legacies of the future
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Legacies of the FutureMark Dawson aa University of LeedsPublished online: 16 Jan 2012.
To cite this article: Mark Dawson (2012) Legacies of the Future, Parallax, 18:1, 120-123, DOI:10.1080/13534645.2012.632994
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relation to multiple cultural texts also means itcarves out a corner of its own.
Notes
1 See John Armitage, ed., Paul Virilio: From
Modernism to Hypermodernism and Beyond (London:Sage, 2000).2 David Harvey, The Enigma of Capital: And the
Crises of Capitalism (London: Profile, 2011).3 Slavoj Zizek, Living in the End Times (London:
Verso, 2010).4 Such complexities might include, for example,
the fact that Heidegger, Marcuse, Mumford,Ellul, and McLuhan, amongst others, all wrote
about the relationship between humans and
machines long before the publication of any
posthumanist criticism. Such discontinuities
certainly do not invalidate Crosthwaite’s strategy,
but they do complicate it somewhat.5 Crosthwaite himself, as he explains via an
endnote in the introduction, has written several
engaging articles about global interconnectedness
in relation to Virilio’s ‘global accident’, most
recently is his ‘Anticipations of the Accident:
Modernist Fiction and Systemic Risk’, Textual
Practice, 24:2 (2010), pp.331–52.
q 2012 Robert BullardNorthumbria University and
Teesside UniversityE-mail: [email protected]
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13534645.2012.632993
Legacies of the Future
Gabriele Schwab. Haunting Legacies:Violent Histories and TransgenerationalTrauma.(New York: Columbia University Press, 2010)
Ending the Legacy
Gabriele Schwab suggests two points of origin to
Haunting Legacies, a text which considers the
transgenerational encryption of trauma. The first
revolves around an uncannily overdetermineddate: ‘I feel that the book was conceived when we
buried my mother on September 11, 2001,
because it was after my return from Germany tothe United States that I began writing about
growing up in postwar Germany’ (p.xi). The
second source points to an intellectual commit-
ment: ‘It is no coincidence that the origins of thisbook coincide with the beginning of my training
in psychoanalysis’ (p.5). Indeed,Haunting Legacies
will be the goal of Schwab’s experience as
analysand, a goal, which comes as a completesurprise to her:
In the first session of my training analysis, myanalyst asked me: ‘If you were to name one
prominent goal you want to reach in this
analysis, what would it be?’ Without
hesitation I answered: ‘Writing a bookabout what it meant to grow up in
Germany after the war.’ I utterly surprised
myself with my own answer (pp.5–6).
The burial of Schwab’s mother is overdetermined
by her return to a severely traumatized country,
itself taken by utter surprise by the events of 9/11.
Analogously, the call to write this book comes
somewhat as a shock. The writing of Haunting
Legacies, then, will mark a process of mourning, as
well as the journey towards the end of Schwab’s
training analysis.
It is no coincidence that the call to write this book
is correlative with the shock of 9/11, and the
question of how to recover from that traumatic
event. Indeed, Haunting Legacies continually aligns
writing with recovery, and the reparation of the
wound with the restoration of community and
(political) agency:
I analyze how literary texts and memoirs
break through silences and trauma’s attack
on language to reintegrate conflicted histories
into a communal and political space (p.32).
I look at the linguistic traces [ . . . ] left by
traumatic disturbances of the symbolic order
such as ruptures, gaps, designifications, and
mutilated or invented words. Finally, I view
these writings of trauma as attempts to work
toward psychic integration and a
concomitant reparation of the symbolic
(p.33).
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Schwab aligns writing with speaking here, and a
lack of writing with melancholic silence. Writing is
associated with recovery, the talking cure and life;
silence is associated with illness, haunting and
death. Reading the work of Samuel Beckett, she
suggests that:
Perhaps this is why writing trauma matters, if
only by murmurs and stammers, or tortured
attempts at approximation. It counters the
work of death and breaths life back into the
silences haunted by dead words (p.34).
Writing is given the power to counter death, to
give life back to dead words, inspire them or
resurrect them. In turn, this power presumes a
desire to exorcize the ghost, to unlock the crypt
and recover its contents once and for all. Again,
the teleological aim of this book can also be seen to
mirror that of a certain notion of psychoanalysis.
By countering death with what might be described
as a very traditional notion of ‘life-writing’, the
traumatic ghosts of the past can be allocated a
‘proper’ resting place. For example, in her reading
of Patricia Grace’s novel Baby No-Eyes, the story of
a Maori mother whose baby daughter’s eyes were
stolen for medical research after a car accident,
Schwab links the witnessing of traumatic events
with the ability to end a legacy of trauma, an end
facilitated by an adequate account of those events:
Having stared into the heart of her sister’s
trauma, Tawera will no longer have to pass it
on to the next generation. Baby No-Eyes has
received a proper burial place; her story has
been told (p.141).1
One of the problems with the aim of ending the
haunting legacies of trauma through a practice of
writing, complete with the repairing of a disturbed
symbolic register, or working through haunting
and death in favour of life and ‘psychic
integration’, is that the very possibility of writing
is always-already a negotiation with death.
Schwab opens her second chapter, ‘Writing
Against Memory and Forgetting’, with a bold
claim: ‘We tell or write [notice the alignment of an
oral, ‘live’ delivery, and writing (MD)] stories in
order to defer death’ (p.41). This statement
suggests that writing and telling is on the side of
life, and silence and a lack of writing on that of
death. Schwab’s readings are premised on this
clear opposition between life and death, in which
the spectral is something to be exorcized in favour
of healing and reparation. This is not to say
Schwab’s text is not subtle in its readings; she
repeatedly argues for a more nuanced engagement
with the writing of trauma, as encountered in thework of Beckett and Perec for example, and her
championing of writing’s ability to span ‘daily life
and trauma’, a space in which these two worlds
‘must converge’, is important to note (p.41). Butthe many slight, and unsustained, engagements
with the work of Jacques Derrida, and especially
his reading of Abraham and Torok’s work in the
text ‘FORS’, are symptomatic of a reluctance toreally engage with the ghost, and with that
precarious border between life and death.2 I
continually hoped for a reading which would nottake up the notions of life and death, as well as
those of mourning, melancholia, introjection,
incorporation, writing, speech, trauma and heal-
ing so quickly, one which would take a little moretime to read these immense terms in greater detail
(though I appreciate finding the space to do this
kind of deconstructive work is increasingly hard to
find, and the attraction to do this kind of ‘traumatheory’ increasingly attractive, especially in light
of the current emphasis upon ‘impact’ in British
academic research policy). Though Schwab high-
lights points at which this might have taken place(footnote 20 on page 105 for example, in which she
acknowledges a need to read Derrida’s work on
forgiving the unforgivable), there are just toomany occasions in which the necessity of this kind
of work is hinted at, but avoided. In light of a
similar spatial restriction, however, I can only
briefly address one of the recurring theoreticalthemes in Schwab’s text which might have
benefitted from a more intimate engagement
with the terms she works with.
The Promise of Suffering
In a chapter considering ‘Identity Trouble’,
Schwab reads, amongst other texts, BarackObama’s speech ‘A More Perfect Union’, in
which he suggests a need for America to face ‘its
original sin of slavery’.3 Obama’s eschatological
tone is matched by Schwab’s, when she claims thatit is
one of the characteristics of trauma that it
makes the victim a prisoner of the past. This iswhy healing trauma also means a release from
the past and an opening toward the future
(p.105).
Healing and penitence are linked here; both
Obama and Schwab are asking how we can
acknowledge our originary wounds, our foundingsins, and in doing so, herald a time in which we
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will no longer be marked by them. The future, for
both Obama and Schwab, could be a period in
which our wounds and our sins have been fully
worked through, a period in which we are no
longer ‘prisoners of the past’, but are released from
it into an unmarked future. This teleological, or
even millenarian aim, of both the general
theoretical structure of the book, as well as that
which drove Schwab to write it in the first place, is
rooted in a quite traditional eschatology, one
which predicts a final judgement after which the
sinful are annihilated and the good freed from the
past. These allusions (to a certain Christian
messianism) beg the question as to why Schwab
did not take up the notion of ‘messianicity without
messianism’ (as elaborated by Derrida via Walter
Benjamin), a notion which I feel any promise of
healing must consider.4 Indeed, it could be
suggested that, in terms of both Benjamin and
Derrida’s work, the mark/wound is in fact the very
possibility of the future, rather than that which
must be erased once and for all.5
My concern with the eschatological tone of
Schwab’s text is that her repeated promise of a
future free from trauma presupposes a future in
which its transgenerational effects have also been
eradicated. And this takes us to the central
concern of the text. Schwab’s text ostensibly deals
with the origination, transmission, and exorcism of
‘haunting legacies’; indeed, she herself has been
encrypted with the traumas of her native country
Germany, most obviously the crimes of the Nazi
regime, as well as the unspoken traumas passed on
to her from her mother. The bravery of Schwab’s
text comes through whenever she attempts to read
the theoretical implications of these very personal
moments. Her frank admissions of naivety, as well
as her highly intimate revelations concerning her
mother and the secret history of her home town
are – for want of a better word – fascinating.
Schwab’s description of her mother’s repetitious,
‘frantic’, writing is particularly interesting, and
the text as a whole might have benefitted from a
more sustained reading of these powerful instances
of inscription.6
But the guiding thread of the text, informed as it is
with a rather orthodox psychoanalytic eschatol-
ogy, is the question of how we might finally
exorcize these instances of transgenerational
haunting. The text is structured by the suggestion
that it is writing that might unlock the crypts that
continue to be passed from one haunted gener-
ation to the next. Most crucially, however, is that
this emphasis on writing is one which sees it as a
process undertaken in order to reach the goal of
healing. In referring to Nicolas Abraham, Schwab
states that he
speaks of a haunting that spans generations.
He calls for a kind of psychoanalytic ‘cult of
ancestors’ (as defined by [Abraham and
Torok’s editor Nicholas] Rand) that allows
the dead to rest and the living to gain freedom
from their ghostly haunting. Yet to achieve
this freeing from the past requires one first to
awaken the dead and to revisit the trauma
(p.79).
In a way, this reading of Abraham describes the
performance of Schwab’s text. It revisits trauma –
both her own and others’ – through writing, but
with the underlying teleological goal of an epoch
in which that re-visiting, and thus a certain
practice of writing, will not be necessary. Schwab’s
reading of Toni Morrison’s Beloved demonstrates
this, in that, for her, it is a novel in which ‘the ghost
of Sethe’s murdered child comes back to haunt her
and her family until they work through the trauma of the
past’ (p.78). If this is the premise of Morrison’s
novel, then it is also structured by the same goal of
Schwab’s text, but I suspect there is more at work
in both. What worries me is not the function of the
promise as such, but that which is promised,
which, ironically, is actually the promise of a
world in which the necessity to write about such
things – and writing in general – is absent.
The implication of this is that transgenerational
haunting – the ‘haunting legacies’ of the title –
seems to be something we need to face through
varying writing practices, but also something these
practices will one day finally work through, heal or
exorcize. Yet the mark, inscription, or wound is
always the splitting of the past from the future, and
whenever or wherever there is the trace, there will
be an interminable work of mourning, in that the
trace both hides and reveals, loses and finds.
Indeed, Derrida performs this originary haunting
of the trace in reference to a central term in
Schwab’s text: the crypt. In an essay I feel Schwab
needed to take up in a little more detail, Derrida
states that, ‘A la place d’un autre ici le premier mot –
crypte’ [in place of another, here the first word is –
crypt].7 The ‘first’ word, the principle term, the
‘crypt’, is always the mark of the other, always the
mark of what came before it as that whichmay still
be to come (a ghost or ‘revenant’, that which
returns). Because this essential split is at work from
the beginning, it is impossible to return to, or
arrive at, a place that does not suffer the effects of
this cryptonymic writing. Writing is encryption
from the very first word. In turn, writing is from
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the beginning a work of mourning, but one thatcould never end. The very first word can be seen to
mourn what came before it as the possibility of
what might remain to come, hence the possibility
of the future. Moreover, as it is the trace itselfwhich promises this future, it would never be a
future without mourning, for to recognize it, to
mark that future, would be to misrecognize it and
therefore defer it once again.
There is an intimate, complex, relation between
writing and trauma, one which, unfortunately, isonly touched upon in Schwab’s admittedly brave,
and at times, fascinating, text. It is only when the
spectrality of the trace is considered vital to the
inscription (and encryption) of trauma that areading of its traces beyond the reductive
teleological aims of healing and reparation can
begin. Indeed, for much trauma theory today, it is
these very aims that annul in advance the writingin which they are promised.
Notes
1 Of course, there is a register of vision andblindness at work here. Unfortunately, however,
the scope of this review does not allow me to take
this up in the detail it requires.2 See, Jacques Derrida, ‘FORS: Les mots angles deNicolas Abraham et Maria Torok’, in Nicolas
Abraham andMaria Torok, Cryptonymie: Le Verbier
de L’Homme aux Loups (Paris: Flammarion, 1976),
pp.7–73. For the English text, see JacquesDerrida, ‘Fors: The Anglish Words of Nicolas
Abraham and Maria Torok’, trans. Barbara Johnson,
in Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, The Wolf
Man’s Magic Word: A Cryptonymy (Minneapolis:
Minnesota University Press, 1986), pp.xi–xlviii.3 Barack Obama, ‘A More Perfect Union’, cited
in Gabriele Schwab, Haunting Legacies, p.105.4 See for example: Jacques Derrida, Spectres de
Marx: L’Etat de la dette, le travail du deuil et la nouvelle
Internationale (Paris: Galilee, 1993); Specters of
Marx: the State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning,
and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf
(London: Routledge, 1994).5 Another way to think this in terms of psycho-
analysis is through the work of Jean Laplanche.There are several points in Schwab’s text at
which a detour via Laplanche’s re-consideration
of Freud’s seduction theory, a re-consideration he
attempts through the notion of the ‘enigmatic
signifier’, would have proved rewarding. See,
Jean Laplanche, New Foundations for Psycho-
analysis, trans. David Macey (Oxford: Blackwell,
1989).6 See, for example, Chapter Two, ‘Writing
Against Memory and Forgetting’, p.65. Not
unconnected to this is the slightly repetitious
nature of Schwab’s text as a whole. It repeatedly
presents a gloss on the work of Abraham and
Torok, or example, without ever taking that work
up in any great detail.7 Jacques Derrida, ‘FORS: Les mots angles de
Nicolas Abraham et Maria Torok’, p.9.
q 2012 Mark DawsonUniversity of Leeds
E-mail: [email protected]
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13534645.2012.632994
The Writing of Horror
NicholasChare.AuschwitzandAfterimages:Abjection, Witnessing and Representation.(London: I.B. Tauris, 2011)
Perennial suffering has as much right to expression
as a tortured man has to scream; hence it may have
been wrong to say that after Auschwitz you can no
longer write poems.
Theodor W. Adorno.1
Auschwitz and Afterimages is a reply to those – most
famously the director Claude Lanzmann – who
have argued that theHolocaust is unrepresentable.2
On a bookshelf it would be at home alongside
Giorgio Agamben’s Remnants of Auschwitz and
Georges Didi-Huberman’s Images malgre tout:
works that Nicholas Chare deals with at length in
this complex and compelling book. Auschwitz-
Birkenau is its point of departure and return, a limit
case and an inescapable shadow, but this is also a
book about perennial suffering and its expression in
art and in testimony. It is not therefore surprising
that Chare opens the Preface with Elaine Scarry’s
description, in The Body in Pain, of the violent
unmaking of the world:
To witness the moment when pain causes a
reversion to the pre-language of cries and
groans is to witness the destruction of
language; but conversely, to be present
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