Writing History, Writing Trauma (review)

Writing History, Writing Trauma. Dominick LaCapra. Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001. Pp. xvi. + 226. $39.95 (cloth); $17.95 (paper).

Trauma of the kind that plagued twentieth-century modernity has hardly been left behind in the emerging public sphere of the new millennium. Recent troubles--most notably the destruction of the World Trade Center--have surely driven home the traumatic stakes of globalization in 2001. The need to come to terms with trauma, its relation to historicity, and its place in cultural studies generally has never been more pressing. By definition, however, trauma poses a limit to critical reason and--as wound, disaster, or catastrophe--eclipses thought itself. Nevertheless, the psychological, social, and political impact that trauma effects historically, as well as the psychic toll it takes in our daily lives, demand theorization even as they resist total understanding. Since 1980--when the American Psychiatric Association officially recognized Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD)--a substantial corpus of neurological, psychological, legal, theological, ethical, literary, and cultural studies has complicated any simple or straightforward approaches to trauma. Key questions asked by some scholars in the emerging field of trauma studies are site specific, or unique to such singular events as, say, the Holocaust. Other writers formulate more general questions by comparing different cases of modern trauma, such as genocide, the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, nuclear accidents, natural disasters, rape and incest narratives, hate crimes, global terrorism, and other crimes against humanity, not to mention the ontic sources of trauma that may well be rooted in the human condition as such.

During the 1990s, trauma studies developed into a dynamic and cross-disciplinary, if provisional, enterprise. Today it faces a moment of methodological crisis even as it negotiates disciplinary legitimation. Until now trauma studies lacked the kind of discerning metacommentary that would adjudicate among its emergent logics, truth claims, intellectual strategies, objects of analysis, and scholarly positions. That dream of totalization, however, is precisely what LaCapra casts doubt upon in his important new book, which includes essays, modified talks, and an interview that speaks to the core issue of trauma's relation to disciplinary inquiry in the wake of the Holocaust.

He begins by tackling the tough issue of what constitutes historical method after Auschwitz. Here he moves deftly between, on the one hand, the documented, evidentiary truth claims of "objectivist historicism" and, on the other hand, the "radical constructivism" of critical historians such as Hayden White and Frank Ankersmit, who locate a deep structural affinity in the tropological bases of historical narrative and aesthetic discourse. The tension between objectivity and construction becomes most pressing in regard to the Holocaust, where objectively verified referents only take one so far in addressing the psychic, ethical, moral, and even theological dimensions of its traumatic event. This dilemma, as LaCapra shows, mirrors the impasse between functionalist and intentionalist approaches to the Nazi genocide. One possible settlement is White's tactic of assuming what Roland Barthes characterized as the "middle voice." While resisting an intransitive writing where "anything goes," a middle-voiced historicism probes what Barthes characterizes as "the problematic of interlocution."¹ Noting controversial, hybridized cases of the middle voice (such as Binjamin Wilkomirski's Fragments: Memories of a Wartime Childhood), LaCapra relates interlocution to Derridean différance but with a caveat against unregulated undecidability that threatens "to disarticulate relations, confuse self and other, and collapse all distinctions, including that between present and past" (21).

This implosion of difference is precisely the risk of trauma that LaCapra explores by rigorously framing key distinctions, such as the difference between loss and absence. This distinction, in particular, allows him to separate specific social losses (acts of war, genocide, domestic cruelty, and so on) from philosophical and psychological sources of absence, such as species-being-toward-death, the passage from nature to culture, encounters with the "Real" (understood as lack in the Lacanian sense), and so on. Minding the distinction between historical loss and ontological absence, he argues, can demystify redemptive...