The Problem of Trauma

This chapter brings to light the ways in which the concept of the psychic event, understood as a traumatic event, in the Freudian metapsychology blurs the distinction between interiority and exteriority in the form and functioning of psychical life. It demonstrates that Freud’s thinking of the compulsion to repeat traumatic scenarios distinguishes between the binding of repetition and the process of representing the drives. This difference shows that the character of compulsion is not purely determinist and the psychic elaboration of trauma is the formation of a materially real event. Unlike current trends in trauma studies, this chapter exposes how the relation between binding and repetition in trauma leads to the possibility of transforming the ontological meaning of destruction.

Rwanda Transforming

This chapter turns upon the relation between trauma and memory in the context of post-genocide Rwanda. Paying special attention to the case of the Bisesero Memorial site, known as the “National Resistance Memorial,” it shows how the imperishable character of the vivacity of memory in psychical life is a return of nature that realizes a neutral time without proper destination. The politics of memorializing the genocide in Rwanda challenges us to think the self-transformative tendency of life, which overwhelms the assertion of the character of the postcolonial condition as the repetition of legacies of colonialism. With reference to Nietzsche’s idea of “active forgetting,” the chapter proposes the development of forgetting as a new conceptual habit that impacts upon and frustrates the idea of messianic.

Introduction

The introduction describes the conceptual contexts for the composition of the traumatic event as it is developed in psychoanalysis and postcolonial studies. It offers an analysis of the analytic strategies of postcolonial critiques that identify and resist so called Eurocentric biases within the field of trauma studies. Unveiling that such critiques owe to the same ideological tendency that assumes priority of the symbolic over the material dimensions of life advanced by the field, this chapter situates the traumatic event as the point where psychoanalytic and postcolonial discourses meet. In so establishing, it demonstrates the necessity to transform the concepts of trauma and event.

After Word

The conclusion considers the question of how contemporary forms of geopolitical violence demand an articulation of a new form of the psyche, one that is susceptible to transformation and destruction. Paradoxes in Derrida’s concepts of differánce and the universal urgency of memory are unveiled in order to elaborate a new form of responsibility and meaning of response that does not depend on the motif of transference. To restore back to the other their pain without taking their place: such is the ethical and political demand of responsibility of our time.

Whither Partition?

This division constructs a dialogue between the materiality of trauma and the postcolonial condition through a sustained focus on the establishment of new geographical borders during the 1947 Partition of British India. The border is treated as an assigned place without proper destination. The chapter pays particular attention to the ways in which the temporality and formation of forms of nation during the Partition situate the living being and subject as the center of interaction to the extent it challenges the western tradition’s ideological tendency to assume life as irremediably divided between its symbolic and empirical, material aspects. The case of the Partition makes clear that the event as it is governed by the axiological principle of the “always already” in the psychoanalytic conception of trauma is overcome by the emergence of partition as another regime of events that asserts a coincidence between the material and symbolic domains of life.

The Eventality of Trauma

The relation between chance and necessity in the psychic event introduced in the previous chapter is brought to the fore through a sustained confrontation with the Freudian and Lacanian notions of destruction, challenging the idea of trauma as that which always already happens. The development a new psychoanalytic conception of time in the chapter exposes the vulnerability inherent within the structure of destruction, conceived in both Freud and Lacan as the repetition of a more originary trauma and thus as a fundamental law of psychical life. Concentrating on the status of contingency in the dream and the Lacanian formulation of trauma as a missed encounter, this chapter presents the eventality of trauma as a material reality that reveals transformation as the dynamic movement immanent to the real.