Writing History, Writing Trauma (review)

Debarati Sanyal

SubStance, Issue 98/99 (Volume 31, Number 2&3), 2002, pp. 301-306 (Review)

Published by University of Wisconsin Press

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/sub.2002.0040

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Reviews 301

important markers of Caribbean difference, but also marks a crisis of the

self that is best addressed if “we ? examine not only the othering practices of
Prospero’s reason but also those of Caliban’s” (279). Henry, then, has
successfully elaborated and analyzed a distinctly Caribbean philosophy,
clearly delineating both its debt to Africa and the relentless growth of its
discursive difference. His inscriptions of these regional intersections of the
post/colonial and the philosophical should give new depth and legitimacy
to the writing of Caribbeanness.
H. Adlai Murdoch
University of Illinois-Urbana

LaCapra, Dominick.Writing History, Writing Trauma. Baltimore, Johns

Hopkins University Press, 2001. Pp. xiv + 226.

What does the writing of history have to do with the writing of trauma?
How write an experience that defies representation? Are certain forms of
inquiry and representation better suited to the transmission of trauma than
others? How can a historical writing of trauma attest to the specificity of a
past event while attending to its ongoing reverberation in the present? These
are some of the questions examined in Dominick LaCapra’s Writing History,
Writing Trauma. As the comma between them suggests, writing history
(writing about the past) and writing trauma (conveying that past’s resistance
to writing) are not incompatible representational practices, even if they have
been traditionally opposed as the dichotomy between history and literature,
historicism and psychoanalysis or historiography and literary criticism.
LaCapra instead proposes to weave a dialogue between, on the one hand,
traditionally historicist approaches to the past invested in truth claims,
propositional contents and reference, and, on the other, postmodern,
psychoanalytically informed approaches characterized by transference,
performativity and aporia. Rather than seeking a compromise between
“writing history” and “writing trauma,” LaCapra rethinks these terms in
order to envision a hybrid historical practice attuned to the affective, literary
and experiential dimensions of history, while also remaining mindful of
regulative ideals, sociopolitical agency and the claims of reference.
In this comprehensive, informed and generously footnoted contribution
to trauma studies, LaCapra returns to key issues broached in his previous
books on transmissions of the Shoah, Representing the Holocaust (1994) and

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History and Memory after Auschwitz (1998), works that focused on the
distinction between “acting out” and “working through” a traumatic past,
on the inevitability of transference and of second-hand trauma in this past’s
reception, and on the impasses of deconstruction with regard to historical
traumas. In Writing History, Writing Trauma, LaCapra recapitulates these
points to meditate more broadly—if primarily through the legacy of the
Holocaust—on the critical methodology most appropriate for the traumatic
inheritance of contemporary culture, a reflection that potentially encompasses
other traumas such as slavery, nuclear destruction, or apartheid. Readers
familiar with his considerable body of work on the Holocaust will thus find
useful reformulations of terms and concepts that can then be applied to other
traumatic contexts. LaCapra proposes a theoretically minded, yet historical
approach to trauma that would commemorate the particularity of historical
wounds, while recognizing the ways in which this unmasterable past
continues to shape our current experiential and conceptual landscape.
However, this past and its losses would also be subject to a collective process
of mourning, “working through,” and moving on, a trajectory that would
ultimately release us from a cycle of perpetual retraumatization and allow
us to turn to future-oriented ethical and political projects.
What might it mean to “write trauma,” or to give voice to a wound that
seems to defy representation? LaCapra suggests that literature, because of
its supple and intricate relation to reference, has been the privileged domain,
or “safe haven” (185) for trauma’s rehearsal and performative transmission.
The writings of Franz Kafka, Tadeusz Borowski and Paul Celan, in their
distinct ways, enact the shattering, uncanny quality of traumatic experience.
Yet when modes of analytical inquiry such as literary criticism,
historiography, or even literature itself, unquestioningly or excessively
emulate trauma, they compromise or even betray their obligation to truth-
claims, normative limits, and ethico-political responsibility.
Two critical concepts emerge in response to the tension between
traumatic and historical modes of addressing the past: the notion of “the
middle voice” (19) and that of “empathic unsettlement” (41). With many
precautions and qualifications, LaCapra proposes the discursive analogue
of a “middle voice”—a voice hovering between active and passive modes
—as a vehicle for writing trauma: “The middle voice would thus be the ‘in
between’ voice of undecidability and the unavailability or radical
ambivalence of clear-cut positions” (20). This “middle voice” (free indirect
style, for instance) would thus fully identify with the trauma that it

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represents. Yet LaCapra is careful to point out that to privilege a stance of

identification, ambivalence and indeterminacy with respect to history, and
particularly another(’s) history, can lead to certain abuses. This is particularly
true in a context as fraught as the Holocaust, where the identification enabled
by such a “middle-voice” perspective may end up blurring the crucial
distinction between victim, perpetrator, accomplice, witness and proxy-
witness. Examples of this unmodulated use of the middle voice are Binjamin
Wilkomirski’s memoir of his childhood in Auschwitz, or the ambiguous
representation of the perpetrator as victim in Schlink’s The Reader. Similarly,
Daniel Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing Executioners (to which LaCapra devotes
a chapter) compromises its integrity as a historical account by presenting a
highly speculative phenomenological narrative of the perpetrator’s world-
view, as Goldhagen imagines it from the victim’s point of view.
LaCapra argues that approaches to the past (and, in particular, to
another’s past) rely too heavily on a binary logic of identity and difference,
thereby locking us into a structure of identification in which we assume
another’s place (as do Wilkomirski and Goldhagen in adopting a position
of “surrogate victimage” [211]). To counteract this excessive identification
with trauma and victimization, LaCapra proposes the “middle voice,” whose
“modulations of proximity and distance, empathy and irony with respect to
different objects of identification” would communicate trauma’s troubling
affective charge while maintaining the distinction between victims and
proxy-witnesses (30). LaCapra further proffers the concept of “empathic
unsettlement,” an affective response he considers most appropriate to the
reception of another’s traumatic past. A notion akin to Kaja Silverman’s
“heteropathic identification” (40), “empathic unsettlement” recognizes the
affective impact of another’s traumatic history, yet respects its irreducible
specificity, and thus avoids conflating empathy with identification.1
LaCapra’s analysis of the excesses of the “middle voice” is woven into
a broader critique of post-structuralist approaches that rehearse the aporetic
impact of the traumatic experience itself. In various ways, theorists such as
Shoshana Felman, Cathy Caruth, Slavoj Zizek and Judith Butler are, he
claims, overly invested in an identification with trauma. They thus “act out”
rather than “work through” a transferential relation to the past. Transference,
or “the tendency to repeat or reenact performatively in one’s own discourse
or relations processes active in the object of study” (36), often produces a
theoretical violence that echoes the historical violence under scrutiny. Both
the real violence of the Holocaust and the melancholy abdications and
impasses of deconstructive thought, LaCapra argues, are the result of

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conflating absence and loss, and of confusing structural trauma with

historical trauma. When we convert constitutive absences (the lack of
foundational certainties such as God or the Volksgemeinschaft) into historical
losses, we are most likely to project the cause of that loss onto an other through
a logic of scapegoating and sacrifice. Conversely, when we mistake historical
losses, such as those who perished at Auschwitz, for a state of absence or
lack that is constitutive of who we are, we risk succumbing to a melancholy
re-enactment of trauma. In doing so, we replicate a violent logic of sacrifice
in which totalization and fragmentation are but mirrors of one another.
LaCapra’s treatment of absence and loss, structural and historical
trauma, illuminates sacrificial tendencies both within modernity and in its
post-structuralist theorizations. His analysis thus avoids the “contextual
reductionism” (185) of purely historicist approaches, and accounts for deeply
rooted impulses that may occur across historical events and ideological
formations. For instance, LaCapra complicates Goldhagen’s sweeping claim
that Nazi eliminationist anti-semitism was intrinsic to the German national
character, by showing how historical features of modernity such as
bureaucratization were inseparable from archaic impulses such as repressed
anxieties about pollution leading to violent social purifications in the form
of scapegoating and victimization. LaCapra also makes a provocative
connection between historical and real violence, between the sacrificialism
of Nazi ideology and critical thought which, paradoxically, seeks to undo
the very conditions of possibility for this type of sacrificial violence. Indeed,
LaCapra criticizes certain strands of post-structuralist theory for their
investment in aporia, lack and victimization. Such approaches collude with
the very logic they seek to dismantle by replicating an “all-or-nothing logic”
(72) that bears disquieting affinities with Nazi sacrificialism. The postmodern
fear of reproducing the totalizing redemptions associated with Nazism,
LaCapra suggests, has produced an equally questionable investment in an
aporetic, abyssal thought that valorizes loss, victimization and melancholy
as constant and constitutive features of subjectivity.
One of the most powerful and timely considerations to emerge from
LaCapra’s critique of current theorizations of trauma, then, is the conflation
of historical and structural trauma, a move that divests the traumatic event—
and the subject positions within it—of specificity, thus also blocking any
viable form of “working through” and moving on. Yet such conflations of
histories and subject-positions are arguably endemic to theorizing history
through the kaleidoscopic lens of trauma. Trauma is an experience which,
because of its unthinkable, shattering nature, is not available to immediate

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and conscious understanding. Instead, the event (or history) is belatedly

and repetitively recorded by the psyche. Hence it is dis-located from a specific
historical event, since the experience only emerges in its displaced,
symptomatic afterlife within the fractured individual or collective psyche.
It is precisely the unmooring, or dislocation, of the traumatic experience
that makes it susceptible to the abusive appropriations critiqued by LaCapra.
Is it even possible, then, to address the historical particularity of distinct
traumas, given the dominant view of trauma as an experience of radical
aporia? The strain of maintaining the distinction between historical and
structural trauma, when trauma is itself a category that resists such
distinctions, may be detected even in LaCapra’s judicious and nuanced
readings of representations of the Holocaust. As the primary, if not exclusive,
illustration of traumatic history in this book, the Holocaust is treated both
as an irreducibly specific historical event, and as a paradigmatic limit-case
for traumatic history. Although LaCapra continually reminds us of the
“aboutness” (5), specificity and historical grounding of the Holocaust, its
treatment as a “limit-event” (7) that radically shatters both previous and
subsequent frames of reference verges on turning the event itself into a
general figure for trauma. The crisis of representation inaugurated by the
Holocaust, LaCapra suggests, is both prefigured by transgressive writers as
different as Nietzsche, Flaubert and Woolf (whose performative style
emulated the distinct traumas of modern experience) and it is rehearsed in
the aporias of post-structuralist thought. Perhaps this ambiguity attests to
the difficulties of situating the Shoah within a broader conception of
modernity as trauma, while viewing the formation of modernity through the
trauma of the Shoah. Does this approach to the Holocaust, in terms of a
referential crisis defining modernity and its aftermath, not run the risk of
subsuming historically distinct traumas within a larger developmental
narrative centered on the paradigmatic trauma of the Holocaust? LaCapra’s
book thus leaves us to meditate on the need to constantly recalibrate our
readings of a historical event in relation to broader cultural processes.
LaCapra’s analysis of trauma is folded into an ambitious and compelling
reflection on the possibilities for a genuinely cross-disciplinary theoretical
dialogue on history. The approach he proposes would negotiate between
the aporias of trauma and the emplotment of historiography, by drawing
upon genres as diverse as film, literature and philosophy, and by responsibly
incorporating different voices and perspectives. His book provides crucial
points of reference in the interdisciplinary map that would establish this
dialogue, such as the distinction between beauty and the sublime, reference

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and performativity, “civic responsibility” (211) and “poetic license” (188).

Writing History, Writing Trauma will thus be important reading not only to
trauma theorists and their critics, but to historians and literary critics of all
persuasions invested in rethinking the relationship between trauma, history
and ethics.
Debarati Sanyal
University of California, Berkeley

1. Moral philosopher Iris Marion Young also offers the notion of “asymmetrical reciprocity,”
a theory of reading as a form of imperfect identification that recognizes the historical
specificity and alterity of the other. See Young’s Intersecting Voices: Dilemmas of Gender,
Political Philosophy and Policy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997): 77.

McCracken, Peggy. The Romance of Adultery: Queenship and Sexual

Transgression in Old French Literature. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania
Press, 1998. Pp. xiii + 224.

Medieval romance has traditionally been understood by literary critics

as the narrative expression of utopian longings, and therefore as an attempt
to escape history through strategies of idealization. Indeed, romance plots
typically move from the articulation of a desire, lack, or defect toward an
end-point of fulfillment, completion, or perfection. To give merely the most
famous examples, Arthur, the once and future king, is in some sense removed
from time altogether, especially in that his prophesied return from Avalon is
perpetually deferred; Camelot is a place of immaculate beauty and pure
social cohesion, even under the threat of attack from the outside; and the
Round Table figures a continuity without beginning or end and a community
without dissent. However, while romance may be fundamentally escapist
in nature, it is clear that it is never actually divorced from the social, political,
and historical matrices in which it was produced—and, for that matter, in
which it continues to be consumed. Writing in 1945, Erich Auerbach describes
romance as eschewing a “penetrating view of contemporary reality,” but
nonetheless using its fantastic imaginary in order to produce a “class ethics
which as such claimed and indeed attained acceptance and validity in this
real and earthly world” (Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western
Literature, Princeton, 1963, 136-37). In other words, while romance may not
seek to imitate the reality of its feudal audience, it nonetheless serves as a
ritual of community formation that pertains directly to how the actual nobility

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