The Memory of Place: A Phenomenology of the Uncanny

6. Ruins of Trauma

C hapt e r S i x ................................... ruins of trauma But if I see before me the nervature of past life in one image, I always think that this has something to do with truth. —W. G. Sebald, After Nature In the opening scene of Claude Lanzmann’s documentary film Shoah (1985), we follow Simon Srebnik, a former Polish prisoner, in his return to the ruins of the Chelmno extermination camp. As he approaches the site, Srebnik pauses, surveys the space, and nods. “It’s hard to recognize,” he remarks somberly, “but it was here. They burned people here” (Lanzmann, 1985). During this opening scene, the camera, so far fixed on Srebnik’s devastated expression, cuts to a panning shot of a flat, desiccated clearing, punctuated by the rectangular spaces of what were the camp’s structural foundations. “No one can describe it,” Srebnik says, now walking around the site. “No one can re-create what happened here. Impossible! And no one can understand it. Even, I, here, now . . . I can’t believe I’m here.” How can we approach this tension between place and trauma in a phenomenological sense? On the one hand, we are faced with a scene of recognition , in which specific details are recollected from the past and applied to the spatiality of the present. On the other hand, the same place where Srebnik stands in the present is undercut by the radical singularity of the traumatic past, such that the simple fact of being there fails to contribute to reality. The result of this displacement between recollection and experience is the impossibility of re-creating the felt depth of the past. Phenomenologically, materiality, memory, and time appear to splinter in this ambiguously placed emergence of the past. Far from offering itself as a testimony to the past, Srebnik’s witnessing of Chelmno brings to light a fundamentally spectral relation trauma occupies to place. Central to this logic of spectrality is the displacement of the body. Despite being in place, during this 258 from black holes to specters opening scene of Shoah, Srebnik remains essentially displaced from the materiality of the location. We return to his confession: “Even, I, here, now . . . I can’t believe I’m here.” Phenomenologically, this is a startling claim, which appears to usurp the classical notion of the body as a locus of unity and movement, evident, above all, in the work of Merleau-Ponty. Given the temporal and spatial complexity of this experience, it is somewhat surprising to consider how little attention phenomenologists have paid to the relation between materiality, time, and what might be termed the “spectrality of trauma,” where spectrality would mean a presence that is ambiguously placed. How can we account for this oversight? Perhaps one response is that phenomenology’s relationship with place has predominantly relied on the notion of the environment as reinforcing identity, temporal continuity, and, more broadly, the harmony between place and memory. This reliance is clear enough in an explicitly topophilic work such as Bachelard’s (1994) The Poetics of Space, where “felicitous” places dominate, but remains implicit in Merleau-Ponty’s (2006) notion of the “absolute here,” is central in Husserl’s (1970) account of “kinesthetic” experience, and occupies a pivotal place in Heidegger’s (1996) presentation of the unity of “aroundness,” and indeed in the notion of “Dasein” itself. Yet in pointing out this lineage of omission, my intention is far from wishing to dispense with phenomenology as a method. Indeed, phrased in a constructive way, this oversight can be seen as an invitation to assert the dynamism of phenomenology. How, then, can phenomenology assist us in negotiating the tension between the experience of place in the present and the blocked emergence of a traumatic memory rooted in the past? It is this question with which the present chapter seeks to contend. abnormal embodiment In the dual subjects of Srebnik and Chelmno, we gain a sense of the tension between place and trauma. Yet even at a glance the relationship is problematized through the inclusion of the terms “place” and “subject.” Are these terms legitimate if each appears to be incompatible with the other? The frequent usage of the term “site” in relation to the memory of trauma testifies to the tension between conflating place with trauma (Foote 2003; Huyssen 2003; Adams, Hoelscher, and Till 2005; Tumarkin 2005). But is the term “site” employed as a methodological device simply to provide a link between spatiality and subjectivity? For the most...