Trauma and literary theory

Abstract

Berger reviews "Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History" by Cathy Caruth, "Representing the Holocaust: History, Theory, Trauma" by Dominick LaCapra and "Worlds of Hurt: Reading the Literatures of Trauma" by Kali Tal.

Headnote

Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History. Baltimore, MD, and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996. x + 154 pp. $33.50; $14.95 paper.

Dominick LaCapra, Representing the Holocaust: History, Theory, Trauma. Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press, 1994. xiii + 230 pp. $35.00; $14.95 paper.

Kali Tal, Worlds of Hurt: Reading the Literatures of Trauma. Cambridge Studies in American Literature and Culture 95. Cambridge, New York, and Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1996. x + 2% pp. $54.95; $18.95 paper.

With the publication of three important new books on the psychoanalytic concept of trauma as it intersects with literature, literary theory, historiography, and contemporary culture, it is worth asking why, at this moment, trauma should attract such attention and become a pivotal subject connecting so many disciplines.1 Of course, looking at contemporary American culture and at the history of this century, one might well ask how trauma could not be a primary concern, and why it has taken so long to elaborate the three suggestions for traumatic theory put forward by Freud.

Freud's earliest idea, in Studies in Hysteria, concerned the dynamics of trauma, repression, and symptom formation. Freud held that an overpowering event, unacceptable to consciousness, can be forgotten and yet return in the form of somatic symptoms or compulsive, repetitive behaviors. This initial theory of trauma and symptom became problematic for Freud when he concluded that neurotic symptoms were more often the result of repressed drives and desires than of traumatic events. Freud returned to the theory of trauma in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, a work which originated in his treatment of World War I combat veterans who suffered from repeated nightmares and other symptoms of their wartime experiences. Here, the traumatic event and its aftermath again became central to psychoanalysis, but again Freud shifted his emphasis from the event to what he considered a more comprehensive frame, in this case a biological urge toward equilibrium which he then theorized as the "death drive." Finally, in Moses and Monotheism, Freud attempted a theory of trauma that would account for the historical development of entire cultures. Especially valuable in this work is his elaboration of the concept of "latency," of how memory of a traumatic event can be lost over time but then regained in a symptomatic form when triggered by some similar event. In this way, each national catastrophe invokes and transforms memories of other catastrophes, so that history becomes a complex entanglement of crimes inflicted and suffered, with each catastrophe understood-that is, misunderstood-in the context of repressed memories of previous ones. The chief problem with Moses and Monotheism, it seems to me, is its overreliance on the mythical, oedipal anthropology of Totem and Taboo. All historical traumas are seen ultimately as repetitions of a "phylogenetic" ur-trauma, the murder of the primal father-an interpretation which, in addition to being fanciful, once again discredits the event, whether in a personal or a social history, in favor of some all-encompassing instinctualbiological determination.2

All Freud's thinking on trauma manifests this ambivalence regarding the significance of the historical event. Reading Freud, we are tempted to ask, Are there events, are there traumas at all? That is, do events in history have consequences, as Freud urges in the first movements of each of his theoretical ventures, or, as he concludes in each of his second moves, are events secondary to desire, instinct, or a form of genetic history? Dominick LaCapra, Cathy Caruth, and Kali Tal all confront the Freudian ambivalence toward the event (an ambivalence, though based on different premises, seen also in poststructuralist theory), and all, in different ways, regard events, their aftermaths, and their representations as crucial to interpreting personal and social histories.

But again, what are the needs for and values of a theory of trauma in the United States at present, and why in particular should there be such interest in trauma among literary and cultural theorists? First, we can look at a popular culture and mass media obsessed by repetitions of violent disasters: at the successions of DieHards, Terminators, and Robocops, as well as Nightmares on Elm Street, disease and epidemic films, and now the return of the "classic" disaster films of twisters and turbulence and the repeated sequences of miniapocalypses within each film; at "real life" cop shows; and at the news itself, that never exhausted source of pure horror. I am particularly fascinated by the "black box" obsession that follows each airplane crash-the wish (which I share) to witness the last moments, especially the moment that reveals the certainty of death entering the pilot's consciousness. Why do I want to know this, over and over?

We can look next at the preoccupation with family dysfunctions-child abuse, incest, spousal abuse-in the media, most strikingly on the talk show circuit. There appears to be the sense both that the family is the only hope for curing all social ills and that the family is damaged beyond hope. Along with the interest in family breakdown and violence comes the interest in the enigmatic figure of the survivor, the one who has passed through the catastrophe and can tell us what it is like. The survivor is a kind of living "black box," a source of final knowledge and authority. Over the past fifteen years, there has been an enormous growth in interest in eyewitness accounts and testimonies of all kinds: by victims of child abuse, Holocaust survivors, survivors of near-death experiences, and so on. And accompanying the survivor in popular consciousness, we have seen proliferating representations of ghosts, angels, zombies, and aliens-all of them witnesses to some "other side," some realm of both trauma and revelation.

Finally, most generally and perhaps most obviously, the late twentieth century is a time marked, indeed defined, by historical catastrophe. World wars, local wars, civil wars, ideological wars, ethnic wars, the two atomic bomb attacks, the cold war, genocides, famines, epidemics, and lesser turmoils of all kinds-these events, and the visual representations of these events, have in large part shaped contemporary American modes of viewing the world. All things considered, we might well ask, as D. M. Thomas has his fictional Sigmund Freud ask in The White Hotel, "what secret trauma in the mind of the Creator ha[s] been converted to the symptoms of pain everywhere around us?"3 It is not surprising that theorists have turned to concepts of trauma as tools of literary and cultural analysis.

But "trauma" is not simply another word for disaster. The idea of catastrophe as trauma provides a method of interpretation, for it posits that the effects of an event may be dispersed and manifested in many forms not obviously associated with the event. Moreover, this dispersal occurs across time, so that an event experienced as shattering may actually produce its full impact only years later. This representational and temporal hermeneutics of the symptom has powerful implications for contemporary theory. In its emphasis on the retrospective reconstruction of the traumatic event (for the event cannot be comprehended when it occurs), a traumatic analysis is both constructivist and empirical. It pays the closest attention to the representational means through which an event is remembered and yet retains the importance of the event itself, the thing that did happen. Thus a concept of trauma can be of great value in the study of history and historical narrative, and also of narrative in general, as the verbal representation of temporality. The idea of trauma also allows for an interpretation of cultural symptoms-of the growths, wounds, scars on a social body, and its compulsive, repeated actions. For instance, a sense of the dynamics of trauma offers a new understanding of the insistent returns of family disasters on talk shows that goes beyond discussions of market share and public taste.

A theory of trauma in addition suggests ways of reconceptualizing important directions in critical theory itself. In particular, the recent crisis in poststructuralist thought brought on by the Heidegger and de Man controversies seems to require a way of thinking about how events in the past return to haunt the present. More fundamentally, it may be useful to look again at the rhetorics of poststructuralist and postmodern theory-their emphases on decentering, fragmentation, the sublime and apocalyptic-and explore what relation they might have to the traumatic historical events of mid-century. This question becomes more immediately relevant when we see thinkers like Jacques Derrida, Jean-Francois Lyotard, and Hayden White writing explicitly about the Holocaust in the 1980s in ways that seem uncannily to echo earlier work of theirs which, while full of rhetorics of catastrophe, contained no references to that history.4

Finally, a theory of trauma will intersect with other critical vocabularies which problematize representation and attempt to define its limits-discourses of the sublime, the sacred, the apocalyptic, and the Other in all its guises. Trauma theory is another such discourse of the unrepresentable, of the event or object that destabilizes language and demands a vocabulary and syntax in some sense incommensurable with what went before. In troubling ways, these discourses often blur into each other, creating a traumatic-sacred-sublime alterity (such as we see, for instance, in the frequent sacralizing of the Holocaust, or in certain fetishizations of postcolonial "others") in which historical complexity and historical pain are effaced or "redeemed." Indeed, theories of trauma can help to demystify all sorts of "narrative fetishes" (to use Eric Santner's term) and ideologies. For traumatic symptoms are not only somatic, nonlinguistic phenomena; they occur also in language.5

Dominick LaCapra's Representing the Holocaust: History, Theory, Trauma has two related goals: to intervene in and clarify some of the recent public controversies regarding Holocaust representation (for example, the German "historians' debate" and the de Man and Heidegger affairs); and to elaborate a theory of historical trauma and its transmission. LaCapra achieves both these goals admirably. His discussions of specific controversies are among the best available, and his contribution to a theory of trauma and its cultural transmission is extraordinarily lucid and insightful.6

LaCapra's theory of trauma focuses on three psychoanalytic topics: the return of the repressed; acting out versus working through; and the dynamics of transference. A traumatic historical event, LaCapra argues, tends first to be repressed and then to return in forms of compulsive repetition. Specifically, the Shoah "has often been in the position of the repressed in the post-World War II West" (188), and he regards the Historikerstreit and the de Man and Heidegger controversies as symptomatic returns of the repressed. LaCapra is concerned primarily with the return of the repressed as discourse, rather than with physical returns such as the genocidal repetitions in Cambodia and Bosnia, and he outlines two symptomatic possibilities for the return of historical trauma as discourse. There is, on the one hand, the "redemptive, fetishistic narrative that excludes or marginalizes trauma through a teleological story that projectively presents values and wishes as viably realized" (192). Examples of this mode, for LaCapra, are the works of nationalist German historians like Ernst Nolte who, while not denying the Holocaust, subordinate it to a narrative of German sacrifice and tragedy, and apologists for Paul de Man and Martin Heidegger (like Shoshona Felman and Derrida) who read an improbable integrity into de Man's and Heidegger's silences. On the other hand, LaCapra points to the "construction of all history . . . as trauma and an insistence that there is no alternative to symptomatic acting-out and the repetition compulsion other than an imaginary . . . hope for totalization, full closure, and redemptive meaning" (193). He puts theories of postmodernity, especially Lyotard's sense of the postmodern sublime, in this category.

LaCapra wants to create a position that avoids both redemptive narrative and sublime acting out. He sets out to describe a way to work through trauma that does not "deny the irreducibility of loss or the role of paradox and aporia" but avoids becoming "compulsively fixated" (193). It's a very thin line, for LaCapra acknowledges a certain value in acting out. If there is no acting out at all, no repetition of the traumatic disruption, the resulting account of the historical trauma will be that teleological, redemptive fetishizing that denies the trauma's reality: it happened, but it had no lasting effects; look, we're all better now, even better than before!

The most pervasive of LaCapra's concerns is transference. The failure to come to terms with the discursive returns of some traumatic event usually signals the failure to recognize one's own emotional and ideological investments in the event and its representation. Transference in psychoanalysis is itself a return of the repressed, or rather a more conscious summoning of the repressed; transference repeats or acts out a past event or relationship in a new, therapeutic setting that allows for critical evaluation and change. Transference is the occasion for working through the traumatic symptom. It is imperative therefore to recognize the symptom and the trauma as one's own, to acknowledge that the trauma still is active and that one is implicated in its destructive effects. The failures of the German nationalist historians and of the defenders of de Man and Heidegger, their constructions of various redemptive narratives, LaCapra argues, ultimately is a failure to recognize their transferential relations to their objects.

LaCapra describes two important implications of his view of historical trauma. First, trauma provides a method for rethinking postmodern and poststructuralist theories in a clearer historical context. As LaCapra suggests, "the postmodern and the postHolocaust become mutually intertwined issues that are best addressed in relation to each other" (188). This relation would include a new, traumatic understanding of what he calls "the near fixation on the sublime or the almost obsessive preoccupation with loss, aporia, dispossession, and deferred meaning" (xi). Secondly, LaCapra provides an original rethinking of the debates over the literary canon, suggesting that a canonical text should not help permanently install an ideological order but should, rather, "help one to foreground ideological problems and to work through them critically" (25). Each text would be, in effect, a site of trauma with which the reader would have to engage.

While I very much admire LaCapra's theorizing, especially his use of the idea of transference, I have a few reservations about the book. First, its organization might be improved. Because the two general theoretical chapters follow the chapters on particular controversies, most of which had been previously published, LaCapra's larger points relating to trauma as applied to the earlier chapters can only be grasped by the end of the book. The readings and the theory might be better integrated. Secondly, as Representing the Holocaust is largely devoted to analyzing two broad categories of failures of transference, then to theorizing a third, more effective method of representing historical trauma, it would be helpful if LaCapra would examine particular instances of traumatic representation that act out and work through the trauma, as his theory requires. Such analyses of more successful, though still problematic, texts would also help illuminate his remarks on the canonical text that foregrounds its processes of acting out and working through. Finally, and again because he has raised the issue of canonicity, it seems a loss that LaCapra has not examined the relations between historical trauma and any literary text. Literature might be the site of symptomatic acting out combined with critical, playful working through that he seeks to describe. Cathy Caruth, in Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History, is concerned principally with questions of reference and representation: how trauma becomes text, or, as she puts it in her introduction, how wound becomes voice. This book is far-ranging and suggestive. Caruth sketches a theory of trauma as instigator of historical narrative through an analysis of Moses and Monotheism; describes the intersections of traumatic narratives in the Alain Resnais-Marguerite Duras film Hiroshima, Mon Amour; outlines a theory of reference as the imprint of a catastrophic fall in a discussion of de Man and Heinrich von Kleist; and ends with a reading of Lacan's gloss on Freud's interpretation of the dream of the burning child (a sequence of interpretations that itself highlights issues of traumatic transmission), in which she proposes testimony as providing an ethical relation to trauma.

Unclaimed Experience is full of brilliant insights. Caruth's introduction, "The Wound and the Voice," opens new ground on a problematic explored by Geoffrey Hartman, Elaine Scarry, and Slavoj Zizek-the relation between pain and language, in its narrative, historical, and ethical dimensions. Caruth argues that trauma as it first occurs is incomprehensible. It is only later, after a period of latency, that it can be placed in a narrative: "the impact of the traumatic event lies precisely in its belatedness, in its refusal to be simply located" (8). Traumatic narrative, then, is strongly referential, but not in any simple or direct way. And the construction of a history develops from this delayed response to trauma, which permits "history to arise where immediate understanding may not" (11). Furthermore, in tracing the traumatic returns in the text of Moses and Monotheism as a rewriting of Exodus, and in the composition of Moses and Monotheism (delayed by Freud's own exodus from Austria), Caruth argues that the historical narrative arises from such intersections of traumatic repetitions, that "history, like trauma, is never simply one's own, that history is precisely the way we are implicated in each other's traumas" (24).

These points on Moses and Monotheism, trauma, and history seem to me the most compelling in the book. The most problematic chapter is that on de Man and reference as falling. This chapter is, at its center, a defense of figurative language as the only properly referential language, a defense of de Manian methods of interpretation (which, of course, stress the figurative nature of language), and, somewhat obliquely or figuratively, a defense of de Man himself. Caruth cites de Man's distinction in "The Resistance to Theory" between language and natural law and follows de Man in arguing that because the language of science has progressed toward mathematical abstraction, "direct or phenomenal reference to the world means, paradoxically, the production of a fiction" (76). Caruth then proceeds to a quite difficult discussion of how events "befall" authors, how language falls short of perceptual reality while producing reference through this fall, and how reference ultimately "registers, in language, the impact of an event" (74). Her principal text is de Man's essay on Kleist's On the Marionette Theater, in which de Man argues for, in effect, a literality of the letter. This literality constitutes a form of reference which is both absolutely direct-a translation of event into the physical repetition of letters, the inscription of dates-and absolutely oblique, in that the event is never actually mentioned. For de Man, the blatantly mechanical motions of the puppet-like the de Manian allegory in opposition to the symbolprovide the most direct reference to human action through their very distance from similitude.7

Caruth presents de Manian reference as a literary symptom, an unconscious, inevitable imprint of events on texts in the form of verbal ticks, or tropes; and she quite effectively reinterprets de Man's blindness and insight model in terms of traumatic impact and later inscription. But Caruth becomes, finally, strangely coy about the traumatic backdrop to de Man's own writing. In discussing reference as the impact of a fall, she invites consideration of de Man's wartime writings and his failure ever to refer to them. If, like a marionette, de Man fell, then, oblivious to gravity, rose again, where in his mature work can we note the impact of and reference to his fall? At the end of this chapter, Caruth writes:

It is the originality and unique referential resonance of de Man's writing . . . to discover the resistance of theory in the story it tells of its own falling. What theory does, de Man tells us repeatedly, is fall; and in falling, it refers. To capture the reality of this falling is the crucial task de Man's theoretical work is engaged in, and it is the task that falls upon us as we read the very particular story of de Man's writing. (90)

Through this oblique reference to the "very particular story," Caruth seems to suggest that de Man's mature writing cannot help but refer to his "fall," that its refusal to refer is still an imprint of reference. This suggestion is close to Felman's argument that de Man's silence was a form of testsimony, and I think that LaCapra's criticism of Felman's position applies also to Caruth. Her elegant use of de Manian interppretation that blurs at the end into an implied apology for de Man's wartime writings may indicate that she is too close to her subject, has not engaged critically with the issue of transference.

Nevertheless, Unclaimed Experience is an extremely valuable book. My chief complaint is that I wish it were longer so that Caruth could expand on her excellent insights and readings.

Kali Tal, in Worlds of Hurt: Reading the Literatures of Trauma, takes an approach entirely different from those of LaCapra and Caruth. Tal is hostile to psychoanalysis and bases her views of trauma on cognitive psychology and a feminist politics that identifies strongly with the testimonies of rape and incest survivors. This strategy has certain strengths-a keen awareness of systemic violence against women and a sense of how traumatic literature might produce social change-but certain limitations as well. Most notably, Tal is unable to discuss the social symptom, the transmissions and reverberations of widespread or systemic violence into forms not overtly testimonial.

Worlds of Hurt is divided into three sections: the first discusses recent critical approaches to the testimonies of Holocaust survivors; the second concerns some of the literature produced by American veterans of the Vietnam War; and the third analyzes published testimonies of women survivors of incest and child abuse. Tal's chief concern is with the social appropriations of individual testimonies. Differing quite emphatically from psychoanalytically oriented writers like Caruth and LaCapra, Tal argues that the literature of trauma consists only of the writings of victims and survivors of trauma. Consequently, we must be wary of how others interpret the survivors' accounts, especially when those are transformed into sacred texts (as with Holocaust testimony), mythic supports for some vision of national identity (as with Vietnam literature), or medical cases, as happens with all these discourses but especially with the experiences of incest survivors. "Literature of trauma," writes Tal, "is defined by the identity of its author.... The work of the critic of the literature of trauma is both to identify and explicate literature by members of survivor groups, and to deconstruct the process by which the dominant culture codifies their traumatic experience" (17, 18).

Tal's criticism of psychoanalysis is that it is one of the chief cultural mechanisms that appropriates and codifies accounts of trauma, and that it is itself inevitably a discipline that reinforces social practices of domination under the guise of therapy. Tal quotes Monique Wittig's characterization of psychoanalysis as a "cruel contract, which constrains a human being to display her/his misery to an oppressor who is directly responsible for it, who exploits her/him economically, politically, ideologically and whose interpretation reduces this misery to a few figures of speech" (57). Testimony, for Tal, must be as nearly as possible unmediated and uninterpreted. Therapy should consist of survivors talking with each other and speaking out to a wider audience, and its goal should be political. Tal criticizes two editors of an anthology of testimonies who "emphasize that women need `healing,' . . . [but] do not mention that many women survivors of child sexual abuse also believe that they need revolution" (183).

Tal's criticisms seem to me overstated and ill-informed. Psychoanalysis today, especially as a form of cultural analysis and critique, is far removed from the bearded patriarch telling a young woman (as in the case of Freud and "Dora") what has been secretly causing her symptoms and what she should and should not desire. The works of LaCapra, Caruth, Santner, Zizek, Robert Jay Lifton, Leo Bersani, and Jacqueline Rose (with none of which Tal appears to be familiar) suggest enormously flexible modes of interpretation which do not reinforce patriarchal power relations. Furthermore, Tal's emphasis on the individual survivor's account of trauma and her opposition to all interpretive "appropriations" prevent her from seeing trauma in broader social and historical forms. Tal has no sense of a traumatic return of the repressed, of widespread cultural symptoms and fetishes, of the role of trauma in ideology. As a result, her political diagnosis seems simplistic: essentially, that men are systematically injuring and dominating women, and women should rise up and stop them.

And yet, is there not some truth to this? And will a more sophisticated analytic method contribute any more to correcting the injustice? Tal might respond that analytical acumen in recognizing symptoms, acting out, and narrative fetishes is most likely to result in political passivity, in a mere satisfaction with its intellectual products, that what is important is to recognize the evil and oppose it, to prevent further trauma by fundamentally changing gender relations. It seems to me that opposing evil, oppression, and systemic traumatization does not preclude analyzing their contexts, symptoms, and forms of transmission. We need to understand the socially traumatizing factors that produce men who abuse children and women. Certainly these men must be stopped. But there seems to be a wider dysfunction in sexual and gender relations that needs to be grasped as part of the same constellation that includes anorexia, the commodification of sex in advertising and pornography, and the various mechanisms of racism. These are all repeated cultural wounds transmitted across generations. Tal, I believe, would agree with this overall point, but her model does not provide a means for interpreting these phenomena, and this failure makes her calls for action less persuasive.

Worlds of Hurt has another serious problem. It is badly in need of editing. The book still reads too much like the dissertation on which it was based, with too many detailed readings of too many texts, and too many asides and qualifications that hinder the argument. Indeed, Tal begins an endnote (which she and her editors at Cambridge obviously overlooked), "In this dissertation, I. . ." (270 n76). In addition, the book contains numerous claims that are absurd in their generality-for example, "Women's [literary] works are ridiculed, trivialized, appropriated, scorned, or ignored, rarely engaged sympathetically and infrequently appreciated" (199), or "Men who are not under severe stress rarely form strong bonds of affection, or reach toward each other for emotional support" (142)-or that are simply absurd, as when she quotes approvingly a feminist tarot card interpreter saying that tarot is "an instrument for women's self-discovery and self-exploration" (205). Tal's editors should have protected her from such embarrassments.

The book needs work, both in its theoretical approach and in its writing. For its particular analyses of critical debates regarding Holocaust testimonies (especially that between Terrence Des Pres and Bruno Bettelheim), Vietnam literature, and, most importantly, child abuse narratives, however, Worlds of Hurt is an important contribution to trauma theory.

Hofstra University

Footnote

1. Other recent works exploring aspects of trauma include Robert Jay Lifton, The Broken Connection: On Death and the Continuity of Life (New York: Simon, 1979); Leo Bersani, The Freudian Body: Psychoanalysis and Art (New York: Columbia UP, 1986); Slavoj Zizek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 1989); Cathy Caruth, ed., Trauma: Explorations in Memory (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins UP, 1995); Eric L. Santner, "History beyond the Pleasure Principle: Some Thoughts on the Representation of Trauma," Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the "Final Solution," ed. Saul Friedlander (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1992) 143-54; Geoffrey Hartman, "On Traumatic Knowledge and Literary Studies," New Literary History 26 (1995): 537-63.

Footnote

2. Sigmund Freud, Studies in Hysteria, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth, 1955) vol. 2; Beyond the

Footnote

Pleasure Principle, Standard Edition 18:7-64; Moses and Monotheism, Standard Edition 23:1138; Totem and Taboo, Standard Edition 13:1-161.

Footnote

3. D. M. Thomas, The White Hotel (1981; New York: Penguin, 1993) 110.

Footnote

4. See Jacques Derrida, Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1989); Cinders, trans. Ned Lukacher (Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1991); "The Force of Law: The 'Mystical Foundation of Authority,' "Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice, ed. Drucilla Cornell, Michel Rosenfeld, and David Gray Carlson (New York: Routledge, 1992); Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Differend: Phrases in Dispute, trans. G. Van Den Abbeele (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1988); Heidegger and "The Jews", trans. Andreas Michel and Mark S. Roberts (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1990); and Hayden White, "Historical Emplotment and the Problem of Truth," Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the "Final Solution," ed. Saul Friedlander (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1992) 37-53.

Footnote

5. Santner writes, "Narrative fetishism . . . is the way an inability or refusal to mourn emplots traumatic events; it is a strategy of undoing, in fantasy, the need for mourning by simulating a condition of intactness, typically by situating the site and origin of loss elsewhere. Narrative fetishism releases one from the burden of having to reconstitute one's self-identity under 'posttraumatic' conditions; in narrative fetishism, the 'post' is indefinitely postponed" ("History beyond the Pleasure Principle" 144). Santner cites Ronald Reagan's speech at Bitburg as a prime example. See also Slavoj Zizek's writing on ideology as a set of narratives and images-a social fantasy-that covers over some traumatic rip in a symbolic-social order.

6. For other discussions of specific controversies, see Werner Hamacher, Neil Hertz, and Thomas Keenan, eds., Responses: On Paul de Man's Wartime Journalism (Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1989); Charles S. Maier, The Unmasterable Past: History, Holocaust, and German National Identity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1988); Saul Friedlander, ed., Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the "Final Solution" (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP 1992); Shoshona Felman and Dori Laub, Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History (New York: Routledge, 1992); Robert C. Holub, Crossing Borders: Reception Theory, Poststructuralism, Deconstruction (Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1992); and David Lehman, Signs of the Times: Deconstruction and the Fall of Paul de Man (New York: Poseidon, 1991). Lehman's book is poorly informed about deconstruction, but very thorough in its account of the de Man debates.

Footnote

7. Paul de Man, "The Resistance to Theory," The Resistance to Theory (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1986); and "Aesthetic Formalization in Kleist," The Rhetoric of Romanticism (New York: Columbia UP, 1984).