Presentation to the Harvard Program for Refugee Trauma based on my doctoral dissertation, Trauma and Event (EGS, 2012)

1. Harvard Program for Refugee
Trauma
Cambridge, MA
Two Trauma Communities:
A Philosophical Reconciliation of
Cultural and Psychiatric Trauma Theories
Vincenzo Di Nicola, MPhil, MD, PhD,
FAPA
Professor of Psychiatry, University of Montreal
Monday, October 15, 2012

4. Vincenzo Di Nicola
 Trauma and Event: A
PhilosophicalArchaeology
 Supervisors: Giorgio Agamben, Alain Badiou,
Martin Hielscher, Richard Mollica, Thomas
Zummer
 Defensecommittee: Alain Badiou, Slavoj Zizek,
Wolfgang Schirmacher –
DoctorateawardedSumma cum laude
 August 12, 2012, Saas-Fee, Wallis, Switzerland

5. Trauma and Event:
A PhilosophicalArchaeology
 Michel Foucault, Giorgio Agamben, Alain Badiou
 The work of this triumviri of philosophers is knit
together to forge new answers to the aporias of
trauma and event: the philosophical archaeology
of the disruption of the discourse of being and the
traumatic closing or evental opening of
possibilities in the coming community.

6. Trauma and Event:
A PhilosophicalArchaeology
 Trauma is defined as the destruction of
experience which is investigated through a series
of annotations and excursuses on its cultural
origins, from the pharmakon, the skandalon and
the scapegoat, to a rhetorical reformulation of
trauma as catachresis/apostrophe.
 A new model employing the truth tables of
scientific research offers a new vocabulary for
trauma and event and their simulacra.

7. Richard F. Mollica
 The dictum my Italian immigrant father
voiced,
also a victim of violence, remains loud
and clear,
―Son, take on a problem you cannot
solve.‖
- Healing a Violent World: A Manifesto

8. Alain Badiou
 Philosophy … is either reckless or it is
nothing.
- Second Manifesto for Philosophy
trans. by Louise Burchill (2011, p. 71)

9. Richard F. Mollica
 Empathic failure is the bedrock of
human aggression and violence.-
Healing a Violent World: A Manifesto

10. Alain Badiou
 What wound was I seeking to heal, what
thorn was I seeking to draw from the
flesh of existence when I became what
is called ‗a philosopher‘?
-―Preface,‖ Quentin Meillassoux‘sAfter
Finitude,
trans. by Ray Brassier (2008, p. vi)

11. Trauma
 It is an error to divide people into the living and
the dead: there are people who are dead-alive,
and people who are alive-alive. The dead-alive
also write, walk, speak, act. But they make no
mistakes, and they produce only dead things. The
alive-alive are constantly in error, in search, in
torment.
—YevgenyZamyatin
Ref: YevgenyZamyatin, ―On Literature, Revolution,
Entropy, and Other Matters‖ (1923), trans. by
Mirra Ginsburg in, A Soviet Heretic: Essays by
YevgenyZamyatin (1970), p. 110.

12.  The discourse of psychic trauma is marked by a
confusion of signifiers.
 There is a confusion among what we may
separate conceptually into predisposing,
precipitating and prolonging factors of trauma, to
which we may add protective factors.
 Furthermore, we need to separate direct,
immediate traumatic impacts from delayed, latent
or long-term consequences called sequelae in
medical terms. Finally, we may call this whole
schema a trauma process.

13.  Thus, we may usefully separate the traumatic
process into these factors:
 predisposing traumatic contexts or situations that
place individuals at risk—we may call these distal
determinants, such as causes and influences;
 precipitating traumatic triggers are proximal
determinants;
 prolonging factors amplify, augment or extend the
traumatic process synchronically or diachronically;
 protective factors dampen, diminish or mitigate the
traumatic process.

14.  The key question then becomes: What makes
trauma traumatic? Is it the threat that something
hurtful may happen, the experience of the injury
itself, or living with the consequences of the
threat or of injury? Which aspect is the trauma
and which traumatic? Is this conflation of
predisposing, precipitating and perpetuating
factors normal?
 Is this typical in medicine or psychiatry?
Infections work like this; ―flu,‖ the common term
for influenza means the virus, getting infected and
suffering with the symptoms. Nonetheless, the
very notion of medical progress means the clear
identification of different phases of a disease
process and its determinants. These are the

15.  In philosophical terms, we need a vocabulary for
what Agamben calls ―desubjectivation‖—the
―dead-alive‖ (Zamyatin), ―bare life‖ (Agamben)
and ―states of dissociation,‖ but we need to open
space for what Foucault called ―subjectivation‖—
for the Event and for the faithful subject, as
Badiou has described them.

16.  This distinction opens only the first of many
dichotomies that emerge in every trauma
discourse. In the onomasiology (from Greek,
ὀνομάζω onomāzο, ―toname‖) of trauma—how we
name trauma—we encounter dichotomies and
bivalent notions throughout.
 In this investigation, annotations and excursuses
document the philosophical archaeology of these
bivalent notions such as the Akedah, the
pharmakon, the skandalon and the katechon,
while the dichotomies of trauma theories are
dissected below.

17. A Philosophical Archaeology of
The Concept of “Trauma”
 I think that many philosophers secretly harbor
the view that there is something deeply (i.e.,
conceptually) wrong with psychology, but a
philosopher with a little training in the
techniques of linguistic analysis and a free
afternoon could straighten it out.
—Jerry Fodor
Ref: Jerry A. Fodor, Psychological Explanation: An
Introduction to the Philosophy of Psychology (1968), p. vii.

18. A Philosophical Archaeology of
The Concept of “Trauma”
 At first sight, Caruth … appears to define
trauma in ways that are quite compatible with
psychological research on trauma and post-
traumatic stress. However, unlike most of her
contemporaries who study the vicissitudes of
mental suffering in a clinical context,Caruth
goes on to celebrate the experience and the
concept of trauma as providing unprecedented
insight into the human condition.
—WulfKansteiner and HaraldWeilnböck
Ref: WulfKansteiner and HaraldWeilnböck, ―Against the
Concept of Cultural Trauma or How I Learned to Love the
Suffering of Others without the Help of Psychotherapy,‖ in
Astrid Erll and AnsgarNünning, eds., Cultural Memory
Studies. An Internationaland Interdisciplinary Handbook
(2008), pp. 229-240, p. 230.

19. A Dichotomy in Trauma
Theories
 We cannot characterize trauma as a unified
discourse or as a spectrum even with one
discipline.
 What seems to bring conceptual order to the
concept of trauma and to trauma studies is to
discern a dichotomy as a separator or marker
that divides the discourses along different
axes and conceptualizations.

20. A Dichotomy in Trauma
Theories
 This is a meta-concept that creates two
groups or two poles around which certain
notions or studies or emerging traditions
congeal.
 Yet, any given separator that creates a
dichotomy is shifting, porous and unstable.

21. Mimetic/Antimimetic Dichotomy
 In describing two theories of trauma she
names mimetic and antimimetic theories, Ruth
Leys lucidly demonstrates that, ―from the turn
of the century to the present there has been a
continual oscillation between them, indeed
that the interpenetration of one by the other or
alternatively the collapse of one into the other
has been recurrent and unstoppable.‖
 Furthermore, she notes that historically, the
mimetic/antimimetic dichotomy constantly
invites and defeats all attempts to resolve it.
Leys is consistent on this to the point that she
predicts that our current debates are ―fated to
end in an impasse.‖

22.  Leys‘ own analysis becomes part of the meta-
concept of trauma, such that her
mimetic/antimimetic dichotomy confirms the
notion of a dichotomy but does not exhaust it.
 Other dichotomies come into play and while we
can separate their poles, they do not match
evenly with each other and are sometimes even
incongruent and incompatible.
 What I appreciate most about Leys‘ analysis is
her conclusion that trauma has a historical
structure, an idea that is congruent with
Foucault‘s notion of a discursive formation or

23.  Trauma, as a concept or theory with its
associated practices, has become an
apparatus. Not only has ―trauma‖ been
constructed and put in play as an apparatus
describing something we want to name and
explain, but as both Kansteiner and Leys
emphasize, it has hard not to reach for this
apparatus as an explanatory model, with all its
conflations and confusions.

24.  Leys convincingly demonstrates that the two
theories are intertwined not only across
theories but even within each individual theory
or group of researchers.
 In concluding, Leys acknowledges the
intractability of the dichotomy and eschews a
meta-position from which one can assess the
aporias that she sees as intrinsic to this field.

25.  My meta-concept places Leys‘ approach
within a larger one: hers is one dichotomy
among others.
 This is not to say that we can take a stand
above the dichotomy but that if we see it as
an apparatus, which is a discourse with a
strategic function, we can discern that it
functions not as one dichotomy, one particular
difference, but an epistemological cut in any
possible discourse about trauma.

26.  We see this in the bivalence of crucial terms
in this archaeology, from the word trauma
itself, to the metaphors used to describe it, to
the ways in which wound is deployed in
Western culture.
 From Achilles‘ spear that both cuts and heals,
to Plato‘s pharmakon which is both a poison
and a remedy, this bivalence reaches its
apogee in the current cultural theory of trauma
which I call trauma as event.

27.  I do not share Leys‘ pessimistic conclusion
that it is intractable.
 The dichotomy in trauma theories will be
intractable as long as we unwittingly repeat it,
a point Leys makes lucidly by observing that
each generation has had to rediscover the
notion of traumatic stress.
 Once we are aware of trauma as an
apparatus, we may more consciously
entertain other theories, as Kansteiner has
suggested, by finding a new lexicon for
trauma, a project I warmly endorse.

28.  Kansteiner calls for ―low-density‖
psychological concepts that ―avoid the moral
and existential excess of the trauma claim,‖
hoping that greater conceptual precision will
allow us to differentiate between trauma and
the culture of trauma.
 In Ian Hacking‘s terms, Kansteiner wants to
interrupt the ―looping effects‖ between
professional and public or cultural discourses.
Elaine Showalter has also suggested
something similar.
Refs: WulfKanstainer, ―Genealogy of a category mistake: a
critical intellectual history of the cultural trauma metaphor,‖
Rethinking History: The Journal of Theory and Practice,
2004, 8:2:193-221, p. 195.

29.  My own proposal is more modest.
 First, I believe that trauma has accrued a
supplementarity or excess (echoing both Derrida
and Kansteiner here). This supplementarity is
―overdetermined,‖ as Freud would say, or more
simply, multiply-determined. I suspect that a great
proportion of the variation may be attributed
precisely to the ―looping effects‖ between the clinical
use of trauma and its cultural avatar.
 Second, I believe that we must separate the various
ways in which the word trauma is deployed and
differentiate our vocabulary for these different
aspects of the trauma process.
 Third, and most salient, I believe that trauma must
be separated radically from event, which is the

30. Dichotomising Trauma
 Let us now examine some of the
characteristics of the trauma trope according
to two columns or groupings of dichotomies:
aleph and beth.
 The reason that I do not simply offer a
definition at the outset is to reveal the
armature of the construction of the concept
and how it is deployed as an apparatus.

31.  What this representative but not exhaustive survey
demonstrates is that the word trauma has become
too broad and inclusive, too vague and unfixed, too
(am)bivalent and polysemous, too deterministic
and fatalistic an idea.
 My greatest concern, however, is that trauma is too
pre-conceived and, ultimately, too emblematic a
condition.
 All the other descriptors set the stage for an
emblem to emerge which then binds them into an
explanatory notion; once an emblem appears, it in
turn retrospectively creates its own precursors, in
the well-known process Freud called
Nachträglichkeit, belatedness or deferred meaning,
which Lacan crafted into après-coup.
 And while it is true that trauma also invokes the
opposite of these terms, its deployment as a trope

32. – Aleph Beth–
Oligosemia, asemia Polysemia
(concreteness, loss of (sensory and expressive
meaning and expression) overload)
Mimetic
Object-relations model Antimimetic
Literary-metaphoric Psycho-economic
pole model
Moral Scientific-metonymic
pole
Scientific

33. – Aleph Beth–
Dominick Lacapra
Everyday psychological Extraordinary psychological
challenges ordeals of extreme
violence
Lloyd deMause Philippe Ariès
Childhood is a nightmare Childhood is a cultural
invention
Alice Miller
Ubiquitous childhood Sigmund Freud
violence Childhood sexual seduction is a
fantasy
Richard Mollica
Witnessing the trauma story
Resilience, self-healing of Traumaticexperiences of
victims everyday life

34. – Aleph –Trauma as a Trope
 One way to make sense of this, a hypothesis
of the order of Leys‘ mimetic/antimimetic
dichotomy, is to see the aleph list as the
Freudian legacy.

35. Beth – PTSD is a Psychiatric
Disorder -
 The beth list is the Kraepelinian legacy.
 Narrower, more pathological in its
discernments, neo-Kraepelinian psychiatry
draws a sharp line between health and
disease (if the investigator is biologically-
oriented or given to evolutionary psychology,
both of which favour categorical thinking) or
health and illness (if the investigator is more
given to the social sciences and a
hermeneutic, socio-cultural or narrative
approach).

36. References
 Alain Badiou, ―Preface,‖ Quentin
Meillassoux‘sAfter Finitude, trans. by
Ray Brassier (2008)
 Alain Badiou, Second Manifesto for
Philosophy, trans. by Louise Burchill
(2011)
 Richard Mollica, Healing Invisible
Wounds (2006)
 Richard Mollica, ―Manifesto: Healing a

37. References
 Vincenzo Di Nicola, Trauma and Event:
A Philosophical Archaeology, Doctoral
dissertation, European Graduate
School, Saas-Fee, Switzerland (2012)