Saturday, December 17, 2011

Bracketing Man: An Essay in Philosophical Archaeology



(Dedication page for my dissertation)


Bento de Espinosa
(1632-1677)

Whose life and work,
notably his Ethics,
embodies the first great break with Western tradition
to create a modern psychology,
integrating passion and reason

“The prince of philosophers”
—Gilles Deleuze



Primo Levi
(1919‑1987)

“Häftling Nummer 174517”—
an Italian and a Jew from Turin
—who survived Auschwitz
to become its clearest witness before
succumbing to the “background noise”

“A perfect example of the witness”
—Giorgio Agamben


* * *



Bracketing Man:
An Essay in Philosophical Archaeology

Vincenzo Di Nicola
Doctoral candidate, European Graduate School


Before the end of the eighteenth century, man did not exist…. As the archaeology of our thought easily shows, man is an invention of recent date. And one perhaps nearing its end.
—Michel Foucault, The Order of Things (1966/1970, pp. 336, 422)


BENTO DE ESPINOSA (1632-1677), who we know as Benedictus Spinoza, opens something that Primo Levi (1919-1987) closes. Let us say that they bracket something. We may choose various tropes—brackets, parentheses, bookends—to articulate a kind of encapsulation. We can imagine that which is bracketed as a highlight, a golden age, an enlightenment. We may also see it as an interruption, a caesura, a rupture, a cut, a hiatus or suspension—a process of evacuation. We may see it as an ideology (think of the two Karls, Marx and Mannheim, and later, Althusser’s notion of “lacunar discourse”), a hegemony (in Gramsci’s term), a culture (in the sense of philosophical anthropology)… or as an épistémè or a discourse (as we see it evolve in Foucault’s thought) .1

We may choose other bookends, other thinkers or events to place the brackets or anchor an era. Shall we move the opening of the parentheses forward to Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) and the Enlightenment? Should we place the closing somewhere else, such as the European declaration of the New Man in the 1930s—from Fascist Italy to Soviet Russia to Nazi Germany (see Jean Clair, 2008)? Or do we choose an emblematic moment of the nadir of the New Man—Kristallnacht? The Republic of Salo? Auschwitz? The Moscow Show Trials? The Gulag Archipelago?

Who will represent this moment? Osip Mandelstam feeding his fellow prisoners the bread of poetry in Stalin’s prisons? Walter Benjamin committing suicide in France on the frontier with Spain, mere metres and minutes from freedom? Simone Weil choosing a starvation diet in solidarity with allied POWs during WWII? Primo Levi witnessing the walking dead, the Muselmanner of Auschwitz? Paul Celan committing suicide in Paris in the shadow of “that which happened”? Or shall it be Hannah Arendt reporting on the “banality of evil” at Eichmann’s trial in the shadow of the Shoah?

These questions can be addressed by a philosophical-historical method that Giorgio Agamben, following Kant and Foucault, calls philosophical archaeology.2

Provisionally, we may call “archaeology” that practice which in any historical investigation has to do not with origins but with the moment of a phenomenon’s arising and must therefore engage anew the sources and traditions (Agamben, 2008/2009, p. 89).


Clearly, I place this closure of the brackets in the twentieth century, somewhere in the Nazi or the Soviet world; that which is bracketed is a human construction, however else we qualify it; we must ironize any possible notion of progress associated with this bracketing.

If we can bracket it—and it is on the long run of human history a comparatively short breath (a gasp?)—it is a time, perhaps indeed a state, of exception (cf. Agamben, 2003/2005).

For this reason, I prefer people or events that are themselves exceptions, outliers, excluded, ectopic—liminal people, on the threshold, on the cusp (cf. Victor Turner’s social anthropology, 1969) who are harbingers, messengers (echoing Walker Percy here), vectors or vehicles—opening events (cf. Alain Badiou, 1988/2005) or foreclosing the possibilities of events (trauma).

So, to open the brackets, I choose Spinoza as a liminal figure as much for his biography as for his philosophy and what that philosophy opens: I see his Ethics as the opening of a modern psychology based on understanding man.3

This notion of man, as Michel Foucault (1926-1984) suggests, is nearing its end. Paradoxically, its end was announced with fanfare and exuberance with Marinetti’s “Futurist Manifesto” (1909/2008) and achieved hegemony in the Fascist and Soviet declaration of the New Man, reaching its nadir in the death camps f Nazism and the Stalinist Gulag. Its denouement came with the post-war world of denial and forgetting and newer, subtler forms of desubjectivation which I define as evacuation of the human.

This image of man—the New Man—buries our humanity. Instead of manifestos, fanfare, declarations and exuberance, we have evasions, negations, denials, a total failure of memory. The New Man of the Fascists and the Soviets relegated Futurism to the past. In a reversal of Wittgenstein’s ladder, they fabricated a descending staircase and then flooded it, drowning themselves (see Marcel Duchamp’s provocative Nu descendant un escalier n° 2, http://www.beatmuseum.org/duchamp/images/nude2.jpg; 
a brilliant pastiche by Karl Nicholsason has Mussolini dressed in jackboots descending a staircase, transforming into a naked woman).

And to close the brackets, I choose Primo Levi not only because he was witness to Auschwitz but because he persisted in telling his story against the evasions and denials of the post-Nazi world. His is the struggle of memory against forgetting.

What is bracketed by Spinoza and Levi is the very notion of man—whose birth was announced in Spinoza’s Ethics and given its death notice in Primo Levi’s Survival in Auschwitz.

In Spinoza’s Ethics (completed in 1676 but published posthumously in 1677), Proposition 46 states the foundation of what we would call social psychology, with prescient elements of both behaviourism and attribution theory, in what is a theory of empathy:

If a man has been affected pleasurably or painfully by anyone of a class or nation different from his own, and if the pleasure or pain has been accompanied by the idea of the said stranger as cause, under the general category of the class or nation: the man will feel love or hatred, not only for the individual stranger, but also to the whole class or nation whereto he belongs (Spinoza, 1677/1957, p. 53).


Contrast this with Levi’s report of a profound failure of empathy on the eve of the transport of Italian Jews from a camp in Fossoli to Auschwitz, 21 February 1944:

Only a minority of ingenuous and deluded souls continued to hope; we others had often spoken with the Polish and Croat refugees and we knew what departure meant.…

The Italian commissar …  decreed that all services should continue to function … and even the teacher of the little school gave lessons until the evening, as on other days. But that evening the children were given no homework.

And night came, and it was such a night that one knew that human eyes would not witness it and survive. Everyone felt this: not one of the guards, neither Italian nor German, had the courage to come and see what men do when they know they have to die (Levi, 1958/1959, pp. 10-11).


*

MEN AND WOMEN, human beings, will live long after this death notice. But these humans will not be citizens of the American or French revolutions; they will not be living under Kant’s moral imperative (not even as reformulated by Lawrence Kohlberg or Jürgen Habermas); nor will they be the alienated workers of Marx and Engels and certainly not the European New Man.

Like Spinoza, Levi is a liminal figure. An Italian Jew with one foot in the Europe whose Jews were emancipated by Napoleon and included in modern Italy by Count Cavour and another snared in the Third Reich, Levi survived the Auschwitz death camp, to emerge as its clearest witness with a measured voice. Many great questions have been asked about the Shoah, leading to what historian Raul Hilberg calls “small answers” (cited in Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah, 1985). Levi shows us that attending to small details yields moments of insight into the discontinuous discourses nested side by side or within each other in his Lager at Auschwitz. Through small descriptions and subtle restraint, Levi allows his experiences to become visible to us. Then, imperceptibly, by an almost evolutionary process of accretion, the enormity makes itself felt, all the more strongly because it is anchored in the particulars of the people we meet through Levi’s eyes. His method is resonant with Agamben’s archaeology: with patience and exacting skill, Levi uncovers the layers of his internment through a sort of philological archaeology—or is it a geology? Listen to the Israeli poet, Yehuda Amichai:

The Jews are not a historical people
and not even an archaeological people, the Jews
are a geological people with rifts
and collapses and strata and fiery lava.
Their history must be measured
on a different scale.
—Yehuda Amichai, “The Jews,” (1991, p. 84)


To read Levi is to realize that something radical had changed in the construction of a European, Italian or Jewish identity. Emblematic in my reading is Levi’s rejection as a Jew by his fellow Jewish inmates at Auschwitz. When I read that, something broke in me. I would never be able to simultaneously affirm my identities—Italian and Jew. In Levi’s experience, these two were forcibly separated, not only by the racial laws of Mussolini’s Fascists or the German masters and their Polish collaborators at Auschwitz but by the other Ashkenazi Jewish inmates from Eastern Europe who used Yiddish as a shibboleth, defining who is a Jew:

Yiddish was de facto the camp’s second language…. The Polish, Russian and Hungarian Jews were astonished that we Italians did not speak it: we were suspect Jews, not to be trusted, besides being naturally, “badoglios” for the SS and “mussolinis” for the French, Greeks, and political prisoners (Levi, 1986/1988, p. 100).


He was liminal too in the reconstruction of his memories after Auschwitz. Levi’s readymade tools are memory and words:

Then for the first time we became aware that our language lacks words to express this offense, the demolition of a man (Levi, 1958/1959, p. 22).


In The Drowned and the Saved, Levi describes interactions with educated Germans after the war where words like fressen (verb to eat, applied “in good German” only to animals) and abhauen (verb to cut, to chop off, used in a phrase learned in the camp, meaning to leave) created a stir:

They looked at me in astonishment …. I explained to them that I had not learned German in school but rather in a Lager called Auschwitz; this gave rise to a certain embarrassment … I later on realized also that my pronunciation is coarse, but I deliberately have not tried to make it more genteel; for the same reason, I have never had the tattoo removed from my left arm (Levi, 1986/1988, p. 99).


This book documents debates Levi had with the translator of his memoir into German, doing further research to confirm his memories. In spite of not knowing Yiddish and only little German, “Mechanical memory had functioned correctly” (p. 101). Levi examines many words and nuances about his memoir in the chapter, “Letters from Germans,” (Levi, 1986/1988).

Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937) teaches us that hegemony makes things seem obvious, taken for granted. Spinoza opens the modern era of cultural hegemony with the notion of man as the centre of our preoccupations. Levi teaches us the cruelty of that hegemony—the Italian Fascists bowing to the Nazis’ viral notion of racial purity and contamination, nested within the eugenics movement with its origins in the England of Charles Darwin and his cousin Francis Galton (see Stephen Gould’s incisive study, 1981), that the German guards and the Polish population accepted as evident commonsense. Through Levi’s witnessing, I am able to identify something new—not merely Gramsci’s (1992) notion of cultural hegemony, “layered” by numerous individual and collective experiences, nor Althusser’s “lacunar discourse” (1971) where the unsaid and the implicit shape the dominant discourse, nor even the great sweep of Foucault’s (1966/1970, 1969/1972) view of discourse shaping society, but something more nuanced and capable of articulating paradoxes: nested hegemonies. In my notion of nested hegemonies, parallel (e.g., the eugenics movement, the New Man, Nazi anti-Semitism) or even apparently contradictory (e.g., Aryan superiority, Ashkenazi exclusivity) discourses may not only co-exist but mutually reinforce each other.

So we see that Levi closes many things. This closure does not apply to one group alone. It is not simply the shame of the German people or the Nazi ideology or of Russian communism and its brutalities (Levi makes reference to many parallels with the Soviet prison camps, 1986/1988). It is the end of a shared illusion about our human nature. The Futurists, the Fascists, the Nazis and the Soviets forthrightly announced their intentions to kill the past and the basis for that illusion. 

The hand-wringing in post-war Europe over how this could happen, the descent into the endless negations of existentialism, critical theory, postmodernism and the like evaporate into air—just as Marx predicted. Those of us born after “that which happened,” as Celan (2001) characterized the death camps of Europe, cannot find George Steiner’s (1982) questions about “language and silence,” about the failure of language in the face of Fascism edifying or relevant. We don’t experience the paradox or the scandal of listening to Bach or reading Rilke in the evening and tending to the ovens in the day. It simply occurred. Our impulse is not to mourn or anguish over the death of the New Man or even the approaching “end of man” announced by Foucault, but to acknowledge the illusion subtending such beliefs and move on.

Philosophical archaeology provides us with tools to locate and separate the nested discourses, like landmines, and disarm them. Now, this illusion that we shared in the hegemony or discourse of modernism, is no longer possible for us. Not among the nations that created modernism or the man of the Enlightenment, not among the nations that announced the New Man—Italy, Germany and Russia—and not among Jews, anywhere.



Acknowledgements

I am very grateful for the stimulating seminar with Professor Giorgio Agamben on Homo Sacer at the European Graduate School in 2009 cross-fertilized by an extended dialogue with Thomas Zummer, EGS scholar-in-residence and student of Michel Foucault.


Notes

1      The evolution of notions subsumed under the rubric ideology, with all the debates and disputes it engendered is a long and complex one, going to the heart of politics, sociology and critical theory. I refer in the first instance to the work of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels in The German Ideology (1846/1932) and its adoption into sociology by Karl Mannheim (1936). The elaboration of ideology from Marx along with Lenin’s work on hegemony was developed most profoundly by Antonio Gramsci (1992) with later glosses by Louis Althusser (1971). The bridge between Gramsci’s and Foucault’s work is implicit and central to my argument here but left for further elaboration in another essay. The development of Foucault’s own work from épistémè/episteme in The Order of Things (1966/1970) to discours/discourse in The Archaeology of Knowledge (1969/1972) is a fascinating study on its own and germane to my argument (cf. Alan Sheridan, 1980).

2      Giorgio Agamben (2008/2009) traces the term philosophical archaeology from Immanuel Kant. Clearly there is an archaeology of the term itself, embedded in successive strata of thought from Nietzsche’s “critical history” to Foucault’s “epistemological field, the episteme,” where we see glimpses of Freud’s regression, Marcel Mauss’ “historical a priori,” Franz Overbeck’s prehistory, Georges Dumézil’ “fringe of ultra-history” and Benjamin’s prehistory and post-history. The link between psychoanalytic regression and archaeology was intuited by Paul Ricoeur, carefully elaborated by Enzo Melandri, and explicitly connected to the task of philosophy through Foucault by Agamben. In sum, Agamben constructs a genealogy from Kant and Nietzsche connecting Freud and Foucault to forge a subtle and fertile method of philosophical inquiry.

3      Gilles Deleuze (1968/1990) crowned Spinoza “the ‘prince’ of philosophers.” There are now so many studies of Spinoza in so many languages and disciplines that it is impossible to choose a canonical study or interpretation. Nonetheless, a masterful reading of Spinoza in the spirit of philosophical archaeology is offered in Yirmiahu Yovel’s two-volume study, Spinoza and Other Heretics (1989a, 1989b). Yovel provides a very fine, historically-informed and closely-argued analysis of Spinoza as a liminal figure between Christianity and Judaism. Descending from Portuguese Marrano Jews who were forced to convert to Christianity while maintaining their traditions in hiding as crypto-Jews, Spinoza opens major questions of modernity and identity and may be understood as “the first secular Jew” in Yovel’s analysis, foreshadowing that unusual ontological chimera called “the non-Jewish Jew” by Isaac Deutscher (1968). By situating him in this historical, theological and philosophical context of liminality, we may recognize Spinoza’s life and work:

It is not hard to understand how a man who is neither a Christian nor a Jew, but who is divided between the two or who possesses memories of one within the other, might be inclined to develop doubts about both, or even to question the foundations of religion altogether (Yovel, 1989b, p. 6).




References


Agamben, G. (2003/2005). State of Exception (Trans. by Kevin Attell). Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.  (Original published in Italian in 2003)

Agamben, G. (2008/2009). “Philosophical Archaeology” (pp. 81-111, 119-121) in The Signature of All Things: On Method (trans. by Luca D’Isanto with Kevin Attell). New York: Zone Books. (Original published in Italian in 2008)

Althusser, L. (1971). "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses" in Lenin and Philosophy and other Essays (Trans. by Ben Brewster). New York: Monthly Review Press.

Amichai, Y. (1991). Even a Fist Was Once an Open Palm with Fingers: Recent Poems by Yehuda Amichai (Trans. by Barbara and Benjamin Harshav). New York: HarperCollins.

Badiou, A. (1988/2005). Being and Event (Transl. by Oliver Feltham). New York: Continuum. (Original published in French in 1988)

Celan, P. (2001). Selected Poems and Prose of Paul Celan (Trans. by John Felstiner). New York: W.W. Norton.

Clair, J., ed. (2008). The 1930s: The Making of “The New Man.” Exhibition organized by Pierre Théberge. Ottawa: National Gallery of Canada.

Deleuze, G. (1968/1990). Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza (Trans. by Martin Joughin). New York: Zone Books. (Original published in French in 1968)

Deutscher, I. (1968). The Non-Jewish Jew and Other Essays (Tamara Deutscher, ed. and Introduction). New York: Oxford University Press.

Foucault, M. (1966/1970). The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. New York: Pantheon Books. (Original published in French in 1966)

Foucault, M. (1969/1972). The Archaeology of Knowledge (trans. by A. M. Sheridan Smith). London and New York: Routledge. (Original published in French in 1969)

Gould, S.J. (1981). The Mismeasure of Man. New York: W.W. Norton & Co.

Gramsci, A. (1992). Prison Notebooks (ed. by Joseph A. Buttigieg). New York: Columbia University Press.

Lanzmann, C. (1985). Shoah: An Oral History of the Holocaust. The Complete Text of the Film. New York: Pantheon Books.

Levi, P. (1958/1959). Survival in Auschwitz: The Nazi Assault on Humanity (trans. by Stuart Woolf). New York: The Orion Press. (Original published in Italian in 1958)

Mannheim, K. (1936). Ideology and Utopia (trans. by Louis Wirth and Edward Shils).
New York: Harvest Books. (Originally published in English based on selections from original works in German and Part I written in English)

Marinetti, F.T. (1909/2008). “Fondazione e manifesto del futurismo” (pp. 11-16). In Manifesti del Futurismo (ed. by V. Birolli). Milano: Abscondita. (Original published in Italian in 1909)

Marx, K. and Engels, F. (1846/1932). The German Ideology. In Collected Works of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Vol. 5. Marx & Engels Internet Archive. (Original in German in 1846)

Sheridan, A. (1980). Michel Foucault: The Will to Truth. London: Tavistock Publications.

Spinoza, B. (1677/1957). The Ethics of Spinoza: The Road to Inner Freedom (ed. by D.D. Runes). New York: Philosophical Library. (Original published in Latin in 1677)

Steiner, G. (1982). Language and Silence: Essays on Language, Literature and the Inhuman. New York: Atheneum.

Turner, V. (1969). The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

Yovel, Y. (1989a). Spinoza and Other Heretics. The Adventures of Immanence. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Yovel, Y. (1989b). Spinoza and Other Heretics. The Marrano of Reason. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.




Montreal, Quebec, Canada
18 September &
7, 13-15 February 2010

Friday, December 16, 2011

What We Talk About When We Talk About Trauma


This essay was written in the spring of 2011 as my inaugural column for the alumni newsletter of the Harvard Program in Refugee Mental Health with the overall epigraph from American anthropologist Clifford Geertz, a plea against received wisdom in favour of critical thinking. 


GLOBAL MENTAL HEALTH

ALUMNI SOCIETY NEWSLETTER



Column: Critical Thinking About Trauma



If we wanted home truths, we should have stayed home.

—Clifford Geertz

 


What We Talk About When We Talk About Trauma




Vincenzo Di Nicola 



What wound was I seeking to heal, what thorn was I seeking to draw from the flesh of existence when I became what is called “a philosopher”? 
Alain Badiou1



ANNUNZIATA, my maternal grandmother, was born in 1910 in a quarter of Pescina, L’Aquila, Italy, called Fontamara.2 In her lifetime, she lived through the Spanish Influenza, an earthquake that fairly levelled her town, two world wars fought in our backyard, the deaths of two young children and the early death of her husband just after the Second World War which he had spent in Libya fighting and as a prisoner, leaving her as a widow with four young children and an estate to manage.



While she would cry retelling the stories of her children’s death, I would not say she was traumatized in any way, nor would I describe her as resilient. She simply lived through those dramatic experiences—natural and man-made disasters and the fullness of the lifecycle in a world where everything happened at home. I was born in the same bed that my grandfather died in!



It is possible that my grandmother, preoccupied with the vicissitudes of life, did not have the leisure or the capacity to find “the words to say it,” to express her suffering. Her mother kept her home to work and she never spent a day in school. But a distant cousin born in the same town did find the words and the man who took the name of Ignazio Silone from the high road above that same quarter and made Fontamara famous in world literature wrote that he was marked for life by the earthquake in Pescina.3  





So Much Trauma So Close To Home



The American writer Raymond Carver wrote well-wrought short stories (we could say he was well-named as his stories feel sculpted, mostly by the art of excision, removing all superfluities) about the disappointments and ruptures of daily life and family relationships. He is our portraitist of trauma, alerting us to the vicissitudes of everyday life, or to adapt the title of one of his more disturbing stories—“So much trauma so close to home.4



A popular trope in contemporary Western cultures holds that people experience traumatic experiences that must be transformed. There are several elements wrapped together in this notion: that bad things happen, that they have traumatic impacts which may be nonetheless mitigated by resilience and which may in any case be transformed into triumphal experiences. Clearly, I wish to challenge this trope.



One of the reasons to read literature and philosophy is precisely to prepare us to bear these stories and to understand them. Philosopher Hannah Arendt said we cannot master a traumatic past but we can try to know it and endure it before we reach for transformation.5 To do this, Richard Mollica offers us the simplest yet deepest of empathic tools: the trauma story. I call it the story that must be told. Telling stories is necessarily dialogic and relational. The story that must be told must be told to another in what I call the relational dialogue.6





Falling Beauty



And we, who think of ascending 
joy, would feel the emotion 
that almost dismays us, 
when a joyful thing falls. 
—Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies7



Paul Celan is the modern European poet of trauma. His most accessible and successful poem, “Death Fugue” was criticized in some quarters for aestheticizing the Nazi death camps.8 Even he distanced himself from his own creation, refusing to have his most celebrated work anthologized. But this has many layers. First, let us recognize that Celan was able to create his art out of suffering. Against Theodor Adorno’s notorious pronouncement that after Auschwitz there can be no more poetry, Celan was able to do just that: to write poetry almost literally with the ashes left in the ground and rising in the air of Auschwitz. He was able to wrest a terrible beauty from the limit experiences there.9 Yes, there are objections to shaping beauty out of terror (remember Milton’s “Paradise Lost” and “Paradise Regained”) but consider the alternative: that horror is unspeakable, its execution unthinkable, the experience incommunicable and the consequences unbearable. And yet Primo Levi, who was suspicious of the notion of incommunicability, proved to be a sober, stable witness of the unthinkable and found ways to speak it in a measured voice with calm tones.10



Can we imagine what Rilke challenges us to imagine? Instead of transforming trauma, can we imagine that suffering is an experience, what Rilke calls a joyful thing falling? Let’s not be too concrete about the word joyful. Think of Dylan Thomas’ wartime poem, “A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London.”11 Here, the joyful thing falling is a child and the refusal to mourn is a statement about how the experience is to be construed. Is it to be traumatic? Will it occlude or open experience? Thomas suggests an occlusion, but as a choice, a kind of mourning without mourning in a nuanced final line that asserts


      After the first death, there can be no other



As Adorno said elsewhere, “all expression is the trace left by suffering.”12 Let me connect this now to what Mollica says. By creating the conditions that allow the trauma story to be told, we can follow the trace left by suffering. It is the ideology of our day that such suffering is traumatizing and hence needs to be transformed. In order to be borne and tolerated, it must be changed.





Life, Interrupted



A popular American movie was based on a memoir called Girl, Interrupted. This resonant title perfectly captures Susanna Kaysen’s fragmented experience.13 I think of trauma this way: it interrupts life, becoming “a nodal point” in someone’s lifeworld, marking a before and an after, as in Leftover Life To Kill, Caitlin Thomas’ account of her life after the death of her husband, the celebrated and hard drinking poet Dylan Thomas.14 Whether that point is a rupture or an event depends on all the things that this community holds dear—those positive characteristics and qualities that allow for an experience to open up new possibilities—or close down them down in a rigid and hurtful way.



Alain Badiou has given us a new philosophy of the event defined as an experience that heralds change by introducing novelty.15 This is in stark contrast to the literature on stress (including posttraumatic stress disorder) where no matter how we perceive it, stress is stress, accumulating and multiplying inexorably towards illness. In Badiou’s philosophy, one can live an entire lifetime and not experience an event. We can live through something that is an event for others and not for ourselves. An experience that closes the possibilities of a life is the opposite of an event; it is a rupture, occluding change. It is traumatic.



We can even apply this insight to ourselves as therapists, philosophers or whatever practice we follow, as Badiou explained the epigraph to this column:



It may be that, as Bergson maintained, a philosopher only ever develops one idea. In any case, there is no doubt that the philosopher is born of a single question, the question which arises at the intersection of thought and life at a given moment in the philosopher’s youth; the question which one must at all costs find a way to answer.



This is deeply compatible with Alice Miller’s view of how we become therapists in her classic, The Drama of the Gifted Child.16 Early in life, we are taken by certain family dramas which those of us who become therapists work to resolve “at all costs,” as Badiou so poignantly puts it.





Waiting and Seeing



Who can tell from the sound of the word ‘parting’ 
What kind of bereavements await us 
—Osip Mandelstam, Tristia17



We need to clarify our language and thinking about trauma. The poet Mandelstam lamented the impoverished language of our emotions. We have conflated vicissitudes, vulnerability, suffering and trauma. Currently, one word, trauma, refers to the context, the triggering incident, object or agent (vicissitudes), the individual disposition before, during and after the incident, as well as the lifeworld of the individual in a web of relationships (vulnerability vs. resilience), not to mention the complex responses (suffering) to all of the above. Like the difference between illness and disease, we need a more nuanced vocabulary of suffering.18 Such a lexicon will not come from any one group and nobody can own trauma. Neither psychiatry nor psychoanalysis, neither medicine nor psychology, and neither those who document and catalogue suffering nor the sufferers themselves can exhaust what we wish to capture with the notion of trauma.



Another conflation and category mistake is the almost automatic coupling of trauma and transformation. Like the poet’s refusal to mourn, let us refuse to demand of those who suffer that they transform their experience. While I wish to acknowledge strength and celebrate survival, I suggest another way to imagine these positive experiences. Trauma may be contrasted with Badiou’s notion of the event. An event opens possibilities of experience; trauma closes them. This philosophy creates a dialectic, opposing rupture against continuity, trauma against event.19



What do we talk about when we talk about trauma? Many things, but too little about trauma itself. The wellness and flow of positive psychology, the resilience and transformation of the clinical professions belong to a different set of experiences that we may call, following Badiou, events, opening possibilities.20 It is not clear how we can yoke trauma to transformation without doing violence to the notion of trauma, either through a psychological negation or a philosophical reduction.



I am talking about trauma: a rupture in the lifeworld of those affected by vicissitudes, interrupting their lives. In his phenomenological philosophy, Edmund Husserl called for an epoché: a pause before action, “bracketing away” lived experience to create a reflective distance.21 Faced with trauma, I am asking anthropologists and journalists, historians and jurists, philosophers and filmmakers simply to witness and to bear the trauma story. And those of us who put broken lives back together must first cure ourselves of the need to do “emotional alchemy” as a way of validating our work. Against the automatic interpretation, the demanded change and the imposed meaning, I am asking all of us in the global community of mental health face to face with trauma to heed what Hannah Arendt said about the traumatic past:



The best thing that can be achieved is to know precisely what it was, and to endure this knowledge, and then to wait and see what comes from knowing and enduring.22









Notes





1 Alain Badiou, Preface, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency by Quentin Meillassoux, trans. by Ray Brassier (London: Continuum, 2008), pp. 3-4.



2 This column is dedicated to my grandmother, Annunziata Cipriani (1910-2005), who taught me the love of words through words of love. I am grateful to many thoughtful first readers who have helped me clarify my thoughts: Jan Jorgensen, Carlo Di Nicola, Armando Favazza, Eliot Sorel, Raymond Reed, Patrick Reed, Paul Francis, Emmanuel Stip, Laurence Kirmayer, Jacques Bernier, Ryan Smith and Paul Boshears.



3 Fontamara is part of Ignazio Silone’s The Abruzzo Trilogy (Zoland Books, 2000). Marie Cardinal, The Words to Say It, trans. by Pat Goodheart; Preface and Afterword by Bruno Bettelheim (Cambridge, MA: Van Vactor & Goodheart, 1983).



4 Raymond Carver’s collection of short stories, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love (New York: Vintage Books, 1982), includes “So Much Water So Close To Home” (pp. 79-88) in which four men on a fishing trip discover the naked body of a dead girl floating in a river. These stories and others inspired Robert Altman’s movie, Short Cuts (1993, available in the Criterion Collection, 2004). Altman described them as “terrific because he made stories out of small incidents. None of them were extraordinary, but mundane events could have important emotional consequences” (p. 163) in Altman on Altman, ed. by David Thompson, Foreword by Paul Thomas Anderson (London: Faber and Faber, 2006). Readers of philosophy will hear other resonances in my title, notably the influence of Wittgenstein through Stanley Cavell’s Must We Mean What We Say? 2nd ed. (London: Cambridge University Press, 2002).



5 Hannah Arendt, “On humanity in dark times” in Men in Dark Times (San Diego: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1968), pp. 20-22.



6 Richard F. Mollica, Healing Invisible Wounds: Paths to Hope and Recovery in a Violent World (Vanderbilt University Press, 2008). All therapeutic approaches to narrative owe a debt to Bakhtin’s dialogism; see Mikhail M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M.M. Bakhtin, ed. by Michael Holquist, trans. by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1981). For an application of Bakhtin's dialogism in creating relational dialogues, see my Letters to a Young Therapist: Relational Practices for the Coming Community (New York & Dresden: Atropos Press, 2011).



7 Rainer Maria Rilke, “The Tenth Elegy” in The Duino Elegies, trans. by A.S. Kline.

http://www.poetryintranslation.com/PITBR/German/Rilke.htm



8 Paul Celan: Selected Poems, trans. by Michael Hamburger and Christopher Middleton, Introduction by Michael Hamburger (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972).



9 Michael Hamburger in Paul Celan, op.cit., pp. 9-20.



10 Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, trans. by Raymond Rosenthal (New York: Summit, 1989). Philosopher Giorgio Agamben reads Levi as a witness in Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive. Homo Sacer III, trans. by Daniel Heller-Roazen (New York: Zone, 1999).



11 Dylan Thomas, “A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London” in Collected Poems (London: Dent, 1952), p. 101.



12 Theodor Adorno, “Heine the Wound,” in Can We Live After Auschwitz? A Philosophical Reader, ed. by Rolf Tiedemann, trans. by Rodney Livingstone, et al. (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003).



13 I am struck by the fragmented quality in these two women’s memoirs: Susanna Kaysen, Girl, Interrupted (New York: Vintage Books, 1994) and Caitlin Thomas, Leftover Life to Kill (London: Putnam, 1957).



14 Family therapist Maurizio Andolfi proposed the notion of a “nodal point” which gives structure and meaning to family narratives (Maurizio Andolfi, Claudio Angelo, and Marcella de Nichilo, The Myth of Atlas: Families and the Therapeutic Story, trans. and ed. by Vincenzo F. Di Nicola; New York: Brunner/Mazel, 1989) while phenomenological philosopher Edmund Husserl proposed the notion of “lifeworld” as the canvas of such narratives (Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Philosophy, trans. by D. Carr; Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1970).



15 Alain Badiou, Being and Event, transl. by Oliver Feltham (New York: Continuum, 2005). For an accessible introduction to Badiou’s work see Ed Pluth, Alain Badiou: A Philosophy of the New (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2010). For our purposes, the key feature of an event is its radical contingency, which means that it is situated between nothing and itself, introducing novelty (novation in French). A perfect illustration of radical contingency creating an event is the poem “Could Have” by Wislawa Szymborska, View From a Grain of Sand: Selected Poems (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2001), pp. 65-66.



16 The similarities between philosophers Henri Bergson and Alain Badiou and Swiss psychoanalyst Alice Miller are striking in this regard. See Alice Miller, The Drama of the Gifted Child: The Search for the True Self, 3rd ed. (New York: Basic, 1996).



17 Osip Mandelstam, “Tristia” in Osip Mandelstam: Selected Poems, translated by Clarence Brown and W.S. Merwin (London: Oxford University Press, 1973), p. 23.



18 Arthur Kleinman, The Illness Narratives: Suffering, Healing, and the Human Condition (New York: Basic, 1989).



19 I am grateful to Alain Badiou for edifying conversations on my thesis, which he calls “ce couple traumatisme-événement—this pairing of trauma and event, at the European Graduate School, 2009-2010.



20 Many things have their place in our work, but I am expressing what I perceive on a broad canvas as a denial of suffering and more narrowly as a denial of mental illness in contemporary professional discourses. In the guise of “positive psychology,” I discern much negation in these narratives. Both philosophy and psychoanalysis have much to say about negation and reduction, which I will take up in another essay.



21 Edmund Husserl, op. cit.



22 For a more detailed deconstruction of what we mean by change and how we limit therapy by yoking it to change, see my Letters to a Young Therapist, op.cit. Quote from Hannah Arendt, op. cit., p. 20.

Thursday, December 15, 2011

The Work of Art as a Form-of-Life


In this short reflection based on my seminar and discussions with Giorgio Agamben at the European Graduate School in 2009, I am not arguing merely for the potentiality of a work of art but for a work of art, science or philosophy—that is, embodied thought—as a form-of-life.


Agamben and Wittgenstein on Language

Both Wittgenstein and Agamben see that there is no place to stand outside of the world or outside of philosophy to make sense of it and that language is all we have to deal with it.

While Wittgenstein’s work can be seen as toiling in different parts of his city, we can imagine Agamben’s work as going well beyond into anything we can call a city into the surrounding countryside and approaching other cities in his province. Agamben clearly admits the limits of language as the starting point for philosophy and then imaginatively suggests investigations beyond that.

Event and Potentiality

How to understand trauma?

The rupture it represents and that ephemeral, difficult to grasp something that we want to articulate as the continuity that never was (due to the trauma incident), that was interrupted … so that the rupture always has to be imagined against what might have happened … and this is best expressed as potentiality …

This potentiality has within it also the possibility of impotentiality … as Agamben says, its own lack …

So that in contemporary psychiatric language we say susceptibility, vulnerability and we want immediately to reach for resilience and transformation … how can we make sense of this?

By connecting continuity with potentiality …

We want to call it resilience but it is also at the same a vulnerability … what these two together articulate is the indeterminacy of potentiality.

Without the traumatic incident we can never assume let alone assure an unperturbed life … at most we can point to potentiality.

When that life is marked in a way that opens new possibilities … not an assumed continuity, not a determined trajectory … but a realization of potentiality towards a lived reality … we can call it an event in Badiou’s sense.

When an incident forecloses potentiality towards impotentiality, now we can talk of trauma, in the sense of an outcome … and it only retrospectively becomes a traumatic process. It is not foretold but always radically open.

This is why we need a new language for trauma and event.
That new language can only emerge from philosophical archaeology.

*

This connects why we need to do different kinds of investigation to understand trauma …

It connects traumatology in clinical psychology and psychiatry with how we understand children’s potential and connects trauma to potentiality and event.

And it harkens back to Aristotle … actuality and potentiality …

which we live today in traumatology as vulnerability and resilience …

“What is potential can pass over into actuality only at the point at which it sets aside its own potential not to be (its adynamia),” Agamben writes, discussing the Aristotelian definition of potentiality. “To set im-potentiality aside,” he continues, “is not to destroy it but, on the contrary, to fulfill it, to turn potentiality back upon itself in order to give itself to itself.”

“Agamben encapsulates the task of a new experience of the taking place of language in the idea of infancy, by which he means the mute experience of language that ontologically precedes and that makes possible the appropriation of language in speech. Infancy is what the human being must undergo in order to become a subject in speech; but at the same time, speaking requires a fall from the experience of infancy into discourse.”
—Catherine Mills, The Philosophy of Agamben (2008, p. 134) 


Thoughts on Trauma Triggered by Two Propositions from Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

7 Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.

Anything that can be experienced must necessarily be expressible. What is it then that cannot be spoken? Language itself. Yet the state of impotentiality, of waiting for the words to say it, affirms potentiality in its radical form of language, of the infant in its own immaturity and indeterminacy. Thus, the infant incarnates at once in its impotentiality the very potentiality which its unfolding promises and make possible. It is this dialectical interplay bathed in a social surround that creates the subject.

1 The world is everything that is the case. This world which is all that we have, includes all that we humans have thought, have expressed in our words, and have executed in our deeds, cannot be reduced to trauma. Which is to say that trauma cannot exhaust everything that humans are capable of, nor does it overwhelm it. Much less is trauma inexpressible, unthinkable, or beyond the limits of our comprehension or capacity to articulate. What has been done must be sayable in words; what is expressed in words can be put into action. All of the accumulated traumas of the world cannot evacuate the potentiality of human being. After all the traumas occur, are experienced and wreak their consequences, there will always be at least one human being who will survive to be a witness (Primo Levi), to write a novel (Elsa Morante) or to make a poem (Paul Celan). And another who will make of it a philosophy (Giorgio Agamben, Emmanuel Levinas). Which is to say that to be human is to resist the reduction of zoë to bare life and this resistance itself will become a form-of-life.

Beyond Primo Levi’s putative suicide and Paul Celan’s certain one, the work survives. After Kant human contingency died, but the human work survives as a form-of-life pace Adorno in the work of art (Celan, Morante), science (Levi-Montalcini) and philosophy (Agamben, Blanchot, Levinas).

 *

My argument to Agamben in his seminar is simply summed up: a work of art is a form-of-life.

*

A full account of trauma cannot be a complete description of human suffering much less of human being. Trauma is only a subset of suffering and it is a subset knowingly constructed in our time through professional discourses on behalf of society. In fact, describing trauma or narrating suffering offer very different maps of human experience and even together the two cannot exhaust human being. Nevertheless, the success of this map is why we are calling it here the emblematic experience of our time to which it gives it a name: the age of trauma.

*

The age of trauma = the destruction or loss of experience (Agamben)