ABSTRACT
Interpreting trauma phenomenologically requires engaging with its prismic experience. In this chapter, this plurality of experience is situated in the context of political thought. Trauma does not only affect relations between the self and the other; it also involves grappling with the more formal interpretation of relations that constitutes the political. Here, traumatic experience is explored through the dilemma of moral guilt and violations of justice. Assessing the complexity of testimony and the victim-perpetrator relation, we will appeal to political human rights discourse and Lévinas’ invocation of the ‘third’ (le tiers). This chapter will also explore how responsibility is extricated and interpreted through the rights-based discourse, and how the violation of rights creates the conditions for traumatic experiences. This chapter will draw on the case study of trafficked children. It suggests that rights can emerge as a way of phenomenological reconstituting a child’s relationship with the world, and, more urgently, never letting trauma happen in the first place. It will also examine the relational aspects of trauma, as it pertains to conversations surrounding decolonialisation and land relations. This requires that we expand our understanding of the other-relation to include a different ‘kind’ of other. Expanding the self-other relationship to include the non-human sentient other, and the land itself, it looks at how colonialisation can be interpreted as traumatic. Read through the experience of bodied world and phenomenological interaction, it will expand on Merleau-Ponty’s lived experience as bodied. It will also draw on Ricœur’s interconnection between the life of consciousness and the lived body to develop a hermeneutic of flesh, as coined by Richard Kearney. This chapter requires addressing the colonialisation of ‘sameness’ and reflects on the intergenerational and land-based traumas that have emerged from the violent affect of these experiences.
