Libby Saxton

Book Review: Didier Fassin and Richard Rechtman, The Empire of Trauma: An Inquiry into the Condition of Victimhood, trans. R. Gomme. Princeton, NJ and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2009. xii + 305 pp. ISBN 978-0-691-13752-0 (hardback); 978-0-691-13753-7 (paperback)

The meaning of trauma is neither fixed nor self-evident, as the modern history of the concept reveals. ‘Trauma’ derives from the Greek trauma, designating a wound to the body. The word’s metaphorical application to injuries to the mind dates back to the second half of the 19 century, when Jean-Martin Charcot sought to account for symptoms manifested by train crash survivors in terms of a neurological disorder, paving the way for Pierre Janet and Sigmund Freud to theorize the psychic origin of what was known at the time as ‘trauma neurosis’. Since then, trauma’s meaning has continued to shift and expand. Although it would rarely appear outside specialist medical contexts for another century, today the term has entered the vernacular and encompasses a bewildering diversity of experiences which otherwise have little in common. Trauma now links the apocalyptic occurrence to the prosaic mishap, the individual history to the collective memory, the victim of a crime to its perpetrator, and those directly affected by a violent event to those who witnessed it from a distance. In the aftermath of the exposure of torture in the Abu Ghraib prison, for example, it came as no surprise that we should hear, not the victims, but the soldiers who carried it out and people who saw photographs of it in the media recast their experiences as ‘traumatic’. What has caused the signifier ‘trauma’ to slide across this ever wider field of signifieds and where is the truth of the concept to be found? According to French anthropologists Didier Fassin and Richard Rechtman, trauma has gone global in the last 25 years as a consequence not of scientific advances but of shifts in collective perceptions of violence, suffering and victimhood. For Fassin and Rechtman, trauma speaks first and foremost of social ethics rather than subjective experience. In L’Empire du traumatisme (published in English translation as The Empire of Trauma) they provocatively conclude that ‘the truth of trauma does not lie in the psyche, the mind, or the brain, but in the moral economy of contemporary societies’ (276).

History, Memory, Fiction in French Cinema

“Is there a relation between trauma and pedagogy?” asks Shoshana Felman. “Can trauma instruct pedagogy, and can pedagogy shed light on the mystery of trauma?”1 The affirmative response anticipated by her questions takes the form of an essay, framed as a “life-testimony,” about her experience of teaching a graduate course on literature and testimony. Felman describes how towards the end of the course, a screening of a videotaped Holocaust testimony unexpectedly precipitated a “trauma” or “crisis” in her students which “unwittingly enacted” the class’s subject-matter, and had to be contained and reintegrated “in a transformed frame of meaning” through reflection, discussion and writing or “testimony.” One of the lessons she draws from this experience is pedagogical: “teaching in itself, teaching as such, takes place precisely only through a crisis: if teaching does not hit upon some sort of crisis, if it does not encounter either the vulnerability or the explosiveness of a (explicit or implicit) critical and unpredictable dimension, it has perhaps not truly taught.”2