ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how the disarticulations performed by climate change discourse might be illuminated by framing them in relation to “trauma.” Briefly distinguishing “trauma” from terms like “catastrophe” or “disaster,” it suggests that “trauma” not only refers to a violent happening but also raises questions about how that happening can be known, experienced, and represented, how to an important extent it remains what Cathy Caruth calls an “unclaimed experience.” It locates the consequent representational challenge as akin to what Roger Luckhurst, tracing the emergence of cultural trauma theory, characterizes as “the problem of aesthetics ‘after Auschwitz’”—a problem whose kinship with how to represent the magnitude of the climate crisis has gone mostly unrecognized. Suggesting that the disarticulations of climate discourse obscure the traumatic violence inherent in cultural business as usual, the chapter concludes by considering how such butchery also forestalls the traumatic self-shattering of what it would mean to the modernist subject to see and know that violence. If, as Naomi Klein writes, it is “blindingly obvious” that the climate crisis is “rooted” in “contemporary capitalism’s quest for perpetual growth,” then the modernist subject, rooted in that same ideological ground, must be careful not to look, lest looking rupture vision itself.
