45e Convegno di Studio
“La Dimensione Umana del Morire e Il Sostegno alla
Famiglia”
Accademia di Psicoterapia della Famiglia
Roma – 13-14 Novembre 2015
After Paris, After Everything:
Reflections on Death and Dying
With Special Reference to Trauma
Vincenzo Di Nicola
Psychiatrist-Psychotherapist-Philosopher Vincenzo Di
Nicola attended the Convegno in Rome, “La
Dimensione Umana del Morire/The Human
Dimension of Dying,” 13-14 November 2015. This is his report.
Death and trauma as exceptions
Death and dying
are eminently philosophical questions. Albert Camus famously asserted in The Myth of Sisyphus that suicide is the
only serious philosophical problem.
The death of Socrates
is a foundational myth for Western thought that heralds the mortal danger of
critical inquiry. Accused of corrupting the youth of Athens, Socrates was
condemned to death by hemlock for inviting them into his relational dialogues
that led them to question received wisdom.
The earthquake
that levelled the city of Lisbon in 1755, killing many of its citizens, was a
seminal incident in European history that triggered critical reflection and
theological questions such as the beneficence of God and divine providence.
Gottfried Leibniz coined the term théodicée
(teodicea, theodicy) to frame the question of how a good God could permit evil
acts. Voltaire satirized Leibniz’s position in his provocative novella, Candide, whose protagonist Professor
Pangloss pronounced, “Tout
est pour le mieux dans le meilleur des mondes possibles.” (“All is the for the
best in the best of all possible worlds.”)
The First World
War in Europe destroyed not only countries and empires but a European culture
of hope and progress. The 19th century positivism of August Comte
had articulated this hopeful atmosphere, with its motto, Ordem e Progresso (“Order and Progress”) emblazoned in Portuguese
on a banner on Brazil’s flag. Its undoing is reflected in the work of artists
like Otto Dix who portrayed the war and its physically and spiritually
traumatized soldiers and citizens. In this era, too, Freud began his research
on war and death, memory and trauma. His use of the word invoked “trauma” as a breach, a rupture in the order of things,
and thus an exception. His essay, Zeitgemäßes
über Krieg und Tod (“Thoughts for the times on war and death,” 1915) is one of the most pained
expressions of his humanistic concerns beyond the psychoanalytic couch.
Each generation since
then has rediscovered and re-invented some new representation of horror and
disaster that we call “trauma”:
· * “Shell shock” (WWI combatants)
· * “Combat fatigue” or “battle
neurosis” (WWII combatants)
· * “Concentration camp syndrome”
(Nazi death camp survivors)
· * “Post-traumatic Stress Disorder
– PTSD” (Viet Nam war veterans)
· * Genocide and post-genocidal
societies (the Armenian Genocide, the Holocaust, the Rwandan and Bosnian
Genocides)
Concerns about trauma are so prevalent
today; they take up so much space in the collective imagination of sensitive
and thoughtful people, that we may call our times the age of trauma. In invoking the age of trauma, I am not approving
of this preoccupation but witnessing it.
The contemporary
discourse of trauma implies that we are all at risk for trauma, if not actually
traumatized. This creates a paradox whereby trauma, which is by definition an
exception (a breach, a rupture in the order of things), becomes the norm, which
by definition applies to all. This is precisely the contemporary predicament
that Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben has limned in his series of studies
called Homo Sacer, notably in his
historical-philosophical essay, Il stato
di eccezione (The State of Exception).
The state of exception, with its
origins in the banishment of a Roman citizen who was legally neither inside nor
outside Roman society, neither protected nor allowed to be killed, took its
paradigmatic form with the Nazi death camps, justified by the legal philosophy
of Carl Schmitt and sanctioned by German law. Do they exist today? Agamben asked
in an interview:
Bisogna chiedersi se esistono dei “Campi” oggi
in Europa …
Questi luoghi sono stati pensati come “spazi di
eccezione” fin dall’inizio.
Sono zone pensate come zone d’eccezione in
senso tecnico, come zone di sospensione della legge, così come zone di
sospensione assoluta della legge erano i campi di concentramento, in cui – come
dice Hannah Arendt – “tutto era possibile” perché appunto la legge era sospesa.
– Giorgio Agamben, “Nei campi dei senza nomi,” Il Manifesto, 1998
We must ask ourselves if these “camps” exist today in Europe …
These places were imagined as “spaces of exception” from the
beginning.
They are zones imaged as zones of exception in the technical sense,
as zones where laws are suspended, just as concentration camps were zones of
the absolute suspension of laws, where – as Hannah Arendt says – “everything
was possible” precisely because law was suspended.
– Giorgio Agamben, “In the camps of the nameless,” Il Manifesto, 1998
In this
contemporary cultural logic, we are all in a traumatic situation, we are all
living a kind of death, una muerta
anunciada (“a death foretold”) to invoke the title of a novel by Gabriel
García Márquez. The cultural-historical dynamic that brings us to this
predicament is an exquisite sensitivity whereby we wish to acknowledge and
witness kinds of suffering. Some decry this as a form of political correctness
that becomes authoritarian and condescending. I will go further and call it
nihilistic.
I contest this
way of thinking and propose precisely the contrary: trauma is and remains an
exception. Trauma is neither the condition of all of us nor should this be an
accepted way of living. Most of us, most of the time, cannot identify with the
exception that is trauma because it is not a shared experience.
The possibility of witnessing death
In the middle of
the conference, between the two conference days, the Paris terrorist attacks
occurred in which 129 people were murdered. As if to make my point, at a
meeting of several hundred sensitive and thoughtful people, no one could find
the words, a way to address what had happened in Paris until the very last
minutes of the conference when it fell to a younger man, a
therapist-in-training to ask how we could close the conference with no mention
of what had occurred. As it turned out, there was a sizeable group attending
the conference from Palermo, Sicily that was in mourning over the loss of one
of their members. Instigated by the student’s courage, Maurizio Andolfi, the
Director of the Accademia di Psicoterapia della Famiglia, spoke to these two
kinds of losses and asked the Palermo group to stand as we observed a moment of
silence.
As an exception,
trauma is like death: we do not have easy access to it. Vittorino Andreoli, an Italian
psychiatrist-neurologist, novelist and playwright, asserted in his keynote
address to the conference that, “morte e
dolore sono le espressione più umane,” that bring out in us, “la voglia di auitare.” (“Death and pain
are the most human expressions,” that bring out in us, “the wish to help.”)
I do not know
what it means to say that pain and death are the most human of experiences. Is
it a description of the human
condition? Does it mean that they are universal, unavoidable and hence define
our very existence? Is it rather a prescription
for how to be more humane, if not human? Does it mean, as Andreoli suggested,
that it brings out in us the need to be understood and the wish to help others
in their pain? Many of us healers identify with that. But callous indifference
and sadism are also the lot of humanity.
I would like to
comment first as a philosopher, then as a psychiatrist-psychotherapist. The
issue is whether we can witness the exception without living it ourselves. To
make this come alive for you, I recommend a reading of Maurice Blanchot’s brief
story-memoir, L’Instant de ma mort
(“L’Istante della mia morte”), where he asserts, “Solo io posso testimoniare alla mia morte.” Condemned to death,
the author-protagonist of the memoir awaits his death but does not die. In this
context, he was able to testify to the possibility of death, as he says, “at
the instant of my death.”
How are we to
read – to understand, to signify, to grasp – this text? Philosopher Jacques
Derrida in a companion piece called Demeure
(Dimora), marks the distinction in German between Dichtung (fizione, fiction) and Warheit
(verità, truth). Is the text a fiction or is it the truth? Is it a short
story or a memoir? Is death then an understanding (that is, a construction) or
an experience? This creates these antinomies:
Dichtung vs.
Warheit
Construction vs. Truth
Culture vs. Nature
Is this “most
human of experiences,” in the words of physician-novelist Andreoli, face to
face with the finitude of our mortal existence, a construction or a truth, a
shared cultural experience or a natural one? Spared of dying by another’s
death, Blanchot’s protagonist feels a légèreté,
a “lightness” which Derrida claims is neither a relief nor a salvation. In the
end, Blanchot writes about the impossibility of testifying to one’s own death
and asks who has the right to declare the instant of my death?
Now, the community
of healers – psychiatrists, psychologists and psychotherapists – may well ask why
does a philosopher offer this reflection? Of what use is it to us? Blanchot’s
writing both closes and opens perspectives on dying. In problematizing the question of testifying to death – problematizing
is a kind of enclosure, giving form to a question – Blanchot opens for us the
possibility of a relational understanding
of dying. Not the journalistic truth of what can be documented, nor the
phenomenological truth of what is experienced, but of what can be communicated
and witnessed interpersonally. A shared human experience of our finitude.
In his profound
reading of Primo Levi’s writings about Auschwitz, Quel che resta di Auschwitz: l’archivio e il testimone/What Remains of
Auschwitz: The Archive and the Testimony, Giorgio Agamben says that all we
can do is to read Levi as a witness who was there. A witness not of his own
death but of the lives and deaths of others in the spazio di eccezione, the space of exception where a new forma-di-vita, form-of-life took hold – la vita nuda, bare life. Even when the
inmates living a bare life could not witness their own deaths and testify to
them, the survivors have the imperative to bear witness and to testify. This is
a relational understanding of the truth of existence, of life and of death. It
is not easy, it is not common, it cannot be taken for granted, but the effort
to do so – to witness and to testify – makes us more human, even as the state
of exception makes it everyday more arduous and more tenuous.
When the
conference ended, I waited to say goodbye to my friend Maurizio Andolfi as we
were both travelling to other places while the Palermo group sat silently,
huddled together for comfort, wordlessly reaching out to Maurizio, and indeed,
as everyone else left, Maurizio stayed there to bear witness. And I write this to testify.
This is now the
task before us, as psychotherapists, after Paris, after everything.
