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Trauma and Historical Witnessing: Hope for Malabou’s New Wounded
- The Journal of Speculative Philosophy
- Penn State University Press
- Volume 30, Number 3, 2016
- pp. 404-413
- Article
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abstract:
Malabou claims that trauma permanently punctures sociohistorical connections and creates deconstituted subjectivities that Freudian psychoanalysis cannot address. Working from her provocations, I show that Freud provides an understanding of history as essentially discontinuous and allows us to acknowledge discursive latency, which opens the way for a reevaluation of analysis as a form of historical witnessing. While Malabou denies the possibility of hope for understanding post-traumatic stress disorder survivors, I argue, along with contemporary theorists and analysts, that we have a responsibility to allow the new histories inaugurated by trauma to enter into the social narrative and stretch the boundaries of shared memory.