The promise of authenticity and the idea of trauma as one of the last bastions of the “real” in a hypermediated world is a powerful one. One might even argue that such a conception of trauma arose as a response to the hypermediation of the Holocaust and other violent events. Yet, the exceptional popularity of Caruth’s work cannot be separated from the ethical possibilities her concept entails. As I have tried to demonstrate, Caruth’s ideas of belatedness and literalness are indebted to Freud’s notion of the repetition-compulsion phenomenon as discussed in connection with the traumatic nightmare in ‘Jenseits des Lustprinzips’.113 Drawing on Freud’s essay, Caruth defines trauma as that which cannot be represented (linguistically) but instead needs to be enacted, embodied, and performed. Caruth then fuses this “performative theory of traumatic repetition” with Shoshana Felman’s and Dori Laub’s ethics of
111 In their definition of Freud’s term, Jean Laplanche and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis also stress the
importance of retroactivity: “In actuality Freud had pointed out from the beginning that the subject revises past events at a later date (nachträglich). And that it is this revision which invests them with significance and even with efficacy or pathogenic force”. They also argue against a position that could be aligned with Caruth’s understanding of the term: “As these texts show, the Freudian conception of
nachträglich cannot be understood in terms of a variable time-lapse, due to some kind of storing
procedure, between stimuli and response”, see Jean Laplanche and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis, The
Language of Psycho-Analysis, transl. by Donald Nicholson-Smith; with an introduction by Daniel
Lagache (London: W.W. Norton, 1988), p. 112; p.114.
112 Ruth Leys, Trauma, p. 20.
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witnessing,114 which, according to Ruth Leys, leads her to the idea of transmission as
a process of infection or contagion:
The transmission of the unrepresentable – a transmission imagined by Caruth simultaneously as an ineluctable process of infection and as involving an ethical obligation on the part of the listener – therefore implicates those of us who were not there by making us, as Dori Laub has put it, participants and coowners of the traumatic event […].115
Leys’ statement brings us back to the criticism conveyed by Mandel: how can notions of traumatic unassimilatability and the passive process of contagion be conceptualised as ethical? Here, it is important to note that, for Felman, Laub and Caruth, the ethical response is not so much linked to an active (political) engagement but rather to the act of listening. Listening involves an openness to the enigmatic and abysmal address of the Other and a willingness to let oneself be overwhelmed and hurt by this fundamental alterity. Paradoxically, the destructive experience of trauma is thus turned into the site for an encounter and a non-essentialist type of community, which is rooted in “the very possibility and surprise of listening to another’s wound”.116 This transformation is
criticised by Mandel who objects to the ways in which “access to the ability to be traumatized [via contagion] becomes an index of ethical commitment”.117
Mandel’s critique points to various problems caused by the contagion paradigm in Caruth’s trauma-ethics, which haunt Hirsch’s work in particular: first of all, the process of contagion does not pass on representable knowledge but rather affect and the experience of trauma, both of which collide with a cognitive-reflexive approach towards the past. The concept of transmission as contagion thus fosters a problematic privileging of “feeling-structures”, as Anne Fuchs has argued.118 Caruth’s stress on the unknowable leads her to frame the transmission of history as a perpetual acting out, as that which “remains ungrasped and endlessly returning”.119 This take on history as
“interminable aporia” is pitted against approaches that stress the necessity of working through the past, alongside the importance of the process of mourning.120 Drawing on
114 Ruth Leys, Trauma, p. 252; see Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, Testimonies. Crises of Witnessing
in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History (London and New York, NY: Routledge, 1992).
115 Ruth Leys, Trauma, p. 269.
116 Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience, p. 8. 117 Naomi Mandel, Against the Unspeakable, p. 58. 118 Anne Fuchs, Phantoms of War, p. 49.
119 Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience, p. 69.
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Freud’s essay ‘Erinnern, Wiederholen und Durcharbeiten’,121 Dominick LaCapra
therefore contrasts (and assesses) these two positions:
In acting out, the past is performatively regenerated or relived as it were fully present rather than represented in memory and inscription, and it hauntingly returns as the repressed. Mourning involves a different inflection of performativity: a relation to the past which involves recognizing its difference from the present – simultaneously remembering and taking leave of or actively forgetting it, thereby allowing for critical judgement and a reinvestment in life […].122
While for Caruth it is inherently ethical to become infected by the trauma of others, LaCapra is critical of this performative hauntology, precisely because it denies the difference between the self and the Other, the past and the present.
As already mentioned, Caruth posits that trauma cannot ever be experienced directly by the subject, either in the moment of its occurrence or at a later point. It can only be (re-)enacted in a displaced fashion, by spreading contagiously through a community of witnesses and suffering. This also means that the victim and survivor is no longer in a position of “epistemological authority” when it comes to his or her own experience.123 In fact s/he relies on later generations to articulate it: “[P]erhaps it is not possible for the witnessing of the trauma to occur within the individual at all, […] it may only be in future generations that ‘cure’ or at least witnessing can take place”.124 Caruth’s rather tentative statement points to an epistemological and, up to a point, ethical privileging of later generations, who not only have the ability to witness but also to (potentially) heal the traumatic affliction. Similar assumptions are made by Hirsch: “Perhaps it is only in subsequent generations that trauma can be witnessed and worked through, by those who were not there to live it but who received its effects, belatedly, through the narratives, actions and symptoms of the previous generation [italics in the original text]”.125 Hirsch underlines even more strongly than Caruth that
the process of working through depends on and is limited to later generations; for her, the traumatised subject can neither experience nor work through the event, but is
121 Sigmund Freud, ‘Erinnern, Wiederholen und Durcharbeiten’, in: Sigmund Freud. Gesammelte Werke,
Vol. X: Werke aus den Jahren 1913-1917, ed. by Anna Freud et al. (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1999),
pp. 126-136.
122 Dominick LaCapra, Writing History, Writing Trauma, p. 70. The first two chapters in LaCapra’s
book – ‘Writing History, Writing Trauma’ and ‘Trauma, Absence, Loss’ – are dedicated to the tensions and problems arising from these two contrasting positions.
123 Jonathan Long, ‘Monika Maron’s Pawels Briefe’, p. 149. 124 Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience, Footnote 21, p. 136.
125 Marianne Hirsch, ‘Surviving Images: Holocaust Photographs and the Work of Postmemory’, The
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plagued by it. In this way, Hirsch endows later generations with greater agency, reflexivity, and ethical awareness in relation to the past.126
Finally, Caruth’s contagion paradigm also prepares the ground for a problematic universalisation of the trauma and victimisation experience. As mentioned earlier, her idea of trauma as a site of encounter implies a non-essentialist definition of community: everyone, regardless of their personal background, can, through the act of listening, be(come) a witness and a part of the community of suffering. If this were to be the case, then trauma would lose its subjective anchorage as well as its historical specificity, thereby turning into a universally accessible experience – “individuals or groups who never experienced the trauma directly themselves are imagined as ‘inheriting’ the traumatic memories of those who died long ago”.127 As Leys, LaCapra
and others have pointed out,128 this amounts to an extremely problematic
universalisation not only of trauma but also of victimhood. It is problematic because it blurs the lines between victims and perpetrators, while simultaneously making the Holocaust part of “a movement of identity formation which makes invidious and ideological use of traumatic series of events in foundational ways or as symbolic capital”.129 This consequence of Caruth’s argument is highly ironic, given that her
deconstructivist framework and anti-essentialist notion of (post-)traumatic community are meant to avoid the pitfalls of identity politics.