| abstract | This work advances a single claim: trauma is an exception. While that claim might appear to be simple prima facie, its repercussions
require intense reconsideration of Western philosophical and, especially, political traditions. The task is to explore trauma beyond its origins denoting a psychological
condition, delving into the individuated and communal silences indicative of traumatic injury. Recast as a philosophical category, trauma signifies the possibility,
actuality, and aftermath of phenomena of languagelessness. Language becomes a technical term to denote discursive modalities of communication (including
self-communication), inclusive of all means for delineating and proposing boundaries. Yet, the null horizons implicated by trauma's languagelessness upend philosophical
anthropologies inherent to Western political thought, necessitating new structures with which to address the discursive limits of individual and collective power. In
our first chapter, we frame the contemporary context, which denies the possibility of any exception, and introduce Carl Schmitt and Martin Heidegger as our main
interlocutors. We establish the term, "trauma," and track its interdisciplinary development through psychology, literary criticism, and theology. We pursue our
methodological way forward with an examination of the, "incomprehensible event," and the scelus infandum addressed by Schmitt. In our second chapter, consideration of
logic via Heidegger leads us to discover the origins of discursive language in the cosmogonic command of the interpretative state's power, the power to continue as such.
This reveals the extraordinariness of discursive language, its relationship to historical past, present, and future, and its role in world creation. All of these are
endangered by the destruction of discursive language, which occurs in the chthonic encounter introduced by trauma's injury-as-event. In our final chapter, bereft of
discursive language, we explore whether mythic language remains as a possibility for disclosure and self-disclosure. Its affinity for judgment in the aesthetic mode is
conducive to healing traumatic injury, opening up new opportunities for expression. However, moving in scope from individual to multitude, myth is revealed as a
treacherous resource that can lead to further trauma, if the operative mode of political discourse. In this way, trauma as languagelessness implicates the apocalyptic,
revealing itself as the exception and concluding our investigations. |
