Trauma and the Ontology of the Modern Subject: Historical Studies in Philosophy, Psychology, and Psychoanalysis by Roberts John L

Author:Roberts, John L. [Roberts, John L.]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9781138826724
Publisher: Taylor and Francis
Published: 2017-09-10T16:00:00+00:00

Unlike Erichsen, who entirely places trauma in the world of jolting bodies and nerves, Page increasingly aligns such phenomena to unseen lacunae, the non-knowledge, of legal advocacy where the self is determined as an unconscious malingerer. Consequently, traumatic experience being hidden, or unconscious, not only threatens the individual sufferer’s moral integrity for brave, Victorian personhood, but legal, civic personhood as well. Now, it is no longer clear what the subject’s intentions or motivations might be, and whether suffering merely factitiously imitates neurological disease. Significantly, however, the effacement of the subject’s determination in scientific and legal discourse is required for its agency. The forensic subject’s powers of coming to knowledge, therefore, arise from its failure to fully represent itself to interior vision, to remain free of being fixed as knowledge. Put another way, the exile of the traumatic subject from its own experience – as embedded in the Real or Being – gives itself over to normative agentic functioning, which necessitates a fissure in the subject’s history for the generation of its being. Medical and legal discourse reveals antimimetically, and at a distance, the subject as empirical object (whether helpless victim of shock, hysteria, or unconscious malingerer) to itself for institutional and instrumental use. Nonetheless, the exile of the traumatic subject from its own experience within an orderly functioning and usual social world recurs as a fissure in the subject’s history productive of its selfhood. In other words, the work of technology in early trauma theory involves not simply an objectification of the subject, but rather the effective incorporation within the subject’s being of a pathologized yet generative tension in the limits of what is representable. Importantly, for the present argument, however, is the concealment of traumatic ontology effected through Victorian legal and medical discourses that segregate trauma as an unusual experience befalling accident victims, and also one supportive of living a certain kind of life within an industrial culture – that of a claimant forensically asserting legitimate economic interest. Of course, a tension persists in the power/knowledge that externally acts upon the subject in constituting a clinical entity – which might be impressed by fear and actualize as hysterical symptom or malingering – and the temporal void itself that the subject must ethically appropriate for its freedom. Traumatic ontology is thus concealed through the giving over to the subject its possible being as various subject positions (or selves) – as Victorian moral agent, or legal personhood – through the ontic, pathologized limits of traumatic neuro-physiological and legal collapse.

As suggested, as forms of epistemic and ontically formed intelligibility, the metastases of trauma colonize adjacent discourse and institutional practice. The failure of any one discourse (i.e., legal or surgical) to subsume the phenomena of trauma allows it to circulate among knowledge that touches both physiological and more psychological domains. Charcot (1889) remains significant for trauma, not only because both his theory of “hystero-traumatism” and his location within the dynamic psychiatric movement challenge the integrity of consciousness. First, Charcot (1889) extends traumatic hysteria

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