Abstract
To read the nineteenth-century texts that comprise the critical core of this book is to experience that moment of shock in which the historian, in the words of Walter Benjamin, “grasps the constellation which his own era has formed with a definite earlier one.” This sudden encounter of past and present does not imply, it seems to me, the simple equation of “documentary” evidence from separate historical periods but rather the awareness of a certain similarity between the rhetorical, ideological, and interpretive structures in which such facts and events are embedded and by means of which they take on historically comparable meanings. The “constellation” to which Benjamin refers entails, however, not only repetition but also difference: “thinking suddenly stops in a configuration pregnant with tensions.”1 Readers of Zola, Flaubert, and Baudelaire might establish, for example, imaginative analogies between the authoritarian politics of Napoleon III and those of our American “empire” today, yet not overlook the cultural traditions and sociohistorical circumstances that clearly separate “then” from “now.” Indeed, the very resonance of the encounter between these two historical moments requires that we keep in mind the significant differences between our “postmodern” society of electronic information, transnational corporations, and global markets on the one hand and the rising industrial capitalism of early modern France on the other.
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Notes
Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” trans. Harry Zohn, in his Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt (London: Fontana/Collins, 1973), 263, 262.
Fredric Jameson and Masao Miyoshi, The Cultures of Globalization (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998), xii.
Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 4. Hereafter, this work is cited parenthetically as BP.
Mark Seltzer, “Wound Culture: Trauma in the Pathological Public Sphere,” October 80 (Spring 1997): 3–26.
See Karyn Ball, “Introduction: Trauma and Its Institutional Destinies,” Cultural Critique 46 (Fall 2000): 1–44;
John Mowitt, “Trauma Envy,” Cultural Critique 46 (Fall 2000): 273–297;
and Lauren Berlant, “The Subject of True Feeling: Pain, Privacy, and Politics,” in Cultural Pluralism, Ldentity Politics, and the Law, ed. Austin Sarat (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999), 48–84.
See Vamik Volkan, Blind Trust: Large Groups and their Leaders in Times of Crisis and Terror (Charlottesville, VA: Pitchstone Publishing, 2004). The expression “chosen trauma” designates “the collective mental representation of an event that has caused a large group to face drastic common losses, to feel helpless and victimized by another group, and to share a humiliating injury” (48). The chosen trauma, like the “chosen glory,” may be transmitted from generation to generation unconsciously through caretaker-child interactions or consciously through symbols, rituals, and other cultural forms. What is important, however, is less the historical event itself than the power of the shared image of it (an image that may be modified by wishes, fantasies, and defenses) to knit the members of a population together in a common sense of identity with respect to the past (47–52). Unfortunately, a chosen trauma may support the idealization of victimhood and “may be used to construct the group as avengers” (49).
On the uses of trauma, see Kirby Farrell, Post-traumatic Culture: Injury and Interpretation in the Nineties (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), 1–33.
I am alluding to the practice of torture at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq and to the less publicized massacres carried out by the Allies of the United States in Afghanistan. Many captives of the United States and the Northern Alliance died as a result of inhumane prison conditions as well. On the abuses in Afghanistan, see Robert Fisk, “We Are the War Criminals Now,” 29 November 2001, https://argument.independent.co.uk/commentators/story.jsp?story=107292; “Ce documentaire qui accuse les vainqueurs de crimes de guerre en Afghanistan,” Le Monde, 13 June 2002, https://argument.independent.co.uk/commentators/story.jsp?story=107292;
and Richard W. Miller, “Terrorism, War, and Empire,” in Terrorism and International justice, ed. James P. Sterba (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 186–205.
Here I refer only to unequivocal contraventions of the Geneva Convention; we should not forget, however, that related if more controversial legal and moral issues surround the USA Patriot Act, American activities in Guantanamo Bay, the large number of civilian casualties resulting from U.S. bombing in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children who, even before the invasion of 2003, died as a direct result of U.S.-led economic sanctions. For political and ethical considerations of these events, see Howard Zinn, Terrorism and War (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2002);
Arundhati Roy, War Talk (Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2003);
Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Power of Mourning and Violence (London: Verso, 2004).
On pain as a psychologically, culturally, and historically conditioned experience, see David B. Morris, The Culture of Pain (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991);
Roselyne Rey, The History of Pain, trans. Louise Elliott Wallace, J.A. Cadden, and S.W. Cadden (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998), 1–9;
Ronald Melzack and Patrick D. Wall, The Challenge of Pain (New York: Basic Books, 1983), 27–51.
Valerie Hardcastle, The Myth of Pain (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999), 101. See also Melzack and Wall, The Challenge of Pain, 100, 178.
As I discuss in chapter 1, to feel pain is to engage working memory in a comparison of negative stimuli in the present with similarly negative experiences from the past, more or less “spontaneously” evaluating the particular qualities and the relative gravity of these past and present experiences and—again on the basis of not only evolutionary hardwiring but also learned constructions of the self and the world—responding to the immediate sensation with a strategy of defense (e.g., fight or flight, or freezing). Animals and newborn humans in possession of the transient, nonlinguistic “stream” of consciousness that Antonio Damasio calls the “core self” probably experience a form of pain that is not as qualitatively resonant and subjectively meaningful as that felt by those humans (from as early as 18 months) and animals (e.g., chimpanzees) having an “autobiographical self.” “Autobiographical” or “extended” consciousness is not necessarily linguistic, but it is capable of organizing a large compass of long-and short-term memories and using them as the framework for planning the future. As its name implies, autobiographical consciousness is fully self-reflexive, aware of its own capacity for conceptually coordinating mental images related to the past, present, and future. See Antonio R. Damasio, The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1999);
Antonio R. Damasio, Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain (Orlando, FL: Harcourt, 2003). Damasio’s “extended” or “autobiographical” consciousness corresponds roughly to Gerald Edelman’s “higher-order” consciousness, with the important exception that Edelman’s category is largely confined to humans with the capacity for language (I say “largely” because Edelman hedges a bit with respect to chimps).
See Gerald M. Edelman, The Remembered Present: A Biological Theory of Consciousness (New York: Basic Books, 1989)
and Gerald M. Edelman, Bright Air, Brilliant Fire: On the Matter of the Mind (New York: Basic Books, 1992).
The present discussion of the similarities and differences between specific affects is informed by Jaak Panksepp, Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 32–35, 187–209, 215–217, 262–269, 274–276. On the need for biologically informed theories of affect in the humanities, history, and anthropology,
see Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Adam Frank, “Shame in the Cybernetic Fold: Reading Silvan Tomkins,” in Shame audits Sisters: A Silvan Tomkins Reader, ed. Eve Kosofsky Sedwick and Adam Frank (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995), 1–31.
Dominick LaCapra, Writing History, Writing Trauma (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), 21, 68–69.
On the cognitive and emotive components of empathy, as well as on the importance of empathy in the development of social awareness and moral sensibility, see Laurence R. Tancredi, Hardwired Behavior: What Neuroscience Reveals about Morality (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 87–88 and 112–113. On the existence of ethical or proto-ethical behavior in certain nonhuman species, see Damasio, The Feeling of What Happens, 159–165. For a sustained argument for altruism as an evolutionary selected adaptive mechanism,
see Elliott Sober and David Sloan Wilson, Unto Others: The Evolution and Psychology of Unselfish Behavior (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998).
See the discussion of theories of neurological “kindling” in Elizabeth A. Wilson, Psychosomatic: Feminism and the Neurological Body (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), 24–26.
Jacques Derrida, “Autoimmunity: Real and Symbolic Suicides,” interview with Giovanna Borradori, Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida, ed. Giovanna Borradori, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 85–136.
For example, when confronted with the “terrifying and magnificent spectacle” of violence and evil in nature—“the elusiveness of happiness, confidence betrayed, unrighteousness triumphant and innocence laid low”—Friedrich Shiller’s exemplary poet or philosopher abandons his “effeminate” desire to comprehend the “lawless chaos” of the sensuous world and, perceiving that “the relative grandeur outside him” is but “the mirror” of “the absolute grandeur within himself,” seizes triumphantly upon “the eternal in his breast.” Friedrich von Schiller, “Naive and Sentimental Poetry” and “On the Sublime”: Two Essays, trans. Julius A. Elias (New York: Ungar, 1966), 210, 209, 205, 210.
On irony’s intellectual investment in the perception of paradox, contradiction, or incongruity, see Douglas C. Muecke, The Compass of Irony (London: Methuen, 1969)
and Douglas C. Muecke, Irony and the Ironic, 2nd ed. (London: Methuen, 1982).
On irony as aggression and disparagement, see Catherine Kerbrat-Orecchioni, “Probèmes de l’ironie,” in L’Ironie: Travaux du Centre de Recherches Linguistiques et Sémiologiques de Lyon (Lyon: Presses Universitaires de Lyon, 1976), 10–46;
Catherine Kerbrat-Orecchioni, “L’Ironie comme trope,” Poétique 11 (1980): 108–127;
and Linda Hutcheon, Irony’s Edge: The Theory and Politics of Irony (New York: Routledge, 1995), 37–43, 52–54. Hutcheon is sensitive to the potentially affective impact of irony on its interpreter(s). For an influential, if tendentious, characterization of irony as intellectually and socially elitist,
see Hegel’s critique of Friedrich Schlegel, which is examined from a critical-historical perspective in Joseph A. Dane, The Critical Mythology of Irony (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1991), 83–118.
On aftermath as the uncanny experience of nondifferentiation between trauma and the survival of trauma, hence, between cause and effect and between past, present, and future, see Ross Chambers, Untimely Interventions: AIDS Writing, Testimonial, and the Rhetoric of Haunting (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004), xxii, 43–44, 288–289. “Aftermath writing”—of which irony is for me a primary figure—designates the simultaneously mimetic and symbolic representation of aftermath as “a state of unresolvable and intolerable tension and suspension” (289).
These alternatives include both nonbelligerent correctives directly applicable to Afghanistan and long-term, comprehensive strategies for preventing terrorism and responding justly to it in the future. For a sampling of such options as well as cogent legal, moral, and rational arguments for their preferability to war, see the following essays in Terrorism and International Justice, ed. James P. Sterba (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003): Noam Chomsky, “Terror and Just Response,” 69–87; Daniele Archibugi and Iris Marion Young, “Envisioning a Global Rule of Law,” 158–170; Claudia Card, “Making War on Terrorism in Response to 9/11,” 171–185; Miller, “Terrorism, War, and Empire,” 186–205; James P. Sterba, “Terrorism and International Justice,” 206–228.
On the pitfalls of the “Bush doctrine” of “preemption,” see Stephen M. Walt, Taming American Power: The Global Response to U.S. Primacy (New York: W.W. Norton, 2005), 146–147, 162, 224–225, 261. In light of the implausibility of weapons of mass destruction and ties to al Qaeda as grounds for “preemptive” military action against Iraq, defenders of the invasion now seek to justify it as a humanitarian intervention. (The pretext is reminiscent of ex-post facto attempts to portray the bombing of Afghanistan as a campaign to liberate indigenous women from the oppressive grip of the Taliban.) On the dangers inherent in attempting to portray the Iraq War as a legitimate humanitarian operation,
see Paul Theodoulou, ed., Humanitarian Intervention, spec. issue of Global Dialogue 7.1–2 (Winter/Spring 2005): 1–141.
Emile Zola, Correspondance, ed. B.H. Bakker, 10 vols. (Montréal and Paris: Presses de l’Université de Montréal and Éditions du CNRS, 1978–1995), 4: 329. Unless otherwise indicated, all translations of French texts are my own. In view of the importance of stylistic analysis to my study, I have provided the original French along with my translations in chapters 3 and 4. In chapter 2, however, the particularly dense interweaving of quoting and quoted texts made it necessary for me to omit most of the original French material in the interest of readability.
Quoted in Roland Barthes, Michelet, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Farrar, 1987), 101.
Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful, ed. James T. Boulton (London: Routledge, 1958), 40.
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© 2007 Vaheed Ramazani
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Ramazani, V. (2007). Introduction. In: Writing in Pain. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230607231_1
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