Trauma Theories: Cathy Caruth

Trauma Theories: Cathy Caruth Discussion Questions 1) How does Caruth learns from and revise Freud? 2) Why does she define the voice of the wound as double-telling, which involve both repetition and deferral? Whose wound and whose telling? 3) One of her central concern is history as erasure, but is history simply erased? How does she revise the concept of repetition compulsion with her reading of both Derrida s Archive Fever and Freud s Project? 4) Do you know how Caruth is different from LaCapra in her approaches to trauma? Of the two approaches, which do you prefer or agree with more? 5) Can you find examples in support of Caruth s views of trauma s messages and our responses as archive fever (repetition compulsion)? Discussion Questions... 1 Unclaimed Experience... 1 Introduction: The Wound and the Voice... 1 The Other Chapters... 2 Chap 2: LITERATURE AND THE ENACTMENT OF MEMORY (through forgetting)... 3 Chap 3: Freud s BP and Moses and Monotheism.... 3 After the End: Psychoanalysis in the Ashes of History... 4 A Burning Archive (Psychoanalysis as an archival science that re-defines history. )... 5 Return and Repetition (w/ a historical example of inscription/erasure of history)... 6 Freud s Fever (The two theorists return and repetition/resinscription of a previous work of theirs.)... 6 Disappearing History (return and departure, of Jewish history and also that of psychoanalysis)... 7 Psychoanalysis in Ashes... 7 Strange Witnesses... 8 Unclaimed Experience Introduction: The Wound and the Voice 1) Tacred and Clorinda in Tasso s epic Gerusalemme Liberata Caruth: what s striking is not the repeated act, but the voice of the wound that

cries out in the second act, and bears witness to the past he has unwittingly repeated (3) 2) Trauma: not known at the moment of violence, unassimilable, returns to haunt the survivor; it simultaneously defies and demands our witness (Caruth 5) 3) [the parable of the wound] it is always a story of a wound that cries out, that addresses us in the attempt to tell us of a reality or truth that is not otherwise available. This truth, in its delayed appearance and its belated address, cannot be linked only to what is known, but also to what remains unknown in our very actions and our language (Caruth 4). 4) the texts dealt with: crisis in meaning each one of these texts engages, in its own specific way, a central problem of listening, of knowing, and of representing that emerges from the actual experience of the crisis. * Her reading of the texts: not to follow their argument, but to trace the textual itinerary of insistently recurrent words or figures (5) --the figures of "departure," "falling," "burning," or "awakening 5) Trauma and History: double telling At the core of these stories, I would suggest, is thus a kind of double telling, the oscillation between a crisis of death and the correlative crisis of life: between the story of the unbearable nature of an event and the story of the unbearable nature of its survival. These two stories, both incomprehensible and absolutely inextricable, ultimately define the complexity of that I refer to as history in the texts that I read (7). 6) The Voice of the Other --the story can also be read as the story of the way in which one's own trauma is tied up with the trauma of another (8) The figure of Tancred addressed by the speaking wound constitutes, in other words, not only a parable of trauma and of its uncanny repetition but, more generally, a parable of psychoanalytic theory itself as it listens to a voice that it cannot fully know but to which it nonetheless bears witness (9) The Other Chapters Chap 1 on Moses and Monotheism: argument: History as related to us -- Through the notion of trauma,..., we can understand that a rethinking of reference is aimed not at eliminating history but at resituating it in our understanding, that is, at precisely permitting history to arise where immediate understanding may not (11) The historical power of the trauma is not just that the experience is repeated after its forgetting, but that it is only in and through its inherent forgetting that it is first

experienced at all. (17) Freud s own experience of trauma during his writing of the book 1934-1938 (WWII): first, the infiltration of Nazism into Austria, causing Freud to withhold or repress the third part, and then the invasion of Austria by Germany, causing Freud to leave, and ultimately to bring the third part to light. "It forced me to leave my home, but it also freed me" Freud s main point in Moses and Monotheism: that history, like trauma, is never simply one's own, that history is precisely the way we are implicated in each other's traumas (24). Chap 2: LITERATURE AND THE ENACTMENT OF MEMORY (through forgetting) "When the man begins the questioning that leads to her final telling of her story, he does not ask about the lover's death as a fact she could lmow; rather, by assuming the position of the lover himself, he asks her to speak of his death through the very impossibility of distinguishing the living from the dead: "When you are in the cellar, am I dead? [slap] distinguishing life and death. What we see and hear, in Hiroshima mon amour, resonates beyond what we can know and understand; but it is in the event of this incomprehension and in our departure from sense and understanding that our own witnessing may indeed begin to take place. Chap 3: Freud s BP and Moses and Monotheism. History as survival I will suggest that these two works, read together, represent Freud s formulation of trauma as a theory of the peculiar incomprehensibility of human survival. It is only by reading the theory of individual trauma in BP in the context of historical trauma in MM that we can understand the full complexity of the problem of survival at the heart of human experience (58). A. BP 1) traumatic neurosis defines the shape of individual lives. (59) 2) the structure of indirectness in psyche (or the deferred action): trauma is suffered because it is not directly available for experience. (61) The threat is recognized one moment too late. (62) à repetition compulsion 3) Repetition, in other words, is not simply the attempt to grasp that one has almost died but, more fundamentally and enigmatically, the very attempt to claim one s own survival. If history is to be understood as the history of a trauma, it is a history that is experienced as endless attempt to assume one s survival as one s own. (64) (fright // awakening to life)

4) fort-da game = trauma as experience of departure B. MM Jewish history as a story of Jewish victimhood, of an incomprehensible missed trauma that violently separates the Jews from Moses (69), of traumatic departure, a survival and a literal return (to the moment before the murder, to Moses s doctrine of chosenness (69; or monotheism). Chap 5 Traumatic Awakenings: Freud, Lacan and the Ethics of Memory p. 91-91 Trauma re-defined: that immediacy [of trauma], paradoxically, may take the form of belatedness. Main Idea: Lacan s reinterpretation of Freud s dream (of the father s dream of his dead child) In thus relating trauma to the very identity of the self and to one s relation to another, Lacan s reading shows us,, that the shock of traumatic sight reveals at the heart of human subjectivity not so much an epistemological, but rather what can be defined as an ethical relation to the real. 1. Freud s interpretation (p. 96): the father s wish to keep the child alive, and the father s wish to sleep. 2. Lacan: sees a contradiction: this wish is enigmatically defied in waking up; for if consciousness as such is what desires not to wake up, the waking is in conflict with the conscious wish. [The child: Father, don t you see I m burning? ] The dream thus becomes, in Lacan s analysis, no longer a function of sleep, but rather a function of awakening. (p. 99) 3. The nature of survival Lacan suggests that awakening itself is not a simple accident, but engages a larger question of responsibility. à the father s survival inherently and constitutively bound up with the address of a dead child. 4. A failed address: [the question suggests that the father does not see the child dead.] In awakening, he sees the child s death too late 5. An unavoidable imperative: wake up, leave me, survive; survive to tell the story of my burning. (105) After the End: Psychoanalysis in the Ashes of History Cathy Caruth Background: Caruth: interested in the erasure of history (past and present) and the possibility of witnessing, literary, philosophical and psychoanalytic, all mediated through the literary and in a dream.

Main Argument: At the heart of psychoanalysis, Derrida suggests, is the thinking of an archival drive that simultaneously yearns after memory and offers the potential for its radical elimination. Beginning from a reflection on the main argument of Archive Fever concerning the nature of the psychoanalytic archive, 1 will argue that the texts of Freud and Derrida, read together, ultimately enable a rethinking of the very nature of history around the possibility of its erasure. 1 will also argue that these insights about history can ultimately be understood only from within the literary story of Norbert Hanold, the archaeologist, and in particular, the story of his dream. (17) Main Questions: What does it mean for history to be a history of ashes? And how does psychoanalysis bear witness to such a history? (17) Main Argument rephrased: traumatic history contains both its erasure and a burning desire for its reconstruction Introduction Caruth à Derrida [Archive Fever] àfreud à Jensen s Gradiva: A Pompeiian Fantasy (1927) Freud: an allegory for repression and the reemergence of repressed desire. Derrida: discovers in Freud s study of the story an archival drive, a pain and a suffering (mal) that bears witness to the suffering and evil, of a unique twentieth-century history. Derrida proposes that the history of the twentieth century can best be thought through its relation to the archive," a psychic as well as technical procedure of recording or of writing" history that participates not only in its remembering but also in its forgetting. (17) A Burning Archive (Psychoanalysis as an archival science that re-defines history. ) 1) Today s archive is archive du mal of evil and of suffering, of disasters. These disasters are not simply the objects of archives, or objects that call out for archiving; they are also, themselves, unique events whose archives have been repressed or erased, and whose singularity, as events, can be defined by that erasure. They involve evil or suffering, that is, precisely because they hide or prohibit their own memory: because they are themselves hidden or destroyed, prohibited, repressed. (Derrida qtd in Caruth 18) 2) The thinking of archive is also the thinking of history. 3) Psychoanalysis: archival science

Indeed psychoanalysis must itself be understood, Derrida argues, primarily as an archival science. Psychoanalysis, 1 would suggest, can thus help us to think, and perhaps witness, a new kind of event that is constituted, paradoxically, by the way it disappears. Return and Repetition (w/ a historical example of inscription/erasure of history) What has been erased? The mind and history 4) For Freud, the unconscious is like a buried city, but Derrida finds not just buried objects, but also the figure of buried writings 5) A new kind of history as traces, inscription and re-inscription; e.g. traumatic memory totters between remembrance & erasure 6) The role of psychoanalysis: digging for meanings; leaving its own traces and doing its own repression, too. --If the archaeological project is the uncovering of an object, the archival task is the reading of an inscription. -- In this reading, psychoanalytic discourse does not only unveil a meaning of impressions" and their repressions" but also installs itself at the heart of the dig. -- e.g. soldiers from WWI. They repeat and enact the history they do not remember, and thus they archive history and erase it at the same time. self-erasing inscriptions of history. effacing history, they also created it. The soldiers became, as it were, They archived history by effacing it, and in -- Traumatic memory thus totters between remembrance and erasure, producing a history that is, in its very events, a kind of inscription of the past; but also a history constituted by the erasure of its traces (20). Summary: Between the shock of the memory that effaces and the shock of the discovery of this memory, is the event of an erasure, and of a history, that carries the name of the death drive, which is also archive fever, because it is made up of memory and is about memory, it is about the burning desire for memory and the history of its burning up. (21) 7) Psychoanalysis: as an archival theory, it describes the way memory can make history precisely by erasing it. Freud s Fever (The two theorists return and repetition/resinscription of a previous work of theirs.) Here Caruth relates Freud s reinterpretation in Beyond the Pleasure Principle of his previous work (the 1895 Project for a Scientifìc Psychology) to Derrida s (Archive Fever & his 1967 Freud and the Scene of Writing ) 8) Memory as fundamental deferral and repetition at the beginning Memory originates its own deferral and also its later repetition. (21)

At the beginning of Freud s work, there is the concept of the return of the memory trace at the beginning, which anticipates his idea of repetition compulsion. 9) Derrida argues that deferral and repetition are central to Freud s thought, but he later did not use the word deferral. Instead, he uses repetition compulsion. 10) Deferral is archiving: a return and departure. n This psychoanalytic concept of deferred action enacts its own deferred action and its own repetition throughout Freud's career, but in doing so it also both records and effaces its own past, and to a certain extent becomes erased from the psychoanalytic archive. n Deferral described in BP as an attempt to return by consciousness that ultimately fails and departs into the repetitions of a future history. Trauma, and ultimately life and the drive itself, is an attempt to return that instead departs (22). Disappearing History (return and departure, of Jewish history and also that of psychoanalysis) n Moses and Monotheism as example. This history also contains the history of its own impossibility of witness; a history that burns away, with ashes left behind. Psychoanalysis in Ashes 11) Freud s return to a story and the dream in it: Wilhelm Jensen's Gradiva: A Pompeiian Fantasy 12) The story summarized n Freud: finds in the burial of Pompei an analogy of the unconscious and the beginning traces of psychoanalysis; n likewise, Hanold goes to Pompei, not to find Gradiva, but to find the traces of her footsteps, how she can be remembered by ( return to the origin of his memory as the origin of Gradiva s traces ). n In doing so, Freud also returns to another memory, that of his own love of his youth, psychoanalysis, as the very possibility of testimony (25). Burning Dream (of Harold) p. 26 The dream that has been erased by both the philosopher and psychoanalyst. 13) Hanold first dreams of Gradiva, and then goes to Pompei to find her traces; he then sees her, and realizes that he repeats his dream of seeing her. His conceptualization, therefore, is a belated awakening to the fact that he sees her again. 14) For Freud, this dream speaks of Hanold s unconscious desire for Zoe. 15) For Caruth, Freud's interpretation has an uncanny effect: for the dream is thus not only read archaeologically, but also becomes thereby a staging of its own formation, a staging of the burial of Pompeii which is the figure of repression. It is a dream of the

origin of dreaming, of the possibility of knowing and not knowing, of figuring without consciousness, a mode of witnessing that originates in a catastrophe (28). 13) The past is not just buried, but buried in incinerating ashes. 14) For Caruth, what Freud does not see is the origin of his theory in dreams, not just in Interpretation of Dreams, but in the memory traces of his Project, the dreams that can be connected with the nightmares he discusses in BP. 15) Trauma of the past linked to trauma in the future (both via repetition and via imaginative understanding/archive fever): Faced by the dream, he is stirred to seek a saving figure in Zoe (whose name means life," in Greek), but he gives us in fact another kind of figure, the imagination of an unimaginable erasure that is carried by all of his figures of deferral, repetition, return and departure, of trauma. The language of trauma is the language of this absolute erasure, not imaginable in the past ore present but always, as something missed, and about to return, a possibility, always, of a trauma in the future (28) 16) Her question: To burn with archive fever, does it mean to burn with ashes or to bear witness? Strange Witnesses We are strange witness to something we do not understand. [Derrida s chance meeting of Gradiva] [Archive Fever, also a dream a burning, dreaming conceptualization] dream = imagination of Gradiva suddenly = the language of trauma, or of chance encounter Footsteps of Psychoanalysis