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When "to die in freedom" is Written in English Petar Ramadanovic * Cathy Caruth. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1996. [UE]
For Teresa Brennan
While waiting to leave Vienna in May of 1938, Sigmund Freud writes a letter to his son Ernst. "Two prospects," he says, "keep me going in these grim times: to rejoin you all and-to die in freedom." Almost sixty years later, Cathy Caruth comments upon this letter, emphasizing that the last four words-"to die in freedom"-were written in English. It is here, Caruth suggests,
in the movement from German to English, in the rewriting of the departure within the languages of Freud's text, that we participate most fully in Freud's central insight, in Moses and Monotheism, that history, like trauma, is never simply one's own, that history is precisely the way we are implicated in each other's traumas. [UE 23-24]
And she concludes: "In this departure, in the leave-taking of our hearing, we are first fully addressed by Freud's text, in ways we perhaps cannot yet fully understand" [UE 24].
In this text I argue that Caruth's understanding of trauma as "deeply tied to our own historical realities" [UE 12] offers a possibility to think anew our involvement in each other's histories, as we examine what we mean by history, writing, and community. My reading depends in particular on the insistent recurrence of figures of "entanglement" in Caruth's text, which I take to be Caruth's own "translation of the concept-of the experience of trauma" [UE 7]. 1 That is, Caruth's "entanglement" is the trace of an unclaimed experience and has a function analogous to "departure" in Freud's text and to "falling" in Paul de Man's, both analyzed by Caruth in Unclaimed Experience. As such, "entanglement" and its variations, being "inextricably bound up" or "inextricably tied," are not representations of trauma. They rather suggest a different, aporetic understanding of the relation between history and reference, experience and writing.
I will try to show that Caruth's notion of trauma as unclaimed experience, together with our entanglement in each other's histories, chart a history of the modern subject as a history of implication. This subject is recognized by its inextricable ties to what cannot be experienced or subjectivized fully....