions, elections, and such like within the framework of the status quo. . . . The political on the other hand 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."  (Though, she goes on to say, there are problems with the distinction.)

Trauma is a betrayal in the double sense of breaking trust and revealing.  Re the first (p. 109):  "So what traumatic encounter does, then, 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."  Overall,:  "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.”

Memory, Memorials, and Art Spiegelman’s Shadow

1/31/09

Art Spiegelman is  the cartoonist author whose two volume comic-strip book Maus deservedly won him a Pulitzer Prize.  A native New Yorker, he and his family were in the city when the attacks on the Twin Towers occurred on 9/11/2001.  The entry from my journal posted below concerns his subsequent treatment of those attacks, and of the public, “official” responses to them, in his subsequent book In the Shadow of No Towers.

Readers can find a few more of my reflections on Spiegelman’s work–Maus in the case of that earlier post–in “Items Concerning LaCapra’s Works #1,” posted at this site earlier this  month, on January 7. 

On the dubious nature of official or semi-official “memorializations” of shared or public trauma, see Jenny Edkins, Trauma and the Memory of Politics (Cambridge University Press, 2003) and my comments on it in my earlier journal entry posted at this site on December 14, 2008, under the title “Trauma, Sovereignty–and Alcoholics Anonymous.”

Tuesday, April 22, 2008

Art Spiegelman, In the Shadow of No Towers (New York:  Pantheon Books, 2004), “The Sky Is Falling,” a two large-paged essay by Spiegelman at the beginning of the  book:

“Only when I heard paranoid Arabs and Americans blaming it all [that is, blaming "9/11"] on the Jews did Ireel myself back in, deciding it wasn’t essential to know precisely how much my ‘leaders’ knew about the hijackings in advance–it was sufficient that they immediately instrumentalized the attack for their  own agenda.”

Next page, same essay:  “I wanted to sort out the fragments of what I’d exper-ienced from the media images that threatened to engulf what I actually saw . . .”

The two–the “instrumentalization for their ["my 'leaders'"] own agenda,” and the flood of media images–form a whole.  Each feeds and reinforces the other.

Plate 10 [in Spiegelman's book], 1st frame is all text, the opening of which is:  “Nothing like commemorating an event to make you forget it.”

The Trauma of Philosophy

The entry from my philosophical journal reproduced below is a short one.  It stands alone between the entry posted yesterday,  which is a response to my reading political scientist Jenny Edkin’s Trauma and the Memory of Politics, and the entry for my next posting, which begins a series of entries in which my reflections are elicited by reading feminist scholar Ann Chetkovich’s An Archive of Feeling.   In contrast, the entry below stands on its own, rather than as evoked by any specific reading.  In it I very broadly and quickly sketch a critical reading of philosophy itself as the manifestation of a trauma–or, more specifically, of a mechanism to keep a trauma at bay.

In my mind, the critical sketch of philosophy from the entry below sets up rich resonances with another critical sketch of philosophy, by Franz Rosenzweig in the opening pages of The Star of Redemption, to which I refer the interested reader.   To give a brief summary,  in those great opening pages of his master-work Rosenzweig addresses the whole history of philosophy since Socrates, and contrasts it with the “New Thinking” Rosenzweig himself endorses, and sees as finally beginning to emerge only with Nietzsche, eventually to become more fully represented by Heidegger, especially in the latter’s famous disputation at Davos, Switzerland, in the 1920s with Ernst Cassirer about the interpretation Kant.  Rosenzweig presents philosophy from Socrates to Nietzsche as a sort of suicide.  As Rosenzweig interprets it, the Socratic philosopher chooses to negate flesh-and-blood life itself in favor of a bloodless projected Ideal reality, making that choice in order never to have to face the fear of deathhead on.  By Rosenzweig’s analysis, the “otherworldliness” of philosophy until Nietzsche manifests an attempt to avoid the fear of death by avoiding ever fully living.

The interpretation of which I  give a thumbnail sketch in the entry below should be seen as moving within the horizon first opened by Rosenzweig’s critique.

Sunday, February 2, 2008

From its inception philosophy has defined itself by a movement of exclusion–exclusion of that from which philosophy differentiates itself, and precisely [only] in such differentiation becomes itself.  Thus, in its founding movement philosophy gives priority to that against which it defines itself.  It can come to itself only as the negation of its opposite, as,  for Nietzsche, the “good” of the “good/evil” distinction [in the first of the three essays that make up his Genealogy of Morals] can come to itself only as the exclusion of its opposite, which has status independent of, and prior to, the ”good,” which comes as a sort of afterthought, almost.

Hence the obsessiveness of philosophy’s return to defining itself [rather like the dog of the Christian gospel that returns to its own vomit, to use one of my favorite analogies], since that can never be accomplished  for  sure.  Only what needs no  movement of distinguishing itself from what it extrudes and excludes, in order to  come to  itself, can ever fully “accomplish”itself.  Or, rather, only what never needs to accomplish itself at all, but what simply is in its fullness, like the sun in the Prologue to [Thus Spoke] Zarathustra, can escape the excremental cycle–the cycle of excreting its own opposite and opposing itself to it in in obsessive retention–[Giorgio] Agamben’s [notion of] ban.

Since its inception in Plato, philosophy has bound itself to the ban of sophistry.  No wonder [then that] philosophy always reeks of solipsism, which is the shit of philosophy.

What would a thinking which was not under such an excremental ban be like?

Trauma and Sovereignty — and Alcoholics Anonymous

12/14/08

After the entry posted yesterday, the next entry of significance pertaining to trauma in my philosophical journal occurs almost a month later. As was also true of the first posted entry and will be true for subsequent entries overall, the entry below was occasions by my reflections on the literature about trauma that I was reading at the time. Just as there is something appropriate, as I mentioned in my previous post, about both the delayed posting of these entries from my philosophical journal and the episodic nature of the entries themselves, so is there something appropriate to the general subject of this website–trauma–about the typically responsive character of all the entries: their being occasioned by reflections engendered by earlier experiences, in this case, earlier reading. The truths carried to us in trauma always require just such response for their reception. What is more, if, as I will be arguing in a variety of entries for future postings, truth itself is unavoidably traumatic, then the coming of truth itself must always take place in such responsiveness.

The entry posted below also introduces the reader to another of my long-standing philosophical and personal interests, that of the philosophy of addiction and “recovery.” Readers unfamiliar with my earlier work and interested in pursuing some of my writing on that topic may consult my book Addiction and Responsibility: An Inquiry into the Addictive Mind, which was originally published in 1993 (New York: Crossroad), and which I have recently made available chapter by chapter online at

http://blog.addictionandresponsibility.com/.

Below is the newly posted entry from my philosophical journal.

Sunday, January 20, 2008

Reading Trauma and the Memory of Politics, by Jenny Edkins (Cambridge U. Press, 2003).

Pp.188-189: Very good, clear, short summary of [contemporary Italian philosopher Giorgio] Agamben [in such works as Homo Sacer] on how, in the [Nazi concentration/extermination] camps, the zone of indistinction between zoe [Greek for life in the minimal zoological sense] and bios [life in the full, human sense, as involved in a person’s “biography,” for example] is reached. And, even better, she grasps and presents how, for Agamben, testimony bears witness to the inseparability of the two. As she sees it, it is that testimony/witness to their inseparability that truly contests “modern sovereignty.” But she ends by throwing away her own insight, it seems to me, when she goes on to write (p. 189): “The distinction between zoe and bios underlies sovereign power–is fundamental to it.” Her whole analysis shows, on the contrary, that it is not distinguishing between the two that founds sovereignty, but is, rather, the self-dissembling of that very distinction–the engendering of the myth of the natural or original givenness of the distinction, as it it were, rather than the acknowledgment of the artificiality and conventionality of the distinction, [such a mystifying mythification of the distinction being necessary] to get sovereignty up and running in the first place. What testimony/witnessing does is point to the fictional ”nature” of the distinction–its non-”naturality,” as it were: the emperor [of Hans-Christian Anderson's fairytale story, "The Emperor's New Clothes"] never has any clothes! (She ends up saying the same herself, in effect, on p. 232.)

Related: Right after that (pp. 190-191) she discusses the processes whereby the status quo appropriates testimony/witnessing through such devices as memorialization (narratives of rescue and hope), mediatization, etc., thereby diverting, in effect, the potentially disruptive power of such testimony. Well, I’ve long been aware of that precisely as it applies to AA. It could certainly be plausibly argued that AA itself functions as just such a diversion of otherwise potentially disruptive power, by diverting the addict from the angry manifestation of anger itself–that disruptive power–in substance/practice abuse, into “peaceful” channels, so that the addict gets “set straight,” back on the road of socially useful and productive behavior.

Such an analysis is not without power of its own. However, there are two factors about AA, concretely taken in the context of addiction and society in interaction, that tell me the analysis along those lines needs to be thought through into a different analysis, if the analysis itself is to serve any liberating potential. Those two factors are:

1) It is addiction itself–e.g., alcoholism–that actually serves the status quo as a diversion of the potentially disruptive power that the potential addict could otherwise become. Precisely by giving all us social malcontents, us “restless, irritable, and discontented” people [a reference to a well known line from "The Doctor's Opinion" in the book Alcoholics Anonymous], something to keep us occupied, as it were, the power that is–the “status quo”–effectively neutralizes us. That’s why truly to hear [someone in an AA meeting say, as someone often will, especially if there is a "newcomer" present], “You never have to drink again [if you don't want to],” is [potentially] so liberating for the alcoholic, but also carries a hidden potential to liberate the socially disruptive power that till then had been so successfully neutralized.

2) That newly liberated potentially disruptive power, in turn, works–not by encouraging/propelling recovered addicts to organize/mobilize for direct political action. That would not accord with the 10th AA tradition, against having any “opinion on outside issues,” as well as the 5th tradition, on keeping “singleness of purpose” (“but one primary purpose” [namely, "to help other alcoholics to achieve sobriety"].  Rather, the revolutionary potential is AA itself! It is “life together” in AA that marginalizes the very things that, outside AA, marginalize segments of the [larger] society (blacks, gays, women, whomever). In AA [AA members] live together in such a way that all such divisions are set aside. Thus, it is at the level of AA as a border-less, place-less place in the social landscape–a place where, whenever one comes into that place, the fictions of sovereignty are swept away as the fictions they are–it’s as such a place without place that AA simply lets free life occur.