{"title":"The Transcendence of Trauma: Prospects for the Continental Philosophy of Religion","authors":"M. Rubenstein","doi":"10.5422/fordham/9780823280261.003.0014","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5422/fordham/9780823280261.003.0014","url":null,"abstract":"This paper will serve as a response to the manuscripts in the volume with special attention to the consequences and prospects that its insights hold for the future of the continental philosophy of religion. Its specifics are to be determined.","PeriodicalId":402905,"journal":{"name":"Trauma and Transcendence","volume":"30 2 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-08-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"129356091","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Artful Politics of Trauma: Rancière’s Critique of Lyotard","authors":"T. Chanter","doi":"10.5422/fordham/9780823280261.003.0007","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5422/fordham/9780823280261.003.0007","url":null,"abstract":"Just as Rancière challenges the absolute difference between politics and art, he resists the absolutization of the other that he sees as characteristic of the ethical turn in contemporary aesthetics. The tendency of Lyotard, however, remains turning alterity into the unrepresentable, the unassimilable, and the unthinkable. Its consequences are precisely what Rancière forebodes with the appropriation of the sublime: For all its talk of art witnessing that which is unrepresentable—and the holocaust as the unrepresentable per se—the ethical turn only manages to rejoin a discourse of purism. If everyone is traumatised, what specific meaning remains for trauma? This chapter explores the context of Rancière’s critique of Lyotard, particularly regarding the attenuation of any sense to trauma that accumulates a privileged status for its singular event; it subsequently interrogates the generalization of trauma to such an extent that one evacuates it of any significance.","PeriodicalId":402905,"journal":{"name":"Trauma and Transcendence","volume":"48 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-08-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"130553416","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Limits of Theory in Trauma and Transcendence","authors":"Eric Boynton, Peter Capretto","doi":"10.5422/fordham/9780823280261.003.0001","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5422/fordham/9780823280261.003.0001","url":null,"abstract":"This introduction describes the challenge of how to think trauma in light of the field's burgeoning interdisciplinarity, and often its theoretical splintering. The introduction offers an overview of scholarship on trauma that has always been challenged by the temporal, affective, and corporeal dimensions of trauma itself, yet it has recently been rendered all the more complex by theoretical and methodological issues that have emerged for these disciplines in their attempts to think trauma. From distinctive disciplinary vectors, the introduction introduces the work of philosophers, social theorists, philosophical psychologists and theologians that considers the limits and prospects of theory when thinking trauma and transcendence, particularly as it relates to Continental Philosophy of Religion.","PeriodicalId":402905,"journal":{"name":"Trauma and Transcendence","volume":"88 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-08-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"127016595","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Body-Wise: Re-Fleshing Christian Spiritual Practice in Trauma’s Wake","authors":"M. Shoop","doi":"10.5422/FORDHAM/9780823280261.003.0012","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5422/FORDHAM/9780823280261.003.0012","url":null,"abstract":"Though Christian Theology profess a God who inhabits flesh, bodies have been historically and systematically ignored and reviled by many institutional expressions of this faith tradition. Even as many core Christian institutions resist the Incarnational symmetry between embodied practice and Christian theological professions, bodies explore and embrace healing modalities at the margins of Christian practice. Using the emerging wisdom of four particular healing explorations along the margins of Christian institutional life, this chapter explores the contours of Christian spiritual practices that fold out of trauma. By focusing on the institutional practices of Kevin Ladd with labyrinths, Shelley Rambo with the Warriors Journey Home project, Sr. Joanna Walsh with trusting touch, and my own Wandering Home Retreat for women, this chapter attends to these contours with an eye toward possibilities for institutional transformation around trauma.","PeriodicalId":402905,"journal":{"name":"Trauma and Transcendence","volume":"67 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-08-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"128934378","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Theopoetics of Trauma","authors":"S. Rambo","doi":"10.5422/fordham/9780823280261.003.0011","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5422/fordham/9780823280261.003.0011","url":null,"abstract":"In “Theology and the Poetics of Testimony,” Rebecca Chopp forecasts the future of theology, suggesting that the rise of the new genre of testimony in contemporary culture requires significant shifts in modern theology--both in content and in form (Converging on Culture). First delivered as a lecture in 1997, this essay is both a forerunner in the area of trauma theology and in theopoetics. She predicts that trauma will become the context out of which theology is done, poetics will be its new form, and transcendence will be rewritten in the process. While many theologians recognize their work as situated within a “post-traumatic” context, poetics remains a more elusive challenge. This essay examines the connection between poetics and transcendence, in light of new trajectories of trauma studies and growing literatures in theopoetics.","PeriodicalId":402905,"journal":{"name":"Trauma and Transcendence","volume":"114 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-08-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"117203416","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Psychic Economy and Fetishization of Traumatic Lived Experience","authors":"Peter Capretto","doi":"10.5422/FORDHAM/9780823280261.003.0010","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5422/FORDHAM/9780823280261.003.0010","url":null,"abstract":"Trauma theorists have thoroughly named the impossibility of adequately witnessing to the traumatic experience of others. Yet the demand of trauma researchers to study and advocate on behalf of survivors leaves them in a double bind, wherein lowering the ethical standards of their social relation appears not only tempting, but necessary. Through examinations of Freud’s psychoanalytic understanding of the psychic economy of trauma and Heidegger’s phenomenological critique of the concept of lived experience, this chapter argues that trauma theorists in philosophy and religion must be attentive to the fetishization of the traumatic lived experience of others, specifically as a libidinal symptom of our inevitable failure to satisfy the impossible demands of witnessing. This more quotidian attention to our psychic motivation supplements the transcendent task of conceptually understanding the psychic exteriority of others in trauma, thereby elevating the ethical standards the continental philosophy of religion sets for social research into trauma.","PeriodicalId":402905,"journal":{"name":"Trauma and Transcendence","volume":"24 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-08-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"122569551","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Black Embodied Wounds and the Traumatic Impact of the White Imaginary","authors":"G. Yancy","doi":"10.5422/FORDHAM/9780823280261.003.0008","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5422/FORDHAM/9780823280261.003.0008","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter theorizes racialization as an interstitial process. In the context of white supremacy, white privilege, and white power, whiteness functions as the transcendental norm that obfuscates its own racialization and normative constitution vis-à-vis Blackness, thereby marking the Black body within the socio-political matrix as “dangerous,” “evil,” “suspicious,” and “disposable.” It analyzes racialization as a site of trauma, a wounding, and a felt terror of both symbolic and existential annihilation. The experience of trauma thus is the result of a violation and violence that attempts to reduce Black people to a state of pure facticity, the very absence of transcendence, where Black alterity is reduced to the white racist imago. This paper contextualizes the historical backdrop of anti-Black racism through the examples of Trayvon Martin, Eric Garner, Tamir Rice, and the author’s personal experience with racial hate speech. This demonstrates how the Black body has undergone a long and enduring history of racialized somatic trauma.","PeriodicalId":402905,"journal":{"name":"Trauma and Transcendence","volume":"24 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-08-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"123942475","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Evil, Trauma, and the Building of Absences","authors":"Eric Boynton","doi":"10.5422/FORDHAM/9780823280261.003.0005","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5422/FORDHAM/9780823280261.003.0005","url":null,"abstract":"A phenomenon with a lingering enigmatic quality, evil has, it seems, been “re-discovered” as a highly suggestive phenomenon today. Evil’s resurgence might be particularly relevant, highlighting lacunae in predominant tendencies of modern thought, specifically in recent attempts to commemorate historical trauma proliferating our genocidal age. This chapter examines the challenge of commemorating historical trauma and atrocity by considering the counter-monuments proposed and completed by the German installation artist, Horst Hoheisel. This study links Emmanuel Levinas’ work with Hoheisel’s constructions and trauma theory’s characterization of trauma as non-assimilable with recent philosophical considerations of evil and suffering in our genocidal age. In this light, Hoheisel’s attempt to bring to presence that which is essentially absent opens up an alternative approach to evil and trauma issuing from the perspective of absence and loss, thereby granting the failure of therapeutic techniques an ethical significance.","PeriodicalId":402905,"journal":{"name":"Trauma and Transcendence","volume":"2657 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-08-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"126761061","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Unsettling of Perception: Levinas and the Anarchic Trauma","authors":"E. Severson","doi":"10.5422/FORDHAM/9780823280261.003.0006","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5422/FORDHAM/9780823280261.003.0006","url":null,"abstract":"Levinas utilizes the term “trauma” to refer to the pre-original unsettling of the auto-identification of the ego, a project that takes center stage in his final masterwork, Otherwise than Being. This chapter begins with some deliberations concerning the use of the term “trauma” to refer to this unsettling, particularly in light of contemporary psychological and medical uses of that term. Building from Plato’s Allegory of the Cave and Heidegger’s work on unconcealment, it argues that whereas for Heidegger and Plato trauma occurs through unconcealment of sensation, for Levinas trauma occurs as an interruption of sensation’s appropriation into perception itself. The chapter focuses principally on the event itself, the encounter with the other, which at times he calls “inspiration” instead of trauma, and the way this event occurs in a time-before-time that initiates the very possibility of responsibility.","PeriodicalId":402905,"journal":{"name":"Trauma and Transcendence","volume":"38 9 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-08-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"125738719","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Perpetrator Trauma and Collective Guilt: My Lai","authors":"R. Eyerman","doi":"10.5422/FORDHAM/9780823280261.003.0009","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5422/FORDHAM/9780823280261.003.0009","url":null,"abstract":"Among other atrocities of the American war in Vietnam, the My Lai Massacre stands out as a clear illustration of the social pressure to individualize guilt and restrict any attempt to collectivize responsibility. With special attention to the traumatic character of this event, this chapter introduces and develops the notion of perpetrator trauma, which I define as a moral injury. I claim that perpetrator trauma occurs when individuals and collectives feel they have acted in ways contrary to deeply held moral beliefs. The essay contends that this encounter is rightly described as a trauma, in that it results from or in the shattering of identity, individual and/or collective. The mass murder of Vietnamese civilians at My Lai was cause for great public debate in the United States, wherein the idea of collective guilt and responsibility was central. I show way the attempt to responsibility was unsuccessful.","PeriodicalId":402905,"journal":{"name":"Trauma and Transcendence","volume":"35 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-08-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"124849060","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}