The open wound

A sustained philosophical reflection on trauma and recovery, this work is an original contribution to contemporary trauma studies, integrating material from psychology, sociology, history, literary studies, biography, and fiction. It addresses trauma as an open wound that cannot be closed over without festering. Distorted by trauma, we automatically react by trying to draw away from it, as we do from all pain. Trying to close the wound, cover it, and secure ourselves against further wounding, we strive to preserve our identity in the face of the blows that would shatter it. Inevitably, however, such reactive efforts only distort us even more painfully. Genuine recovery requires that instead of struggling to avoid our wounds we turn toward them, opening ourselves to the very way they so painfully split us open. Then we may find to our surprise that the open wound of trauma also opens, perhaps for the very first time, upon the real possibility of building a truly universal, all-inclusive, human community, one in which each and every one of us is allowed to be just who we are. In addition to investigating the impact of trauma upon identity and community, the book gives serious attention to such topics as: the politics of trauma; trauma and sovereignty; trauma, memory, and memorials; the meaning of trauma; trauma and history; the role of resistance in recovery from trauma; the social dimensions of trauma; and the complex connections between perpetrators and victims of trauma. Among the major historical traumas it discusses are the Nazi extermination of the Jews of Europe, the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima at the end of World War II, and September 11, 2001. It integrates insights and inspiration from such sources as: Freud, Robert J. Lifton, Jacques Lacan, Holocaust survivor Dori Laub, and various other psychoanalysts, psychologists, and therapists; James Joyce, Pat Barker, Margueritte Duras and other novelists and fiction writers; multiple 20th and 21st century philosophers, including especially Heidegger, Franz Rosenzweig, Giorgio Agamben, Alain Badiou, Jean Baudrillard, Slavoj Žižek, Jean-Luc Nancy, Jacques Derrida, Jean-Luc Marion, and Jean-Louis Chrétien; historian Dominick LaCapra; literary theorists Cathy Caruth, Shoshana Felman, and Paul Eisenstein; legal and political theorist Carl Schmitt; numerous journalists, memoirists, and essayists; the literature of survivors of the Holocaust and other major historical traumas; and diverse sources of popular culture from films to comics to music and TV.