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  • Sympathetic Conditions:Toward a New Ontology of Trauma
  • Marija Cetinic (bio)

Entering the spacewe have heard aboutbut rarely known:this underground.Here one breathes inan uncanny and unstable auraof resistance, wary hope, and sadness.One sometimes chooses this,sometimes simply gets cast.It seems to be our space and time.We feel so numbered,feel so numb. The web is dark.We are roped to this dark,in which tides of voices rise,swell, are noted, and break over us.It is hard to know whythis site is so implacablebut it is, clearly it is.

—Rachel Blau DuPlessis1

When the University Library in Sarajevo was bombed in August of 1992, it burned for three days, and 1.5 million volumes of books were destroyed. The librarian of Bosnia's National Museum, Kemal Bakaršić, observed the scene: "All over the city sheets of burned paper, fragile pages of grey ashes, floated down like a dirty black snow. Catching a page you could feel its heat, and for a moment read a fragment of text in a strange kind of black and grey negative, until, as the heat dissipated, the page melted to dust in your hand."2 [End Page 285]

What sort of conceptual framework—and what methodologies of critical engagement—would be required to think and to practice the relations among trauma, affect, and textuality that such a description evokes? Bakaršić describes a disaster, certainly, but what sort of potential for thinking new modes of relationality does such a description disclose and distribute? This is to ask what this scene exposes.

To expose is to put out, to deprive of shelter, to present to view, to put forth; to cast out to chance, to uncover, to unmask and abandon, to dislocate, but also to put into circulation, to open toward, and to risk. To expose is to submit (a sensitized surface) to the action of light.3 What is exposed by the scene that Bakaršić describes? What is exposed is the contingency of the archive, the materiality of the book, the fragility of the page, the unwrittenness of writing, the temporality of temperature, the singularity of snow in the distribution of ashes. In this scene, reading is itself an exposure—an exposure of incompletion, an exposure to textual elements. The text is a "negative" that dissolves under the conditions of its exposure, exposing exposure as such.

This essay attempts to engage both trauma and reading as exposure, and to think exposure as partagé, in Jean-Luc Nancy's sense of both dividing and sharing-out, a mode of being-with that depends upon disposition, the spacing of singularities. For Nancy, "a singular being appears, as finitude itself: at the end (or at the beginning), with the contact of the skin (or the heart) of another singular being, at the confines of the same singularity that is, as such, always other, always shared, always exposed."4 If trauma exposes the subject as a singularity, or if there is no subject prior to the singularity of trauma, how can we think, and construct, the affective conditions under which trauma might constitute a community, and how can we do so while also respecting the singularity of trauma—while respecting its capacity to singularize? How can we think, through trauma, community, and singularity together—the partagé of singularity and community?

Approaching these questions will involve engaging a problematic in recent trauma theory whereby the category of trauma is generalized, distributed into a sort of affective cloud that hovers over attempts to think or conceptualize possibilities of what Nancy calls "community" or Brian Massumi refers to as "belonging."5 One might call these conditions "sympathetic," or in Nancy's terms, we could say, compassion, that "contact of being with one another in this turmoil."6

Much of contemporary trauma studies rely on psychoanalytic models to interpret trauma within a text. Two major critics in [End Page 286] the emergence of the field in the early 1990s, Shoshana Felman and Cathy Caruth, argue that traumatic narrative (the telling of trauma), must be spoken in a language that permits for temporal disruption, fragmentation, violence, and the breakdown...

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