Traumatic Affect

309 Pages·2013·1.56 MB·English

by  Meera Atkinson

Traumatic Affect

Traumatic Affect
Edited by
Meera Atkinson and Michael Richardson
Traumatic Affect,
Edited by Meera Atkinson and Michael Richardson
This book first published 2013
Cambridge Scholars Publishing
12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Copyright © 2013 by Meera Atkinson and Michael Richardson and contributors
All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system,
or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or
otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner.
ISBN (10): 1-4438-4867-0, ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-4867-1
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Acknowledgments .................................................................................... vii
Introduction ................................................................................................ 1
At the Nexus
Meera Atkinson and Michael Richardson
Part I: Silence
Chapter One .............................................................................................. 22
Benjamin’s Silence
Shoshana Felman
Chapter Two ............................................................................................. 59
“Un Petit Geste”: Affect and Silence in Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah
Magdalena Zolkos
Chapter Three ........................................................................................... 80
Film, Trauma and the Enunciative Present
Anne Rutherford
Part II: Cultures
Chapter Four ........................................................................................... 104
The Earthquake After Kant’s Lisbon: “Visceral Reason” in Kleist’s
Precarious Modernity
Karyn Ball
Chapter Five ........................................................................................... 129
Apparently Unrelated: Affective Resonance, Concatenation
and Traumatic Circuitry in the Terrain of the Everyday
Anna Gibbs
Chapter Six ............................................................................................. 148
Torturous Affect: Writing and the Problem of Pain
Michael Richardson
vi Table of Contents
Part III: Mediatized
Chapter Seven ......................................................................................... 172
Gojira’s Bones: The Monster as a Vessel of Affective Energy
Aaron Kerner
Chapter Eight .......................................................................................... 193
The Mediatization of Trauma and the Trauma of Mediatization:
Benjamin, Tulloch, and the Struggle to Speak
Ben O’Loughlin
Chapter Nine ........................................................................................... 213
Where the Buffalo No Longer Roam: Affect and Allegory
in The Last Hunt and The Last Buffalo Hunt
Jonathan L. Knapp
Part IV: Embodied
Chapter Ten ............................................................................................ 230
Radical Realism and Other Possibilities in Contemporary
Intercultural Indigenous Australian Cinema
Jennifer L. Biddle
Chapter Eleven ....................................................................................... 240
Trauma Stimulated Art, or the Embodiment of Affect in Lebanon:
An Allegory
Ricardo Mbarkho
Chapter Twelve ...................................................................................... 247
Channeling the Specter and Translating Phantoms:
Hauntology and the Spooked Text
Meera Atkinson
Bibliography ........................................................................................... 271
Contributors ............................................................................................ 290
Index ....................................................................................................... 294
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Traumatic Affect, a collection of essays from contributors around the
world, was conceived and developed within the Writing and Society
Research Centre at the University of Western Sydney, Australia. The
Centre hosted a public symposium on “Trauma: Writing, Art and Affect”
in April 2011, which we convened, and has since supported the production
of this book. We owe thanks to Anthony Uhlman, Ivor Indyk, our
invaluable copyeditor and indexer Melinda Jewell, and all those in the
Centre who pitched in along the way. We also wish to thank the
participants and attendees of the 2011 symposium, several of whom appear
in this volume, who helped begin the dialogue of which Traumatic Affect
is the result. We would like to extend a special thanks to Anna Gibbs,
Magdalena Zolkos, Deborah Staines and Catherine Camden-Pratt for their
encouragement and assistance, and we are indebted to Kylie Boxall for her
striking work on the cover image. Last but certainly not least, we thank the
contributors to this collection who have so generously participated in this
project, delivering powerful essays on the nexus of trauma and affect.
Shoshana Felman’s essay “Benjamin’s Silence” was previously published
in Critical Inquiry Vol. 25 No. 2 (1999).
Jennifer L. Biddle’s chapter “Radical Realism and Other Possibilities in
Contemporary Intercultural Indigenous Australian Cinema” was developed
from an essay written for the Sydney Un_imaginable exhibition catalogue,
published in-house by Ivan-Dougherty Gallery (2008).

INTRODUCTION
AT THE NEXUS
MEERA ATKINSON
AND MICHAEL RICHARDSON
The story of trauma [. . .] as the narrative of a belated experience, far from
telling of an escape from reality—the escape from a death, or from its
referential force—rather attests to its endless impact on a life.
—Cathy Caruth, UnclaimedExperience, 7.
Affect is an impingement or extrusion of a momentary or sometimes more
sustained state of relation as well as the passage (and the duration of
passage) of forces or intensities. That is, affect is found in those intensities
that pass body to body (human, nonhuman, part-body, and otherwise), in
those resonances that circulate about, between, and sometimes stick to
bodies and worlds, and in their very passages or variations between these
intensities and resonances themselves.
—Melissa Gregg & Gregory Seigworth, The Affect Theory Reader, 1.
These quotes gesture towards the heart of this collection: the question
of how trauma might be approached with respect for, and recognition of,
its existence, recurrence, and lived presence as an “impossible event,”
while nonetheless examining the form, substance and dynamics of that
impossibility in new ways. How might we recognize the continuum
between personal and collective, without collapsing them into dichotomy?
How can we think about trauma in terms of present relation rather than
absence or disconnection? How would we re-imagine the transmission of
trauma between bodies? How might we acknowledge, and even intervene
upon, the cycle of affect and effect between individual and collective,
familial and national? It is the contention of this volume that thinking
trauma in terms of affect offers enormous promise. In what follows, we
aim to set out a theoretical topology of the intersection of trauma and
affect. Our intent here is not to provide a complete account of either field,