기억과 서사 : 트라우마의 정치학

Memory and Narrative: The Politics of Trauma

This essay is an attempt to approach the question of trauma in terms of the Lacanian dialectics of the symbolic and the real, or the hermeneutics and the energetics. The fundamental psychoanalytic distinction can be extended to that between representation and affect, language and libido, and signifier and jouissance. Etymologically, trauma means a physical wound where the skin is broken as a consequence of external violence. In accordance with this, Freud defines as “‘traumatic’ any excitations from outside which are powerful enough to break through the protective shield”(SE 18: 29). In Lacanian terms, it can be translated into a breach of the symbolic system of representation, resulting in the engenderment of the traumatic real. Generally speaking, the Lacanian real is an effect of symbolization that can nevertheless be irreducible to the symbolic order. Accordingly, the traumatic real is regarded as an effect of a negative, traumatic symbolization, which has to do with the breach of the symbolic system of representation. The traumatic memory, which is ‘marked by a blank or occupied by a falsehood’ (É, 50), is distinct from what Janet terms ‘narrative memory,’ which is “intelligible, consistent, and unbroken”(SE 7: 18). The analytic dictum to transform repetition into memory is to change the traumatic memory to the narrative, historical memory. According to the Nachträglichkeit, or the peculiar temporality of the traumatic event, the past repeats ‘compulsively’ instead of being remembered because it was not all represented, not fully integrated into the subject's symbolic universe, not made present as such to the subject. In other words, the traumatic experience is an ‘unclaimed’ one in which the ‘event’ did not take place in a past that was not ‘present’ in the proper sense of the word. This essay draws attention to the way in which Lacanian psychoanalysis is a way of working on the traumatic real with symbolic means, or a way of speaking the unspeakable through the medium of the signifier (Vorstellungsrepräsentanz). Otherwise said, the analysis is conducted in such a way as to have an impact on the injured affect or jouissance by means of representation, or language. For there is no access to the affective charge of the trauma without representation, the real of symptom can only be approached through the detour of the symbolic order. And this approach to affect through representation is specifically conducted by way of the dualistic reading of the text. As distinguished from the conscious, ego discourse, the discourse of the Other, which is unconscious as such, leads the analytic subject to the unsayable, der Kern unseres Wesen.