Psychoanalysis, Trauma, and Giorgio Agamben

Abstract

The author uses the work of Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben to reimagine the meaning and dynamics of trauma, as well as psychoanalysis as a process that remedies, in part, traumatic experiences. More particularly, trauma is conceptualized in terms of Agamben's notions of potentiality, singularity/suchness, and inoperativity, although these are inflected from psychosocial developmental and political perspectives. This provides a way to bridge the idea of individual trauma with the larger political milieu's apparatuses that can be systemically traumatizing, as seen in the social death of racism. This reframing of trauma leads to reconceiving the process of therapy as rendering inoperative memories of trauma and, in some cases, traumainducing apparatuses, while, in part, mending the dialectical and paradoxical tension between potentiality and actuality that is necessary for socialpolitical agency and experiences of singularity.