JAC: A Journal of Composition Theory, Volume 24, Number 2, 2004 Page: 495
261-512 p. : ill. (some col.), ports. ; 22 cm.View a full description of this periodical.
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Timothy Richardson
the circumstances for the text's production in introductions, notes, and in
letters, and Caruth reads these as part of the primary text-which, of
course, they are under this reading paradigm. I will consider the nature of
narrative later, but what is useful now is Caruth's understanding of
trauma as both departure and return. She writes, "Centering his story in
the nature of the leaving, and returning, constituted by trauma, Freud
resituates the very possibility of history in the nature of a traumatic
departure .... What does it mean, precisely, for history to be the history
of a trauma?" (15). In Freud's particular argument, the answer is some-
thing like the combining of what may or may not be "historical" (in the
straight referential sense; the murder of one Moses, the introduction of
another, and their combination) into a common narrative that at once
gives a history (a past) and founds a people (a present as an unwritten but
indicative future in the myth). This is what allows Freud to write that
Moses invented the Jews, without bothering to indicate which Moses
applied for the patent. That is, Moses is a placeholder, a signifier without
a particular signified except an excess, a trauma, something Caruth calls
"a latency" (17).
The latent character of trauma, the fact that it happens too soon for
signification and is committed to returning as bits of the real-cum-
signification (symptoms, holocausts) explains both how Freud's work
can be considered historical (it marks the contours of an event that cannot
be spoken) and how Freud's writing as a return to trauma (his political and
personal situation) supports the notion of the return of the repressed (and
allows for the understanding of trauma as Baudrillard's "event" and its
writing as being the enactment of what both Lacan and Lyotard call the
future anterior, the "what will have been").' Perhaps it would be useful
to remember here that trauma is universal. Chaitin writes that trauma is
"the unassimilable kernel at the heart of human experience, and the
contingent, the only haven for human subjectivity" (9). Particular trau-
mas are, well, particular, but trauma as the mark of entering into language
(and culture) is what Julia Kristeva is concerned with when she discusses
the abject as the remainder of what cannot be symbolized, what Chaitin
writes of in his discussion of the lost object and the death drive and what
Lacan considers the object cause. Freud could not seem to give up his
book at precisely the time he was preparing for his own departure "to die
in freedom" (23). That is, as Caruth writes in her gloss ofLacan's reading
of the burning child dream, "the gap between the accident [for us, Freud's
situation] and the words ... produces a significance ... that must be read
in the relation between the chance event and the words it calls up" (101).495
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Association of Teachers of Advanced Composition (U.S.). JAC: A Journal of Composition Theory, Volume 24, Number 2, 2004, periodical, 2004; (https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc28644/m1/241/: accessed April 19, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, UNT Digital Library, https://digital.library.unt.edu; .