Trauma, absence, loss

Critical Inquiry

Volumn 25, Issue 4, 1999, Pages 696-727

  Lacapra, Dominick ^a  

^a Department of Obstetrics Gynecology

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EID: 0042528262     PISSN: 00931896     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/448943     Document Type: Article

References (63)

1. See Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (New York, I99G)
2. On these issues, see Reworking the Past: Hitler, the Holocaust, and the Historians' Debate, ed. Peter Baldwin (Boston, 1990) and Unwilling Gennans? The Goldhagen Debate, ed
3. Robert R. Shandley (Minneapolis, 1998)
4. as well as my Representing the Holocaust: History, Theory, Trauma (Ithaca, N.Y., 1994)
5. and History and Memory after Auschwitz (Ithaca, N.Y., 1998)
6. see Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World, p. 81. He usefully stresses the interaction between life and death in mourning but does not explore the broader problem of the relation of mourning to ways of working through the past. Moreover, he provides little insight into the process of secularization in terms of displacements of the sacred and sacrifice, including their role in the Nazi genocide, about which he is surprisingly silent
7. The distinction between absence and loss would also apply critically to Bill Readings's The University in Ruins (Cambridge, Mass., 1996). In it the current, putative university in ruins is contrasted with a university of culture that is conceived as a (welcome) loss but that would more accurately be understood as an absence-a status that places in doubt the idea of ruins that is its correlate and raises questions about the rather empty Utopia that is proposed as its alternative. See my discussion in "The University in Ruins?" Critical Inquiry 25 (Autumn 1998): 32-55
8. Lydia Davis (1948; Barrytown, N.Y., 1978). I have noted that the mingling of absence and loss may bear witness to experience in closest proximity to trauma wherein confusion itself may be a telling post-traumatic sign or symptom of radical disorientation. On the other hand, the ability to distinguish (without simply opposing) absence and loss may be related to at least a partial working-through of problems related to trauma or extreme disruption
9. (Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures [New York, 1973], p. 432)
10. Note that, in contrast to the famous assertion "God is dead" (whose relation to Nietzsche's voice is complex), one may argue that one finds an affirmation of absence as absence in the final passage of Nietzsche's "How the 'True World' Finally Became a Fable," in Twilight of the Idols: "The true world-we have abolished. What world has remained? The apparent one perhaps? But no! With the true world we have also abolished the apparent one. (Noon; moment of the briefest shadow; end of the longest error; high point of humanity; INCIPIT ZARATHUSTRA)" (Friedrich Nietzsche, "How the 'True World' Finally Became a Fable," Twilight of the Idols, in The Portable Nietzsche, trans, and ed. Walter Kaufmann [New York, 1954], p. 486). One would have to read closely the entire section that concludes with this passage, including the interplay of principal text and parentheses in which what is included as seemingly marginal in the parentheses becomes increasingly insistent and important. The implications of the passage are explored, as Nietzsche intimates, in Thus Spake Zara-thustra
11. Martha Nussbaurri, Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense of Reform in Liberal Education (Cambridge, Mass., 1997), p. 132
12. I would also mention a singularly objectionable example of invoking lack instead of absence. It is found in Keith Windschuttle, The Killing of History: How a Discipline Is Being Murdered by Literary Critics and Social Theorists (Paddington, 1996), pp. 276-77
13. This type of open dialectic was sought by Maurice Merleau-Ponty and, in more insistently negative terms, allowing for an impossibly Utopian or redemptive hope against hope, by Theodor Adorno. It may also be found in an important dimension of Marx's work. On Marx in this respect, see my Soundings in Critical Theory (Ithaca, N.Y., 1989), chap. 6
14. The work of Derrida is crucially concerned with the problem of absence and would seem to valorize the gift as distinguished from victimization. But, in his important The Gift of Death, trans. David Wills (1992; Chicago, 1995)
15. One may initially contest this view by arguing that, whatever one's relation to a radically transcendent divinity, one's relation to others in society is based on a variable combination of distance or strangeness and intimacy, solidarity, or proximity, as Kierkegaard himself seemed to intimate when he restricted lifelong indirect communication to the God-man and asserted that "we human beings need each other, and in that there is already directness" (S0ren Kierkegaard, Søren Kierkegaard's Journals and Papers, trans, and ed. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, 5 vols. [Bloomington, Ind., 1970], 2:384)
16. See Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca, N.Y., 1981), p. 11
17. See Jean-Luc Nancy, The Inoperative Community, trans. Peter Connor et al., ed
18. Connor (1986; Minneapolis, 1991)
19. On this issue, see Françoise Gaillard, "The Terror of Consensus," trans. Jennifer Curtiss Gage, in Terror and Consensus: Vicissitudes of French Thought, ed. Jean-Joseph Goux and Philip R. Wood (Stanford, Calif., 1998), pp. 65-74. Gaillard seems to assume that consensus is always absent and functions as an ideology, but she does not explicitly make this point
20. On this issue, see Bruce Robbins, Feeling Global: Internationalism in Distress (New York, 1999)
21. The nondialogic riposte has become typical of such genres as the talk show, the letter to the editor, and the book review
22. The view of narrative as conventionalizing is crucial to Sande Cohen's argument in Historical Culture: On the Recoding of an Academic Discipline (Berkeley, 1986). One might, however, contend both that historiography has stricter theoretical limits than the novel in experimenting with narrative (for example, with respect to inventing events, as well as on more structural levels, such as the use of free indirect style) and that it probably has not been as experimental as it could be. On these issues, see White, The Content of the Form; Philippe Carrard, Poetics of the New History: French Historical Discourse from Braudel to Chartier (Baltimore, 1992)
23. RobertJ. Berkhofer, Jr., Beyonrd the Great Story: History as Text and Discourse (Cambridge, Mass., 1995)
24. and my History and Criticism (Ithaca, N.Y., 1985)
25. see Kirby Farrell, Post-Traumatic Culture: Injury and Interpretation in the Nineties (Baltimore, 1998). Ruth Leys will soon publish a much-needed critical genealogy of the concept of trauma
26. I thank Richard Schaefer for this example
27. See Freud, "Remembering, Repeating and Working-Through (Further Recommendations on the Technique of Psycho-Analysis II)" (1914), The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, 12:145-56
28. and "Mourning and Melancholia" (1917), The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, 14:237-60. I would agree with Judith Butler that "in The Ego and the Id [Freud] makes room for the notion that melancholic identification may be a prerequisite for letting the object go"
29. (Judith Butler, The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection [Stanford, Calif., 1997], p. 134; hereafter abbreviated PL). But I think this is already implied by the analysis of the complex, ambivalent relation of melancholia and mourning in "Mourning and Melancholia." Moreover, acting-out in general may be a prerequisite of working-through, at least with respect to traumatic events, although, as I shall later argue, I do not think that melancholia should be given an originary position as constitutive of the socialized psyche
30. Wood notes the resemblance between Derrida's notion of differance and the Buddhist notion of '"dependent arising'" or '"dependent coorigination'" in which the "'emptiness'" or nonfull presence of each thing implies its interinvolvement with others and the absence of any ultimate ground, foundation, or sub-jectum (metaphysical subject as foundation) (Wood, "'Democracy' and 'Totalitarianism' in Contemporary French Thought: Neoliberalism, the Heidegger Scandal, and Ethics in Post-Structuralism," in Terror and Consensus, p. 98)
31. He quotes Nagarjuna, the second-century founder of the Madhyamika school as stating: "When emptiness 'works,' then everything in existence 'works'" (ibid., p. 98 n. 48)
32. I would also note that, on the level of belief and practice, the line of thought I am suggesting might lead to a seemingly paradoxical, nonfanatical religious atheism that is not the simple negation, opposite, or reversal of established religions (as most atheisms tend to be). Instead, it might indicate the value of elements of religion (for example, certain rituals) and even seek to honor the name of God in God's absence. An important tendency in both religious and secular thought might be seen as going in this direction, for example, in Heidegger, Levinas, and Derrida. See also the discussion of post-Holocaust Jewish theology in Zachary Braiterman, (God) After Auschwitz (Princeton, N.J., 1998). Braiterman's emphasis is, however, on the critique of theodicy, an issue already rehearsed in pre-HoIocaust thought
33. As indicated earlier, theoretical or discursive undoing is not in and of itself tantamount to practical transformation, and it should not blind one to the empirically effective role of binary oppositions
34. Here one may refer to the deconstruction and critique of humanism in its historically specific form that represents the human being as the absolute center of meaning and value and justifies any practice insofar as it serves human interests. This critique does not amount to a simple antihumanism, nor does it entail a rejection of agency, subjectivity, or responsible action, as some critics seem to assume. See, for example, Luc Ferry and Alain Renaut, French Philosophy of the Sixties: An Essay on Antihumanism, trans. Mary H. S. Cattani (1985; Amherst, Mass., 1990). It does, however, situate these important concerns differently, and it is open to a reconception of human rights in relation to the claims of other beings and the environment
35. In Mourning Becomes the Law: Philosophy and Representation (Cambridge, 1996), Gillian Rose writes: Post-modernism in its renunciation of reason, power, and truth identifies itself as a process of endless mourning, lamenting the loss of securities which, on its own argument, were none such. Yet this everlasting melancholia accurately monitors the refusal to let go, which I express in the phrase describing post-modernism as 'despairing rationalism without reason'. One recent ironic aphorism for this static condition between desire for presence and acceptance of absence occurs in an interview by Derrida: 'I mourn, therefore I am.' [P. 11] I do not agree with all aspects of Rose's analysis and critique, but I share her concern about an insistence on impossible mourning that continually loops back into inconsolable melancholy, thereby providing little room for even limited processes (including political processes) of working through problems
36. The all-or-nothing tendency (including the somewhat histrionic idea that one should "never say never") also appears in the assumption that any critique of excess must eventuate in an indiscriminate affirmation of a juste milieu or a blandly general belief that one must never exaggerate, be hyperbolic, or go too far. On the contrary, one may recognize that, in certain contexts (notably post-traumatic ones), one must undergo at least the temptation of excess and even engage in forms of hyperbole but still attempt to signal the importance of, and help bring about, a viable interaction between excess and legitimate normative limits
37. Butler, Bodies That Mailer: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex" (New York, 1993), p. 10 n. 7
38. See also p. 22 n. 19, where she further elaborates her view. Relevant to the issues I discuss is the analysis in Peter Starr, Logics of Failed Revolt: French Theory after May '68 (Stanford, Calif., 1995), which I read only after completing this article. Of special interest is Starr's discussion of Lacan (chap. 3)
39. Here her strategy is one of reversal in the form of metaleptic performativity: melancholy, which would seem to be the effect of the superego insofar as melancholia (as analytically distinguished from mourning) involves self-criticism and even self-berating, is the cause of the superego-indeed a terroristic superego as a vehicle of the death drive-in its distinction from the ego
40. By withdrawing its own presence, power becomes an object lost-"a loss of a more ideal kind."⋯ The subject is produced, paradoxically, through this withdrawal of power, its dissimulation and tabulation of the psyche as a speaking topos. Social power vanishes, becoming the object lost, or social power makes vanish, effecting a mandatory set of losses. Thus, it effects a melancholia that reproduces power as the psychic voice of judgment, addressed to (turned upon) oneself, thus modeling re-flexivity on subjection. [PL, pp. 197-98]
41. In the penultimate chapter, by contrast, melancholia is more dynamically related to arrested mourning without being given an originary or constitutive status. Adam Phillips's critique, which was addressed to a version of the penultimate chapter and which separates the two last chapters in the book, may have prompted a change in Butler's argument-a questionable change, in my judgment. Phillips justifiably objects to facile, redemptive ideas of mourning but, in the process, almost threatens to foreclose working-through and simultaneously to see melancholia as the more radical option
42. As Butler puts it in her penultimate chapter, I would argue that phenomenologically there are many ways of experiencing gender and sexuality that do not reduce to this equation [of melancholic gender identity derived from the repudiation of homosexual desire and its incorporation as a lost identity], that do not presume that gender is stabilized through the installation of a firm heterosexuality, but for the moment I want to invoke this stark and hyperbolic construction of the relation between gender and sexuality in order to think through the question of ungrieved and ungrievable loss in the formation of what we might call the gendered character of the ego. [PL, p. 136] The difficulty is that the "stark and hyperbolic construction" tends to govern the entire analysis and may severely restrict or even foreclose the attempt to "think through" other possibilities that may, to a greater or lesser extent, even constitute countervailing forces in existing society. Among these possible modes of subjectivity is trust, which of course applies differently with respect to a subject's relations with different others and groups of others. Along with working-through, trust is a category that may not hold a sufficiently prominent place in certain forms of critical theory. To avoid certain inferences, I would note that trust is not purely positive or related to a pollyanna view of existence. The attitude of trust, which is, I think, common in people and especially evident in children, opens one to manipulation and abuse. The prevalence of the confidence man (or, more generally, the trickster figure) as a social type in both history and literature is one sign of the openness of trust to abuse. Yet trust also has other possibilities in child care and in social relations more generally. Indeed, one might suggest that the intensity and prevalence (not the mere existence) of melancholia may be related to the abuse or impairment of trust, and melancholia is often pronounced in those who have experienced some injury to trust
43. On these problems, see, for example, Juliana Schiesari, The Gendering of Melancholia: Feminism, Psychoanalysis, and the Symbolics of Loss in Renaissance Literature (Ithaca, N.Y., 1992)
44. Winfried Schleiner, Melancholy, Genius, and Utopia in the Renaissance (Wiesbaden, 1991)
45. Mitchell Robert Breitwieser, American Puritanism and the Defense of Mourning: Religion, Grief, and Ethnology in Mary White Rowlandson's Captivity Narrative (Madison, Wise, 1990)
46. and especially Wolf Lepenies, Melancholy and Society, trans. Jeremy Gaines and Doris Jones (1969; Cambridge, Mass., 1992). One may, of course, argue that Butler is postulating melancholic loss in transhistorical terms comparable to those I employ for absence. This is, however, a postulation I am trying to question and resist
47. After completing the present article, I read a work that parallels this line of argument: Allison Weir's Sacrificial Logics: Feminist Theory and the Critique of Identity (New York, 1996). Weir, however, tends to use interchangeably the concepts of the sacrificial and the binary without further elucidating their relationship. On de Man, see my "The Temporality of Rhetoric," Soundings in Critical Theory, pp. 90-124
48. Normalization involves the postulation of the statistical average (or perhaps the dominant) as normative. This postulation is certainly open to criticism, but its critique does not imply the avoidance or delegitimation of all normativity, including alternative normativities. Indeed, a crucial problem with respect to homophobia would be the development of a normativity that did not "abjectify" homosexual desire and practice-for example, a normativity that engaged the problems of commitment and trust without simply taking the conventional family as its model. It may be noted that Derrida, while recognizing that "there is nothing but" normativity, also states his suspicion of normativity "in the ordinary sense of the term" and observes that what he suggests about responsibility "signals instead in the direction of a law, of an imperative injunction to which one must finally respond without norm" (Derrida, "A 'Madness' Must Watch over Thinking," interview with François Ewald, Points ⋯ Interviews, 1974-1994, trans. Peggy Kamuf et al., ed. Elisabeth Weber [1992; Stanford, Calif., 1995], pp. 361-62)
49. He also asserts that "each time a responsibility (ethical or political) has to be taken, one must pass by way of antinomic injunctions, which have an aporetic form, by way of a sort of experience of the impossible" (ibid., p. 359). One may agree with him yet also insist (as he sometimes does) on the tense interaction between norms (distinguished from normalization) and what escapes or exceeds them, thereby calling for something like "an imperative injunction" that leads to a "responsible" decision in the context of antinomic injunctions"-a decision that cannot be convincingly justified through normatively based reasoning. But this eventuality, which exists to some extent in every moral decision and is particularly accentuated in extreme cases, does not diminish the importance of norms setting legitimate limits that are crucial in ethicopolitical education and reasoning. Without a countervailing stress on limiting norms that articulate social and political relations, one's concern with an "experience of the impossible" may become all-consuming, and tension may be resolved or distended in the direction of a decisionist messianism (or messianicity) without a messiah-an ethics or politics of "imperative injunctions" that come from nowhere (like leaps of religiously atheistic faith) and repeatedly point to the promise of a blank, ever-to-come future (an avenir that is always a-venir and never in any sense a present, however limited or marked by absence)
50. Walter Benjamin's The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (1928; London, 1977) may have provided an important model for what has become a prevalent move in recent theory. Trauerspiel would be better translated as "mourning play" and understood in terms of an impossible mourning in closest proximity to interminably melancholic grieving. In my judgment, Benjamin's thought is not restricted to a framework that valorizes melancholy and resists mourning (as a mode of working-through), but this framework does play an important role especially in his early work. (This role is discussed by Martin Jay in a forthcoming essay.) Benjamin might be reread against the grain to elicit forms of mourning and working-through intricately related to melancholy as well as for indications of absence not conflated with loss and blank messianic hope. Indeed, a distinctive appreciation of his turn to Marxism would be significant in this rereading
51. This conflation tends to occur in Shoshana Felman's contributions to the work she coauthored with Dori Laub, Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History (New York, 1992)
52. Structuralists such as Claude Lévi-Strauss or Ferdinand de Saussure tended to confine their interest in events to that which could indeed be informed by structures (for example, la langue or language as an abstract, systematic structure of differences). Whatever structure did not encompass or inform was seen as merely contingent or particular (for example, la parole, or the particular, contingent spoken word). One move of poststructur-alism was to focus on the contingent or particular as supplement that could not be seen as mere refuse or negligible residue with respect to structures and the "scientific" structuralism focused on them. Yet the result was at times an extreme stress on contingency, particu-larity, or singularity in a manner that induced nominalism and a repetitive return to the aporetic interplay of structure and event. More fruitful is the notion that seeming binaries interact and mutually mark one another in ways involving "internal" differences-a perspective that enables the recognition of the actual role of binaries (for example, in more or less repressive or oppressive hierarchies), allows for a critique of that role, and raises the question of nonbinaristic distinctions, including their relative strength or weakness (both in fact and in right). As I intimated earlier, one form of myth is the symmetrical opposite of structuralism that tries to account for it insofar as the myth attempts to "explain" the genesis of structure from an event that performatively enacts it
53. At least in one movement of his argument in Being and Nothingriess: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology, trans. Hazel E. Barnes (1943; New York, 1953), Sartre did histori-cize this desire
54. I find this tendency toward surrogate victim status in Claude Lanzmann as interviewer in his film Shoah. See my discussion in "Lanzmann's Shoah: 'Here There Is No Why,'" Critical Inquiry 23 (Winter 1997): 231-69; rpt. in History and Memory after Auschwitz, chap. 4
55. Compare the formulation in Saul Friedlander, Memory, History, and the Extermination of the Jews of Europe (Bloomington, Ind., 1993), pp. 130-34
56. The type of empathy I am defending is discussed by Kaja Silverman in terms of heteropathic identification. See her The Threshold of the Visible World (New York, 1996)
57. Here the cases of Blanchot and de Man pose a similar problem in judgment: whether early, direct, dubious, at times vehement writings receive an adequate critical response in later, indirect, allegorical, at times elusive writings that may indiscriminately mingle historical and structural trauma
58. I discuss this problem from various perspectives both in Representing the Holocaust and in History and Memory after Auschwitz, esp. chap. 4
59. Bessel A. van der Kolk makes the questionable attempt to localize in a portion of the brain the trace or imprint of the experience of trauma. See Bessel A. van der Kolk and Onno van der Hart, "The Intrusive Past: The Flexibility of Memory and the Engraving of Trauma," in Trauma: Explorations in Memory, ed. Cathy Caruth (Baltimore, 1995), pp. 158-82
60. Curiously, Caruth, despite her subtle analyses and stress on the elusiveness and belated temporality of the experience of trauma, accepts van der Kolk's literalizing view. Along with her contributions to Trauma: Explorations in Memory, see her Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (Baltimore, 1996)
61. The important and influential work of Pierre Bourdieu is sometimes prone to contextual reductionism or at least to a limited understanding of differential responses to contextual (or "field") forces. See, for example, his L'Ontotogie politique de Martin Heidegger (Paris, 1988)
62. and The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field, trans. Susan Emanuel (1992; Stanford, Calif., 1995)
63. Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London, 1989), p. 50