ABSTRACT
This chapter draws on the work of Merleau-Ponty, Fuchs and Koch to reconsider the intercorporeality, interanimality and interaffectivity of traumatic experiencing. I go on to describe the movement of intercorporeality through a temporal-spatial consideration of traumatic experiences, and especially in proximity and distance. Using the work of Minkowski and Levinas, I explore how our lived experience of temporal-spatiality and agentic participation in the present is fragmented through traumatic movements. This leads to a description of traumatic experiences of disembodiment as a modal response, drawing on the work of Laing. I reformulate ideas about existential guilt and regret, and how this gives rise to an existential shame, embitterment and humiliation in relation to modes of disillusionment or re-illusionment. Finally I explore the modal identities of survivorism and survivalism that are awakened by our primordial impulsion to philosophise and that incorporate our traumatic confrontation with reality as a mode of resistance and liberation through modal activism. Building on the work of Hacking, I describe the making of interactive traumatised ‘kinds’ of person, and what I call ‘contra-modal’ movements in forming kinds of personhood in relation to interpersonal trauma, and the generative tensions of modal identities.
