Trauma’s Essential Bodies

Abstract

Usable theories of the body and embodiment have proven essential, and even elemental, to the emergence of Trauma Studies in all of its camped and contested manifestations. For in every instance out of which a theory of trauma has arisen—a theory, that is, describing or accounting for the disruption of experience and its representation, the rupturing of the subject’s capacity to regulate its own sense of embodiment—there has also been a substrate that functions to record the suffering or rupture that fuels the engine of Trauma Studies; a medium in or through which traces of the event, real or imagined, find their expression. Trauma Studies registers these traces, appearing as they do in the form of scars, or symptoms, or lapses, or repetitions upon “bodies” of various types: corporeal entities, psychic projections, narratives of selfhood, and informational archives. Indeed, beginning with “marks” like bloodied bodies, ruptured minds, incomplete narratives, or riddled archives, Trauma Studies provides explanatory narratives that, by offering one telling of how the subject achieved its ruination, support fantasies of an originary time before the fall; a time of whole, coherent, innocent selfhood and uncorrupted, clean and proper subjectivity. And now, as much as at any other time, perhaps, the proliferation of affect and informational economies, the society of control and surveillance thus occasioned, and the precariousness of existence inherent to this stage of globalization, almost necessitate a very powerful recuperative fantasy.