ABSTRACT
This chapter examines a significant strand in the development of modern trauma studies as practised in the humanities, that is, its emergence out of what is sometimes characterized as an “ethical turn” in poststructuralism in the latter part of the twentieth century. In 1993 the French philosopher Alain Badiou wrote, with some exasperation, that ethics had become “the principal philosophical ‘tendency’ of the moment”. A trauma study is, inseparable from a sense that literary and cultural criticism is worthwhile only if it can position itself as ethically responsible. Indeed, the language of ethics permeates the self-understanding of leading trauma theorists. Amongst innumerable other instances of the word imperative in the founding texts of modern trauma studies, Shoshana Felman refers to “the new moral and political imperative” of the age of testimony. The language of ethics is integral to trauma studies and related areas of research such as memory studies.
