JAC: A Journal of Composition Theory, Volume 24, Number 2, 2004 Page: 498

                                
498

mortal" syllogism-could become a rationalization (in the full sense of
the word) for homicide or suicide. Or, with different terms plugged in, for
the Nazis' final solution.
One difficulty, then, with shifting from the logical to temporal is that
the logically necessary does not always map to the temporally contingent.
That is, problems can arise when some thing that is purely formal (the
necessary primary lack-trauma) is conflated with the contingent event
that covers over that lack. This contingency is precisely what Caruth
points to when she says that the event "happens too soon" for
symbolization.
Not every horrible event is traumatic. Only those events that func-
tionally indicate lack in the symbolic by becoming signifiers for that lack,
that trauma, attain the status of trauma.5 In the analytic-and perhaps in
the literary-setting, one recognizes this signifier by its palpable ab-
sence. Lacan calls these signifiers that support the symbolic in absentia
caput mnortuum. Bruce Fink explains:
The chain [of signifiers; the symbolic order] is as unequivocally deter-
mined by what it excludes as by what it includes, by what is within it as by
what is without. The chain never ceases to not write the numbers [or
signifiers] that constitute the caput mortuum in certain positions, being
condemned to ceaselessly write something else or say something which
keeps avoiding the point, as thought this point were the truth of everything
the chain produces as it beats about the bush. One could go so far as to say
that what, of necessity, remains outside the chain causes what is inside;
something must, structurally speaking, be pushed outside for there to be
an inside. (27)
So one strategy for reading and hearing language responding to trauma is
to pay close attention to what is not being spoken but what is nonetheless
being spoken about. Clearly, one goal of analysis is the analysand's
uttering of that previously unspoken (and unspeakable) signifier. Indeed,
the objective is actually to produce a signifier for what had none before.
What remains unclear, though, is how that signifier can come into being
(so to speak) after the work of analysis, writing, reading. That is, how
might cause appear after its effect?
Slavjo Zifek offers as an example of this apparent paradox in the form
of the joke about the conscript
who tries to evade military service by pretending to be mad. His symptom
is that he compulsively checks all the pieces of paper he can lay his hands

jac