1. Harvard Program for Refugee Trauma Cambridge, MA Two Trauma Communities:A Philosophical Reconciliation ofCultural and Psychiatric Trauma Theories Vincenzo Di Nicola, MPhil, MD, PhD,FAPAProfessor of Psychiatry, University of Montreal Monday, October 15, 2012

2. Vincenzo Di Nicola Trauma and Event: A PhilosophicalArchaeology Supervisors: Giorgio Agamben, Alain Badiou,Martin Hielscher, Richard Mollica, ThomasZummer Defensecommittee: Alain Badiou, Slavoj Zizek,Wolfgang Schirmacher DoctorateawardedSumma cum laude August 12, 2012, Saas-Fee, Wallis, Switzerland 3. Trauma and Event: A PhilosophicalArchaeology Michel Foucault, Giorgio Agamben, Alain Badiou The work of this triumviri of philosophers is knittogether to forge new answers to the aporias oftrauma and event: the philosophical archaeologyof the disruption of the discourse of being and thetraumatic closing or evental opening ofpossibilities in the coming community. 4. Trauma and Event:A PhilosophicalArchaeology Trauma is defined as the destruction of experience which is investigated through a series of annotations and excursuses on its cultural origins, from the pharmakon, the skandalon and the scapegoat, to a rhetorical reformulation of trauma as catachresis/apostrophe. A new model employing the truth tables of scientific research offers a new vocabulary for trauma and event and their simulacra. 5. Richard F. Mollica The dictum my Italian immigrant father voiced, also a victim of violence, remains loud and clear, Son, take on a problem you cannot solve. - Healing a Violent World: A Manifesto 6. Alain Badiou Philosophy is either reckless or it is nothing. - Second Manifesto for Philosophy trans. by Louise Burchill (2011, p. 71) 7. Richard F. Mollica Empathic failure is the bedrock of human aggression and violence.- Healing a Violent World: A Manifesto 8. Alain Badiou 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? -Preface, Quentin MeillassouxsAfter Finitude,trans. by Ray Brassier (2008, p. vi) 9. Trauma It is an error to divide people into the living andthe dead: there are people who are dead-alive,and people who are alive-alive. The dead-alivealso write, walk, speak, act. But they make nomistakes, and they produce only dead things. Thealive-alive are constantly in error, in search, intorment.YevgenyZamyatinRef: YevgenyZamyatin, On Literature, Revolution, Entropy, and Other Matters (1923), trans. by Mirra Ginsburg in, A Soviet Heretic: Essays by YevgenyZamyatin (1970), p. 110. 10. The discourse of psychic trauma is marked by aconfusion of signifiers. There is a confusion among what we mayseparate conceptually into predisposing,precipitating and prolonging factors of trauma, towhich we may add protective factors. Furthermore, we need to separate direct,immediate traumatic impacts from delayed, latentor long-term consequences called sequelae inmedical terms. Finally, we may call this wholeschema a trauma process. 11. Thus, we may usefully separate the traumatic process into these factors: predisposing traumatic contexts or situations thatplace individuals at riskwe may call these distaldeterminants, such as causes and influences; precipitating traumatic triggers are proximaldeterminants; prolonging factors amplify, augment or extend thetraumatic process synchronically or diachronically; protective factors dampen, diminish or mitigate thetraumatic process. 12. The key question then becomes: What makestrauma traumatic? Is it the threat that somethinghurtful may happen, the experience of the injuryitself, or living with the consequences of thethreat or of injury? Which aspect is the traumaand which traumatic? Is this conflation ofpredisposing, precipitating and perpetuatingfactors normal? Is this typical in medicine or psychiatry?Infections work like this; flu, the common termfor influenza means the virus, getting infected andsuffering with the symptoms. Nonetheless, thevery notion of medical progress means the clearidentification of different phases of a diseaseprocess and its determinants. These are the 13. In philosophical terms, we need a vocabulary for what Agamben calls desubjectivationthe dead-alive (Zamyatin), bare life (Agamben) and states of dissociation, but we need to open space for what Foucault called subjectivation for the Event and for the faithful subject, as Badiou has described them. 14. This distinction opens only the first of manydichotomies that emerge in every traumadiscourse. In the onomasiology (from Greek, onomz, toname) of traumahow wename traumawe encounter dichotomies andbivalent notions throughout. In this investigation, annotations and excursusesdocument the philosophical archaeology of thesebivalent notions such as the Akedah, thepharmakon, the skandalon and the katechon,while the dichotomies of trauma theories aredissected below. 15. A Philosophical Archaeology ofThe Concept of Trauma I think that many philosophers secretly harborthe view that there is something deeply (i.e.,conceptually) wrong with psychology, but aphilosopher with a little training in thetechniques of linguistic analysis and a freeafternoon could straighten it out.Jerry FodorRef: Jerry A. Fodor, Psychological Explanation: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Psychology (1968), p. vii. 16. A Philosophical Archaeology of The Concept of Trauma At first sight, Caruth appears to definetrauma in ways that are quite compatible withpsychological research on trauma and post-traumatic stress. However, unlike most of hercontemporaries who study the vicissitudes ofmental suffering in a clinical context,Caruthgoes on to celebrate the experience and theconcept of trauma as providing unprecedentedinsight into the human condition.WulfKansteiner and HaraldWeilnbckRef: WulfKansteiner and HaraldWeilnbck, Against the Concept of Cultural Trauma or How I Learned to Love the Suffering of Others without the Help of Psychotherapy, in Astrid Erll and AnsgarNunning, eds., Cultural Memory Studies. An Internationaland Interdisciplinary Handbook (2008), pp. 229-240, p. 230. 17. A Dichotomy in TraumaTheories We cannot characterize trauma as a unified discourse or as a spectrum even with one discipline. What seems to bring conceptual order to the concept of trauma and to trauma studies is to discern a dichotomy as a separator or marker that divides the discourses along different axes and conceptualizations. 18. A Dichotomy in Trauma Theories This is a meta-concept that creates two groups or two poles around which certain notions or studies or emerging traditions congeal. Yet, any given separator that creates a dichotomy is shifting, porous and unstable. 19. Mimetic/Antimimetic Dichotomy In describing two theories of trauma shenames mimetic and antimimetic theories, RuthLeys lucidly demonstrates that, from the turnof the century to the present there has been acontinual oscillation between them, indeedthat the interpenetration of one by the other oralternatively the collapse of one into the otherhas been recurrent and unstoppable. Furthermore, she notes that historically, themimetic/antimimetic dichotomy constantlyinvites and defeats all attempts to resolve it.Leys is consistent on this to the point that shepredicts that our current debates are fated toend in an impasse. 20. Leys own analysis becomes part of the meta-concept of trauma, such that hermimetic/antimimetic dichotomy confirms thenotion of a dichotomy but does not exhaust it. Other dichotomies come into play and while wecan separate their poles, they do not matchevenly with each other and are sometimes evenincongruent and incompatible. What I appreciate most about Leys analysis isher conclusion that trauma has a historicalstructure, an idea that is congruent withFoucaults notion of a discursive formation or 21. Trauma, as a concept or theory with its associated practices, has become an apparatus. Not only has trauma been constructed and put in play as an apparatus describing something we want to name and explain, but as both Kansteiner and Leys emphasize, it has hard not to reach for this apparatus as an explanatory model, with all its conflations and confusions. 22. Leys convincingly demonstrates that the two theories are intertwined not only across theories but even within each individual theory or group of researchers. In concluding, Leys acknowledges the intractability of the dichotomy and eschews a meta-position from which one can assess the aporias that she sees as intrinsic to this field. 23. My meta-concept places Leys approach within a larger one: hers is one dichotomy among others. This is not to say that we can take a stand above the dichotomy but that if we see it as an apparatus, which is a discourse with a strategic function, we can discern that it functions not as one dichotomy, one particular difference, but an epistemological cut in any possible discourse about trauma. 24. We see this in the bivalence of crucial terms in this archaeology, from the word trauma itself, to the metaphors used to describe it, to the ways in which wound is deployed in Western culture. From Achilles spear that both cuts and heals, to Platos pharmakon which is both a poison and a remedy, this bivalence reaches its apogee in the current cultural theory of trauma which I call trauma as event. 25. I do not share Leys pessimistic conclusionthat it is intractable. The dichotomy in trauma theories will beintractable as long as we unwittingly repeat it,a point Leys makes lucidly by observing thateach generation has had to rediscover thenotion of traumatic stress. Once we are aware of trauma as anapparatus, we may more consciouslyentertain other theories, as Kansteiner hassuggested, by finding a new lexicon fortrauma, a project I warmly endorse. 26. Kansteiner calls for low-densitypsychological concepts that avoid the moraland existential excess of the trauma claim,hoping that greater conceptual precision willallow us to differentiate between trauma andthe culture of trauma. In Ian Hackings terms, Kansteiner wants tointerrupt the looping effects betweenprofessional and public or cultural discourses.Elaine Showalter has also suggestedsomething similar.Refs: WulfKanstainer, Genealogy of a category mistake: a critical intellectual history of the cultural trauma metaphor, Rethinking History: The Journal of Theory and Practice, 2004, 8:2:193-221, p. 195. 27. My own proposal is more modest. First, I believe that trauma has accrued asupplementarity or excess (echoing both Derridaand Kansteiner here). This supplementarity isoverdetermined, as Freud would say, or moresimply, multiply-determined. I suspect that a greatproportion of the variation may be attributedprecisely to the looping effects between the clinicaluse of trauma and its cultural avatar. Second, I believe that we must separate the variousways in which the word trauma is deployed anddifferentiate our vocabulary for these differentaspects of the trauma process. Third, and most salient, I believe that trauma mustbe separated radically from event, which is the 28. Dichotomising Trauma Let us now examine some of the characteristics of the trauma trope according to two columns or groupings of dichotomies: aleph and beth. The reason that I do not simply offer a definition at the outset is to reveal the armature of the construction of the concept and how it is deployed as an apparatus. 29. What this representative but not exhaustive surveydemonstrates is that the word trauma has becometoo broad and inclusive, too vague and unfixed, too(am)bivalent and polysemous, too deterministicand fatalistic an idea. My greatest concern, however, is that trauma is toopre-conceived and, ultimately, too emblematic acondition. All the other descriptors set the stage for anemblem to emerge which then binds them into anexplanatory notion; once an emblem appears, it inturn retrospectively creates its own precursors, inthe well-known process Freud calledNachtrglichkeit, belatedness or deferred meaning,which Lacan crafted into aprs-coup. And while it is true that trauma also invokes theopposite of these terms, its deployment as a trope 30. Aleph BethOligosemia, asemiaPolysemia(concreteness, loss of(sensory and expressivemeaning and expression) overload)MimeticObject-relations modelAntimimeticLiterary-metaphoric Psycho-economicpole modelMoral Scientific-metonymic poleScientific 31. AlephBethDominick LacapraEveryday psychologicalExtraordinary psychological challengesordeals of extreme violenceLloyd deMause Philippe ArisChildhood is a nightmareChildhood is a cultural inventionAlice MillerUbiquitous childhoodSigmund FreudviolenceChildhood sexual seduction is a fantasyRichard MollicaWitnessing the trauma storyResilience, self-healing of Traumaticexperiences ofvictims everyday life 32. Aleph Trauma as a Trope One way to make sense of this, a hypothesis of the order of Leys mimetic/antimimetic dichotomy, is to see the aleph list as the Freudian legacy. 33. Beth PTSD is a Psychiatric Disorder - The beth list is the Kraepelinian legacy. Narrower, more pathological in its discernments, neo-Kraepelinian psychiatry draws a sharp line between health and disease (if the investigator is biologically- oriented or given to evolutionary psychology, both of which favour categorical thinking) or health and illness (if the investigator is more given to the social sciences and a hermeneutic, socio-cultural or narrative approach). 34. References Alain Badiou, Preface, QuentinMeillassouxsAfter Finitude, trans. byRay Brassier (2008) Alain Badiou, Second Manifesto forPhilosophy, trans. by Louise Burchill(2011) Richard Mollica, Healing InvisibleWounds (2006) Richard Mollica, Manifesto: Healing a 35. References Vincenzo Di Nicola, Trauma and Event: A Philosophical Archaeology, Doctoral dissertation, European Graduate School, Saas-Fee, Switzerland (2012)