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  • Traumatic HermeneuticsReading and Overreading the Pain of Others
  • Colin Davis (bio)

How can I know that someone else is in pain, let alone have any real knowledge of what that pain feels like? Considering these questions, Wittgenstein answers them with breathtaking directness. Neither dismissing nor solving the problem, he tells us all we can know and all we need to know: “If I see someone writhing in pain with evident cause I do not think: all the same, his feelings are hidden from me” (1958: 223). I can doubt most things if I put my mind to it; and of course I cannot know precisely how another’s pain feels. But if I see a person who has been hit by a truck, it would be better to call for help than to consider the merits of philosophical skepticism. As Wittgenstein puts it in another passage, “Just try—in a real case—to doubt someone else’s fear or pain” (1958: 102). We cannot directly share it, but we know it when we see it.

The case of trauma and of trauma texts nevertheless complicates the recognition of the other’s pain. Wittgenstein refers to suffering that is visible (“I see someone [End Page 31] writhing in pain”) and has “evident cause.” Its source and its signs cannot be misinterpreted: the truck hit a person who is now crying in agony. The causes and symptoms of trauma, however, are less obviously manifest and more easily mistakable. This is suggested in one of the most frequently quoted passages in trauma studies, where Freud describes the survivor of a train crash in Moses and Monotheism:

It may happen that a man who has experienced some frightful accident—a railway collision, for instance—leaves the scene of the event apparently uninjured. In the course of the next few weeks, however, he develops a number of severe psychical and motor symptoms which can only be traced to his shock, the concussion or whatever else it was. He now has a “traumatic neurosis.”

(1985: 309)

Initially at least, the survivor shows no sign of suffering. He walks away from the scene of the crash without apparent physical or mental damage. There is no visible writhing in agony and unmistakable cause that would lead an observer to the conclusion that he is in pain; yet his later behavior will demonstrate that he is traumatized, and that he is prey to an agony which has no demonstrable physical source. Thomas Elsaesser neatly summarizes the problem of recognizing trauma: “If trauma is experienced through its forgetting, its repeated forgetting, then, paradoxically, one of the signs of the presence of trauma is the absence of all signs of it” (2001: 199). Trauma isn’t there. This is not to say that it is not real, that it does not exist; but its sources and signs are not always immediately manifest as they are in the case of the person hit by the truck.

This is where hermeneutics—and what I call here traumatic hermeneutics— comes in. Hermeneutics starts from the assumption that people and texts do not say only or exactly what they mean. Trauma exacerbates and radicalizes the hermeneutical search for what-is-not-quite-said, because the signs that point to it may be totally absent. This inaugurates both a pressing need for interpretation and the inevitable risk of mis-or overinterpretation. How do we distinguish between signs that are absent because there is nothing for them to signify, and signs that are absent because what they signify is too dark, repressed, and unknowable to be given manifest form? A person or text may bear no obvious marks of trauma, quite simply, because there are none to [End Page 32] show; or the trauma may be profoundly hidden because it is too deep to acknowledge. The call to interpretation is exhibited very clearly in Freud’s example of the train crash survivor. The initial absence of signs of suffering is followed by what Freud calls “symptoms” that can “only be traced to his shock” (my emphasis); and Freud now confidently concludes that “He now has a ‘traumatic neurosis.’” Every step in this diagnosis, including the final...

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