Pub Date : 2001-01-01DOI: 10.1080/14797580109367218
C. Caruth
Abstract This article examines an enigma at the heart of Freud's work on trauma: the surprising emergence, from within the theory of the death drive, of the drive to life, a form of survival that both witnesses and turns away from the trauma in which it originates. I analyse in particular the striking juxtaposition, in Freud's founding work Beyond the Pleasure Principle, of his two primary examples of trauma: the repetitive nightmares of battle suffered by the soldiers of World War I, and the game of the child, faced with the loss of its mother, who plays fort and da (there and here) with his spool. My own understanding of Freud's insight did not emerge, however, simply through a reading of his text but began, in fact, in my encounter with a real child in Atlanta, a child whose best friend was murdered in the street and who is interviewed by the friend's mother. I thus read together the language of the nightmare and the language of the child in Freud's text, and then attempt to understand how Freud's text and the language of the real child shed light upon each other.
本文探讨了弗洛伊德创伤研究的一个核心谜题:在死亡驱力理论中，令人惊讶的出现了对生命的驱力，一种生存形式，既见证了它起源的创伤，又远离了它。在弗洛伊德的著作《超越快乐原则》(Beyond the Pleasure Principle)中，我特别分析了他的两个主要创伤例子的惊人并列:第一次世界大战中士兵所遭受的反复的战斗噩梦，以及面对失去母亲的孩子的游戏，母亲用线轴玩fort和da(那里和这里)。然而，我对弗洛伊德的见解的理解并不是简单地通过阅读他的文章而产生的，而是始于我在亚特兰大遇到的一个真实的孩子，这个孩子最好的朋友在街上被谋杀了，他接受了朋友母亲的采访。因此，我在弗洛伊德的文本中把噩梦的语言和孩子的语言读在一起，然后试图理解弗洛伊德的文本和真实孩子的语言是如何相互揭示的。
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Pub Date : 2001-01-01DOI: 10.1080/14797580109367220
Lauren Berlant
Abstract This is a paper about trauma and ineloquence, violence and banality, and the utopian conventions of self‐expression in liberal mass society: the U.S. is the scene of the case. The essay pursues relations among the post‐traumatic reparative contexts of the law, religion, therapy and popular culture, all under the sign of autobiography. These domains articulate generic conventions of self‐expressivity with the formalism of self‐reflective liberal personhood. They link norms of expressive denegation to genres that conventionalize, and make false equivalents among, diverse traumatic consequences. When scenes of post‐traumatic ineloquence morph into modes of transformative‐style rhetoric, does the eloquent form distract from, become a mask for, or intensify the unreachable or inarticulable thought that wants to change the norms of negation? A short history of the soundtrack as a site that marks the centrality of ineloquence to traumatic expression condenses the paradox of the moment, where a post‐traumatic desire to become undefensive meets up with pop banality and therapeutic cliche.
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Pub Date : 2001-01-01DOI: 10.1080/14797580109367221
Susannah Radstone
Abstract This essay places the recent academic fascination with trauma and victimhood in a psycho‐social context within which identifications with pure victimhood hold sway. The essay takes as its starting point Freud's description, in Civilisation and its Discontents, of the formation of the super‐ego via the small child's negotiation of ambivalence towards its first authority figure. It is argued that this process lacks secondary re‐inforcement in western urban postmodernity, where authority has become diffuse, all‐pervasive and unavailable as a point of identification. In this context, aggression becomes harder to acknowledge and manage resulting in a tendency towards Manicheanism and the attenuation of ambivalence. Taking as its case‐study Marianne Hirsch's writings on the ethical aesthetics of postmemorial photography, the essay concludes that recent work on trauma and testimony fails to acknowledge that identifications may straddle victimhood and perpetration. This acknowledgement is only possible where some containment of aggression feels possible.
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Pub Date : 2001-01-01DOI: 10.1080/14797580109367223
K. McAllister
Abstract This article explores the potent force of material objects in testimional culture by enacting an encounter with the ‘debris’ of a World War Two internment camp for Japanese Canadians. Pushing beyond the limits of the repetition of linear history, the article moves instead towards a phenomenological analysis of how yielding to remains of the past might allow us to reconnect with the destroyed worlds from which they were removed. Using Michel Taussig's notion of mimesis and Peggy Phelan's work on mimicry, alongside Merleau‐Ponty's work on the habit‐body, this article brings into relief the neglected place of material objects collected by archives and brought to memorials in testimonial culture.
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Pub Date : 2001-01-01DOI: 10.1080/14797580109367224
K. Robson
Abstract The possibility of a so‐called ‘narrative cure’, whereby a survivor of traumatic experience can begin to deal with her past through integrating it into narrative, has become central both to psychotherapy and to literary criticism on writings of trauma as a means of ethical, ‘truthful’ testimony and of healing. This article seeks to question the correlation between testimony and ‘cure’ through analysing the function of the ‘narrative cure’ in a psychotherapeutic text and in a literary text. This highlights how any notion of ‘truthful’ testimony is always underwritten by fiction, which raises crucial ethical questions about the relation between fiction and ‘truth’, testimony and ‘cure’ and psychotherapy and literature. I argue that the ‘narrative cure’ is not a privileged space of curative ‘truth’, but a point of tension between memory and amnesia and between ‘truth’ and fiction; it is precisely this tension, I suggest, which should characterize and structure interdisciplinary responses to trauma.
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Pub Date : 2001-01-01DOI: 10.1080/14797580109367219
P. Phelan
Abstract This essay empasizes the dimensions of opticality in Freud's Beyond the Pleasure Principle and in Caruth's Parting Words. Thinking how to move from the ‘o‐o‐o‐o’ to the ‘a‐a‐a‐a’ central to the Fort/Da game, suggest that ‘u’ must be drawn into the creative act that inspires testimony, critical theory, psychoanalysis and love.
摘要本文着重分析了弗洛伊德的《超越快乐原则》和卡鲁斯的《临别话》中光学的维度。思考如何从“o - o - o - o - o”转移到Fort/Da游戏的核心“a - a - a - a”，建议“u”必须被吸引到激发证词、批判理论、精神分析和爱的创造性行为中。
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Pub Date : 2000-10-01DOI: 10.1080/14797580009367214
Emily Martin
There are signs that mental conditions involving constant shifting in time and space, emotionally or cognitively namely manic depression and Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) have been undergoing a dramatic revision in American middle-class culture, from being simply dreaded liabilities, to being especially valuable assets that can potentially enhance one's life in the particular social and cultural world now inhabited by many middle-class Americans. To understand this change, I turn to the social concept of the 'person', long a mainstay of anthropological analysis, a concept that is central to the earth-shaking changes many middle-class Americans are now undergoing. As Marcel Mauss (1985) made clear, what it means to be a person is deeply embedded in its social context, and highly various over time and space. A particular kind of person, the 'individual', seen as owner of himself and his capacities, rather than as part of a social whole, has been prominent in Euro-American culture since 17th century liberal democratic theory.
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Pub Date : 2000-10-01DOI: 10.1080/14797580009367208
G. Lipsitz, Jonathan Munby
The present moment of social and cultural transformation requires us to develop trans-national and post-national ways of knowing. We now see in retrospect that industrialization, nationalism, and the Cold War were not just historical events, but also epistemologies and ontologies. They directed our attention toward investigations of national identities and national cultures. They encouraged us to define politics in terms of citizenship and the state. They led us to look for universality, uniformity, and sameness as preconditions for social justice. Yet our experiences in the post-industrial, post-nationalist, and post-Cold War eras confront us continuously with cultural practices that cannot be pinned down to any one place, with political projects that go beyond demands by citizens on states, and by struggles for social justice that rely on partial, perspectival, and differential consciousness. We encounter unexpected allies and enemies; our political and cultural projects proceed through principles of identification and affiliation, rather than through identicality and coalition. This special issue of Cultural Values brings together scholars from the U. S. and the U. K. to explore the nature of national identity in the U. S. at the start of a new century. They present a composite picture of intercultural conflict and creativity, of the seeming compression of time and space, of the rapid emergence of new identities and the ghostly return of old ones. Contemporary cultural production in the U. S. does not erase older narratives of national identity, citizenship, and subjectivity, but rather recontextualizes them in light of emerging understandings, ideas, and identities. They underscore the contradictory processes at the present time that make it equally impossible for us to either embrace or to evade the national identities that we inhabit, but instead make it necessary for us to fashion new ways of knowing. The rapid movement across the globe of people and products that characterizes the present era influences nearly every aspect of contemporary culture and politics. Traditional assumptions linking culture to place have been disrupted by the emergence of new modes of production and distribution, new communications technologies, and new alignments of private and public power. In the United States today, emerging patterns of migration, trade, investment, and military intervention affect everything from the national origins of babies
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Pub Date : 2000-10-01DOI: 10.1080/14797580009367211
Victor Hugo Viesca
Abstract Ozomatli's history of formation, the multiplicity of its sounds, the role played by its music in enabling political activism and political coalitions illuminate the relations between identities and politics at the present moment. The group is grounded in Los Angeles contemporary Chicano/a culture and in the new social relations, new knowledges, and new sensibilities of an emerging global city in a transnational era. Speaking from the interstices between commercial culture and the new social movements, Ozomatli's music and political work offers us invaluable bottom‐up perspectives on the terrain of counter‐politics and cultural creation at the beginning of the twenty‐first century.
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Pub Date : 2000-10-01DOI: 10.1080/14797580009367215
G. Lipsitz
Cornel West observes that it is fundamentally depressing to confront the degree to which race still matters in U.S. society. Although the civil rights movement of the 1960s secured important and lasting victories, people from different races still confront starkly unequal access to housing and health care, to education and employment. Biologists and anthropologists now agree that dividing humanity into different races is fabricated and fraudulent; racial categories are scientific fictions. Yet scientific fictions often become social facts with deadly consequences. Malcolm X used to say that racism was like a Cadillac they make a new model every year. Just as it is impossible to fix a 1990s Cadillac with a 1960s owner's manual, we will not address the racism of the 1990s and beyond with a 1960s philosophy and approach. Our challenge is to develop an anti-racist vision appropriate to our own time, to the challenges presented to us by the injustices inscribed in our everyday lives through racial inequality. A broad range of private prejudices and public policies keep racism alive and functioning in our society, not so much through the direct, snarling, and referential racism of avowedly white supremacist groups like the Ku Klux Klan, but more through the indirect, institutional, and inferential racism encoded within what I call the possessive investment in whiteness. In my view, the possessive investment in whiteness creates the racialized hierarchies of our society. It determines which families receive home loans and which families remain renters, whose children attend well-funded schools and whose children go to the overcrowded and underfunded institutions with inexperienced teachers and inadequate equipment that tend to be found in non-white neighborhoods. The possessive investment in whiteness determines which people breathe polluted air, ingest lead in their blood streams, or eat fish poisoned by mercury. It determines who can rely on inside information and personal networks to secure one of the 85 percent of all available jobs in the U.S. that never appear in the 'help wanted' section of the newspaper, and influences the racial make-up of the unemployed and under-employed population. It helps shape the tax code in such a way as to give favored treatment to precisely the kinds of income that
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