Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Fichamento - CARUTH. After The End
Fichamento - CARUTH. After The End
In: NADAL,
Marita (Editor); CALVO, Mónica (Editor). Trauma in Contemporary Literature:
Narrative and Representation. New York: Taylor Francis Group, 2014
A escrita da história dos séculos XX e XXI na chave dos conceitos de cinzas e de mal de
arquivo:
“This history is not, as one might traditionally expect, constituted by events that create their
own remenbrance, but by events that destroy their own remembrance”
“As a thinking of archive, psychoanalysis thus becomes witness to the strange notion of a
memory that erases”
“Traumatic mempory thus totters between remembrance ande rasure, producing a history
that is, in its very events, a kind of inscription of the past; but also a history constituted by the
erasure of its traces”
Archive fever: “the way memory can make history precisely by erasing it”. “Burning
desire for memory and the history of its burning up”. Archive fever enacts “a kind of
return and repetition, a memory and its erasure”
“Memory thus originates as its own deferral and also as its later repetition, a fundamental
deferral and repetition at the beginning”.
“the possibility of history constituted by the erasure of its own witness; a history that burns
Away the very possibility of conceiving memory, that leaves the future, itself, in ashes”.
“The figure of the destruction of Pompeii is not precisely, or not simply, a figure of burial,
since the peculiarity of this ‘singular historical event’ is that the destruction occurred not
simply through burial but through burial by ashes, which is also a burning-up, a destruction
that does not simply preserve but may also totally incinarate the bodies it buries”.
“The figure of ash itself is indeed, not only the substractum for a writing that has taken
place, but the figure of a writing that is burning up”.
“the language of trauma is the language of this absolute erasure, not imaginable in the past or
presente but always as something missed, and about to return, a possibility, always, of a
trauma in the future”.
“The traumatic event is its future, is its repetition, as something other than what one could
ever recognise”
A autora questiona-se: “to burn with archive fever: does it mean to bear witness, or to
be ash?”. Poderia ser os dois? Testemunha-se a partir do traço da memória traumática
na metáfora da cinza, sinal de uma destruição pelo fogo que teve lugar mas que ainda
está em curso, clamando pelo testemunho cuja possibilidade está sempre sob ameaça
de destruição.
A autora fala, então, de uma linguagem da cinza, como linguagem do trauma, que
seria, talvez, uma nova forma de linguagem com os traumas do século XX,
especialmente a partir do meio do século XX. Mas por que essa linguagem é “nova”,
sendo que a humanidade já testemunhava seus traumas séculos antes, como os
sujeitos vítimas da escravidão cujo trauma foi transferido às gerações seguintes,
cravando sua marca na vulnerabilidade social à qual a população descendente de
escravizados foi empurrada? A visibilidade dessa linguagem, descrita como “nova”, foi
garantida pelo surgimento da psicanálise, pelas catástrofes das guerras que vitimaram
europeus brancos, pelo boom de escritas testemunhais que surgiu na europa, ou seja,
a visibilidade do trauma e da linguagem que o traduz é eurocêntrica.
“The language of ashes, which is perharps a new kind of language that is, for us today,
marked historically, at least since the middle of the twentieth century.