“This Desire That Isn’t Mine” - Distributed Desire and the Consciousless Subject

ZIZEK STUDIES CONFERENCE 2012

"Neo-liberal Perversions: Fantasy and Gaze in Contemporary Culture" 

The College at Brockport (SUNY)

April 28-29, 2012

Panel: “The Other That Does Not Exist”

Paper: “This Desire That Isn’t Mine”

Distributed Desire and the Consciousless Subject

Abstract

Vincenzo Di Nicola

Doctoral candidate, European Graduate School

As part of a doctoral dissertation on ‘Trauma and Event” calling for a new, objective phenomenology to declare the end of trauma psychiatry and call for an evental psychiatry, this paper invokes a series of ideas that undermine received notions of the conscious subject as a bounded individual to describe the subject that emerges from the Truth-Event:

·      Alain Badiou’s “fidelity-subjectivity” as reciprocally constitutive of event and truth;

·      Freud’s “nachträglich”/Lacan-Zizek’s “après-coup” meaning a chronologically anterior event as supplement to a posterior one;

·      Norman Cameron’s “paranoid pseudo community” as an extreme case but plausible model for relational psychology;

·      René Girard’s mimetic theory, buttressed by mirror neurons to found a theory of imitation, establishes psychology as ineluctably social;

·      Ian Hacking’s “looping effects” as reciprocal influences of professional and public discourses to explain the emergence of diagnostic categories and lived conditions with a “looping” back and forth;

·      Slavoj Zizek’s “plague of fantasies” as a deluge of imagery from the Other;

·      Badiou’s “subjectizable body” posits three types of subject, each with key processes and emblematic situations. Whereas the positivist project of modernity concerns the boundaries of the subject and paradoxically aims to tame or erase subjectivity through technology (Neil Postman):

o   The faithful subject is marked by porosity (cf. Walter Benjamin), open to radical change and witnessing (e.g., St. Paul, Primo Levi, Giorgio Agamben) of desire through processes of absorption/incorporation.

Two responses occur when porosity becomes a threat: dissipation or mimesis. These responses are described through these pairs: centrifugal vs. centripetal, dispersal vs. containment, evacuation vs. encapsulation.

o   The reactive subject, who is marked by dissipation, experiences rupture as trauma through a process of dispersal/evacuation.

o   The obscure subject is marked by mimesis, whose emblematic experience is paranoia, triggered by failed attempts at containment/encapsulation.

This paper explores one element in this sketch: Walter Benjamin’s porosity and other relational processes (Mikhail Bakhtin’s dialogism, Badiou’s multiplicity) to propose the notion of distributed desire as the emblematic feature of the faithful subject emerging from the Event. Vignettes from the film “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” (2004) and Lacanian psychoanalyst Paul Verhaeghe’s Love in a Time of Loneliness (1999) provide illustrations. Just as après-coup (Lacan/Zizek) means that significance is in the future perfect tense—what “will have been,” distributed desire means that desire is never located, much less owned, only imitated, shared. Purely contingent, disembodied, distributed desire is appropriated by naming and incarnated through love by the faithful subject.

Excursus on Excursuses

Physicians collect “clinical pearls” to make sense of complex medical phenomena. These are usually empirical, time-tested observations about patients, such as “Feed cold, starve a fever.” In psychiatry, there is an instructive distinction between the circumstantial and tangential historian (meaning the patient as narrator of his own story). The circumstantial historian talks round and round a point but eventually makes his way to the mark, whereas the tangential historian continues veering off the point so that it is hard to grasp where he started or to see where he is going. Circumstantiality is taken to be a symptom of obsessionality, while tangentiality suggests a psychotic process. Both styles are digressive; both of them distract us from the history we wish to get from the patient. And it is also true that they tell a story in and of themselves.

The opening pages of Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy are a knowing gesture by the narrator who constantly intrudes into the text with a kind of delaying tactic that builds tension almost to the breaking point. The first-person narrator of this 18^th century novel brings us to the scene of his procreation and delays the crucial moment with a series of descriptions, deviations and divagations that are not only comical but also make the point that it was these very delays that created an imbalance in the actual composition of his being. In digressing and taking excursions into other matters, the narrator artfully captures our attention and frustrates our wish to know more, making us delightfully aware of the narrator’s character and the contingency and necessity of certain facts of life. Simultaneously. We precisely come into contact with the character’s obsessionality—and our own. And we are left with the maddening experience of tangentiality—Are we going mad? Will he ever get to the point? How was such a creature ever conceived?—until we relinquish the need to control the narrative and abandon ourselves to its vagaries and pleasures. The character of Tristram Shandy is nothing if not a very digressive narrator and the text is composed entirely of picaresque excursions which in fact prove to be the substance of the story. 

The excursus is just this sort of digression in an academic text. It is somewhere between the high-brow scholium or scholion (from Greek σχόλιον “comment”, “interpretation” which couldn’t have a better academic pedigree than Spinoza’s scholia in his Ethics) and the low-brow vulgarizations or marginalia written by students. The most famous mathematical marginal note – Fermat’s last theorem –  was discovered by his son in the margins of his father’s edition of Diophantus, the Alexandrian mathematician, with the comment that the margin was too small to contain the proof.

An excursus from the main text is an aside, a diversion, a divagation, an excursion; let’s call it a deviation, a day-trip on a longer journey. (We can call it a parenthesis.)

The word comes from the Latin, excurrere, “to run out,” and has at least two somewhat opposing countercurrents in contemporary academic usage:

(a)   A “lighter” digression, almost a diversion from the main text in order not to distract from the main argument versus a separate section or appendix to comment more “seriously” on a particular point or deepen the argument of the text.

(b)  On one hand, the excursus in embedded in the main text (not written in the margin as an afterthought, relegated like a subaltern to the foot of the page or an endnote appended like a second class citizen sent to the back of the bus); on the other hand, its function is to unpack the meanings of the text.

My own first encounter with the excursus was in Brigitte Berger and Peter Berger’s The War Over the Family (1984), a work of advocacy, where it is employed to highlight the polemics over the politics and sociology of the family. Jürgen Habermas also employs excursuses (the English plural; not “excursi,” if we followed the Latin) in his masterful overview, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (1987).

Giorgio Agamben’s Infancy and History: On the Destruction of Experience (2007) has many “Glosses” that enliven the text, serve all the functions suggested here, and more. Agamben’s text, just as Franco-Czech writer Milan Kundera consciously composes his novels, has an almost musical, contrapuntal structure. Leland de la Durantaye’s (2009) “critical introduction” to Agamben’s work has more didactic “Scholia” sprinkled throughout the text, in an effort to deepen our understanding of Agamben’s rich, allusive writing.

In his first Gloss on one of Montaigne’s essays, Agamben lets the French master tell us the story of his fall from a horse, his loss of consciousness and the gradual recovery of his senses. I refer you to Montaigne himself for edification. Then Agamben offers his gloss:

This memory furnishes Montaigne with the pretext for a series if digressions, where the twilight state [Agamben is too wise a reader to miss the neurological overtones of this poetic but scientifically precise phrase] comes to stand for a form of experience which, albeit specific, is also in a sense experience at its extreme and most authentic, emblematically summing up the entire scope of inquiry of the Essays. (Agamben, 2007, p. 44)

An excursus, then, in a text as in life, is a pretext for allowing contingency—even horrific ideas or frightening accidents—to enter our lives, and to be open to what is extreme and authentic to become real events for us.

A Whodunit Without a Who

I am going to propose … a concept of being-there and existence without making the slightest reference to anything like consciousness, experience or human reality.

—Alain Badiou, Second Manifesto for Philosophy (2011, p. 44)

Stanislaw Lem’s The Investigation (1959)

What if the world isn’t scattered around us like a jigsaw puzzle—what if it’s like a soup with all kinds of things floating around in it, and from time to time some of them get stuck together by chance to make some kind of whole? What if everything that exists is fragmentary, incomplete, aborted, events with ends but no beginnings, events that only have middles, things that have fronts or rears but not both, with us constantly making categories, seeking out, and reconstructing, until we think we can see total love, total betrayal and defeat, although in reality we are all no more than haphazard fractions.[...:]The mathematical order of the universe is our answer to the pyramids of chaos.

The reviews of this novel by a Polish master of science fiction do not fully grasp what Lem attempts in this experimental novel, which is to attribute cause without human agency. Lem’s ontologically insecure police procedural The Investigation is a whodunit without a who. Two key examples of this in the novel are: a statistician, Dr. Harvey Sciss, offers a statistical model for the disappearance of dead bodies (statistics is not about single incidents or individual subjects but about series and groups) and the mysterious encounter of the Inspector Gregory at night in an arcade, where he confronts a stranger advancing towards him. Does it make one think of Lacan’s mirror stage? Perhaps, but the mirror stage is about the construction of identity—subjectivation, if you will, whereas this episode is the opposite, about desubjectivation—the experience of self as other, defamiliarization (cf. Viktor Shklovsky), where the incidents are stripped of human agency and identity is desubjectified.

The case proves to be impenetrable for the police inspector who is disturbed by what appears as the lack of human agency in the case of dead bodies being disturbed or disappearing:

In fact it appalls me, it’s absolutely inhuman. Human beings don’t work that way. Human beings make mistakes, it’s in the nature of things that they miscalculate from time to time, make mistakes, leave clues behind, change their plans in the middle of everything.

The inspector’s worldview and way of working is challenged. His view of existence is falling apart. Perhaps Alain Badiou, a philosopher who is also a novelist, has the key:

“Existence” is not a specific predicate of the human animal.
             (2011, p. 44)

            

Recall G.K. Chesterton’s metaphysical thriller, The Man Who Was Thursday (1908), featuring Lucian Gregory, an anarchist poet, and a Scotland Yard inspector called Gabriel Syme. In Lem’s novel, the statistician is called Sciss. This suggests: scissors, from Latin caedere, “to cut,” influenced by scindere, “to split,” and evokes abscissa, “x coordinate,” a term by which a point is mapped on a system of axes. Does Sciss’ statistical hypothesis represent an incisive cut, a disorienting split, or a new way to map reality for Gregory?

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A Subject Without Consciousness

With nowhere to turn, isolated and lost, Inspector Gregory turns in on himself:

The day faded quickly, so quickly that the displays in the shop windows were soon being lit up for the evening. The street narrowed. Gregory found himself in a district of the city which hadn't been rebuilt since the Middle Ages. It was jammed with dark, clumsy old buildings, most of them sheltering brand-new modern shops that sparkled unnaturally like transparent glass boxes.

Gregory turned into an arcade, amazed that the thin layer of windswept snow at its entrance still hadn’t been trampled. A woman in a red hat stood nearby looking at some smiling wax manikins dressed in evening gowns. Beyond her, where some square white floodlights brightened the concrete walk, the arcade curved slightly.

Walking slowly, hardly conscious of his surroundings and whereabouts, Gregory brooded about Sciss’s laugh. What exactly had it meant, he wondered. It had to be significant. Despite appearances, Sciss didn't just do things for effect, although he was certainly arrogant enough, and consequently it followed that Sciss must have had a good reason for laughing, even if he was the only one who knew it.

Farther up the deserted arcade a man was walking toward Gregory – a tall, lean man, whose head was nodding as if he were talking to himself. Gregory was too busy with his own thoughts to pay much attention to him, but he kept him in sight out of the corner of his eye. The man drew nearer. Three shops turned off their lights for the night and the arcade suddenly became darker. The windows of a fourth shop were covered with whitewash because of a renovation in progress, and the only lights still visible were a few glittering displays in the direction from which the man was approaching.

Gregory looked up. The man’s pace slowed, but he kept coming, albeit hesitantly. Suddenly they stood facing each other, no more than a few paces apart. Still engrossed in his thoughts, Gregory stared at the tall male figure before him without really seeing his face. He took a step; the man did the same.

“What does he want?” Gregory wondered. The two men scowled at each other. In the shadows the man's broad face was hidden; he was wearing his hat pushed down on his forehead, his coat was somewhat too short, and his belt was all askew, with its end twisted loosely around the buckle. There was certainly something wrong with the buckle, Gregory thought, but he had enough problems without worrying about that too. He moved as if to walk past the stranger but found his path blocked.

“Hey,” Gregory began angrily, “what the. . .” his words faltering into silence.

The stranger. . . was himself. He was standing in front of a huge mirrored wall marking the end of the arcade. He had mistakenly walked into a glass-roofed dead end.

Unable to escape the disconcerting feeling that he was really looking at someone else, Gregory stared at his own reflection for a moment. The face that looked back at him was swarthy, not very intelligent, perhaps, but with a strong, square jaw that showed firmness, or at least so he liked to think, although more than once he had decided it was only pigheadedness.

“Had a good look?” he muttered to himself, then turned on his heels in embarrassment and headed in the direction he had come from.

Halfway up the arcade, Gregory couldn’t resist an irrational impulse to turn and look back. The “stranger” stopped also. He was far away now among some brightly lit, empty shops, heading down the arcade, busy with his own affairs in his mirror world. Gregory angrily adjusted his belt in its buckle, pushed his hat farther back on his head, and went out into the street.

In another disorienting cut, Gregory is invited to a late-night discussion at the Chief Inspector’s home, where they discuss the Lapeyrot case in Paris which is a case of folie à deux. This psychiatric syndrome, coined by the French and called shared paranoid disorder in contemporary psychiatry, occurs when one person is dominated by another to the point of losing his identity and submissively following the dominant person.

The Investigation is set in a London in which the inspector seems to feel more and more estranged. Mostly set in the dark of night and the fog of London, the novel is full of references to appearances, surfaces … glass doors, reflections, gazes, glare of lights, light falling on images, photographs, maps … partially illuminating … illusions, simulacra …

Badiou again on negation, the multiple and the conscious-less subject:

For my part … the determination of the concept of existence is conditioned by something like negation as well as self-differing. Ontologically, this is for me, the question of the void – the empty set. Phenomenologically, it is the question of negation in the various senses this can take in (classical, intuitionist and paraconsistent) logic and as applicable to the appearing of a multiple if one measures the degree of identity between this and its negation in a world. But I will plot these connections without any relation whatsoever with the conscious subject, and even less again with freedom. (2011, p. 45)

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Excursus: Janus-faced Terms I—The Fugue State

In my dissertation and in these blogs, I will explore some bivalent, bimodal Janus-faced terms in philosophy and psychiatry.

Janus-faced: pharmakon—the philter is both a poison and a remedy; Achilles’ spear both wounds and heals; akedah—God commands the “binding” of Isaac then saves him; skandalon—the rock over which we stumble is also a foundation stone; trauma is a wound that activates growth.

In this first excursus on Janus-faced terms, I explore the “fugue” in music (musical composition) and in psychiatry (a disturbed state of consciousness).

Excursus: Janus-faced Terms I—The Fugue State

Wikipedia:

The English term fugue originated in the 16th century and is derived from either the French word fugue or the Italian fuga. This in turn comes from Latin, also fuga, which is itself related to both fugere (‘to flee’) and fugare, (‘to chase’). The adjectival form is fugal. Variants include fughetta (literally, ‘a small fugue’) and fugato (a passage in fugal style within another work that is not a fugue).

http://eliot.thefreelibrary.com/The-Mill-on-the-Floss/6-1#fugue

George Eliot. The Mill on the Floss.

Book VI: The Great Temptation. Chapter 1: A Duet in Paradise

Surely the only courtship unshaken by doubts and fears must be that in which the lovers can sing together. The sense of mutual fitness that springs from the two deep notes fulfilling expectation just at the right moment between the notes of the silvery soprano, from the perfect accord of descending thirds and fifths, from the preconcerted loving chase of a fugue, is likely enough to supersede any immediate demand for less impassioned forms of agreement. The contralto will not care to catechise the bass; the tenor will foresee no embarrassing dearth of remark in evenings spent with the lovely soprano. In the provinces, too, where music was so scarce in that remote time, how could the musical people avoid falling in love with each other? Even political principle must have been in danger of relaxation under such circumstances; and the violin, faithful to rotten boroughs, must have been tempted to fraternize in a demoralizing way with a reforming violoncello. In that case, the linnet-throated soprano and the full-toned bass singing,—

(emphasis added)

We have repeated in the psychiatric notion of the fugue state, whose name is borrowed from the musical form or texture (there is a debate as to its musical quality) of the fugue, a similar paradoxical enchainement that we see in Plato’s pharmakon, Achilles’ spear, akedah—the “binding” of Isaac that I call “Isaac machine,” the Biblical skandalon or the trauma trope. Whereas in music, contrary (“contrapuntal”) elements that we may imagine “chase” each other or appear to “flee” the main musical statement are brought together to produce pleasingly complex harmonics (see George Eliot’s lovely description in The Mill on the Floss), in psychiatry, the flight is a dissociative state with interrupted memory and the simultaneous loss of and recreation of personal identity (a celebrated example occurred in the life of Agatha Christie). Again, there is a rhetorical conflation of two Latin roots—fugere, to flee and fugare, to chase.

*

This Janus-like face of core notions in psychiatry goes back to the roots of our philosophy and our culture.

*

Janus-faced: the philter is both a poison and a remedy (pharmakon), Achilles’ spear wounds and heals, God commands the binding of Isaac and saves him (akedah), the rock over which we stumble is also a foundation stone (skandalon), trauma is a wound that activates growth.

*

It’s as if we have built in to our culture, that is to say, our way of thinking, this aporia of bimodal or bivalent notions, a bringing together of opposites, an opposition of elements that is surely not accidental. Is it to hide, to preserve or protect, to stultify, to segregate those with knowledge and those who lack it?  There are such hints. We see them in Leo Strauss’s Persecution and the Art of Writing (personally recommended by Michel Foucault to Thomas Zummer). They are the “things hidden since the beginning of the world,” as René Girard has it with his invocation of Paul. A hidden order, as some read Foucault (inaccurately, in my view, that is to say, without nuance). 

*

It’s as if something in our culture wants traumas to be events (emblematization) and events to be traumas (alchemical transformations). I want to pose the question: what is the origin of that impulse or response, how does it express itself and what does it mean for us?

There is a well-known distinction about cognitive styles in medicine about classification and diagnosis: there are lumpers and splitters. That is, those who see commonalities among phenomena and want to group them together (lumpers) and those who perceive differences and nuances and want to separate them (splitters). I have argued for the presence of two therapeutic temperaments—the technocratic and the phenomenological (see my Letters to a Young Therapist: Relational Practices for the Coming Community, 2011). A fascinating line of inquiry in cultural anthropology concerns categories for thinking food. The most noted example is Lévi-Strauss’ culinary triangle: the raw, the cooked and the boiled (used to great effect in Zizek’s work, sometimes hilariously as with the examples of different types of toilets in Europe and pubic hair styles). Jean Soler’s essay on the Jewish rules for kashruth is perceptive and instructive. Yet it’s final line landed like a bomb in the world of ideas. On the evidence of Biblical dietary restrictions in Leviticus and Deuteronomy, the Hebrew mind, he concluded, was intolerant of compromise and mixtures (the edible and the non-edible)—and not only in the kitchen!¹ In fact, this sort of analysis is well-established in the anthropology of Mary Douglas (see Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Conceptions of Pollution and Taboo, 1966), yet its use by Soler smacks of an unscientific, that is unscholarly, judgement.

Cognitive style and temperament aside, I am concerned in this work with conflations, reductions, evacuations.

As Foucault said, structuralism wanted to “evacuate the concept of the event” (see his interview in Paul Rabinow’s The Essential Foucault). I very much want the concept of the event to flourish to be the basis for a new vision of psychiatry.

Furthermore, I want to question Janus-faced terms that have brought us as a culture to a confused understanding of trauma as both wound and transformation. It is even evident in the comments on this blog!

I am a category splitter, will be the charge. I am technocratic in my approach, offering merely rhetorical arguments, splitting hairs, reflecting perhaps a Jewish intolerance of nuance and subtlety (lacking hybrid, synthesis and compromise in Soler’s thesis). Myself scandalized, in Girard’s terms, by the cross.

Quite to the contrary, I live on the cusp, as Spinoza did, between Judaism and Christianity (as Yirmiahu Yovel brilliantly shows in his study of Spinoza, Spinoza and Other Heretics, 1989), I have a “saturated life” in social psychologist Kenneth Gergen’s vivid phrase, of professional identities, working languages and alliances, and my thought is marked more by the “porosity” that Walter Benjamin and Asja Lacis observed in Naples than by rigid categories. When I was awarded a prize for my last book, the president of the Association des médecins psychiatres du Québec remarked wryly that the prize, named for a québecois psychiatrist, Camille Laurin, noted for establishing French as the official language of Quebec, was being given to an Italian who works in French for a book written in English!

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Footnote

1.     Jean Soler, who was a French diplomat stationed in Israel for eight years, concluded his article on “The Dietary Prohibitions of the Hebrews” with this incendiary statement: “whatever variations the Mosaic system may have undergone in the course of history, they do not seem to have shaken its fundamental structures. This logic, which sets up its terms in contrasting pairs and lives by the rule of refusing all that is hybrid, mixed, or arrived at by synthesis and compromise, can be seen in action to this day in Israel, and not only in its cuisine” (emphasis added), The New York Review of Books, June 14, 1979. That line still rings in my ears. It was a betrayal of the anti-categorical argument Soler so carefully built and a call to arms.

Letters to a Young Therapist: Relational Practices for the Coming Community

Letters to a Young Therapist: Relational Practices for the Coming Community

The Age of Trauma: From "Candide" to "Incendies/Scorched"

News item: 20.04.2010

Iranian cleric: Promiscuous women cause earthquakes

By The Associated Press

A senior Iranian cleric said Monday women who wear revealing clothing and behave promiscuously are to blame for earthquakes.

The Birth of the Modern Discourse on Trauma

In 1755, Lisbon was destroyed by an earthquake, followed shortly after by the start of the Seven Years’ War (1756-1763), prompting many reflections by Europeans on their belief in the Enlightenment. Voltaire responded in 1759 with Candide, a picaresque novel, which the Germans call a bildungsroman, or coming of age novel. It is a biting satire on the naïve Candide and his philosophical mentor Dr. Pangloss with his cheerful optimism, “All is for the best in the best of all possible worlds.” The character of Pangloss reflects many layers of invention and satire; it is above all a satire of Leibniz’s optimistic philosophy and in speaking all languages (pangloss), the philosopher’s name is a reference to a preternatural, all-knowing, ur-language. We see a negative apotheosis of this in Umberto Eco’s character Salvatore in The Name of the Rose who garbles a variety of languages from Latin and its derivatives in the Romance languages, to German, Greek and others like the grammelot of commedia dell’arte. This hapless creature inadvertently mouths the vulgarized Latin phrase, “Penitenziagite,” from Poenitentiam agite, the doctrine of a heretical sect, leading to his demise.

(For a scholarly review of the notion of an ur-language, see Umberto Eco’s The Search for the Perfect Language, 1995. For a description of grammelot, see Dario Fo’s brilliant Manuale minimo dell’attore, 1987; Tricks of the Trade in English translation, 1991).

If we stay with the history of my country, Italy, we see that Giordano Bruno talked about the eruptions of Vesuvius being acts of nature, not related to divine providence or the mistakes of men (that is, human agency versus acts of God). In passing, Polish Nobelist Czeslaw Milosz wrote a stirring poem, “Campo dei Fiori,” about the place in Rome where Bruno was burnt at the stake as a heretic. Written in 1943 in Warsaw, it addresses through the rhetorical device called paralepsis or preterition the burning of the Jewish Ghetto in Warsaw by the Nazis.

(Rowland, Ingrid D. Giordano Bruno: Philosopher/Heretic. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009)

Another countryman from my own region of Abruzzo, Ignazio Silone, was deeply marked by the earthquake in 1915 of his hometown, Pescina. Bruno’s and Silone’s reflections on the relationship between natural disasters and our perceived sense of trauma are instructive. One hears these distinctions in almost all discourses on disaster and trauma and here we have an emerging topology of trauma in the thought of Giordano Bruno: acts of nature, divine providence, mistakes of men. There is no question that the human experience of these three distinct categories is both socially constructed and historically robust. All of this connects our reflections with Voltaire, his reaction to the Lisbon earthquake in 1755 with Candide, and the opening of the modern discourse on trauma as neither a divine (Voltaire’s rejection of divine providence) nor a natural occurrence (in the wake of the Seven Years’ War).

           

Let us sketch this out:

·      In the 18^th century, with the Lisbon earthquake and the Seven Years’ War, we questioned whether we failed a providential God.

·      In the 19^th century, we questioned whether God was really there.

·      In the 20^th century, with the declared death of God, we questioned the core values of the Enlightenment, made all kinds of apocalyptic declarations and entered a world of post-everything: the death of the author, the death of all possible metaphysics, the death of philosophy and of thought itself.

So the Iranian cleric is not so strange in attributing natural disasters to human behaviour. This is simply premodern thinking, a world where there is a God whose providence is contingent on human actions. In a world where God has already been declared dead and the humanism that was constructed to replace theism fails to move people in a consistent and predictable manner, we have invented trauma as a way to explain disasters and our reactions to them.

In a premodern world, we didn’t need trauma. We had convenants with God, and bad things happened when we didn’t live up to our end of the bargain.

In the modern period, with the Enlightenment project, we elevated reason and made ourselves the masters of our fate. Whether we wanted it or not (J-P Sartre: “Every man is condemned to freedom”; Erich Fromm: “escape from freedom”).

But with the accumulation of horrors, where we can blame no one else but ourselves (war, crime & violence, pace Steven Pinker and his cheerful reassurance of their decline; see Pinker's The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, 2011) if indeed blame can be assigned (consider natural disasters, famine, diseases), we entered a period where successive generations kept reinventing traumatic responses to human horrors and natural disasters:

·      The First World War: shell shock

·      The Second World War: battle fatigue, concentration camp syndrome, survivors

·      The Korean War: brainwashing, “The Manchurian Candidate”

·      And after the Viet Nam War, it all coalesced into PTSD — “Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder”

It is not coincidental that it took two great man-made tragedies before PTSD coalesced into a medical-psychiatric syndrome or disorder. Not so much WWII as a military engagement but the assault on civilians, above all in the Holocaust, and the unpopular war in Viet Nam, led to the invention of PTSD.

Surely, there were injured soldiers and populations after WWI and WWII.

It took the massacre of innocent civilians and an unpopular war for the effects of war to be construed so negatively. The work of Paul Fussell, The Boys’ Crusade (2004), is instructive in this regard.

The Age of Trauma

And we now live in the age of trauma.

The age of trauma is only possible with a dual loss of faith—in both God and in all the other gods that failed as substitutes (communism, fascism, nationalism—politics generally—and humanism). (See the now almost-forgotten classic, The God That Failed, 1949, edited by Richard Crossman, with contributions by Ignazio Silone, Arthur Koestler and André Gide, among others. Cf. also the anti-humanism of Althusser, Lacan, Foucault and Badiou.)

Arthur Miller (1949), in his bold essay in The New York Times, “Tragedy and the common man,” redefined tragedy not as an affair of kings and the great men of history but of the “common man” and of the gap between his aspirations and his paltry achievements. Note the date—just four years after the end of a supposedly victorious American involvement in WWII.

What we have in the figure of the traumatized victim is a contemporary articulation of tragedy doubly redefined: firstly, as Miller’s “common man” (rather than the privileged patients making their way to Bergasse 19, to Freud’s study), and secondly, as the unwitting victim of large forces whose circumstances are themselves morally charged and “beyond reason,” bringing into question the gods of rationality and the myth of progress of modernity in our day just as the Lisbon earthquake of 1755 brought the Enlightenment into question.

Our age, the age of trauma, has not yet found its Voltaire who found in the Lisbon earthquake the perfect foil for his critique of Leibniz’s optimistic philosophy, forever remembered in the satirical figure of Dr. Pangloss hailing “all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds.”

It is not for want of trying. Novelists have given it a hand—and come to grief (Jerzy Kosinski’s masterwork, The Painted Bird, defined him and perhaps hounded him to his grave). Others who touch it have mixed results (Canada’s Yann Martel attempted to tell the Holocaust as a fable with animals in his Virgil & Beatrice with so far, negative critical reviews). Günter Grass’ Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded in great part for his Die Bechtrommel/The Tin Drum—which would now be unfilmmable for many reasons, including the allusion to/illusion of a young boy making love to an adult woman. I will do a close reading of this novel in my dissertation, examining Grass’ use of Oskar as an emblem of war. Imre Kertesz’s Fatelessness and Kaddish for an Unborn Child were met with indifference or worse in his native Hungary, though eventually garnering another Nobel Prize in Literature.

In film, from the garbled Sette Bellezze/Seven Beauties (for which Italian filmmaker Lina Wertmuller was savaged by literary scholar Leon Wieseltier) and the sado-masochism of The Night Porter to Schindler’s List and La Vita É Bella (see Slavoj Zizek’s comment on the film’s denouement), we have a constricted emotional range from bathos to exploitation. Only perhaps in documentary form has the Gorgon medusa been faced full on with acceptable results: Claude Lanzmann’s relentless Shoah and the raw personal statement of Araz Artinian’s The Genocide in Me.

Theatre may be a privileged venue for staging horror. Lebanese Canadian playwright Wajdi Mouawad’s Incendies/Scorched (play, 2005; film, 2010) is intense and excessive but this may be the only way for contemporary audiences to take their tragedies. The searing phrase intoned in that play is:

L’enfance est un couteau planté dans la gorge. 

On ne le retire pas facilement.

Childhood is a knife stuck in your throat. You don’t remove it easily.

(my translation)

The Holocaust has not found its satirist with the possible exception of the dark humour evinced in Tadeusz Borowski’s This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen. Peter Weiss’ The Investigation and Jean-Paul Sartre’s The Condemned of Altona attempt the staging of historical tragedies. They are powerful, but somehow unsatisfying. I inhaled Weiss’ The Investigation in a single, breathless reading in London and was left both tingling and numbed. Notably with Sartre, I have an intense subliminal perception of legerdemain, misdirection, or to invoke the phrase he coined and made infamous, “bad faith.”

The age of trauma is like that: we are left a-tingle and benumbed, we can’t avoid it and we can’t quite it wrestle it down to the mat, like Jacob with the angel. German writer Christa Wolf said it so well:

What is past is not dead; it is not even past. We cut ourselves off from it; we pretend to be strangers.

—Patterns of Childhood (1976, p. 3)

Wolf sets out to write, confronts harsh choices: “to remain speechless, or else to live in the third person.” She ponders, “The first is impossible, the second strange.” Then admits: “the less unbearable alternative will win out.”

*

“This Footnote’s For You” (1)

The footnote—

“A humble subaltern in the ranks of the apparatus of textual scholarship.”

—Peter Cosgrove (1991)

Canadian popular singer-songwriter Neil Young (1988) railed against the use of popular music in advertising with a polemical pastiche of a publicity campaign for an American beer, “This Bud’s for you,” singing “This Note’s For You.” In the lyrics, there are two widely-recognizable ad slogans, the Budweiser ad parodied in the title and Coca-Cola’s “It’s the real thing” mocked at the end with his repeated assertion, “I got the real thing,” and ending with the singing equivalent of italics or bold text (or are they distancing quotation marks?)—“Yeah, alright.”

The footnote is …

a notational supplement;

an apparatus of annotation;

a scholarly apparatus.

In a delightful essay, Peter Cosgrove (1991) asks whether the footnote is an objective tool or rhetorical device? (p. 130). He reads in the footnote an “inherent instability” between “its rhetorical and its factual elements” (p. 131).

The footnote has its origin in the “idea of objectivity” … “among its origins is the desire during the Reformation to formulate an ideal of knowledge free from the influence of partisan religious struggles, or from the apriori syllogisms of medieval Aristotelianism.”

Quickly associated with mathematics and experimental science … “we regard it today as a way of thinking uncontaminated by prejudices personal, professional, natural, or ideological” (p. 131).

Cosgrove describes the footnote as a “humble subaltern in the ranks of the apparatus of textual scholarship” (p. 131). It is necessary but self-effacing: “Along with bibliographies, indexes, catalogues, reference books, and dictionaries, the footnote became an indispensible if anonymous tool.”

Why is it indispensible? “A reader … is not to be convinced by rhetoric alone; like a good positivist, or a jury in a court of law, he or she demands that the manipulations of the text come equipped with an independent support system.” (p. 132)

Cf. Today’s “disclaimer” at scientific meetings in medicine and psychiatry are attempts to establish scholarly independence and assert intellectual integrity.²

Reference

Cosgrove, Peter W. Undermining the text: Edward Gibbon, Alexander Pope, and the anti-authenticating footnote. In: Barney, Stephen A., ed. (1991). Annotation and Its Texts. Oxford: Oxford University Press; pp. 130-151.

Footnotes

¹ This is the first in a series of reflections about the scholarly apparatus employed in my doctoral dissertation. The scholarly apparatus that I want to clarify includes:

Annotations, Excursi, Footnotes, Glosses, Marginalia, Scholia, 

Supplements

² A newer requirement in the academy is the disclaimer read before a scientific paper. It serves a very perverse function. Someone who gets up and has nothing to disclaim or disown may be seen as unimportant. Someone who is on advisory boards and has the requisite number of affiliations in the requisite areas establishes in a sense their authority. It is disingenuous at best. Often, it is puffery at its worst. It is the opposite, really, of acknowledging, as many scholarly texts offer acknowledgements, both to funding and other sources of support and intellectual accompaniment in the scholarly tasks. Speakers would be better off simply stating they are capable of having independent thought and demonstrating that in their presentation.