The Future Life of Trauma: Partitions, Borders, Repetition

School of the Freudian Letter - Alterities

Presents: Jennifer Yusin

Speaking on The Future Life of Trauma: Partitions, Borders, Repetition

Proceeds from this evening will be donated to AVEGA

Yusin spent some time at the Eastern branch of AVGEA, and it was there that she met the widow who forever changed her thinking about trauma and its afterlives. The photograph above captures one of the moments from her stay.

This seminar offers us an opportunity to extend active, participatory thought in areas where, precisely, thought and act are first crushed by the massive impact of trauma and then condensed, commodified into jouissant soundbites. Our awareness of irrupting events has never been greater, placing the 'citizen' as witness in a state where s/he can neither respond to nor unknow. The capabilty to act demands a vital working through and a working out beyond the trap of compulsive consumption of news objects.

Speaking in person on The Future Life of Trauma affords Yusin the opportunity to work through this challenging question of a transformation in the concepts of trauma and event. She works by situating a ground-breaking encounter between psychoanalytic and postcolonial discourse. Proceeding from the formation of psychical life as presented in the Freudian metapsychology, she renews her thought of the relation between temporality and traumatized subjectivity, demonstrating how the psychic event, as a traumatic event, is a material reality that alters the character of the structure of repetition.

By examining the role of borders in the history of the 1947 partition of British India and the politics of memorialization in postgenocide Rwanda, Yusin raises the implications of trauma as a material event in contemporary nation-formation, sovereignty, and geopolitical violence. In showing how the form of the psyche changes in the encounter, she presents a challenge to the category of difference in the condition of identity, resulting in the formation of a concept of life that elaborates a new relation to destruction and finitude by asserting its power to transform itself.