ABSTRACT

Psychoanalytically informed research on political violence has shown time and again that political violence involves social and cultural processes of othering and libidinal dynamics of desire and enjoyment, usually associated with processes of "feminisation" of those excluded others. This chapter aims to contribute to some of the existing debates on trauma and to the theorising of structural violence and the logic of meaning and desire that inform it. Particularly relevant for this endeavour is the contribution of Cathy Caruth to the field, not only because she defines trauma as exceeding the symbolic, but also because she situates the possibility of thinking of ethics within the experience of trauma. Caruth's claim that trauma expresses the limits of language, resonates both with the structuralist claim of language as arbitrary system of signs and with the psychoanalytic notion of the unconscious.