ABSTRACT
In an essay published early in 2001, called “Postmodernism as Mourning Work: Trauma Theory,” I tried to give a preliminary assessment of trauma theory and the possible significance of its intervention in the humanities, after Cathy Caruth had introduced the term in her book Unclaimed Experience in 1996. 1 I outlined several symptomatic perspectives: first, to point to the emergence of trauma in the different memory discourses; second, to note the paradoxical role it played in identity politics, in that it gave victimhood an aura of positive agency, enabling new kinds of subject-positions; third, to speculate on the strategic role of trauma within the crisis of ‘theory’ itself: especially how it reinterpreted the status of history, reference and the event, after postmodernism’s “end of grand narratives” and deconstruction’s il n’y pas de hors-texte (“there is no outside to the text,” but also “there is nothing but context,” i.e., text and context cannot be played off against each other). Finally, there was the question whether trauma theory proposed itself as a new hermeneutics that could bridge the gap between literary theory and cultural studies (including film studies), by promoting a more embodied form of reading, emphasizing not only active but also affective spectatorship, without however giving “the body” an essentialist definition, and preserving instead its signifying properties: including the possibility of signifying through absence or silence.
The following remarks try to evaluate whether trauma theory has retained its intellectual momentum and strategic usefulness, even after 9/11 made “trauma” into a cliché, or worse, into a tool that lent itself to be appropriated for acts of revenge and a politics of retaliation. Did trauma theory become a counter category to this appropriation, meant to acknowledge the sudden re-emergence of history (so soon after the end of history had been declared), while maintaining that geopolitics and religious fundamentalism could not by themselves account for the violence of history’s spectacular return? Or had trauma theory anticipated some of the tremors, but became itself caught up in the ideological 307 polarization and intellectual paralysis that followed the fall of Western complacency? In an earlier chapter I argued the shift in the semantics of “terror” and “terrorism” from 1977 to 2007, brought about by the “war on terror.” In this postscript I turn to some of the critiques of trauma theory that have been voiced, and try to clarify the stakes and implications. I conclude with a more speculative outlook on my own preferred alternative to trauma theory, while keeping in mind its strategic uses as stand-in and placeholder, in the debate over how an ethics of accountability and implication can be aligned with a politics of justice and equality, and how traumatic forgetting might be the optimal way of remembering, in the era of moving images and electronic media.
