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Trauma and Psychoanalysis, Beyond Life and Death SUFFERING AND SURVIVAL: CONSIDERING TRAUMA, TRAUMA STUDIES AND LIVING ON MARK DAWSON Submitted in accordance with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy The University of Leeds School of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies September, 2010 The candidate confirms that the work submitted is his own and that appropriate credit has been given where reference has been made to the work of others. This copy has been supplied on the understanding that it is copyright material and that no quotation from the thesis may be published without proper acknowledgement. © 2010: The University of Leeds and Mark Dawson. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS What remains beyond this thesis are the others to whom it is indebted; though it is impossible to name them all, I would like to acknowledge the sustained and indispensable guidance of my supervisors, Dr. Ashley Thompson and Professor Griselda Pollock. I would also like to acknowledge the support of Dr. Barbara Engh and Dr. Rowan Bailey, as well as note the unique and stimulating environment of the School of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies at The University of Leeds. I would also like to thank the Arts and Humanities Research Council for their financial assistance. I want especially to thank my mother, for her love as well as her unwavering support, and Sarah, for her love, belief, and the remarkable capacity to welcome the uncertainties of this process. ABSTRACT Referring to the academic phenomenon of ‗Trauma Studies‘, this thesis argues that if it is possible to ‗speak about and speak through‘ trauma (Caruth, 1996), such a double operation can only occur through a writing which, paradoxically, touches on what exceeds it. To structure this argument, the thesis proposes a distinction between ‗Trauma Studies‘ – as a discipline or field of academic study – and a trauma study; the latter being a writing (on) trauma which suffers and survives as an inscription of the traumatic event, an event which nevertheless remains irreducible to the text ‗as such‘. Moreover, by referring to Jacques Derrida‘s consideration of the term ‗survivre‘, a quasi-originary textual dimension which ‗survives‘ or ‗lives on‘ the border between life and death, I suggest that if a trauma study is to ‗take place‘, it must affirm this essentially ‗spectral‘ dimension as its very condition. Following Derrida‘s suggestion that all events are in a sense traumatic, I further argue that a trauma study must write (on) the traumatic event in terms of the force and potentiality of the future – what I refer to as the ‗might‘ of what remains to come. This thesis, therefore, considers a trauma study in terms of ‗living on‘, a textual dimension which suffers and survives the ‗might‘ of what remains to come. Chapter One reads Chris Marker‘s film La Jetée, Chapter Two Roland Barthes‘s reading of Stendhal, and Chapter Three considers Hélène Cixous‘s Le jour où je n‟étais pas là. These chapters read how a trauma study remains a possibility of the im-possible, an experimental writing which survives or lives on the precarious border between experience and study. The thesis concludes by suggesting that, in order to write (on) what remains traumatic, the (im)possibility of a trauma study is determined by a certain feminine ‗might‘. CONTENTS Intellectual Property and Publication Statements…………… ................................... ii Acknowledgements .................................................................................................... iii Abstract ...................................................................................................................... iv Contents ...................................................................................................................... v INTRODUCTION ............................................................................................ 1 ii 1. LA JETÉE: SUFFERING AND SURVIVAL… „AVEC UN PEU DE VERTIGE‘....... ......24 1.1 An art/science/séance of the spectral ......................................................... 26 1.2 A „theoretical jetty‟ .................................................................................... 33 1.3 La Jetée as ‗theoretical jetty‘ ..................................................................... 35 1.4 Surviving life and death ............................................................................. 41 1.5 The sequoia scenes ..................................................................................... 50 1.6 The promise of cinema ............................................................................... 63 1.7 A trauma study ........................................................................................... 69 1.8 Suffering the wound ................................................................................... 72 1.9 Welcoming the im-possible ........................................................................ 78 2. FROM LOSS TO IMMINENCE: READING BARTHES READING STENDHAL……. ............................................ 83 2.1 A „primal state of pleasure‟ ....................................................................... 89 2.2 A promise of the other ................................................................................ 92 2.3 Spectral reservation ................................................................................. 100 2.4 Spectralizing messianism Ŕ a hesitation .................................................. 106 2.5 It‟s all in the head .................................................................................... 111 2.6 Fragments d‟un discours amoureux ........................................................ 121 2.7 A spectral imaginary ................................................................................ 131 2.8 A virtual double act .................................................................................. 136 3. ADDRESSING ARRIVANCE: LE JOUR OÙ JE N‟ÉTAIS PAS LÀ…................................................................ ..139 3.1 Faute de langue ........................................................................................ 143 3.2 Arrivance/Happening ............................................................................... 153 3.3 Belebtheit: art, study, arrivivance ............................................................ 158 3.4 On narcissism ........................................................................................... 165 3.5 Acknowledging denial Ŕ an „undecidable gesture‟ .................................. 168 3.6 To be almost Ŕ the story of „o‟ ................................................................. 176 3.7 Eve Ŕ her might… ................................................................................... 187 CONCLUSION ............................................................................................. 195 BIBLIOGRAPHY ........................................................................................ 202 1 INTRODUCTION ‗So the loss of son or brother, or of property, or anything else of the kind, will hold the least terrors for the good man.‘ ‗He will be least affected by them.‘ ‗So when any catastrophe of the kind overtakes him, he will lament it less and bear it more calmly then others.‘ ‗He will.‘ ‗Then we should be quite right to cut out from our poetry lamentations by famous men. We can give them to the less reputable women characters or to the bad men, so that those whom we say we are bringing up as Guardians of our state will be ashamed to imitate them.‘ ‗You are quite right.‘ Plato.1 Writing (on) trauma The word ‗trauma‘ comes from the Greek ‗τραύμα‘, which means ‗wound‘, and is usually experienced as a painful marking of the body. The notion of trauma has featured extensively in many intellectual traditions; in terms of western aesthetics this can be traced at least from the work of Plato (with the notion of trauma or suffering having no place in his phallocentrically ideal state, constitution, or ‗Republic‘). Though trauma is currently the preserve of discourses/disciplines such as psychoanalysis and psychology, the study of trauma has also found a home in the modern humanities. This particular consideration of trauma, referred to as the discipline or field of ‗Trauma Studies‘, has manifested itself most clearly in the (comparative) literature departments of the North American university. Trauma Studies divides many as to its place in the university, the term ‗trauma‘ recalling for many the impasse of ‗identity politics‘, as well as the all too easily appropriable ‗survivor narrative‘, a narrative which might found a certain claim to 1 Plato, The Republic, trans. Desmond Lee (London: Penguin Books Ltd, 2007), pt.III, bk.III, §1, 387e- 388a (p.79). 2 moral, political and/or subjective agency.2 Deriving in part from the Yale School of the mid 1970s, and thus a certain amalgamation of literary theory, psychoanalysis and deconstruction, the now seminal work on trauma by Cathy Caruth and Shoshana Felman – which emerged from the late 1980s – asks how intellectual culture and practice might engage with catastrophic history. In terms of Trauma Studies, then, Caruth‘s first book, Unclaimed Experience, is central. In it Caruth reads Freud‘s Moses and Monotheism, a text which identifies a traumatic departure as the mark of both the impossibility and possibility of Jewish history: In [Freud‘s] rethinking of Jewish beginnings […] the future is no longer continuous with the past but is united with it through a profound discontinuity. The exodus
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