역사적 외상의 재현 (불가능성) : 홀로코스트 담론에 대한 비판적 읽기

The (Im)Possibility of Representing the Historical Trauma : A Critical Reading of Holocaust Discourses

The Holocaust has remained, in Western discourses, the event of limit defying representation and posing a serious challenge to the project of modern rationality. Various theoretical and ethical attempts to deal with it has led to the so-called "post" discourses, which share the task of reexamining and restructuring pre-existing concepts and frameworks of thought, despite their inner differences. This paper attempts to critically read recent approaches to the Holocaust in terms of psychoanalytic notion of trauma. "Trauma" means the sudden shattering of the protective shields of one's psyche or, by extension, a culture's symbolic system. In order to master its impact, one or a culture cannot but return to the past trauma, though repeating it is, in itself, painful. One can meet, through trauma, history beyond the pleasure principle and representational order. In order to properly deal with the Holocaust as a specific historical event, I proposes to distinguish historical trauma from structural trauma. The two concepts are distinct from, and irreducible to, each other, though having much in common. The former designates the trauma happening to specific individuals and groups in a specific historical context, and the latter the one happening to all people in all historical contexts. Cathy Caruth's and Shoshana Felman's responses to the Holocaust, I argue, fall into the trap of conflating the former with the latter. They symptomatically repeat Paul de Man's problematic response to Nazi Fascist regime, with which he collaborated during World War Two. Borrowing Freud's notion of "working through," which is neither compulsive return to nor evading of the trauma but overcoming it, I argue, we can move out of the vicious circle of traumatic repetition by changing the core of our being.