TRAUMA: FROM REPETITION TO REPRESENTATION AND BACK

Abstract

The article explores the concept of the cultural trauma, analyzes the psychoanalytic context of the concept of trauma and its impact on the subsequent development of the problematics of trauma studies. On the one hand, it is common to say that the theoretical tools of cultural trauma research are largely borrowed from the language of psychoanalytic theory (D. LaCapra, C. Caruth, E. Santner, etc.), on the other, we can talk about some alternative approaches within trauma studies that try somehow to overcome the psychoanalytic vestige by developing a new research methodology (J. Alexander) or questioning the significance of this line of origin in general (A. Assman). Both of these positions are articulated in the context of the discussion on the status of the event as a cause of trauma. The article attempts to consider this discussion through the prism of Zizek's interpretation of Lacanian psychoanalysis as well as to demonstrate the homology of the opposition of the two possible interpretations of the nature of trauma, described by J. Alexander, and the juxtaposition of the two perspectives in understanding the nature of language (descriptivism and antidescriptivism).

The research was supported by the RFBR grant (18-011-00570 A «Theory of Cultural Trauma: Individual Traumatic Experience and the Experience of Historic Disasters»).