ABSTRACT
Globalization experienced in terms of disaster, apocalypse, and trauma, in a trend that has superseded earlier utopian musings on the topic, such as Marshall McLuhan's vision of a "global village", a "simultaneous happening" of instantaneous communication, interaction among different nations, and flows among diverse cultures. Damien refers to jet lag as "soul delay", his theory being that the soul cannot travel by air and must catch up with the air traveller; the experience of jet lag is the result of waiting in a new place for a new soul, a new self to reunite. But if "soul delay" may be seen as a metaphor for temporality under the global condition, it may be equally used as an expression to convey the experience of post-traumatic belatedness, when the victim's soul has been fixated to the traumatic incident. In this sense, "soul delay" may be seen as a perfect metaphor to encapsulate the relations between trauma and globalization.
