1. Judith Herman, M. D., Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence; From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror (New York: Basic Books, 1992), IX.
2. See Laura S. Brown, “Not Outside the Range: One Feminist Perspective on Psychic Trauma,” in Trauma: Explorations in Memory, ed. Cathy Caruth (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 100–112. For an original treatment of incest from the standpoint of Holocaust and trauma studies, see Janet Walker, Trauma Cinema: Documenting Incest and the Holocaust (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2005).
3. For a trenchant critique of the reification of PTSD, see Allan Young, The Harmony of Illusions: Inventing Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995);as well as Alan Gibbs, Contemporary American Trauma Narratives (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014). Gibbs seems to accept Young’s standpoint wholeheartedly in characterizing the conversion of PTSD into a set of generic conventions that devolve into clichés in late postmodernist writing. For critical discussions of “trauma culture” and “post-traumatic culture,” see Mark Seltzer, Serial Killers: Death and Life in America’s Wound Culture (New York and London: Routledge, 1998); Kirby Farrell, Post-traumatic Culture: Injury and Interpretation in the Nineties (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998); John Mowitt, “Trauma Envy,” in a special issue on “Trauma and Its Cultural Aftereffects” edited by Karyn Ball. Cultural Critique 46 (fall 2000): 272–297; and Griselda Pollock, ed., Visual Politics of Psychoanalysis and the Image in Post-Traumatic Cultures (London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 2013).
4. The controversy over the memorial sometimes touched on its purportedly “emasculated” form. For a feminist analysis of the Vietnam War as an emasculating trauma, see Susan Jeffords, The Re-Masculinization of America: Gender and the Vietnam War (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989). Martin Scorsese’s Palm d’Or–winning Taxi Driver from 1976 is widely viewed as an early cinematic representation of the dangerously traumatized Vietnam War veteran as portrayed by Robert De Niro; however, because the film focuses on a delusional veteran failing to adapt to life after discharge in New York City, it is also manifestly distinct from the films that followed in the 1980s, which tend to depict American soldiers becoming traumatized by the war they were fighting. The latter, significantly, also encouraged American audiences to sympathize with young soldiers scarred by the violence they not only witnessed but also perpetrated. An incomplete list of influential films released during this period includes Platoon (1986), Full Metal Jacket (1987), Good Morning, Vietnam (1987), Hamburger Hill (1987), Casualties of War (1989), and Born on the Fourth of July (1989).
5. Richard Berg and John Carlos Rowe, “American Representations of Vietnam,” special issue, Cultural Critique 3 (Spring 1986). The symptomatology associated with PTSD doubtlessly assumed greater cultural intelligibility for the generations born during and after the war as a result of films that represented American soldiers as “unwilling” perpetrators traumatized by their own violence. Jonathan Shay’s Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character (New York: Scribner, 2003), originally published in 1994, thus reflected and further intensified an investment in studying veterans’ PTSD.
6. Toni Morrison, Beloved: A Novel. New York: Vintage International, 1987).
7. Gibbs, Trauma Narratives, 72–73; and Roger Luckhurst, The Trauma Question (New York: Routledge, 2008).
8. Gibbs, Trauma Narratives, 73.
9. See Rebecca Saunders, “Disgrace in the Time of a Truth Commission” in “Visceral Reason,” edited by Karyn Ball. Special issue, Parallax 36 (July-September 2005): 99–106
10. In this connection, see Piotr Sztompka’s insightful discussion in “The Trauma of Social Change: A Case of Postcommunist Societies,” in Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity, ed. Jeffrey Alexander, et al. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 155–195.
11. Barbara Christian, “The Race for Theory,” Feminist Studies 14, no. 1 (Spring 1988): 67–79.
12. See Maurice Halbwachs, On Collective Memory, ed., trans., and introduced by Lewis A. Coser (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). See also Jeffrey K. Olick, Vered Vinitzky-Seroussi, and Daniel Levy, eds., The Collective Memory Reader (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011). On the constitution of post-traumatic communities through disaster, see Kai Erikson, A New Species of Trouble: The Human Experience of Modern Disaster (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1995).
13. See Sigmund Freud, “Childhood Memories and Screen Memories,” The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. VI: The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1901), translated and edited by. James Strachey in collaboration with Anna Freud (London: The Hogarth Press, 2001), 43–53.
14. Karyn Ball, “Introduction: Trauma and Its Institutional Destinies,” in “Trauma and Its Cultural Aftereffects,” ed. Karyn Ball, special issue, Cultural Critique 46 (2000): 1–44.
15. Richard Brody, “Claude Lanzmann Changed the History of Filmmaking with ‘Shoah’,” The New Yorker, July 6, 2018. Lanzmann’s nine-hour documentary along with Shoshana Felman’s and Dominick LaCapra’s respective chapters on it furthered the symbiosis between Holocaust and trauma studies, hinging on the question of how to represent the diversely fracturing impacts of genocide. See LaCapra, Chapter Four: Lanzmann’s Shoah: “Here There Is No Why,” History and Memory after Auschwitz (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998), 95–135; and Felman and Laub, “Chapter 7: The Return of the Voice: Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah,” Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History (New York: Routledge, 1992), 204–283.
16. Cathy Caruth, ed., Trauma: Explorations in Memory (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995); Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996); Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, M. D., Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History (New York: Routledge, 1992); Saul Friedländer, Reflections on Nazism: An Essay on Kitsch and Death, trans. Thomas Weyr (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2000); Saul Friedlander, ed., Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the “Final Solution” (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992); Eric L. Santner, Stranded Objects: Mourning, Memory, and Film in Postwar Germany (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990); Dominick LaCapra, Representing the Holocaust (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994); Dominick LaCapra, History and Memory after Auschwitz (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998); Dominick LaCapra, Writing History, Writing Trauma (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001); Geoffrey H. Hartman, ed., The Longest Shadow: In the Aftermath of the Holocaust (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1996); Marianne Hirsch, Family Frames: Photography, Narrative, and Postmemory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997); Marianne Hirsch, The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture after the Holocaust (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012).
⤴Berel Lang, ed., Writing and the Holocaust (Teaneck, NJ: Holmes & Meier Publishers, 1989); Berel Lang, Act and Idea in the Nazi Genocide (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990); Berel Lang, Holocaust Representation: Art within the Limits of History and Ethics (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000); Lawrence Langer, Holocaust Testimonies: The Ruins of Memory (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991); Michael Rothberg, Traumatic Realism: The Demands of Holocaust Representation (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000); James E. Young, Writing and Rewriting the Holocaust: Narrative and the Consequences of Interpretation (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988); James E. Young, Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993); and James E. Young, At Memory’s Edge: After-Images of the Holocaust in Contemporary Art and Architecture (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000). Lang’s publications on the Holocaust are almost too numerous to list. The texts mentioned in this note were selected on the basis of their proximity to the “Probing the Limits of Representation” conference at UCLA in 1990.
17. Kelly Oliver, Witnessing beyond Recognition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001); Michael Bernard-Donals and Richard Geljzer, Between Witness and Testimony: The Holocaust and the Limits of Representation (New York: State University of New York Press, 2001); Michael Bernard-Donals and Richard Geljzer, eds., Witnessing the Disaster: Essays on Representation and the Holocaust (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2003); Ana Douglass and Thomas A. Vogler, eds., Witness and Memory: The Discourse of Trauma (New York: Routledge, 2003); Gary Weissman, Fantasies of Witnessing: Postwar Efforts to Experience the Holocaust (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004); Jakob Lothe with Susan Rubin Suleiman and James Phelan, After Testimony: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Holocaust Narrative for the Future (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2012); and Thomas Trezise, Witnessing Witnessing: On the Reception of Holocaust Survivor Testimony (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013).
18. Herman, Trauma and Recovery; and Felman and Laub, Testimony.
19. Jacques Derrida, The Work of Mourning, ed. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 73.
20. Following a brief stint as a professor of humanities at Johns Hopkins, de Man joined the faculty at Yale University in 1970, where his membership in a cluster of exceptional scholars “brought fame and prestige to what was considered the center of deconstructive theory in the United States in the late 1970s and early 1980s”; Derrida, The Work of Mourning, 70. De Man’s colleagues, students, and imitators admired his innovations of rhetorical analysis and his sensitivity to the indeterminacies of meaning that arise as grammatical oddities and other material elements in a text belie its denotative register. One of de Man’s typical moves, as Kevin Newmark aptly characterizes it, is to show how historical terms, to name one example, “turn out not to be really historical after all, but rather are,” themselves, crude metaphors “for figural relationships”; Kevin Newmark, “Paul de Man’s History,” in Reading de Man Reading, eds. Lindsey Waters and Wlad Godzich (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 123. Newmark makes this observation in the course of examining de Man’s apparent dismissal of conventional literary-historical terms in Paul de Man, “Anthropomorphism and Trope in the Lyric,” in The Rhetoric of Romanticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 239–262. De Man is also well known for demonstrating how theoretical terminology and categories provide a means for critics to avoid actual reading.
21. Louis Menand, “The de Man Case: Does a Critic’s Past Explain His Criticism?” New Yorker, (March 17, 2014), 3.
22. Menand, “The de Man Case,” 4.
23. Menand, “The de Man Case,” 4.
24. On the de Man controversy, see Paul de Man, Wartime Journalism, 1939–1943, ed. Werner Hamacher, Neil H. Hertz, and Thomas Keenan (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1988); Jacques Derrida, Memoires for Paul de Man, rev. ed., translations ed. Avital Ronell and Eduardo Cadava (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989); Jacques Derrida, “Paul de Man (1919–83): In Memorium; On the Soul,” in The Work of Mourning, ed. Pascalle-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 69–75; Jacques Derrida, “Like the Sound of the Sea Deep Within a Shell: Paul de Man’s War,” trans. Peggy Kamuf in Werner Hamacher, Neil Hertz, and Thomas Keenan, eds., On Paul de Man’s Wartime Journalism (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989), 127–164; David Lehman, Signs of the Times: Deconstruction and the Fall of Paul de Man (New York: Poseidon, 1991); Evelyn Barish, The Double Life of Paul de Man (New York: Liveright, 2014); Louis Menand, “The de Man Case: Does a Critic’s Past Explain His Criticism?”,” March 24, 2014, 1–12; and Marc Redfield, Theory at Yale: The Strange Case of Deconstruction in America (New York: Fordham University Press, 2015).
25. Victor Farías, Heidegger and Nazism (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989).
26. Felman and Laub, Testimony. Felman accepted the Thomas E. Donnelly Professorship in French and Comparative Literature at Yale in 1986.
27. Cathy Caruth, “The Claims of Reference,” Yale Journal of Criticism 4.1 (1991): 193–205; Cathy Caruth, “Unclaimed Experience: Trauma and the Possibility of History in Freud,” Yale French Studies 79 “Literature and the Ethical Question” (winter 1991): 181–193. Both essays also appear in Caruth’s collection, Unclaimed Experience, chaps. 1 and 4. In disseminating the idea of the Holocaust’s “unrepresentability,” the translation and discussion of Lyotard and Adorno in venues such as Yale French Studies and New German Critique were vital. As the first American journal to focus on French and Francophone culture and writing, Yale French Studies in the 1980s and 1990s was instrumental in elevating the fortunes of linguistically turned post-war philosophers and theorists writing in French both before and after their translation into English. Another ascendant journal in this period was New German Critique, which was founded by David Bathrick, Andreas Huyssen, Anson Rabinbach, and Jack Zipes in the early 1970s. This cutting-edge journal played a crucial role in publishing and translating writings by and about the Frankfurt School, thereby introducing it to Anglophone readers, while making space for interdisciplinary scholarship devoted to problems connected with the Holocaust’s representations and their German receptions.
28. Caruth, Unclaimed Experience, ix.
29. Cathy Caruth, ed., “Psychoanalysis, Culture and Trauma,” special issue, American Imago 48.1 (Spring 1991) and Cathy Caruth, ed., “Psychoanalysis, Culture and Trauma,” special issue, American Imago 48.4 (winter 1991; Caruth, Trauma: Explorations in Memory; and Herman, Trauma and Recovery.
30. Herman, Trauma and Recovery, 1.
31. Naomi Mandel, Against the Unspeakable: Complicity, the Holocaust, and Slavery in America (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2006), 7.
32. Immanual Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, ed. Paul Guyer, trans. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
33. Kant, Critique, § 25, p. 134.
34. Theodor W. Adorno, “On Lyric Poetry and Society” in Notes to Literature, vol. 1, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen (New York: Columbia University Press 1991), 37–54; Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (New York: Continuum, 1995); and Karyn Ball, Disciplining the Holocaust (New York: State University of New York Press, 2008).
35. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 361.
36. Theodor W. Adorno, “On Cultural Criticism and Society,” in Prisms, trans. Samuel Weber and Shierry Weber (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997), 34.
37. Adorno, “On Cultural Criticism,” 34.
38. Theodor W. Adorno, “Commitment,” in Notes to Literature, vol. 2, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), 87.
39. For Lyotard’s conceptualization of “negative” signs of history, see the last chapter “The Sign of History,” in The Differend (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 151–181, 179.
40. Wulf Kansteiner and Todd Presner, “Introduction: The Field of Holocaust Studies and the Emergence of Global Holocaust Culture” in Probing the Ethics of Holocaust Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016), 1–2.
41. See Ernst Nolte, “Zwischen Geschichtslegende und Revisionismus?,” in Historiker-“Streit”: Die Dokumentation der Kontroverse um die Einzigartigkeit der national-sozialistischen Judenvernichtung, ed. Ernst Reinhard Piper (Munich: Reinhard Piper Verlag, 1987), 13–35; and Ernst Nolte, “Vergangenheit, die nicht vergehen will,” in Historiker-“Streit”: Die Dokumentation der Kontroverse um die Einzigartigkeit der national-sozialistischen Judenvernichtung, ed. Ernst Reinhard Piper (Munich: Reinhard Piper Verlag, 1987), 39–47. For the translation of this debate, see James Knowlton and Truett Cates, trans., Forever in the Shadow of Hitler? Original Documents of the Historikerstreit, the Controversy Concerning the Singularity of the Holocaust (New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1993). See also Anson Rabinbach and John Torpey, eds., “Special Issue on the Historikerstreit,” special issue, New German Critique 44 (Spring–Summer 1988), a special issue devoted to the debate, which included, among other pivotal pieces, translations of Jurgen Habermas’s responses to Ernst Nolte.
42. Hayden White, “Historical Emplotment and the Problem of Truth,” in Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the “Final Solution,” ed. Saul Friedlander (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 37. It is worth observing that White’s essay, “The Modernist Event,” amplified this lesson in proclaiming modernism’s particular aptitude for simulating psychologically realist responses to events that derealized conventional oppositions between facts and meaning, truth and fantasy, as well as the “outside” and “inside” of an event; Hayden White, “The Modernist Event,” in Figural Realism: Studies in the Mimesis Effect (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 66–86. It was in this context that he notoriously positioned the “German genocide of six million European Jews” as “paradigmatic among such events” that “function in the consciousness of certain social groups exactly as infantile traumas are conceived to function in the psyche of neurotic individuals.” As he elaborates it, this comparison implies that, “they cannot be simply forgotten and put out of our of mind, or conversely, adequately remembered, which is to say, clearly and unambiguously identified as to their meaning and contextualized in the group memory in such a way as to reduce the shadow they cast over the group’s capacities to go into its present and envision a future free of their debilitating effects”; Hayden White, Figural Realism: Studies in the Mimesis Effect (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 69. A careful reader of White’s work, Rothberg will subsequently identify this standpoint with the lessons he draws from reading Adorno’s and Maurice Blanchot’s respective “meditations on the ‘after Auschwitz’ epoch” to the effect that “post-Holocaust history has a traumatic structure – it is repetitive, discontinuous, and characterized by obsessive returns to the past and the troubling of simple chronology”; Rothberg, Traumatic Realism, 19; see also Maurice Blanchot, Writing the Disaster, trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1995). Rothberg additionally suggests that this “traumatic version of modernism differs from realism in that it is primarily concerned not with the practice of representation, but rather with the metanarrative that the modern age tells about itself and its representational practices”; Rothberg, Traumatic Realism, 19. A passage in his introduction to Traumatic Realism where he disentangles the realist, modernist, and postmodernist strains that alternate in White’s “The Modernist Event” is worth quoting at length: “The realist aims at the mimesis of a certain spatial world, but in confronting the structural problem of the relationship between the extreme and the everyday finds herself caught in a traumatic temporality. The modernist, on the other hand, confronts a particular form of progressive time consciousness, but finds his attempt to establish a before and after frustrated as he is pulled back again and again toward the site of a genocidal crime. Finally, the postmodernist interrogates the reign of the pure image or simulacrum and attempts to negotiate between the demands of memory and the omnipresence of mediation and commodification.” He adds: “The constellation of the three categories corresponds to some of the emblematic figures of an era of extreme violence; the survivor, who attempts to document an undocumentable experience; the bystander, who feels impelled to bear an impossible witness to the extreme from a place of relative safety; and the latecomer or representative of the ‘postmemory’ generation, who, like Spiegelman, inherits the detritus of the twentieth century”; Rothberg, Traumatic Realism, 14.
43. White, “Historical Emplotment,” 37.
44. White, “Historical Emplotment,” 37–38.
45. White, “Historical Emplotment,” 39. His ensuing discussion of Art Spiegelman’s Maus demonstrates how the text “assimilates the events of the Holocaust to the conventions of comic book representation, and in this absurd mixture of a ‘low’ genre with the events of the most momentous significance,” succeeds in posing “all of the crucial issues regarding the ‘limits of representation’ in general” (White, “Historical Emplotment,” 42).
46. White, “Historical Emplotment,” 52; and Lang, Act and Idea.
47. White, “Historical Emplotment,” 37–53; see also the version reprinted in White, Figural Realism, 22–43; Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth Century Europe (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973); and Hayden White, The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987).
48. Santner, Stranded Objects.
49. Berel Lang, ed., Writing and the Holocaust (Teaneck, NJ: Holmes and Meier, 1988); and Lang, Act and Idea.
50. Geoffrey H. Hartman, The Longest Shadow; Hartman, “The Book of the Destruction,” in Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the “Final Solution,” ed. Saul Friedlander (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 318–334; Hartman, ed., Holocaust Remembrance: The Shapes of Memory (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1994); Friedlander, “Trauma, Memory, Transference,” in Hartman, ed., Holocaust Remembrance: The Shapes of Memory (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 1994), 252–263; and Shoshana Felman, “Film as Witness: Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah,” in Hartman, ed., Holocaust Remembrance: The Shapes of Memory (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 1994), 90–103.
51. LaCapra, Representing the Holocaust; LaCapra, History and Memory; LaCapra, Writing History; and Dominick LaCapra, History in Transit: Experience, Identity, Critical Theory (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004).
52. LaCapra, Representing the Holocaust, 111.
53. LaCapra, Representing the Holocaust, 113. LaCapra has argued that Felman’s and Caruth’s discussions about de Man attest to a “transferential” relationship with him insofar as their deconstructive style deflects or attenuates the questions raised by his anti-Semitic war-time journalism and his silence about it afterward. This transference, for LaCapra at least, undermines the explanatory value of their poetically articulated reflections on trauma. LaCapra details this argument against not only Felman but also Derrida in “Paul de Man as Object of Transference,” chap. 4, in Representing the Holocaust: History, Theory, Trauma (Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 1994), 111–136. A few years later, in the course of citing Caruth’s chapter on de Man from Unclaimed Experience, LaCapra wonders about “the extent to which [her] version of trauma theory, as an ambitious rewriting of de Manian deconstruction, is able to get beyond the repetition compulsion other than through allegories of excess, incomprehensibility, and empty utopian hope”; LaCapra, History and Memory, 208. What amounts to a guilt-by-association argument is, ultimately, not very persuasive, however, since it presumes that an author’s moral character is necessarily relevant to anything diverse readers might draw from her work. While it is worth contemplating what is at stake in reading a morally compromised author, or reflecting on how to read them (see, for example, Tom Rockmore, On Heidegger’s Nazism and Philosophy [Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1991]), de Man’s and Heidegger’s considerable faults (including but not limited to their anti-Semitism) do not preempt the import of their writing; neither should their disciples’ scholarship be condemned, unless they use it to engage in apologetics, or worse—embrace the master’s dehumanizing prejudices as their own.
54. LaCapra, Representing the Holocaust, 115–116.
55. LaCapra, Representing the Holocaust, 116.
56. Alexander Mitscherlich and Margarete Mitscherlich, The Inability to Mourn: Principles of Collective Behavior (New York: Grove Press, 1975).
57. In one of his most useful explanations of the Real (which he capitalizes), Zizek defines it as “that which resists symbolization: the traumatic point which is always missed but none the less always returns, although we try – through a set of different strategies – to neutralize it, to integrate it into the symbolic order.” Zizek situates this understanding in “the last stage of Lacanian teaching,” where it is figured as “precisely the symptom,” and “as such a real kernel of enjoyment, which persists as a surplus and returns through all attempts to domesticate it, to gentrify it . . . to dissolve it by means of explication, of putting-into-words its meaning”; Slavoj Zizek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 1989), 69.
58. See LaCapra, Writing History, 43–85.
59. See LaCapra, Representing the Holocaust, 14n; LaCapra, History and Memory, 208n; LaCapra, Writing History, 107–109n, 181–185; and LaCapra, History in Transit, 118–123. Despite the conspicuous evidence of LaCapra’s own highly invested repetition compulsion with respect to Caruth, he nevertheless remarks on Leys’s “extremely judgmental and affectively charged” treatment of the former’s recourses to Bessel van der Kolk; LaCapra, History in Transit, 87n.
60. Ruth Leys, Trauma: A Genealogy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 283; and Caruth, Trauma: Explorations in Memory, 153.
61. Caruth, Trauma: Explorations in Memory, 153. Emphasis in the original.
62. See Bessel A. Van der Kolk, and Onno van der Hart, “The Intrusive Past: The Flexibility of Memory and the Engraving of Trauma,” in Trauma: Explorations in Memory, ed., Cathy Caruth (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 158–182.
63. Caruth, Trauma: Explorations in Memory, 153.
64. See Caruth, Unclaimed Experience, 10–24, 57–72.
65. For an elegant example of this style, see Rebecca Comay, Mourning Sickness: Hegel and the French Revolution (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011).
66. Leys, Trauma, 300. For a magisterial amplification of the staging metaphor throughout Freud’s work, but particularly in his trauma theory, see John Fletcher, Freud and the Scene of Trauma (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013).
67. Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle: The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 18, trans. and ed. James Strachey in collaboration with Anna Freud (London: Hogarth Press, 2001), 7–64; and Sigmund Freud, Interpretation of Dreams The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vols. IV and V, trans. and ed. James Strachey in collaboration with Anna Freud (London: Hogarth Press, 2001).
68. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen Lane (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983).
69. Brown, “Not Outside the Range”; and Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011). Trauma scholars in literary and cultural fields may have come to know Laura S. Brown from her contribution to Caruth, Trauma: Explorations in Memory. It is worth pointing out that she is a founding member of the Division of Trauma Psychology of the American Psychological Association (APA).
70. See Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson, trans. and ed., The Complete Letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess 1887–1904 (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1985); and Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson, The Assault on Truth: Freud’s Suppression of the Seduction Theory (New York: Pocket Books, 1998).
71. In this connection, see Hanna S. Decker, Freud, Dora, and Vienna 1900 (New York: Free Press, 1991); and Claire Kahane, “Chapter Two: Freud’s Passion/Dora’s Voice,” in Passions of the Voice: Hysteria, Narrative, and the Figure of the Speaking Woman, 1850–1915, (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 14–33.
72. Bill Readings, University in Ruins (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996).
73. Sigmund Freud, “On Narcissism: An Introduction,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 14: (1914–1916): On the History of the Psycho-Analytic Movement, Papers on Metapsychology and Other Works, trans. and ed. James Strachey in collaboration with Anna Freud (London: Hogarth Press, 2001), 73–102.
74. In 1997–1998, the Society for the Humanities at Cornell University invited scholars to participate in a year of conversations on “two sets of critical issues that often intersect” relating to the topic of “1997–98: Trauma and Psychoanalysis”: “the widespread attention to trauma and the uses of psychoanalysis as an explanatory model.”
75. See Karyn Ball, “Introduction: Traumatizing Psychoanalysis,” Traumatizing Theory: The Cultural Politics of Affect in and beyond Psychoanalysis (New York: Other Press, 2007), xvii–li; and Maurice E. Stevens, “Trauma Is as Trauma Does: The Politics of Affect in Catastrophic Times,” in Critical Trauma Studies: Understanding Violence, Conflict, and Memory in Everyday Life (New York: New York University Press, 2016), 19–36.
76. Joan Scott, “The Evidence of Experience,” Critical Theory 17 (1991): 773–797.
77. White, Figural Realism; and Rothberg, Traumatic Realism.
78. Virginia Woolf, Between the Acts (San Diego: Harcourt Brace, 1970).
79. Teresa Brennan, The Transmission of Affect (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004); and Sarah Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion (New York: Routledge, 2004). It might be recalled that Eve Sedwick co-edited a Silvan Tomkins reader devoted to shame with Adam Frank, which appeared in 1995; Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Adam Frank, eds., Shame and Its Sisters: A Silvan Tomkins Reader (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995). This reader contributes more meaningfully to post-psychoanalytic affect theory than Sedgwick’s Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), despite the latter collection’s title.
80. Ahmed, The Cultural Politics, 45. Emphasis in the original.
81. Ahmed, The Cultural Politics, 46.
82. Lauren Berlant, The Queen of America Goes to Washington City (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997); and Lauren Berlant, ed., Intimacy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000).
83. Berlant, Cruel Optimism.
84. Lauren Berlant, Desire/Love (Brooklyn: Punctum Books, 2012).
85. Judith Butler’s attention to Agamben’s analysis of sovereignty in Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London: Verso, 2004) was also pivotal in spurring deeper considerations of biopolitics and precarity in the aftermath of 9/11 and the so-called “war on terror.” See also her chapter entitled “Survivability, Vulnerability, Affect,” in Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable, by Judith Butler (London: Verso, 2010), 33–62.
86. For insightful discussions of racial shame in Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks and Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye respectively, see Kelly Oliver, “The Good Infection” in a special issue on “Visceral Reason” edited by Karyn Ball, Parallax 36 (2005): 87–98; and Kathleen Woodward’s “Traumatic Shame: Toni Morrison, Televisual Culture, and the Cultural Politics of the Emotions,” in a special issue on “Trauma and Its Cultural Aftereffects” edited by Karyn Ball. Cultural Critique 46 (fall 2000): 210–240.
87. See Raymond Williams, “Chapter 9: Structures of Feeling,” in Marxism and Literature, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 129–135.
88. Elizabeth A. Povinelli, Economies of Abandonment: Social Belonging and Endurance in Late Liberalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011).
89. Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus; and Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. and foreword by Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987).
90. Among the responses to this seemingly paradoxical juncture is Traumatic Affect, a volume of essays edited by Meera Atkinson and Michael Richardson, and featuring essays by Shoshana Felman, Anna Gibbs, and Magdaelna Zolkos among others, which encouraged contributors to rethink the emplotment, location, and intensity of trauma with respect to recent questions posed by affect studies. With a disciplinary home in political science, Zolkos’s work on forgiveness remains committed to subjects who endure, perpetrate, or confront it with varying degrees of cognition. Yet in her editing collaborations with Gerta Roelvink in special issues of Angelaki and Emotions, Space, and Society she has also invited scholars to consider the stakes of posthumanist and new materialist standpoints on affect. See Meera Atkinson and Michael Richardson, Traumatic Affect (Newcastle upon Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars, 2013). Magdalena Zolkos, Reconciling Community and Subjective Life: Trauma Testimony as Political Theorizing in the Work of Jean Améry and Imre Kertész (London: Continuum, 2010); Magdalena Zolkos, Restitution and the Politics of Repair: Tropes, Imaginaries, Theory (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2020); Magdalena Zolkos and Gerta Roelvink, eds., “Posthumanist Perspectives on Affect,” special issue, Angelaki 20.3 (2015); and Magdalena Zolkos and Gerta Roelvink, eds., “Affective Ontologies: Posthumanist Perpsectives on the Self, Feeling and Intersubjectivity,” special issue, Emotion, Space, and Society 14 (2015).
91. See Wendy Brown, States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995).
92. See, for example, Karen Barad, “Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter,” Signs: A Journal of Women in Culture and Society 28, no. 3 (2003): 801–831.
93. Karyn Ball, “Losing Steam after Marx and Freud: On Entropy as the Horizon of the Community to Come,” Angelaki 3 (2015): 55–78.
94. For incisively argued critical analyses of the discourses of trauma and reparation as they pertain to the figure of the victim, see Didier Fassin and Richard Rechtman, Empire of Trauma: An Inquiry into the Condition of Victimhood (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009); and Carolyn Dean, Aversion and Erasure: The Fate of the Victim after the Holocaust (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2010); though her previous book, The Fragility of Empathy after the Holocaust (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004), is also germane, albeit less directly.
95. Indeed, circulation and scale have become recent preoccupations in memory studies. See Chiara de Cesari and Ann Rigney, eds., Transnational Memory: Circulation, Articulation, Scale (Berlin, Germany: De Gruyter, 2014).
96. De Cesari and Rigney, Transnational Memory.
97. See Pumla Dineo Gqola, What Is Slavery to Me? Postcolonial/Slave Memory in Post-Apartheid South Africa (Witwatersrand: University of Witwatersrand, 2010); and Josias Semujanga, “Narratives of the Rwandan Genocide,” in The Routledge Companion to Literature, ed., Colin Davis and Hanna Meretoja (London and New York: Routledge, 2020), 395–406.
98. Iris Chang, The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II (New York Penguin, 1998); Bashir, Bashir and Amos Goldberg, The Holocaust and the Nakba: A New Grammar of Trauma and History (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018); Rosanne Kennedy, “Moving Testimony: Human Rights, Palestinian Memory, and the Transnational Public Sphere” in Transnational Memory: Circulation, Articulation, Scales, ed., Chiara de Cesari and Ann Rigney (Berlin and Boston: Walter de Gruyter, 2014), 51–78; Rosanne Kennedy, “The Affective Work of Stolen Generations Testimony: From the Archive to the Classroom,” Biography27, no. 1 (Winter 2004): 48–77. For a summary of research on intergenerational trauma connected with the residential schools in Canada, see Amy Bombay, Kimberly Matheson, and Hymie Anisman, “The Intergenerational Effects of Indian Residential Schools: Implications for the Concept of Historical Trauma,” Transcultural Psychiatry 51.3 (2014): 320–338; on the Nigerian Civil War, see Chinua Achebe, There Was a Country: A Memoir (New York: Penguin Books, 2012); and S. Elizabeth Bird and Fraser M. Ottanelli, The Asaba Massacre: Trauma, Memory, and the Nigerian Civil War (Cambridge, UK:Cambridge University Press, 2017); on los desaparecidos (the disappeared) of Argentina’s Dirty War, see Avery F. Gordon, “Chapter 3: “the other door, it’s floods [sic] of tears with consolation enclosed,” in Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 63–136; and on cinematic responses to the Lebanese Civil War, see Nouri Gana, “Trauma Ties: Chiasmus and Community in Lebanese Civil War Literature” in Gert Beulens, Samuel Durrant, and Robert Eaglestone, eds., The Future of Trauma Theory: Contemporary Literary and Cultural Criticism (Abingdon, : Routledge, 2014), 77–90; and Zeina Tarraf, “Haunting and the Neoliberal Encounter in Terra Incognita and A Perfect Day,” Cultural Dynamics 29, no. 1–2 (2017): 39–62.
99. Echoing Michael Rothberg, Chiari de Cesari and Ann Rigney observe that the Holocaust is itself global: “it is indeed the case that globally circulating memories and particularly the memory of the Holocaust – which has itself emerged as a paradigm and model for memory-making world-wide – have helped provide a language in which to articulate other narratives of suffering and loss.” De Cesari and Rigney, Transnational Memory, 10; and Michael Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009).
100. See Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Richard Philcox (New York: Grove Press, 2008); and Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (San Diego: Harcourt, 1994). Sam Durrant and Ryan Topper counter criticisms of Cathy Caruth’s Eurocentrism by foregrounding her conception of the implicated subject, arguing that it exemplifies how trauma theory has, simultaneously, always and never been postcolonial; see Sam Durrant and Ryan Topper, “Cosmological Trauma and Postcolonial Modernity,” in The Routledge Companion to Literature and Trauma, ed., Colin Davis and Hanna Meretoya (London: Routledge, 2020), 187–200.
101. Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory; and see Karyn Ball and Per Anders Rudling, “The Underbelly of Canadian Multiculturalism: Holocaust Obfuscation and Envy in the Debate about the Canadian Museum for Human Rights,” Holocaust Studies: A Journal of Culture and History 20, no. 3 (2014): 33–80.
102. Norman Finkelstein has gone so far as to accuse the field of Holocaust studies of rationalizing the ongoing occupation while providing sacred cover for the United States government’s failure to block Israel’s expansion and pursue justice for the Palestinians. See Norman Finkelstein, “Daniel Jonah Goldhagen’s ‘Crazy’ Thesis: A Critique of Hitler’s Willing Executioners,” New Left Review 224 (July–August 1997): 39–87.
103. Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory, 3.
104. Stef Craps, Postcolonial Witnessing: Trauma out of Bounds (New York: Palgrave-MacMillan, 2013); and Rebecca Saunders, Lamentation and Modernity in Literature, Philosophy, and Culture (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 15.
105. For a range of sociologically-oriented perspectives in postcolonial trauma studies, see Ron Eyerman and Giuseppe Sciortino, eds., The Cultural Trauma of Decolonization: Colonial Returnees (London and New York: Palgrave-MacMillan, 2019).
106. Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory.
107. Craps, Postcolonial Witnessing; Crapsand GertBeulens, eds., “Postcolonial Trauma Novels,” special issue, Studies in the Novel40, no. 1–2 (2008); and Lucy Bond, Stef Craps, and Pieter Vermeulen, Memory Unbound: Tracing the Dynamics of Memory Studies (New York: Berghahn, 2016).
108. Astrid Erll, “Traveling Memory,” Parallax 17.4 (2011): 4–18; and TerriTomsky, “From Sarajevo to 9/11: Traveling Memory and the Trauma Economy,” Parallax17, no. 4 (2011): 49–60. Max Silverman’s study of what he calls “palimpsest memory” illuminates how the composite structure of the “buried” or repressed past overlays (and underlies) the present (and vice versa) as well as a “number of different moments, hence producing a chain of signification which draws together disparate spaces and times.” By virtue of this hybrid form, two disparate phenomena “are shown to be profoundly connected, so that what one might have thought of as distinct moments in time and space are recomposed to create a different spatio-temporal configuration.” In effect, what the palimpsest concept “captures most completely,” for Silverman, is “the superimposition and productive interaction of different inscriptions and the spatialization of time central to the work of memory.” Max Silverman, Palimpsestic Memory: The Holocaust and Colonialism in French and Francophone Fiction and Film (New York: Berghahn Books, 2013), 3–4.
109. Rick Crownshaw, Jane Kilby, and Antony Rowland, eds., The Future of Memory (New York: Berghahn Books, 2011).
110. See Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela, A Human Being Died That Night: A South African Woman Confronts the Legacy of Apartheid (New York: Mariner Books, 2004); and Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela, ed., Breaking Intergenerational Cycles of Repetition: A Global Dialogue on Historical Trauma and Memory (Cologne, Germany: Budrich Academic Press, 2016).
111. Beulens, Durrant, and Eaglestone, Future of Trauma Theory.
112. Kaplan, Climate Trauma; Lucy Bond, Ben de Bruyn, and Jessica Rapson, Planetary Memory in Contemporary American Fiction (Abingdon: Routledge, 2018); Maria Roca Lizarazu and Rebekah Vince, “Memory Studies Goes Planetary: Interview with Stef Craps,” Exchanges: The Interdisciplinary Research Journal 5, no. 2 (2018): 1–15; and Stef Craps and Rick Crownshaw, “Introduction: The Rising Tide of Climate Change Fiction,” Studies in the Novel 50, no. 1 (Spring 2018): 1–8. Craps and Crownshaw’s various collaborations in the 2010s offer a lens on issues and subfields in trauma and memory and trauma studies. See, for example, their 2012 roundtable with Pieter Vermeulen, Ortwin de Graef, Andreas Huyssen, and Vivian Liska in Stef Craps, et al., “Dispersal and Redemption: The Future Dynamics of Memory Studies; A Roundtable,” Memory Studies 5, no. 2 (2012): 223–239; and their 2018 roundtable with Jennifer Wenzel, Rosanne Kennedy, and Claire Colebrook in Stef Craps, et al., “Memory Studies and the Anthropocene: A Roundtable,” Memory Studies 11, no. 4(2018): 498–515.
113. Deborah P. Britzman, Lost Subjects, Contested Objects: Toward a Psychoanalytic Inquiry of Learning (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998).
114. Kimberle Williams Crenshaw, “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color,” Stanford Law Review 43, no. 6 (July 1991): 1241–1299. For a thumbnail sketch and list of canonical works, see Patrice Douglass, Selamawit D. Terrefe, and Frank B. Wilderson III, “Afro-Pessimism,” Oxford Bibliographies, modified August 28, 2018. Among the more recent references, the entry lists Dionne Brand, A Map to the Door of No Return: Notes to Belonging (Toronto: Vintage, 2002); Matthieu Chapman, Anti-Black Racism in Early Modern English Drama: The Other “Other” (London: Routledge, 2017); Patrice Douglass and Frank B. Wilderson, “The Violence of Presence: Metaphysics in a Blackened World,” The Black Scholar 3, no. 4 (Winter 2013): 117–123; Lewis R. Gordon, Bad Faith and Antiblack Racism (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1995); Saidiya Hartman, Lose Your Mother; Jared Sexton, “Afro-Pessimism: The Unclear Word,” Rhizomes 29 (2016); Sharpe, In the Wake; Selamawit D. Terrefe, “Phantasmagoria: Or, The World Is a Haunted Plantation,” The Feminist Wire, October 10, 2012; Sylvia Wynter, “No Humans Involved: An Open Letter to My Colleagues,” Forum N. H. I.: Knowledge for the 21st Century 1, no. 1 (Fall 1994): 1–11; Frank B. Wilderson, Incognegro: A Memoir of Exile and Apartheid (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008); and Wilderson, Afropessimism. Names not mentioned in the bibliography but nevertheless pivotal to conversations about Afro-pessimism include Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me (New York: Random House, 2015); David Marriott, On Black Men (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000); David Marriott, Haunted Life: Visual Culture and Black Modernity (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2007); Achille Mbembe, Necropolitics (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019); Fred Moten, In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003); Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study (Wivenhoe, NY: Minor Compositions, 2013); Tavia Nyong’o, “Black Survival in the Uchromatic Dark,” Feminist Wire, December 18, 2012; Claudia Rankine, Citizen: An American Lyric (Minneapolis: Graywolf Press, 2014); and Claudia Rankine, “The Condition of Black Life Is One of Mourning,” The New York Times, June 22, 2015.
115. Sharpe, In the Wake, 5.
116. Sharpe, In the Wake, 7; and Joy James and Costa Vargas, “Refusing Blackness-as-Victimization: Trayvon Martin and the Black Cyborgs,” in Pursuing Trayvon Martin: Historical Manifestations of Racial Dynamics, ed. George Yancy and Janine Jones (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2014), 193.
117. Sharpe, In the Wake, 7.
118. Sharpe, In the Wake, 5; and Saidiya Hartman, Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route (New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 2007), 6. In this connection, see also Ron Eyerman, Cultural Trauma: Slavery and the Formation of African American Identity (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001).
119. Sharpe, In the Wake, 3.
120. Sharpe, In the Wake, 8.
121. Sharpe 10–11 citing Frank B. Wilderson, Red, White, and Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 76.
122. Sharpe, In the Wake, 10.
123. Sharpe writes: “Despite knowing otherwise, we are often disciplined into thinking through and along lines that reinscribe our own annihilation, reinforcing and reproducing what Sylvia Wynter (1994, 70) has called our ‘narratively condemned status’”; Sharpe, In the Wake, 13.
124. Veena Das, Life and Words: Violence and the Descent into the Ordinary (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007); and Avery Gordon, Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007).
