Future Life of Trauma

Jennifer Yusin

Description

The Future Life of Trauma elaborates a transformation in the concepts of trauma and event by situating a groundbreaking encounter between psychoanalytic and postcolonial discourse. Proceeding from the formation of psychical life as presented in the Freudian metapsychology, it thinks anew the relation between temporality and traumatized subjectivity, demonstrating how the psychic event, as a traumatic event, is a material reality that alters the character of the structure of repetition.By examining the role of borders in the history of the 1947 partition of British India and the politics of memorialization in postgenocide Rwanda, The Future Life of Trauma brings to light the implications of trauma as a material event in contemporary nation-formation, sovereignty, and geopolitical violence. In showing how the form of the psyche changes in the encounter, it presents a challenge to the category of difference in the condition of identity, resulting in the formation of a concept of life that elaborates a new relation to destruction and finitude by asserting its power to transform itself.

Sujets

• Western philosophy
• Literary theory

Informations

• Publié par: Fordham University Press
• Date de parution: 01 juin 2017
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780823275489
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

Extrait

The Future Life of Trauma

The Future Life of Trauma

p a r t i t i o n s , b o r d e r s , r e p e t i t i o n

Jennifer Yusin

f o r d h a m u n i v e r s i t y p r e s sNew York 2 0 1 7

this book is made possible by a collaborative grant from the andrew w. mellon foundation.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data available online at http://catalog.loc.gov.

Printed in the United States of America

19181754321

First edition

for clare, in memoriam≈for mary, in persistere

C o n t e n t s

Prologue: The Place of a Thousand Hills

 Introduction: The Interface of Trauma 1. The Problem of Trauma

2Eventality of Trauma. The

3Partition?. Whither

4. Rwanda Transforming  After Word

Acknowledgments Notes Index

ix

1 15 41 83 111 137

149 151 191

P r o l o g u e : T h e P l a c e o f a T h o u s a n d H i l l s

In March2010, I traveled to Rwamagana, one of seven districts in the eastern province of Rwanda. There stands the campus of the eastern branch of the Association des Vueves du Genocide Agahozo (Associa- tion of the Widows of Genocide), or AVEGA as it is more commonly known. Formed in October1995by fifty genocide widows, AVEGA is a nonprofit organization that helps facilitate the economic and social reintegration of genocide widows into Rwandan society. There are four branches, located in the northern, eastern, western, and southern provinces of the country. The eastern branch features a large campus that includes a health center, a bar and restaurant, a couple of recep- tion halls that are sometimes rented out for large functions like wed- dings, guesthouses, and administrative offices. Once there, a woman—a genocide widow—who was one of the facility’s principal administrators guided me on a tour of the grounds. Before becoming an administrator, she served as one of the site’s trauma counselors. She had no formal training in trauma counseling. Like the other women working in a similar capacity, her knowledge and expertise was acquired through her own lived experience during the genocide. Not long thereafter, we were in her house with two other widows. Over the next few hours, the three women talked about their expe- riences during the genocide in unadulterated detail and with a sur- prising intimacy. They related the specific ways in which particular friends and family members were killed. They showed me photos of their children—ranging from three months to sixteen years in age— and detailed the gruesome death of each child. They revealed the dif- ferent forms of violence they endured and recounted the bombing of a