A Poetics of Trauma: The Work of Dahlia Ravikovitch

Conclusion: "The Transparent Skin that Unites Us"

132 ][ Conclusion “This Torment”2 The Politics of Trauma Ravikovitch’s work creates a space for otherness, estrangement, and inferiority , and enables silenced voices to express their particular viewpoints and be heard. Characters that have often been marginalized in the Israeli literary and cultural milieu stand at the center of Ravikovitch’s writing. The room she makes for victimhood, as well as the way her characters and speakers fail to conform or accommodate themselves to the symbolic order, creates poetic and cultural possibilities different from those established in the works of her contemporaries, like Amos Oz (b. 1939), A. B. Yehoshua (b. 1936), and David Shahar (1926–1997). Furthermore, Ravikovitch’s movement between the symbolic order and the deviant—the way in which she confronts the issues of womanhood, manic depression, madness, victimhood, and national identity from within and from outside, while revealing the inside-out and outside-in perspectives and their points of collision—is one of her most influential accomplishments in terms of the construction of deviant feminine subjectivity in Israeli culture beginning in the 1960s. In her poem “We Had an Understanding” (Hayta beyneynu havanah), Ravikovitch describes her experience of subjectivity as having a “transparent skin”: “skin that doesn’t protect the flesh/not in the least.” This subject experiences herself as a permanent victim (who at times has the capacity also to reveal the victimhood of others), haunted by trauma and longing but proud of her own estrangement and individualism. A kind of modern Lot’s wife, perhaps. Lot’s wife became a pillar of salt the moment she looked back at the burning Sodom, at the core of the catastrophe (Genesis 19, 26). Unlike Lot, the representative of the symbolic order, who could turn his gaze away from destruction, his wife was unable to ignore the catastrophe and leave her traumatic past behind. The history of Lot’s wife—a narrative of petrifaction, weakness , and fragility—is comparable to Ravikovitch’s poetic “historiography.” It is, to use Walter Benjamin’s words, a “secular explanation of history as the Passion of the world,”3 as though the whole world were a bleeding wound and its whole existence a traumatized self: “this torment/will turn into summer and winter and spring/in a perfect circle—/will become one memory, delicate, scorching” (“Birdy,” cp, 176; bk, 172). “This torment,” the focus of my book, lies at the center of Ravikovitch’s unique approach to deviation. Her emotional, cultural, and ideological portrayal of a deviant subjectivity raises questions about the politics of trauma. Conclusion ][ 133 In various ways, this book has asked the following: What are the critical and creative challenges facing a subversive alternative to the symbolic order? What are the implications of inscribing trauma in culture? How might a traumatic event, or the speech of a victimized personality, affect the social order and bring about cultural and ethical transformation? These questions become even more problematic when one considers involuntary subversion. According to Julia Kristeva, the semiotic—the preOedipal emotional sphere tied to nonverbal impulses and instincts, the indeterminate and anarchic drive—has the potential to challenge and destabilize the symbolic order. Although signification requires both the semiotic and the symbolic, some nonverbal signifiers are constructed exclusively on the basis of the semiotic. In this sense, the semiotic is the “raw material” of signification : the corporeal, libidinal matter that must be harnessed and channeled appropriately to facilitate social cohesion and regulation. By nature, then, the semiotic is seen by Kristeva to contain subversive forces able to overflow or break down the boundaries of the symbolic order.4 Judith Butler, however, takes issue with the notion that the subversive effects of the semiotic might be “anything more than a temporary and futile disruption of the hegemony of the paternal law.” Thus, according to Butler, “Kristeva offers us a strategy of subversion that can never become a sustained political practice.”5 I believe that questions of subversion and political practice cannot remain within the limits of common power relations (strong/weak, hegemonic/ marginal, oppressor/victim); rather, they should be extended to the larger question of the politics of inferior and suppressed subjectivity. Ravikovitch’s work offers us this political practice in poetic language.6 The deviation is inherent to subjectivity, and for Ravikovitch’s speakers and characters, aberrant eruptions are a crucial (if largely unconscious) part of their self-construction. They have no choice but to dispute the...