Ethical Loneliness by Jill Stauffer

Author:Jill Stauffer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: PHI005000, Philosophy/Ethics and Moral Philosophy, POL035010, Political Science/Political Freedom & Security/Human Rights
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2015-08-31T16:00:00+00:00

Trauma doesn’t stay in the past, and it doesn’t always reside only in the body of the initial victim. If selves are formed in a cooperative if unchosen feedback loop between self and other, self and world, then in any society recovering from widespread infliction of trauma, it won’t be only the survivors who are contending with the aftereffects of violence. Even people who aren’t listening may be absorbing the negative effects (and affects) of a violent legacy. Adults may “teach” children and other adults how to inhabit trauma because of how affect is transmitted between persons. “Postmemory” is a term used by Marianne Hirsch to describe “the relationship that the generation after those who witnessed cultural or collective trauma bears to the experiences of those who came before, experiences that they ‘remember’ only by means of stories, images, and behaviors among which they grew up. But these experiences were transmitted to them so deeply as to seem to constitute memories in their own right.”115 Postmemory doesn’t affect only those whose parents were subjected to genocidal regimes or long-standing abuse and oppression. Brison points out that “girls in our society are raised with so many cautionary tales about rape that, even if we are not assaulted in childhood, we enter womanhood freighted with postmemories of sexual violence…. Post-memories of rape are not primarily inherited from one’s parents, but, rather, absorbed from the culture.”116 Statistics make this point well: an adult American woman has a one in eight chance of being raped and a 50 percent chance of being assaulted by an intimate partner.117 Adolescent girls have a one in five chance of being raped or battered by someone they date.118 Postmemory points backward toward a harm already undergone. But it also sets up a present moment wherein the future is unsteady. Anyone who watches television or film will have seen so many depictions of rape or its aftermath that they can’t fail to have made an impression even on those whose lives have felt safe. Even where rape is successfully depicted as an inexcusable crime and a harm, it is also shown to be an ever-present threat. In other words, even when nothing has happened, present-day social conditions are far from offering a reasonable guarantee of female safety. Sometimes it seems as if no one is listening to that truth. And yet it also seems that too many of us have heard it, for better and for worse. Kathleen Stewart, writing about how affect colors everyday life, puts her finger on how affect’s transmission may be ignored or experienced as “how the world is” rather than as a series of forces ranging between persons:

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