This article examines an enigma at the heart of Freud's work on trauma: the surprising emergence, from within the theory of the death drive, of the drive to life, a form of survival that both witnesses and turns away from the trauma in which it originates. I analyse in particular the striking juxtaposition, in Freud's founding work Beyond the Pleasure Principle, of his two primary examples of trauma: the repetitive nightmares of battle suffered by the soldiers of World War I, (...) and the game of the child, faced with the loss of its mother, who plays fort and da with his spool. My own understanding of Freud's insight did not emerge, however, simply through a reading of his text but began, in fact, in my encounter with a real child in Atlanta, a child whose best friend was murdered in the street and who is interviewed by the friend's mother. I thus read together the language of the nightmare and the language of the child in Freud's text, and then attempt to understand how Freud's text and the language of the real child shed light upon each other. (shrink)

This chapter addresses the problem of violence in the political realm by focusing on a question that emerges out of several late works by Hannah Arendt: What is history in the time of what Arendt calls “the modern lie”? In “Truth and Politics” and “Lying in Politics”, Arendt reflects on what she considers a profound philosophical conundrum at the heart of politics and the political: an intimate and foundational relation between politics and the lie that has momentous implications for the (...) way we think about political history. Beginning from a reflection on the nature of political action in the context of lying, Arendt ultimately enables a rethinking of the very nature of history around the possibility of its political denial. (shrink)

This article takes as its focus the question, raised by Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub in their 1995 book Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis and History, of what it means for an event to be constituted by the collapse of its witness. The discussion centres on a reading of the moment Yehiel Dinoor, a writer also known as K-Zetnik and one of the few eyewitnesses at the 1961 Eichmann trial in Jerusalem, falls out of the stand and into (...) a coma while attempting to provide his testimony. By rethinking this historical trauma as a ‘collapse of witnessing’, I suggest Felman and Laub shift the focus from a purely cognitive or epistemological question — a problem of knowing and not-knowing — to a question of communicating to others: a problem of address. It is the circumstance of having ‘no one to whom one could say Thou’, as Laub puts it, that constitutes the Holocaust, for the victims, as what the authors call an ‘event without a witness’. (shrink)