CONTENTS 
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Petar Ramadanovic, "Introduction: Trauma and Crisis"

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                         Articles

David Farrell Krell, "'Das Vergangene wird gewusst, das Gewusste 
[aber] wird erzahlt': Trauma, Forgetting, and Narrative in F.W.J. 
Schelling's Die Weltalter"

Petar Ramadanovic, "From Haunting to Trauma: Nietzsche's Active 
Forgetting and Blanchot's Writing of the Disaster"

Cathy Caruth, "An Interview with Jean Laplanche"

Ellie Ragland, "The Psychical Nature of Trauma: Freud's Dora, The 
Young Homosexual Woman, and the Fort! Da! Paradigm"

Linda Belau, "Trauma and the Material Signifier"

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                     Related Readings
 		    [WWW Version Only]

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                     Bibliography of
                      Postmodernism
                    and Critical Theory
 		    [WWW Version Only]

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                         Notices
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                  Notes on Contributors

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                        Abstracts


David Farrell Krell, "'Das Vergangene wird gewusst, das Gewusste 
[aber] wird erzahlt': Trauma, Forgetting, and Narrative in F.W.J. 
Schelling's Die Weltalter"

    o Abstract: The article asks about the possibility of trauma
      in the existence of the God of the Old Testament--according
      to the reading of the German Idealist and Romantic 
      philosopher F.W.J. Schelling (1775-1854). At the center of 
      the investigation is Schelling's never-completed book 
      project entitled "The Ages of the World," die Weltalter, on
      which Schelling labored from 1810 to 1815. Even after 
      Schelling put the third and last version aside, however, he 
      continued to work on the set of problems elaborated in his 
      truncated magnum opus. The principal theme of the work is 
      that the primal nature of God is dark, wrathful, and
      violent, albeit ultimately vulnerable. Yet our history has 
      repressed the most distant past of the deity, and Schelling
      must attempt a narrative that will recapture that past. One 
      final complication: God's primal nature is womanly.--dfk

Petar Ramadanovic, "From Haunting to Trauma: Nietzsche's Active 
Forgetting and Blanchot's Writing of the Disaster"

    o Abstract: This essay focuses on Nietzsche and the writing 
      of history, closely following Nietzsche's untimely 
      meditation "On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for 
      Life." The essay aims to tease out what it means to bring 
      the past and present into a balanced relation, a relation 
      in which one does not suppress the other. It argues that to 
      think history, and to think historically, we need to think 
      time. Moreover, following Nietzsche further, it is argued 
      that the call for active forgetting needs to be 
      complemented by a thought about the disaster.  The essay 
      then turns to Maurice Blanchot's notion of the writing of 
      the disaster--itself developed in Blanchot's dialogue with,
      among others, Nietzsche. Through an examination of 
      Blanchot, the essay suggests that the impossibility of
      remembering the disaster should not "lead us to invent the 
      right substitute, nor another order of facts and another 
      methodology, another mnemotechnics and mythology, to deal 
      with the immeasurable."  What we may need, rather, is a 
      thought about the future and, with it, a way to mourn the 
      past without surrendering to nostalgia or the hope for
      restitution of past wrongs.--pr

Cathy Caruth, "An Interview with Jean Laplanche"

    o Abstract: The interview examines the central aspects of 
      Laplanche's crucial reading and rethinking of Freud's  
      notion of trauma in his early work, beginning with 
      Laplanche's pathbreaking insights into the temporal 
      structure of the Freudian notion of trauma and extending to
      Laplanche's reworking of the early seduction theory into a 
      more general and foundational notion.  Laplanche discusses 
      the importance of sexuality in the notion of trauma, the 
      centrality of death and otherness, and the philosphical 
      nature of seduction in his own thinking of the Freudian 
      writing on trauma. The interview then explores Laplanche's 
      more recent extension of these ideas, in particular as they
      inform his notions of translation and of implantation, i.e.
      the implantation of the enigmatic message of the other. 
      Laplanche concludes with some thoughts on the possibilities
      opened in the analytic process, or, as he says, on "the
      temporality of retranslating one's own fate, of 
      retranslating what's coming to this fate from the message 
      of the other."--cc

Ellie Ragland, "The Psychical Nature of Trauma: Freud's Dora, The 
Young Homosexual Woman, and the Fort! Da! Paradigm"

    o Abstract: This article takes as textual examples Freud's 
      Dora case, "Fragment of a Little Hysteria" (1905), "The 
      Psychogenesis of a Case of Homosexuality in a Woman" 
      (1920), and the anecdote regarding Freud's nephew playing 
      the Fort! Da! game with a bobbin reel (1915) to demonstrate
      the link of trauma to memory and representation. While 
      trauma is known through repetitions and acts, secrecy and 
      silence surround it. It speaks, then, in enigmas and 
      symptoms. In Lacan's parlance, trauma appears in the real 
      as a limit when unconscious fantasy breaks down. It makes a 
      hole in language.  Freud's early erroneous idea that he had 
      discovered the element of trauma in hysteria in premature 
      sexual experience is re-evaluated by Lacan to argue that 
      the assumption of sexuality is traumatic for all human
      subjects.  Lacan says that Dora, the young homosexual 
      woman, and Freud's nephew all manifest anxiety when they 
      encounter a void place in the Other, showing a limit to   
      thought that gives the sense of a meaning beyond meaning. 
      Dora, when in a state of primal hysteria, depicts this 
      dilemma which Lacan says is an identity problem caused by 
      her not knowing what a woman is. Thus, Lacan gives a logic 
      and a means to what is lacking in Freud's biological 
      theories. Symptoms substitute for something else. Indeed, 
      Lacan explains how a hole is created by unary 
      (identificatory) traits that both make the hole and bound 
      it at the same time.  Dora is traumatized by the role she 
      is expected to play with Herr K. Both the young homosexual 
      woman and Freud's nephew dramatize a sense of "well" being 
      in the position each "has" in the symbolic order. When the 
      young woman loses her place in her father's gaze, she 
      attempts suicide.  When the little boy loses his place in 
      his mother's gaze, he cries before finding a replacement 
      game as a solution to his trauma.--er

Linda Belau, "Trauma and the Material Signifier"

    o Abstract: Through an analysis of the signifier and its 
      relation to traumatic repetition, this essay explores the 
      necessity of psychoanalytic theory for an analysis of 
      trauma. Arguing that deconstructive approaches, which have 
      come to form the center of what is currently known as 
      "trauma theory," ignore the structure of the subject and, 
      consequently, the significance of the psychoanalytic primal
      scene for the analysis of trauma, the essay argues for a 
      more psychoanalytically-inflected understanding of trauma 
      and the missed event. Inhabiting a time before time, an 
      impossible time, the primal scene--which, for Freud is the 
      most significant missed event--marks the inaugurating 
      moment of society, repression, and the law.  Because 
      analytic practices themselves open onto the space of 
      trauma, enacting a missed encounter, they are necessary to
      begin the arduous process of understanding, or of what 
      Freud calls "remembering, repeating, and working through." 
      Because psychoanalysis is able to commemorate the traumatic 
      missed encounter as the forgotten event, it is able to 
      attend to the structural force of trauma without giving way
      to the temptation to idealize the experience as something 
      untouchable or inaccessible. Such idealization, the essay 
      claims, has been the tendency of some deconstructive 
      theories of trauma that maintain tha trauma is beyond the 
      limits of representation and our symbolic periphery.  
      Through an analysis of the role of the signifier in the 
      traumatic event, the essay argues that trauma, like Lacan's 
      notion of the real, is very much a part of the symbolic, 
      even though it only makes its mark negatively.--lb