ABSTRACT
The assault on trauma theory begun by Ruth Leys was continued by Wulf Kansteiner and Harald Weilnbock in their provocatively titled essay ‘Against the Concept of Cultural Trauma Theory’. Anne Rothe accuses Cathy Caruth of using ‘misleading interpretations of ideas from disciplines like psychoanalysis, deconstruction, trauma therapy, and the cognitive sciences’ to ‘authorize her claims’. If anything, the intensity, vehemence, and persistence of the critiques are a testament to trauma theory’s considerable importance as a field of academic study: only a paradigm perceived to be dominant is likely to attract this level of hostility. Trauma displaces positive legacies of past activisms, memories of mass movements for change such as the student protests of 1968 or the revolutions of 1989. The link that has been forged between traumatic injury and moral authority has led to what John Mowitt calls ‘trauma envy’, a general phenomenon of which the rise of the academic study of trauma is just one manifestation.
