ABSTRACT
This chapter elaborates the later Heidegger’s understanding of technology as enframing or ordering human being (in the human sciences, especially) into a standing reserve, or resource, for the ends of calculative rationality. With some similarity, Foucault takes up technology as a “grid of intelligibility” for power/knowledge. This chapter inquires into the emergent intelligibility of modern subjectivity as depicted in psychological and clinical accounts of trauma in Janet, Freud, Caruth, and others. It is argued that trauma, as a dispositif, technologically refashions the masterful subject that fell into crisis after the early Enlightenment. It is also suggested that the technological enframing of trauma as the collapse of memory and language conceals the modern subject’s traumatic ontology – the dispersion of its being in time, which underwrites its own space of reflexivity and freedom.
