Petar Ramadanovic

Department of English
University of New Hampshire
petarr@cisunix.unh.edu

 

The development of theory in America is marked by what has come to be known in the last ten years as trauma, and our purpose in this introduction is to point to that, and to open our collection with and to the question: What is meant by trauma theory? We will situate this question through a brief examination of history as it unfolds between texts, and will forego a discussion of social and political events that may have contributed to the development of the interest in trauma. We choose to do this in the belief that access to the former (history as it unfolds between texts) will provide a path to the latter (social and political events), and that this would not be the case if we were to reverse the direction.

 

We begin with one precise moment, Shoshana Felman’s “Education and Crisis, or the Vicissitudes of Teaching,” a text that ushered the term trauma, in its present critical formation, onto the American theoretical scene.¹ As Cathy Caruth made clear in her introduction to Trauma: Explorations in Memory and throughout her Unclaimed Experience, trauma is an overwhelming experience which is in some way present in and through a literary text.² What makes literature into the privileged, but not the only, site of trauma is the fact that literature as an art form can contain and present an aspect of experience which was not experienced or processed fully. Literature, in other words, because of its sensible and representational character, because of its figurative language, is a channel and a medium for a transmission of trauma which does not need to be apprehended in order to be present in a text or, to use Felman’s and Dori Laub’s term, in order to be witnessed. What is thus also presented through a text is a certain truth about history that is not otherwise available.

 

“Education and Crisis” is even more pertinent for our present purposes because in it Felman reads Mallarmé’s lecture “La Musique et les lettres” and a text based on it, “Crise de verse.”³ The two writings, we remember, played a pivotal role for literary theory in the U.S. when they were read by Paul de Man in his “The Crisis of Contemporary Criticism,” which first appeared in Arion (Spring 1967) and was later included as the opening essay–now entitled simply “Criticism and Crisis”–in Blindness and Insight. We recall also that this and other essays in Blindness and Insight were written in “response to theoretical questions about the possibility of literary interpretation” (de Man xi). So, when Felman turns to Mallarmé, this is in effect a return to the possibility of literary theory and to its history.⁴ Here are the five most important points about this critical turn, before we begin our reading of Felman’s essay which will help us situate this volume with respect to the current state of trauma theory.

 

First, in “Education and Crisis” Felman does not cite de Man’s engagement with Mallarmé. But she does offer more than an allusive suggestion as to which theoretical path she is pursuing when, in her own title, she repeats the crucial term (crisis) de Man developed in his “Criticism and Crisis.”

 

Second, de Man uses “crisis” to define the state of literary criticism in analogy to Mallarmé’s description of the state of poetry in his time. Adapting and paraphrasing Mallarmé, de Man says:

 

Well-established rules and conventions that governed the discipline of criticism and made it a cornerstone of the intellectual establishment have been so badly tampered with that the entire edifice threatens to collapse. One is tempted to speak of recent developments in Continental criticism in terms of crisis. (3)

 

Taking some liberties, we can read these two sentences as saying that the role of Mallarmé’s poetic revolution in revamping literature at the end of 19th century is, in the 1960s, performed by a theoretical revolution. Since literary criticism “occurs in the mode of crisis” (de Man 8), we can assume that its task is, in fact, perpetually to trouble and reinvent writing.

 

Third, “crisis” for de Man is not simply characteristic of the state when an entire edifice threatens to collapse; it is, more precisely, the process whereby scrutiny reaches the “point of reflecting on its own origin” (de Man 8). And, we might add, crisis is constituted through this act, when writing is turned or turns upon itself to examine its condition of possibility.

 

Fourth, like the rest of de Man’s oeuvre, “Criticism and Crisis” is engaged in establishing theory in America. In this text he is translating the crisis from one continent to another, from structuralism to post-structuralism, and from French into English. In doing this de Man is again repeating Mallarmé, in the sense that he is taking an event that happened in and around the French language into an English-speaking context. Mallarmé, we remember, delivered his lecture “La Musique et les lettres” when he visited Oxford in 1894.

 

Fifth, as de Man compares Mallarmé’s texts on the new verse to Edmund Husserl’s two lectures entitled “The Crisis of European Humanity and Philosophy,”⁵ he notes that there is a “recurrent epistemological structure” in the critical discourses of and on crisis. A structure, that is, which is characterized not only by an insight but also by a blindness:

 

When modern critics think they are demystifying literature, they are in fact being demystified by it; but since this necessarily occurs in the form of a crisis, they are blind to what takes place within themselves. (de Man 18)

 

Bearing these five points in mind, we can say that Felman’s “Education and Crisis” is necessarily positioned at a turning point in critical theory. As such the text should be announcing a certain new event. And indeed it does. If de Man establishes criticism as the “rhetoric of crisis,” Felman proceeds to relate the crisis–that is, theory–to education, and, more importantly, she takes the term crisis in a new direction as she focuses on the presence of history in writing. This move from the rhetoric of crisis to the rhetoric of trauma is announced at the essay’s very outset, where the first question, “is there a relation between crisis and the very enterprise of education?” is immediately restated “more audaciously and sharply” as “is there a relation between trauma and pedagogy?” (1). In lieu of an explanation of this move, suffice it to note at this point that Felman works with two general suppositions, not as such present in de Man’s essay: that the twentieth century is “a post-traumatic century” (1) and that testimony is a literary genre of our time (6).⁶

 

Mallarmé is not the first author Felman analyzes. Her engagement with him comes after she has completed simultaneously two major epistemological moves by establishing parallels between education and psychoanalysis and between literature and testimony. After she notes that literature (to be precise, “discursive practice” [5]) testifies to historical accidents, Felman takes up Camus and narrative, Dostoevsky and confession, Freud and psychoanalysis, and Mallarmé and poetry in order to show how each of these kinds of writing bears witness. While the first two authors allow Felman to reveal that certain biographical elements are unwittingly present in their texts, it is with Mallarmé and Freud that the connection between general history and particular works is established. For the sake of brevity, we will proceed to follow only the main point of Felman’s reading of Mallarmé.

 

The novelty of Mallarmé’s verse is its rhythmic unpredictability which, in Felman’s understanding, “reaches out for what precisely cannot be anticipated” (19) as it speaks to an accident–historical accident but also the accident of history–which has an epochal significance. The verse continues the changes begun in the French Revolution, but takes the revolution to a more profound level. It forges and testifies to the new relationship “between culture and language, between poetry and politics” (20). In doing so (changing and testifying), the new verse has liberating effects (23). While it is not possible to identify precisely the kind of freeing taking place here–by definition, this is a thrust forward into what is not yet known–we find the liberation in

 

the witness’s readiness, precisely, to pursue the accident, to actively pursue its path and its direction through obscurity, through darkness, and through fragmentation, without quite grasping the full scope and meaning of its implications, without entirely foreseeing where the journey leads and what is the precise nature of its destination. (Felman 24)

 

The witness here is Mallarmé as well as Freud, and, of course, the witness refers to Paul Célan, who is virtually quoted in this passage. But it is also Felman’s own pursuit of testimony and trauma that deserves the same name. That the author is involved in an act of witnessing is explained in Dori Laub’s contribution to Testimony, when he observes that he participates in the Holocaust testimonials of the Yale Fortunoff archive as both psychoanalyst and concentration camp survivor and suggests that a testimony to an accident becomes testimony only when there is another witness–a reader or a listener, a critic or an analyst–to hear the testimony.

 

Now, we should ask the obvious questions about the difference between de Man’s and Felman’s readings of Mallarmé, which concerns de Man’s two conclusions–cited above as points three and five–about the fold created by critical discourse on crisis, a fold which prevents the full scope of the project (the full scope of the thrust forward) from realization. The question is, in effect, whether Felman follows de Man all the way through or stops short of the two critical gestures of scrutinizing the origin of discourse and of turning the reading back upon itself. Let us ask this as a general question of trauma theory–and as a guiding question of this collection–and leave further analysis of Felman’s contribution to Testimony for another occasion.⁷ In its simplest formulation the question is, can there be a trauma theory that is not critical? We understand the task of the generation of texts coming after Felman to be to address and negotiate this issue in some form, no matter whether they approach trauma in a de Manian vein or not. This is not only because trauma theory needs to clarify its link to previous theoretical formations but more importantly because of the supposed ineffable nature of traumatic experience and the possibility for any discourse to “bring it to significance,” to borrow the phrase Felman uses in the context of her class, which was traumatized by Holocaust testimonials. The study of trauma, of course, does not have to remain within the realm of critical theory, and could reconfigure what is meant by “critical.”

 

The first two essays in this volume (Krell’s and Ramadanovic’s) situate the examination of trauma within an already existing body of knowledge and analyze the field’s constitutive limitations. David Farrell Krell’s essay, entitled “‘Das Vergangene wird gewußt, das Gewußte aber wird erzählt‘: Trauma, Forgetting, and Narrative in F.W.J. Schelling’s Die Weltalter,” suggests that our experience of the past is fundamentally split and asks why it is that the past must be narrated or recounted rather than depicted or presented dialectically. As Krell reconstructs the drafts of Schelling’s The Ages of the World, he first considers the inaccessibility of the past and finds it to be not merely unavailable but repressed. Repression [Verdrängung] is, of course, Freud’s term, but it is a term which, like the “uncanny,” is possibly borrowed from Schelling. From here on the question is three-fold: what precisely is repressed, how does that repression take place, and why would we want to pursue the repressed past? Schelling’s answer to these questions is, in effect, a fable: there was a primal time, a time of pantheism and female divinity, which–as it is repressed, killed off by subsequent ages–is also posited as irrecuperable. The reason we need to know about the repressed past is in order to reawaken life. What is uncovered in the process of awakening is not only what Schelling would call a living divinity, but also the necessity which dictates that the past can be known only through narrative forms.

 

If this is so, then Krell’s philosophical analysis of Schelling is itself a fable to the extent that it would tell us something about the absolute past. But it is also a story that marks a beginning. While we may not know (yet) exactly what Krell’s story says, we do know that the time when it is told, that is, the present, is “itself a Chaos, linked by both its repressed memories of suffering and its longing for a caress to the remote past and a distant future.”

 

Petar Ramadanovic’s essay “From Haunting to Trauma: Nietzsche’s Active Forgetting and Blanchot’s Writing of the Disaster” continues the consideration of the possibility for a discourse about the past and the future. In distinction to Krell, Ramadanovic focuses on Nietzsche and history writing. Ramadanovic follows closely Nietzsche’s untimely meditation, “On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life,” in order to tease out what it means to bring the past and present into a balanced relation, a relation in which one does not suppress the other. Ramadanovic’s first conclusion is that to think history and to think historically, we need to think time. Following Nietzsche further, the author shows that the call for active forgetting needs to be complemented by a thought about the disaster. In the second part of his essay, Ramadanovic hence turns to Blanchot’s notion of the writing of the disaster–itself developed in Blanchot’s dialogue with, among others, Nietzsche. Through a reading of Blanchot, Ramadanovic suggests that the impossibility of remembering the disaster should not “lead us to invent the right substitute, nor another order of facts and another methodology, another mnemotechnics and mythology, to deal with the immeasurable.” What we may need, rather, is a thought about the future and, with it, a way to mourn the past without surrendering to nostalgia or the hope for restitution of past wrongs.

 

Cathy Caruth’s interview with one of the leading French psychoanalysts and thinkers, Jean Laplanche, turns to Freud’s theory of trauma and offers a close examination of the elements of Freud’s seduction theory. Caruth and Laplanche begin with an understanding of trauma’s temporal structure. While we can distinguish two moments in trauma, the original moment and its belated emergence, Laplanche points out that the term Freud uses to characterize the emergence, Nachträglichkeit, marks in fact a split. Laplanche translates Nachträglichkeit into French as “après-coup” and into English as “afterwardsness” and says that we should distinguish its two meanings. It is a “deferred action,” an action that is constituted as an event only after a temporal interval. And it is also an “after the event”; that is, a certain consequence that follows upon the event. But if we now conclude that in trauma either “the past determines the future, or the future reinterprets the past,” we have only posited a dilemma that is impossible to resolve. Instead, we need to understand the position of the other in trauma. What is other is not simply an outside which lies beyond the protective layer surrounding our biological organism; the other is not outside, but an addressee who is within and who sends an enigmatic message to an ego that this message also creates. The other is, Laplanche insists, the unconscious. Trauma reenacts this situation of the founding of the ego and revives something deeply personal, that is, something sexual, which helps an individual cope with trauma. Such a reenactment suggests the possibility of the resymbolization of trauma and, consequently, makes analysis of trauma possible. This is because, Laplanche claims, repetitions in trauma are not identical. Sexuality, understood in Freud’s general way, plays an important role in trauma in that it is present during the very formation of the ego. For example, the mother’s breast is not only, Laplanche reminds, good or bad as Melanie Klein claimed, it is also an erotic organ for the woman. And if this is so, then there is something in the mother-child relation of which the mother is not fully aware and that remains enigmatic, that is, unconscious. But this also means, Caruth notes, that for Laplanche the general theory of repression and the traumatic model of sexuality are not opposed, as they are for psychiatrists in the U.S. Caruth and Laplanche then turn to examine what Laplanche calls his attempt to humanize trauma as they analyze the place of death and the other’s message in the formation of the subject. The last part of the interview discusses Laplanche’s philosophical training and offers a more general overview of his psychoanalytic positions.

 

Ellie Ragland’s “The Psychical Nature of Trauma: Freud’s Dora, The Young Homosexual Woman, and the Fort! Da! Paradigm” continues to unravel the enigmatic nature of trauma as she turns to the work of Jacques Lacan, arguing “that the limits of representation in trauma tell us something new about the affects (as opposed to cognition) which Lacan tried to explain by his category of the real.” The symptom of trauma is enigmatic because it is shrouded in secrecy and silence. Bearing this in mind, Ragland examines Lacan’s theory of the symptom, a focus of his later seminars, where the symptom is the link–the knot–that ties together the three orders: imaginary, symbolic, and real. If this is so, the very act of witnessing to a trauma–an act, that is, which brings the unconscious acting out of trauma to its conscious naming or representation (as in art) and results in a belief that there is/was a trauma–such an act is also a symptom. The trauma appears, Ragland argues, “at the point where unconscious fantasy objects can no longer suture the structural lack-in-being” and trauma is felt as a structural disturbance–as, that is, an anxiety whose object is the void or the lack-in-being. At such a moment, trauma becomes knowable but, Ragland argues, not as a historical fact or empirical event, but as a limit point of representation, that is, as object a. Our knowledge follows two distinct logics, one conscious and one unconscious, and trauma is like a cipher, secret on one level and enunciated on another. Ragland shows that when we think that we know what the cipher says, we are hiding at all costs the lack of the object; that is, the fact that the cipher does not represent anything (no history or empirical event) but instead a fundamental lack. In Freud’s fort/da game, the boy is not symbolizing the mother and mastering external reality, but trying to maintain his own psychic unity. Ragland concludes that since what is repeated in trauma is a signifier, the study of trauma traces “the operation of the real on language,” and of “language on the real.”

 

In the last text of this collection, “Trauma and the Material Signifier,” Linda Belau takes the argument about the psychoanalytic understanding of trauma developed in Ragland’s essay one step further, considering the difference between psychoanalytic (Lacan, Zizek, Dolar) and deconstructive (Felman, Langer) treatments of this problem. Beginning with the suggestion that recent studies of trauma have “invited a dangerous elevation of traumatic experience to the level of an ideal,” Belau tries to show that trauma does not lie beyond the limits of representation and that it is not an exceptional experience. Rather, Belau supposes, trauma, like all human experience, is tied to the system of representation and language, and she goes on to examine the role of the signifier in trauma in some detail. She clarifies the accusation of idealism leveled against psychoanalysis, showing that the signifier is marked by a constitutive inadequacy, a missing piece, and not, as some have supposed, a prohibited content. This is to say that since loss is a part of the subject’s constitution, the signifier, or a symbolic act, cannot fill in the lack produced by a trauma or restitute the loss. The consequence of this inadequacy is that the subject is destined to encounter trauma in the present, where trauma appears as a repetition. What is repeated here is the impossibility of returning to the past moment when the injury occurred. Hence trauma is not “beyond representation” but is, more precisely, a repetition of what is not possible. The loss does not precede the subject but is the effect of the process of the subject’s becoming. In this sense, anything beyond symbolization is created by symbolization itself. Symbolization, however, necessarily fails to cover the traumatic void. Hence, when Belau reads Felman’s analysis of Claude Lanzmann’s film Shoah, she shows that trauma’s very resistance to interpretation is felt as traumatic. Felman, Belau suggests first, fails in her analysis of the Shoah to the precise extent that she makes sense of the incomprehensible event. But, second, Belau adds, it is in this failure that Felman performs unwittingly an obscene understanding of the Holocaust, and, Belau concludes, this is what makes Felman paradoxically close to Lanzmann. As Belau performs her own analysis of Felman and of Shoah, we are led to understand that psychoanalysis is not so much an interpretation as it is an act–an act which sometimes counters interpretation, undoing its knot. Belau then shows that trauma, like the real for Lacan, is not beyond the symbolic. “It is rather,” Belau concludes, “the very limit of the symbolic, the impossible kernel of the symbolic around which it [trauma, the real] circles.”

 

This collection, unlike some currently available works on trauma, does not claim that trauma is beyond the limits of representation, but that in order for an assessment of trauma to acquire significance we need to situate the study of trauma in a specific way, namely as a study of the constitutive limitations of knowledge and experience. Our collection thus intends to return the promise of a new field to the sometimes tedious examination of texts and assumptions before we can use the term trauma in a rigorous and sustained way. Only then can a work on trauma open itself to wider social, cultural, historical, and political issues.

 

* * * 

The special issue editors would like to thank The Other Press, LLC for permission to print David Krell’s “Das Vergangene wird gewußt, das Gewußte aber wird erzählt: Trauma, Forgetting, and Narrative in F.W.J. Schelling’s Die Weltalter,” Ellie Ragland’s “The Psychical Nature of Trauma: Freud’s Dora, The Young Homosexual Woman, and the Fort! Da! Paradigm,” and Cathy Caruth’s “An Interview With Jean Laplanche,” which will be appearing in Topologies of Trauma (July 2001). Another version of Petar Ramadanovic’s “From Haunting to Trauma: Nietzsche’s Active Forgetting and Blanchot’s Writing of the Disaster” will appear in Forgetting/Futures (Lexington Books, 2001). We are grateful to the Graduate School of the University of New Hampshire for the Summer Faculty Fellowship they granted to Petar, which made possible the finalization of this project.

 

Notes

 

1. This is the first text in Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History. While Felman is not the first to use this term in the context of literary and cultural studies, in “Education and Crisis” trauma is formulated into one of the fundamental concepts of this field. In a modified earlier version, Felman’s “Education and Crisis” appeared in Psychoanalysis, Culture and Trauma, the special issue of American Imago 48.1 (Spring 1991), ed. Cathy Caruth.

 

2. Felman and Caruth acknowledge each other’s contribution to their works on trauma. In a footnote in the part of “Education and Crisis” upon which we will focus, Felman is indebted to Caruth’s explanation of “belated knowledge of ‘the accident,’ and the significance of this belatedness for an understanding of the relation between trauma and history” (22). See Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience and Cathy Caruth, ed., Trauma: Explorations in Memory.

 

3. In choosing the Felman-de Man-Mallarmé connection we were looking for the quickest but still precise way to situate current trauma studies with respect to the practice of critical theory in the last hundred years. Mallarmé is one of the authors, if not the author, whose work has been pivotal for the development of French theory, which, in turn, was crucial to the most recent events in trauma studies in the U.S. We were also thinking more about the fundamental theoretical questions in the humanities (namely, literature, history, philosophy) and how the humanities can adopt or turn to trauma than about the specific demands of any discipline. That literature and narrative more generally are de facto privileged sites or media of trauma is itself a characteristic of the field. Kant and the Romantics are perhaps more to blame for this than any of the contemporary authors. For more on trauma and narrative see, in this volume, David Farrell Krell’s “‘Das Vergangene wird gewußt, das Gewußte aber wird erzählt‘: Trauma, Forgetting, and Narrative in F. W. J. Schelling’s Die Weltalter” and Ellie Ragland’s “The Psychical Nature of Trauma: Freud’s Dora, The Young Homosexual Woman, and the Fort! Da! Paradigm.”

 

4. If we had time, at least two other authors and their texts would be called on in this discussion of trauma theory: Barbara Johnson’s Défigurations du langage poétique for her reading of Mallarmé, cited by Felman in “Education and Crisis,” and Jacques Derrida’s Mémoires for Paul de Man because of his reading of de Man, which, among other things, introduces the notion of impossible mourning.

 

5. The lectures were delivered on May 7 and May 10, 1935 under the title “Philosophy and the Crisis of European Humanity” and constitute the first version of Husserl’s The Crisis of the European Sciences and Transcendental Philosophy.

 

6. In “Criticism and Crisis,” de Man refers to the twentieth century’s “turbulent history” (14) and notes about Husserl’s 1935 lectures that this German-Jewish philosopher was speaking “in what was in fact a state of urgent personal and political crisis about a more general form of crisis”(16).

 

7. In the last text of our collection, Linda Belau takes up chapter six of the Testimony, Felman’s “The Return of the Voice: Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah,” and then returns to “Education and Crisis.”

Works Cited

 

• Caruth, Cathy. Unclaimed Experience. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins UP, 1996.
• Caruth, Cathy, ed. Trauma: Explorations in Memory. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins UP, 1995.
• Derrida, Jacques. Mémoires for Paul de Man. New York: Columbia UP, 1989.
• Felman, Shoshana. “Education and Crisis.” Caruth, Trauma 13-60.
• —. “The Return of the Voice: Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah.” Felman and Laub 204-283.
• Felman, Shoshana and Dori Laub. Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History. New York: Routledge, 1992.
• Husserl, Edmund. The Crisis of the European Sciences and Transcendental Philosophy. Trans. David Carr. Evanston, IL: Northwestern UP, 1970.
• Johnson, Barbara. Défigurations du langage poétique. Paris: Flammarion, 1979.
• Mallarmé, Stéphane. “Crise de vers.” Oeuvres complètes. Paris: Gallimard, 1945. 360-368.
• —. “La Musique et les lettres.” Oeuvres complètes. Paris: Gallimard, 1945. 635-657.
• de Man, Paul. Blindness and Insight. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1983.