Trauma, Therapy and Representation: Theory and Critical Reection NEREA ARRUTI

Certainly practice (in this case frequent re-evocation) keeps memories fresh and alive in the same manner in which a muscle often used remain efcient, but it is also true that a memory evoked too often, and expressed in the form of a story, tends to become xed in a stereotype, in a form tested by experience, crystallized, perfected, adorned, installing itself in the place of the raw memory and growing at its expense. Primo Levi1

For Primo Levi, the origin of the drive to write is to be found in an experience of trauma whose painful aftermath only narrative can alleviate, as illustrated in the epigraph to The Drowned and the Saved taken from Coleridges Ancient Mariner: Since then, at an uncertain hour/That agony returns,/And till my ghastly tale is told/This heart within me burns. Yet testimony raises issues no less complex than the trauma it seeks to represent. Giorgio Agamben reects on Primo Levis work in Remnants of Auschwitz by considering the limits between the human and the non-human, and their connection with language. Agambens thesis links testimony and the human: human beings are human insofar as they bear witness to the human.2 And, regarding the relationship between language and testimony: to bear witness is to place oneself in ones own language in the position of those who have lost it (RA, 161). The crucial question is how can we write trauma without ironing out its complexities? Bearing witness to a traumatic event is an intrinsically paradoxical gesture since, according to Agamben, the true witness is the non-human, to use Primo Levis term the Muselmann, whose loss comes to represent the very humanity of man (RA, 81). The aim of Agambens critical enquiry is to understand this aporia:
The Italian title of Survival in Auschwitz, If This is a Man, also has this meaning; the name man applies rst of all to a non-man, and the complete witness is he whose humanity has been wholly destroyed. The human being, Levis title Paragraph 30:1 (2007) 18

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implies, is the one who can survive the human being. If we give the name Levis paradox to the statement that the Muselmann is the complete witness, then understanding Auschwitz if such a thing is possible will coincide with understanding the sense and nonsense of this paradox. (RA, 82)

However, the notion of aporia is not necessarily negative and should be seen as a starting point for critical enquiry and provocation for thought. Rather than seeking to resolve the paradoxes with which traumatic experiences confront us, it is imperative to think through the complexities of the relationship between trauma and representation, and to question the extent to which such representation may be therapeutic. Let me begin by sketching the context in which such thinking must take place. The body of concepts and methods in trauma studies has been developed as a result of engaging with the Holocaust. Cathy Caruths pioneering work has to be contextualized as critically engaging with this historical event. Her formulation of the impossibility of knowing the traumatic event is based on the collapse of witnessing as developed by Dori Laub, whose work is informed by his own status as a witness and his work as a psychoanalyst with Holocaust survivors.3 This piece of research is part of the collection on testimony published in 1992 by Shelman Felman and Dori Laub that introduces an understanding of (this) historical trauma as an event without witnesses. This notion also informs Agambens work. Yet Agamben is highly critical of the fact that Felmans reading of Claude Lanzmanns work fails to interrogate the threshold between being inside and outside (RA, 356). As already stated, the theoretical tenets of trauma studies were shaped by the Holocaust and the notion of the event without witness would not have become prominent within the eld without academic research based on survivors testimony. Yet, as Agamben notes, ignoring the paradoxical nature of bearing witness has produced readings which erase the aporia of Auschwitz (RA, 12). Within the framework of questioning the critical tenets of trauma studies, Andreas Huyssen similarly challenges simplifying readings of Adorno which neglect his views that all reication is a mode of forgetting. As a consequence, Huyssen sees trauma studies locked into the sthetics of non-representability:
Given the wealth of Holocaust representations over the decades, I have become increasingly sceptical about demands that on principle posit an sthetics and an ethics of non-representability, often by drawing on a misreading of Adornos post-45 statement about poetry after Auschwitz. When acknowledging the limits

Trauma, Therapy and Representation: Theory and Critical Reection 3 of representation becomes itself an ideology, we are locked into a last ditch defense of modernist purity against the onslaught of new and old forms of representation, and ethics is in danger of being turned into moralizing against any form of representation that does not meet the assumed standard.4

The links both between trauma and representation and between trauma and temporality are important, not only fully to comprehend the process of the traumatic experience, but to contextualize present theoretical debates within trauma studies. Temporality is one of the cornerstones of trauma theory, as established in the already-mentioned highly inuential writings on trauma by Cathy Caruth.5 The impact of this is that the structure of the reception of trauma has shaped the study of trauma in the humanities, to the extent that it could be argued that the focus on temporality has become a rigidity within trauma studies. Trauma studies have become a reading machine within the academic repertoire of critical theories, whose critical assumptions, commonplaces and orthodoxies need to be challenged. The need to address these issues from an artistic or academic perspective has not diminished; on the contrary, in the current global situation, the ethical and political demands are greater than ever. It behoves us thus to ask how we can move the debate forward? If we place trauma studies within the context of a wider debate within the humanities as to the very role of and challenges faced by the humanities in academic institutions, a critical intervention by Christopher Fynsk sheds light as to possible directions. Indeed, the key issues raised by some of the articles in the present issue relate to these wider debates in the humanities, and specically to the future of theory, and we need to locate trauma studies within such wider debates. Fynsk points towards future directions, writing his proposal in the aftermath of a collective trauma, 9/11 in New York. Far from a hostile approach to theory or a proclamation of the end of theory, his contribution recognizes a shift to a different form of engagement with theory as a result of the institutional context of the humanities and the historical juncture post-9/11. In his text on the role of the humanities, Fynsk presents a move from (conceptual) theory to a thinking which above all is answerable:
Here, I will observe simply that fundamental research diverges from much theory in that it is always seeking the limits of its language in responding to that to which it seeks to answer: those dimensions of experience and symbolic expression that summon it (as a kind exigency for thought) and to which no concept will ever be quite adequate. Such research is impelled by its own neediness and its sense

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of being answerable, whereas theory, governed by the concept, proceeds with ever-expanding appropriations; fundamental research proceeds from encounter (always from a sense that something has happened to which it must answer), and it seeks encounter. In theory, there are no encounters.6

If, then, a future direction of the study of trauma is this move towards critical thought, we are moving closer to Wittgensteins view of therapy as an exploration of the workings of language, as pushing against the limits of language through encountering bumps in understanding. Therapy is a method and procedure of critical enquiry rather than the goal. In Fynsks proposal this would constitute a line of research identied as fundamental research in the humanities (CL, viii), namely research that is specically of the humanities (CL, ix). What does fundamental research in point of fact embody? By proposing an investigation into the nature of being human, Fynsk makes a link between the human and the humanities which offers a clear parallel with Agambens philosophy of the human. Fynsks proposal for fundamental research in the humanities rests on a consequent thought of language. He notes, Wittgenstein suggested that the only possible ethical language would be one that brought into play the existence of language itself (CL, 67). The ethical and political context of his critical challenge necessitates this reection on language in the world we inhabit after the attack on the World Trade Centre. Trauma, therapy and representation are interconnected by exploring these limits of language. Before 9/11 became the event it has become an event endlessly played and re-played, xed in time and meaning 11 September was the date associated with the 1973 Pinochet coup d tat. The e Chilean writer based in the USA, Ariel Dorfman, speaks about the uncanny similarity between the mourning without bodies in both collective traumas, as he writes against American isolationism.7 In the Chilean academic context the most important contribution to post-dictatorial critical thought has been that of Nelly Richard, but Richard is a theoretician whose work has major importance beyond the disciplinary boundaries of Latin American Studies. Jean Franco reects on the fact that Richards analysis of language, representation and debate where conict and real differences are levelled out is relevant for post-9/11 North America.8 The core issues are the same despite very clear historical and political differences. Richards intervention is highly signicant when discussing directions and approaches to the study of trauma in the humanities.

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Historically, we have the Chilean 1973 trauma and the postdictatorship period when, according to Richard, a process of failed mourning takes place. Following the distinction made by Freud between melancholy and mourning, the Chilean post-dictatorial epoch is one lived under the sign of melancholy, a state in which the distinction between subject and object collapses.9 In Freud the melancholic state is contradictory and conictive.10 Following Freud, Agamben denes melancholy as the paradox of an intention to mourn that precedes and anticipates the lost object and the imaginative capacity to make an unobtainable object appear as if lost.11 The pathological relationship with the lost object creates a never-ending recurrent temporal cycle in melancholia. Nelly Richard stresses the notion of engaging with critical thought in a two-fold move:
How does one articulate a reexive distance that stands back from the simple testimonial realism of the affectively lived, such that the hierarchy inherent in the concept does not at the same time erase the subjective texture of what is lived and suffered? How to re-employ signicant articulations and operative connections so that critical thought may reactivate itself as such, but without letting the promise of a recovery of thought merely accommodate loss? How, in sum, to express the loss of sense, but without renouncing to critically reconjugate the sense of loss? (RPCT, 275)

When discussing the connection between trauma, mourning and melancholy, Richard sets limits between the sites of academic culture (the professional universe of discursive thinking) and intellectual practice (criticisms networks of social intervention and public debate) (RPCT, 277). Fynsks critical response reects Richards distinction between academic interiority and exteriority, and the need for academia to engage with the public sphere. In this sense the debates around the canonical texts in trauma studies such as Felman, Laub and Caruths are part of academic self-reexiveness and thus part of a closed discourse. As such trauma studies has deployed a repertoire of reading machines within the academic context. A possible alternative is to see critical thought as a therapeutic process. The standardization of the representation of trauma as described by Andreas Huyssen is elaborated upon in Richards critical analysis of refractory art during the Chilean dictatorship. For Richard, the forms of representation created by this group of artists are not domesticated and do not conform to the symmetrical opposite of

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ofcial language and modes of representation, and they resist being inscribed within a Manichan vision:
A reader faced with communicable but not easily processed signs, signs conserving in their interior a linguistic memory of the clashes born from repeated disarmings of meaning. These clashes inscribed resistance and rebellion in the interior of the word, generating a memory of trauma in solidarity with accidents and deformations of its graphing as a wounded word.12

The urgency to tell the story is present after all trauma, but critical reception varies a great deal in terms of focus and coverage if we look at the global mapping of trauma. When focusing on locations of trauma the title of the collection Trauma at Home: After 9/11 exemplies some of the tensions in geography with regard to the selection and coverage of traumatic events. The collection offers a nuanced vision of the meanings of home for instance an article by James Berger offers a strong critique of binary oppositions in the war on terror13 and yet the title of the collection resonates with xed isolationist views of 9/11 after the event. The prevalence of certain traumas over others and the selective view of world trauma, as in the coverage of the Rwandan genocide, are addressed in the present issue by Audrey Smalls article which focuses on the Rwandan genocide as written by African writers and understood in the African context their written works interpreted as the expression of the duty to remember. No memory project works in isolation; many projects now engage with international networks and indeed engage with theory about trauma; their transnational and theoretical dimensions are interwoven, and critical thought has an impact on ethical and political debates, as exemplied in Huyssens interventions in on-going debates on memory in the Argentinian context. There are undoubtedly intrinsic ethical and political questions in collective trauma and ensuing memory work that should inform academic debates. Let me go back to the beginning of this introduction, returning to the challenge posed by Primo Levis words in the epigraph to the process of stagnation of memory. Here creativity rests on engaging with the traumatic event without reication. The aim is the same in Nelly Richards critical approach to represent the loss of sense by engaging critically with a sense of loss. In the interaction between trauma and engagement two of the contributions to this special issue, the articles by Susannah Radstone and Bob Plant, engage critically with trauma studies. Radstone gives a background leading to, and offers a critique of, the rise of trauma studies within the institutional

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context of the humanities, Plant on the other hand contributes with a philosophical investigation of testimony. The articles by Audrey Small and Nerea Arruti originate from encounters with memory projects in Africa and Latin America and how these projects engage with and can contribute to wider theoretical debates on trauma, specically the role of art in the struggle for memory. The articles by Richard Kearney and James Agar analyse creativity and trauma from very different viewpoints. Kearney adopts the perspective of the cathartic function of story-telling when dealing with trauma while Agar focuses on temporality and creativity in writing Aids. The impact of Aids on the body and the writing process, which is described by Agar in his article, is precisely that factor which leads to an implosion in the narrative of the autobiographical account Before Night Falls by the Cuban writer Reinaldo Arenas. This central event shifts Arenass narrative towards a representation of illness as a shattering glass symbolizing the lack of protection offered by the body: Something very strange had occurred in the room: the glass of water on my nightstand had exploded without my touching it; it was shattered.14 This image of the glass shattering mirrors Agars view that the nature of the trauma of being HIV-positive is simultaneously both within and without the body and makes a distinction between writing Aids and not writing about Aids. I would argue that the same urge exists in Nelly Richards critical practice that can be formulated as writing trauma rather than writing about trauma. There is an ethical and political need to engage in critical thought; the insubordination of signs in art cannot be studied critically in an academic culture that mirrors Manichan forms of representation; the interconnection between critical thought and art cannot erase the shattering of the glass, the wounded word. NOTES
1 Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved (New York, Random House, 1989), 24. 2 Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive (New York, Zone Books, 1999), 121; hereafter abbreviated in the text as RA. 3 Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis and History (New York, Routledge, 1992). 4 Andreas Huyssen, Lecture on Resistance to Memory: The Uses and Abuses of Public Oblivion (Porto Alegre, 2004), quoted in Memory under Construction (Buenos Aires, La Marca Editora, 2005), 266. 5 Cathy Caruth denes trauma in the following terms: The pathology consists, rather, solely in the structure of its experience or reception: the event is not

Paragraph assimilated or experienced fully at the time, but only belatedly, in its repeated possession of the one who experiences it (Trauma and Experience: Introduction, in Trauma: Exploration in Memory, edited by Cathy Caruth (Baltimore, John Hopkins University Press, 1995), 4). Christopher Fynsk, The Claim of Language: A Case for the Humanities (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 2004), xi; hereafter abbreviated in the text as CL. Ariel Dorfman, The Last September 11, Chile: the Other September 11 (Melbourne, Ocean Press, 2003). Jean Franco, Foreword, in Nelly Richard, Cultural Residues (Minnesota, University of Minnesota Press, 2004), viii. Nelly Richard, The Recongurations of Post-dictatorship Critical Thought, Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies 9:3 (2000), 27382; hereafter abbreviated in the text as RPCT. The conict results from the fact that The analogy with mourning led us to conclude that he had suffered a loss in regard to an object; what he tells us points to a loss in regard to his ego (Sigmund Freud, Mourning and Melancholia in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud: Volume XIV (London, Hogarth Press, 1957), 247). Giorgio Agamben, Stanzas: Word and Phantasm in Western Culture (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 20. Nelly Richard, The Insubordination of Signs (Durham, Duke University Press, 2004) 56. James Berger, There is No Backhand to This, Trauma at Home: After 9/11 (Lincoln and London, University of Nebraska, 2003), 529. Reinaldo Arenas, Before Night Falls (New York, Viking, 1993), 314.

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