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Alan Jay Richard

Trauma and Disaffection: Plasticity After Writing

In what we read today, in what is written, the body is changing. After having undergone a

kind of disappearance into code and of the symbolic, appearing there as a bare and featureless

site for inscription with only a problematic ontological status, and then having been

disarticulated without remainder into a nexus of discursive practices and performance, the body

has re-emerged by way of multiple challenges to this regime. The insistent disruption of trauma,

of an immemorial blow that pierces the fragile screen of symbolic coherence and insists on its

priority precisely by its resistance to inscription, is one of these challenges. Or so it is written, in

texts that declare themselves to be written against the regime of writing, in the name of an escape

from the repetition of law and transgression, of mediation and positionality, that had threatened

to foreclose any possibility of an explosive, revolutionary, or decisive disruption other than the

disruption that has always already occurred.

Within this growing corpus of texts, Catherine Malabou’s work is especially important.

Malabou, a student of Jacques Derrida and Jean-Luc Marion, draws neuroscience and trauma

theory together, shares her mentors’ fidelity to a radical politics (Counterpath), and offers a what

she calls a motor scheme that accounts for the emergence of the regime of writing, persuasively

critiques it without thereby returning to a pre-structuralist metaphysics, and forms an interpretive

tool for reconceptualizing liberatory practice. She calls this motor schema “plasticity.” In her

recent work, however, Malabou challenges any simple appropriation of this motor scheme for

liberatory practice. Here, “explosive plasticity,” rather than signifying the embrained body’s

capacity to escape its given forms and set out on truly novel paths forged by joyful affects,

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becomes the “destructive plasticity” of trauma, an irreparable deformation that creates a new self

indifferent to itself, bereft of affective valuation and so incapable of political decision, without a

future, the living embodiment of the death drive. In fact, destructive plasticity may solidify

biopolitical control through the proliferation of accidents that produce post-traumatic subjects as

incapable of resistance as they are equipped to become the agents of violence. The body, if more

fully emancipated in Malabou’s work from the regime of writing than in previous theoretical

work on affect and trauma and thus no longer, as Michel Foucault would have it, trapped in the

soul as in a prison (Discipline & Punish 30), finds itself trapped in its own vulnerable

materiality. How to wrest free of this new prison, when the death drive is so fully embodied as to

leave no way out? How to imagine liberatory practice within a regime that can wield plasticity

against itself in a way that resists interpretation? How to write this impossible transition?

Trauma in and of Writing

In a sense, trauma is the regime of writing’s immanent lament rather than a response to it

or refusal of it issued in the twilight of its influence on theory. The “grammatological” science of

writing, which Jacques Derrida explicitly formulated in 1967, emerges from underlying motifs

that made of writing more than writing in the narrow sense, that made of it the materiality of the

signifier, the decoupling of signifier and signified, the simultaneous desire for and impossibility

of presence that constitutes the possibility of any signification, and perpetual deferral. These

motifs had been circulating since World War II, primarily in key texts of structuralism. A subset

of the latter also confront the phenomenon of trauma. Strongly and explicitly indebted to both

Sigmund Freud and Roman Jakobson, these texts consistently identify trauma with signification

itself, with a symbolic order that necessarily produces a never-present lost origin. I have selected

Jacques Derrida’s early texts on Freud and Levi-Strauss, and Levi-Strauss’s early texts on

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shamanic healing and on Marcel Mauss to show this emergence because (1) Derrida’s early work

represents the fullest recognition of what Catherine Malabou, with whose rehabilitation of the

body this essay concludes, calls “a gradual movement that began with structuralism and found its

mooring in linguistics, genetics, and cybernetics” (Dusk of Writing 57) that, if not beginning with

the texts of Levi-Strauss examined here, nevertheless passed through them on its way to the

semantic enlargement that Derrida more consistently articulates,1 and (2) Derrida’s early texts on

Levi-Strauss complement his early essay on Freud inasmuch as the former do not mention

trauma but interact with those texts in which Levi-Strauss explicitly discusses it, while the latter

names trauma as such and draws on texts of Freud crucial to Levi-Strauss’s. These texts thus

intersect in a way that renders the immanence of trauma to the regime of writing more clearly

than would any of them read in isolation.

Freud’s own involvement with trauma – the graphic signifier itself, identical in German

and in English, and the phenomena gathered into it – dates from a paper co-authored with Breuer

“On the Psychical Mechanism of Hysterical Phenomena: A Preliminary Communication” in

December 1892 and appearing in January and February of the following year in the

Neurologisches Centralblatt. This text poses a set of problems concerning the body, the psyche,

and memory that inform Freud’s first attempt at a naturalistic account of the psyche in the 1895

Project for a Scientific Psychology and indeed the entirety of his subsequent work. They are the

starting point for Derrida’s “Freud and the Scene of Writing” and Levi-Strauss’s account of

trauma and signification in Structural Anthropology.

Freud and Breuer’s “Preliminary Communication” is indebted to the work of Jean-Martin

Charcot, under whom Freud had studied. Although the extent of this indebtedness is not

acknowledged in the Communication, Freud himself explicitly acknowledges it in a lecture

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summarizing the same material, which was delivered to a meeting of the Wiener medizinischer

Club during the month following the Communication’s completion. Freud’s lecture characterizes

the argument of his article with Breuer as “a continuation” of Charcot’s work the “traumatic

paralyses” associated with hysteria (SE II: 287). Freud asks his listeners to consider “the case of

a person who is subjected to trauma without having been ill previously” and lacking any

“hereditary taint” (288). The trauma poses a real threat to life, does not result in a brain

concussion or serious injury, and involves a specific body part – for example, a billet of wood

falls on a workman’s shoulder and knocks him down. After a few weeks or months, he wakes up

and the arm is hanging limp. He begins experiencing attacks in which he becomes delirious and

experiences a hallucinatory repetition of the accident. Freud asserts that Charcot explains this

process by inducing similar paralyses in hysterical patients by means of hypnotic suggestion, and

suggests that, while the workman was not under hypnosis at the time of his accident, “we may

assume that he was in a special state of mind during the trauma; and Charcot is inclined to equate

that affect with the artificially induced state of hypnosis” (289). Here, Freud says, Charcot’s

contribution stops.

Charcot had accepted the association of mental disease with the supposedly weak bodies

of women and so-called hereditary degenerates, but Freud recognizes in his work a challenge to

the notion that hysteria can be attributed to congenitally or biologically pathological bodies.

Charcot had identified cases of male hysteria among unquestionably masculine workers –

“stokers, engine-drivers, victims of railway or other accidents” with no apparent hereditary taint

after sustaining “a blow on the head, severe shaking, or general shock” where “neither

alcoholism, nor plumbism (lead poisoning), existed” (Lectures 224). Thus, Charcot insists that

“hysteria may exist even in a robust adult man, in an artisan, neither of delicate nor nervous

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organization” (318). Charcot claims to have been able to reproduce hysterical paralysis of limbs

using hypnosis both with verbal suggestion and “by sharply, yet not very forcibly, striking this

region with the palm of the hand” (304). Although his male hysterics were not in a condition of

hypnotic sleep at the time of their accidents, Charcot suggests that “the mental condition

occasioned by the emotion, by the Nervous Shock experienced at the moment of the accident and

for some time after, is not equivalent” to the “cerebral condition” obtained by hypnosis (305). As

a result, “the production of an image, or of a mental representation,” which is “an indispensable

preliminary condition” for moving the paralyzed limb has “been so seriously affected as to

render its formation impossible – in consequence of an inhibitory action exercised over the

cortical motor centres by the fixed idea of motor weakness” (309-310). The “nervous shock”

responsible for these cases of hysteria, distinct from “traumatic shock,” is generated “by some

strong emotion, a fright, a feeling of terror determined by an accident, especially when this

accident menaces life,” inducing “a peculiar mental condition” linked to “the hypnotic state”

during which “the mental spontaneity, the will, or the judgment, is more or less suppressed or

obscured” (335), rendering the subject highly suggestible.

Charcot attributes the concept of “nervous shock” to Herbert Page, a physician for the

London and North Western Railway Company, who had argued in his Injuries of the Spine and

Spinal Cord Without Apparent Mechanical Lesion, and Nervous Shock, in their Surgical and

Medico-Legal Aspects, that many cases of apparent spinal injury after railway accidents were in

fact generated from “fright, and from fright only” (Injuries 162). Page contrasts the traumatic

shock encountered in hospitals, caused by the failure of the heart to supply sufficient blood to

peripheral tissues after an injury, with nervous shock, with which it bears superficial

resemblances. Page describes the horror of being trapped in a railway car during a collision,

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emphasizing suddenness, helplessness, loud noise, confusion, and cries of injured passengers,

and argues that these sights and sounds combine “to produce a profound impression on the

nervous system” (163). The patient with traumatic hysteria is neither malingering nor suffering

from “concussion to the nervous system,” which would merit damages from the railroad (86). He

is “really suffering” because “his whole nervous system has received a shock” (164), but the

cause is “the impalpable element of alarm, which must be measured by the events of the accident

itself, and by the temperament of the individual” and not the “bodily injury” (165). For Page,

nervous shock is not a mater of “bodily injury” because the latter, while real, has “purely mental

causes” (183). This distinction between the body and the psyche, between “concussion to the

nervous system” and “nervous shock” is also a distinction within the nervous system itself. The

distinction hinges on Page’s notion of “nerve force.” According to Page, “every organ and

function is subservient” in “a man in the prime of life” to that man’s “nerve force,” and “shock is

essentially a depression or metamorphosis of nerve force” (169). In nervous shock, “there is loss

of control and enfeeblement of the power of the will” including “loss of the habitual power to

suppress and keep in due subjection the sensations - - associated with the various functions of the

organic life” (191). In higher organisms, evolution has increased the complexity of the brain and

distinguished it from the peripheral nervous system, rendering the ordinary role of these internal

sensations in the behavioral economy of the organism less pronounced. As a result of this

development “towards a higher state of intellectual activity,” human beings have become “more

and more unconscious of the sensations” of the body’s organs and structures (Ibid.). Given

“perfect health of body and stability of mind,” these sensations “play little part in the sentient life

of the individual” (192). But the structures having to do with higher intellectual processes are the

most recently evolved, the least deeply organized, and the least stable. In circumstances that

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disturb this stability, these internal sensations “step out of their natural obscurity, and become the

foci of the uncontrolled and misdirected attention of the mind” (193). Because of this, Page

argues, the prospect of legal redress actually harms the patient, since

an unconscious or willful yielding to every sensation that may arise, the

abandonment of the conscious self to the thralldom of the morbid state, the

enjoyment, so to speak of the luxury, not of woe exactly, but of gloomy hopes and

feelings and fears, pave the way for the impossibility of regaining, even in the

best of circumstances, that complete mental stability and continuous self-control

which are the happy appendage of perfect bodily and mental health. (205).

The sequence Charcot identifies in his etiology of traumatic hysteria echoes the sequence

Page outlines in his concept of “nervous shock”: an event of terrifying significance, an

overwhelming affect, loss of judgment and will, appearance of bodily symptom. When a fall or a

crash injures the body, that injury is not the cause of these symptoms, but rather the association

of that blow with the judgment that one is absolutely helpless to prevent a threat to life itself.

This judgment releases a powerful affect responding to its significance, and this affect

incapacitates the will and judgment that would normally regulate and subordinate the body. The

concept of “nervous shock” separates the “psychic” or “mental” from the body and

simultaneously places it in the body, specifically in the brain and the nervous system. The brain

is where the body loses and finds itself. “Nervous shock” scrambles the complex, delicate, and

phylogenetically late function of the brain that subordinates the body to the will and separates the

body’s internal sensing of itself from awareness, but it does so only inasmuch as this complex

and delicate function recognizes something in the occurrence, releasing the affect that

overwhelms it. The nervous system induces in itself the “hypnoid” state that Charcot believes to

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be responsible for the development of the symptoms of traumatic hysteria that hypnosis enables

him to artificially induce. A judgment, then, results in a condition that impedes judgment,

exposes the brain to the body’s sensations, and separates the brain’s complex and delicate

function of judging and willing in a lasting way from the patient’s nervous system, which is no

longer subject to that function. Charcot leaves open the question of how this judgment arises.

Freud, for his part, will not.

Freud and Breuer’s “Preliminary Communication” begins with the observation that

patients seldom remember the precipitating cause of their hysterical symptoms unless they are in

a hypnotic trance. The use of hypnosis to identify these causes has “taught us that external events

determine the pathology of hysteria to a far greater extent than is known or recognized” (SE II:

4). This is obvious in the case of traumatic hysteria, as Charcot had shown. But even seemingly

unrelated symptoms are also linked to a precipitating trauma, which can be identified by rigorous

methods of investigation. Sometimes, the link is “a ‘symbolic’ relation” of the kind “healthy

people form in dreams” (5). But since a link can always be identified, all hysteria can be

understood as traumatic. In drawing this conclusion, Freud and Breuer substantially extend the

range of symptoms that can be regarded as traumatic in origin. Since traumatic neuroses

themselves are not caused by the injuries sustained in the accidents that precipitate them, but by

“the affect of fright – the psychical trauma” that accompanies these injuries (6), “any experience

which calls up distressing affects – such as those of fright, anxiety, or physical pain – may

operate as a trauma” (Ibid.). In common hysteria, the symptom is often provoked by “a number

of partial traumas forming a group” and accumulating as “components of a single story of

suffering” (Ibid.). In other cases, seemingly trivial events combine with the “actually operative

event” or occur at a “time of peculiar susceptibility” to transform these events into traumas.

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Traumatic events, however, are not mere triggering mechanisms but act “like a foreign body

which long after its entry must continue to be regarded as an agent that is still at work” (Ibid.).

When the memory of the event can be provoked, its accompanying affect aroused, and the

patient can both describe the event in detail and “put the affect into words”, the symptom can be

made to disappear permanently. Hysterics, then, “suffer mainly from reminiscences” (7).

Freud and Breuer then seek to investigate why hysterical memories are not subject to the

normal erosion of affective memory. They speculate that the most important factor in this

erosion is the energetic discharge of the affect. Tears or acts of revenge discharge affects but if a

reaction is suppressed, “the affect remains attached to the memory” (8). Language can substitute

for action, for instance in cases of lamentation or confession. But without a reaction of some

kind, the intensity of affect remains attached to the memory. In some cases, a traumatic memory

comes to be associated with other contradictory experiences, such as the experience of safety

after an accident, or a reminder of self-worth after a humiliation and its affect blunted. But

hysterical memories lack this association. They both persist with “astonishing freshness” and

“the whole of their affective coloring” and are “not at the patient’s disposal” when the patient is

“in a normal psychical state” (9). Normally vague or absent, these memories become unusually

vivid and affect-laden during hysterical attacks or under hypnosis.

Two sets of conditions have the power to create hysterical memories. The first have to do

with traumas the nature of which excludes adequate reaction because of excessive force, social

circumstances, or the patient’s deliberate suppression. The second have to do with the patient’s

psychical state at the time of the precipitating events, either under conditions of paralyzing fright

or in a “semi-hypnotic twilight state” (11). Both sets of conditions exclude immediate reactions

and also prevent association between these memories and the patient’s larger network of

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memories. Freud and Breuer write that their experience has convinced them that “the splitting of

consciousness” occurs in every hysteria and that “a tendency to such dissociation” and “the

emergence of abnormal states of consciousness” is “the basic phenomenon of this neurosis” (12).

The familiar thesis that hypnosis is an artificial hysteria can thus be reversed, since hypnotic

states are the essence of hysteria. The mechanism of the “talking cure” can be explained by this

etiological mechanism. The verbalization of the memory and affect while they are being

experienced in a hypnoid state both enables the affect “to find a way out through speech” and

“subjects it to associative correction” (15).

Here, the sequence that Charcot proposed has undergone some revision. A bodily shock

is no longer required, though an “external event” or series of events is still regarded as essential.

The development of the illness begins with the distressing affect itself. Second, the precipitating

affect that splits the consciousness also deprives the normal, waking consciousness of any

memory of the occurrence that generated that affect. This memory can only be reached when

that subject’s will and judgment are suspended in a hypnotic or hysterical state, and when that

happens, the subject experiences it not as a memory but as a repetition. Finally, the full

verbalization of this memory, the emergence of the “external event” that determined it,

eliminates the symptom. Instead of bodily blow, terrifying significance, affect, loss of will and

judgment, and appearance of the symptom, traumatic neurosis would be a matter of external

event, distressing affect, splitting, loss of the external event, appearance of the symptom, (re)

discovery of the event, disappearance of the symptom. Indeed, the tendency of the external event

to be linked symbolically rather than mimetically to the symptom, together with the potential for

it to become associated with subsequent “seemingly trivial” events, largely decomposes it into its

therapeutic discovery. The disappearance of the symptom becomes the sole evidence that the

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“actually operative” traumatic event has been located. From the perspective of the analyst and

the patient, then, the sequence is: puzzling symptom, splitting, distressing affect, precipitating

event, and elimination of the symptom.

This knot involving the body, the psyche, and memory sharpen in Freud’s subsequent

work, and the status afforded to trauma in this work marks the shifting authority of the body. The

1895 Project proposes “a psychology which shall be a natural science” in which psychic

processes can be understood in terms of “quantitatively determined states of specifiable

particles” (SE I: 355).2 Nevertheless, Freud declares that his approach “is derived directly from

pathological clinical observations,” particularly “in hysteria and obsessional neuroses” where the

processes of “stimulus, substitution, conversion and discharge - - directly suggested the notion of

viewing neuronic excitation as quantities in a condition of flow” (356). The “starting point”

given by what were for Freud ultimately traumatic neuroses makes it possible for him to “lay

down a basic principle of neuronic activity,” which “asserts that neurons tend to divest

themselves of quantity” (Ibid.). A neuronic system functions primarily to discharge the quantities

of stimulus that a neuronic system receives from its milieu, and avoidance or flight are the initial

mechanisms. But “as the internal complexity of the organism increases,” the organism receives

endogenous stimuli from the interior of the body that “give rise to the major needs: hunger,

respiration, and sexuality,” and since the system cannot avoid or flee these, it can only discharge

them “if certain definite conditions are realized in the external world” (357). This forces the

neuronic system “to abandon its original trend towards inertia” and “tolerate a store of quantity

sufficient to meet the demands for specific action” (358).

The Project proceeds by elaborating these two principles, as Freud hypothesizes that

stimuli pass into or “cathect” neurons near the body’s surface that afford no resistance but that

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split large quantities into smaller, manageable quantities. These smaller, split quantities pass into

and cathect multiple neurons in the body’s interior (especially in the brain) equipped with

“contact barriers” that resist stimuli and are altered only by sufficient quantities, facilitating the

creation of experience-dependent connections between specific neurons and making the

pathways cut by stimuli through chains of contact barriers “the vehicles of memory and

presumably, therefore, of psychical processes in general” (360). The neurons equipped with

alterable and therefore sculptable contact barriers are “out of contact with the external world”

(366), but this “contrivance” occasionally fails, forcing large quantities into the interior neuronic

system, inducing the sensation of pain and producing “permanent facilitations - - like a stroke of

lightning” (368).

They are, however, in direct contact with the interior of the body, where stimuli “arise

continuously” and “accumulate,” reaching levels at which they pass through contact barriers

“leading up the nucleus” of the system (377). This produces a tension or an urgency, which can

only be discharged by “an alteration in the external world,” beginning “in the human organism”

with the infant’s cry that results in the “specific action” of an “extraneous helper” (379). After

this, the cathexis in the nucleus is discharged, and the organism experiences satisfaction. This

experience creates a facilitation between the neurons in the nucleus and those cathected by the

stimuli reaching the interior system through the surface of the body, corresponding to the

“perception of an object” and the motor discharge: an object image and a “motor [or

kinaesthetic] image” (380). And it is also this “interior” mechanism that enables the organism to

recognize “hostile” or painful objects, since the excessive rush of stimuli into the surface excites

“secretory” or “key neurons” that “cause the generation in the interior of the body of something

which acts as a stimulus on the endogenous paths of conduction” and facilitates connections

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between the perception of the object and an unpleasant urge for discharge, which is the “affect”

(382). Once these facilitations are laid down, subsequent perceptions of desired and hostile

objects are capable of generating, respectively, “wishful states” and “affects” (383).

This introduces a further complication. When urges demanding satisfaction arise from the

accumulation of quantity from the body’s interior, stimuli associated with the prior experiences

of satisfaction or pain generate wishful states or affects demanding discharge. But this demand,

when the accompanying motor image results in compulsive bodily movement, can damage the

organism. The neurons in the nucleus of the body’s interior are receiving constant cathexis and

the latter only demands discharge when it reaches a certain threshold either by summation (urge)

or sudden influx (affect), and Freud calls the totality of cathected neurons in the nucleus at any

given time, which includes “a permanent portion” and “a changing one,” the “the ego” (384).

Since the pathways taken by stimuli are influenced by the neurons simultaneously cathected, this

constantly cathected network makes it possible for motor discharge to be deferred by “lateral

cathexis” (385) that “binds” the stimulus to the ego (396). If a hostile memory or a wishful

memory is stimulated, and if motor discharge and therefore the affective flooding of the neurons

is pointless because the situation as a whole doesn’t warrant it, discharge can occur along

pathways facilitated by the cluster of currently cathected neurons – by the ego – as a “defence”

against or “inhibition” of the affect (386). Inhibition allows “analysis” to take place, during

which the organism “judges” the relationship between the memory and the current stimulus,

seeking “a state of identity” (394). This “secondary process” modifies the “primary process” of

urge/affect, perception, and motor activity.

In sleep, the network of neurons that are co-cathected as the ego is reduced as are the

endogenous charges associated with the urges, and the body is in a state of “motor paralysis, a

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paralysis of the will” (399). Thus, in dreams, associations no longer follow the ego’s “bound”

paths. Dreams “mostly follow old facilitations” (402) along “a whole chain of associations” that

includes not just conscious images but “unconscious intermediate links” (403). Although waking

life also follows the same types of chains, dreams differ from waking consciousness in “the ease

with which quantity is displaced in them” (404). Hysteria mimics this “unbound” primary

process. Hysterical symptoms combine compulsion with “excessively intense ideas” with

“results which, on the one hand, cannot be suppressed and, on the other, cannot be understood”

(405). Although excessively intense ideas are normal as when, for example, someone is

frightened of carriage rides after having been involved in a carriage accident, but these ideas are

“comprehensible” while hysterical ideas have “the appearance of absurdity and incongruity”

(406). Moreover, these compulsive ideas – ideas attached to memories that are appropriate to

them – do not result in lasting compulsions but fade with time. To effect a cure, analysis traces

the hysterical idea to another idea that is “comprehensible to the subject and can even be fought

against” (Ibid.), and in this way eliminates the symptom. The hysterical idea, then, functions as a

“symbol” for the memory that lies at the origin of the hysterical symptom. Freud cites the soldier

who sacrifices himself for a piece of colored cloth on a pole as an example of how symbols

function normally. The hysteric’s symbol differs from this because the symbol itself is

“compulsive” while the symbolized is “repressed” and completely unavailable to the subject.

This process is “one of displacement, such as we have come to know in dreams, and is hence a

primary process” (407).

The determinants of repression and displacement in hysterical symbols, Freud argues, are

memory-images that “arouse a distressing affect” and – in a substantial departure from the

etiology of hysteria contained in the Preliminary Communication with Breuer – those that “relate

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to sexual life” (408). Defensive lateral cathexis is the mechanism susbserving repression, and the

strength of this defensive cathexis is evident both in the hysteric’s resistance to any activity of

thought in relation to the symbolized memory-image even after it has been made partially

conscious, and in the compulsion attached to the symbol that displaces it. This defensive lateral

cathexis makes the hysterical displacement distinct from that occurring in dreams, because

defensive lateral cathexis is the work of the ego itself. Freud rejects the notion that sexual

memories are repressed because they are more distressing than other types of memories. On the

contrary, “the most distressing memories - - cannot be repressed and replaced by symbols,” so

“some other attribute of sexual ideas” must “explain why they alone are subject to repression”

(409). The clue lies in the paradox that “an ego-process can be accompanied by consequences

which we are accustomed to meet with only in the primary process” (410). Freud gives an

example of a woman (Emma) who was assaulted while buying sweets as a child by a shopkeeper

who grabbed her to her clothes, and who later during puberty entered a clothing shop and, seeing

two shop assistants laughing together, experienced compulsive fear and fled the store. Although

she had experienced no sexual feelings at the time of the assault, the laughter of the shopkeepers

in the clothing store unconsciously “aroused the memory of the shopkeeper” and, since she had

now arrived at puberty, “a sexual release, which turned into anxiety” (411). “Clothes” acted as a

symbol for the entire complex, including the memory and the retroactive significance attached to

it, which depended on sexual maturation. This “typical case” illustrates that in hysteria a memory

is repressed which has only become a trauma after the event.” (413). Although all adolescents

carry memory-traces that are retroactively understood sexually, hysterics are “precociously

excitable sexually” and thus attach “a precociously intense” affect to such memory-traces (415).

Although the later event that renders the earlier even traumatic triggers the ego’s lateral cathexis,

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the fact that it is a memory and not a perception that rouses the affect means that “the ego

discovers this too late” to prevent a primary process from occurring, resulting in the affect’s

attachment to the symbol and the defensive repression of the symbolized (416).

In the Project, Freud locates the traumatic knot of body, psyche, and memory described

in the Preliminary Communication in the nervous system’s vulnerability and resistance to stimuli

at the level of the neuron, and specifically of the brain. The very ability to recognize pain and

satisfaction lies in the coordination of the signals it receives from the body’s interior to those it

receives from the body’s surface. Inasmuch as memory itself arises from the cortical neurons’

failed defense against these stimuli, first in the resistance of the contact barriers and then in the

discharge of stimuli along the paths they cut toward bodily motility, has a traumatic origin. This

defense is reduplicated in the secondary process of lateral cathexis, which both enables the

organism to exercise judgment and renders memory unreliable. It is reduplicated again in body’s

transition from childhood to adolescence, which renders memories traumatic that were not so as

experiences.

Although the Project was not published in Freud’s lifetime, its influence on his

subsequent theorization of the trauma is difficult to exaggerate. One year later, he delivered the

lecture “The Aetiology of Hysteria,” the locus classicus of his so-called “seduction theory” of

hysteria. In the former, he focuses his attention on the “mnemic symbols” that are “determined

by certain experiences of the patient’s which have operated in a traumatic fashion” (SE III 189).

The analyst’s investigation, Freud insists, can only terminate when a memory is unearthed that

has the necessary traumatic force to account for the symptom, and a suitable, understandable

relationship to the specifics of the symptom. The notion of a “hypnoid state” no longer has

explanatory value for Freud, since the “traumatic scenes” themselves most often lack “suitability

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as determinants” (191). Nor can the identification of a memory of a traumatic experience that

fails the test of force and suitability, since the recovery of such a scene fails to have last effects

on the symptom and “behind the first traumatic scene there may be concealed the memory of a

second, which satisfies our requirements better” (192). This investigation is fraught with

difficulty because “the traumatic scenes do not form a simple row, like a string of pearls, but

ramify and are interconnected like genealogical trees” (193) that stretch “far back behind the first

traumatic scene” (194). These genealogical trees are gnarled, like that those “of a family whose

members have also intermarried” (195). Not only are individual symptoms attached to multiple

memories, but any one of these memories could be attached to multiple symptoms. When

analysis is pursued rigorously, analysis uncovers experiences that “have in common the two

characteristics of being sexual and occurring a puberty” (197), but which include “serious and

trifling events alike” and so fail the test of traumatic force. If memories attached to these scenes

are pursued, however, the analysis invariably encounters scenes of sexual excitement from “the

period of earliest childhood” (199). These are of “a far more uniform kind than the scenes at

puberty” and affect “the subject’s own body” (200).

In 1899, Freud published “Screen Memories,” which throws doubt on the very reliability

of any memories from this period of childhood. In this paper, he argues that although “the

earliest years of our childhood leave ineradicable traces in the depths of our minds,” we are only

able to retrieve “a relatively small number of isolated recollections which are often of dubious or

enigmatic importance” from this period (302). An analogy thus exists “between the psychical

content of neuroses and our infantile life” (303). Indeed, in the “mnemic images” that are

recollected from childhood, “precisely what is important is suppressed and what is indifferent

retained,” and this is due to “two psychical forces” (305). The first of these is the importance of

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an image selecting and preferring it for retrieval and the second is “a resistance” that “tries to

prevent any such preference” (306). The compromise between these two forces is one of conflict,

repression, substitution” (307), by means of which a tolerable, innocuous image is substituted

symbolically for the intolerable but important image. Freud relates a case of an acquaintance

whose most vivid childhood memory, which includes both pleasant and unpleasant aspects but

for which the reason for retention is puzzling, turns out to be almost entirely composed of

symbolic displacements of anxieties, some belonging to childhood and others to later periods of

life. Freud concludes that “it may indeed be questioned whether we have any memories at all

from our childhood;” what appear as childhood memories “show us our earliest years not as they

were but as they appeared at the later periods when the memories were aroused,” and this

appearance is not the emergence of childhood memories but their very formation (321). “Screen

Memories” thus tightens the knot of body, psyche, and memory in a way that prepares for the

displacement of the “original” traumatic experience of early childhood sexual assault from the

biological to the symbolic. Sexuality becomes the name for this knot, inasmuch as sexuality

names the libidinal force that structures the psyche through displacement and, in doing so, forges

a fantasmatic body that the psyche remembers and perceives as the body it lost at the moment of

its own constitution. This knot becomes Freud’s explicit theme starting with the Three Essays on

the Theory of Sexuality.

When Freud returns to the subject of trauma in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, he makes

use of the concepts of the Project, but with a distinct and important different. The body, the

nervous system, and the resistant contact barriers become “the living vesicle with its receptive

cortical layer” suspended in a milieu “charged with the most powerful energies” that would kill it

without the hard protective shield that dies in order to save the deeper layers “from a similar

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fate” (SE XVIII 27). The principle of neuronic inertia reappears as “the inertia inherent in organic

life” and “the conservative nature of living substance” (36). The needs arising from the

complexity of the organism and generating cathexes that the neurons cannot discharge without

changes in the external world return as “the history of the earth” imposed on “the course of the

organism’s life” that divert its inertia and give the appearance of “forces tending toward change

and progress” (38). In the end, Freud declares that the “origin of an instinct for a need to restore

an earlier state of things” can be stated only as a “myth rather than a scientific explanation” (57).

This myth is the myth told by Aristophanes in the Symposium, in which the original human

beings, split by a lightning bolt from Zeus, seek their lost halves. Freud restates this myth as the

“hypothesis that living substance at the time of its coming to life was torn apart into tiny

particles, which have ever since endeavored to reunite” through impossible sexual intercourse,

itself an expression of the death drive. The traumatic primal scene of seduction is thus an

expression of the death drive that it symbolically entails. In the end, we are left with “scientific

terms” that are psychology’s “figurative language,” and even if we were “in a position to replace

our psychological terms with physiological or chemical ones,” these too “are only part of a

figurative language” (60). We have no access to the body beyond our symbols. This is our

trauma, and the desire to regain that access is the repetition compulsion that is ultimately the

drive toward death.

Trauma is not the ostensible theme of Derrida’a 1966 lecture “Freud and the Scene of

Writing,” which concerns how Freud’s use of “scriptural metaphors” to model memory in a way

that detaches these metaphors from any secondary status in relationship to speech or to phonemic

writing illuminates something hitherto unnoticed about writing as commonly understood,

rendering the latter “enigmatic” (Scene of Writing 75). In Derrida’s text, this “enigmatic” quality

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emerges as he reads Freud’s work chronologically, focusing closely on the Project, the 1900

Interpretation of Dreams, and the 1925 “Note Upon the Mystic Writing Pad.” Derrida argues

that Freud’s attempts to grapple with a material foundation for memory and the psyche move

him from a physiological, neuroscientific image of neuronic cathexes and “contact barriers’

(synapses) to the technological image of a graphic writing machine. This movement is driven by

two requirements: the psyche must be able to receive and record fresh stimuli from outside the

body, and it must be able to preserve the traces of these stimuli indefinitely. How can the latter

occur without threatening the former? The Mystic Writing Pad is Freud’s eventual answer, an

answer in some ways already rendered visible, as Derrida’s “Freud and the Scene of Writing”

argues, in the 1895 Project.

Derrida focuses his attention on the Project’s reliance on the repetition of differential

quantities of force. First, Derrida argues, the excitations themselves differ in quantity so that they

can find distinct paths, and second, each quantity of excitation must be repeated in order for it to

it to cut its path through the neurons. It must find a path previously cut by the same excitation.

For Derrida, “these differences in the production of the trace may be reinterpreted as moments of

deferment” during which life seeks “to protect itself by deferring a dangerous cathexis,” holding

back excitation and “constituting a reserve” of excitation (79). The neuron’s holding back that

deflects the excitation along the path of repetition, where contact barriers have already been

frayed or facilitated, cannot ever happen for a first time. It presupposes that a pathway has been

cut, that for some contact barriers, this resistance has already failed. “Life is already threatened

by the origin of the memory which constitutes it and by the fraying which it resists, by the

effraction which it can contain only by repeating it” (80). Derrida points out the neurons in the

Project resist the formation of the memory that constitutes life, which is nothing but the fraying

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of contact barriers that protect them from being cathected with quantities of stimuli. The fraying

of contact barriers is, Derrida observes, the reason Freud privileges pain. Life as memory is

constituted by its own avoidance. The death drive that Derrida discerns already at work in the

formation of the memory inseparable from psychic life is a postponement of what has already

occurred, which Derrida here associates with différance. In this context, Derrida notes that

Nachträglichkeit (belatedness) and Verspätung (deferral), “concepts which govern the whole of

Freud’s thought and determine all other concepts,” already appear in the Project (81).

Derrida argues that Freud’s examination of dreams takes the metaphor of writing further.

The dream world is “a preverbal lithography: metaphonetic, non-linguistic, a-logical” (86).

Indeed, Freud’s illustrations include examples where phonetic signs are translated, not by spoken

phonemes, but by affects with which they are associated. There is, however, no codebook that

could finally unlock these associations because they do not terminate in a final signified, are not

related as signifier to signified, but rather as an endless chain of substitutions. The materiality of

verbal signs does not in dream interpretation give way to their meaning but their sonority is

retained along with the path of association cut by memory, so that dream language is always

private language in which image, sound, and lexical definition mingle on the same plane. The

impossibility of strict inter-psychic translation also applies intrapsychically so that the conscious

appropriation of unconscious cognition is not the transcription of an original unconscious text.

Everywhere there is instead the belated supplement of an absent original: nachträglich (96).

Conscious transcription related to the unconscious text as an irreducibly originary secondariness,

embedded as it is in the same energetics of writing that characterizes the entire system and so

generates that which it is transcribing. The same power of repetition is at work in the transition

of signs from the unconscious to consciousness as was at work in the laying down of memories

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necessary to psychic life, and this power “always divides the point of departure of the first time”

(95).

Here Derrida cites the case of the Wolf Man and invokes trauma by name. This

invocation occurs in a quotation on hysteria from the Project: “We invariably find that a memory

is repressed which has become a trauma only after the event” (SE I 413; Scene of Writing 96),

reminding us that the path cut in the Interpretation of Dreams, into the discussion of which

Derrida inserts the reference to the Wolf Man, has already been cut, was already cut from the

beginning of the Project. The Wolf Man can only live the meaning of the primal scene, the

reality of which is not the issue, after the period of deferment culminating in sexual maturation.

The unconscious is not, Derrida insists, timeless except “from the standpoint of a certain vulgar

conception of time,” but rather belongs to a different order of time, neither a no-longer-present

nor a backward projection from the present but the deferral that absents every present. The

relation of the scene of trauma, the primal scene, to the secondary shock of puberty is like the

relation of the conscious transcription (the “dream-thought”) to what it transcribes (the “dream

content”). What rises up in these memories is not an originating event, but the trauma of spacing

in language itself, its groundless non-origin as originarily split and unresolveable into signifier

and signified, thing and thought, that must be “repressed by so called living, alert speech, by

consciousness” (103). The dream-work and the associative work in psychoanalysis depend on

this spacing, in which words are things and things words, a hieroglyphics in which sign functions

are never a matter of their essential meaning but “emerge from a play of differences” (104). The

paradox of fresh inscription and indefinite preservation, clean sheet and indelible cut, eventually

takes shape as the Mystic Writing Pad, a “stratification of surfaces” with no inside other than

“the implication of another similarly exposed surface” (109). First, a layer of celluloid preserves

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no trace of the impressions it receives from the stylus but serves to protect a second waxed paper

layer from shredding, serving the “protective shield” function Freud had outlined in Beyond the

Pleasure Principle but which does not “account for writing as a trace which survives the

scratch’s present, punctuality, and stigme” (110). The wax slab beneath the waxed paper, which

is permanently altered by the cut and, in being permanently altered, makes a visible mark on the

waxed paper that can then be removed once these two layers are separated, performs this

function. In this way, Derrida observes, “writing supplements perception before the latter even

appears to itself” so that “the ‘perceived’ may be read only in the past, beneath perception and

after it” (110). Perception would be a matter of a cathexis, which occurs when “feelers” from the

unconscious “stretch out toward the external world and withdraw when they had sampled the

excitations coming from it and warned the unconscious of any threat” like the hand that lifts the

waxed paper from the wax slab and makes the image on the paper disappear while preserving the

cuts in the slab that made it adhere to the surface of the waxed paper, creating the image (112).

The subjective apparatus is a system of relations between strata that between which there is

neither permanent contact nor absolute break. The memory that becomes traumatic, then, is the

witness to the absence – and not the loss - of self-presence, to the absence of any perception that

is only a perception, to “death and finitude within the psyche” (115). This instance, at once

structure and materiality, is the closest we will ever come to the blows our bodies may have

sustained, and cuts it may have resisted – and inasmuch as it is a body in and of language, it has

sustained the blow always already rendered by originary writing, arche-writing, itself. The body

comes to us, belatedly, already in the form of a writing that is also a trauma.

Derrida’s reading of Freud foregrounds trauma as inherent in writing, and writing as

inescapable for the speaking subject, as constitutive of a splitting immanent to signification and

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subjectivity. Derrida names this inescapable trauma as writing. Writing’s “enigma,” its expanded

meaning, includes trauma as a groundless non-origin that proliferates as endless signification.

This writing, this arche-writing, is not an event before which there would have been a body fully

present to itself as such. The only body is a traumatized body, and this body is a supplemental

material apparatus without recourse to a presence of any kind. There is no “before” of writing, no

time wherein the “fraying” that constitutes the endless chain of signification and supplementarity

would have begun, no traumatic event. There is always only the phantasmatic lost body and the

symbolic structure that constitutes it as lost.

Derrida’s reading of Levi-Strauss similarly locates trauma in language as writing,

apparently against Levi-Strauss. In Of Grammatology, Derrida examines the section toward the

end of Tristes Tropiques where Levi-Strauss recounts the introduction of writing to the

Nambikwara, an Amazonian people, as a narrative of traumatic loss, of a radical initiation into

violence and domination. Levi-Strauss’s text recounts an incident during which a group leader

pretended to read from a scrap of paper the rules that would determine how items were to be

exchanged, using his pretense of “reading” the markings on the scraps (mimicking the behavior

of the ‘civilized’ people he had seen doing this) in order to confer on himself the authority to

decide on the distribution of goods (TT 289). Levi-Strauss then uses this anecdote to reflect on

the significance of writing as an instrument of violence and dominion rather than a tool for

understanding and accumulating knowledge. The evidence that Levi-Strauss presents for this

interpretation consists of, on the one hand, the absence of any correlation between creative

innovation and writing (TT 291) and, on the other, “the one phenomenon which has invariably

accompanied it – the formation of cities and empires: the integration into a political system, that

is to say, of a considerable number of individuals, and the distribution of those individuals into a

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hierarchy of castes and classes” (292). Levi-Strauss admits of “exceptions to this rule” including

ancient African empires and pre-Columbian America but suggests that their instability “confirm,

instead of refuting, our hypothesis” that writing is “indispensible to the establishment of an

enduring dominion” (293).

Derrida notes the tension between Levi-Strauss’s depiction of the innocence of

Nambikwara prior to writing and his identification of Marx and Freud as his “only true masters”

(Grammatology 118). As badly as this innocence fits into the discourse of these masters, it is

necessary to the story Levi-Strauss is to tell, since “only an innocent community,” a community

“fully self-present in its living speech, only such a community can suffer, as the surprise of an

aggression coming from without, the insinuation of writing, the infiltration of its ‘ruse’ and of its

‘perfidy’” (119). Derrida acknowledges that Levi-Strauss’s idealization of the Nambikwara is

written against the prior ethnocentric depiction of them as complacent, disease-ridden, and

unhygienic but reminds the reader of his argument earlier in Grammatology that the “exclusion

of writing” is itself an ethnocentrism “privileging the model of phonetic writing”, a model that

makes writing secondary to and representative of speech (120). Separating language from

writing and placing writing “below and outside” language gives one the sense that one can

“restore the status of authentic language, human and fully signifying language” to those peoples

who, in their pristine innocence, “one nevertheless continues to describe as ‘without writing’.”

Derrida argues that Levi-Strauss’s own historical evidence in fact suggests that writing as

the establishment of dominion appears much earlier than writing in the narrow sense – that

indeed, it may not make sense to speak of a human life before writing. The categorization of

people into castes with some occupying the place of the universal law of distribution, the

violence of writing that Levi-Strauss’s anecdote supposedly illustrates, occurs the moment

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consumption is deferred and a surplus placed in reserve while production is organized, “as soon

as a society begins to live as a society” and “well before the appearance of writing in the narrow

sense” (Grammatology 131). Indeed, for Levi-Strauss himself, the violence of writing is not

ameliorated but made more pervasive when universal literacy extends the reach writing from a

privileged caste to an entire population (TT 293) since, as Derrida notes, the universal form is

“always monopolized as empirical force by a determined empirical force” so that “the access to

writing is the constitution of a free subject in the violent movement of its own effacement and its

own bondage” (Grammatology 132). Levi-Strauss’s praise of “those wise Nambikwara who had

the courage to resist writing” though “only for a time, alas” connects “a necessary or rather fatal

degradation, as the very form of progress” with “nostalgia for what preceded this degradation”,

which would have been “a unanimous people assembled in the self-presence of its speech” (134).

But for Derrida, this prior situation is Levi-Strauss’s retroactive construction since earlier in his

account, he reports that certain Nambikwara were already using the act of “drawing lines” to

diagram genealogy and social structure (124) and since “it suffices to open Tristes Tropiques and

the thesis at any page to find striking evidence” that hierarchy and violence were already present

among the Nambikwara prior to the “writing lesson” (135). Moreover, the bricolage that Levi-

Strauss attributes to mythical thought in The Savage Mind undoes this notion of a primordial

self-presence interrupted by writing, since it already “builds its castles with debris” (139). Thus,

Derrida unambiguously affirms Levi-Strauss’s association between writing and “the horizon of

intersubjective violence” even as he refuses the latter’s identification of (narrowly speaking)

non-literate peoples with the innocence of a time before writing. The writing lesson isn’t, then,

isn’t a traumatic event occurring in history and imposing itself on the resisting bodies of the

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Nambikwara under Levi-Strauss’s watchful eye but rather a kind of performance that functions

as a supplementary substitution for the anthropologist and for his text.

Both of Derrida’s most extensive examinations of Levi-Strauss’s work, in Of

Grammatology and in “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences,”

criticize the latter for indulging in nostalgia for presence. But Levi-Strauss’s discussion of

trauma in the latter’s 1949 article “The Sorcerer and his Magic”, later included in the collection

Structural Anthropology, anticipates Derrida’s critique and his invocation of the supplement.

Levi-Strauss begins his discussion of sorcery by comparing the biologist W.B. Cannon’s 1942

account of “voodoo death” to “cases of trauma resulting from bombings, battle shock, and even

surgical operations” that result in death even though “autopsy reveals no lesions” (SA 168). For

Levi-Strauss, the similarity in these cases lies in their demonstration that “the sudden total

withdrawal of the multiple reference systems provided by the support of the group” can fatally

and irreversibly impede the nervous system’s ability to return to homeostasis. In this account, the

biological is not a system the functioning of which is autonomous in relationship to the social

and indexical but rather linked to it in such a way that the cutting of this link in itself, with or

without some extra-symbolic force, compromise biological integrity. The biological and

signification are embedded in each other.

Levi-Strauss recounts three stories: a personal anecdote from his time with the

Nambikwara involving temporary uncertainty and anxiety about the meaning of a sorcerer’s

sudden disappearance and reappearance, a Zuni story of a youth put on trial for sorcery who

initially pleads innocence and then tries out various stories of his initiation into sorcery before

finally hitting on one that restores coherence both for his judges and for himself, and a Kwakiutl

autobiographic fragment recorded by Franz Boas in which a man thoroughly skeptical about

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shamanic healing seeks shamanic apprenticeship and later becomes a renowned shaman while

retaining his skepticism only slightly altered to allow for the possibility of the rare case of the

real shaman. In each of these accounts, an event interrupts the smooth correspondence of

signifier and signified, triggering anxiety. The situation is resolved by recourse to signifiers held

in reserve, without corresponding signifieds, resulting in the always-temporary restoration of

homeostasis. What is “signified” in this restoration is not an actual occurrence but the mere

presence of signification as opposed to its absence.

In view of these three accounts, Levi-Strauss reflects on the key elements of the shamanic

complex. Shamanic power, he argues, involves a negotiation between shaman, sick person, and

the public. The shaman’s sense of his own power is inferred from an intimate psychosomatic

experience, a “bodily impression (that is, the most intuitive type of experience)” (179). The

illness of the sick person is also grounded in the psychosomatic dysregulation “prevalent in

societies with a low degree of security” so that, if successfully treated, the sickness itself places

the patient “in an especially good position to become a shaman in his own right, as we see today

in the case of psychoanalysis” (180). Both shaman and sick person, then, are to some degree

subject to the withdrawal of social reference systems and the concomitant exposure to the

experience of the body itself. But it is the group rather than the shaman or the sick person that

finally confers the power that creates and maintains the shaman. The shamanic complex is about

“the relationship between a specific category of individuals and specific expectations of the

group”.

How does this take place? In the shamanic performance, the shaman, in the actual or

virtual presence of the group, relives the experiences that persuaded him of his vocation “in all

their vividness, originality, and violence” (181). The case of the shaman is an instance of the

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relationship between normal and pathological thinking, which are complementary rather than

opposed processes. On the one hand, normal thinking seeks the meaning of things that refuse to

yield a meaning. On the other hand, so-called pathological thinking “overflows with emotional

interpretations and overtones, in order to supplement an otherwise deficient reality” (181).

Normal thinking is confronted with objects the meaning of which cannot be determined, while

pathological thinking is overwhelmed by experiences that correspond to no known object. The

deficit of meaning in normal thinking is complementary to the plethora of meaning in

pathological thinking. The spectacle of the mute passivity and self-alienation of the patient in

encounter with the self-projection and affectivity of the shaman enables normal thinking to

appropriate the pathological supplement from a safe distance and, in doing so, bring a certain

coherence to the inassimilable (182). The secret of the shaman, which illuminates the phenomena

of voodoo death and trauma, is not, even in its bodily intimacy, a matter of an encounter with a

real outside the symbolic or finally a matter of individual experience but rather a matter of a lack

of correspondence between signifier and signified, a zone of incompletion within the symbolic

function. “For only the history of the symbolic function can allow us to understand the

intellectual condition of man, in which the universe is never charged with sufficient meaning and

in which the mind always has more meanings available than there are objects to which to relate

them.” (184).

This lack within the symbolic function, which is the source of normal and pathological

thinking in the social as a whole, is distributed among bodies in such a way that some some are

subjectivized as normality seeking signification while others are inhabited or possessed by the

pathological excess of signification – marked as traumatized. Both are located at specific sites

within the overall symbolic structure. But the drama played out between the normal and the

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pathological is also “an antagonism that is inherent in all thought but that normally remains

vague and imprecise” (182). All bodies subjected to the symbolic function are embedded in the

complementary dance of the normal and pathological around this function’s inherent

incompleteness and its inherent excess. What is traumatic about a traumatizing situation is

precisely its location within the symbolic system. Thus, Levi-Strauss writes in “The

Effectiveness of Symbols”, which follows “The Sorcerer and his Magic” in the Structural

Anthropology, traumatizing situations are traumatizing because “the subject experiences them

immediately as living myth”, so that “the traumatizing power of any situation cannot result from

its intrinsic features but must, rather, result from the capacity of certain events, appearing within

an appropriate psychological, historical, and social context, to induce an emotional

crystallization which is molded by a preexisting structure” (202). But what is the nature of this

location of trauma within the symbolic function, the place of an immediate experience of “living

myth” and of “emotional crystallization”?

Levi-Strauss’s theory of the symbolic function is further elaborated in his Introduction to

the Work of Marcel Mauss, published the year after the initial appearance of “The Sorcerer and

his Magic” in Le Temps Modernes and five years before the appearance of Tristes Tropiques.

This text opens with a discussion of the body before moving on to elaborate his theory of the

symbolic function and to critique an aspect of Mauss’s notion of the gift. Levi-Strauss stresses

the “intrinsic importance” of bodily techniques (IMM 6). Although “the body is universal and at

everyone’s disposal,” we remain ignorant of its “very numerous and varied possibilities.” The

body’s thresholds and limits, its capacities for tolerating pain or pleasure, vary according to

“criteria ratified by collective approval or disapproval” (7). The human body is a not a raw

natural occurrence but a product of “techniques and his representations” (9). The very gestures

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and bodily dispositions most invisible and apparently insignificant are evidence of this: how one

washes oneself, for instance, or how one urinates. But it is the examination of extremities such as

“death by magic or of bodily techniques” – the same phenomena that his earlier article linked to

the death of traumatized individuals in modern societies - that bring us face to face with “facts in

which social nature is very directly linked to man’s biological nature” (10). The body’s image

and proprioceptive schema are not pre-cultural givens, but already signs.

This declaration of a direct linkage between biological and social “natures” leads Levi-

Strauss to return to the interplay between the normal and the pathological. Normal modes of

individual behavior are the elements from which a symbolic system is built but are never in and

of themselves symbolic. Symbolic systems are, rather, incomplete syntheses binding these

individual bodies together, though always imperfectly. There is always an indeterminate excess

so that “no society is ever wholly and completely symbolic” (17). At the same time, individual

bodies never behave in a way that escapes symbolic capture. Although abnormal behavior – the

pathological – creates “the illusion of autonomous symbolism on the level of the individual”

because it expresses “an order really incommensurable to that of the group’s self-expression”, it

is nevertheless “vaguely evocative of normal forms” (13). Even pathological behavior is not

absolutely singular but falls into indigenous categories that vary from group to group or from

historical moment to historical moment. Even if “physiologists one day uncover a biological

substratum for the neuroses,” it is still this structured dissociation of the pathological individual

from the group that is decisive (17).

The structured dissociation of pathological bodies arises from the inability of symbolic

systems to fully achieve structural integrity. Symbolic systems are in flux due to temporal and

spatial juxtaposition with other symbolic systems, and the different systems can never be

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perfectly translated into each other or combined to form a larger seamless system. Consequently,

signifieds are perpetually out of alignment, out of complementarity, with signifiers. The

symbolic order is incommensurate with itself. Individual bodies are differently related to this

incommensurability. On the one hand, “the person whom we call sane is the one capable of

alienating himself” to assume a set of social roles with little thought or awareness of this

incommensurability (18). On the other, a variable percentage of individuals in any society “find

themselves placed ‘off system,’ so to speak, or between two or more irreducible systems” (Ibid.).

These individuals are not outside the symbolic order, but represent and embody the

compromises, the imaginary transitions and incomplete syntheses, that serve to complete any

system of signification by standing in for its internal gaps. Without these indefinite signifiers, the

system would fragment. Sensitivity to the contradictions and gaps in the system becomes a

vocation, supplying in human form a signifier without a definite signified. The pathological body

is in this sense the supplement that supplies the magical truth supporting the order of normal

bodies.

The symbolic order, for Levi-Strauss, operates on the level of the unconscious, and the

latter is never individual because it finally is “the condition of all forms of mental life of all men

at all times” (35). At this unconscious level, a specific type of signifier is available in every

symbolic system, a signifier lacking a specific signified and available to absorb multiple

phenomena, and this signifier functions “to fill a gap between the signifier and the signified”, or

to signal the fact that the system of complementarities between signifier and signified has been

broken and that unity must be restored (56). It says “I don’t know what this signifies, but it must

signify.” It provides, where there was incommensurability, “a totality which is closed and

complementary to itself” (61). Notions like mana, Manitou, hau, even the relatively secularized

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oomph “represent nothing more or less than that floating signifier which is the disability of all

finite thought” (63) but which enables symbolic thinking to function in spite of its inherent

contradiction. Such a signifier is the “zero symbolic value” in any symbolic system, “marking

the necessity of a supplementary symbolic content over and above that which the signified

already contains, which can be any value at all, provided it is still part of the available reserve”

rather than having been assigned a specific signified.

The location of trauma, of the “living myth,” of “emotional crystallization,” of the direct

confrontation between the biological and the social, is the location of the floating signifier.

Trauma occurs when the body possessed by a speaking subject is dysregulated by an event that

exposes it to the shock of its precisely social and symbolic noncoincidence with itself, making

the body available within the symbolic system as floating signifier and filling the speech of the

subject with an excess of signification. That event will only ever be available to the traumatized

subject and to her ‘normal’ witnesses in the form of an endless chain of signifiers that will never

correspond to the signified moment of the trauma. The traumatized body and the speech of the

traumatized subject combine to supply for the unconscious of the normal subject what is lacking

in the symbolic function.

There is little here of the nostalgia that Derrida, in Of Grammatology and in “Structure,

Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences,” justly discerns in Levi-Strauss’s work,

little of the side of this work that “must always conceive of the origin of a new structure on the

model of a catastrophe” (WD 369) even if, elsewhere in the same essay on Marcel Mauss, Levi-

Strauss indulges in a mythological account of the sudden appearance of signification separating

the human from nature. Instead, there is an immanence of the biological and the symbolic, an

absence of any “raw” nature, a coincidence of the most intimate bodily experience and the social

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or symbolic order. It is as if the stories of rupture and discontinuity populating these texts – the

brief abstract one in Introduction to the Work of Marcel Mauss regarding the sudden appearance

of the symbolic and the more elaborate tale of the writing lesson in Tristes Tropiques – were

performances of the pathological thinking in any symbolic system, signifiers of a traumatic event

only ever produced as past present and corresponding with a stable and coherent signified.

Indeed, Derrida reads Levi-Strauss’s account of the noncoincidence of signifier and signified and

of the floating signifier against the nostalgic aspects of his thought, not in order to replace them

with some more correct narrative, but in order to ask what is at stake in figuring this situation as

a traumatic break, a loss. The alternative interpretation he offers is one that interprets the play of

lack and excess as originary and irremediable, but he stresses that he is not advocating this

interpretation over the other as if “there is any question of choosing” (370). Instead, he proposes

that we “try to conceive of the common ground, and the différance of this irreducible difference”

between a delirious affirmation of the endless repetition of signifiers dissociated from any

ultimate signified and the desire that “dreams of deciphering a truth or an origin” and “lives the

necessity of interpretation as an exile” (369). In Levi-Strauss’s terms, this would be to attempt to

think the symbolic function itself, to occupy both the place of the pathological off-system body

and the place of the normal bodies it serves to stabilize.

Trauma against Writing

A series of historical events intervened between the figurations examined above of

trauma as spacing, as the unstable symbolic order, and the renewed focus on trauma in the

humanities that occurred in the 1990s. The most important of these for Trauma Theory were the

delayed recognition of the Holocaust as something other than the last vestiges of barbaric

resistance to progress, owing as much to the breakdown of the progressive narrative in the

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United States during the Vietnam War as to the survivor narratives that refused to frame that

event in a way that fit into the progressive narrative,3 pressure on professional psychiatric

organizations from both the medical profession and feminists resulting in a dramatic revision of

the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, the involvement of Veteran’s Administration personnel

working with Vietnam veterans in that revision, and a resulting reconceptualization of

psychiatric sequelae of trauma as the responses of normal persons to extraordinary, inherently

traumatizing circumstances without regard for the patient’s status as victim or perpetrator,4 the

confrontation between thinkers in the continental tradition and Holocaust historical negationists

such as the Historikerstreit of 1986-895 and the similar French, British, and American

confrontation circling around negationist Robert Faurisson,6 and the posthumous publication of

Paul de Man’s wartime journalism for Le Soir.7 “Trauma theory,” as it appeared in the 1990s, is

both indebted to structuralist and poststructuralist theory and determined to extricate theory from

them by refiguring trauma as a kind of encounter with a real beyond signification. There are two

interrelated stakes that these events thrust into the foreground and with which Trauma Theory

attempted to grapple.

First, the specific historical trauma of the Holocaust was generalized to pose a challenge

to the very notion of liberating action as the systems and movements that had opposed the Nazis

became implicated in atrocities. Theodor Adorno articulated this challenge in a series of lectures

on metaphysics, delivered in the summer of 1965 while he was working on the Negative

Dialectics, by suggesting that Auschwitz is a sign, encompassing not just the camps themselves

“but the world of torture which has continued to exist after Auschwitz and of which we are

receiving the most horrifying reports from Vietnam,” that makes the assertion of “a positive

meaning or purpose” impossible (Metaphysics 101), that “in the face of these experiences the

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assertion that what is has meaning, and the affirmative character which has been attributed to

metaphysics without exception, become a mockery” (104). For Adorno, it must be remembered

that even affirmation of an impossible situation, the “Nietzschean affirmation” that for the early

Derrida “is the joyous affirmation of the play of the world and of the innocence of becoming, the

affirmation of a world of signs without fault, without truth, and without origin” (WD 369) is

“love of stone walls and barred windows,” that “last resort of someone who sees and has nothing

else to love” (MM 98), and is finally “a lie” (Metaphysics 106). When Adorno delivered the

lectures on metaphysics, his was a minority perspective. By the end of the 1970s, however, all of

the agents of the progressive narrative - the United States, the Soviet Union, and even non-Soviet

Marxist movements - had been undercut and this minority perspective became the dominant

interpretation of the Nazi death camps. As sociologist Jeffrey Alexander has written, “the

contemporary representatives of the historic enemies of Nazism lost control over the means of

symbolic production” (Alexander, ch. 2).

Second, the site of the etiology of trauma was transferred from the individual to the

situation. The revision of diagnostic categories both universalized vulnerability to “traumatic

stress” and erased, from a clinical perspective, the distinction between victim and perpetrator.

Trauma is no longer embedded either in the individual or the social unconscious; the stressor that

initiates symptoms is rather traumatic by nature, “an event that is outside the range of usual

human experience and that would be markedly distressing to almost anyone” according to the

DSM-III-R (247).8 Thus, traumatic memories, while fragmented, are in a sense straightforward

and symptoms of trauma are no longer attributed to a failure of individuals to fully accede to the

symbolic order. Victims of trauma have encountered something materially, and not just

symbolically or imaginally, traumatic. Also, “the definition of the disorder did not call for any

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analysis of the moral circumstances. Acts committed with full awareness and even with

enjoyment could give rise to PTSD” (Fassin & Rechtman 93).

Thus, the figuration of trauma as an unsurpassable trace of absence, that is, of an absence

of even its own presence, subtly gave way to a figuration of trauma as a kind of direct encounter

with an inexpressible but nevertheless historical real that demands expression, albeit in an

indirect way. The distinction here is a subtle one. As discussed above, both the early Levi-

Strauss and the early Derrida insist on the materiality of the symbolic, and do not advocate any

kind of linguistic or symbolic idealism. Moreover, both conceptualize this materiality in such a

way that the symbolic system, structured as it is of differential pairings, is necessarily incomplete

so that one is always suspended between a lack and an excess, in the inevitable space of an

inadequate repetition of substitutions, exposed to what one’s language cannot cover, cannot

shield against. But the threat against which this work was composed was a kind of naturalism,

which Levi-Strauss expressed as “the racialist conceptions which try to make out that man is a

product of his body” (IMM 8-9) and Derrida as “the ontology which, in its innermost course, has

determined the meaning of being as presence and the meaning of language as the full continuity

of speech” and has therefore impeded openness to the other (Grammatology 70). The debate with

Holocaust negationists, beginning with Vidal-Naquet’s sophisticated and nuanced attack

response to Robert Faurisson, foregrounded another kind of threat: that of the “concerted

derealization of discourse” (Vidal-Naquet, ch. 3). The posthumous publication of De Man’s

wartime journalism in the 1980s, which shocked his colleagues not so much because of the

content itself but because of his lifelong silence regarding it, reinforced this shift in the felt

nature of the threat. “He looks at us,” writes Derrida in 1988, “but he is also our concern, we

have concerns regarding him more than ever without his being here” (“Paul de Man’s War” 593).

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Two texts, Shoshana Felman and Doril Laub’s (1992) Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in

Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History and Cathy Caruth’s (1996) Unclaimed Experience:

Trauma, Narrative, and History, set the tone and supplied the frame for today’s ongoing

reconsideration of trauma. Both Felman and Caruth had worked with De Man, the former as a

colleague at Yale and the latter as a student. Both Testimony and Unclaimed Experience

contextualize their theories of trauma as a kind of response to attacks on de Man, and on

structuralism and deconstruction. Both incorporate a tragic interpretation of trauma and by

extension the condition of writing to varying degrees, although both recapitulate to a lesser

degree Derrida’s early challenge to that interpretation and even tend to move toward a figuration

of trauma as a kind of dark redemption and as a kind of authority. Both offer readings of de

Man’s work and that of others that to some degree trouble the distinction between perpetrator

and victim. Both allude to trauma as situated outside any cultural frame and as real, insistently

so, even if inexpressible.

In Testimony, Felman observes that the controversy surrounding the discovery of de

Man’s wartime writings “reopens with some urgency the question of the ethical implications of

de Man's work and, by extension, of the whole school of critical approach known as

‘deconstruction’” (Felman & Laub 121). She devotes an entire chapter to an analysis of de Man’s

work that reads his silence as a means of giving of giving voice to a history that cannot be

directly spoken but can only “address us in its very silence” (163). The introduction to Caruth’s

book cites an “increasing concern” within literary criticism that “the possibility that reference is

indirect, and that consequently we may not have direct access to others’, or even our own,

histories, seems to imply the impossibility of access to other cultures and hence of any means of

making political or ethical judgments” and explicitly proposes “the peculiar and paradoxical

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experience of trauma” as an answer to these concerns (Caruth 10-11). She too devotes a chapter

to de Man’s work and opens that chapter by citing concerns that “structuralist and

poststructuralist developments in literary theory” leave “literature and language, and even

consciousness in general, cut off from historical reality” (73-74). At its inception, then, trauma

theory proposes to justify the regime of writing by showing how the figuration of thought as

writing transmits a direct encounter with the real of history precisely by refusing any claim to

know it.

In the reiteration of Trauma Theory expressed in these books, the traumatic occurrence is

direct and historical, even though its existence as an event and an experience awaits its repetition

and its performance in testimony and witness. In the introduction to Testimony, Felman and Laub

“propose to introduce the dimension of the real – the events and implications of contemporary

history” the encounter with which “leads to the experience of an existential crisis in all those

involved” (Felman & Laub xvi). In the chapters Felman contributes to the book, she argues that

testimony is essentially performative rather than representational because the “occurrences,” the

“acts,” and the “events” to which it testifies have overwhelmed the memory of the bearer of the

testimony (5). The performative dimension of testimony “addresses what in history” escapes

signification, conceptualization, and constative language because of its excessive force (Ibid.).

Mallarmé’s “revolution in poetic form,” for instance, is “both a replica and a sequence, an effect

of, the French Revolution” without explicitly mentioning it (20). The new poetic form’s

“breathless gasps” speaks what cannot yet become “knowledge and awareness” and in doing so,

breaks through “the limits of its own conscious understanding” (21). Similarly, Paul Celan’s

“Todesfugue” “elliptically and circularly” testifies to a concentration camp experience it does not

name as such

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through the polyphonic but ironically disjointed art of counterpoint, and through

the obsessional, compulsive repetitions and the vertigionous explosion of a mad

song whose lament – half blasphemy, half prayer – bursts at once into a

speechless, voiceless crying and into the dancing tumult of a drunken celebration.

(29)

Felman analyzes Camus’ The Plague as a similarly oblique expression of the horrors of

the camps. Felman asserts that Camus’ choice of a plague as a metaphor for the Holocaust is

“striking” because the plague is a “historically impossible” event that is supposed to have ceased

to exist in the West long ago (101). It contradicts the scientific knowledge of the doctors as well

as the humanistic beliefs and expectations of the townspeople. “Because our perception of reality

is molded by frames of reference, what is outside them, however imminent and otherwise

conspicuous, remains historically invisible, unreal, and can only be encountered by a systematic

disbelief” (103). Moreover, it cannot be written into history after the fact because its historical

specificity lies precisely in its violation of the frames of reference that history encodes and thus

“it cannot, historically, be witnessed” (104). Literature must do what history cannot, and by

evoking an occurrence that the historian’s failure of imagination cannot acknowledge, open up

the body’s “imaginative capability of perceiving history” (108). The specificity of the occurrence

will only be claimed by “the radical change the witness has undergone” (110). Such testimony

doesn’t so much tell about historical occurrences as it transmits them by transforming “words

into events” (114). Camus’ later work The Fall is for Felman less optimistic about the possibility

of such a witness. Written in the wake of a falling out with wartime ally Sartre and his coterie

following an attack on The Rebel’s critique of Stalinism in Le temps modernes, The Fall revolves

around a primal scene, which is the failure of the protagonist to respond to a suicide witnessed

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during a walk home one night. The silence to which it testifies is not the silence of an aloofness,

however, but the silence that occurs because “the ‘making of a history is tied up with” a refusal

to know and to look from the perspective of hell (184), the silence precisely of the one who

insists on the integrity of his own testimony. If The Plague still held out hope for “the honest

witness” in the person of the narrator, and of a narrative that “could still hope to transmit a clear

picture of events”, The Fall suggests “that no one can legitimately claim the ownership or the

possession of such a picture” and that we are left only with the “trace” of a great crime the reality

of which we can only ever betray. She asks, in the wake of this inevitable failure, how testimony

can “bridge, speak over, the collapse of bridges” while also bearing witness to “the process and

event of the collapse” of any bridge (199). In the culminating chapter of the book, an analysis of

Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah, Felman articulates a kind of answer to this question, arguing that the

film shows how the “literally overwhelming evidence” of “an absolute historical event” renders

it “utterly proofless” and announces the age of testimony as “the age of prooflessness” made so

by a sheer “magnitude of reference” (211). The failure of testimony, then, is not due to the

repetitive, retroactive, and always incomplete marking of an absence that was never present, but

to the inadequacy of signification to frame a reality that precedes and exceeds it.

Similarly, Caruth’s Unclaimed Experience declares trauma to be both “the reality of the

violent event” and “the reality of the way that its violence has not yet been fully known” (6).

Trauma’s “historical power” lies in the fact that its overwhelming nature deprives its victim of

any immediate consciousness of its occurrence, so that “it is only in and through its inherent

forgetting that it is first experienced at all” (17). The battlefield flashbacks occurring in the

nightmares of Freud’s wartime patients “seem to reflect, in startling directness and simplicity,

nothing but the unmediated occurrence of violent events” (59). Traumatic repetition is a “literal

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return of the past” carried in the body “without any mediation”, raising the question of history

itself as “the history of a trauma” (60). Thus, the traumatic event is too direct and literal a threat

to “bodily life” to be experienced and its experience in repetition is “not a signal of direct

experience” but “the repeated confrontation with the necessity and impossibility of grasping the

threat” (62). Because of this “the most direct seeing of a violent event may occur as an absolute

inability to know it; that immediacy, paradoxically, may take the form of belatedness” (91-92).

Caruth’s theory of trauma is less explicitly tied to the Holocaust and its testimony – or to any

specific historical occurrence - than Felman’s, but it resembles Felman’s in its insistence that

trauma is “real” in the sense of being prior to signification and, in a sense, forever outside it. If

trauma’s “testimony” takes the form of a multiplication of signifiers that do not directly refer to

the traumatic occurrence, this is not because of the place that event occupies in the chain of

signification but to its transcendence of signification. Indeed, the transformation of occurrence

into event is the work of testimony, of poetry, of tradition.

Both of these books, then, theorize trauma and its retroactive eventfulness as an

affirmation of an extra-textual reality that can be transmitted if not described in the work of

testimony. This affirmation troubles their appropriation of the challenge that the traumatic event

poses to liberating narratives. Both books acknowledge this challenge but, at the same time,

seem to re-inscribe liberating narratives by means of the mechanism of testimony, as if the

discovery of the very extra-textual force of trauma and its literary expression were a kind of

liberation, as if they were traces of the body’s transcendence of and intrusion into the realm of

signification.

Psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Dori Laub contributes two chapters to Testimony. The first

of these chapters, almost against itself, articulates the challenge that trauma poses to the

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possibility of liberation. Prior to the appearance of this book, Laub had played an important role

in the emergence of Trauma Theory when he collaborated with journalist Lauren Vlock to create

the Holocaust Survivors Film Project (now the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust

Testimonies). A Romanian child Holcaust survivor, Laub recalls that his training analysis wore

away his own psychological defenses and made him able to face his memories of life in the

concentration camp for the first time. After witnessning the profound lingering effects of the

camp experience on the children of Holocaust survivors after the latter’s exposure to the violence

of the Yom Kippur War, Laub spent the better part of a decade seeking grant funding for

research on the testimony of Holocaust survivors before a meeting with Vlock persuaded him to

begin a self-funded project videotaping testimonies of local survivors. Holocaust memoirs,

including pioneering work such as Victor Frankl’s Trotsdem Ja Zum Leben Sagen: Ein

Psychologe erlebt das Konzentrationslager (1946), Primo Levi’s Se questo è un uomo (1947),

Elie Wiesel’s Night (1958), were already well known. But Laub’s effort represents the first

concerted attempt to gather testimony from ordinary survivors, many of whom had spent decades

in silence about their experiences. Yale poststructuralist literature professor Geoffrey Hartman’s

wife Renee was one of the first to be interviewed. Hartman wrote a grant to the New Haven

Foundation that resulted in an increase in funding for the project, and is largely responsible for

the proximity of Holocaust testimony to Yale literary theory. All of this occurred the year before

the diagnostic category “post-traumatic stress disorder’ made its appearance in the DSMIII.

Laub discusses how memory emerges in the testimony of the survivor to an auditor.

During extreme human pain and the accompanying “massive psychic trauma,” “the observing

and recording mechanisms of the human mind are temporarily knocked out” so that the narrative

of trauma begins “with someone who testifies to an absence, to an event that has not yet come

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into existence, in spite of the overwhelming and compelling nature of the reality of its

occurrence” (Felman & Laub 57). The presence of an auditor is not incidental to such testimony.

“The testimony to the trauma thus includes its hearer, who is, so to speak, the blank screen on

which the event comes to be inscribed for the first time” (Ibid). This inscription takes place in the

form of a visible effect that the bearer of testimony discerns in the auditor, and that signals to the

bearer of testimony that his or her words are not mere noise.

This visible effect, however, threatens the auditor’s sense of security and selfhood, so the

auditor must monitor his or her own response so as to remain “the one who triggers its initiation,

as well as the guardian of its process and of its momentum” (58). The knowledge that emerges in

the interaction between the bearer of testimony and the auditor dissolves boundaries of time and

subjectivity and the threat of this dissolution is what has prevented the testimony from occurring

previously, and what brings the testimony continually back to a silence that is both sanctuary and

bondage for its bearer. This knowledge is not a knowledge of historical details – Laub takes

pains to point out that it may even contradict the known historical record – but rather “of survival

and of resistance to extermination” (62). What passes between the bearer of testimony and its

auditor is not information about historical details but finally a kind of understanding, a

“password,” that is subtly signaled “in addition to what is manifestly said, associated to, dreamt

about and elaborated” and is echoed in the auditor’s response, signaling the “reciprocal

identification” that the bearer of testimony asks for in the signal but does not expect (63).

The traumatic event that emerges in the testimony has no time, place, sequence, or

causality because “it took place outside the parameters of ‘normal’ reality” (68), but the

testimony nevertheless amounts to “reconstructing a history” and “entails a reassertion of the

hegemony of reality” (69). The auditor and the bearer of testimony must accept “the Holocaust

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reality” and indeed the auditor “must often be there first” (Ibid). This is not simple, since the

Holocaust experience “is a very condensed version of most of what life is all about” and

inevitable raises existential questions “that we mange to avoid in our daily living” (72). Such

questions include those of death, of time and its passage, of meaning and meaninglessness, loss,

ultimate aloneness, and the limits of love. The auditor will inevitably raise defenses against the

knowledge that emerges because the bearer of testimony bears “witness to our own historical

disfiguration” and poses “for us a riddle and a threat from which we cannot turn away” (72). The

event that emerges in the testimony to the Holocaust lays waste to the most closely held values,

conventions, identities, investments, and institutions and, though Laub insists that it is a “life-

assertion” inasmuch as the testimony can occur at all, he also asserts that it “is the vehicle of an

inexorable historical transvaluation, the implications of which we have yet to understand” (73).

In his second chapter, Laub repeats this almost simultaneous embrace and repudiation of

affirmation, noting that while “the process of the testimony does in fact hold out the promise of

truth as the return of a sane, normal and connected world, “ the commitment to truth that this

promise entails forces the testimony into “at least a partial breach, failure and relinquishment of

this promise” (91). What can be affirmed is not any liberating project, still less the possibility of

repairing the damage that the traumatic event has precipitated, only the fact that the bearer of

testimony and its auditor can, through the testimony and the witness, avoid falling into nostalgia,

memorializing, battles with the past, flight into superficiality, or substitution. At first glance, this

is a modest affirmation, but one may still ask whether the prospect of a life delivered from these

apparently ubiquitous phenomena, to say nothing of the substitution that Freud, Levi-Strauss,

and Derrida discerned as inherent in the symbolic function, doesn’t repeat just the kind of

liberating narrative that trauma challenges. For what is a life without nostalgia, memorializing,

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battles with the past, flight into superficiality or substitution other than a life that is not divided

against itself, a life that is whole and complete, a life no longer in need of liberation?

Caruth’s Unclaimed Experience also seems to acknowledge the challenge that trauma

poses to any liberating narrative. She notes that neurobiologists have shown the “destructive

repetition of the trauma” in flashbacks and re-experiencing alters the brain chemistry of the

survivor “and can ultimately lead to deterioration” (62). This neurodestructive repetition, she

argues, supports Freud’s view that traumatic disorder manifests a death drive. If, as Caruth

argues, traumatic disorder is “an experience that governs history,” then it would seem to point to

“the reality of the destructive force that the violence of history imposes on the human psyche, the

formation of history as the endless repetition of previous violence” (63). But Caruth almost

immediately turns, by means of a reading of Freud’s account of the accident dream, from this to

a figuration of trauma as an inexorable repetition of violence toward death to a figuration of

trauma awakening, as survival. Evoking Freud’s formulation of the death drive in Beyond the

Pleasure Principle, Caruth locates trauma not in an already-living being’s subjection to

overwhelming violence and subsequent attempt to eradicate the tension that separates it from

inanimate substance, but in the primordial awakening to that tension, for Caruth “the experience

of having passed beyond death without knowing it” (65) and in the failed attempt to return to that

awakening that pushes it into the future. Turning to Moses and Monotheism, Caruth characterizes

Freud’s account of the origin of Jewish monotheism in the posthumous return of the murder of

the monotheistic Egyptian priest Moses as “an unconscious force” manifesting as tradition (67).

The sense of having been chosen by God is a sense of having been chosen “to survive” in a way

that is “incomprehensible” and as such homologous to the death drive (really, for Caruth, an

“awakening” drive), so that it is “both an endless crisis and the endless possibility of a new

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future” (68). By way of evidence, Caruth points to Freud’s invocation of the rail accident,

familiar from Beyond the Pleasure Principle and used in Moses and Monotheism to discuss the

hypothetical period after the murder during which the community was not monotheistic, and

focuses on Freud’s observation that the rail accident victim gets away apparently unharmed.

Jewish monotheism is, then, less a matter of the horror undergone than it is of “the

incomprehensible fact of being chosen for a future that remains, in its promise, yet to be

understood” (70). Generalizing from Moses and Monotheism, Caruth asserts that traumatic

memory’s belatedness “suggests that history is not only the passing on of a crisis but the passing

on of a survival that can only be possessed within a history larger than any single individual or

any single generation” (71).

Criticisms of the version of Trauma Theory represented in Testimony and Unclaimed

Experience have focused on the tendency of trauma in these works to function as an assertion of

an insistent and indirectly accessible though not directly experienced or known historical event

that evades rather than theoretical confronts the epistemological challenges of the structuralism

and post-structuralism whose critical language it employs. Thus, Ruth Leys’ genealogy of trauma

theory criticizes Caruth along with psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk for proposing a theory of

trauma that emphasizes “an undistorted, material, and – her key term – literal registration of the

traumatic event that, dissociated from normal mental processes of cognition, cannot be known or

represented but retruns belatedly in the form of ‘flashbacks,’ traumatic nightmares, and other

repetitive phenomena” (Leys, ch. 8). In “Trauma and the Material Signifier,” Linda Belau

criticizes Felman from a Lacanian perspective for missing “the very point she embraces,” since

she both recognizes that the trauma narrative “endlessly repeats the impossibility of

transmission” and asserts that witnessing “will make the real of the trauma accessible to the

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symbolic, available for symbolic exchange.” Dominick La Capra warns that the approach to

trauma evident in both Caruth’s and Felman and Laub’s texts risks a “conflation of absence and

loss” that “induces either a metametaphysical etherealization, even obfuscation, of historical

problems or a historicist, reductive localization of transhistorical, recurrently displaced

problems” (LaCapra, ch. 6). John Mowitt, while expressing admiration for Caruth’s work, argues

that trauma theory, by forgetting its own history at the intersection between law and medicine

whereby “everything is potentially traumatic” and “trauma has come to be invested with such

authority and legitimacy that it elicits a concomitant desire to have suffered it” or at least to

exercise “the testimonial agency it is understood to produce” (Mowitt 283).

Lauren Berlant has taken these responses to trauma theory further, and proposes an

alternative notion of “crisis ordinariness” that challenges the punctual logic of trauma. In Cruel

Optimism, Lauren Berlant argues that trauma theory’s focus on “exceptional shock and data loss

in the memory and experience of catastrophe” is inadequate because “crisis is not exceptional to

history or consciousness” and is instead “embedded in the ordinary that unfolds in stories about

navigating what’s overwhelming” (Berlant, Introduction). What gets narrated as a traumatic

event “always turns out to be an amplification of something in the works, a labile boundary at

best, not a slammed-door departure.” This amplification is analogous to a suspicious optimism.

Although optimistic events and traumatic events appear to be opposites, “at a certain degree of

abstraction both from trauma and optimism the sensual experience of self-dissolution, radically

reshaped consciousness, new sensorial, and narrative rupture can look similar” (ch. 1). Trauma

punctualizes and therefore marks periods in histories, whether personal or collective. Trauma

theory is a periodizing genre that separates an old world from a new one. Berlant argues that

Cathy Caruth’s model both exemplifies and obscures this periodizing and optimistic function.

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From the perspective of this model, the traumatic event is “self-evident” both because it is

known in an unmediated way, and because no agency can master it, still less construct it. The

“too-closeness of the event” as Caruth theorizes it “floods experience, memory knowledge, and

practices of habituation.” Trauma becomes a kind of hidden victory because it “shatters the

biostory that was a foundation for what gets taken for granted about life’s historical self-

continuity” and thus makes the experience of the present possible.

But, Berlant argues, this account of catastrophic happenings is incomplete because

“flooding does not always feel like flooding,” and “those things that we call traumatic events do

not always induce traumatic responses.” The concept of trauma necessarily involves “the

dialectic of structure (what is systemic in the reproduction of the world), agency (what people do

in everyday life), and the traumatic event of their disruption,” and misses “crisis-shaped

subjectivity amid the ongoingness of adjudication, adaptation, and improvisation.” Happenings

labeled traumatic do not halt time. What trauma produces is “a sense of the uncanny – free-

floating anxiety in the room, negativity in the street, a scenario seeming to unfold within the

ordinary without clear margins.” The subject of the traumatizing event may be “opened to a new

habituation,” but what follows a traumatic happening is neither the end of life nor a fresh

beginning but a “living on” in “crisis ordinariness.” Trauma is “a punctum in the historical

present without becoming event in any narrative sense.” Thus, “even when some thing has

happened, even in those cases where there’s a consensually recognized event, there is no a priori

consequence, habit, or style of resonance that intensifies the ordinary in a particular way.” The

traumatic event “always produces something technical without content: a sense of out-of-

synchness with the world that is reproduced in the protagonist.” For post-traumatic subjects,

“facing the death of the illusion that their personality and history are grounds rather than habits

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multiplies histories, intensifies affects across the spectrum of negativity and positivity, creates

scenes and confuses dreaming with living,” and therefore “demands a deft improvisatory

renaturalization of the evidence of ongoingness that constitutes the default historical present.”

That present is neither a shattered world nor a world restored to any kind of stability, but an

impasse. The “traumatic” is “one genre of explanation for the situation of being without genre.”

These critics of trauma theory share a refusal of the gesture that opposes trauma to

writing in order to place the former prior to and outside the latter, where the body, presumably,

assumes the blows striking it from the outside and, in doing so, asserts itself in the way it

perturbs signification. They do not, however, directly grapple with the regime of signification

itself, signification as the dominant image that spreads itself over theory and envelops the body,

silencing and domesticating it. Thus, trauma theory as articulated by Felman, Laub, and Caruth

and many of the more recent developments that refine or criticize it remain caught up in the knot

of body, psyche, and memory that frame the regime of writing and consign the body to obscurity.

That is where Catherine Malabou’s work enters the scene.

Trauma in Plasticity

Catherine Malabou’s intervention into trauma theory is bound up with her attention to

“plasticity”. For Malabou, “plasticity” is more than a concept. It is a “hermeneutical motor

scheme” (Dusk of Writing 13). A “hermeneutical motor scheme” is what a concept becomes

when it has been enlarged, extended, and transformed at a given historical moment to become

the “pure image of a thought” (14). This enlargement and extension of a concept isn’t a matter of

some influential theorist engaging in word-play and, due to reputation or status, coining a phrase

that becomes au courant for a period of time. Rather, a concept becomes a motor scheme when

“semantic powers of displacement” borne by “a historical tendency” (13) transform it in such as

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way that it “gathers and develops the meanings and tendencies that impregnate the culture at a

given moment as floating images” (14). The “floating image” is Malabou’s appropriation and

redeployment of Levi-Strauss’s “floating signifier,” but her historicization of this signifier insists

that, although hau, mana, Manitou, writing, or plasticity may all mark a certain excess and lack,

they do so differently. Difference itself is subject to change. When this happens, what was

originally a fragment of discourse begins to characterize its epoch, and becomes “an initiating

process for action or practice” (14).

To illustrate how this works, Malabou explicitly refers to the regime of writing, of the

graphic scheme. “The constitution of writing as a motor scheme was the result of a gradual

movement that began with structuralism and found its mooring in linguistics, genetics, and

cybernetics” (57). Its image is that of the meaningful “gap or difference” that, while initially

deployed within linguistics, reappeared elsewhere not so much as a result of its migration but as

a result of a convergence of emerging technologies, social practices, and vocabularies of

explanation. Computerized data processing, genetics, ethology, and other new fields all

contributed to “the pregnancy of the motifs of program, information, or code” (59), but it is the

cybernetic concept of the program that is its culmination and completion (58). Malabou’s brief

evocation of writing’s pregnancy echoes Eve Sedgwick’s account of the “cybernetic fold” within

which she locates both systems theory and the structuralism that, as we indicated above, she

regarded as having survived “its sleek trajectory into poststructuralism” (Sedgwick 104). The

“cybernetic fold” was the moment when “understanding of the brain and other life processes is

marked by the concept of powerful computers but the actual computational muscle of the new

computers isn’t available yet.” (105) It was a moment when the power and possibility of digital

codes could be richly imagined. It was a moment when “systems theory, precisely through its

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tropism toward the image of an undifferentiated but differentiable ecology, had as one of its great

representational strengths an ability to discuss how things differentiate” (106). Although the

pregnancy of writing did not occur without the intellectual labor of diverse thinkers occupied

with specific questions, its result cannot be attributed to the intention of any individual or group

of thinkers. It is “at once intuitively given and conceptually constructed” (“The end of Writing?”,

437). Malabou reports that even Jacques Derrida, who “alone recognized the full importance of

this fulfillment” (Dusk of Writing 58), acknowledged that “deconstruction”, the crucial term that

expressed it for a generation, “imposed itself upon me” as he attempted to translate the

Heideggerian term “Destruktion or Abbau” and that “I little thought it would be credited with

such a central role” (19). Thus, the motor scheme of writing was “not an arbitrary philosophical

decision” but “an event”, a “programmatic organization of the real as it is liable to come to the

awareness of an era” (59).

Today, Malabou argues, the motor scheme of writing is “no longer pregnant in the real”

(Changing Difference 55):

Indeed, in the domain of genetics, for example, the motif of the code is less and

less pregnant. In the domain of neurobiology, the models of “frayage” or

facilitation, of the trace, of the imprint, take a back seat to those of form: neuronal

configurations, network formations, emergences of images. In cybernetics, the

program is no longer even the master word. We are witnessing a decline or a

disinvestment of the graphic sign and graphism in general (“The End of Writing?”

439).

The models emerging in multiple fields of inquiry do not, however, mark a return to a naïve

embrace of the language of presence. For philosophy, in fact, they cannot do so. “No one can be

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blind to the historical and historial line of demarcation that separates Being from Being and in

effect structures our approach to any given type of philosophy, including the least destructive or

the least deconstructive” (Dusk of Writing 51). Instead, the motor schemes that drew this line

“are engaged in the plastic process of their own metamorphosis” and “plastic reading aspires to

the metamorphosis of deconstructive reading” (52).

Plasticity transforms rather than erases writing. Malabou introduces the enlarged and

extended concept of plasticity in her inaugural work, The Future of Hegel: Plasticity,

Temporality, and Dialectic. It is derived in part from Hegel’s own usage in connection with his

discussion of the Greek art of sculpture and the “sculpting” of ‘plastic individualities’ that

“acquires the value of a model for the ideal philosophical attitude” (Future of Hegel 10). This

attitude attends to the content or ‘matter at hand’ by clearing away “all that is arbitrary and

personal, all that is immediate and particular” (10), while at the same time embodying that

content and giving it incarnate form (11). Plasticity is thus “on the one hand, to be ‘susceptible to

changes of form’ or malleable (clay is a ‘plastic’ material); and on the other hand, ‘having the

power to bestow form, the power to mould’, as in the expressions ‘plastic surgeon’ or ‘plastic

arts’ (8). By extension, plasticity is the power to be molded by culture and socialization, to be

developed and, conversely, the ability to evolve and adapt. To be plastic is not to be elastic.

Plastic things preserve the shape they have received, and do not recover their previous form. At

the same time – and this is an example of the concept’s contemporary extension – plasticity

resists deformation, as in “the ability of a tissue to re-form after a lesion” (9). This meaning of

plasticity also applies to her interpretation of Hegel’s analysis of accident and habit. Malabou

explains that, for Hegel, “the ‘plastic individual’ has the power to add to the accidental the very

integrity and ontological constancy of a genus” (73). This power is what habit adds to the

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accidental. Thus, for instance, “Plato’s commitment to philosophy” began as an “accidental

fact,” but “through continual repetition of the same gestures,” it achieved “the integrity of a

form” (74). Another extension of the concept, which becomes important for Malabou in her later

discussions of affect and trauma, was acquired by the term with the introduction of explosives

made of moldable material in 1875. Plastique, from the label Explosif Plastique, has become a

common generic term for explosive material in France. So in addition to the power to receive

and give form, Malabou associated plasticity with the power to explode form (10).

As a metamorphosis of writing and deconstruction, reading with plasticity “is the reading

that seeks to reveal the form left in the text through the withdrawing of presence, that is, through

its own deconstruction” (Dusk of Writing 52). A text’s plastic reading would reveal a form that is

“other than metaphysics, other than deconstruction” and emerges from “the self-regulation of the

relation between tradition and its superseding and which at the same time exceeds the strict

binary terms of this relation” (52). A practice of thinking from the motor scheme of plasticity

recognizes that “there is always something other than writing in writing,” and that this

“something” is not a disguise for the metaphysical prejudice of the self-present voice but “marks

the difference of the grammatological instance from itself” (“The End of Writing?” 439). This

difference is “both the specter of its history and the outline of something within it that is not yet

born, something innate in the true sense” (Dusk of Writing, 54). Instead of excoriating form and

privileging “the formless, the unpresentable,” plasticity means that language – writing as

difference from itself - involves an “optical arrangement” yielding a visibility that “can only be

envisaged through a discourse function” (56). This visibility does not resist discourse but is its

depth. A “precarious gathering,” plasticity “configures traces and erases them to form them,

without however rigidifying them” (61). It is the form of metamorphosis, the form of the self-

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dispersal and self-gathering of form. As such, it belongs to the age of the synapse rather than the

DNA code, and to the age of “new metamorphic occurrences - - at the level of social and

economic organization and at the level of ‘gender’ or individual sexual identity” (57) that “show

that the privileged regime of change is the continued implosion of form, by which form revises

and reforms itself continually” (“The End of Writing?” 439).

Malabou’s fidelity to plasticity as motor scheme would preclude any theoretical use of

trauma that would entail flight from the condition of being or of form, however impossible or

painful that condition. “It is not a question of how to escape closure but rather how to escape

within closure itself” (Dusk of Writing, 65). The only alterity is “an articulated alterity, attached

to that of which it is the alterity, dislocated but always bespoken or taken, in the same way we

say that something takes form” (40). She follows Derrida’s rule of the “double mark” or double

fold,” whereby philosophical concepts are doubly marked with metaphysical meaning and

ultrametaphysical meaning, as presence and its absence. The latter, however, is not a formless

excess but a form with a specific visibility, as even marks or folds “are in fact grooves, types of

relief” (52). The self-deconstruction of the text, which is the only deconstruction, has a form that

is other than its metaphysical meaning and other than the deconstruction of that meaning. This

form is not its truth or its remainder, but “an answer,” a “possible form of an other” text that is

“launching itself beyond its own deconstruction” (53). This form is “both the specter of its

history and the outline of something within it that is not yet born, something innate in the true

sense” (54).

In order to free plasticity to become a motor scheme, it is necessary to “delocalize” it and

break “with the idea that the primary area of meaning and experience for this concept is the

aesthetic or artistic field,” at least in the way that this field is currently understood (54). The

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plastic form that Malabou is interested in exploring relates to formal ideality and figural

corporeality without invoking supersensible structuration that is opposed to an inexpressible

otherness that resists structuration. Significantly for a discussion of trauma, Malabou cites

Lanzmann’s refusal to use images or representations of the Shoah due to its unpresentability, and

notes that Lanzmann still “describes his film clearly and explicitly as a form: the form of the

‘fiction of the real,’ the form not of images, of course, but of ‘imaginations’” (55). The graphic

signifier is not “separate” from the plastic form, but the plastic confers visibility on the meaning

whose presence it is not. Rather, it emerges from the graphic qua graphic. Plasticity is “the law

of the deconstructed real,” which amounts to “the continuous implosion of form, through which

it recasts and reforms itself continually” (57).

The body re-emerges in Malabou’s work as something other than a prelinguistic nature, a

formless surface on which power is inscribed, a lost object, or a discursive performance without

essence. Since gender is a privileged way in which bodies have been marked in philosophy,

Malabou’s critique of anti-essentialism in feminist discourse can illustrate how this re-emergence

works. In her lecture “Post-Gender Theory and the Feminine,” Malabou criticizes the notion of

woman as the performance of gender’s non-essential absence of identity, but not in order to

recover a gendered essentialism of complementarity or dominance and subordination. Rather, her

critique is aimed at birthing a form that arises from the violence that casts woman and the body

out of being, that negates them, and laying hold of the plastic power of that form.

She begins by discussing Sartre’s argument in Anti-Semite and Jew that the anti-Semite

makes the Jew, but that the Jew who is made by the anti-Semite asserts a claim in the face of

what negates him or her. She proposes a “minimal concept of woman” that, echoing this

argument, as “a subject overexposed to a specific type of violence,” an essence shaped by

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destruction. This violence has essentialist and anti-essentialist forms. Malabou cites Derrida’s

discussion of the two Nietzsches in Spurs: Nietzsche’s Styles as a discussion of essentialist

violence that is also an example of anti-essentialist violence. She notes that Derrida discerns

“two understandings” of Nietzsche’s identification of truth and the idea with woman. The first is

disparaging and essentialist, since the femininity of truth for Nietzsche assumes that femininity is

falsity, seduction, illusion, lie, and appearance. Moreover, woman appears as Christian, which

indicts her as castrating. In the second understanding, lying and seduction are positive

phenomena and assimilated to art. Since there is no original, woman is originary and suspends

the distinction between the true and the non-true. She is the style of truth without essence that

phallogocentrism has repressed. Woman is, then, trans-gender, the truth of gender’s absence of

essence. Malabou argues that, although this looks like a dialectical move on Derrida’s part, it

fails to redouble itself and to produce a concept of what a negative essence might be. The

violence of this negation originates “in the artistic paradigm.” The link between woman and art,

and between the latter and imitation without model, “does not change the fact that they remain

imitations.” As the capacity to imitate without a model, the concept of performativity repeats this

Derridean anti-essentialist violence.

Malabou accuses anti-essentialist discourse on gender of making an “ontological

mistake” that “confuses essence and being.” It is quite legitimate, she admits, to claim that

women or Jews or artists have no being. But to say that they have no essence is to deprive them

of power. Being is not essence, but it has an essence. Being is without foundation, but not

without essence. The essence of being is precisely its “capacity to transform itself into another

being or into its contrary.” Plasticity, Malabou suggests, is not being but being’s essence, and its

domain is ontological. To be is to be negated. So “when I say ‘I am a woman,’ it doesn’t mean

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that this ‘I am’ is something fixed and solid, but that it is a movement.” As essence of being, this

movement is not formless but mutable, transformable, plastic. The destruction of form itself

forms and takes form. “I am a woman” is not a way of saying that I have no essence. It is a way

of negating the negation that makes me. This is not accomplished with a strategy that depends on

the structure and the exception, presence and the unpresentable, form and formlessness. It is

entered through “a door which is physical.” Thus, Malabou affirms an assertion she reads in both

Simone de Beauvior and Luce Irigaray that “the specificity of the feminine philosophical

discourse - if it has one – is that the woman will identify the neglected part of the body in order

to found their discourse.” Philosophy has traditionally valued certain body parts (the heart, the

phallus) and raised them to paradigmatic status, while consigning the remainder of the body to

the level of generality, ontic triviality, or oblivion. But Irigaray, for instance, selects a neglected

body part – the lips – and thinks from there. Malabou declares that the brain plays this role in her

work. In the history of philosophy, she says, the brain, like woman, is simply “an organ of

transmission” with “no autonomy.” Woman, like the brain, is “part of the body, the social body,

but always in a secondary, dark, obscure place.” To think essence through the brain is to answer

this neglect.

Malabou’s choice of the brain is not, however, arbitrary. Developments in the

neurosciences belong to the enlargement of the concept of plasticity that has challenged the

motor scheme of writing. They are not the only such developments. Stem cells, for instance,

remind us “that regeneration is a deprogramming, a ‘de-writing,’ if you prefer” because of “this

capacity of cells to modify their program, to break away from their text,” thus expressing “the

resistance of différance to its graphic reduction” (“Wounds of the Spirit” 36). But today,

“plasticity is the dominant concept of the neurosciences” that “constitutes their common point of

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interest, their dominant motif, and their privileged organizing model,” enabling them to think of

the brain as “dynamic, structure, and organization” (Brain 4). Moreover, the post-Fordist

reorganization of capitalism has given us “an immediate, daily experience of the neuronal form

of political and social functioning” (Brain 10), which is not “simply a neuronal given” but “also

a political and ideological construction (including the ‘neuronal’ itself)” (13). In a sense, we live

the brain but do not know it, partly because those of us who do not engage the neurosciences still

imagine the brain as a kind of mechanical control center, in spite of our immersion in plasticity.

We “experience it without either thinking it or being conscious of it” (38). But “the scientific

descriptions themselves” are separated from the brain by “an ideological screen” (40) that often

superimoses flexibility onto plasticity, implicitly celebrating the capacity “to receive a form or

impression, to be able to fold oneself” but not “to explode” (12).

As dynamic, structure, and organization, the brain ties the knot of body, psyche, and

memory differently than the mystic writing pad or the floating signifier. The brain is a layered

“open structure” in the body that is “fragile” because it is “primarily a sensuous and affected

organ” (Johnston and Malabou 30) that registers, regulates, and is altered by variations in bodily

metabolism. At the same time, it is “not a simple ‘organ’ but the very possibility of linking, the

fundamental organic coherence of our personality, our ‘we’” (Brain 57). Malabou draws heavily

on the work of Antonio Damasio, for whom “brains evolved as devices that could improve the

business of sensing, deciding, and moving and run it in a more effective and differentiated

manner” (Damasio, ch. 2). This is accomplished by means of “hormones and neuromodulators”

that “were already very much present in simple organisms with only one cell” (Ibid.). The brain

registers tissue states that are out of the range of variation necessary to ensure bodily survival

and releases these molecules, which stimulate appropriate bodily activity until the organism

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again reaches homeostasis, and then releases molecules that signal that this state has been

achieved. The brain does by constantly constructing maps, “a projection or production of

surfaces and planes” (50). These maps are “material surfaces upon which all kinds of events,

both mental and affective, inscribe themselves” (Johnston and Malabou 51).

The “mental images of the body produced in body-mapping structures” constitute the

protoself, the first layer of subjectivity “which foreshadows the self to be” (Damasio, ch. 1).

These structures are located in the brain stem and are “attached to the parts of the body that

bombard the brain with their signals, at all times, only to be bombarded back by the brain and, by

so doing, creating a resonant loop” (Ibid.). Malabou calls this protoself, the mental image of the

body, the map, the material surface that sutures the resonant loop, “the auto-representation of the

organism” (Brain 58). The protoself is not conscious but it is emotional, since primitive emotions

are the molecular signaling processes that make the protoself. The protoself is made of images

and feelings. It is also, importantly, symbolic. The protoself “consists of a gathering of images

that describe relatively stable aspects of the body and generate spontaneous feelings of the living

body” (Damasio, ch. 8). The protoself, the body’s primary map of itself, is what both links the

body to itself as the sense of a singular being but also what makes of the body its own other, “an

internal space of correspondence” which “is the space of heteroaffection” (Johnston and

Malabou 55). Neuronic auto-representation “constitutes the prototypical form of symbolic

activity,” a constant affective, semiotic process that “permits a blurring of the borders between

brain and psyche” (60). This activity is what maintains the integrity of the body’s tissues. Bodily

“homeostasis, maintenance, constancy, and inertia” are, then, not a matter of aversion or

quiescence but “are the paradoxical products of auto-excitation” (New Wounded 37). Because of

this, “the cerebral unconscious is thus fundamentally a destructive unconscious and it ‘knows’

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itself to be so” (45). It is “the original experience of fragility as the absolute exposure to the

accident” (Ibid.).

In Damasio’s architecture, which Malabou echoes, the subsequent layers of the self are

the “core self” and the “autobiographical self.” The “core self” is a second strata of mapmaking

activity that “is generated when the protoself is modified by an interaction between the organism

and an object and when, as a result, the images of the object are also modified” and is “the

central mechanism for the production of conscious minds” (Damasio, ch. 8). For Malabou, the

core self represents a “redoubling of autoaffection” by means of which “feelings produce the

concern for self-attachment,” the “mechanism of attachment for the attachment” of the body to

itself (Johnston and Malabou 51). The core self modifies and is modified by the protoself, but the

core self knows nothing but he feelings of the moment, the body and the object with which it is

occupied. It is a pulse through which “the division between self and object” appears “before any

narcissism and any sexual investment” (New Wounded 41). Finally, the “autobiographical self” is

a third stratum of mapping activity that recruits memories and delivers them to the protoself, and

also holds core self pulses “transiently in a coherent pattern” in relation to sets of memories

(Damasio, ch. 9). Because core self and autobiographical self are maps that are dynamically

drawn in relationship to events, because only the unconscious protoself is perpetually active,

because “core consciousness and autobiographical consciousness are formed from, and emerge

from, the proto-self in a progressive manner, without rupture or leap” (Brain 59), and because

the integral functioning of this layered mapping system involves not just one or two brain

regions but interdependent dynamic interactions between multiple regions, brain damage “does

not merely affect a single place in the neuronal organization but transforms the linkages or

interactions between the systems” (New Wounded 13).

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Unlike the Freudian memory apparatus, “the brain is an auto-affectable instance that is

perfectly capable of managing both internal and external disruptions” so its economy “does not

require the diversion of psychic energy and the constitution of an apparatus whose imaginary

topology would superimpose itself, in some sense, upon the anatomical and biological

organization of the nervous system” (26). The basic structure of subjectivity, its auto-affection, is

not a matter of the psyche but of the body’s resonant loop and the dynamic cerebral map that

keeps its score. If the psyche emerges from it as its secondary and tertiary maps, the psyche is

not its double, and it is not open to the psyche’s gaze as its ideal fantasmatic body. The protoself

affects itself but it does not encounter itself. It is “nonreferable to an ‘I’ or a first person”

(Johnston and Malabou 55). A “sort of opaque wall” rather than a mirror stands between the

conscious self and “the most intimate part of myself, the ‘me’ who thinks and feels within ‘me’”

(New Wounded 140). When I look at scans of my brain, Malabou argues, my brain is “offered,

without any possible internalization, to the gaze of the other, even if this gaze is my own” (Ibid.).

What confronts me in these scans is a me that cannot see itself, but it is the me that affects itself

and affects me. It is not reducible to a fantasmatic body that has always already been violated by

an originary separation from itself, a signifier differentially situated within a web of meaning, or

a floating signifier marking the insufficiency of that web to itself. It is a fourth that is knotted

within and disturbs these three, which Malabou calls the “Material” and defines as “the sense of

an affective economy that solicits itself without seeing itself” (Ibid.).

Unlike the threads in the knot of subjectivity visible within the motor scheme of writing,

the Material is truly subject to accidents and wounds. It is an “absolutely vulnerable zone” that

“can be wounded at any moment, and damage to it may cause a radical transformation of our

identity” (48). The brain’s openness to the body and the body’s openness to the world means that

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“a sudden, isolated event, unrelated to other events that constitute a life story” (52) can alter the

psyche by disturbing the “sites in the brain that induce emotion” (47). Brain lesions and

neurodegenerative diseases form a series with violence, accidents, and social exclusions that

disturb cerebral emotional modulation. A disturbance in any of cerebral sites of emotional

induction reconfigures the entire stratified network of mapping processes that generate the

psyche through the neurochemistry of emotion, but “does not put an end to psychic life” (48).

Rather, such events “can cause radical transformations of the psyche that do not actualize its

preexisting potentialities” (78). Although “brain lesions are paradigmatic in the sense that they

are the very example of violent, meaningless, unexpected, and unforeseeable shock,” they are

still “nothing but examples of this model, traumas among other traumas, no different than the

others” because “they share the same characteristic traits with the others,” including “loss of

curiosity, loss of motivation, disinterest in close friends and relatives, withdrawn behavior”

(157). Traumatic events separate the psyche from its affective history, so that this history “no

longer functions as a resource for the present,” and so become “their own origin” (151). The

traumatic ‘stressor’ is not a sign that strips a subject of its web of meaning and returns it to a

primitive state, whether of individual childhood or of signification, but a wound that “introduces

a radical cut between past and present” (154). Instead, what emerges from trauma is “a new form

of being, a stranger to the one before,” whose suffering “manifests as indifference to pain,

impassivity, forgetting, the loss of symbolic reference points” (Ontology 18). Malabou insists

that “to the extent that every trauma induces disturbances within the core of the ‘self,’ all

posttraumatic changes of personality present – disaffection or desertion” (New Wounded 49).

This indifference is not abjection, denial, or repression. It is the form of absolute destructibility,

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of a discontinuous future, but it is not a figure of hope. It is an ‘otherwise’ that is not a promise

but rather a “collapse of messianic structures” (Ontology 88).

The ideological screen that separates us from our brain, that superimposes flexibility onto

plasticity, helps perpetuate such violence. Since the seventies, flexibility “means above all the

possibility of instantly adapting the productive apparatus and labor to the evolution of demand”

and becomes “a necessary quality of both managers and employees” (Brain 46). The ideological

orientation of post-Fordist neuronal capitalism toward flexibility manifests as a demand for for

the network, for delocalization, and for adaptability. Neuronal capitalism demands that

production be re-organized in a way that substitutes networks for centralized control. One is

always only as strong as one’s ties to multiple networks. It substitutes delocalization for the

stability of role, task orientation, and social connection, so that “one must always be leaving in

order to survive, that is to say, in order to remain” (45). Adaptability presents itself as a

“suppleness, the ability to bend, and docility” that “join together in constituting a new structural

norm that functions immediately to exclude” (46).

The consequences of the failure of the brain to meet the demands of the ideological

understanding of plasticity as flexibility include “nervous depression” and “disaffiliation,” a

form of “suffering from exclusion” that is also biological, associated as it is with the same

hippocampal atrophy found in post-traumatic stress disorder (47). The depressive disorders

induced that the demand of neuronic capitalism for indefinite flexibility induces evidence the

same apathy, the same disaffection, as more obviously violent traumas and brain lesions because

they disrupt the same core functions of auto-affection that suture the psyche materially to its

emotional life. This disaffection, this apathy, appears as rigidity, flexibility’s opposite. It inserts

itself into images of the homeless, the illegal immigrant, and the chronically unemployed. The

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threat of the loss of social ties and of being cut off, excluded, must be contained or warded off

“at any cost to maintain the cohesion of the community” (51). Thus, psychiatric pharmaco-

management responds by restoring connection in these neuronal systems, answering the need for

flexible labor. The ideological circuit is complete, so that “it is no longer possible to distinguish

rigorously on an ideological level between ‘popularly’ accessible neuroscientific studies and the

literature of management – including medical management” or “between those suffering a

neurodegenerative disorder and those with major social handicaps” (52).

Neuronic capitalism thus both generates cerebral trauma and seeks to return the

traumatized brain to a nonexistent flexibility superimposed on the brain’s plasticity. But the

plastic is not elastic. It does not return. It forms itself starting from the shape given by the

accident that sculpts it. The wounds inflicted by neuronic capitalism’s exclusions and

dislocations are manifest in “certain acts of extreme violence” that “appear to be dictated by a

certain behavioral absence, by the dysfunction of emotional markers – in other words, by a

disturbance of cerebrality engendered by the sociopolitical context” (New Wounded 160).

Traumatized psyches are “beyond both love and hate, without being either sadist or masochist”

(198), and as such they “authorize us to affirm that a beyond of the pleasure principle is

manifesting itself and taking form” (199). The “traumatic passivity” through which the

traumatized psyche “receives a shock and its formation proceeds from this very reception” is

mimetically reappropriated and reproduces itself in “the neutrality and senselessness of a blow

without author and without history, of mechanical violence, and the absence of interiority –

thereby adding another valence to the exhaustible concept of the banality of evil” (200).

Neuronic capitalism’s epidemic of disaffiliation spreads out and redoubles through multiple acts

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of such indifferent, disaffected violence makes the “form of pure destruction” into “an existential

possibility that threatens each of us at every moment” (213).

Cerebral trauma is the dark underbelly of explosive plasticity, the facet of plasticity least

explored in the neurological literature. It has another side, “the deep structure of transformation”

giving rise to the “singular self” (Brain 64), hinted at in the notion of the ‘plastic individual’ in

The Future of Hegel and in her lecture on Post-Gender Theory. This deep structure is “an

intermediate plasticity” situated “between the plasticity of the ‘protoself’ and that of the

conscious self” (Brain 69). This intermediate plasticity may enable the brain-body to resist the

“ideological norm” of flexibility that “models and naturalizes the neuronal process in order to

legitimate certain social and political functioning” (68). Plasticity is not elastic, which means that

although it takes a shape, it holes that shape precisely because it resists shaping. In plasticity,

“the tension born of the resistance that constancy and creation mutually oppose to each other” so

that “every form carries within itself its own contradiction” (71). Compromise is not the result of

this contradiction, but explosive transformation, “the violence of a gap that interrupts all

continuity” (73). This violence is not that of traumatic disaffection, not “a terrorist conception,”

but rather one of “energetic discharges, creative bursts that progressively transform nature into

freedom” (74). The plastic doesn’t just absorb disturbances but “creates itself out of them” in “a

movement full of turbulence” (75). The brain is “the locus of an organic tension that is the basis

of our history and our critical activity” (81). This other side of explosive plasticity is “the most

important question, which is that of freedom” (69).

And yet, this free creation from destruction occurs only within limits. The ideological

notion of flexibility can return, even for neurosciences and neuropsychiatry, with the result that

the “dangers of an overly hasty transition toward remission and cure” (165) prevents a serious

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consideration of the relationship of plasticity to its “pathological meaning” (166). The

destruction of the fragile networks that map the psyche’s relationship to the body and the

emotions that open it to itself and others also destroys the ‘plastic individual’ with its capacity to

make itself freely from the accidents that befall it. “Such a subjectivity is absent to itself and to

its essence as well as to its accidents” (Johnston and Malabou 58). For such a subject, “the

mechanism of mapping seems to be separated from all emotional processes” (59). The accidents

to which we are vulnerable do not necessarily lead to an apotheosis of Spirit, at least not in they

way that the metaphysical reading of Hegel might suggest. “I refuse to believe that the accident

responds to the call of an identity which, in a sense, is only waiting for it to unfurl” (Ontology

90). To the degree that we are not already indifferent, disaffected, deserted – and the very notion

of a series gestures toward degrees – our very social situation and the “new wounded” inhabiting

it are orienting us toward a consciousness of this possibility.

Post-Traumatic Exodus

To the degree that we are exposed to neuronic capitalism, we are already post-traumatic.

This does not mean that we are “always already” post-traumatic, like Freudian or Lacanian

subjects. We are, rather, materially post-traumatic inasmuch as we belong to neuronic capitalism,

which is also Lauren Berlant’s milieu of “crisis ordinariness,” engaged in

a form of bargaining with what is overwhelming about the present, a bargaining against

the fall between the cracks, the living death of repetition that's just one step above the fall

into death by drowning or by hitting the concrete at full speed. (Berlant, ch. 5).

If we take Malabou’s argument seriously, we cannot regard this situation as superimposed on an

elastic subjectivity, a body capable assuming infinite shapes or an immovable ontological

foundation, even if that foundation is figured as foundationless. It means that we are being

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hollowed out at a cerebral level, at the level of the maps that inform us of the bodies we are and

make those bodies feel how to respond. We do not know what kind of response will be adequate

to foster a kind of explosive plasticity that refuses neuronic capitalism without adding force to

the cerebral death drive. We can say, however, that neither treating trauma as an “always

already,” nor reconfiguring the body as writing or as discursivity, nor meeting trauma with a

witnessing that places its hopes solely in the power of narrative will be adequate. I say this not

intended to disparage psychoanalysis or deconstruction, but rather to draw attention to the

precise nature of the fragility that is becoming visible with and through the motor scheme of

plasticity and cerebrality. In other words, it may be time to turn to the body in its material,

biological dimension. If we are to make a transition that holds the possibility of any meaningful

resistance open, a transition to transitions other than the transition to a world of living dead, it

will be in and through the body, its affects, and its neural connections – or what remains of them.

It will be a transition in and of the body.

I will conclude with two images of such a transition. The first is drawn from Ann

Cvetkovich’s reflections on public and collective formulations to address trauma, written against

the public-private distinction that opposes therapy and politics. The second is drawn from David

Graeber’s essay Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology. These images share a certain

conviction that collective rather than individual gestures more adequately address the exigencies

of post-traumatic selfhood.

Cvetkovich is motivated by a wariness of “the pathologization of trauma because of its

similarity to the pathoogization of sexual perversity and sexual identities in the name of

constructing normative identities” (Archive 30). Although medical diagnosis of trauma “can

spotlight problems that might otherwise be misrecognized or go unrecognized, medical diagnosis

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too often stops precisely where a more exacting analysis is warranted” (31). She searches for this

analysis in public work in queer and lesbian cultures that refuses to disavow the connection

between trauma and lesbian and queer identities. For Cvetkovich, this “archive of feelings” is

“encoded not only in the content of the texts themselves but in the practices that surround their

production and reception” (Introduction). The archive is “lives not just in museums, libraries,

and other institutions but in more personal and intimate spaces, and significantly, also within

cultural genres” (230). In fact, for Cvetkovich, texts, films, and performances are often important

not because of any supposed aesthetic appeal – a section of her book investigates lesbian sex

manuals and self-help books, the literary quality of which she doesn’t celebrate – but because of

the practices that their distribution stimulated and the collective groupings they created. The

practices that Cvetkovich describes are often practices that elicit powerful affects. She describes

participating the mosh pit at a Tribe 8 performance wherein “some of the band members

identified themselves as survivors of sexual abuse” and “explained how their music and

performances allow them to unleash aggression and pain,” and then demonstrated this in a

performance that blurred “the distinctions between pro-sex practices, sexual violence, and incest

survivorhood in order to reveal that their intimate connections may be productive rather than a

cause for alarm” (70). She conducts oral history interviews with women who were involved in

the AIDS activist group ACT UP during the late 1980s and early 1990s, and discusses the

affective intensity that accompanied the physical activity of demonstrations which, “whether

represented as a strategic form of public intervention or a display of emotion,” was characterized

by her subjects as “not only a significant form of protest but one whose value is highly

emotional” (175).

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Cvetkovich’s discussion of lesbian butch-femme sexual practices explicitly addresses the

power of such extreme emotional practices to counter emotional numbness. She cites Joan

Nestle’s celebratory discussion of “sweetness” of the “pain” she feels as her lover enters her

body, and notes that “feeling is contrasted with numbness; even pain is preferable to not feeling

at all” (51). The pain is interpreted as “attention” that contrasts with the lack of recognition she

receives from a homophobic and woman-negating culture but before this interpretation, it

“destroys the numbness created by an inability to express desire” (Ibid.). Sexualizing her trauma

and then writing about it, Nestle generated “a model - - for the way in which traumatic

experience - - can be brought into the public sphere,” enabling sexual practices to serve “as a

vehicle through which trauma can be articulated and reworked, often in somatic ways” (52).

Similarly, she reads Leslie Feinberg’s Stone Cold Butch Blues as a melodrama about the power

of the femme lover to “unstick” feelings that trauma has locked outside her, leaving her “both

touched and untouched” (66). In examining the differences between butch-femme sexuality and

Mark Seltzer’s depiction of trauma culture in Serial Killers, Cvetkovich emphasizes how in the

former, “numbness and fears of feeling or vulnerability are complex modes of response and

resistance rather than pathological” (Ibid.).

Cvetkovich’s “archive of feelings” doesn’t include survivors at the extreme end of

Malabou’s series of the cerebrally traumatized, but the survivors whose practices and texts it

archives do belong to that series. The textual and artifactual relays between these survivors that

she analyzes both record and promote practices that range far outside the confines of any talking

cure. They involve the use of the body to stimulate, if only ephemerally, the emotional intensity

that trauma diminishes, to reconnect, if only fragmentarily, the body’s cerebral resonant loop.

These practices can be compared to sensorimotor psychotherapy, which uses “somatic resources

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that counteract numbing” to “increase integrative capacity in the face of automatic tendencies

toward dissocation and hypoarousal” (Ogden, Pain & Minton 155). Bessel van der Kolk has

recommended such approaches to remediate neuroprocessing deficits that render patients with

post-traumatic stress disorder “too over- or underaroused to be able to ‘process’ and

communicate what they are experiencing” (van der Kolk 255). But the differences between these

professionalized therapeutic techniques and the practices Cvetkovich analyzes are as important

as the similarities. Cvetkovich is not interested in claiming that butch-femme sex, ACT UP

meetings and demonstrations, or all-female mosh pits restore trauma survivors to a ‘normal’

range of emotional responsivity, nor is she interested in valorizing such a restoration, particularly

in view of the questionability of normative standards. And these practices are not simply private

or therapeutic, but public and political. They are aimed at establishing new kinds of linkages

within and among the bodies of the traumatized, activating a queer affective mobilization that

resists the pathologization of affective coolness, the complete collapse of the resonant loop that

attaches the self to itself, and the ‘normal’ social practices that both pathologize and produce an

attenuated affective repertoire.

David Graeber’s Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology also focuses on the generation

of publics that resist the traumatizing effects of neural capitalism. For Graeber, classic

anthropological figures Marcel Mauss and Pierre Clastres, despite shortcomings he

acknowledges, “have succeeded, somewhat despite themselves, in laying the groundwork for a

theory of revolutionary counterpower” (24). Their arguments, based on analyses of

contemporary societies ordinarily regarded as ‘primitive’ and therefore not contemporary,

suggest “that counterpower, at least in the most elementary sense, actually exists where the states

and markets are not even present” and, rather than setting themselves up as popular institutions

Richard  72  

 

that pose themselves against sovereignty, “are embodied in institutions which ensure such types

of persons never come about” (25). Although for Graeber, antagonism is ontological so that all

societies are to some degree at war with themselves, social groupings that function as

counterpower are always surrounded by “invisible worlds” that “are literally battlegrounds” (26).

The ritual performance and mythological narratives circulating in these groups cast the

background of the world and their own social group as one of conflict and violence, and this

“spectral violence seems to emerge from the very tensions inherent in the project of maintaining

an egalitarian society” (31). Our word, the world of neural capitalism, is “riddled with such

anarchic spaces, and the more successful they are, the less likely we are to hear about them” (34).

Much of the work that creates these spaces “was conducted precisely in the spectral nightworld

of sorcerers and witches” where ritual and magic forge “the fulcrum of the moral imagination”

(Ibid.).

For Graeber, the observation and creation of such spaces is crucial to revolutionary

activity that genuinely makes something different out of what we are. First, it means observing

and taking seriously contemporary communities that are usually “assumed to live in an

absolutely different world” (41). It means observing “kin-based” small-scale social groups

neither as “gardens of Eden” nor as a “state of nature” but as belonging to revolutionary history.

It means observing and analyzing the process of ethnogenesis as a collective refusal of a

dominant social formation, “a conscious rejection of certain forms of overarching political power

which causes people to rethink and reorganize the way they deal with one another on an

everyday basis” that, working “through literally or figuratively sculpting flesh, through music

and ritual, food and clothing, and ways of disposing of the dead,” eventually “become identities,

even ones continuous with nature” (56). Graeber emphasizes the “importance of defection”

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rather than direct challenge to power, and insists that “most successful forms of popular

resistance have taken precisely this form” (61).

Graeber’s ethnogenetic conception of revolutionary practice is not grounded in the

nostalgia that the early Derrida reads in Levi-Strauss’s work. Its conceptualizes contemporary

pockets of apparently isolated small-scale “primitive,” “kinship-based,” or “peasant” societies as

the developments of conscious or unconscious projects of refusal rather than as survivals of an

idealized or repudiated past. It conceptualizes the work that prepares for and stimulates such

projects as a work of imagination. And in a way that connects with Cvetkovich’s “archive of

feelings,” it locates that imaginative work not in any realm of subjectivity or thought operating

independently of the body, but in conscious experiment with and of the body. For Graeber and

for Cvetkovich, the response to neuronal capitalism begins by taking hold of the accident that has

thrown us into the series of disaffection that culminates in the figure of the living dead, and to

assert a claim in the face of what casts us into that series, not just by talking or thinking about it,

but by means of the very bodily techniques that Levi-Strauss celebrates Marcel Mauss for having

analyzed. Both Graeber and Cvetkovich suggest that, just as the accident disturbs the affective

economy of the brain by means of the body, the formation (not restoration) of revolutionary

affectively connected brains begins with body.

The cerebral plasticity that we are has been traumatically thrown into a juncture between

explosive freedom and explosive destruction. What happens now depends on the body that has

emerged from the regime of writing, which is neither the metaphysical body that preceded it nor

the symbolic body that it carried as a trace, but the fragile cerebral body that has taken form in

its wake. This body is the body of the affective resonant loop that maps itself in a stratified series

of maps that forms and deforms the ‘we’ that we are. The transition we face is not a matter of the

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mind, or rather it is only a matter of the mind inasmuch as the matter of the mind is the material

brain, the organ of the body’s affective mapping. In order to transition to a world other than the

world of the living dead, we must attend to this body. We must write the body in transition.

Richard  75  

 

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Notes

                                                                                                               1 The towering figure of Jacques Lacan is missing here in spite of Lacan’s importance to the figuration of trauma in this period because, in seeking to trace the arc of the period using only a few texts, I have followed Markos Zafiropoulos in identifying the early texts of Levi-Strauss examined here as the crucial source for what will become Lacan’s much more developed theory of trauma in his Seminar VIII (Zafiropoulos, ch. 2). The linguist Roman Jakobson, whose “Notes on the French Phonemic Pattern” and “Zero Sign” supplied the central concepts that Levi-Strauss would use in these texts, and that Derrida would later cite against Levi-Strauss in his reading of them, is also missing – in this case because it was Levi-Strauss rather than Jakobson for whom these concepts became a new way of reading Freud and the phenomenon of trauma as signification. 2 Breuer’s theoretical contribution to their Studies on Hysteria is ambivalent about the possibility of such an account. Although it refers to “intercerebral tonic excitation” and, citing Freud, to a “tendency to keep intracerebral excitation constant” (SE II: 197), it begins by announcing that “psychical process will be dealt with in the language of psychology” because “while ideas are constant objects of our experience and are familiar to us in all their shades of meaning, ‘cortical excitations’ are on the contrary rather in the nature of the postulate” (185). 3 On the role of the progressive narrative and its breakdown in the gradual reframing of the Nazi death camps as a tragic narrative that both refuted and implicated the progressive narrative, see Alexander 31–96. 4 On the mechanisms through which the U.S. women’s movement and professionals treating “post-Vietnam syndrome” shaped the new criteria for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) in the DSM-III and the impact of that diagnosis on trauma discourse, see Fassin and Rechtman 77-97. 5 This controversy is discussed in Morgan 264. 6 See Roudinesco, ch. 6. This controversy began as a direct confrontation between Faurisson and Pierre Vidal-Naquet but later broadened when American linguist Noam Chomsky joined the debate on the side of Faurisson’s right to “free speech” and used the opportunity to attack the entire 20th century French philosophical tradition, and when Jean-Francois Lyotard used the Faurisson controversy as a framework for his book The Differend. 7 On the relationship between the “de Man incident” and the emergence of “trauma theory,” see LaCapra, ch. 5. 8 This criterion was deleted in the 1994 DSM-IV and replaced with a two-part criterion that included “a life-threatening event or a violation of bodily integrity” and “extreme fear, helplessness, or horror” (427-428).