THE FUTURE OF TRAUMA THEORY

This collection analyses the future of 'trauma theory', a major theoretical discourse
IIIcontemporary criticism and theory. The chapters advance the current state of
[he field by exploring new areas, asking new questions and making new connections.
Part I, History and Culture, begins by developing trauma theory in its more
familiar pcst-deccnsrructive mode and explores how these insights might still be
productive. It goes Oil, via a critique of existing positions, to relocate trauma theory
In a postcolonial and globalized world-theoretically, aesthetically and marerially-s-
and focuses on non-Western accounts and understandings of trauma, memory and
,uffenng, Part II, Politics atui Svbjeaivity, turns explicitly to politics and subjectivity,
foccsmg on the stare and the various [onus of subjection to which it gives rise, and
on human rights, biopolitics and cornmuniry.
Each chapter, in different ways, advocates a movement beyond the sorts of texts
and concepts that are the usual focus for trauma criticism and moves this dynamic
network of ideas forward.
With contributions from an international selection ofleading critics and thinkers
from the US and Europe, this volume will be a key critical intervention in one of
the most important areas in contemporary literary criticism and theory.

Gert Buelees is Professor of English at Ghent University, Belgium, and a founder

member of LITRA, the Centre for Literature and Trauma.

am Durrant is Senior Lecturer in Postcolonial Literature at the University of

Leeds, UK.

Robert Eaglestone is Professor of Contemporary Literature and Thou~ht a~d

Dtpucy Director of the Holocaust Research Centre at Royal Holloway, University
of London, UK.
THE FUTURE OF
TRAUMA THEORY
Contemporary literary and
cultural criticism

Edited by Gert Buelens,

Sam Durrant and Robert Eaglestone

11Routledge
\ TI)b' Ffll"lCtS
lONDON AND NEW YORK
Croup
First published 2014
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milron Park, Abingdon, Oxen OX 14 4RN
Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
by Routledge CONTENTS
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Routledge is a1l imprint if the Taylor & Francis Group, all i'!fon/la business
© 2014 Gert Buelens, Sam Durrant and Robert Eagiestonc for selection and
editorial matter; individual contributions the contributors
The right of Gert Buclens, Sam Durrant and Robert Eaglesecnc to be
identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their
individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of
the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or
utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now
known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in
any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing
from the publishers.
Trademark no/icc: Product or corporate 113IllCS may be trademarks or registered
trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without COtJlriburors vii
intent to infringe.
Ack"olv!edgeme"rs X
Bn"lish Library Cara/ogl/iug in PHMicll/iO/I Oil/a
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Ubraryl c!f Congress Cataloging ill Publication Dam Preface: beyond Tancred and Clorinda-trauma studies for
A catalog record for this title has been requested implicated subjects Xl

ISBN: 978-0-415-69458-2 (hbk) Michael Rothberg

ISBN: 978-0-415-69459-9 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-0-203-49310-6 (ebk)
Introducti n 1
Typeset ill Bembo Gert B"eletfs Sam Durrant
J
and Robert Eaglestone
by Saxon Graphics Ltd, Derby

/J "".... -
_.- MIX PART I
9

--
FSC
FSe- C004839
History and culture

Knowledge, 'afterwardsness' and the future of trauma theory 11

Robert Ea,glesrotle

2 F.. cism and the sacred: sites of inquiry after (or along with)
23
mUI113

Dl1mj"ick lAC"pra

3 Beyond Eurocentrism: trauma theory in the global age 45

t<jetapS

4 Affect, body, place: trauma theory in the world 63

At,a"ya)alulllard Kabir
 vi Contents

5 Trauma ties: chiasmus and community in Lebanese

civil war literature 77
Noun Gana

6 Undoing sovereignty: towards a theory of critical mourning 91 NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Sam Durrant

PART II
Politics and subjectivity 111

7 'That which you are denying us': refugees, rights and

writing in Arendt 113
Lyndsey Stonebridge

8 Time, personhood, politics 127

Jenny Edkins
Gert Buelens is Professor f'English at Ghent University, where he directs a long-
9 The biopolitics of trauma 141 term research project on the concept of authorship, and chairs the Department of
Pieter Vermeulen Literary rudies. He edits the e-joumal Authorship, is the author of some 60 essays
10 collections and journals, and has, most recently, co-edited TI,e Catastrophic
10 Future shock: science fiction and the trauma paracligm In/prralilli': IIbjretivjty, Time and Memory in Contemporary Thought (with Dominiek
157
Roger Lucehurst Hoens and Sigi jbrrkandt). He is currently working on two volumes for the CUP
edmon of Henry James's fiction,
Index
169
tef Crap teaches English at Ghent University, Belgium, where he also directs
the entre for Literature and Trauma, He is the author of Postcolonial Witnessing:
Trllumtl Out qf Bounds (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013) and Trauma and Ethics in the
SOl'tls of Grtlham I/Iifi: No Short-Cuts to Salvation (Sussex Academic Press, 2005),
and has guest-edited special issues of Criticism: A Quarterly for Literature and the Arts
(2011; with Michael Rothberg) and Studies ill 'he Novel (2008; with Gert Buelens)
on the topics of, respectively, transcultural negotiations of Holocaust memory and
pc»tcolonial trauma novels. His next book project is an introductory guide to the
concept cf rrauma for Routledge's New Critical Idiom series.

Sam Durrant is ASSOCiateProfessor of Postcolonial Literature at Leeds University.

HIS first monograph Potuolonial Narrative and the Work of Mourning: J. M. Coeizee,
11'/$(1"Ham's a"d Toni Morrison was published by State University of New York
PTe\S 111 2004. He co-edited Essays ill Migratory Aesthetics with Catherine Lord
CRodopl. 2(07) and has published numerous articles on postcolonial literature and
aspects of cnucal theory. His current monograph, due from Routledge in 2014, is
ennded AfOlmlitlg aud Postapanheid Literature: Reconciliation and its Discontents.
viii Contributors Contributors Ix

Robert Eaglestone is Professor of Contemporary Literature and. Thought at nncism and lnrerprecive Th~ory, the Departrnenr of Germanic Languages and
Royal Holloway, University of London. He works on contemporary lit~rature ~nd lnerarures. and {he Programs In Comparative Literature and Jewish Culture and
literary theory, contemporary philosophy and on Holocaust and Genocide studies. Sociery. Rothberg works in the fields of critical theory and cultural studies, Holocaust
He is the author of five books, including The Holocaust and the Posunodem (2004) eudres. postcolonial studies and contemporary literatures. His latest book is
and Contemporary Fiction (2013), and the editor or co-editor of six more. His work .\lu/riJIirrnio"alJ\femory: R~ltIe"'.ben·tlgthe Holocaust in the Age oj Decolotlization (2009),
has been translated into five languages. publrshed by Stanford University Press in its Cultural Memory in the Present series.
He t~ also the author of Traumatic Realism: The Demands of Holocaust Representation
Jenny Edkins is Professor of International Politics at Aberysrwyrh University; her (2000) and co-editor with Nei.l Levi of TIle Holocaust: TheoreticalReadings (2003).
most recent books are Missing. Persons and Politics (Cornell, 2011) and Trauma and
the Memory of Politics (Cambridge, 2003). She is editor with Maja Zehfuss of the Lynd ey Seonebridge is Professor of Literature and Critical Theory at the
textbook Global Politics: A New Introduction, and series editor with Nick Vaughan- University of Easr Anglia. She is the aurhcr.mosr recently, ofT1Iejudicia/ Imagination:
Williams of the Routledge Interventions book series. II'riril~~After Nllrrmberg (2011). Other publications include: TI,e Writitlg if Allxier}'
(2007). Tlie Desrnwil'e Elemew: British Psychoanalysis and Modemism(1998), British
Noun Gana is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and Near Eastern Fiaion after Modemism: TIle Novel at Mid-Century, edited with Marina MacKay
Languages and Cultures at the University of California, Los Angeles. He has published (2007), and Readj,t~ Melallie Klein, edited with John Phillips (1998). She is currently
numerous articles and chapters on the literatures and cultures of the Arab world and its working on 3 new project, Refugee IlfIriritlg:Srares, Statelessness and Modem Literature.
diasporas in such scholarly venues as Comparative Literature Studies, PMLA, Pub/u.
Culture and Social Text. He has also contributed op-eds to such magazines and Pieter Vermeulen is Assistant Professor of English Literature at Stockholm
international newspapers as The Guardian, El Pais, The ElectronicInrfada, Jadaliyya and Uruversrry. He works in the fields of critical theory, the contemporary novel, and
Counteri'undt, Author of Sigl/ifyillg Loss: Towards a Poeticsof Narrative Mourning (Bucknell memory studies. His writing has appeared or will appear in journals such as Arcadia,
UP, 2011), he is currently completing a book manuscript on the politics of melancholia Critidsm, ritiqllc,Jourual of Modem Literature, Memory Studies, Modem Fiction Studies,
in the Arab world and another on the cultural politics of the Tunisia revolution. In Mosdi(, IlflUes ill the Novel, and Textual Practice. His book Romanticism after the
addition, he is the editor of The Tunisian Revolution: Contexts, Architects, Prospedsand H(llorfllm was republished in paperback by Continuum/Bloomsbury in 2012. He is
of The Edil/burglz Companion to the Arab Novel ill Ellglish (Edinburgh UP, 2013). currently at work on :\ book-length study of the paradoxical productivity of early-
twenty-first century discourses of the end of the novel.
AnanyaJahanara Kabir is Professor of English Literature at King's College London.
She is the author of Territory if Desire: Representing Kashmir (2009) and Partition's Post-
Aftlllesias: 1947, 1971 and Modem South Asia (2013). From 2013 to 2018 she will lead
a project funded by a European Research Council Advanced Grant, titled Modem
Moves: Kinetic Transnationalism and Afro-Diasporic Rhythm Cultures.

Dominick LaCapra is Emeritus Professor of History and Cornparative Literature

and Bryce and Edith M. Bowmar Professor of Humanistic Studies at Cornell
University. He is the editor of two books and the author of fourteen, including
Writing History, Writillg Trauma, History ill Trallsit: Experiellce, Idwtity, Critical Theory,
History and Its Limirs: Humall, AIl,imal, Violence, and History, Literature, CriticaITI/eory.

Ro~er . Luckhurst is Professor of Modem Literature at Birkbeck College,

UmverSIty of London .. He published TI,e Mummy's Curse: The True Histor)' of a
Dark Falllasy (Oxford) 111 2012 and The Shilling for the BFI Classics series in 2013.

Michael
. .
Rothberg is Professor of English 'and Con-d,a H unlarutleS
.. SCh 0 Iar at t he
Ul1lverSlty of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he is also Director of the
Holocaust, Genocide, and Memory Studies Initiative. Affiliated with the Unit for
ACKNOWLEDG EM ENTS PREFACE
Beyond Tancred and Clorinda-trauma studies
for implicated subjects

Michael Rothberg

We would like to thank the Centre for Literature and Trauma at the University of What do we talk about when we talk about trauma? Any assessment of the future
Ghent (LiTRA), and in particular Seer Craps, for organizing an international of rrauma studies must start with that question. The answer-even, or especially,
research cluster in this field. We would also like to thank the Flemish Academic In a bo k rhar asks us to reflect on the future-will necessarily be historical: we
Centre for Science and the Arts (VLAC) for funding the research team whose work need to start from the assumption that answers will vary across time and across
forms the kernel of this book: the VLAC Fellows were Gert Buelens, Stef Craps, cultural context. Trauma today is probably not the trauma of twenty years ago and
Ortwin de Graef, Sam Durrant, Robert Eaglestone, Dominick La Capra, Roger certainly not the trauma of the early twentieth century. Yet the way we talk: about
Luckhurst and Michael Rothberg. Kristiaau VersJuys was extremely supportive of trauma roday and tomorrow will certainly bear the traces of those earlier layers of
this initiative, for which we are grateful. We'd also like to acknowledge the
hiuorical accretion. Trauma is perhaps best thought of not as any kind of singular
informative and inspiring discussions we have had on these matters with many
object, but rather-s-in the helpful conceptualization Roger Luckhurst adapts from
colleagues from five continents over several years. The editors would also like to
Brune Larour-c-ns one of those 'knots' or 'hybrid assemblages' that 'tangle up
thank all those at Taylor and Francis, including Elizabeth Levine, Polly Dodson
questions of science, law, technology, capitalism, politics, medicine and risk'
and Ruth Moody, for their guidance, help and support.
[l.uckhursr 14-15). Luckhurst's capacious genealogy of the trauma knot helps us
avoid familiar, reductive accounts that simply link the rise of trauma studies to the
expansion of Holocaust consciousness or the context of post-Vietnam America
(although these arc surely crucial). Instead, he reveals how, over the course of more
than a century, the problem of individual psychic suffering became 'tangled up'
with an array of the luger problems of modernity, including industrialization,
bureaucracy, and war.
Thinking genealogically about trauma is one essential means of openi~g it
rewards possible, alternative futures. Genealogical thinking loosens up the reified
common sense that tends to cluster around concepts that achieve a rapid rise in
pepulanry, as trauma clearly has in the humanities since the publication of Cathy
Canuh's landmark edited volume Trauma: Explorations in Memory (1995). If the
explosion of interest in trauma seemed to come out of nowhere, Luckhursr
demonstrates how it actually emerged from a whole host of somewheres. With a
focus more on what is to come than on what has been, the chapters 10 The Future
ofTrouma 77leory nevertheless derive from a similar critical engagement with the
 Preface xIII
xU M. Rothberg

current state of me field. While recognizing their debt to the intellectual genealogy the alienating work of the Lebanese novelist Elias Khoury discussed by Gana, in the
that culminated in the postsrructuralisr theorization of trauma in the 1990s, the kmeuc kilt/UfO dance moves of post-civil war Angola vividly described by Kabir,
contributors are not bound to or by it. Both individually and, most powerfully, and III the activist and aesthetic resistance of the Woomera inmates in Stonebridge's
taken together, they make an irrefutable argument that in the future-s-and, really, reflections. Even if we must conceive of multiple fonns of dislocation-those that
already in the present-trauma studies will need to travel further and add a whole result from events. from systemic violence, and, in LaCapra's terms, from
rranshutorical, structural trauma (LaCapra, 'Trauma, Absence, Loss')-we can only
new series of destinations to its agenda.
Some of those new destinations are geographical or geo-cultural, and inhabiting mamrain trauma as a theoretical category by recognizing overlaps and similarities
them will require recalibrating inherited concepts. As Stef Craps makes dear in his across the historical and cultural contexts we track. As Edkins argues in similar
chapter, we cannot assume that a category crafted in Europe and North America terms, event-like 'curie' trauma reveals structural, 'ontological' lack. This is the
can travel smoothly [0 all other cultural locations: 'the PTSD construct reflects a work of theory: in Kabir's words, 'theory'S drive is to generate connections and
Eurocentric, monocultural orientation'. Several of the other conrriburors to TI,e paradigms that must work in, and despite, different contexts.'
Future of Trauma Theory help us begin envisioning what an alternate orientation Here, I think, the 'new' trauma theory is still in the process of developing
might look like. Without by any means abandoning alJ the insights crafted in paradigms to match those ofits classical, psychoanalysis-inspired predecessors. That
Europe, Ananya Kabir leads us through the dispersed 'affect-worlds' of the black IS, classical mauna theory provided us with a powerful hermeneutic for linking
Atlantic, Cambodian Buddhism and the Sufi-inflected lslamicate; Nouri Gana asks evenu of extreme violence, srrucrures of subjective and collective experience, and
us to consider what it would mean to dwell in the post-catastrophic context of civil discursive and aesthetic fonns. Once we have revealed the specificities hiding
war Lebanon; and Lyndsey Stonebridge moves us from a refugee camp in Australia under the apparently neutral and universal face of this understanding of trauma-its
to the uncanny imaginary landscapes of Kafka, whiJe gesturing at the all-roo-real attention to events and not systems; its assumption of privileged, secure subject
urgencies of contemporary Palestine. positions; its investment in fragmented modernist aesthetics-it is incumbent on us
But even those who remain focused on Europe and North America argue for to provide the counter-forms that would maintain trauma as an object of inquiry.
the need to rethink the central categories of trauma studies. History, after ill, moves Pluralization alone is not enough. In various ways, this cutting-edge collection
on, even if we stay in place. Thus,jenny Edkins continues her reflections on how, makes moves towards a new paradigm that might link up apparently divergent sites
in the post-9ftt moment, the state has colonized a previously disruptive traumatic and moments. One of the most promising may be the biopolitical framework
temporality and integrated it into its sovereign chronologies; Dominick LaCapra developed in several of the essays. Via the approach inspired by Foucault and
invites us to rethink fascism and Nazism from a lens inflected by 'post-secular' developed by Agamben and Esposito, among others, questions of power and life
concerns; Pieter Vermeulen alerts us to the changing biopolitical horizon in which itself have begun to enter more fully into the field of trauma studies, as the essays
trauma is both produced and policed; and Luckhurst himself evokes science fiction of Edkins and Vermeulen, especially, demonstrate.
in orderto turn us toward potential futures in which the technological transformation Even as we seck to maintain trauma as a theoretical category, we should not, of
of subjectivity will (if it doesn't already) necessitate a transformed notion of trauma course, attempt to subsume all fonns of violence, dislocation, and psychic pain
(for more on 'trauma future-tense', see Kaplan). under its categorical singularity. The project of building a non-Eurocentric, fully
In their different ways, then, the essays collected here call on us to nuance our historicized rraurna theory should not be an imperial one. I agree with LaCapra
notions of trauma by revealing their cultural and historical specificity. But if we are that it can be productive to talk about trauma without explicitly nanling it, but I
to redirect the field of trauma studies, the simple call for specificity must lead to a would add that we might also want to think about the relationship between trauma
second moment of theoretical re-elaboraticu. For, however we conceive it, trauma (named or ncr) and other disruptive social forces. We should be suspicious of
is ~l.s~a category that ought to trouble the historicist gesture of much contemporary overgeneralizing the trauma concept because, as Vermeulen points out, its
cnticrsm as well as its concomitant notions of history and culture. Theorists such as Circulation 'riskjs] strengthening "immunitary" tendencies that perpetuate rather
~athy Ca.ruth have famously claimed that trauma dislocates history and makes it than minimize trauma ... especially in an age of globaJization.' That is, when
difficult, If not impossible, to think in terms of singular historical or cultural power operates biopolitically as the management of life, trauma talk in the centers
contexts (Caruth, Trauma; Unclaimed Experience). Critics of Caruth-e-including of pohtical sovereignty may activate concerns about security and contagion that
~everal here-have pointed to the limits of classical trauma theory's dislocation of lead to asymmetrical forms of violence rather than egalitarian, global solidarity. The
. fail
Its own context of emerge nee (iI.e. ItS lal ure to transcend a Eurocentric frame) btU post-9111 United States is the most obvious example of such a phenomenon.
that
.
does
.
not necessarily ne~t
0" e
C <trutI15
,. POlllt. Indeed, .It IS
. difficult for me' to In the face of the paradoxlcaJ need to pluralize trauma while recognizing the
unagme . trauma as nor invol· vlllg d"ISIOCatlon
" f"
0 subjects,
"
histories, and cultures. hnms of its applicability, I would like to suggest that we think of the trauma
These dislocations are every were
h "lt1 tenon-European
h archives evoked here: in category 25 tletlSsary bm /lot sr!fficiellt for diagnosing the problems that concern us as

.
 xlv M. Rothberg Preface xv

scholars and human beings. To explore what it might mean to declare the category to understand the conditions of Structural violence. At the same time, we can
of trauma necessary but not sufficient, I want very briefly ro add two examples of peculate that sociological accounts of structural violence could benefit from event-
contemporary and future urgency co the important areas of concern discussed rued models in order to understand the psych.ic effects of systemic exploitation,
elsewhere in this volume: the status oflabor under globalization and the impact of tITecrs that would have implications for organizing resistance to such structures.
climate change. These examples both confirm the necessity of de-provincializing nut another step is necessary to encourage tiS to move beyond an isolated
trauma and suggest in turn how such a move necessitates that trauma studies join conception of trauma studies: the Structures of globalization undergirding this (all
with ocher fields and methodologies of inquiry that, like the critique ofbiopolitics, tOOordiI~ary) example necessitate a turn back on the producer of theory in a way
address the mutations of power and the conditions of life. that classical trauma theory has nor always demanded. That is, 'we' producers of
In the fall of 2012, two factory fires in South Asia killed hundreds of garment theory in the Euro-American academy-as all the contributors to this volume
workers who were making clothes for subcontractors of European and American are-r-are part of this picture: our seemingly insatiable consumption of clothes and
companies such as H&M, Wal-Mart, and Gap. In September, a fire killed at least gadgets and our habituation to the benefits of globalization (in many realms, if not
262 workers in a factory in Karachi, Pakistan, while 1"12 died in November during In aU) drive the regime of accumulation in factories like these as much as do the
a fire in Dhaka, Bangladesh (see Bajaj; Walsh and Greenhouse). These events are corporate drive fI r profits and the devious system of factory inspection. Trauma
not exceptions-more than 500 Bangladeshi workers had already died in fires in theory has helped us to think about the relation between perpetrators and victirm-
the last six years before the recent catastrophe-and they are obviously not limited even if it has, in the (in)f.ll'l1OuS example of Tancred and Clorinda, sometimes
to South Asia. Surely there is plenty of evidence of trauma here, but conceptual confused them (Caruth. Unclaimed Experience; Leys; Novak; Rothberg,
clarity is crucial if we want to move beyond a confirmation of what we already Muitidircer;olltlllv[emory; raps, in this volume). But these categories alone are not
know and a simple denunciation of global capitalism (as worthy as such denunciation sufficient to understand 'our' positioning in this globalized scenario of exploitation
is!). To start with the obvious: trauma is not a category that encompasses death and trauma. Nor is the third tenn usually brought in at this point sufficient: the
directly, but rather draws our attention to the sumllN,l of subjects in and beyond bystander. We are more than bystanders and something other than direct
sites of violence and ill proximity to death. The dead workers are not the victims of perperratcrs in the violence of global capital. Rather, in the terms I have been
trauma, and thus trauma theory can onJy partially reckon with their death. But if developing in other contexts, we are implicated subjects, beneficiaries ofa system that
trauma theory cannot fulJy encompass the event, that does not imply that a generates dispersed and uneven experiences of trauma and wellbeing simultaneously
renovated trauma studies is of no use. What kinds of violence are at stake here and (sec Rothberg. 'Multidirectional Memory' and 'Progress, Progression, Procession').
how does trauma fit into this scenario? The notion of the implicated subject-neither simply perpetrator nor victim,
We clearly have an intersection of two forms of violence that concern the though potentially either or both at other moments-e-also proves useful for thinking
contributors to this volume. We have a sudden event of extreme violence that about the second c ntexc of violence and trauma I want to explore: climate change.
could very well have traumatized survivors of the fires and families and loved ones Taking account of the devastation wrought by human-induced climate change and
of the workers who perished, even if we cannot predict precisely what their environmental degradation similarly requires a move beyond event-centered
experience will have been or the form their response to it will take. But, in addition, accounts of violence, as Rob Nixon suggests with his concept of 'slow violence.'
that. event takes place on the site of -r-and thoroughly embedded within-a system In order to understand the impact of ecological disaster on the environments of the
of vlo.lence that ~sn.either sudden nor accidental: exploitation in an age of globalized world' poor-s-in other words, the same people most directly and harshly affected
neo-It.beral capItaL.sm. To be sure, exploitation can be both physically and by the nee-liberal regime of accumulation-Nixon argues that we need to
psychically traun~atlc: and yet, as with the problem of death, the category of rrauma comprehend 'a violence that is neither spectacular nor instantaneous, but rather
cannot subsume It without an important loss of analytical clarity-in this case the Incremental and accretive, its calaruirous repercussions playing Ollt across a range of
sort of clarity rh t M . ." ' temporal scales' (Nixon 2). This 'violence of delayed destruction,' this 'arrritional
. .. a a arxist cnnque of political economy can provide. Despite
their ~0~-co1l1cIdence, however, this example does succinctly illustrate how tightly VIolence that is typically not viewed as violence at all' (2), also results, I would add,
explo'tatJ~n and trauma are interwoven. The mechanisms of neoliberal In more fanuliar and 'visible' f0n11S of trauma, such as wars and punctual (tnarural')
accumulatJOn not only se . drsasters. As with the case of exploitation and factory fires, climate change is a site
ex I· . .. em to require the everyday regimen of sweatshop
"p Oltat~on under inhuman circumstances, bur aho enable the 'extraordinary' (if orknoucd and Illlltually dependent fonns of violence; and, as in the pre"ious case,
sall predJctable) event of the f: t fi A cl . the unpact of both slow and puncfilaJ fOrolS of violence can surely be traumatic.
. I ac my lre. s le New York TlInes reported it is
p;eclse kY'Ihe neo-li~~ral structure of voluntary, 'industry-backed "social-audi:ing'" But IS trauma theory--evcn one that is non-Eurocentric and open to systemic,
o Wor p ace conditiOns that makes 'bI .
w 1 h d G
( a s an reenhouse) He 'pOSSl e, even likely, such devastating fires non-specacular violence--the onJy or best lens for exploring the environment's
h 'long dyings', to which ixon wants to draw our attention? At most, it seems to
. re we see ow an event-focused trauma theory needs
 xvi M. Rothberg Preface xvII

laya subsidiary role in addressing a problem that demands

me, trauma stu eli es co uld P The linked examples of globalized industrial production and human-induced
multi-faceted, interdisciplinary approaches. .. . dnnaee change suggest a number of consequences for the future of trauma studies
The slow violence of climate change does not onJy reqUIre a shift 111 ten~poraJ that are also evoked in differenr terms by the essays in this volume. First, they
.
percepuon away r I
f 0 n the shattering event of classically
..'
conceived trauma; It also
..
confirm the necessity. evinced by all the contributors here, of broadening and
. alibrated
requrres a rec 1 .... understanding
'
of humanist
. .
history .
and
.
subjectivity that differenunung ur understanding of what trauma is, along with our account of the
displaces (without entirely eliminating) the p.OSICIOI1S .of vlc~m and perpetrator. ccndnions under which it is produced. As these examples and several of the essays
Although distributed unevenJy, and disproportlonately unpacong the poor ~nd the demonstrate. the site of theoretical production of trauma theory-the Euro-
global south, as Nixon reminds us powerfully, climate catastrophe ultimately American academy-has remained distant from many of the sites of trauma's
implicates us all. (Hurricane Sandy's flooding of the Wall Street area ~fNew :ork uupact. Thus, second, we must continue to trouble the West/non-West binary that
City in October 2012 might serve as an allegory of that facr.) According to Dlpe~h I~ at the roor of Eurccentric thinking (and some forms of resistance to it): the
Chakrabarty, the evidence of climate change thus requires a new, post-huma~JSt disnncrions between event-based, systemic, and structural trauma do not map onto
philosophy of history that would trouble not only key presuppositions of ~Iass,cal allYsunplc. geo-culmml map, but cut across all borders (even if their distribution is
trauma theory but also those of Marxist and postcolonial theory. Drawing on markedly uneven). In addition, the different sites of trauma -as well as the different
scientists' proposal of a new geological era-the Anthropocene-in which, for the utes of trauma theory-are linked in networks of causality, feedback, and mediation
first time, 'humans act as a main determinant of the environment of the planet' due that require a more sophisticated tracing of knots and assemblages of violence than
to the large-scale use offossil fuel, Chakrabarty argues provocatively that '[hjumans early work on trauma provided. Furthermore, not all violence and suffering are best
now wield a geological force' (Chakrabarty 209, 206). What he calls humanity's descnbed by rrauma-e-even if something we can recognize as trauma often
'geological agency' in the Anthropocene-a period chemist Paul Crutzen dates to accompanies chose other forms of violence and suffering. Exploitation and ecological
the late eighteenth century (Chakrabarty 209)-cntails the collapse of the distance devastation can be rraumntic-e-and can certainly lead indirectly to trauma of various
between '[gJeological time and the chronology of human histories' (208). sons-but their essence (also) lies elsewhere. We need better ways of understanding
In Nixon's account, slow violence already challenges our usual historical how different forms of suffering and violence may inhabit the same social spaces and
chronologies as well as the categories of perpetration and vicrimhood, but his we need to understand what such overlap entails for the possibilities of resistance,
account stays relatively close to Marxist and postcolonial understandings of history healing, and social change. Finally, both examples discussed here suggest that
in highlighting the unevenness of the effects of climate change across rich and poor developing a "e{ess(/ry-lmt-IIO(-s~ifJidenr trauma theory entails reflection on implicated
regrons. Chakrabarty's adoption of the Anthropocene to describe our slIbjea positiotls beyond chose of perpetrator and victim, such as the beneficiaries of
contemporaneity and his linked notion of 'geological agency' lead him to nee-liberal capitalism and the inhabitants of the Anthropocene. As we contemplate
supplement Marxist and postcolonial visions with a more encompassing notion of the future of trauma studies and the changing nature of violence and power, this
our implication as a species in a common and novel problematic. Such a shift to a volume inspires us to construct new parables beyond Tancred and Clorinda.
more universal implication, Chakrabarty clarifies, 'is not to deny the historical role
that the richer and mainly Western nations have played in emitting greenhouse
gases ... [bjut scientists' discovery of the fact that human beings have in the process Works cited
[of capitalist modernization] become a geological agent points to a shared lbJaJ, vikas. 'Factory FIre Kills More Than 100 People in Bangladesh.' New York Times 25
catastrophe that we have all fallen into' (2 '18). Chakrabarty'S analysis suggests a November 2012. Available online at w\Vw.nytimes.com/2012/11126/world/asial
bangladesh-fire-kills-more-than-l Ou-and-iujures-many. html.
paradox in the impact of geological agency, which he sees as an 'unintended Caruth, Cathy, ed. Trauma: ExploratiO/ls iI/lv/emory, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1995.
consequence of human actions' (221): geological agency 'scale]s] up our imagination Druth. Cathy. U"dl1l'med Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History. Baltimore.johns Hopkins
of the human' (206) by recognizing our planetary impact, but it simultaneously UP. 1996.
installs limits in the potentials of human freedom and in the possibilities for control Chakrabarty, Dlpesh. 'The Climate of History: Four Theses.' CritiCtl/ Inquiry 35.2 (2009):
197-222.
over our environment. One may quarrel with Chakrabarty's relative emphasis of iUpbn. E. Ann. 'TraumJ Funlre-Tense (with reference to Alfonso Cuar6n's Children of Me II
conunonality over unevenness-his universalization of what I've called implication 2(06).' lnJuha Koe.hne, ed. Trauma aud Ciuemfl. Berlin: KadnlOs P, 2012. 364-380.
under the heading of the 'species' (21-2). Yet his fom1Ulation of a paradoxical laDpra, DomulIck. 'Tnllll13, Absence, Loss,' Writing His/ory, Writing Traumtl. Baltimore:
~um,an ag~ncy of unintended consequences helps us to grasp what he calls in his Johns Hopkllls UP, 2000. 43-85. .
lq'1, Ruth. Trl1mna: A Gellealogy. Chicago: U or Chicago P, 2000.
tIde the chn~ate of history' as a problem of violence involving vastly different scales luekhurn, Roger, TIle Trrll/trla QlIcsriotl. London: Routledge, 2008:
of temporabty and modes of subjectivity than we in trauma studies have yec 'lXon, R.ob. /014/l'1ofrPlcel1l1dtIle EtlrJirQllmenltllislll oJtlJCPoor. Cambndge: Harvard UP, 2009.
ventured to address.

t
xvIII M. Rothberg

'Who S eaks? Who Listens? The Problem of Address in TW~ Nigerian

Novak, Amy. ,P fC id Gert Buelens eds. Postcolonial Trauma NOlle/s. Spec.
Trauma Novels. In S te raps at ~, '
issue of Studies ill the NOllel40.1-2 (2008): 31-:> I. . . .
. I '" I ·d· . IMemorv: Rell1emberillo she Holocal/srll/lheAgeojDecololl1zalloll.
Rothberg, Michae . mil II IreCflOl/a 'Vh. •l' 6

Stanford: Stanford UP, 2009. .' .' I

Rothberg, Mic h ae.I 'P rogress, Progression ' Procession: Wilham Kenrridge and the Narraro ogy INTRODUCTION
of Transitional Justice.' Nanative 20.1 (2012): 1-24.. '.
Rot hb erg, Mic h aer.I 'M u lridirecrional Memory and the Implicated . Subject. On Sebald and
Kentridge.' In Liedeke Plate and Anneke Srnelik, :ds. . I
Pefonning lvlemory III t ie Arrs all
d
Gert Bueiens, Sam Durrant and Robert EagJestone
Popular Culture. New York: ROlltled~e, 2~13. 39-::>8. . .. ..
Walsh, Dec1an and Steven Greenhouse. Certified Safe, a ~actory m. Karachi Still QU.lckly
Burned.' New York Times 7 December 2012. Available online at ~.\V.nytlmes.
com120 12/ 12/08/ wo rld/ asia/ pakistan- (,1ctory - fire-shows- fiaws- in-moru tonng. hrml.

Like waves breaking On the shore, every discipline, every field and sub-field, every
theoren lmovemenr tells and retells the story of its genesis, until a pattern is written
on the 5.111d,awkward points are eroded and the beach seems stable and calm: a
seemingly inevitable result of natural processes. The shoreline then becomes a place
from which to view the horizon, to survey the future in serenity or with wild surmise.
However, in a collection that concerns the messy complexities of trauma, this
paradoxically stabilizing Row seems to be a problem. It is clear that the names 'trauma'
or 'trauma theory' mark a rising tide in the humanities and beyond, and that the
concepts and approaches that make up this surge come from many currents and fiow
frommany sources. These often run into each other, contradict, agitate, creating nor
iii smoorh, gently shelving bench but shifting, unpredictable sands and turbulent
waters. Charting the future of trauma studies is not meant to channel these waters in
one. rea suringly navigable direction, which would, after all, be a disavowal of the
unexpected nature of trauma itself Rather, this collection seeks to trace the
cOlltr:rdictionswithin the field that might continue to render its turbulence productive.
As the work of Roger Luckhurst and others has shown, the modern concept
of trauma developed, in the West, through the interlocking areas of 'law,
psychiatry and industrialized warfare' (Luckhurst 19). From around the time of
the Second World War to the present, the concept has been increasingly
medrcalized but also and importantly linked into wider political frames: survivor
narrauves, responses to persecution and prejudice, and to the Holocausr and other
actS of mass atrocity and genocide. In all of these discourses, as Luckhursr argues,
the concept of trauma is neither fulJy material or somatic, nor simply psychic, nor
fully cultural or easily located in its appropriative or disruptive relation to the
symbohc order, nor simply historic or Structural, but a point at which all these
CUrrents meet. It is precisely because it is a point of intersection, of turbulence,
that 'trauma' is such a powerful force.
 Introduction 3
2 G. Suelens, S. Durrant and R. Eaglestone

It is certainly true that 'trauma theory' is a response to the de~eloping a.nd c.han~n~ However, it is also the case that in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Derrida and those
impact of the Holocaust, at least in the West. Equally, there IS something In Aime inspired by his work were being widely criticized from the right and from the left
Cesaire's declaration that before the Nazis' 'supreme barbarism', many in Europe because many found the work overly textual and far away from the 'real world',
unable to address political or ethical issues. (This was aggravated by the Paul de
absolved it, shut their eyes to it, legitimized it, because, until then, it had Man scandal, in which the influential Belgian-born critic was discovered to have
been applied only to non-European peoples; that they are responsible for it, published a handful ofliterary articles in a collaborationist newspaper in occupied
and that before engulfing the whole of Western, Christian civilisations in its Belgium during the War). Much of Derrida's work in the 1990s and afterwards,
reddening waters, it oozes, seeps and trickles from every crack. and much scholarship on his work, aimed to correct this impression. It is in this
(Cisaire 14) context that nrurh's and Felman's work developed.
arurh's edited collection, Trauma: Explorations in Memory (1995), drew on a
Recognition of this, the world history of barbarity, also underlies 'trauma'. It is also wide interdisciplinary range of critics and theorists, film-makers and medical
true that there has been an increased medical attention to trauma, from the experts and practitioners. Her introduction to the volume serves almost as a
declaration by the American Psychiatric Association that post-traumatic stress 'nu sian statement' for this [0n11 of'trauma theory' and is, perhaps, the most widely

disorder was a disease. However, these wider shifts are, in some way, beyond the erred piece in this field. It is here that the claim is made that trauma consists 'in the
remit of this book, which is concerned with the future of trauma theory in structure of irs experience Or reception: the event is nor assimilated fully at the

contemporary cultural and literary criticism and theory.

time, but only belatedly, in its repeated possession of the one who experiences it.'
In terms of its growth within literary studies and cognate disciplines, trauma (Caruth 1995: 4-5). While this statement has been explored and problematized-r-
theory again comes from a range of sources. There was, in history, a tum to mdeed, many of the chapters in this volume cite it and use it as the basis of their
'memory', in part stimulated by the work of Pierre Nora in the 1980s and Yosef critique-s-ir remains a crucial insight. But her 1996 book, too, Unclaimed Experience:
Yerushalmi's influential book Zakhor:Jelllish History nnd jewish. Memory (1982) (see TrawlUl, Narrative and History made important interventions in the field, especially
Klein). Michel Foucault, too, invoked a politics of memory and, tracing this out, Ian in relation to the relationship between experience and representation. Similarly,
Hacking explored what he named 'rnemcro-politics' (Hacking, 1994). This turn to Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub's Testimonv (1992) had a huge impact. Testimony
memory often involved a rediscovery and translation of Maurice Halbw ...achs's work has art explicit debt to psychoanalysis and to deconstruction and has at its core a
on collective memory from the 1920s (Halbwachs was murdered at Buchenwald in sense f oddness and peculiarity which is connected to trauma: texts 'that testify do
not simply report [.1Ct,<; but, in a different way, encounter-and make us encounter-
1945). This shift in historical discourse not only seemed to align much in that field
strangeness' (Felman and Laub 7). Felman and Laub argue that the strangeness of
with similar questions about representation, politics and ethics and historical
trauma canner be easily domesticated. While some of the claims of the book have
understanding in literary and cultural studies but also seemed to beg questions about
been questioned, its impact remains powerful (see Trezise, and Laub's response),
trauma. Ian Hacking (1994), for example, wrote that 'there are interconnections
not least in the academy itself, where so may have followed Felman's lead in
between group memory and personal memory. One obvious link is trauma' (211).
But a strand in literary and cultural theory in general in the 1980s and 19905
organizing their modules around questions of trauma, testimony and witnessing.
The work of the intellectual historian Dominick LaCapra, too, draws on these
seemed to tum towards trauma for other reasons. Research in the nascent medical
. d b y J u eli th LeWIS
humanities , sometim es inspire
. . Herman's discussions of memory, historiography and trauma to make significant interventions
Trauma and Recovery
111 this growing field. These publications, and the others that made up the sources
(1992) or Arthur Frank's The Itflolmded Storyteller (1995) focused on traumatic events
and the ways that' 1I1 di VIid U al snug. h t come to terms with them. The work oftheorisrs of this field, led to a huge burst of intellectual and critical creativity consisting of
. .
inspired by Lacan , or by 51avoJ. Z'·, new readings of texts, critical disputes and revisions.
rze k' s H egelian'-Lacanian
. politicized psychoanalysis.
Despite the importance of Caruth and Felman, 'trauma theory' is perhaps less a
ItlCS 0 ften use trauma as a core concept. The work of
(or .perhaps psychoanal. y tiIC po 1"')
judith . Butler.' too , ru me d toro Issues
! f field or a methodology than a coming together of concerns and disciplines. The
0 trauma, grief and mourning in books like
PrecarlOUSLife (2004) and F -r work done in it is usually profoundly interdisciplinary, drawing on literary and
' rmlles OJ W(/r (2009). However, perhaps the most powerful
st ream cam.e from the work f C art h y Caruth and Shoshana Felman in work cultural srudie , history, politics, sociology, psychology and philosophy. Some of
did fi 0
0 the promise of Camth 's collection - of all engagement with more strictly medical
eve
M ope h rom the impact of ern .d a, P au.1 de Man and deconstruction.
any ave argued that ther . hi knowledge _ has not yet been fulfilled, but emergent fields such as 'nemo-criticism'
that d li d e IS somet ng profoundly traumatic in the impulse
un er es econstruction adD 'd' may well have much to offer.
and respo d n em a s work, and that this work both enact'S It IS ag<I1I15t
this background, then, that this collection offers not a reflection on
n s to trauma (see C' hI E .
biography ntc ey; aglestone; Of rat). The recent Demda
the past of tr'3uma theory, bur a consideration of its future. The chapters point to
suggests some traumatic political events from his life (see Peters).
 •

4 G. Buelens, S. Durrant and R. Eaglestone

Introduction 5

areas of change in the field, especially in relation to issues of globalization and In a productive counterpoint to these two chapters, Stef Craps, in 'Beyond
posrcolonialism. They also respond to the very nature of 'becoming a field' itself: Eurccenrri m: trauma theory in the global age', argues that many of the founding
it is very easy for a series of complex ideas to become a concrete 'method', and so texts in the ield seemed to promise a wider cultural engagement precisely through
to lose both the capability of self-reflection and the original questioning, trauma - arum wrote that that 'trauma itself may provide the very link between
investigative (and in this case, ethical) impulse. Part of the point of this book is to cultures' (1996: 11) - than has in C1Cttaken place. Often, texts on trauma theory
prevent this from happening. marginalise the rraurnatic experience of non-western cultures, assume the
As we have suggested, issues of trauma theory are characterized by a 'knot' tying definitions of trauma and recovery that the West has developed are universal and
together representation, the past, the self, the political and suffering. Reflecting often favour 3. distinctively modernist form in order to 'bear witness' to trauma.
this, each of these chapters is woven with these complex threads. However, we raps suggests that aruth's reading of Hiroshima IIlO//. amOHr- essentially a Western
have divided them into two parts: the first part tends to deal more with the role of sr ry in which the Japanese setting and character arc foils for the French woman's
history and culture, the second more with the importance of politics and subjectivity. trauma - is:1I1 example of this. In order to open up trauma theory to become more
Each chapter explores how 'trauma theory' might move beyond its current phase. inclusive and less Western-focused, Craps critiques the implicit Western
Various strands bind them together. They all, in different ways, stress the importance construction of PT D. He also reads Arninatta Forna's novel, The Memorv if Love
of politics, yet none offer simplistic resolutions. Each, again in different ways, (20tO). set in ierrc Leone jusr after the civil war, in a way that both highlights the
advocates a movement beyond the sort of modernist or postmodern narrative texts Westernized approach to trauma and its failings in a country where the 'Western
that are the usual focus of trauma criticism. Many <Ire concerned with the body as standards of normality ... are actually the exception rather than the rule'. The
a site of meaning and trauma. And each is, within the remit of the humanities, future of rrauma tudies must work with and through these critiques.
profoundly interdisciplinary, responding to the interweaving that trauma itself Along similar lines, Auanya jahanara Kabir's chapter 'Affect, body, place:
gestures towards. trauma theory in the world' begins with two lines from an anthology of poetry
The first part of the book, 'History and Culture', begins with more traditional from the Tnliban and suggests that there are limitations and blind Spots in trauma
accounts of trauma theory in its post-deconstructive mode. Robert Eaglestone and theory which stern from the contexts from within which it has arisen. The
Dominick LaCapra discuss the ways in which trauma theory engages with chapter then seeks to explore these blind spots within a broader, more global
representations of the Holocaust and how this might still be productive for framework. Her own work on the partition of India revealed that the 'Holocaust-
reflection and analysis. Following numerous critiques of the centrality of the centric' forms of trauma theory, while useful, were not capacious enough,
Holocaust to the development of trauma studies, however, contributions from Sref especially to deal with a global range ofliterary, musical and cinematic forms, the
Craps, Ananya jahanara Kabir, Noun Gana and Sam Durrant relocate trauma multiple, often contradict ry messages therein and the complex role of affect.
theory ~n a postcolonial and globalized world, theoretically and materially. Kabir traces similar sites of complication and challenge to the (European) model
In his chapter 'Knowledge, "afterwardsness" and the future of trauma theory'. of trauma in Phnom Penh, in Angola and in Iraq. While Kabir acknowledges
Robert Eaglestone turns to Landscapes if the Metropolis of Death, the memoir ofOtt~ Rothberg's model of tmulti-directional memory', she suggests that this model is
Dov Kulka, which is a sort of modernist precipitate of a historical work, something still rooted in a Freudian vocabulary that occludes vernacular (and in particular
strange and powerful formed from, but separate to, the solution of history. non-narrative) modes of response co trauma and their origins in complexly
Eaglesrone argues d r i hi . .. .
. ta 111 t IS memoir It 15 possible to see how trauma opens up a differentiated 'affect-worlds'.
WIder range of dis . [i d h
. Clp Illes an texts, ow trauma destabilizes our wider senses of ouri Gana, in 'Trauma ties: chiasmus and community in Lebanese civil war
temporalIty and ho v t h > > >

literature', argues that devastation and war are so much part of to day's world that
~ \ rauma r eery, 111 Its claSSIC Eurocentric and post-
d econstructlve mode COlli ts h
,
> > >

iec wit a range of WIder intellectual and exisrennal they threaten to institutionalize 'ungrievabiliry, disposability and post-traumatic
currents of thought related t h ' Stress di orders as ineluctable contradictions of human existence'. Structural
. 0 t e structure of experience'. He suggests that the
eXPs~n~:lllceJ of trauma has shifted SOme profound part of western discourse. OlCCOUnts of trauma need to be carefully distinguished from the historical, often
imuar y, Dominick LaCa ' 'F . coloma! ongins of suffering in regions such as Iraq, Palestine and Lebanon, not least
J > h ' pra s asclsm and the sacred: sites of inquiry after (or
a ong Wit ) traUma uses the adv
h· .. ' ances made through the study of trauma to explore beC:luse such [ruetuml accountS threaten to obscure the possibility of justice,
ow ISsues of religlOn underlie f:. ..
Knowl d . Th aSClSlTI.A diSCUSSion of Derrida's essay 'Faith and redress OlndforglVeness. 'Counter-narratives' are needed that aim to make sense of
e ge. e Two Sources of "R r· " wu and engage with and process its traumatic effects. However, this process of
introduces the th fl. e IglOn at the limits of Reason Alone'
emes 0, lob ness and I d hi>
m~klllg sense demands an intricate attention to the [onnaJ complexity of
illuminate e.. H t le sacre w ch 111 turn LaCapra uses to
lascISm. e suggests tha h b reprcsentmg [r'3um:ltlc experience. Accordingly Gana turns to one of contemporary
effects is transe. db. .' t muc a our the Holocaust and its traumatic
l0n11e y see1l1g It thr h hi I> > ArabiC hlerarure's most experimental novels, Elias Khoury's City Gates (2007;
.oug t s re Jgtous or 'postsecular' pnsll1.
 6 G. Buelens, S. Durrant and R. Eaglestone Introduction 7

AblViih al-madina, 1981). Gana identifies in the novel a 'poetics of occlosure' in senses, is the focus of rhis analysis and forms, in the end, a locus from which a
which opposing stresses exist in a chiasmus: between the excess of the traumatic re rsrance ro the Stare in the figure of the 'neighbour' can be analysed.
event and its unrepresentabiliry; between closure and a resistance to closure: Pieter Vermeulen's 'The biopolitics of trauma' analyses a concern that trauma
between event and its repetition; between wholeness and fragmentation. Chiasmus studies, in its focusing all suffering and woundedness, may add to a politics of
emerges as 'the figure of traumatic survival and vulnerability' that binds the stranger recrurunarion and vengeance. Drawing on the work of Judith Butler, Giorgio
to the 'community of the traumatized'. Agamben and others, he measures it shift in the analysis of power from the 'domain
Sam Durrant's chapter, 'Undoing sovereignty: towards a theory of critical of culture to the problematic of life' and to the policing of life: to, in short,
mourning', serves as a hinge between the two parts of the collection, concemedas bropolirics. In his chapter, he shows how trauma and discourses of trauma are
it with how postcolonial attempts to memorialize the traumatic histories of resiruated in the context of biopolitics. While biopolitics disguises itself as 'mere
colonialism structurally reproduce state processes of subjection. Following Judith management or bureaucracy' with rhe aim of'preserving' life, in fact it generates a
Butler's lead, Durrant explores how trauma's capacity to breach what Freud posited constant 'insidious trauma' (Vermeulen cites Laura Brown). These daily traumata
as the subject's protective shield might be put to political use in producing a shared shape and affect us, and - rurning to Foucault and Esposito - Vermeulen argues
consciousness of corporeal vulnerability. Transposing her argument into the realm (hat trauma theory can be seen as an 'immunitary technology' involved with life
of aesthetics, he explores how the artwork can only give rise to such a consciousness and the care oflife. Where Durrant transposes Butler's politics of vulnerability inro
by undoing its own protective shield, namely the self-legitimating ideology of its a critical aesthetics, V cnneulen reminds LIS that 'unprotected exposure to contagion
own form. He turns to a poetry cycle by Ingrid de Kok in order to show how the and contamination is not a livable option', repositioning trauma studies as working
artwork maintains a rnimetic solidarity with corporeal suffering by suspending nor towards a condition of 'sustainable exposure'.
only the cathartic logic of South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Borh Edkins and Vermeulen imagine a roughly contemporary form of
hut also the rranscendent logic of its own lyric form. subjectivity; in the final chapter of the collection, 'Future shock: science fiction
The second part of the book focuses even more clearly on issues of polirics and and the tmU1l13paradigm', R.oger Luckhurst uses 'hard science fiction' to challenge
subjectivity, on the state and the various states of subjection to which it gives rise. this. In 1970, Alvin Toffier pll blished a book called Future Shock. Luckhurst argues
Stonebridge considers rights and refugees, Edkins the relation between personhood that many of the terms the book introduced (such as 'adaptational breakdown')
and the political, and Vermeulen, using similar intellectual resources, considers have now been replaced with a discourse of trauma. While trauma theory has, to
biopolitics and community. Finally Luckhurst speculates on trauma after subjectivity date, largely turned to elitist modernist texts, it has been suspicious of popular
through a reflection on science fiction. genres such as science fiction; yet science fiction n1.ay well be, Luckhurst suggests,
. If, Lyndse~ ~ton.ebridge argues in '''That which you are denying us"; refugees, the best place to examine the future, the future here now, and the future of
nghts and wntmg In Arendt', trauma theory began with a contemplation of the trauma. 'The most challenging contemporary science fiction', he writes, leads us
Holocaust, the detention centres of the twenty-first century are where a parr of ro rethink trauma itself. Ballard and Vonnegut, for example, are both seen to have
that legacy endures and so the future of trauma theory must be tied up with the fare transmuted wartime traumatic experiences into demanding science fiction. But
of roday's refugees • Identifying
I_Y a , entre
"all ..
ynctsrn ,. 111 relugee
r. ..
wnnng, and drawing Luckhursr suggests that in 'hard SF', drawing on advances in hard sciences such as
on Hann~h Are~ldt, ~erself 'stateless' for 17 years, Sronebridge argues that, for a neurology, even more of a challenge is offered, as the imagining of 'post-human
refugee, to claim fights is first 0 f a U to cntlclze
. . . .. . and pohtlcal
.. futures' questions what a 'post-human' trauma might be. John Brunner's The
. . the ImgUlstlc
mystlficatJons on which th ey rest. 'A t t h e Core of Iyncal
' texts is the idea of rhe Sllot:ku'Qlle Rider (1975) and William Gibson's Paltem Recognitioll (2003) both
human, .and .(as de. Man argu
•
od) a mounung'r lor the human. Again, afrer Arendr,
t:
challenge models of subjectivlty, and so of the trauma that subjectivity might
Sron.ebndge Ide.l1ttfies the development of a 'new kind of human beings' in Kafka endure. Other. even 'harder' works of science fiction work to question and
and 111 other wnters as a response to and broadening of trauma. refoml trauma even further. Yet, as Luckhurst points out, they function as a
In her rb,OOk Trfll./111fl alld ti,e Memor)' if Politics, Jenny Edkins developed the correlate to the new, scientific undersrandings of trauma that are arising in the
concept 0 trauma tlme' a tel li h cOntcmporary moment.
th I 'I" " npora ty t at challenges sovereign power through
e. ~rter s re lance on linear time. Her chapter in this book 'T' _I d Trnuma theory i perhaps, at root, an attempt to trace the inexhaustible shapes
pobacs' ar es th b. -, lDle. persoluloo , barh ofhuI11311suffering and of Ollr responses to that suffering. By gathering these
, ' gu at, y produclllg a pemlanent state of exception the srate has
attempted to take COl t I f hi ' scholars {ogethcr, and allo'\ving a range of views and approaches to develop, we
'h . 1 ro 0 r s traUma time. Following Agamben's conrrasr
be tw een c ronologtcal r" ' C I. hope that we are comnbucing productively to rhe continuing debates around these
themselves') d ' . 1~11e. III w lJch we become 'spectators continually missing
an meSSlal1TCtune' (th· . r: most senous and p3inful of matters.
and personho d I . e time we, Tn I.act, are) she explores how time
o are re ated III the p r ' al Th ' ' ,
o .ltJC.. e l1ussmg person', in a range of
8 G. Buelens, S. Durrant and R. Eagtestone

Works cited
Caruth. Cathy, ed. Trauma: ExpioratiollS ill Memory. London: Johns Hopkins University
Press. 1995.
Caruth, Cathy. Unclaimed Experiel/ce: Trauma, Namuive and History. London: John Hopkins
University Press, 1996.
Cesaire, Aime. Discourse ot! Colollialisnl.1955. Trans. Joan Pinkham. New York: Monthly
PART I
Review Press. 1972.
Critchley. Simon. Et!lics-Po!irics-Subjeetjlliry. London: Verso, 1999.
Eaglestone, Robert. TI,e Holocaust and rile Postmodan. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004.
Edkins.jenny- Trauma and tile Memory qf Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,2003.
History and culture
Felman, Shoshana and Dori Laub. Testunonv: Crises of Wifllessillg ill Literature, Psyc/Joanalysjs,
and History. London: Routledge, 1992.
Hacking, Ian. 'Memoro-Politics, Trauma and the SOll1.' Hislor)' of/he Human Sciences 7.2 (1994).
Hacking, Ian. Rewriting the Soul: lVllllriple PersotltllilY ami tile Sciences of J'vlemor)'. Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1995.
Klein, Kerwin Lee. 'On the Emergence of Memory in Historical Discourse.' Representasians
69 (2000),127-150.
Laub, Dori. 'On Holocaust Testimony and Its "Reception" within Its Own Frame, a, a
Process in Its Own Right: A Response to "Between History and Psychoanalysis" by
Thomas Trezise.' Hisiovy & Memory 21.1 (2009): '127-150.
Luckhurst, Roger. TIle Trauma Quesiioll. London: Routledge, 2008.
Ofiat, Gideon. TIle Jewisll Demda. Trans. Peretz Kidron. Syracuse: Syracuse University
Press, 2001.
Peters, Benoit. Derrida. Trans. Andrew Brown. London: Polity, 2013.
Trezise. Thomas. 'Between History and Psychoanalysis: A Case Study in the Reception of
Holocaust Survivor Testimony.' HisIO,.)1 & Memory 20.1 (2008): 7-47.
1
KNOWLEDGE, 'AFTERWARDSNESS'
AND THE FUTURE OF
TRAUMA THEORY
Robert Eaglestone

'We are singing like little angels, our voices providing an accompaniment to the
processions of the people ill black who are slowly swallowed up into the crematoria'
(Kulka 27). When he was a boy of eleven, Otto Dov Kulka, now a very eminent
Holocaust historian, a survivor of Auschwitz and the son of a survivor from
Auschwitz, sang the' de ro joy' in a children's choir at Birkenau. All through his
life since then, he has asked himself what drove the conductor to choose that
famous declaration of human dignity: was it a protest, 'as long as man breathes he
breathes freedom, something like that' (27)? Or was it 'an act of extreme sarcasm
'" of self amusement. of a person in control of naive beings and implanting in them
naive values, sublime and wonderful values, all the while knowing that there is no
point or purpose and no meaning to those values' (27)? Kulka can find no answer
10 this profound, historical and existential question. He chooses first one possibility
and [hen the other. The first, somehow more hopeful, shapes what he is 'occupied
with and believes in' (28) during his working life. However, when he considers the
rise of the azis, the second haunts him and seems, 'I will not say realistic - but
more authentic' (28). Each choice, like any truly existential choice, 'is in fact the
whole unfolding of my existence or of my confrontation both with the past and
With the present from then until today' (29). There are enough Holocaust survivor
tesnmonies by historians to make a f.1scinating little canon (see Popkin). "VVhen
..Uttllory Comes by Saul Friedlander is a classic of this small genre and Kulka's
lAtldscapts of rile Merropolis of Death deserves a place on a par with that volume.
I begm with this moment in Kulka's astonishing testimony because, in our
attempts to understand it, it draws attention to a number of crucial points about
trauma. These seem central to me for the future of trauma theory, for the thinking
abour what questions and insights might be generated by this responsive and
respcncble conceptual apparatus - if it is anything so organized as an 'apparatus'
and not, rather, conceptual threads turned into a pattern by observers keen to
 12 R. Eaqlestone Knowledge, 'Afterwardsness' and Trauma 13

convert critical thought into a programme or a doctrine. I am going to focus on Eurocenrnc in its development and risks appropriating other, non-Western events
three interrelated aspects, each drawn from Kulka's work. The first is the sense that uno ;I, Western model of traumatic suffering: his work and the work of others seeks
trauma is borh the origin and disruption not only of memorial work or fiction but to address this. orne, such as WulfKansteiner in a series of articles (see Kansteiner
of discipline-specific knowledge in other fields too: the impact of trauma and the 2004; ~~8~, have found ~e whole project (if it is a project) misbegotten, an
theory that studies it respects no academic boundaries and shapes not only affective 'interdisciplinary research trajectory that has gone astray' (Kansteiner 2004: 195). In
'feelings' but also more formally recognized knowledge. Second, and again central ;I, parallel to raps, but with less sympathy, Kansteiner finds it obliterates 'historical
to the form of Kulka's testimony, I am going to draw attention to the way that preostcn and moral specificiry' (194) (I am uncertain what 'moral specificity' is, but
trauma has an impact on our experience of time, our temporality, and its structure lacking it is clearly a bad thing). 'Trauma theory', he argues, contlates the traumatic
as 'afterwardsness'. Freud's idea of 'Nachlragliclikeit' is theoretically complex but- and non-traumatic (194) and provides instead an 'aesrheticised, morally and
oddly - experientially easy, as each of us lives it, often unnoticed, each day. It is not politically imprecise c ncept of cultural trauma, which provides little insight into
in itself traumatic but roughly corresponds to Kirkegaard's observation, so often the social and cultural repercussions of historical traumata' (194).
misquoted that it is now an old saw, that while life is lived forwards, it 'can onJybe HIS substantive issue - from which aJ.1the others stem - is what he sees as the
understood backwards'. Third, stemming from this moment in Kulka's work and 'misleading symbolic equivalency' (194) berween the 'allegedly traumatic
from the understanding of 'afterwardsuess', is the idea that the questions posed by component of all human conversation' (194) and the 'concrete suffering of victims
trauma (and investigated by trauma theory) are existential questions which are to of physical and mental trauma' (194). Kansteiner suggests that the core reason that
do with the time ofa whole life and so with its relation to ethics. In this way, much rlus happens is because arhy Caruth
that underlies trauma theory is tied into not only post-deconstructive thought but
wider currents of contemporary intellectual life. focuses on the question of trauma because the phenomenon appears to her as
Yet trauma theory does have its origins in post-deconstructive work. The a perfect, particularly vivid illustration of her understanding of the workings
story of the origins of trauma theory is fairly well-established: developing from oflanguage, which she adopts [rom Paul de Man.
the Yale school of deconstruction and part of the 'ethical turn' in literary theory (203)
and European philosophy, it grew - centrally through the work of Cathy Caruth
and Sh~shana Felman - to become a critical-theoretical way of attending to and That is, Kansteiner argues that Caruth, and those who come after her, are less
addressm~ the representation of human suffering and 'wounding', both litera] and Interested in the particular histories of a traumatic event, and more interested in
metaphoncaJ, both personaJ and communal. Of course there are other strands of using that event to demonstrate their view of language itself Kansreiner fails to
'trauma theory' too wo
, ,
. hi '
ven mto t s tapestry: SOme stem from the work ofjudirh
. offer his view of 'the workings cflanguage' but it seems fairly clear that he thinks
Herman , for example ,leor COIl Out 0 f memory stu dires and critical . . . .
historiography. of language in an unproblematic, positivistic kind of way, as a vehicle to carry
The concept of 't ,. If h . (presumably extra-linguistic) concepts between people. One does not have to be
rauma use as a much longer life as, for example. Roger
Luckhurst has shown but' t i hi . bl . 211 eighties-style deconstructor to find this 'folk psychology' concept of language
, 1 15 r s recogruza y post-deconstrucrive strand that I
take to be central intra h . limited: indeed, the whole 'linguistic turn' across the humanities in the twentieth
auma teary. Indeed, this strand of critical thought
represents one answ r h .
, hi ans we r- 0 r e question - asked repeatedly in the 1990s _ about the century throws this concept of language into doubt. Moreover, Kansteiner also
et ICS of deconstruction' Ad' . . unplicnly begs a question: if Caruth gets her understanding from de Man, what are
. n, 111 ItS m.any SinUOUS appearances trauma theory
attempts to unite what we mi h ali ( ,. hISideas about the working of language and where does he get them [rom? This
t t d bl ' g t C perhaps too quickJy) a formalist concern for
ex an pro ems of interpret ti (h ' question is too large to answer here, so I will focus on one aspect. De Man's
fl" '. a IOn w at PauJ de Man called the 'internal laws
o uerature) wah a hIstoricist r. '.
thought was inAuenced by Derrida's work, and while Derrida does not, I think,
(the'· 1 I" Concern lor apphcatlOn and response to the world
externa re atlOns of literature). offer a theory of how 1:1Ilguage \Yorks, he offers approaches to understanding why,
Any Current in the seas of sci 1 I' . at least, Kansteiner's version doesn't. (There is aJso a strong argument - too
quick tide i th r. 10 ars up can sometImes flow too fast and, on a
,n e last surge of noveJry b k I extensive to be made here - to say that Dertida's work itself is an ethica.l response
been check d c U ' ar s are aunched when their hulls have not
e carelU y enough £ ·U fi . to tnuma; see Eaglestone,) Kansteiner's view oflanguage fails to work because any
scholars such as M.i h I R or I - 1t[lng planks and outright hoJes. Many
,
pointed to flaw
, C ae
'.
Othbe J
rg, ane
Kilb
y and Susannah Radstone, have
moment oflanguage works only in differentiation to a huge backdrop oflanguage
s, onusSlons and area' I. h Uut IS not there, IS absent: absent in space and also absent in time. Kansteiner, very
expand Stef C ' , S 111W uc trauma theory needs to deveJop and
. raps correctly points h decently, says that mora] 'honesty and concepruaJ and historica.l precision demand
much on the H I out t at trauma theory has tended to focus toO
o Ocaust as the paradi f' di . thn lnuma be first and foremosr read from the perspective of the victim' (214):
so has marginalized h < • gm 0 111 vIduaJ and COOUTIunaJtrauma, and
or er atrOCIOUS H however, these same scholarly virtues point out that this 'reading' isjust not possible
events. e suggests that it has been toO
 14 R. Eaglestone Knowledge, 'Afterwardsness' and Trauma 15

. . htf d ay It is not that Caruth (or de Man or Derrida) does not aware of the impact of the nature of rrauma not simply as a 'wound' to individuals
m a srraig trorwar w . . . .
. . ffering and so on but their concern IS with the understanding but to disciplines of thought (see also Ball).
appreciate pam, su ' '. .
and the limits of understanding, of these things. Trauma IS not the chance example UlIIdSltlpeS '!f rhe Metropolis
of Death shows this 'from the inside'. It is hard to
th at exposes, Crrom a deconstrucrive position '.. how language and reference works: know what to call Kulka's book - perhaps it is a work of 'traumatic meta-history'.
instead, a deconstrucrive approach to language and reference IS that whic.h.allows II IS a SOft of modernist precipitate of a historical work, something strange and
us better to understand trauma. This is obviously not to say, pace the cnuque of powerful fanned from, bur separate to, rhe SOlution of history. It is not 'against'
Kilby, Craps and others, that this approach i~.a. final and complete fo~ of hisrory bur "beyond' or 'below' history, striving to illuminate what Kulka calls the
understanding, but it is to say that the bland pOSItIViSm of other approaches IS not 'tremendous "meta-dimensional" baggage and tensions' (82), philosophical and
able to engage with the profound questions that a serious consideration of trauma personal, which underlie his historical work. It is an account, in fractured, modernist
asks. The future of trauma theory is most usefully to be found by exploring it prose, mixed with photographs and clearly influenced by the work of W. G.
through its deconsrructive past. ebald, of his thoughts, dreams, diaries, visits, moments of epiphany and memory,
The reason that these post-deconstructive insights are most effect is because,as of his unconscious and rarely spoken 'mythology' of the 'Metropolis of Death', of
Caruth argued, the pathology of trauma is not the event itself, or the distortion of Auschwitz. He names the 'Great Death' (the gas chambers) but also the 'Small
the event in memory, but 'consists, rather, solely, in the structure of its experience Death' (the electrified fence) and the 'Life beyond Death', recalling the occasion
or reception: the event is not assimilated or experienced fully at the time, bur only where he was electrified on the fence, hanging a moment 'after death' - 'I am dead,
belatedly, in its repeated possession of the one who experiences it' (Carurh 4). Wllil~ and the world as I see it 11:1snot changed! Is this what the world looks like after
other scholars rightly broaden out and reflect on the nature of trauma in the wider, death?' (34) - he was saved by being pushed off by a pole, 'or maybe it was a
non-western world, this chapter aims to explore the future of trauma by thinking shovel' (35), held by a Soviet POW. Most of all, perhaps, it is about his attempts co
through these deconstructive terms, to explore what impact the idea of the 'structure face his own history. There is a narrative, a map, but it is told not as a chronicle bur
of experience' can offer for the future of trauma theory. As I have suggested, I want as a series of moments, flashes, impressions, ideas, illuminations, poems, even
to suggest that it is still illuminating in three areas: in the range of applicability across dreams and recalled daydreams. The style is terse, often simply descriptive.
a number offonns of representation (including, for example, the writing of history); Crucially of interest here is Kulka's relationship to himself as a historian. Kulka
in terms of the idea of 'afierwardsness' and in relation to the widest and most describes how he went out of his way to separate himself from his research. So
demanding existential questions. And I want to suggest that all these consequences successful was he in chis that, for example, in 1978, on hearing he planned to visit
are shown in a most striking form in Kulka's extraordinary work. Auschwitz, a well-meaning colleague suggested that he ignore the main camp and
'go to Birkenau thar is the real Auschwitz' (3). He writes of his 'paradoxical duality'
e-

( 2) in which he was both historian of that period and at the same rime managed
Trauma as history
[orally to avoid 'integrating any detail of biographical involvement' (82). This is
Raul Hilberg, reflecting on Adorno's famous remark, wonders if footnotes 'after discussed in the book and then illustrated by an appended meta-text, his scholarly
the Holocaust' are 'Jess barbaric?' (138). Similarly, Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub article 'Ghetto in an Annihilation Camp: Jewish Social History in the Holocaust
ask if 'contemporary narrative' can bear witness to how the 'impact of history as Period and irs Ultimate Limits'. As a historian, he both poses and answers the
Holo(~ust has n~odified, affected, shifted the very modes of relationship between question of why the: inmates of the 'family camp' - the sub-camp in Auschwitz in
narranve
.
and h 1st ory. "(94--);) . Thi S IS
. a more derailed
. version of the question asked, which he was held - were rreared so differently. The 'family camp' was planned as a
occasionally too dramatically perhaps, about 'how can we live after the Holocaus" 'show camp' for the R.ed Cross and was suddenly 'liquidated' when the Nazis found
[fwe do think that the Holocaust has had a profound impact on what it is to be a It was no longer necessary. Identifying himself as a survivor, in the book but not the
huma; bei~g, how has it .shifte.d the very frames by which narrative and language arncle, he discusses his intense memories and associations. This doubleness and the
work. In disagreement With thinkers like Pascal Bruckner who find the WesttOO use of meta-texts are, of course, recognized tropes of texts that deal with trauma.
laden with. guilt ' r am me re t ernpce d to to broaden rhi our to ' consider the huge amy
roaden chis Kulka writes that he hoped that his highly regarded historical research would be
o f atrOCIty and genocide of hi I 'mfused' \\~th a consciousness of the intensity of those events he witnessed, or that
w C 1 we are now more excruciatingly and often
sh amefully aware of that E 'I the 'sclentific historical research' (82) would somehow help him break into the
' urope w lere they are never done talking of Man. yet
mur d er men everywhe h fi d . 'mecropolis of death'. However. he f1l1ds that
251) E . re t ey In them ... in all comers of the globe' (Fanon
. ven these questIOns - and I .
. f to t lern we can add the arguments abour heanng
t h e VOices 0 the victims th h I the truth, as it seemS to me now, is that I only tried to bypass here the barrier
at e ped motivate the style of Saul Friedlander's
monumental final historical work b . of that gate. to enter it with the whole force of my being, in the guise of, or
- eg1l1 to show how historians, for example, are
16 R. Eaglestone Knowledge, 'Afterwardsness' and Trauma 17

in the meramorp h 0515' 0 f• per haps , a Trojan horse, intended,

. finally, to smash
. He discusses the blueness of the sky over Israel, and, with a child's eye, he describes
he
the gate and sh atrer [ e Ini visible wall of the city
.
forbidden to me, outside
how he admired the beauty of the blue skies of summer over Auschwitz while
in I had decreed that I would remain.
w h osc d ornam rmpriscned there, and how he was almost immune to the frightful disorientation of
(82)
the camps, a disorientation which itself killed adults, since he knew no other order.
Indeed, both these examples invoke three different times: the past at Auschwitz,
"
Disguised or hidd en as a hiIS t on .an he sought to come. to [eons with, . to work at, .if the represented present (at the Temple Mount, forexample) and the present of the
not work t h raug [1, per h aps, the childhood expenences ., from which he had, III
,
narration (the time of writing of rhe book). It is not just the disciplinary limits that
SOlneproloun found way,
wavv eXl
exil e d himself. But quite the opposite . happened:
. the safe
. and shape Landscapes of/lie MClr0p0lr's ofDc(/th but also those of time and the representation
well-paved way of scientific discipline' (82) led him to skirt pre~lsely the vlOlenc.e,
of nme, centrally that of 'afierwardsness'. Trauma is not only a disruption of how
the mur d er and to rtUT e he had seen , 'as •
perhaps I skirred the piles of skeletons III
we experience time, but of how we represent it, too.
A usc h '\vitz on my way to the youth hut' (83), The 'safe passage' , h (83) of the
' Trauma theory asks questions about the 'structure of experience', and so,
discipline of history led him, he thinks, both not to be ab~e to convey c, e m~age inevitably. about the complexities of 'afierwardsness'. As I have suggested,
(83) that was 'burned into' (83) his being bur at the same trme to cope With preCl~ely
'afrerwardsne 5' - often thought of in tenus of Freud's idea of' Naclurdglichkeit' - is
that inability to tell it. And yet, in these passages over these few pages, he wnres
very close to us: indeed, it is part of our daily experience (everyone is first a
that the message that he could not tell, indeed, that made him 'cower at the vague historian of themselves, after all). However, the common forms of narrative and
awareness that I had no way, and would never attempt, to embark on the path of representation, especially those of the human sciences and even more especially
an attempt to disclose' (83-4) is that 'the world, with the Metropolis and the those which use narrative most and assume a 'god's-eye view point', run counter
immutable law of the Great Death having been, can 110 longer, and will never to and confuse our sense of tafcerwardsness'. In 1989, David Wood suggested that
again be able to free itself of their being part of its existence' (84). the 'century-long linguistic tum' would be followed by a 'spiralling return to time
Kulka's work shows lip something cruciaJ for trauma theory. E. H. Carr as the focus and horizon of all our thought and experience' (xi). He continued: for
famously wrote, in his jolly English way, that one should study 'the historian before 'this to happen time has to be freed from the shackles of its traditional moral and
you begin to study the facts. This is, after all, not very abstruse ... When you read metaphysical understanding' (xi). One place where this change has been more
a work of history, always listen out for the buzzing. If you can detect none, either obvious has been in contemporary fiction and in contemporary fum which both
you are tone deaf or your historian is a dull dog' (18). Listening for the 'buzzing' is show a heightened interest in 'playing' with the representation of time (see Currie).
not to depreciate the work, clearly, but to better understand it. Among historians One might go further, and (as ['U suggest below) trauma theory picks up on a shift
of the Holocaust and of other atrocities, there is of course a great deal of 'buzzing': ofimerest in trauma which goes hand in hand with this shifting sense of how time
much of this is, quite rightly, 'metahistorical' in the Hayden White sense. But some IS, and how it is represented. How this 'afierwardsness' is to be understood is both
'buzzing' is more personal and harder to quantify or qualify: Browning's work, for complex and huge: indeed, if it represents a shift as huge as that of the 'linguistic
example, as he admits, is in part shaped by his early response to Vietnam, and Saul turn' as Wood suggests, then its impact is almost too huge to easily comprehend.
Friedlander's 'turn' from a more traditional, empiricist historian to later work can But, (Olltfa Kansteiner, I want to suggest that the explicit study of 'afierwardsness'
be seen to Occur around the time of his self-exposing memoir. However, in relation In trauma studies can be re-imported into the wider humanities. If the expansion
to historical work and in relation, perhaps, to other work in the human and social of the thinking through of this concept is encouraged, rather than delimited, it may
sciences (see Simon), trauma theory alerts us to more than just buzzing. It alerts us Illuminate a number of complex matters. For example, it may be that the same
vividly to the other forces - fears, hopes, experiences - at play in a historical work, structure inhabits a whole range of non-traumatic discourses that seem to have
other forces which are quite as revealing in bearing witness to the Holocaust, or to some similar characteristics to those analyzed in trauma studies. People often say, to
any traumata, as 'the facts'.
those with young children, that 'the time flies by' and that the quotidian events _of
childrearing must be savoured. The implication is that the event of earl~ child
,Afterwardsness' parenting is, as Caruth suggests of traumatic events, not 'assimilat.ed or expenen~ed
fuUy at the time bur only belatedly' (Caruth 4). Similarly, expenences of great JOy
A recurring trope in Kulka's work is the coming together of rwo different times, as art not experienced fully at the rime ('the day went like a flash' people say, 'it w~s
the. past reap.pears in the present. He has, for example, a sudden and absolute allover too quickly'). Yet these are in no way historically or structurally ~ra.umat.lC
feeling, on his first visit to the Temple Mount (in the 1960s), that he had been evenn, In Alflla Korenina, for example, we see Anna and Vronsky flirting, m
there before, because the desolation there, and at a 'mined' Auschwitz in 1946 (he ~nbapatory love, and then falling from love, into dejection and despair. B~t we
was there to give evidence at a trial), was so 'charged with historic meaning' (74). never see - mdeed. [he narrative purposely jumps over - a moment of happiness.
 Knowledge, 'Afterwardsness' and Trauma 19
18 R. Eaglestone

Here the representation of their happiness - clearly not traumatic - has some of that the trauma, from which this message comes and about which it is concerned
;IW1,rt:

the hallmarks of trauma. One of the futures of trauma theory, then, is perhaps to ISalmost impossible to express. If we are to respond to traumatic events, it must be to
look closely and more carefully not simply at the trauma, but at the structure of analyse not only the ways that these atrocities outrage the principles and virtues b
which we live, bur also the ways that they disrupt even how these principles and
experience within which trauma is made manifest.
virtues come to be understood. Thus, it seems to me that the insights of trauma theory
need to spread more widely across the humanities, not simply to awaken guilt but to
Ethics, 'afterwardsness' and trauma ass15tIII the rethinking of how we tell and think about ourselves.
This rethinking of 'afterwardsness' and the structure of experience and time is
inextricably tied to language not only through the sinews of tense, but also through Conclusion:hyperbolic suggestion
the deeper existential questions that it asks. In his memoir, Kulka writes that he
avoids artistic and memorial representations of the Holocaust because 'I cannot Bur - and here I offer only a hyperbolic suggestion - perhaps this is happening
find in them what they seek to convey' (80). However, he turns to Kafka's 'Before already. My suggesti n throughout this chapter has been that 'trauma theory' is not
the Law' as a way of coming to understand how he can arrive at the 'gate' of really a new disciplinary paradigm, but that it forms a network of ideas that offers a
comprehension but not, as it were, pass through it. Kulka suggests that his new way r
paying attention to forms of texts. Then again, fOnTISof interpretive
mythology exists, perhaps, only for himself, and no other 'gate' will open for him. responsiveness stem from the texts and the world to which they are called to
However, he recalls that, in Kafka's story, the man sees, faintly, a light glowing respond. That is to say that the wave of books with ritles like Trauma, Trauma
from behind the gate of the law. The questions posed by 'afterwardsness' are also.
CII/ture, Cuuure Trallll/a, Texts oj Tmnnm, Traumatic Texts, Traumatic Realism, Worlds
and immediately, ethical questions. This is because questions of ethics are woven
of Hun, POSHrmw/(ujc Cuuure and the misery memoirs, verbatim theatre of terrible
atrocities, narratives fsuffering and so on are both a symptom of, and a response to,
inescapably into questions of narrative and of time.
some wider change. Perhaps - and this is just hyperbole - there has been some shift
In the Aristotelian tradition, the 'good life' of the virtues can only be seen
111 the language (at least) of the West, perhaps the world. A shift in what the larer
rightly in relation to our death and finitude. Aristotle writes that the man who has
Foucault would call the 'discourse' in relation to 'afierwardsness', ethics and trauma.
achieved happiness is
And this change would be, and be visible, first, and most, in and by language.
We know, of course, that language meaning changes over time: we can see this
'one who realises in action a goodness that is complete and that is adequately
easily within our own lifetimes. We also know that what we might call 'language
furnished with external goods, and that not for some limited period but
sensibility' changes over time. For example, think of how in the UK, after the First
throughout a well-rounded Life spent in that way'. And perhaps we must add
World War, the Edwardian discourse of 'Play up, play up and play the game' was
to our defmition 'one who shall live in this way and whose death shall be
undercut with such terrible irony by its speakers that it could not be used again: or
consistent with his life'. For the future is dark to us, and happiness we
of the change, in the West, from a formal public discourse to a much more informal
maintain to be an 'end' and in every way final and complete. If this be so,
one during and after the I960s. These things arc charted in the writings before and
then those who have or shall have the blessings we have enumerated shall be
after these changes and are easily observed by all. The hyperbolic suggestion, then,
pronounced by us entirely happy in terms of human happiness.
is that the change in language and acts of culture is itself a response to trauma and
(48)
thar what's called 'trauma theory' is the place where this change has been responded
This thought - glossed a s
' c all no man h appy until.. he IS dead' - reveals that there to most clearly. This is not a unique idea. Something similar is at the core of
.
ISa profound link between th e stones
. we retII and our sense, however vague, of the Foucault's argument in The Order oj Things. To simplify the argument of that
o

eb.th ical. And nonetheless we are aware, as Kulka shows, that the relationship. complex book, Foucault suggests that there was, in the early modem period, an
'immense reorganisation of culture' (43) around the nature of the sign and its
etween ethics and trauma makes this complicated.
relation to (what we now call) its referent. Prior to this, Foucault argues, the 'value
. When we tell the stories of othe rs, we are k een to make them unified
.. and owe rheir .
Irves a theme (and it 1 oflanguage lay in the filet ir was tile sign of things' (33) and that there was
nifi . Ilay b e t h at SOme people have lives to which this fits).e-It is this
u rcanon that so often plays a r I . ..
h h th < a e In our ethical thinking. However, reading Kulka no difference between the visible marks that God stamped upon the surface of the
t roug e eyes of trauma theory re al I his funi ., .
. d. his ownl: ve s t tat t s unification IS dearly externally
earth, so that we may know its inner secrets, and the legible word ofrhe Scriptures,
unposed: s Own life feel hi disioi
crucial syrnpto f hi . 5, to uu, sjoimed, fragmented, doubled, disunified. One or the sages of Antiquity ... in both cases there are signs to be discovered.
m o t s is the wav ] hi I K Ik (33)
a 'message' (83) . In w C1 U a explores how he both feels he has
,onetodomSOtT1C\ yay Wit·h et hi CS, With
. how we live, and is also
 20 R. Eaglestone Knowledge, 'Afterwardsness' and Trauma 21

To choose a crude example, in medieval medicine, plants that echo the ~hape of Caruth. Cathy, ed. TMW'IIJ: £\'plomlioIlS ill J\;[elllor)'. London: Johns Hopkins University
the head or liver were taken to be beneficial to illnesses of the head or liver and Press. 1995.
Gnps, Seer. Postfolotl/ol lilitllessillg: Trauma Om of Bounds. London: Palgrave Macmillan
were rea d as sue h i10 '[he book of nature' .. Similarly , written words were assumed 2013. '
to be 'coeval with the institution of God' (34). (The shadow of this idea remainsin Curne, M:uk. About Time: 'amuive, Fiction /lnd Ihe Phi/osopll)' cf tnne. Edinburgh: Edinburgh
the present world in various guises, some serious, some not. FO.T e.xampl~, o~e less Umversrry Press, 2007.
serious, but illuminating example is the representation of magic 111 stones: In the Eaglestcne. Robert. TIlt Holocaust and lise Pcstmodem. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004.
Fanon, Frantz. 11ft I Fretdled ift/le Eanh. Trans. Constance Farrington. London: Penguin, 1990.
Harry Potter series of children's books, uttering a pseudo-Latin noun O.T verb for
Felman, Sbcshcna and Don Laub. Test;mollr: Crises oj Wimesshlg ill Literature, Ps)'dlOQ/l/Ilysis
something in a spell gives one power over an object or person: the archaism of the a,.d His/ory. London: Routledge, 1992.
word points to the old idea, preserved as an 'idea fossil', that a word has power Foucault. Michel. TIlt: Ordrroj77lillgs. London: Tavistock, 1970.
directly over a thing because a word is intertwined, not simply arbitrarily associated, Fnedbnder, au!' ~""l'll Memor}' Comes. Trans. Helen It. Lane. New York: Discus Books, 1980.
Hilberg, It:lUL TIlt Politics if Memory. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1996.
with that thing.) The change that occurred with the early modern period happened
Ksnstemer, Wulf. 'Genealogy of a Category Mistake: A Critical Intellectual History of the
at the level of reference: that is, how language itself worked changed. Language, Cultural Trauma Metaphor.' Rethinki/lg History 8 (2004): 193-221.
'instead of existing as the material writing of things, was to find its area of being Kansteiner. Wulf (with Harald Weilubcck). 'Against the Concept of Cultural Trauma or
restricted to the general organisation of representative signs' (42). 'Discourse', How I teamed to Love the Suffering of Others without the Help of Psychotherapy.' In
Astrid Erll, Ansgar i.inning, eds. Cllitural Memory Studies: All International and
Foucault writes, was 'still to have the task of speaking that which is, but it was no IlrIcrdisriplitlar'J'Hamibook. New York: de Gruyter, 2008. 229-240.
longer to be anything more than what it said' (43). My hyperbolic thought- KJlby, Jane. Vio/ellu a"d tltt' ClllfIIMI Politics of Trauma, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University
experiment suggests that such a change has occurred now. The impact of the Press,2007.
Kulka, Otto Dov. LmrdscQpt's of tile N/e/ro/Jo/;s of Death. London: Penguin, 2013.
Holocaust, of our increasing knowledge of the world-wide impacts of global
Popkin.jeremy D. 'Holocaust Memories, Historians' Memoirs: First-Person Narrative and
genocides and atrocity, of our general ability to cause immense suffering to each the Memory of the Holocaust.' History & Memory 15:1 (2003): 49-84.
other, ofwhat]udith Butler calls 'precarious life' has changed how language works. Radsroue, Susannah. TI,e Sex,/(// Pofirics of Time: Confession, Nostalgia, iv/elllory. London:
It is the post-deconstructive understanding of language that, perhaps clumsily, Routledge, 2 07.
gestures towards this most clearly. Radstone. Susannah and O. Schwarz, eds. lV/emory: Histories, Theories, Debates. New York:
Fordham University Press, 2007.
Perhaps even this hyperbolic idea is too totalizing and hegemonic. Wittgenstein's Rothberg, Mich.lt~L NfliltidirccriOlllll l\l{eIllOrj': Remembering tile Holocaust ill ti,e Age of
famous metaphor of language like an ancient clty, with streets, new quarters and DccoIOll;Zl1lioll. Stanford: Stllnford Universi(y Press, 2009.
old districts, suburbs and so on, is useful here. He means to suggest that the 'shape' 1I110n, David. 'To and through the UK: Holocaust Refugee Ethnographies of Escape,
oflanguage varies in each suburb: different levels of, say, accuracy and meaning, or Educ.tlon, Inteml'l1cl1t and Careers in Development.' Contemporary Social Science
(2012): 21-38.
of quality of reference. The language of chemistry or the notations of calculus are Wood, DaVId. The Decof/sm/aioll of Tiule. Atlantic Highlands, Nj: Humanities Press
quite different from, say, the language of art criticism, the discourse of love or, International. 1989.
here, accounts of suffering and testimony. If the clalm that the whole of language
has been altered by atrocity is too hyperbolic after all, then, perhaps, one could
argue that one suburb is growing rapicUy and in this suburb, different rules apply:
we have to feel our way around, find our the shape of things. In this way, the
future of trauma theory is to continue to reflect on and to attempt to understand
the damages that we do to each other, and in so doing draw our attention [0 both
our terrible strength and our litter weakness.

Works cited
Aristotle. Ethics Trans J A K Th
Ball .... , . ,. . OITISon. London: Penguin Books, 1953.
, K~ryn.DISC/plll/lIlg the Holocaust. Albany: SUNY Press 2008
Browning, Christopher. Ordil/a \.1 . R > .' •

ed L d . H . ry 1 ell. eserve Police BattallOll 101 and the Filial SolurioJ/. 2nd
B n. on Oil. arpetCoUms, 1998.
tuckner, Pascal. TI,e Tyranlly oifG "I p. .
Butlet Judith P " L;{; III t. rmceton: Princeton University Press, 2010.
, . reCtmou~ !Je. London: Vers 2004
Cart E H WI 'H'. , 0,.
, . . lat IS glory? Basll1gstoke: Palgrave, 1986.
2
FASCISM AND THE SACRED
Sitesof inquiry after (or along with) trauma

Dominick LaCapra

Where does one go after the recent surge in trauma stu dies? I think that the study
of trauma is not a passing fad or trend. The problems posed by trauma, both
mdividual and collective, are real problems, and the study of trauma has begun to
take differentiated and self-critical [0011S. Such study has provided newer ways of
eciug both older and recent problems. Bur instead of rehearsing what has already
been extensively discussed with respect to trauma and the debates surrounding it,
or applying rr:1l1l113 studies to another text (although there may still be much to
accomplish in the latter respect), we may have reached a point where problems can
be addressed without always ringing the trauma bell. Instead one may choose to
mdicace the role of tr:lU1113when suitable, but often leave its pertinence implicit,
especially when that pertinence would seem obvious. In my recent book, History
alld Irs Limits: Human, Animal, Violence, I have extensively discussed the relevance
of trauma in a variety of areas, including the study of the Nazi genocide or 'final
solution'. Here I would like to pursue that inquiry, touching especially on the way
[he potentially shanering experience of trauma may either be averted or transfigured
through a fonn of sacralization or sublimation (in the sense of rendering sublime),
specifically in the case of certain perpetrators.
I would, however, note that I am not an expert in comparative fascism. And,
despite a few allusions, I shall not discuss all versions of fascism or fascist tendencies.
As will be evident in the approach I shall take, the focus of some of my own work
ius been represenraricns of the Holocaust, memory, trauma, and the understanding
of azi m. I would also norc that my approach is exploratory and that my title is
almost an equation with tWO unknowns. I shall come to fascism and the problem
of ItS relationship to Nazism, I but it is important to keep in mind throughout my
discu sion that the sacred and religion are contested concepts, including their
relation to presumably secular phenomena, such as politics, aesthetics, ideology,
and trauma.
24 D. laCapra Fascism and the Sacred 25
,
One dimension
' 0
f th e 'C
1111
al so,lucian' and perhaps of certain forms of anti-
.'. stresses the importance of the pragmatic question of recent uses and abuses of the
,, 'aJ' eli more generally,is an acting-out In pracnce of
Semitism and racr preJu ce .. . term, including how it is invoked in the confused idea of the return of religion (did
, ',.C d 'ecy-prodLlcing, indeed potentially traumatIzing
ideologically rCHUoree , <l,IlXl . . It ever go away?). He also raises doubts about a presumably disenchanted or secular
other prominently including the Jew as phobic,
phantasms ab out t h e fa eli c,ally . . moderniry as well as the way religion is sometimes linked ideologically to fascism, as
quasi-ritual treat, source 0 f p ollution or contanunaoon,
irual rh world-historical
. power,
. In the ideologically charged, dubious concept of Islarno-fascism.
. .' t Such phantasms might be all the more disconcerting to
and abject victim or pes. . . Derrida also emphasizes the duality - what unsurprisingly emerges in the course
d the, '[ self-contradictoriness or absurdity, yet [ned nonetheless,
the extent one sense . of the essay as the multiplicity - of the meanings attributed to religion. Still, he
C lfilli
rhroug h a se If-Ill LJ ng p erformativiry , to reduce the other .' to the state . of degradation
. . elaborates the idea of rwo senses or 'sources' of religion. One is the sense that relates
and treat
h '
t h ey lmpl
ire to that other . Moreover, anti-Semitism,.' while. having
. . It to faith - 'the fiduciary (trustworthiness, fidelity, credit, belief or faith, "good faith"
d"· .
IstmCtlve C
tearures, 15 • best seen in a larger framework of racism . and vtctimrzation .. unpked in the worst "bad faith"), (Derrida 1998: 63). He also treats the relation of
that may also have ritual or quasi-sacrificial aspects (notably a desire for purification fairh to the 'totally other' (63). Thus in his first sense or somewhat heterogeneous
and regeneration through violence) that may apply to other groups, sll.ch as Slavs, set of senses of religion. Derrida Stresses faith as well as the totally other.
'Gypsies', people of colour, and those judged to be unacceptab.le or um~tegratable The second set of senses relates religion to the sacred and the holy, between
com onents of the community (for example, the mentally ill, the disabled, or which there are also divergences and tensions. (The German 'hei}ig' is translated as
'asocials') who may be swept up into a dynamic of violence and victimization. either 'holy' or 'sacred', whereas the French has two terms: 'saint' - as in Ie Saint
r would like to explore this complex set of contentions or hypotheses in relation Espril- and 'sacrC'.) I would note that the definition or conception of religion in
to a much-debated question: whether fascism (or at least Nazism) can, at least in terms of the sacred, rather than, say, a belief in immortality or in God (as well as the
certain ways, be seen as a civil or secular religion, in one formulation, a political totally other), has been very important in a French tradition of thought to which
religion, and in another, a postsecular phenomenon - to invoke a term with some Derrida i to some degree indebted or by which he is himself hailed or interpellated
currency in recent thought. This issue is typically addressed on the basis of the very - the Durkheimian traditi n, including such important figures as Marcel Mauss,
questionable assumption that we understand and know what we mean by religion and Georges Baraille, Roger aillois, Rene Girard,Julia Kristeva in certain ways (at least
secularity along with other concepts often invoked in discussions of them (such as the via Mary Douglas), and many others, including to some extent Henri Bergson.
aesthetic or even the literary, for example, the 'aestheticization of violence' or 'literary Derrida also indicates the importance of the holy and the problem of the relation
politics'). Despite the dubiousness of any clear-cut definitions of these concepts, I between the sacred and the holy. 1 would simply suggest in passing that the holy is
would nonetheless like to inquire into the role of the religious or the sacred in fascism, often related to notions of the radical transcendence of divinity (as is the totally
and especially Nazism, without pretending to offer definitive answers or an inclusive Other and perhaps even faith or at least the 'leap of faith '). The sacred relates to more
and exhaustive account of the complex phenomena in question. Iam addressing only munanenr, this-worldly, at times carn.ivalesque forces such as ritual, including (but
one complex strand or network of factors in a more complicated process. not reducible to) sacrifice, which Derrida discusses in many places, including his
Of interest here is a late essay by Jacques Derrid1, a typically intricate, difficult, Gift if Death, (Yet it is interesting char one refers to the 'holy' rather than the 'sacred'
questioning, and self-questioning essay entitled 'Faith and Knowledge: the Two Sources foo1- as well as the indwelJing of the Holy Spirit - bur to the 'sacred' monster -Ie
of "Religion" at the Limits of Reason Alone' (in Derrida and Vattimo 1998: 1-78). I mOUSER! sacre - such as Derrida himself.) The holy as the heilig is very important in
shall say a few words about this essay and perforce simplifY and make a selective use of Gcmlan thought, including Heidegger's thought, in a sense privileged for Derrida
Derrida's analysis without dwelling on aspects of it with which I would take issue.2 for an interesting reason, because of 'irs extreme character and of what it tells us, in
What I find pertinent for my purposes is how Derrida wornes, works, and these times, abOllt a cerrain "extremity'" (59), from which Derrida himself is not
unsettles the concepts of religion and secularity, along with related concepts, (Q mununc. One may also mention Rudolf OttO, whom Derrida does not discuss.
indicate how little we can say we know or understand with any degree of confidence, Derrida sees the holy or Iteilig as related to hailing and the way one is hailed by
much less certainty (a not unfamiliar strategy in Derrida). He does not simply an address to which one must respond. One thinks, say, of Abraham or Moses as
introduce a necessary degree of hesitancy and self-critical doubt that may be missing, well as the hailing of Mary. Derrida refers to a possible division
orat le~t no~ tak~n beyond a certain point, in the work of some if not many historians
and SOCIalSCientIsts. He also tries to sketch Ollt the meanings given to religion and III the altemative between sacredness without belief (index of this algebra:
more ~r less related phenomena that deserve serious critical attention. The title of his 'He:idegger') and (.,ith in a holiness without sacredness, i~ a desacralizing
e~say l~volves ~ dual reference to work:; of Kant and Bergson _ initiators of tWO truth, even making of a certain disenchannnent the conditIon of authentIC
discursIve practICes or tradir"o I h ' holiness (index: 'Levinas' - notably the author of From the Sacred to the Holy).
I ns t lat ave 1l1teracted in complex ways in French and,
more genera.lly, modem thought. And in discussing the problem of religion Derrida (64)
 Fascism and the Sacred 27
26 D. laCapra

With respect to the reference to Levinas and disenchanted holiness, one might add waters of the tWO sources of religion are themselves typically mingled in a veiled
Karl Barth or Rudolf Bultmann - indicating a meeting of a certain Judaism and a and even muddied, impure, or secret manner.
certain Protestantism, both of which tend to desacralize or 'disenchant' the world Towards the end of the essay, he asserts that 'the experience of witnessing situates
through a notion of the radical transcendence of a totally other, hidden God who a convergence of these tWO sources: the unscathed and the fiduciary' (65) - a thought
may be both the ultimate object of desire and the most extreme, dangerously that resonates with the widespread tum to experience, trauma, witnessing, and
traumatizing force - arguably similar in certain ways to the 'real' in Lacan. Derrida tesumony in the recent past. Perhaps surprisingly for some readers, Derrida also
does not mention what is pertinent to problems I shall discuss shortly: the role of argues that an elementary testimonial trust precedes all questioning, indeed that the
address or hailing in the fascist salute and forms of address such as Heil Hitler or Sieg slighresr testimony 'must still appeal co faith as would a miracle'. And he makes the
Heil. He nonetheless emphasizes how the l/eifig conveys notions of the unscathed, provocative, in certain ways problematic, assertions that the experience of
the pure, the undefiled, the uncontaminated, the immune that is safe and sound, in disenchantment itself 'is only one modality of this "miraculous" experience' (64),
one sense the avoidance or voiding of the traumatizing or anxiety-producing, and, that disenchantment is 'the lIery resource oj tile religious,' and that 'the possibility of
in Nazi Gerrnany, the quest to beJudelifrei. rlldinJ! evil both destroys and institutes the religious' (65) - views that I think apply
This notion of the unscathed, pure, and uncontaminated has been a crucial more to the 'faith' side of the 'sources' of religion. In the present conrext I cannot
object of critical inquiry throughout Derrida's thought. It is related to his inquire further into these assertions. Iwould simply observe that attempts to separate
deconstruction of pure binary oppositions through which one attains purity in a and oppose the 'two sources' or their analogues are contestable and may be conjoined
concept or a phenomenon by concentrating and projecting onto the other all with conflict and even with wars, as in the wars of religion and the Reformation.
internal alterity, or difference from oneself, to arrive at the pure, integral, unscathed, Dcrrida also discusses tWO putative etymological sources of the term religion that
presumably self-identical entity or concept. This procedure is crucial both to a in a sense cut across, or form tributaries to, his two mai n sources. One is relegere,
logic of pure identity and difference and to a sacrificial scapegoat mechanism. For important in the Ciceronian tradition and meaning harvest or gather. The other
Derrida such a logic undermines itself by repressing or disavowing internal alteriry and perhaps more prevalent is religare, to bind, link, obligate ~ related to having
(the female in the male, the animal in the human, the heteronomous in the
scruples that hold one back from doing or thinking possibly transgressive things. I
h:IVC intimated that I think that the more prominent concepts, at least in Christian
autonomous, or the Jew in the German, say, as well as the sacred in the holy). This
process of generating what radically questions pure identity and pure difference is theology, that are related to the two main sources specified by Derricla - to simplify,
the sacred-holy-pure and faith-radical alteriry - are immanence and transcendence.
what he designates by various terms over time: perhaps most famously, dfffhauce,
The relation or ncnrelarion between transcendence and immanence has, I think, a
related to the intertwined processes of temporalizarion and spacing. And the issue
claim to being the paradigmatic aporia or paradox of Christianity (notably with
of more or less flexible limits and of the problematic but necessary role of non-
respect to what, for Kierkegaard, was the 'scandal' of the incarnation - a 'scandal'
abso~ut~ distinctions in the wake of the deconstruction of binary' oppositions is
that messianism tries to defer - the 'scandal' of the transcendent becoming immanent
crucial m the bearing of deconstruction on historical, ethical, and political analysis.
or God, man). The tt1u1sccndencelinunanence aporia or paradox (or its
I have intimated that Derrida has joined others in referring, perhaps at times in
displacements and allegories) may even have this paradigmatic status in the so-called
an extreme, questionable fashion, to auto-immunity in the sense of the way a
Western tradition more generally - something intimated in what was for some
system gen~rates its own antibodies that unsettle its pure identity and, at a certain
nme, at least in the English-speaking world, Derrida's signature essay, 'Structure,
thr~shold, Its very being or life. I would also note that the process of diUhmlce,
which takes Sign, and Play in the Disc urse of the Human Sciences' (in Derrida 1978: chapter
. . a partie u Iar swerve In . auto-unmumry
. . and which I would relate - to
internal dialogi zation , self -quesuorung,
.. 10). specifically his analysis of the problem of the centre as both inside and outside
and self-contestation also helps one to
understand Derrida's ofc-repe a t e d an d rat h er b ewildenngly ..' . (immanent and transcendent to) the circle it detem1.ines. One may also refer to
h paradoxical assertion
t at a. condition .of pos 51ibilitv j . . . .
dimensions of Derrida's C3r1y and later thought that are not explicitly brought
I lty IS a condltlon of Impossibility. I would gloss thiS
assertion as nleanmg that so n h" .. together and thematized as a problem - the LWlOUS assertions that there is no
. . I et tng s conditlon of possibility is the very condition
o f Its Impossibility 'as sllch' _ .. 'outside-the-text' (3 notion more 011 the side of immanence) and that every other
'u' as a pure, undIVided, integral autonomoUS,
ncomamll1ated' entity or es sence - Ilence unplYll1g .. ' IS tot:llly ocher (toW autre est rOllt autre), a generalization of radical transcendence.
h' the impossibility of (he 'as
suc as sllch. (Conversely Son th" d" " " The cranscendel1ce/inllnanel1ce aporia or paradox is also operative in a displaced
c d"" f .. . ' le lllg s con ltion of mlpossibiliry as such is its very m~nner in theories of meaning as immanent to its vehicles or signs or, on. the
on 1[IOn 0 pOSSIbility as wh " . . .
structure 0 dier Co • at It IS w1th Its II1temal altenty, marking, ttace- coornu)', arbitrary and, in a sense, transcendent with respect. to the~. One nught
, r l1erence 1rom Itself· .. .
any simple .. b . , m a sense, Its ongmary hybridity that threatens c\'en ask whether 'meaning' has become a 'god-tenn' in studIes of histo?" culture,
opposition erween a . I""
on 'Fal"th d K pure, lI1tegra ll1slde and an outside.) In his essay .nd society that sec their goal as the determination or recovery of mearung.
an nowledge' , D ern ·d a al so makes observations indicating that the
 28 D. LaCapra Fascism and the Sacred 29

The immanent sacred is related co a multiplicity of phenomena - notably The second, and I think more historically pertinent, notion of ideology is
sacraments and rituals, including sacrifice but nor reducible ro it. The transcendent formulated by Althusser and taken up by many others. It has curious resonances
sacred (possibly construed as the holy) may be figured as the unrepresentable, the With aspects of 'religion'. This is ideology that addresses, hails, or interpellates one
ineffable, the totally other, the hidden God. I t may serve as a bar to mediations, and calls for a r~po1l5e. In more secular terms, it says 'hey you'. In more 'religious',
including sacraments and rituals, including sacrifice. I would note in passing, and or at least affccrively charged and even visceral terms, it may say 'Hail Adolf or
later return to me point, that to the extent fascism and especially Nazism arguably even 'H~il Hitler'. It is related to subject formation, and it need not appeal to
have a significant relation to the religious and the sacred, it is, I think, more to a ystemauc thought. Indeed a systematic ideology that is explicit and well-articulated
specific form of the immanent sacred, especially when the latter is absolurized and opens itself to scrutiny and may invite criticism. An ideology that hails or
bound up with a quest for total purity that may generate anxiety about contamination mrerpellates can be 1110re vague, even confused, and linked more compelling] ,
and prompt a turn to rituals, including purifying and sacrificial rituals that get rid of more bindingly, and more unreAectively to practices, even rituals and more or less
phobic, anxiety-producing, typically scapegcated others. From a transcendem structured forms, of acting out phantasms.
perspective, Nazism may be seen as a diabolical, immanent, politicaJ religion, as it I shall also invoke another concept that has become prominent recently - the
was by Eric Voegelin and others (see Ustorf; Vondung). pcstsecular (for example, in the work of Eric Sanmer and Jane Bennett, among
Allow me to memion another distinction, at times taken to binary, oppositional, others). The postsecular is neither the secular nor the religious or sacred but
or separatist extremes: that between faith and works or actions. Faith (like certain somehow both - or betwixt and between. It comes into its own in the attempt to
transhistorical, universalizing approaches to theory) is more on the side of the re-enchanr the world, even to evoke a sense of the uncanny, the epiphanous, the
radically transcendent, and works are more on the side of the immanent, this- extraordinariness of the ordinary, indeed the miraculous or the endowed with
worldly, and mediated. (Yet a this-worldly figure such as Hitler may be the object grace, charisma, the gift of grace. And the postsecular has very labile, often rather
of a certain kind of faith.) The problem of faith and works was, of course, an issue confused relations to the aesthetic, including notably the performative, the uncanny,
in the Reformation. I would suggest that there are analogous concepts and concerns and the sublime. My own appeal to the concept of the posrsecular involves both use
in historiography and social science, especially with respect to the relation between and mention, indicating a desire to leave open certain questions I raise.
ideology or belief, even theory, and practice. Recently in history there have been I would note what deserves more inquiry: the possible relations of the sacred
attempts to stress the importance of practice, often correlated with Bourdieu's and the sublime as seemingly religious and secular, or perhaps postsecular, correlates
notion of habitus as what is embedded, goes without saying or is simply assumed. - the sublime. as a displacement or at least analogue of the transcendent sacred (or
I would refer you, for example, to a recent book, Pracricillg History: New Directiom perhaps the holy), indeed what is out of this world - in a phrase often used with
in the .rtf/riting afHistory after the Linguistic Tum, edited by Gabrielle Spiegel. Bourdieu reference to works of art. (Beauty is more immanent and mediated ~ less excessive
~as hi~nsel~ within the Durkheim.ian tradition, and for Durkheim sacred practices, or extreme. The uncanny disorients beauty but, insofar as it may be seen as a
mcluding rituals, constituted, at least in traditional societies, a habitus. returning repressed, it is closer to the immanent (for Freud, ultimately the mother's
Most historians would see fascism and Nazism as somehow combining practice genitals or womb), with the return of the sacred in the secular, including the
and ideology. Of ~ourse much depends on what one means by ideology, whose sublime, as a somewhat paradoxical, particularly disorienting mode of the uncanny.)
senses are also multiple, which is not to say that the concepts of practice and habirus One may also mention what I term 'rraumarropisms' - different attempts to
are transparent
. . (Spiegel ac kid
now e ges t h·at conceptions of practice along WIth . transfigure trauma inco the sublime or the sacred, for example, in the sacralization
pra~nce theory are, for example, far fr0111 clear and. to the best of my knowledge, or sublimation offounding traumas such as the Crucifixion, the French Revolution,
fascism and Nazism have b li··· . . the Holocaust, and possibly the First World War for Hitler and others (for example,
not een exp Cit tOpICS 111 pracnce theory.) I shall simply
touch on the two extreme I Ernst Junger with respect to the Frol/ferJeb1lis). For Hitler the devastating
c. s or at east two sources or currents of ideology that are
orten opposed or separated f h· duappoinnnenr of loss of (he war was exacerbated by the evangelical promise of its
rom one anot er. One IS the systematically articulated
networks of concepts 0 b 1" f Y C .
outbreak. (In Germany, this sense of devastation was further aggravated by
If . . r e ie s. au find at least an approximation of this in highly
se -conSClQUS intellectuals K developments in the interwar period, including runaway inflation followed by the
. ,say, ant, Hegel, or Marx:. Whether any modem
movement or regime has an .d I . hi . great depression.) As Hitler put it in Mei" Kampf:
m h d' I eo ogy 111 t s seI1Se IS very problel1::latic. A regime
ay ave a octnnal or dognla' b . b .
. I tiC as IS, llt It may be a stretch to compare this with
an artIcu ated system. Ve few h' . . . For me, as for every other German, the most memorable period of my life
ideology al h h ry Istonans would see NazlStl1 as having a systemanc
, t oug many would . h' . now began. Face to face with that mighty struggle all the past fell away into
racism espec· II . 1] . see It as aV1l1g a doctnnal or dogmatic basis in
, la y raCla y onenred . S .. . oblivion. For me these hours came as a deliverance from the distress that had
unscathed Jude ,r. . . antJ- emltlsm and the deSire for a racially pure,
, !brel, utopian Volksgemeillscltaji _ a racial utopia. weighed upon me during the days of my YOllth. I am not ashamed to
 30 D. laCapra Fascism and the Sacred 31

acknowledge today that I was carried away by the enthusiasm of the momem homeopathic ~tr:tte~' that could well lead to overdosing on the antidote, especially
and that I sank down upon my knees and thanked Heaven out of the fullness when mat antidote involved the typically escalating appeal to violence.
of my heart for the favour of having been permitted to live in such a time. I have been using the problematic term 'fascism'. Allow me to give a list of what
(;0) have oficn been taken as ics prominent characterisnrs - what might perhaps be
taken as a fascist constellation, if not a fascist minimum.
The general question of the labile, often confused relations between the sacred or the
religious and the aesthetic are, I think, very important in certain currents in modernity, I. An affirmation of violence often seen not simply instrumentally as a means but as
including but in no sense restricted to fascism. I would recall in passing T. E. Hulme's an intrinsic, valorized aspect of action, practice, or policy, at times bringing a so-
definition of Raman tic ism as spilt religion - something quoted by M. H. Abrams in called cult of violence involving traumatizing terrorism and even sublime elation.
Natural Supematumlistn in the course of tracing the complex relations of Romanticism 2. A vision or figuration of violence both as originary or generative and as a
to religion, its structures, and motifs - a problem, of course, discussed by many ochers, heroic, typically masculine or virile vehicle of regeneration and purification in
including Northrop Frye and Hans Blumenberg. And the religion of art or the role a world condemned as degenerate, fallen, mediocre, feminized, bourgeois - a
of art as a surrogate or competitor with respect to religion has played an important despicable world that had to be radically uprooted and transformed with an
role in 'modern times', including Freud's role-reversing reference in Civilization ami apocalyptic sense of urgency.
Its Discontents to those who may need religion because they do not have art or KHitllr. 3. A charismatic notion ofleadership - an exciting leader who was chosen to lift
Of course this is not the only thing of interest in Freud concerning the complex up and lead the people out of mediocrity, degeneration, or even bondage.
relations between religion and seemingly secular formations, including psychoanalysis This is something even Bataille stressed in his essay on fascism and saw as a
(for example, as involving attempts at exorcism of haunting, possessive forces). source of its appeal (see Bataille).
Allowing for the very problematic meaning or meanings of religion, the sacred, 4. An enthusiastic, even elated, re-enchanted, mass public that followed the
and the aesthetic, let us cautiously move on to fascism and especially Nazism and ask leader. The mass was also to be infused with charisma (not inert or passive).
whether they can be seen in any significant way - not entirely or even essentially- Here one may think of the ecstatic faces in the crowd greeting Hitler at
but in any significant way as related to the religious and the sacred, including their uremberg, as seen in Leni R.iefenstahl's film Triumph of the Will.
contested and often confused relations to the aesthetic. I will not go into the more 5. Extreme nationalism, militarism, and ethnocentrism that might, however, be
delimited and more readily researchable question of the actual, empirical relations combined with an idea of fascism as a transnational movement. There was also
between fascist regimes and religious institutions such as the Catholic Church or the an idea of a new Europe, even a new world order that might include special
related question of clerico-fascism (see Finchelscein). These relations are intricate and affinities among given peoples or nations. Mussolini saw a privileged link
run from compromise to active collaboration; Christian Wiese argues that 'Christian between Italy and Argentina with its large percentage of Italian immigrants.
theology and the policy of the Churches, as well as a widespread social mentality Nazis looked to Nordic and 'Aryan' groups.
determined by demonizing stereotypes of the "alien", dangerous Jew actively and 6. A long series of 'antis' - anti-Marxist, anti-parliamentary, anti-Enlightenment,
often consciously prepared the ground for the National Socialist policy of anti-liberal, anti-bourgeois, anti-intellectual, and with some variation anti-Semitic.
disenfranchisement and - a few exceptions apart - contributed to the fate of the 7, A more positive notion of fascism as a third way, neirher right nor left, neither
Jewish minority through consistent desolidarization and quiet surrender' (Wiese 166). capitalistic nor Marxist,
I hav~ m~ntioned the conception of ideology that has displaced religious aspects, 8. A notion of fascism as more spiritual than competing modem ideologies such as
~otably l~ Its role in fanning subjects through hailing or (in Alrhusser's term) Marxism or capitalistic liberalism - more spiritual but also involving thinking with
interpellation
..
- subiects
J
who may w ell engage III .. practices bound up Wit .h me blood, experientially, even viscerally, not intellectually, critically, oranalytically.
I~eo.logtcal pha~tasms, beliefs, or convictions. What is, I think, of general 9. The importance of movement and the movement (in German Bewegullg),
significance during the interw . d· I . . which is related to the importance of the will and direct action. This was
. .. ar peno IS t te Widespread appeal of fascism,
including Its appeal for inr IJ I d h perhaps most prominent in the Nazis. In Italy, where fascists did affirm direct
. . e ectua s, an r e extreme lability of ideologies in terms
~f shifts III ~osicion of individuals across the spectrum and of 'borrowings' from action and will, (here was also a pronounced valorization of the state and a
Ideology to Ideology even whe th ili top-down corporatist organization of the economy.
. I d' ' n ey were nn ltantly opposed to one another-
IIlCu 109 a tendency to val' . I ....
·C .a1 Otlze VIO ence In IntnnSlC or regenerative even
sacnl.lCJ , and not lim.ited Strat . . . ' ne lTlayperhaps add other characteristics (for example, the breakdown of at leas~ a
B t ill hi Ide . egtc teons. In the sacnficJally oriented Georges
a a e, t s e lor a whde to a d fi fl. 'hberal' sense oflhe rule oflaw), and not all those labelled or self-identifying as fasCist
c. c.' . • e ,ence 0 w lat was tenned sUrlascisllle or taking
lrOm lasclsm Its method bl . 0' ~ccepted all of the above. One problem, however, is the relation of fascism and
S preSllma y III order to Oppose fascism _ a kind of
 •

32 D. LaCapra
Fascism and the Sacred 33
,
Nazism. T hiIS quesnon
" Invalves the broader issue ."
of totalitarianism, which has b.,,,
generally not been seen as a necessary dimension of fascism. Saul Friedlander tries
'
used, wit h certam qu alifications
1,
to include £1.SCISm, Nazism, and Soviet conununnm
.'
to make this argument. Bur Friedlander, like other historians, recognizes that other
f
T h e concept, a coucourse ,. had a pronounced ideological role 10 the Cold
. War, almoa nationalities and countries were active collaborators in the genocide, at times even
an al ogous to t h at 0f terrorism and the war on terror . .
today. (One might almost say,
. outdoing axis or going beyond what was required or even requested of them. It
hrasi
parap asmg reu,F d where ideologically totalitarianism once was, there rerronm
0'.. .
IS well known, after Robert Paxton's research, that Vichy France deported children
has come to be.) This ideological role jeopardized the more analrt.tc uses of the
to the camps when this was not required by the Nazis. And Jan T. Gross has told
concept of totalitarianism. And the question with respect to the latter ISwhether the
the Story of how Poles abused and massacred Jewish neighbours and took over
concept, even as a model or ideal type that o~1e acknowledges. ~as never .fully
their property without being coerced by Nazis, during the pogrom of July 10,
realized in empirical reality, obscures too many differences. Mussolini and certam of
1941 at jedwabne (Gross 2002). The book, touching on sensitive issues, provoked
his ideologues did affirm a totalitarian state as a goal. And the concept of totality was
:I heated controversy (see Polonsky and Michlic; Forum) He has also recounted
prevalent. Stanley Payne and others see political religion (PR) in partial contrast to how, even after ninety per cent of Poland's three-and-a-half million Jews had been
civil religion (CR) as centred on the state and totalitarian in incentive (see Payne; eliminated during the Nazi occupation, the deadliest pogrom of rwentieth-century
Sternhell; Paxton; Gentile; Griffin 1993, 2008). But whether totalitarianism is a way Europe took place in the Polish town of Kielce on july 4, 1946, a year after the war
to highlight the similarities between Nazism and fascism or fascisms is questionable. ended, as Poles once again killed Jews, this time because they feared Jews would
Arendt herself, with whom Payne agrees in his book of1995 (206), argued that the reclaim expropriated property, a fear that may have been reinforced by a sense of
concept of totalitarianism did not apply to Italian fascism and perhaps not even to guilt or unease about whar they themselves had earlier done to Jews and might do
Nazism, although it might have, had the Nazis won the war. So that leaves the again (Gross 2007). For Gross the long-standing accusation of Jewish involvement
Soviet Union and the problem of the Cold War. in ritual murder remained prevalent in Polish society or at least was invoked on
Even without invoking the problematic concept of totalitarianism, one may numerous occasions. And Polish Gentiles, recognized at Yad Vashem, were afraid
note that there were obvious overlaps and actual alliances between Nazis and to reveal that, at the risk of their own lives, they had helped Jews during the war,
fascists. Interestingly, both claimed to be spiritual- more spiritual than materialistic because ofrhe expected hostile reaction of their own anti-Semitic neighbours (see,
Marxism and materialistic capitalism. Both appea.led to violence in furthering for example, Gross 2002: 82-4),
supposedly spiritual ends and valorized violence itself in ways that might even be Another important point that has recently become more prominent is that the
seen as aestheticizing and sacraliaing, notably as regenerative if not redemptive, Holocaust seems less unique if not seen in a purely Eurocentric context but related
elevating, exhilarating, and perhaps even sublime. And both were expansionist, to practices and policies with respect to people of colour in the colonies. The
with the Nazis seeking Lebensraum and colonies in Eastern Europe. It has even been French in Africa, the Belgians in the Congo, and the white South Africans were
argued that the Nazi quest for Lebensraum had a causal role or at least was a very at times quite extreme in their violence against enemies. There has been debate
significant factor in the Holocaust. Once they invaded the east, the Nazis had to about the occurrence of genocide against native peoples in the Western
deal with an enormous number of Jews - notably in Russia, Poland, and Hungary. hemisphere. The practices of Australia with respect to aborigines were assimilative
And they had to clear space for ethnic Germans. So the Holocaust could be seen as and often quite violent, including killings in the colonial period and, in the
c~used, or at least strongly influenced, by problems in population control. This twentieth century, the forcible removal of some 20,000 to 50,000 children of
vIew. fits in with the major tendency in the historiographical literature _ that mixed parentage from aboriginal families and their placement in institutions or in
stress~ng bur~aucratic processes and the machinery of destruction, more recently, at while foster homes (Levi). All of these important cases and controversies would
least 10 certain quarters, biopower. I think this approach points to one important require extensive discussion sensitive to issues of time, place, and context, for
set of faecors But I don't think ! ffici . . illi
.' 1 It IS su rcrent. And It IS noteworthy that ki 109 example, wirh respect to comparisons or analogies with the Holocaust. or Nazi
actions bezan before Na . U d I ' I
. 0'" ZIScontro e arge land masses and peoples, and genocida genocide, including the treatment of animals in factory. farming and
practices were part and pare I f h f h
e 0 t e conquest a those areas. Dan Michman as experimentation as in harles Patterson's Eternal Treblinka (the title comes from
even argued that the de 1 f h '
. . ve oprnenr 0 g ettos was not instrumentally rationalin a phrase of Isaac Bashevis Singer, who was deeply affected by the genocide in
motIvation but stemmed fro d l' . .
, d' all 111 eep y Internalized fear and repulsion in encountenng which his mother and younger brother were killed) or, in a more qualified way,
ra IC h'! ot.her' Ostjudell (see Michman 2009, especially 75n; Michman 2008). m Bona Sax's Animals i" the Third Reich.
S ome Istonans have insistci tl d h '
r. . . 1 Y argue t at what differentiated Nazism from mher It IS IInportant to recall w h'at IS at times
' a b scur ed , especially in .the insistence on
laSClsms was as ImpOrtant if .
t h N ' I . ' not more ImpOrtant, than what they shared especiall}' the machinery of desmlction. There were tWO, partially overl~PPlllg phases of the
e aZI ro e In the 'final soluti 'h' '
id d' I on or t e genOCidal treatInent of Jews as well as the aZI genOCide. The first involved the Eillsatzgrtlppetl (specIal cask forces) and
w esprea , VIO ent abuse f h '.
o Ot er VICtU11Sand victim groups. Genocide has aUXIliarygroups that accompanied the army in the invasion of the east, the so-called
 fascism and the Sacred 35
34 D. laCapra

Operation Barbarossa. This was the phase of. hands-on killing - n~t simpl~ desk or lire [0 mere life in a state of exception), and many others. Different inflections
murder or arranging train schedules. Here the killers were at first often inexperienced among these analysts, as well as curious connections in lines of argument in their
and were spattered with blood and brain as they shot victims in the back of the texts, are worth extensive analysis, some of which I have attempted elsewhere
head. This phase involved the killing of some million and a half Jews and other (La apra 1994. 19 ,2001, 2004, 2009; the last two books contain extensive
victims _ not an insignificant number. For the most part, Nazis and their affiliates, cnrical analyses of Agambcn).
especially those in the elite 55, did not begin as hardened criminals, and a problem The extreme, indeed visceral reaction to the Hilberg orientation is that of Daniel
in Nazi ideology and practice was how to become hard and also how to find jonah Goldhagen in Hitler's ItVilIillg Excwl;ollcrs, a book that has been criticized by
alternatives to the hands-on killing that might shatter or traumatize the insufficiently lustorians but has also found a large popular following, both in the United States and
hardened. It is well known that a primary reason for the turn to gas was not from abroad, notably in Germany. Goldhagen also, bizarrely enough, insists on an
concern for the victims but the demoralization of Gennan troops in direct killing embedded habitus or culture on the level of what goes without saying, but he
actions that included the murder of women and children. applies it to a putative generations-long eliminarionist anti-Semitism in Germany
The second, partially overlapping phase was that of the concentration and death char. with the Nazis, metastasized (in his term) into exterminationist anti-Semitism
camps. The death camps, where the goal was killing and not work or extraction of or genocide. This habitus rather mysteriously disappeared because of institutional
surplus value, included Auschwitz-Birkenau, Chelmno, Sobibor, Belzec, and changes after the war in a way that seems to credit denazification with rather amazing
Treblinka, with Majdanek also involving much killing. Yet conditions in other camps powers of success. Goldhagcn also feels free to feel his way into, read, and render the
were also dire and often led to death due to overwork, abuse, and rampant disease. subjective experience of perpetrators, actually, I think, the experience of perpetrators
3S fantasized by someone identifying with victims - most questionably perperrators
1 intimated that probably the most prevalent explanation of the Holocaust is in
terms of the machinery of destruction, the role of bureaucratic mechanisms, and as they proceeded to escort and kill Jewish girls around the age of puberty. What I
largely 'modernizing' practices that more or less rolled along under their own would like rc argue in conclusion is different from Goldhagen's perspective.
quasi-mechanistic momentum, without clear attribution of responsibility and in Whilt I would like to argue, or at least suggest, is that what is ignored in both
the machinery-of-destruction and the generations-old eliminationist-habitus
conjunction with modern technologies of war and the stress of bat de conditions as
approaches is the way the Nazi genocide may have involved 'religious', purifying,
well as peer pressure. This view is often correlated with the notion of the banality
apocalyptic, regenerative, even redemptive dimensions - one might conceivably
of evil. One finds problematic resonances of tlus view in novels such as Bernhard
call them postsecular - that were in some confused and confusing way at times
Schlink's Der Vorleser (Tile Reader) and Jonathan Littell '5 much more ambitious us
bound up with numerous other factors, including aesthetic concerns, perhaps even
Bie:weilla.utes (Tile Kindlv Ol/.es), where, despite Littell's narrator's explicit distance-
an acceuruatedly negative yet possibly exhilarating aesthetic of the sublime (with a
taking WIth respect to rhe notion of the banality of evil, there is inter alia a stressOil
role for the beautiful as well, which the 'ugly', anti-aesthetic Jews impaired or
the f~rce of circumstance and at best diminished agency. Hanna, in TI,e Reader,is
descnbed as 'fall"mg ,. l11tO her i . rhe 55, similar to the way she and destroyed). I think these dimensions are especially applicable to the actions and
er Job as a guard with
motivations of certain elite Nazis and perhaps some others as well, including such
her young paramour, the narrator, fall into one another's arrns as a towel falls to (he
figures as Hitler and Himrnler, who were bound together by a strongly cathected
ground (the thirty-six-year-old Hanna initially embraces and fondles the fifteen-
nexus. with Hitler becoming for HinU111er a kind of anxiety-inducing, indeed
year-old Michael Berg from behind) (Schlink 1998: 25, 133). and Aue, the
narrattng officer in Tile K'IIIdl Y O'lies, is, as a putauve
. result of an incestuous
.. traumatizing, godlike figure who issued sacred orders. Obedience to Hitler's sacred
. '. relation
. 'I tomosexu al who, like
with his sister , a 'p assive . orders. based on a faith, a fidelity, and a trust, uncontested by criticism and allowing
his fellow 55 officers, is swept
along for no critical distance in relation to their objects, was proclaimed as a Nazi, and
C ds hiby the Course of e vents an d ground up by the machinery of destruction as he
un '. imself Involved in an mere . dibl e number of atrocities and 'perversities' in an especially an 55, cardinal virtue. In the words of Hermann Goring, 'there is
amazmg vanerv of pia - B h . something mystical, unsayable, almost incomprehensible about this man ... we
,. ces. or novels are pervaded by a rather indiscrirninarell
erupat hi c, It-could-happen t " love Adolf Hitler, because we believe, with a faith that is deep and unshakable, that
W' h . - o-anyone (or l1Ioll-selllblable-l1Jolljrere') feel (Q events.
It out makmg misleading
he W35 sent to us by God to save Gennany'. In the analysis of Joachim Remak: 'For
th I' ama I'gamatlons or suggestmg . a siInplistic solunon. to
e comp ex relatlon betweel . reason, rNational Socialisml substituted faith - fairh in "the movement", faith, to
variations f R I H' 1 process or practlce and agency, I think one also fmds
an even greater extent, in Hider' (Remak 41; the affimlation from Goring's Atifba~
Omer B
o all
Ch .
lIb erg's ' hi
mac nery-of-destnJctlon'
. view in Hannah Arendt,
arrov, nstopher B . tmtr 'atiot! IS quoted on 69). The object of faith was more rhe movement (dIe
deconstructiv th . l'h" rowllmg, the sociologisr Zygmunt Bauman, (he &wtgtmg) and. of course, Hitler, than the party or the state, although there mighr
e eonst IlJppe Lac L b h· .. . .
to the sup d oue- a art e (111 Heldeggenan temlS POillong be a metaphoric identification between Hitler, the party,. and the natlo~ or the
pose modern culn" f
framework) G" una non o. the Western technological Gestel/ or I'olk (as in Rudolf Hess's speech filmed in Riefenstahl's TnzWlph if tile WI1~.
, 10rglO Agamben (. f .
1I1 tenns a blOpower and the modern reduction
 36 D. LaCapra
Fascism and the Sacred 37

The broader suggestion I would make is that, to the extent they were operatiw
NUl regime with destruction. Moreover, the entire discourse of martyrdom that is
Nazism's postsecular dimensions do not represent some regression to barbarism,
often used with respect to Holocaust victims (as well as other victims of disasters
much less 'brutishness', but instead make up an intricate dimension ofmodemin'
such :IS the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki) lends itself to a sacrificial frame
- what might in its most perplexing fonn be termed a constitutive outside: whari,
of reference. In German, the dual meaning of the word Opfer as both victim and
inside modernity as its uncanny repressed or disavowed other. This 'extimare' sacrifice almost invites a sacrificial understanding of victimization.
other (to use Lacan's term) may emerge, possibly with a virulence related to in
In :my case, jews were, at times along with other victim groups, localized and
repressed or disavowed status, but at times it also comes to be articulated in a moll' targeted as racially impure, threatening recipients of projective animosity and
or less explicit way. One place th.is articulation arguably occurs is, I think, in violence. Hence they could be ambivalent objects of phobic, quasi-ritualistic
Himmler's Posen speech (or speeches) of October 1943, which I have discussedin animus - not simply mere life or homo sacer (pace Agamben and Zizek). Jews
other places and to which I shall allude later. One might even speculate that me were, in some non-trivial sense, neither one thing nor another - or, in however
seemingly uncanny return of ritual murder charges against Jews in late nineteenth- contradictory a fashion, both one thing and the other - both abject and powerful
and early twentieth-century Europe itself resulted from a projection of phobic, threats, both repulsive and compelling if not desired - betwixt and between, hence
ritualistic attitudes towards them (Spector). What I am pointing to in particularis nor fitting into a well-ordered yet ecstatic community of the people. It is, of
a symbolically, even quasi-ritually 'purifying' and not simply hygienic response to course, also possible that, in one dimension of a complex Nazi reaction, a cynical
jews and possibly other victims who were projective objects of anxiety, allowing reason cfdisavowal was at play which granted that jews were not 'worthy' objects
Nazis - and not only Nazis - to deny sources of disquiet in themselves by construing of sacrifice but would be sacrificed nonetheless because, for whatever reason, this
alienated others as causes of pollution or contamination, as well as ugliness, in the was the sacred order of the Fiihrer and the destined path to renewed glory and
Vothsgemeinschaft. These phobic, toxic, contaminating presences had to be gotten salvation. Extremely important as well, and not incompatible with more 'religious'
rid of - entfernen in order for the sacred community to achieve quasi-ritual purity,
»-
conviction, is the sense that a sacred duty was being fulfilled in eliminating jews,
integrity, and regeneration - a new beauty and even sublimity, indeed redemption which had to be undertaken with something like purity of intention. As Hirnmler
or salvation in a racial utopia - Elldldsung as AusldsulIg and Erldsur/g _ 'final solution' puts it at Posen:
as release and redemption or salvation. The sense of regeneration, or being born
again and possibly redeemed, was fuelJed in ecstatic colJective rituals, celebrations, A number of 55 men have offended against this order [to take nothing of
rallies, parades, and related events that were not simply aesthetic or dramatic goods confiscated from jews for oneself]. There are not many, and they will
perfonnances, although they were that as well. be dead men - WITHOUT MERCY [CNilDEl\/LOS - the one time HinunJer
The dominant historiographical stress on the 'machinery of destruction' and emphatically raises his voice during the speech]. We have the moral right, we
bureaucracy, even when combined with a view of Hitler as a charismatic leader, had the dury to our people to do it, to kill this people who want to kill us.
may obscure the role of a t I eli '. '. Bur we do not have the right to enrich ourselves with even one fur, one
. • pos secu ar mensron In the Nazi genocide related to
scapegoatmg the eliminari f U "
. .' nation 0 po utmg presences, and the attendant quest for Mark, with one cigarette, with one watch, with anything ... We have carried
punficatlon regeneratio d demnri Out this mosr difficult task for the love of our people. And we have taken on
.' n, an even re emption that would 'restore' the intacr,
putativelv lost Volk wen J ~r. Th " "
hat di .\~ l11elllSC lC!it. ere may even have been a quasi-sacrificialism no defect [or damage] within us, in our sou.l, in our character [keinen Sthaden
t at did not confonn to a " d I "
bee round or at least approxi prrstmed "1110 e biof "sacrifice that at best might conceivably ;IIIHLSeremlnnetn, ill IIllserer Seete, in lmserem Charakter doran getlommenJ.
" (Daulidol/licz 44-45; translation modified)
. ". . mate In a sta ilized, formalized institution. Nazi quaSl-
sacnfiClalism If such it rna b
y . . . '. y e ternled, was unbalanced, extreme even deranged.
er It IS slgruficanr that je\ " h '
" f VS, \\ It respect to the 5hoah were in a crucial sense Moreover, the nature of the elation in extremely transgressive violence is
tnnocent 0 the 'crimes' N' . '
certa·l.l h G aZlS projected Onto them, something cenain Nazis and problematic. Summarizing some of the scenes depicted in the do~uments collected
11 YOt er ennans may well h d " In the book 'TIle (;cod Old Days': The Holocaust as Seen by Its Pelpetrators and
was oft " k ave sense . The metaphor of'sheep to slaughter"
en lI1VO ed both durin d ali
by demora]" d dd g an ,ter the Holocaust, at times by Nazis, at rimes B)'slal/ders, Hugh Trevor-Roper writes:
lze an evastated Jew' h h
(such as Abb K )' S 10 t e g ettos, and at times by Jewish resisters
a Ovner who wanted D Thc most horrible photographs, and some of the n~ost horrible narratives, in
not to be led l"k h ro Oster a sense of resistance by urgingjew5
by Nazis and am'-S
1 e seep
.
to the slaught A d I"J
er. n, w 1J e they were perceived as abject
" rh"IS b 00 k recor d t IlC ear I"ler stages
.. in this [genOCIdal] process, ..for the first
I enlltes,jews were Ot' 1 ak " ll1as~cres, espeCially those 111 t c a tic states , were carried out 111 public. In
" "h B l'
for they were als fi d n sllnp y t -en to be abject pests or outlaws,
o Igtlre as powerfi I . d d hi "I
K;lunas, LIt "h e Einsatzkommando 3 operated, the jews were
world-Wide consp' u ,111 ee dden or secret manipulators of a lUanta, w er· h h ldi
lTaCY, even a Bolsh'k I" " b b
clubbed to death WIth crow ars, elor r e cheering crowds. - mot crs 0 ng
. eVl reve utlonary force, that threatened the
 :18 D. LaCapra Fascism and the Sacred 39

up their children to see the fim, and German soldiers clustered round like Before concluding,. I would like to be as explicit as possible about the nature of my
spectators at a football match. At the end, while the streets fan with blood, argument. Iam not trytng to present a 'concept of the Nazi perpetrator', even an ideal-
the chief murderer stood on the pile of corpses as a triumphant hero ~nd typical one. I am even firrther from the idea of offering an overall account of motivation
played the Lithuanian national anthem on an accordion. of the vast majority of Germans under the Nazi regime, even those who devotedly
(Klee, Dressen alld Riess.\iij followed rhe leader. I am trying to explore what I think are aspects of the perpetration
of genocide and perhaps extreme collective action in general that have not been
What were the source and the nature of the elation or excitement that seem adequately researched or conceptualized. The task for empirical research would be to
evident in such scenes? Was it uncanny, sublime, carnivalesque, sadistic, vengeful, set: whether. and to what extent, archival sources substantiate or run counter to the
an accompaniment to fanatical self-righteousness or to 'brutality' (an anthropocentric notion of 3 quasi-ritual animus related to feelings of contamination or pollution by the
misnomer that explains nothing), or some confused amalgam of tangled emotion, other. notably the Jew, whose elimination was deemed necessary for liberation or even
and resentments? And how does one parse Himmler's words to high-ranking SS 3 kind of redemption of the Volksgelllei"sc1/aji. I think such an animus is rather clear in

insiders at Posen, with his references to the shudder caused by the Night of the Hitler and in dimensions of others, including Himmler, at least in terms of his bond
Long Knives (es hat jeden geschauert), the experience shared by those who have been with, or even adulation of, Hitler. I also think it is there in certain elated participants
through it (durchgestanden) and know what it means to see 'a hundred corpseslie III killing actions, perhaps less so in the more routinized activities in the camps. And
side by side, or five hundred, or a thousand'? How does one understand his formula while the Jews had a specific salience for certain key Nazis, including Hitler, Himmler,
for becom.ing hard and avoiding traumatic breakdown by enduring the aporiaor Goebbels, and Eichmann, the 'redemptive' dynamic, involving purification and
combining in oneself the antinomies of decency or uprightness (al/stdt/dig gebliehflJ regeneration through violence and victimization, might possibly apply to other groups
zu sein) and sticking out scenes of mass murder? Why do such events constitute, for as well, thus placing the concept of 'redemptive anti-Semitism' in a somewhat larger
Himmler, 'an unwritten, never-to-be-written page of glory' in German history? context and opening it to careful, critical comparative study.
And why does the speech end with apocalyptic apprehensions and then a pra)'er- The question with respect to any individual perpetrator or even collaborator
like invocation that enjoins his listeners to 'direct [their] thoughts to the Fuhrer, and bystander would be what role, ifany, there was for a quasi-ritual, purifying, at
our Fuhrer, Adolf Hitler, who will create the Germanic Reich and will lead usinro times negatively 'sublime', even more or less sacrificial impetus or motivation - in
the Germanic future'? And then a dedication: 'To our Fuhrer Adolf Hitler: Sieg any case, for an intricate constellation of forces that cannot be reduced to deceptive
Heil.' Sieg HeW Sieg Heit" Can an acceptable response to these questions be reduced catch-all terms such as 'brutality'. It is altogether possible and perhaps likely, that in
to the .comention that Nazis were simply hardened criminals, ignoring the process certain cases or circumstances such a constellation was not in evidence. Here one
by w~lch the.y be~a1l1e hard, and baldly asserting that any notion of a role for the has both a question of types of perpetrators and of dimensions of individual
neganve sublime . tn their orieI n t a 0· on or ou cl 00 k IS Is SImply
si . . Can perpetrators that could be interrelated in complex and perhaps even contradictory
beside the point?
~ant (~r a certain selective, idealized version of Kane) _ even in the dubious fashion. My own argument tries to bring into greater prominence an aspect of the
ideological aspect
.. of his un d erstan dilI1g 0 f t h e sublime
. as attesting invidiously to the
problem rhar I think has been underplayed, perhaps because it is difficult to
moral supenonty
.. and digni Iryo. f t hee ' upng. h t ' human being, in contrast to the rest substantiate convincingly in empirical terrns. This difficulty is less pronounced with
a f nature, mdudmg othe . I ( respect to the ;1ll3chinery of destruction', including tactical and technocratic
r aruma s apparently you cannot be dignified if you go on
all fours) - be held up fi 11 I·· duncl1sions, which were indeed important and are more readily substantiated
as u y aut 10ntattve and even kept unscathed as the good
G ennan whose sublime m . all cmpirically, although the exact nature of their variable articulation with more
Naz· 'C B ·11' ust 111 ways be opposed to anything operative in me
IS. an atal e s sacred d .. . . . . 'nrualistic' or quasi-religious concerns is a difficult problem that is often not even
' esplte Its equIvocations with respect to sacnfioal
via Ience, use Iess expenditu il . fonnulated as an explicit problem. Yet the combination of types of perpetration
shalT\ly sep d fr .re, l11ut :lang torture, death, and ecstatic elation, br
-r arate Om certam ab 1 . iilnd offorces within the same individuals is a cnIciaJ issue for historical understanding.
with the ~ W· h .. yssa practices, even jfit cannot simply be conflated
ffi. It out pretendmg th d fi .. Fonnulated in somewhat different tenns, I have been trying to investigate the
questions because I think the ro at. e mltlve answers are available, I raise thesr tuNrc of the claim that might be made for 'redemptive anti-Semitism', set in a
take Kant· p penslty to reduce the Nazis to hardened criminals.
as lI1contestably auth . . '. . largcr framework of racism, victimization, and quasi-sacrificial purification and
sublime as operativ . N. o.ntatlve, and disnuss any norion of a negaove
e In aZlSand In part" I .., U rtgeneracion through violence, thereby exploring in certain ways the. term th~t is
as to adopt an insuffi· I ' ICU ar, lD H.lJ1unler s Posen speech, aswe
lClent y nuanced ad· . aJ . ccnrral to Saul Friedl:inder's Nazi Gen'/1t11/)' alld the jews but remams, I think,
certain recent analys ( KI.
< n cnttc, approach to Bataille, is at playm
es see 1gemlan· R.i I-u d . msufficiently elaborated on a conceptual or theoretical level in that very important
participatory approach. h " c nan an Surya both offer amelioraove, work (Friedlander 1997, 2007; me teml is most discussed in 1997, chapter 3). Here
es, at t e Other extre Bill·· . ,.
Wolin; see also my discu· f . . me, ata e IS silllply a 'left faSClS(m a crucial problem is to investigate the relations between 'ritual' or quasi-religious
SSlon 0 Batalile 1Il LaCapra 2009).
 40 D. laCapra
Fascism and the Sacred 41

considerations and other forces or factors active in the Nazi genocide by pointing
M1llen aud jclur To:torice',s TI/C S~lcred;'1 Twemictll·Cellfury Politics: Essays ill Honour of
out and critically analyzing, while resisting the tendency to elide or even repeat, ProftSSorStal/fty G. 111)1I/f'.1 he. pernnenr .essayslargely support the argument I make.
the equivocations and confusions of Nazi cliscou~e and p~.ctice theITl~e1ves. 2 For example. I do not agree With the notion of an originary coup deforce or performative
Acknowledging complications in any specific empirical analysis, I would decmcn that precedes and founds all law, institution, or constitution (17-18) a theme
fanuliar frOI11 Derrida's 'Force of Law: The "Mystical" Foundation of Authority' (esp.
nonetheless like to conclude with the question of the extent to which 'postsecular',
941-43). See also my commenrarv on this essay as it was presented at a conference at
sacralizing forces are quite important in history, even in what we term 'modernity', C,ardozo law S,chool, wh.ere, it did not include the footnotes and 'post-scriptum' on
especially in the form of scapegoating and purifying, victimizing practices, along NaZISmand the final solution (973-74 and 1040-45). My response is entitled 'Violence.
with their relation to 'aesthetic' factors such as circumscribed, exclusionary Justice, and the Force of Law'. See as well my discussion in History and lis Limits: Human,
A/llltwl, Via/tll(e, 98-1 02. I would also question what seems at times to be a biomechanisric
conceptions of beauty and a desire for sublime exaltation as well as camivalesque
fatalism that construes in absolute and transceudenral, rather than explicitly speculative
glee, notably through scenes of intrinsically valorized, regenerative violence. I and analogical, renus a notion of the auto-immune that not only must be self-defeating
would repeat that, with reference to the Nazi genocide, I am not presenting these but also go to the extreme in the direction of excess. violence, and sacrifice - what
forces as total explanations. But I think they are often not explicitly articulated as Derrida at one ~oim refers to as 'the terrifying but fatal logic of the auto-immunitv oJthe
11Ilscatl/tJ' (Derrida 1998: 44) and what might perhaps be seen as a variant of the death
concerns, and their relations to other factors or forces may also remain unformulated
drive. But I would see as more suggestive the idea that anything seemingly immune or
as a problem or elided in an insufficiently examined manner. They may even be unscathed runs 'a risk of aucc-immuniry' that 'haunts the community and its system of
neglected or disavowed. Yet they are significant, especially on the level of immunitary survival like the hyperbole of its own possibility' (47).
motivation and lived ideology, which in its quasi-ritual or 'religious' dimensions
might best be understood not as a vestige of an old sacrificial order, as reversals, Works cited
kinks, or feedback loops in a 'dialectic of enlightenment', or as a regression to
barbarism if not brutality, but as an often repressed or disavowed yet constitutive Abrams,M. H. Nall/ral Sllpemafuralislll: Tradition awl Revotntion ill Romantic Literature. New
York: W. W. Norton, 197'1.
outside or extimate other of 'modernity'. I think they had this significance at least 13ar.lille,Georges. 'The Psychological Structure of Fascism.' In Allan StoekJ, ed. Visions if
for a committed group of more or less elite Nazis and some others as well. And Cxuss: Sclemd Wrir;/Igs 1927-1939. Trans. Allan Stoekl with Carl R. Lovitt and Donald
these forces may have been, in part, active recently with respect to the empire of M. Leslie.Jr. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985. 137-60.
evil, the enemy other, the haters of freedom, the elusive, omnipresent spectre of Dawidowicz, Lucy, ed. and trans. A Holowl/sr Reader. West Orange, N.].: Behrman House,
1976.
terror, and the ill-defined terrorist, which often seem to be very 'spiritual' and Demda,Jacqucs. Writing (/lid Dijftre.Ilce. Originally 1967. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: University
mystified categories. of Chicago Press, 1978. Chap. 10,
In any event, with respect to what I have been arguing, a crucial issue is how to Demda, Jacques. 'Force of Law: The "Mystical" Foundation of Authority.' Cardozo Law
assess the role and to elaborate a critical account of a victimizing, purifying frame Revi". 11 (1990): 920-1045.
Derrida, Jacques. Gift of Death, Trans. David Wells. Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
of reference in ways that further at least two things:
1995.
Demda,Jacques and Gianni Varcimo, eds. Religion. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998.
1. An informed, critical, nonsacrificial understanding of problems on the levels of Fmchelstein,Federico. Tmusarlrlllfie Fascism: Ideology, Violence, orui the Sacred ill Argemina and
foreign policy, economic exploitation, and social structure, including gaps in Ilaly 1919-1945. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010.
Forum. 17le Slavic Review 61:3 (Autumn 2002): 453-89.
wealth and income, both across and within societies. Freud, Sigmund. Cwiiizotion alii/ Its Disco,lfellfS.Trans. and ed. James Strachey. London:
2. An attempt to critically disengage scapegoating and victimization as well as any Hogarth Press, 1961. 57-145.
n~tion of originary, regenerative, or divine violence, from the'sacred and to Fnedlander, Saul. Na~i Gem/OFI)' Qud f},eJe.ws: TIll!.)Iears cif Persecution, 1933-1939, vol. 1.
raise the question of what in the sacred or the postsecular is defensible or of New York: HarperCollins, 1997. _

value, or at least what might be of value in a significantly transfonned institutional

Fnedunder, Saul. Nazi GemlQIIY and tlleJews: n,c Years ojExterlllillarioll, 1939-194), vol. 2.
New York: HarperCollil1s, 2007.
Context.
. (Here I would make . specla. 1 mention . f . ....
0 oblation or gtft-gtvmg msofur Cenole, Emillo. TIleOn'gills of Fascist Ideology 1918-1925 New York: Enigma, 2005.
as It may be disentangled fro .... . Goldhagen, Daniel. Hitler's I¥il/illg Ewell/iollers: Ordillary Genllfllis and the Holocaust. New
. . ' In Vlctmuzatlon, and ntuals for transitional points
1I1 SOCialand personal life . I eli .. . Yo,k: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996.
me u ng non-mvldious camivalesque practices.)
< ,
Cnffin, R.oger. n,t Nature of Fascism. London: Routledge, 99~. .t . .)
Cnffin.Roger. A History of Fasdsm '1914-1945. Madison: University OfW1SCOUSlll I ress, 1995.
Notes Gnffin, Roger. A Fasrisl eelUl/f)/. London: Palgrave, 2008. .' ....
Cnffin. Roger, Roben Matiert andJohn Tortorice, eds. TI,e Sacred If1 Twetmelh-Cemury Politics.
After fmishing what I thought was th fi I . Esuys III HOllour oj Proftssor SIal/ley G. Pay tie. New York: ~al~ve Macrrullan, 2008 ..
of essays address,·ng . . • e .1l1<l versIOn of this essay, I came across a volume
questions m •a way p ertmem
. to my di·SCUSSlOn: Roger Griffin, Roben Gross, Jan T. 'tigltoon: TIlt Destrtu:tiotl if the jewish COllllllumry itI Jedwabne, Polalld. WIth a
!lew Afterword. ew York: Penguin Books, 2002.
 42 D. LaCapra Fascism and the Sacred 43

Gross, Jan T. Fear: Anti-Semitism ill Poland after Auschwitz, Au Essay ill Historica/lmerpretation. Vondung, Klaus. 'What Insights Do We Gain from Interpreting National Socialism as a
New York: Random House, 2007. Pohucal RelJglon?' In Roger Griffin, Robert Mallett and john Tortorice, eds. TIle
Hitler, Adolf Mein Kampf Originally 1925. Trans. Ralph Manheim. Boston: Houghton StJcrtd 1II TlI'f'Fl/if'fb-CerUuT)' Politics: Essays in Honour oj Professor StilI/fey C. Payne. New
Mifflin, 1971. York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. 107-18.
Klee, Ernst, Willi Dressen and Volker Riess, eds. 'Tile Good Old Days': TI,e Holocaust asSrtll WIese. Chnsnan. 'An "I.n.delible Stigma": The Churches between Silence, Ideological
by its Perpetrators and Byslanders. Foreword Hugh Trevor-Roper. New York: The Fret Involvement, and Political Complicity.' In Christian Wiese and Paul Betts, eds. Years tif
Press. 1991. Ptrstol/jrlfl, Years r:if £"tenllillarioll.· Sal// Fried/ii"der and the Future of Holocaust Studies.
Kligenna"n, Eric. Sites of the Uncannv: Palll Ceian, Spew/flrity alld rhe Visual Arts. New York: London and New York: Continuum, 2010. 157-92.
Walter de Gruyter, 2007. Wolin, Richard. -nit Sedllrtioll of Unreason: 71,e inielleauat Romance wirh Fascismfrotll Nietzsche
(0 Posll/lodemislll. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004.
LaCapra, Dominick. 'Violence, justice, and the Force of Law.' Cardozo Law Revielv 11
(1990), 1065-78"
LaCapra, Dominick. Representing the Holocaust: History, Theory, Trauma. Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 1994.
LaCapra, Dominick. History (wd Memory after Auschwitz. Ithaca: Cornell University Press,1998
Ls Capra, Dominick. Writillg History, Wririllg Trauma. Baltimore: johns Hopkins University
Press,200l.
LaCapra, Dominick. History ill Transit: Experience, Ide/ltilY, Critical Theory. Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 2004.
LaCapra, Dominick. Htstorv and Its Limits: HUll/ali, Animal, Violence. Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 2009.
LaCapra, Dominick. History, Literature, Criticat Theorv. Ithaca: Cornell University Press,2011
Levi, Neil. 'No Sensible Comparison? The Place of the Holocaust in Australia's History
Wars.' History & Memory 1.9 (2007): 124-56.
Linel, jonathan. Les Bteuveillantee. Paris: Gallimacd, 2006.
Littel, jonathan. TIle Killdly Ones. Trans. Charlotte Mandel. New York: Harper, 2009,
Mann, Michael. Fascists. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004.
Michman, Dan. The jewish Cheuos Durillg the SI/O(/{,:How (/lid vflTI)' Did TI,e)' Emerge? Seardl
alld Research series 11, jerusalem, 2008.
M.ichman, Dan. 'Introducing More "Cultural History" into the Study of the Holocaust: A
Response ro Dan Stone.' Dapim: Studies 011 the SJlOah 23 (2009): 69-75.
Patterson, Charles. Eternal Treblillwa: 0/./1' Trealll/ellt oj Allimals alld the Holocal/st. New York:
Lantern Books, 2002.
Paxton, Robert. Th.e AnatolllY oj Faseisll/. New York: Knopf, 2004.
Payne, Stanley. A Hlstoll' oj Fascisll1, 1924-1945. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press,1993-
Polons)..:y' Anthony andJoa Ina 1 B . M'Ie II"1 IC, e ds . -n Ie f'-'elg
" ,Ibors Respond: TI,e COlltrOl'ersyor'a
rhejedwabll.e .Massacre ill Polalld. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004.
Remak, ~oachml, ed. TI,e Nazi Years: A DOf/./meillary History. Englewood Cliffs, N. J.
Prentice-Hall, 1969.
Richm~n, Michele .. Sacred Rel/obuiolls: Dllrkheim and rite College de Sociologie. Minneapolis:
UmveTSIty of MUlIlesora Press, 2002.
Sax,F"Bona. h Allimais i,l the Tf IIr' d R'Ielel: pers, 5 capegoats and ilte Hofocausl. Foreword KlausP.
1SC cr. New York: Continuum 2000
Schlink, Bernhard Der (/j)(reser.
I ' Z .' h D.'
unc: logenes Taschenbuch Verlag 1997.
Schl"Ill,k B ern1ard
I'
S S . . TIleR ea d er. T rans. C arcl Brownjaneway. New York: ' Vintage, 1998.
pector,
F h COtto VlOlellt SCI/satiolls' 5
. '"
. eXI/a/ty, C"nme, and Utopia ill Vlellna and Berli" 1860-1914.
orr COinIng. '
Spiegel, Gabrielle, ed. Pmcricill H'· . N ..
Lillalli.t' T N ~ BlOT)'. ew DIrect/Oils ill tile r,Vrilillg cif History after dIe
<> -' Ie 11m. ew York: Routledge, 2005.
Sternhell, Zeev. The Birth or Fas' ld l' .
Surya Michel G . ~. Clst eo ogy. Prmceton: Pnnceton Universiry Press, 1994.
a~d Mich~el l~·rg~~ Bdalnllle:All II/tel/eetllal Biograph)'. 1992. Trans. Krzysztof Fijalkowski
IC lar son. London: Verso 2002
U storf, Wemer 'The M' . I . I •.
Griffin Robett M UlSS10 °dgica Roots of the Concept of "Political Religion".' In Roger
,
Essays ill HO/iouroIPro(,"a ett an S IJohn Tortorice r' .
• e.cis TI Ie Sacred'"/11 Twel/t1eth-Cell/llry Pol/IlS.
~e~~or la/l ey G. PaYlle. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. 36-50.
INDEX

Please note that page numbers relating to Notes will have the letter 'n' following the page
llumber.

aborigines, 33 alienation, 98, 99

Abraham. Nicholas, 86 Alisch, Stephanie, 69, 70
Abrams, Meyer, 30 allegory, 79, 82
flue/erell/do (Seross), 165-6 Alphen, Ernst van, 80, 81, 82
acknowledgement, 88 Alter, Joseph, 72
acute dissociative disorders, 84 Ahhusser, Louis, 29, 30
Adams, Parveen, 160 American Psychiatric Association, 2;
adaptationa] breakdown 158 Diagnostic Manual (DSM), 49, 153n,
Adorno, Theodor W., 1'4,50,94,97,98, 158
99-100,102, 107n, 108n amnesia, protective, 56
aestheticlaesthetics, xiii, 3D, 40, 83; of Anceslor Stones (Forna), 52
Adamo, 97; aesrheciciaarion of violence, Anderson, Benedict, 105
~4; feminist literature, 49, 58n; of Angelus NOlIUS (Klee), 93
ragl'l1entation, 46; nonnative trauma Anglo-Afghan War (1860), 71
:esthetics, 46; trauma aesthetics, beyond, Anglophone modemities, 66
'0-1 Angola, xiii, 69-71
'lfe A"il's GflOsr (Ondaatje), 73
'aft Ct-worlds. xii, 71-2, 73
Animals in the Third Reich (Sax), 33
A "wardsness.' 12, 14, 16-19
g;unb en. Georgio,
. xm,
... 7 ,4-~.
3 - 37,-'9' animism, 102, 108n
1
animus, quasi~ritualistic, 37, 39
13, 123n, 143-4, 153n; on biopolirics
AliI/a Karenina (Tolstoy), 17-18
~Sovereignry. 143-5; Homo Sacer:
Anthropocene, xvi
R. vereW" POlller a"d Bare Uft, 143; anthropomorphism, 117-18, 120
S,ell1"IlIllS oj Allsc!mntz, 144;-n,t anti-Semitism, 24, 28, 33, 35; redemptive,
I~'IQtllre, 153n; on time and personhood,
39; see also Holocaust
i/--8, 130-1, 13:>-4, 135, 137, 138:
anti-teleology, 63, 66
i\g1 I,e nme rhal Remaisu, 127-8, 133
Amze, Paul, 64, 65
J\.lelaIC, Kamran, -18, 58n
Arab world, 78
"'I );a1lder, Amy, -19 A.rendt, Hannah, 6, 32, 34, 113-23;
ex, d
"'Ig .n er,Jane, 102 Eic!/IIwm ill Jen/salem, 116; 'human being
Ct1a, 78
170 Index

general,' 114, 115, 120; ti« Human biopolitics, xru, 7, 92 93 1

Condition, 113; Jew-Stranger, It 8-23; blOpower 1"'2 . d' fi • 3O.1;$I-SS E H.I •
. ... n. cmed.142_'
'new kind of human beings,' 116--17, governmcntil!Jrv 143' .. Mid. ICbola. 158
118,121; TIle Origins oj Totaiiuuinnism, 143-5 1- ./ . , ;as SO\'(fflplC\ . Calhy. 2. 12. 13. 14. 17.4 •• 4
1- ,,:)311; than,no pohuull~
114,118, 122; 'We Refugees,' lIS, 116, ;$ .65,.72. 81, 92, 142; TrauntI:
. ,:)3-4n: and trauma pen 9, I I 1;$'
117,119,122,1240 I~ i. M""ory. xi. 3. S8n,
bl?pO\\:er, 32, 34; vs. blopollo(1 '15~
I S. l fftfIGtItd ~: Thumsa,.
Aristotle, 18
art, works of, 97, 100
BIOS: BlOpolifics alld P1Iilo$(lpl'r (~ll
145,1-18. 153n
"-"w"" H""'Y. xv, 3, 45, 132
n. (IU&a). 119. 120
al Assad, Mehmet, 115, 119; 'Asylum,' 113, Birkenau death camp, 11, IS, 14 ,..- Chun:b. 30
114,117,122,1230 Bischoff. Lizclle. 70 (~,Asm6.2
AstOlilldillg Science Fiction (magazine), 164 Black Atlantic. XII, 71,72 Ch.>nt....,., Dipctb. xvi•• 4•• 7
'Asylum' (al Assad), 113, 114, 117,122, Blilek Skill, II/J,,·te MllSks (F~noll). n Clot .... I'h<uI. 145
1230 Blucher. Heinnch (husband o(lhmuh , Imno _ camp. 34
asylum seekers, 115 Arendt), 122 bloom .... 79. 82. 88
Athanasiou, Athena, 146 Blumenberg, Hans, 30 ,.,.,.,.. lbeoIoIY. 27. 30
atrocities, 14 Bodhi tree. in Buddhism. 68 ht"""1opcaIIUnear ........ 127. 128.
Bodies I},I/( Maller (Outler), 92 1\1.133,1)4
Atrociry Exhibition, The (Ballard), 160
C:huR"h ofSeimtology, 165
Auschwitz death camp, 11, 15, 16, 17, 34; body. 72, 15311
( krrortWl cndition. 27
poetry following, 50 'Bo llywood." 66 ;;" c_ (..... by Khoury). 5-6.
auto-immunity, 26, 41n Bourdieu. Pierre. 28 oDapIe ofnunave voice, 83-4. 8
Brazier. David. 68 bdu,. of novel II symbolic form to
bad faith, 25
Baelo-Allue, Sonia, 58n
Breithaupt. Fritz, 15311
Brad, Max, 119
""' ""'« dM event, 81-2;
rnpw_ or. 79.82, mID

Bal, Mieke, 65 Broderick. Mick, 5811 'IIhnF' In. 79-80, 82, 84. 88:
In. 7&-9, 79, BO. 82. 83-4. 85, 87:
Ball, Karyn, 15 Brown, Jayne. 69, 71 106 loiS
Ballard.}. G., 7, 160-1 Brown, Laura S .. 7, 49, . pmdox or. 80, plo. 79-80. SO;
141 15211 .-... ... 79. 84, 86-7; PTSD
Bangladeshi fires, xiv Brown, Wen d y. . 6 34 ,.. publicadoo (1981). 78. 80;
barbarism, 2, 36, 40 Browning, Christopher. 1 •
• 1. o<y\o. SO. 83; vuJneza
....-.tin. 79. 83-4. 85. 88
bare life, 130-1, 136, 144, 153n
Barker, Martin, 160
Barth, Karl, 26
Bruckner.
Bnlllner, John.
brutal1ry, 36, 38.
pasca~, \~7. 162.163
'39
7?
",I ~""on. &ldan/Naasm at, 24.
,,..,.._.. I. D/M» ...... (PIeucl),
Banov, Omer, 34 Buck_Morss,.~usan69~ 71. 72 ':l.ymoft ..... 1.3
Bataille, Georges, 25, 30, 31, 38; Trauma: Buddhism. Xli. ~:. 145 LIjor ~ Drt rp.a;) •• 5
E:\·pectariol1S ill Memory, 58n Buelens, Ger~~ol~' 26 (.
1m<o-&ociom. 30
c..... XIY
Bauman, Zygmunt, 34 Bultll1ann, R 119 147. H ; Jnd , 55.57.65.emodonoJ. 78.79
beauty, 29, 40 cy 7. '
bureau~ra .? 3.t 36 ~.81
'Before the Law' (Kafka), 18 NazlSl1l, 3_.
.J Mo. 69. 106
D.

---
. 106
Beirut, 78; Sabra and Shatila massacres in burial SiteS, . tOria. SSn 96. I ;S, opuaw .... at. 159
(1982),79; Tel al-Zaatar, siege and BurrowS, v. IC
6 7. 92-3, 94. () U •• 32. 63. 70. 72
_.2
massacre of Palestinians (1976), 80 Butler. Jucllth91 i 1. 92. 9·t "::1 Iso. frII"'"

C_
Belzec death camp, 34 141-2: on c~posJto. 1 L; J" ,,"
9?' vs. ~ ';)f;'Ot ....
Bellga!,66 lvlaller. -:, is LJfl' GM'l fAt 1W
Benhabib, Seyla, 67, 124n or "liar: II leo 92; prrlJf1(1flJ .:!.
v vs Freu d. ,d IIol/'tfJ· , ~
=~:_50.65
"""*'
.,.,ClllIi"" ~
70
Benjamin, Walter, 93, 96,105,119, 124n, 142: .J \IOlln,iFlg al J"s'tdt .. Ut (&poIko). 1.5
127, 133, 135,158 pOr/Jers oJ . 1 153n: Tht __ "Y. 1 I". 153ll:
Bennett, Jane, 29 91. 92, ~4 .
Bennen, Jill, 50-1, 580 POWi'f. 9_ 69 16
rvtark. (blSror)"
Bergson, Henri, 24, 25 Bl,tl~r, ill \..·orks 0
Beyond Femillis! AeSfhetics: Feminist Lileratllre bllZZlllg. ..
Imd Social Challge (Felski), 58n ?~ b • < P1'SD .. 34<.
Roger. ~ Wnle. ,0"
Beyond ti,e Pleasure Principle (Freud), 91, 149 Caillois.. pol pot re -l9
l
Bhabha, Homi, 68, 93 CanlbOdl;··firl1O~Y' 16)
Bhakti cult, 66 Call1pbd. xi". 1:;120. -10
binary oppositiollS, 26, 28 capi~a1i~:~~IC praCtices,
biological organisms, 91, 150 carlllV;!
 172 Index

Desai, Anita, 65 Erikson, Kai, 87

destruction, machinery of, 32, 33-4, 36, 39 eschatology, 133 IdIkI. R ... 5Bn. 88
detachment, 72 Esposito. Roberto, xiii, 142 148-. • ~1~.49.58n
detention camps, 113, 114, 117, 120 Bios: Biopolitics /lud P"i1os~J!1r , l~~'b2n; r. C'WuUicd. 15

' ,&
Devi, Mahaswera, 107n fiImt.. es, 66
153n; vs. Buder 149 150' ,148,
Devji, Paisal, 71 Tl Ori·
Ie.
dO
!gill till
IIlllllmu4.l
estillY oj CO/llmullity.
bn.aI ""Iuaon' 1ft Holocawt
FIIIChc'hInn, Fcdmco. 30
Dialeaic if E"lightenment (Adorno and 145, v~. Foucault, 148; Iml1umilas: Tht F'I\C \J,'orkt War, 19,29,93
Horkheimer), 40, 107n, 108n Protection and the Negmi<J1I r:!f Ufe, 14j f1,dn. J"'dun. 890
Dianetics (Hubbard), 165 Eternal Treblillka (Patterson), 33 ~ , Paulo, 71
Dick, Philip K., 161 ethics: ethical turn, 12,45; and rraunu, 18. F" holosY'lanauase concept. 13
difference/ dijfirallce, 26 19 F C' of uw: TM "Myscic:a1" Founda
disciplinary power, 142-3, 144 ethnocentrism, 3 I Ctt Authonty' (Oenida), 41n
discipline-specific knowledge, 12 Euro-Americau academy, xvii Ioe.u~. 77, 79. as
discourse, 19,20,81 Eurocentrism, 5, 33; bias of, 46, 47. 68; 'm1~, 79; of City GrIes. 83
discursive distance, 82 breaking with, 48; empire, trauma of. . Anunatta: AnmlOr StDna, 52; n..
disenfranchisement, 26; legal, 47; National 46-8; empire of trauma, 48-50; lIud .w. (Forna), 51: Mt'lflory oj I...tJw.
Socialist policy, 30 excessive concentration on, in rrauma .... 51-7.590
"ule. MICheL xiii, 19, 20, 93. 130,
Disorders of Extreme Stress Not Otherwise theory, 12-13; trauma aesthetics,
IU. 153n; on disciPlinary power,
Specified, 49 beyond, 50-1; trauma theory beyond,
1..2 l. 144; VI. Esposito, 148; on
domination, 97, 100 45--61; see also Memory of Lave (Fornal .......... talioy. 145-8. 152n; S«orillj!
Douglas, Kate, 58n event-based trauma model: limitations,49,
Douglas, Mary, 25 50, 53, 54, 144; missing 'person,' 132-3;
'~.A,oU~. 146
nrntumal. of Oty Gata, 79, 82
dreamworld, 72 Partition of India (1947), as event, 64, h~ ., W" WIwIc u Lift GriC'vtlble?
Dresden bombing (1945),161 65,66,67; and repetition, 81; see also 'kodnj.:l. 47. 142
Dube, Surabh. 67
Dufourmantelle, Anne, 12411
Holocaust .
exceptionalism, European, 144,
166 turnmfl,. '<4'-2
.unk. Arthur. 2
Duran, Edwardo, 49 exclusive inclusion, 153n 12,14 Ir~OWD, Siena Leone. 51. 52
Dllrns, Marguerite, 47 existential choices/questiol~' 11. lINd. S.... und. 12.29. 32. 64. 72. 73
Dllrkheim, Emile/Durkheimian tradition I ,150, 158: &raffd rlct l'leanm
25,28 '
expan.sionism, European, ~- 81 82
expenence, vs. repr esentatlOll,
d 57 '
'In.. "., 91,149; n. Buder. 92;
C.,...dr,filllOll _ lis Dis"IIf~l'Its, 30:
Durrant, Sam, 4, 6, 89n, 107n; Postcolonial experimentation, avant-gar e, rnruncholia VI. moumiDl. 65. 68.
Narrative and the Work of Mourning, 58n,
107n exploitation, xiv
extenninatlon camps,
113. see nho death
'
'''.n .. MMtodttil"" 47, 48: p
.... Id o( 91. 93. 94. 97. 106. 149
• camps . 'fliterature, 12 " llTy Hmo-J .... 80-1
Eaglestone, Robert, 4, 13 I--...s... Saul. II. 14.16.33; NdZi
external relatiOnS ~ .. xiv 78,141, IH, ,__ 1'*'1-.39
Early Modem Period, 19, 20
extreme violence, XlII, '
Easterbrook, Neil, 163 Fry< Nonhn>p. 30
see also violence

_ ..--
Edkins, Jenny, xii, xiii, 7, 92, 123n, 127, 56
extremity t 25
130,131,134,136; Trauma a"d the oho<k. 7.157-67
Memor)' of Politics, 6, 151 _rr_.7. 157.
158
factal)' fires (2012), xiv of
Egan, Greg, 164 c_
Eichmann, Adolf, 39 L<lith,25, 27, 28, 3-J he Twa Sources Noun. ... 4. 5-6. l07a
'Faith and Knowledge:. t ofiteaSOIl
Eicllmalill itl jemsafem (Arendt), 116
"Religion" at che Lil~6-7
uts
Eimatzgmppell (special task forces) 33 ~.1I7.1Z3a
AIone (Dem ·d) ?4.-
a, - ··rz 15 "-1530
electrified fence, 15 ' •< ·1 Ch\VI '
lan1.ly camp,' Aus 93 ~ 8;.-6 14.20. »-3. 35. 39.40 •
Elinga Tearro, Angola, 69
Fanon, Frantz, 1,4 5811.. 'telling, 84-:1, • H 1 ex: NuiIato .......
embodiment/ embeddedmenr, 72 e;,,-... _67.68
emergency, state of, 135 fantasy, of mastery/scor) . 13: and
Farrier, David, 123n. orJ1par:Jove,- 6S

-"'"
empiphany, 87 R-.72
empire, trauma of, 46-8 fascism, xii, 4, 2)--4.3, crorruJ1e~lr 24,25,
Nazism, 23, 31-2: ~J1dreligl~~: as
_:12
Empire of the SUII (Ballard), 160-1
empire of trauma, 48-50
empty time, 133
characteristics • .31'?4: salute, - '
30· sacred in 2.3, - -
, '14, 45'"
'6 92: .......... 32.36

engrams, 165 secular religion,; 12, 14, .

Epic alld Empire (Quint), 97 Felman, Shoshaoa, -,
Testimony, 3
 Index 175

17" Index
buhallUIU '~Irport roup, 101, 108n Levi, Neil, 33
injury, insistently unrcd«nubk, 1.1 dL .,:.tU1It (1946), 33 Levi, Primo, 144
Hiroshinul moo amour (film), 5, 47-8
insidious trauma, 49, 106. 145 ~....:t:,lJfJ, "'I\U'cl1, 12.27 Levinas, Emmanuel, 25, 26, 92
Hasch, Marianne, 65, 72
'incemallaws' ofbeerawre. 12 ~ ,JJII<. 12,'-6 Leys, Ruth, xv, 153n
historical precision, 13
historical trauma, 13, 92; see also event- interpellation, JO, 67 , J,ft'~t, .'~ licensed displacements, 78
based trauma model interwar period, 29, 30 ",r.JJY (M ...I. tt« I mell). 34 linear/chronological time, 6, 127,128,
history: buzzing, in works of, 16; and Iraq, 71, 78 'c('rlu.lt, ~I 131, 133, 134
narrative. 14; trauma as, 14-16,45 Irish Famine, 94, 95, 100 IcdC"r,ln('~lmh. 160 'linguistic turn,' 13, 17
History and Its Limits: Human, Animal, Irish Folklore Comrmenon. 107n lip-sewing, refugees, 113, 123n, 136
t;,~. \'hrwI, 12~1l
Vwlena (LaCapra), 23, 41n Islam, 63, 71, 72 Lischoeen, Trick van, 63
1«. ["",t, \7 H
Hider, AdoIt 28, 35, 38, 39; charisma of, Islamo-fascism, 25 Liska, Vivian, 122, 124n
isolation of eacmaeeed mdl\'lduoIh, iI. ,'·.lul. en
31, 36; Mein lGunpf, 29-30 In, KCl"\"11t I cc listening, 85
Hiders Willing Executioners (Goldhagen), 35 Israel, 16-17, 136, 137
"lUll,I rH .•. \8 literary realism, 57
holiness, 25,26, 29 literature, internal laws and external
jain, Kajri, 66 ",kJ.,;C", 12. KH
Holocaust, xi, 4, 18, 20, 23, 37, 46, 119;
jalal, Ayesha, 66 , hltt'"J J('. h, 94, 105, 106; 'Pares of relations of, 12
whether excessive concentration on, in
Jameson, Fredric, 162, 163, Ibb f"C"(".. h: 101, 102, 104; 'A Room Full Littell, Jonathan, 34
trauma theory, 12-13, 58n, 64, 144; as
'limit-event,' 64; as population control, janoff-Bulman, Ronme, 49 (.t ~uc"tU)II\.' III I . 102; 'Some there Lloyd, David, 94, 95, 96, 97, 98, 99, 100,
32; survivor testimonies, 11-12, 14, 16; japan, 67 ue,' ICl~. Irn"'llnl,1 Tltillgs, 101 10'1, 10711
see also Second World War jay, Martin, 77 K Jk-,.\d van dcr. 1,83 'Londouisru,' 158
Holy Spirit, 25 jazz, 71 K \'l~r. Ahlu, ,'€I losses, traumatic, 92
homeland, concept of, 98 jedwabne pogrom (1941), 33 Irq. Juh .., 25 love, unrequited, 63, 66
homeland security, breach of, 92 jewish people, 24, 30, 32; ron'plrM"l lkIu",u\, J..a11l,:~ of'{Angola), xiii, 69-71 Lowenstein, Adam, '160
homelessness, lIS, 124n; see also refugees theory, 36-7; hatred of Itt ann- uJllm ("n~\II"11 electronic music-dance Luanda, Angola, 69, 70, 71
Mrnosacer, 130, 131, 136, 145, 152 Semidsm: history, blbhc.11oI(((Ium, l' ltnrl("lt), XIII, 69, 70, 71 Luckburse, Roger, xi, I, 6, 7,12,51,93,
Homo Saar: Sovereign Power and Bare LiJe middle-class European (ellCht('ClIdland K hn. Alex .lnd Pehx 63 145,147, 149,150, 153n, 159
(Agamben), 143 nineteenth centuries). 116:.1\ rt:lu l(uJ . OU(I!)ov, 12, i4, 18-19; as Lyotard. jean-Francois, 164
hope, need for, 54 115; ritual murder charges, .n, \6.
h~ rtan. I~, 16:LmH/scapes of the lyric and law, 117
Horkheimer, Max, 94, 107n, 108n 'sheep to slaughter' metaphor, ,\I,. ,.,
't""'/"t'/IJ ", 1>t',H/" 4, '11,15-16,17; lyric iterntions, 64-6, 69
Hubbard, L. Ron, 164-5 also Holocaust
1("",pic Mount VISI[ (in 60s), 16, 17 lyric poetry, 101, 102
Hulme, T. E., 30 jew-Stnnger, 118-21: and Anh-Stt.11l
KW1l.oIf. l'nyOl, (15 lyric voice, 118
Human Condition, The (Arendt), 113 121-3
W't\\l'"ll, I~.l)'. 164
human rights violations, 100, 114 joffe, Roland, 67
humanitarianism, 121, 130 johnson. Barbara, 117, 118. 120 l'l1:Jchinery of destruction, 32, 33-4, 36, 39
Huxley, T. H., 160 judaism, 26; see also antl-Senllu\ln. 1,J~l J .... qUl"\. 2, 26, 36, 87, 93, 129-30, Magona, Sindiwe, 100-1
Huyssen, Andreas, 67 Holocaust; Jewish people L.,( I, 1\4, '-'ll, 137 Majdanek death camp, 34
Hyder, Syed Akbar, 71 Junger, EnlSt, 29 <Ii
J'u
.,
IlonUIlIl:k
(
..
, XII, )\111,
. .. 3 " 4 35 ' 38 j
Malkki, Liisa H" 115
hyperbolic suggestion, 19-20 juridic.11 framework, 68-9 1~ I IIJll)ry (Iud lIs Limits: HIWII/Il,
,''':
Mallett, Robert, 40-1 n
tfJl..t I "'/nt,,.. 23, 41 n Mal11dani, M<lhmood, 107n
identification, 47 Kabir, An.1nyaJahanan. xu, XIlI. 4. S. l ...holnhc. pL I 34 Man, Paul de, 2, 3, 118
identity, pure, 26 ..fld \1 'n Ippe,
64,65,66.71 4JlIU Il\\'th 63 64 66 71
martyrdom, Holocaust victims, 37
ideology, 24, 25, 29, 30, 32, 38; Nazi, 34 Kafka, Franz, xii. 6, 1 . 11 21. 12" 11w ..'" 'II< h..d. 64, '65'
L..~ , , Marx, Karl/Marxism, 28, 32
~ent~~d,28 Cttirle, 119, 120; ZIonism or.
In ---,v •., tl, t.
<Ii 11 I")
\/
ttropo/is oj Death (Kulka), mass public, 31
Immunitas: The Protection and the Negation oj Kansteiner. Wulf, 13. 17
,'" 1~lb. 17 Massimo, Dona, 15311
lift (Esposito), 145 Kam, Immanuel, 24, 28. 38
immunity, 148, 149, ISO, 152, 153n , u hh..h T 66 master signifier, 129-30
Kaplan. E .. xii. 58n t' \, .1J.
hTunun~tion, 149-50 mastery, fantasy of, 84-5, 85--6
Kaunas, Lithu,:mia (murder of JC\\ j! 11, 'lll~ 1\)-20,99; and Arendt,
inaccessibility of trauma, 45 materialism, 92, 94
37-ll
inanimate, objectification or I lJrulio I materialistic capitalism, 32
Kelly, David, 1
instrumentalization of, 128 Kelly, Erica, tOl ~
>u". 14
It.e-... '
4,
. "'6: Tesfimony. 3 MaliS (Hirsch and Spiegebnan), 65
incarnation, 'scandal' of, 27 Kennedy, Rosanne, 51.; " .,l.lrd. 116 Mauss, Marcel, 25
inclusive exclusion, 153n Khanna, Ranjana, 73, 9n
r ';'fkl Mbembe, Achille, 92, 144
~ 1\ 1 1..1.'(Ill! niSin, 31
Indian Ocean trade routes, 72 Khmer Rouge regime, Dmbodu.. - McFarlane. Alexander c., 81
~ ( ..... 1 ~.Ir literature, xii, 77-90;
Indian Partition (1947), 64, 65, 66, 67 Khoury, Elias, Xlii, 77; Ory G,,:c McLuhall, 'Marshall, 160
individualistic approaches to trauma,
hQu,)'), 78-ll8
78-88; 'Sociology :lnd me ,~, meaning, 25, 27; personhood, 135-7;
limitations, 49-50 89n search for, 79
medieval medicine, 20
...\. 1"6, 152n
meditation, bodily, 72
 Index 177

.98 Peters, Benoit, 2

M.thn to Mothn (Maaona), 100-1 holJ\C"ComlOg}. psychopathology. phantasms, 24, 29
moumillg, 65. 68. 69, 78. 80. 92, 9S. pilgrimage, 67, 68
critical or mafleriI1. tOO. 101, 106-7
",L.. "my. v Pin-Fat, Veronique, 123n, 130, 136
posu:oIoDial, 94-7, 98: ............
-,-65.66 poetics of occlosure, 79
movement/the movement. 31. 3S
"t). \ ('II Yet Diagnosed - Nervous), poetry, 65; following Auschwitz, 50; on
Mufti. AanUr, 66
mukidUectional memory. 72 15 Truth and Reconciliation Commission,
MuJt;ditutl , M ... "Y' ~ .. 94
Hoi ' lit tht At< of~- (. c.oJoy'(\onl.().ll Pol POt (S310th Sar. Cambodian leader). 67
(Rothberg). xv, 58n 0Iyury, 11ft, 1)4, 97-9. 104 Poland, Jews of, 33
Multiple Penona!Uy DUorder. 161 ..c. t,-JCOIl political religion, fascism/Nazism as, 24
MuseI"",,,,,, 130. 145. 152 "'up", M,k.l. 145. 153n Polonsky, Anthony, 33
Mussolini. Benico. 3t, 32 .ue u). 72 polyphony, 79
(lnd.utJc. Mlduel. 73 Popkin. Jeremy D., 11
N,drtllglidtlldl (allerwanlmao). fmld ... tI mUltlJ. XIIl, 131. 132, 135 possibiliry/unpossibiliry, 26, 51
12, 17; , .. aIs. 'allerwudsoeoo' ,.ll trauma. XIII. 132. 135 post-apartheid literature, and critique of
Nancy, Hamid, 72 raucn Barbarosa, 33-4 reconciliation, 100-7
Nagasaki, bombing of, .7
f .. hutultlln~.128. 133. 134 postcolonial commitment, 96
Nair, 5upriya, 63
n-based lr.aU1113. 49 posrcolonial mourning, 98; critique, 94-7
Nancy,Jean-Lue:.77
Naqvi, Akbas, 66 c"., '!f 1""'1/$, nIt (Foucault), 19 Postcolonial Nutratiue alld the Work of
narrative, 14, IS, 17,65,66; in Cur (.-, ( lJ/ r",.,/.ldnaPIIsm. The (Arendt), 114, MOllmillg (Durrant), 58n, 107n
II ,122 postcolonial stress disorder, 49
(Khoury). 7fl-9, 79, 80, 82, 8.H.
87; collapse ofnamtivc voic~ lR Otr OnallJ. fr.mcncJ.. 66 postcolonial syndrome, 49
Gates, 83-4, 85, 87; 6nt and durd C! hc-f," non- Western people categorised Postcolonial Wirtless;llg: Trauma Out of
penon, 84 .... 04&-7 BOil/ills (Craps), 58n
narratoecntric framework, 68-9 ~ f. ..ltll~J
of r'IUmltl: A1C(Il-MerrOl1l1Jitlltl postcolonial world, 67
nationalism, 31 n..... "".Ilu'(.1 "",I
1cicPI,.ries (Croisy), s8n postcolonialism, 4
NaflU'al SNpt:tMttlrtllism (Abrum), JO ~"""O.RUdolf, 25 post-deconstrllctive thought, 12, 14,20
Nul Qrm"'l' ,.d tM.frwr (Fn_. n., 1~J.rr,CI", 123n postmemory, 65
Nuism, xii. 2, 11, IS. 33-4. 36. 46; ..,j postmonolingual tensions, 124n
fascism. 23, 31-2; sacred m. 24, ttf III; ....
NUl • 101
I
~rc;lhst,68 poscsecular, notion of, 24, 29, 36, 40
Holocaust , "'Jln.llo poetry of 66 post-traumatic slavery syndrome, 49
Nealon,Jeffioy, 144. 1520 tlOt'. 7 ' post-traumatic stress disorder see PTSD
Negri, AmoDio, 77. 152n, 1530 nfl{ \11'" " (post-traumatic stress disorder)
oeighbour. 136, 138 ,. ,. 110')'. 11lt lIoloclJusr and
neo-liberal economics. xiv. 160 I ....
4,., lit '-'t"t" d/ld Frtlncophonf Poteat, V. Palll, 49
nervous shock, 147 ..~ (""i J ,/,,1 (Silvennan), 58n Poussaint, Alvin F" 49
neurasthenia, 158 • ')olJ1cndf';l 66 practice/Practice Theory, 28
Neven, French city. 47 • ~lduJ.ht)':· 1S Practicing History: New Directions in the
New HUtoricist anaIyUs, 97 O~ndu. (19-47). 64. 65, 66. 67 Wririllg of History after the Linguistic Tum
Nicbolseo, Sweny Weber. 100 ~. (Kablr), 64
116~~i11';'It'JoIUS (Spiegel). 28
Night of the Long Knives, 38 Precan'ous Life: TIle Powers of Moumiug aud
Nijha ..... Micha.~65 "-n" ,,~,IIK Violence (Butler), 2. 20, 91, 92,141,
9111 terrorist attacks. 46. 92. 93. 163. flo ItftD,ftlll~(l" (Ctbso ) 162.163 153n
tnwnafollowing, 141-3 ~a R. <. hJ.rile'\. ~) n, print cultures, South Asia, 66
Nixon, R.ob. xv. xvi
non-national lives. 105
::--n.
.~.
'2, 33
\2
Protestantism, 26
psychiatric universalism, 48
non-Western cultures. !Duma 0( "" " ,\U,.. ~ psychic experience of trauma, 50
64; "other," noD~Wescnn peopIr Psychic Life of Power, TIle (Butler), 92
.... OOoll ,·;' \ •\<elf. 136
categorised as. 46-7; • shown sa psychoaffective closure, 8: _
~ 1111 . /
M",,"Y ~ Low (Forna). S2-l "='nt.at thc,lnon
psychoanalysis, xiii, 30. 4:l, 64, 13~, ~3?,
Nora. Pierre, 2. 67 I e-r-tlt~llO" of, 128. 138: 'huI112n
t 44, 147; psychoanalytical detennmlsm,
Notdau, Mu. 158 II • II ... liS, 120; I11C211111g,
Nomdge. Zoe, 55. 56 1 • II lInd Of hun un beings,' n
'11'" ~I. unuonofWhuIS2 psychotherapy, 53. 147
-I"
p..n.a : ~d tt1m, 128: Stl' also
PTSD (post_tT:Iumatlc stress disorder), 49.
50,79, 153n; neuroendrocnnological
11 t'lltle
178 Index

basis, 158; as shown in City Gates

:\OOt, Maria, 49
(Khoury), 84; as shown in Memory oj Shoah ,.. HoIoea1llt
\othberg, Michael 1? 58
Love (Forna), 51, 54, 56 .'vlllltidirCClio,wlwi -, n, 67, 72, 144; mock, fi"we, 7, 157-<17
Pupavec, Vanessa, 115 Ho I ocann in tile A e o>{D Rememberi
emory:
'. nglIt
I _ Rim, '1M (B....... ), 7, I
purity, notion of, 26, 28 rule ofla-, 31 g eco/0111l:1l1l01l, xv 162
v, .
pyrotechnics, 57 Rushdie, Salman, 93 S>ddhanba 01 ...... (Buddha), 68
P...ussell, Paul, 86
S.", N_, 69,70
Slem Leone, war II depICted lD
quasi-sacrificialisrn, Nazi, 36
Lo.. (Foma), 51-7, 580
Quint, David, 97 5ab;; and Sharila massacres, Beirut (1982), ""' .... , '1M (Asanben), 153D
~ ...... 155
Rabkin, Erik, 161 sacralization, 23, 29, 32, 40 ulence, 55. 56. 57
racism/racial prejudice, 24, 28, 39, 50 sacraments, 28 Silvtrman, Maz. SIn
Radsrone, Susannah, 12, 46 sacred, the, 23, 24, 25, 29, 30; immanent Simon, David, 16
sacred, 28
Smp, Isw: _ 33
Rae, Patricia, 89n
railway spine, 158 The Sacred ill Twentietu-Century Politics: SUlgularily, 165
Essll)'s ill Honour of Projessor Stllllley G ~5(V_'), 161
Rajararn, Prem Kumar, 123n
Pa)'lIe (Griffin, Mallett and Tortorice), Sleeee, Gecqe. 161
Ramazani, jaban, 72, 89n 'Small Death' (eIectrifiecI filau), 15
Ranciere, Jacques, 124n 40-1n
Sobibor death camp. 34
sacrifice, 24, 25, 26, 28, 36. 37, 132, 135
Reader, 7711; (Schlink), 34 soc:U!-...m, art, 68
reading practice, 45--6 safe-world violations, 49 ",1idarity, 77, 85
'Reasons to be Cheerful' (Egan), 164 Salisbury. Laura, 164 song. 65, 66
S:111ders, Mark, 101, 108n South Aliica, pClIMponheilI. 95
recognition,
reconciliation,
87-8
96-7; critique of, 100-7
Sangari, Kurnkurn, 66 13~ 136 ",..man power, 128, 130, 151, I
Santner, Eric, 29, 129, 130, 133, J, , sovereignty, biopolibCS II, 143-5. 1
Red Cross, 15 Soviet Umon, fimner (USSll), 32-
redemptive anti-Semitism, 39 137 9
Sap11lennan, LIsa B., 4 SpUSO, R. CIiIlon, 89n
Redfield, Marc, 105 Spector, Scott, 36
Sarkar, Bhaskar, 66, 67 d ) 93 ope<uIative __ 163
Reformation, 27, 28 r/ TIle (Rush ret,
Salal/ic verses, 48 58n Spiegel. Gabrielle, 28
Refracriolls of Violence Oay), 77
Saunders, Rebecca, , piegelman, Art, 65
refugee writing, 117, 118, 122
Sax, Boria, 33. . 26 28, 36, 40 Spinoza. Baruch. 1540
refugees, 6, 113, 114, 119, 121, 136 sacnficlal, ,
scapegoat, h Wolfgang, 158 S~Vlk,~yatn,96, 107n
refuSIIiks, Israel, 136, 137
SChl\.,elbUSC, d 34 Th, SpUn/tttd G/.us' "","" 'If
religion, 23, 29; Derrida on, 24-5; and k Bernhar , Pw,.c.lmy ... /ky<>nd (Heftm>
fascism/Nazism, 24, 25, 30; ideological SchlnI, ,144 ' d'and o..Io-AIlul), 58.
Schmjr[, C~J1, (SF) 7,157-67;. ?ar of Sri Lanka, __ o£2004, .w
links to fascism/Nazism 24 25' il1S
science 6CtlOI~1 161-2, 166; orlg
multiplicity of l11eanin~, 25; al;d sacred, SS (SdtM""f4lQ, 34, 55, 57, 38
'soft' modes,
25; sources, 25, 27; split, Romanticism SUte or nacurc. 1070
ter11l,160 15 _ 161· seeaL(O 5UteleslDtll" 115, 120. 121
as, 30; wars of, 27 'II"G 47 60 .
Seba Id 'W· rid War, ' ' Sremhel1, Zeev, 32
Remak, Joachim, 35 stimuli, ovcres:posure co. 91-2. 150.
Second o. Nazism
RCllluams oj Auschwitz (Agamben), 144 Holocaus4t, 25, 30 . (fOiJCau][), 1~6 "" •• bridp, ~, xii, xiii, 6,
repetition, 68, 79, 81, 150 laritV 2, P l//a[1011 ootytellin& &4, 85
seCu ' ' ."fory, op 7
representation, 14, 17,45,100; vs. . ITer/! - 94 9 stress. 157-8
SeC/InI) I d content, '36
experience, 81, 82; failure of City CaW S..... Cbades, 165-6
sediment~ ersooaliry', J sU'Uctunl uauma. xiii, 92, 98. 101G.
novel as symbolic form to represem the 'self,' vs. Pooks, }47
'SIIuawe, Sign, "'" PIaJ ... tho
event, 81-2; unrepresemabil.iry 64 f_helP b. 153J1 oftbe H...... __ ' (DeOd<IO
se·I 'aooo,
Resnais, Alain, 47 '
self-Observark. 147 of I iro-, aDd
'stnlCtW'e
responsibility, 101 Seltzer, [VI. 157-8 meory, 14
Ricciardi, Alessia, 89n se1ye, Ha~os, 78 SIu.. "' die Now! (Capo ....
Richman, Michele, 38 sel1Sell1a~~lL~i,
86 58.
R.ickman, Gregg, 161 .. bjectivity, 77, 79, 83, 15. tr1
Sha~)a~.l1dre\V' 1~: rok),86 ........... 88
Ricoeur, Paul, 87 Shall: Steve, 1 '[11£ (TO
Riefenstahl, Lcni, 31, 35 sh;<\,I(O, /Ie Kef/Ie!,
ritual, 24, 25, 28 _I el/ al1d r ...4 1:'8
::J lock,:J '
Rogbonko Project, 59n Sllel1-sh 71
R.omanticism, 30 . 1s1a111,
sh1a
Roncll, Avital, 117
 Index 181
180 Index
• .,uK. 77, 7~. 132 working through, 150
totalitarianism. 32 Treblinka death camp, 34 '7 works of art, mimesis, 100
'totilly other' (Dcuida). 25, 28 Trevor-Roper, Hugh, 37 ,"('~. Edun. 48-9 World Mel/Wry: Personal Trajectories in Global
train accidents. 158 Trezise, Thomas r Rdu~n'(Arendt). 115. 116, 117, Time (Bennett and Kennedy), 50-1, 58n
trans-Atlantic Silk Route. 72 Triumph oflhe Will (Rlefe~uhJ), ll, IIq, 122. 12411 wound culture, 147
transcendence/immanence
'l:1.28
aporia/paradox, Truth and ReconciliatJon Comnusuon
(TRC), 6, 94, 1~1. 102, 11l,\. 11.14
.n.. H '. 160 lof,louIlded Srory/eller, Tue (Frank), 2
C"hI'I \1ldud ., 50 Wretdied of the Earrh, "DIe (Fan on), 58n
transcendent sacred. 28 IDS, 106, 107n. 108n ntil'm tnull1;l model, lnuuanons, 13,48,
transgcnerational memorialization of tsunami, 2004, 49
~. 54. 57; stt also Eurocenrnsm Yale deconstruction school, 12
trauma, 65, 72 Tuot Sleng, Phnom Penh. 67-Q. 71
14"'" .\lrrfhll')' Ctmu!s (l-nedlander), 11 \'ale Prendt Sudies (Rothberg), 58n
trauma: concept. 1. 12, 145: cultural. 13; of Turia, Tariana, 49
1(', I-!.l){!cn. 16 Yale School, 92, 97
empire, 46--8; empire of, 48-50; and Type 11 traumas, 49
L. (;IIII;aI1, 58n Yerushalmi, Yosef,2
ethics, 18, 19; failed experience of, 8t,
tc\C'. C'hn\tull, 30 Yildiz, Yasenuu, 123n, 124n
83; historical. 13,92; as history, 14-16, uncanny, the, 29
45; impact of, 14. 15,20; inaccessibility, Unclaimed Experienu: r,lJUlIIlJ,;'·'''''IIYaI iDt4l1ll. h.1Il ";lldcr. 160 Young, Allan, 48, 54, 158
45; incessantly quotidian, 145; History (Caruth), xv. 3, 45. 132 dll.Ull\. Paul. 67 Yeung-Bruehl, Elisabeth, 119
individualistic approaches to, limitations, unconscious, the, 72 ("r,al~. 147, 15 n
49--50; insidious, 49, 106. 145; as uncontamination, ncncn of. 26 tnc \lIlt. 27. 46, 66. 85, 86, 101 ZabuLi, Sadullah Sa'eed, 63, 64
medico-legal problem, 147; old and new unforgettable, the. 127. 133 III "11\('111. ludwig, 20 ZakllOr: jewisll His/ory alld jewisll Aifelllory
problems, 23; ondc, xiii, 131. 132, 135; unification, 18 IUl. Rlch;ard, .:\ (Yerusbalmi), 2
ontological, xili, 132, 135; as origin and United States (US), trauma culture. Itli ODd. 1>.. \ rd. 17 Zeleza, Paul, 71
disruption of knowledge, 12; post-9f11, unreadabiliry, 45 OOmrr,a detenucu C;UllP, South Wesrem Zionism, 122,12411
141-3; psychic experience, 50, 91; unrepresentability, 64 u\tr1h ... xru. II . 12311 Ziiek, Slavoj, 2, 92, 93, 131, 136, 160
sttuc~, xiU, 92,98. 107n, 145; and unscathed, notion of. 26, 27, 2M,.111
violence. 141-2 Urdu, 66
Trauma attd Ruo"Q}' (Herman), 2 Ustorf Werner, 28
Trauma and the Memory of Politics (Edkins), utopia, racial. 28, 36
6.151
trauma counselors. 49 Van der Peer, Stephanie. 70
Trauma: Explorations in Memory (Caruth), Vermeulen, Pierer, xii. Xlii. 6. 7
xi,. 3, 58n, 144-5 vernacular lyric, 65. 66
trauma knot, xi vesicle, 91, 93, t07n
Trauma Question, 1Ju (Luckhurst), 51 Vichy France, 33
trauma studies. xii, xiii, xiv, xv, xvii, 1.4, victimization, 24, 39. 40
5,7.17.23,64.68.70.72,88.122; Viemam War, 16, 158
biopolitics.92-3, 141, 142,143,144, Vinge, Vernor, 166
149, ISO, lSI, 152; collective trauma violence, 33, 39, 78: aestheocwnon ol ....
shift from individual. 92-3; and end ~f biopolitical. 144; e\'eryday, n.. \.
trauma theory, 92-3; ethico-political extreme, xiii, xiv, 7 .141, 14.04.,and
agenda, 142; future o~ 88. 159; as fascism/Nazism, 31. 32: hlSlonul,
immunitary technology, 151-2;
slow, xv; srructunl, 79; tr.l.nsgrn~l\~
structural, 92
37--8; and tr.l.um:a. 141-2;)(f.t.lJ,;
Trauma Texts {Whidock and Douglas), 58n genocide; Holoc2ust
trauma theory: 'a.fterwudsness' in, 12, 14,
'viraha' (longing c2ust:d by ~PJ.n
16-19; critique of studies, 46, 49-50;
Voegelin, Eric, 28
end of, 91-109; Eurocentrism, beyond,
Volksgcmeinsc1laft, 28, 36, 39
45-61; event-based model, limitations,
Vondung, Klaus. 28
49, 50, 53, 54; future of, 63-4, 66-7;
Voonegut. Kurt, 7. 161
~ Holocaust, 2; origins, 12, 45; and
vulnerability. 7; bodily. H9; In ar, c.,
Structure of experience,' 14; textualist
(Khoury). 79, 3-4. 5, 8 ; COImIClIQ
approach, limitations, 45-6, 50 51·
corporeal, 92, 94.102: ofo
Western model, 13, 48, 52, 54: 57;' see
(1150 Holocaust
91-2; theory. 142
trauma ~, 127, 128, 132, 133, 134. 137
WalCOtt, Derek. 72
traumatropl$rns, 29
T~veno,Antonio,58n Walsh, Dedan. xiv
war on telTor, 32, 93