The Traumatized Subject

RUDOLF BERNET
Husserl-Archief te Leuven

To the memory of Andr Schuwer

Already for more than a century, the subject has recurrently died and come to
life again upon the stage of philosophical thought. Even if it is incontestable that in the history of these reversals, the reborn subject is never quite the
same as the one that disappeared, this survival gives cause for thought. Might
it not, for example, lead us to think that the life of the subject consists precisely in surviving the dramas that ceaselessly menace its existence? That the
subject, far from being sheltered from the threat of its disappearance, only
experiences the need to aYrm its existence in undergoing the ordeal of its
possible disappearance? By this disappearance we do not mean physical
death, but the abolition of subjective identity by an event that is nonappropriable and, in consequence, traumatizing. I am a subject to the degree and so
long as I resist my fading away. Being a subject would thus be a matter of
being a subject by virtue of losses of identity and subsequent attempts to reconstitute a subjectivity, this subjectivity being henceforth no more than a
vulnerable subjectivity, a wounded cogito. To say that this subjects rhythm of
life is composed of the succession and perhaps even the simultaneity of events
in which its identity is shattered and recomposed, does not, however, by any
means demand that there subsists in the heart of the subject a hard core that
remains sheltered from these ordeals. On the contrary, the sorrowful plot of
160

THE TRAUMATIZED SUBJECT

161

this existence opposes with all its tragic weight any attempt to return to a
mythical conception of a substantial subject. On the other hand, the recourse
to the notion of a subject that would be nothing other than a speaker who
says I is just as problematic. For it is not sure that the subject that is transformed by surviving the ordeals that menace its identity can speak of them
and speak of them in the rst person. The subject which resurfaces after being plunged into the ordeal of a nonrepresentable says at most: Here I am,
in spite of myself.
As one knows, this is the way in which Levinas speaks of the subject, at least
in Otherwise than Being,1 and indeed the thought of Levinas will be a constant inspiration for us throughout our re ections on the dramatic life of the
subject. But why then choose to begin with the event of a trauma menacing
the identity of the subject and not directly, as Levinas does, with the situation
of an appeal emanating from another and demanding a response on the part
of the subject called upon or spoken to? There are at least two good reasons
for this. First, we do not consider that all events that destroy a certain mode
of the life of the subject or a certain idea it has of itself are necessarily attributable to the sudden appearance of another person. Second, we do not wish
to prejudge the fact that the subject that survives what Levinas calls the ruin
of representation is necessarily a subject whose entire existence would be
determined by ethics.
For these reasons, in the following re ections we will draw inspiration as
much from the psychoanalytic conception of trauma as from Levinas. A brief
survey of some texts of Freud and Lacan will allow us to better understand
how something I cannot form the least representation of can nevertheless concern me to the point that my psychical survival depends on my capacity
to respond to or escape from it. From his earliest texts on, Freud draws our
attention to the quite particular temporality that characterizes the traumatic
event. In distinguishing the time of aVection from the time of representation,
and in conceiving of repression and, more precisely, of the symptom as a representation of that which the subject cannot represent, Freud provides a
valuable complement to what Levinas says about the appearance of the other
as trace and the subjective response that transcends the regime of intentional
consciousness. But it is nally the Lacanian analysis of trauma as the irruption of a real deprived of imaginary or symbolic representation in the life
of the subject that allows us to pose the essential questions to Levinas.
Most notably the question: how can the face of the other, which manifests itself beyond representation and all other subjective forms, command
me without destroying me? How can it appeal to me for a response that
does not take the form of a total self-renunciation? Further: what is it in the
subject which allows him to recover from the traumatic annihilation of its narcissism? More precisely, how can trauma give birth to a subject that transcends

162

RUDOLF BERNET

its own narcissism? On what does the subject rely in order to survive and to
respond when the representation it has of itself collapses and when it lacks the
words to describe what it has just undergone?
Drawing freely on Levinas, Freud, and Lacan at each step along our way,
we will dwell successively on the questions: What is a traumatizing event? What
is a traumatized or traumatizable subject? And nally, what does it really means
for a subject to confront trauma?

1. The event of trauma

Even if psychoanalysis speaks more abundantly of trauma than does Levinas,
it is striking to note that all attempts to summarize the psychoanalytic conception of psychic trauma recall the language to which Levinas has accustomed us. In eVect, trauma in the psychoanalytic sense is the event of the
encounter of the subject with something totally foreign that nevertheless irremediably concerns it and does so right in its most intimate identity. It is
not surprising that the domain of infantile sexuality provides Freud with his
best illustrations. 2 The standard example of a traumatic event is the sexual
seduction of a young child by an adult. Leaving aside the more technical
questions concerning the real or purely fantasmatic character of this event, as
well as its role in triggering a hysterical neurosis (which Freud, in the beginning, did not hesitate to call a traumatic neurosis), we will concentrate at rst
on the analysis of the temporality of this event. The least one can say is that
such a seduction is untimely and premature, since it is addressed to someone who is as yet unable to say yes or no. If there are good reasons for
thinking that the subject is properly someone who can say yes or no, then
it has to be accepted that the one who undergoes this traumatic seduction
is not yet in relation to this event in any case a subject. But neither is
it nothing, since this event touches the subject without it knowing how to
speak of it and since it leaves indelible traces. Trace is really the right word
here, since it is a matter of something that refers to an event, the absence
of which is so deep as to have never been truly present for the child. Speaking of this trace, Freud quite rightly says that it is a matter of something
that one can neither remember nor forget, a matter of a forever gaping wound
or of a foreign body stuck in the esh of the victim. He also says, but this
interests us less, that it is a matter of a sexual excitation that is contaminated
by the impossibility of nding an appropriate abreaction and is therefore
transformed into anxiety.
The traumatizing event is thus the shock of the encounter with something
so strange and inconceivable that it neutralizes the subject. For Freud, it
follows from this that the subject is unable to nd within itself the resources to
get over this mute and powerless suVering in icted by the trauma. As the

THE TRAUMATIZED SUBJECT

163

celebrated case of Emma3 shows, the combination of another, second event

is required to draw the subject out of its torpor and to allow the trace of the
rst event to take up a place within the history of the subject. It is a relatively harmless scene in the life of the adolescent Emma that is projected
upon the trace of the sexual abuse to which she had been submitted as a
child. The association between the two scenes is realized through the mediation of equally insigni cant elements, common to the two events: the mocking laughter of the shop-assistants of a department store as they stare at her
clothing superimposes itself upon the coarse laughter of the grocer as he
gropes the young girl sexually through the material of her dress. Even reduced
to its most elementary framework, this case-history is rich in philosophical
lessons. In the rst place, regarding its temporal structure, it is not simply a
question of a premature seduction, but also of a signi cation that only attaches
itself to the rst experience retroactively (nachtrglich) at the time of the later
event. It is only at that moment in which the rst event a shock without
signi cation for the subject is associated with the second a signi cation
without shock that the subject comes onto the scene. It is thus an a-subjective association between two events running against the course of time that
allows a primitive shock to become present for the subject when it is already
long past. It is the force of an anonymous association and the temporality
of a retroaction unforeseeable for the subject that constitutes a subject by
confronting it with an experience it can only recognize as its own by misrecognizing it.
In eVect, in Freuds story, when Emma nds herself confronted with the
deferred recognition of the signi cation (Freud says: of the representation
[Vorstellung ]) of the rst event and the confusion this had sown within her, the
only thing she can do is repress it. Once again, in this repression one
signi cation is substituted for another, with the consequence that the anxiety provoked by the discovery of the sexual signi cation of the rst event
now attaches itself to the circumstances of the second, rendering the adult
Emma incapable of shopping alone. This phobic symptom, the signi cance
of which escapes the adult Emma just as completely as the signi cation of
the rst had escaped her as a child, is, however unlike the two preceding
events an event produced by the subjects unconscious. In eVect, the subject
that emerges from the fortuitous association between two events, by being confronted with the unbearable signi cation of its primitive experience, takes a
position and decides to repress it, something that will not fail to provoke the
new event of a neurotic symptom. Otherwise said, barely has the subject been
placed in the presence of the trauma as being its own than it denies itself
as a traumatized subject and exchanges the experience of the trauma for
a symptom. Aside from this brief moment of activity and lucidity that is
nonetheless inseparable from the instant of repression and misrecognition, the

164

RUDOLF BERNET

traumatized subject nds itself given over to a foreign alterity that concerns
it most closely and that monopolizes its life: at rst under the form of the
mute and insistent trace of the rst shock and then under the form of the inhibition of its entire adult life by an incomprehensible symptom.
One could say that Lacan was able, in a few pages, to draw out the essential
lessons of this Freudian analysis of trauma.4 Recalling the two constitutive
moments of trauma, where we have employed the term trace, he speaks of the
Prgung of the originating traumatic event (S1, 190). He also makes a distinction between the unconscious, non-repressed character of the rst moment
and the maintenance of the repression, despite the repressed becoming conscious (E, 386) characteristic of the second. As concerns the temporality of the
trauma, he is not content to refer to the Freudian doctrine of retroaction (S1,
191) but speci es that the event of the superimposition of the two moments
is a matter of an extratemporal character . . . of the remembering (E,
391). On closer inspection, however, Lacan fundamentally alters the terms
of the problem by declaring that the trauma does not manifest itself under
the form of a neurotic symptom but of a hallucination. His demonstration
takes its inspiration from another case of Freuds, the wolf-man. Brie y
put, the wolf-man suVers from what one might call a trauma of castration,
one that manifests itself at a particular moment in his history by the blinding
hallucination of his severed little nger hanging only by the skin.5 An hallucination is distinguished from a symptom by the fact that it is a matter not
of a phenomenon the signi cation of which escapes the subject, but quite to
the contrary, of a signi ed of which the foreignness (E, 390) for the subject is
such that it evades all signi cation. In the terminology of Lacan, that which is
thus excluded or foreclosed from the domain of signi cation ( imaginary or
symbolic) is called the real. It is necessary therefore to rigorously distinguish between hallucination and symptom, foreclosure and repression, symbolic
abolition constitutive of the real and the return of the repressed in the
symptom (E, 386).
Overlooking the technical details once more, we can see that these considerations of Lacans are borne by the same concern as ours: to understand
how something totally foreign can give itself, or better, impose itself upon a
subject and how this subject can relate itself to this impossibility. Lacan
responds by referring to the example of the severed nger: the content of the
hallucination, so massively symbolic, owes its appearance in the real to the
fact that it does not exist for the subject (E, 392). In contrast to the psychotic foreclosure, the trauma thus does not eVace all distinction between the
signi ed and the signi er, between the symbolic and the real; but like a
well-aimed bullet, it makes a hole in the symbolic fabric of which the history
of the subject is composed. The shock that results when the two moments
of the trauma come together has the strange property of blinding only the

THE TRAUMATIZED SUBJECT

165

traumatized subject and of opening the eyes of all external observers. The
wolf-man is without a doubt the only one for whom the content of his hallucination is stripped of all signi cation and thus rebels against all speech. Only
the wolf-man sees what no one else sees, but he is also the only one not to
understand what he sees.
Commentators often question the diVerence between the Freudian and
Lacanian conceptions of trauma, and their discussion chie y focuses on the
diVerence between repression and foreclosure and thus the diVerence between symptom and hallucination. We should not forget, however, that
Freud and Lacan both found themselves faced with the same problem, one
of an unquestionably philosophical or, to be more precise, phenomenological nature. This problem can be expressed as follows: how can a subject
apprehend the appearance of something totally inconceivable that, however, concerns it irremediably? Freud replies: by misrecognizing it in repression. Lacan says: by fading away before the monstrous manifestation of a
signi ed without signi cance, that is to say, of a totally isolated phenomenon deprived of all context or horizon. One thus passes from a Freudian
subject that substitutes a possible representation for an impossible one to
a Lacanian subject that is aVected or taken aback [atterr ] by a total nonsense, by a hole that it can only detect by the burning sensation and the
charred esh around its edges. In Freud, the subject seems to fool the appearance of the trauma by recognizing it in misrecognition, while in Lacan it is
the phenomenon that triumphs over the subject. This makes a big diVerence; one goes from the denial of the phenomenon by the subject to the negation pure and simple of the subject by the phenomenon.
Before examining more precisely what it is in the subject that predisposes
it to trauma, we will rst turn to the description of the traumatic event in
Levinas. It is astonishing to note how much the Levinasian analysis of the traumatically commanded subject (OB, 87) agrees with psychoanalytic conceptions of trauma. The appeal of the other that assigns me before I designate
him (OB, 87) is in eVect a requisition of the subject that puts it in the
accusative form . . . and not being able to slip away (OB, 85). In insisting
upon the fact that this other is an unknown stranger or a Face without
form,6 a trace of what could not enter (OB, 91), a given unassumable like a
persecution (OB, 87), a phenomenon without horizon or a signi cation without a context (OB, 91), Levinas comes very close to the Lacanian notion of the
real as that which remains beyond signi cation. Levinas also says that
the appeal of the other that is without precondition on the side of the
one to which it is addressed poses a formal denial to all representation or
knowledge by the intentional consciousness of the subject. This appeal is a
phenomenon that, in the framework of the symbolic codes that humans
have in common, does not make any sense. Senseless in the eyes of the

166

RUDOLF BERNET

world, this appeal like that which we have called the shock of the trauma
is a phenomenon that addresses itself to a unique subject. Levinas also walks
in the steps of the psychoanalytic understanding of the trauma when he
describes the temporality that characterizes the way in which the subject is
taken hostage by the other. If the other commands me before I have had
time to face [him] (OB, 88), then this encounter can only receive a meaning and a response retroactively, which leads Levinas to say I am . . .
already late and guilty for being late (OB, 87). Before taking account of the
unbearable misery of the other and trying to respond to it, there is always
already the other and his command come as though from an immemorial
past, which was never present (OB, 88). There is here more than a passing
similarity with the Freudian conception of the temporality of the trauma:
not only, according to Levinas, does the original delay correspond to the
Freudian retroaction, but one is also struck by the precision with which the
Levinasian notion of the immemorial past characterizes the rst moment
of the trauma according to Freud, of which we have said that the subject can
neither remember nor forget it.
Having ( brie y) demonstrated the great aYnity between the Levinasian
and psychoanalytic theories of trauma, it is nevertheless necessary to admit
that with Levinas our re ections have taken a new turn. This shift concerns,
in the rst place, the strange alterity of that which traumatizes the subject.
In Freud it was a matter of an unbearable representation of a personal experience, this representation resulting from the telescoping of two events. In
Lacan it was a matter of the event of encountering a gaping absence, a hole,
a missing piece in the puzzle of the subjects own life. In Levinas, on the contrary, it is always a matter of the alterity of the other person and of what is,
in the rst place, unbearable for him and not for me, of what his life lacks
and not mine. In other words, one goes from the alterity of a subjective representation, or of a hallucinated object blinding in its overwhelming force,
to the alterity of another person, and of another person who is deprived of
everything, who is naked and wretched. This radical change brings with it
at least two consequences the importance of which we will weigh. The rst
has to do with the appearance of this stranger that traumatizes me and the
second with the relation that I can eventually establish with him and with
the response I can make to him.
Of this stranger who imposes himself upon me with a poverty that cuts
short all my representations and ne words, whose person is inconsistent
and whose presence is failing, Levinas goes so far as to say: He does not
appear (OB, 86). This means that he touches me in my ethical sensibility
before being inserted into the horizon of my understanding, that there is no
illumination that precedes his arrival and so nothing upon which his appeal

THE TRAUMATIZED SUBJECT

167

might rest so as to be understood by me: The face of the neighbor . . .

escapes representation; it is the very collapse of phenomenality . . ., nonphenomenon because less than a phenomenon (OB, 88). The other passes
by and his passage is like a blinking light about to go out (OB, 193 n. 31).
Levinas also speaks of the skin of the face and underlines its derisory
protection, its folds, and its nudity: skin with wrinkles, which are a trace
of it (OB, 88); poverty exposed in the formless, and withdrawn from
this absolute exposure in a shame for its poverty (OB, 90). Nevertheless, as
Levinas reiterates throughout his work, the poverty of this dying presence goes
together with a dimension of height. It goes without saying, however,
that this height is not the sign of any personal wealth; it cannot belong to
the other in itself as its ontological property. This height is something that,
in the wretched presence of the neighbor, commands me, that only exists
for me and not for the other, and thus refers me beyond the aged skin of
the other. This is why Levinas says quite explicitly that the face of the other
is not only a trace, but a trace of the in nite, of an in nity that withdraws
to the degree that I come closer to it: in nity as an in nition of the in nite,
as glory (OB, 93). For Levinas, the wretchedness of the Other is thus not
opposed to its glory, and the supplication of the beggar can be a commandment as intransigent as the categorical imperative of Kant.
This nonappearance or apparition (apparoir) of the Other that commands
by supplication remains, however, a traumatic experience in that I can never
rid myself of it, and no response on my part can silence the appeal of the
neighbor. I can at most cross the path of, but not encounter, espouse, or
satisfy, the obsessive demand of the other. I can never exempt myself from
his commandment by raising myself up to his height: despite our being brothers, we will never be equals. Thus there is trauma because there is the experience of the impossibility of a relation, that is to say, a failure of all attempts
to establish a relation of reciprocity with the other: [ T ]he subject aVected
by the Other cannot think the aVection is reciprocal, for he is still obsessed
with the very obsession he could exercise over him that obsesses him (OB,
84). The response that the subject can make to such a trauma in icted by an
other can consist neither of a defensive ruse as in Freud, nor of an irresponsible fading away as in Lacan: it allows me neither to substitute a more acceptable demand for a measureless one, nor to put forward the impossibility of
an adequate response in order to not respond or to transfer my responsibility to someone supposedly more quali ed. Responding without disposing of
the power to respond, facing up to a relation without reciprocity, requires a
subject whose ipseity consists in the sacri ce of a self closed in upon itself:
it is a self despite itself, in incarnation, where it is the very possibility of
oVering, suVering and trauma (OB, 50). We are going to see that Levinas

168

RUDOLF BERNET

will follow the trace of this self haunted by the other, right into the midst
of the subjects enjoyment, despite its suYciency, its involution, or its
coiling upon itself (TI, 118).

2. The traumatized and traumatizable subject

It is evident that the trauma being a phenomenon that through its obsessive
strangeness does violence to the subject cannot come about without a subject. But may one also claim that there is no trauma-free subject, that is
to say, that every subject is, in essence, traumatizable? It must be admitted that our whole approach invites us to take this position, since one cannot
claim to take advantage of the traumatic event for a new comprehension of
the subject, without at the same time aYrming that all subjects can become
acquainted with traumatic experiences. We must therefore show in what way
the accident of a traumatic event reveals better than any other event the
essence of the subject. This requires a closer examination of what a traumatized subject is or, more precisely, how something belonging to the subject
predisposes it to be subjected to a threat or persecution by a foreign event.
Beginning our inquiry once more with Freud, and assuming it is established
that for Freud the essence of the subject or ego [Ich] is of a narcissistic
order, it would seem that nothing in this subject predisposes it to trauma. Is
not the subject presented by Freud through the image of a vesicle [Blschen],
that is to say, through the image of an organism that is autonomous and
entirely enveloped by a membrane that protects it against all the attacks
directed against it from the outside world?7 Passing from image to concept,
we might say that what serves to protect the subject against undesirable stimulation (Reizschutz: BPP, 29) are its representations and, above all, the narcissistic image that it maintains of itself. It is therefore necessary to conclude that
the violence of the trauma is due to its nonrepresentable character, as well
as to the impossibility in which the subject nds itself of binding the tension that this excitation has provoked in it. But is the protection provided
by these representations adequate to the danger the subject runs? Is the subject surrounded by its membrane guarded against every traumatic intrusion?
From the moment that Freud admits that the vesicle is not a windowless
monad, but that it maintains exchanges with the exterior world by means
of certain openings in its skin, nothing protects it from the existing openings
being overwhelmed, and nothing protects it against the opening of a breach in
its defensive system. 8 A fortress besieged by excessively strong or untoward
impressions, traumatized by shock and fright [Schrecken] (BPP, 31), the
subject is reduced to cauterizing the breaches by counter-cathexes [Gegenbesetzungen] that have the consequence of weakening it on another front.
Ferenczi was among the rst to distance himself from this warlike present-

THE TRAUMATIZED SUBJECT

169

ation of the trauma, insisting on the fact that separation is an event every bit
as traumatic as the violent intrusion of the nonrepresentable. This remark,
which is not without consequences for the understanding of hysterical neurosis, interests us rst of all because it emphasizes that the subjects narcissism
goes together with its dependence vis--vis the loved object something
Freud himself was far from ignoring. The subject is thus doubly traumatizable,
and one cannot see how it could protect itself against the trauma in icted by
the loss of a loved one other than by never loving anyone! Thus one should
not be deluded: the barricades with which the subject surrounds itself bear
witness less to its autarchy than to its vulnerability! One cannot therefore
hold to the Freudian scenario in which a traumatic attack takes by surprise an
original state of protection, which the subject attempts to restore, for better
or worse, with defense mechanisms. Cannot we say that nothing renders us
more vulnerable than our narcissistic representations, even though they are
our best weapons against the accidents of life? This is explained by the fact
that narcissism, far from being the original state of the subject, is a constituted
narcissism and is constituted as a protection against the traumatic threat of
self-fragmentation. Even if it is important not to confuse these diVerent forms
of trauma fragmentation, separation, and intrusion it nonetheless remains
that in every case the trauma attacks a traumatizable subject. Traumatizable
does not mean that the subject is waiting to be traumatized, nor that it anticipates the manner in which it will be traumatized (which would be contrary to the nature of a trauma). Rather, it means that the subject feels fragile
and dependent and that it lives haunted by the possibility of its own disappearance.
Still remaining is the question of whether what we have said of the traumatizable subject authorizes us to speak of a subject of the trauma. We have
seen that the opinions of Freud and Lacan diverge on this point. For Freud,
the trauma is an unbearable representation that aVects a subject who attempts to rid itself of the trauma through repression. For Lacan, the trauma,
being of the order of the real, cannot encounter a subject, since the latter
only exists with the support of the order of imaginary representations and
symbolic signi cations. It is therefore not the subject who forecloses the
traumatic signi ed, but on the contrary, this signi ed that, through its manner of being and appearing, excludes itself from the signifying order of the
subject. But it is still the case that what is traumatic for one subject is not
necessarily so for another and that the traumatic force of the event comes
from its colliding with a particular symbolic order, that is to say, an order
stamped with the seal of unique subjectivity. Thus even for Lacan the trauma
addresses itself to a subject, even if the subject and the trauma situate themselves in another place and in another time that excludes every relation of
reciprocity and exchange. The trauma is traumatic for the subject, speci cally

170

RUDOLF BERNET

because it is at once proper and improper, because it touches the subject in its
most singular intimacy all the while remaining a foreign body. The traumatized
subject is thus submitted to an excessive tension, because it remains torn between two contradictory imperatives: appropriating the foreign to itself and
rejecting it in order to preserve that which is its own. Otherwise stated, there
is no trauma without the powerless temptation of an impossible appropriation, and this appropriation can only take the form of an expulsion or of a foreclosure. If we now pass from the traumatized subject to the traumatizable
subject, it is thus a question of thinking the latter in such a manner that what
exists in the subject prior to the trauma has no part in the event of the trauma. It is thus a matter of not confusing the origin of the trauma, which is
outside the subject, with the fact that this traumatic event generally produces itself for a subject that is already there. If the event is exterior and
foreign to the subject, then the subject who precedes it cannot be its condition
of possibility.
Once again psychoanalysis leads us to Levinas who ceaselessly ponders the
diYculty of thinking the appeal of the other as addressed to me in such a
manner that I have no part in this appeal, and in such a way that the me
existing prior to the call is not the same as the self who responds to it. But
Levinas has also understood that this me and this self may not be
completely separated, that a deaf and autistic me is unable to hear this exterior appeal that transforms it into a self for the other. It is therefore necessary that there be a fault in this me that allows the voice of the other to
resound in me without losing its alterity and its power of transformation.
Levinas wants to show that such an originary fault that turns all subjects
into a traumatizable or vulnerable subject is already at work in enjoyment
( jouissance).
The Levinasian analysis of enjoyment, developed at length in Totality and Innity
and resumed in Otherwise than Being, principally undertakes to show that
the intimacy of enjoyment, far from being enclosed upon itself, remains dependent upon an alterity that is exterior to it. Enjoyment is constituted at once
of sovereignty and submission (TI, 164), of coiling up upon oneself and
dependence with respect to the other, of autoaVection and transcendence.
The formula that best summarizes this originary duplicity of pleasurable sensibility is living from (vivre de) (TI, 110, et passim). To live, that is to enjoy: Life enjoys its very life, as though it nourishes itself with life as much
as with what it makes live, or more exactly, as though nourishing had this
twofold reference.9 The reference is twofold precisely because life, also needing nourishment from without in order to survive, does not exclusively
feed upon itself. The from in living from serves as a reminder of this dependence
of enjoyment in relation to what sustains it from without, which enjoyment
cannot give to itself nor totally incorporate. This transcendence in which enjoyment or the autoaVection of life nds support is called, in Levinasian terms,

THE TRAUMATIZED SUBJECT

171

the elements or more commonly, the elemental (TI, 13031). Thus air is
the element that we need to breathe; and if to breathe is to aYrm our love
of life in the enjoyment of life, then the achievement of this enjoyment is dependent upon air. This goes as well for the enjoyment of a walk or of simply
standing still, which relies upon the element of the earth,10 as well as for the
enjoyment of drinking, which is only realized with the complicity of abundant
and pure water, etc.
The relation of enjoyment to the elemental is ambivalent, since, on the one
hand, the element must lend itself to enjoyment and because, on the other
hand, it can only guarantee enjoyment by opposing a certain resistance to it.
The element must be amenable to the life of the subject in order to allow
enjoyment, but if the element lets itself be absorbed by enjoyment, enjoyment would come to want and to die. Despite its aYnity with subjective
enjoyment, the element itself therefore remains exterior, and it is from the outside that it supports (or threatens) enjoyment. The element is the environment in which enjoyment bathes, but it is also that which being without
form or face, and coming to us from nowhere never lets itself be
contained by enjoyment (TI, 13132). The elemental therefore designates an
alterity and an exteriority within the immanence or sensible re exivity of
enjoyment, even if it remains a matter of an anonymous transcendence (TI,
132). The elemental is therefore related to that other formlessness that Levinas calls there is (TI, 142), and of which he says that it haunts our sleepless nights.
In what way is this living being who enjoys her life in complicity with the
elements a traumatizable subject? Levinas answers this question by speaking
simultaneously of worry (inquitude) and disturbance (drangement ). The living
being worries about her enjoyment because she is preoccupied with its duration and because, as Levinas again says, she has the concern for the morrow (TI, 144). This concern for the morrow stems from the fact that she
knows that her enjoyment depends upon the elements, which could come to
be lacking or which could suddenly revolt against their enslavement to her
enjoyment. The gardener fears ood as much as drought. Levinas analyzes
at length in Totality and Innity how work, ownership, and dwelling are supposed to protect our life and our enjoyment of living against the untamed
and unpredictable nature of the elements. These descriptions con rm what we
have already said concerning Freuds vesicle and the desperate attempts of
the subject to seal oV the breaches by means of counter-cathexes: the one
who protects himself feels vulnerable since he knows that no defense will
suYce to suppress the risk of being submerged by the force of exterior powers.
Just as all narcissism is vulnerable, all enjoyment is perilous. One never ghts
on a level eld with the elements or with any other form of foreign alterity
upon which our life and enjoyment depend.
It is evident that our calm self-indulgence is more thoroughly disturbed by

172

RUDOLF BERNET

others than it is troubled by worry for the morrow. Our enjoyment is threatened therefore not only by the anonymous exteriority of the elemental, but
equally and even more so by the personal exteriority of the face of the other.
As has already been clearly shown by Sartres analysis of the gaze, it is enough
that others appear as a subject, and not as an object of consumption, for my
solitary enjoyment to collapse. When Levinas states that the unexpected
appearance of others makes me ashamed of my enjoyment, he is undoubtedly inspired by Sartre. But at the same time he radically separates himself
from Sartre in his manner of viewing the reasons for this shame and the
correct manner in which to respond to it. For Levinas, my shame under the
gaze of the other is due not to her dominant position, but on the contrary, to
her insubstantiality and her misery. My enjoyment is vulnerable because it
is exposed to the risk of being disturbed or interrupted by the event of meeting with the suVering of the other. For a subject in the midst of enjoyment, such a meeting is equivalent to a trauma, one which Levinas does not
hesitate to paint in the most dramatic of colors, speaking of the bread torn
from my mouth, of hemorrhage, etc.
This analysis of the manner in which my enjoyment is unsettled by the
elements and disturbed by others leads us back to our old questions concerning the relation between the subject and trauma. In the light of the above, we
have thus to ask ourselves if there exists a subject that preexists the traumatic
encounter with the other, if the experience of the anonymous alterity of the
elements precedes the interruption of enjoyment by the suVering of the other,
and if the one who enjoys ignores that suVering (and vice versa)? Certainly,
the response provided by Otherwise than Being on all these points is not entirely
the same as that put forward in Totality and Innity. Increasingly, Levinas seems
to have taken account of the danger of assimilating that which is pre-given
with a condition of possibility, with a foundation, or with an origin. In Otherwise
than Being, Levinas quite explicitly departs from any linear presentation of the
relation between enjoyment and trauma, between the anonymous alterity of
the elemental and the personal alterity of others, and between enjoyment and
suVering as well. One does not rst have to enjoy in all innocence in order to
be able subsequently to be traumatized; the alterity of the elemental need not rst
open a breach in an enjoyment closed in upon itself in order that subsequently
the traumatizing appeal of the other should ood in; the one enjoying himself
need not rst ignore suVering to be able subsequently to be traumatized by
the suVering traced in the face of the other. Rather, Levinas now says that
the one who enjoys, forgets momentarily the suVerings of others, that the
alterity of elements that feed my enjoyment has an original bond with the
alterity of the other who is deprived of the air that I breathe, that my enjoyment is not without suVering, and that the suVering of the other can only
be felt by one who knows enjoyment (OB, 93).

THE TRAUMATIZED SUBJECT

173

Continuing to abstract from the properly ethical signi cation of these assertions of Levinas, we can draw from them some valuable lessons concerning
the nature of the traumatizable subject. The rst lesson is a simple con rmation of that which we have already said many times, namely, that
nothing can prepare a subject for the experience of a traumatic event. The
second lesson is that it would be illusory to want to found the possibility of
the encounter with the alterity of others upon a prerequisite experience of
the alterity of elements, since the latter is not without reference to the former. The legitimate concern to distinguish between diVerent forms of alterity
should not blind us to the fact that the other person is the rst other and that
as such he cannot nd its foundation in an alterity unto oneself. It is true
that the subject can be traumatized by the unbearable strangeness of an episode in its life, and it is no less true that it can be traumatized by the unleashing of the forces of nature that it believed it held under its domination so as
to better enjoy them. But this does not take away from the impossibility of
ignoring that which in each of those events refers to the other.
The third lesson lavished on us by Levinas is that the most profound traumas
strike the subject in its bodily sensibility and not in its representations or
cognitions. We should not, therefore, be mistaken; Levinas does not say that
we remain exposed to the encounter with a strange and traumatic alterity even
in enjoyment, but rather that we are exposed to it most of all in enjoyment. One
who does not know enjoyment remains indiVerent to the appeal coming from
the suVering of the other and would thus be spared the experience of the traumatic command: Without egoism complacent in itself suVering would
not have any sense (OB, 73). Once again it proves to be the case that the
strange alterity that traumatizes us strikes us in our most singular intimacy
and not in the generality (of representation or signi cation) that we have in
common with others. In the perspective of Levinas, this means that the encounter
with the suVering of the other only traumatizes us to the extent that it touches
us in the singularity of our enjoyment and that we feel in our esh something that others do not. Thus our response cannot take any other form than
the sacri ce of our enjoyment in favor of the welfare of the other:
The subjectivity of sensibility, taken as incarnation, is an abandon without return, maternity, a body suVering for another, the body as passivity
and renouncement, a pure undergoing. There is indeed an insurmountable
ambiguity there: the incarnate ego, . . . can lose its signi cation, be aYrmated as an animal in its conatus and its joy. . . . But this ambiguity is the
condition of vulnerability itself . . .: it is in the measure that sensibility is
complacent in itself, . . . that in its benevolence for the other it remains for the
other, despite itself, non-act, signi cation for the other and not for itself. (OB, 7980;
emphasis added)
For Levinas the subject is thus traumatizable in its bodily sensibility, this

174

RUDOLF BERNET

sensibility is vulnerability, enjoyment and suVering (OB, 63), and this ambiguous vulnerability is an intimate exposure to the stranger in proximity and
maternity. This maternity is the state of a subject not only traumatizable
but already eVectively traumatized and inhabited by the other: gestation of
the other in the same. . . . the groaning of the wounded entrails by those it
will bear or has borne (OB, 75). The other that I carry within me is thus
no less strange to me than the other who makes demands on me from without; and in the plot (OB, 76) that binds us together, the distinction between
the interior and the exterior of my skin vanishes. My being for the other
is no less exterior to my being for myself than the appeal of the other. The
one for the other that abolishes the spatiality of proper places, separated
by the frontiers delimiting the within and the without, requires a new form
of space that Levinas terms proximity. This is not a state, a repose, but, a
restlessness, null-site (OB, 82). Without a xed point of attachment, the proximity that chains me to the tribulations of the other cannot give place to
the exchanges of a reciprocity (OB, 83): irreversibility this is the subjectness of the subject (OB, 84).
This space of proximity goes together with a temporality of diachrony, the
rhythm of which is scanned by the interruptions that lead to the shattering
of the continuous duration of subjective life into lapses of time that have
no common measure among them.11 Such a transformation of the time of consciousness by the traumatic event of the advent of the other is irreversible: all
eVorts at recuperation on the part of the traumatized subject are doomed to
failure. In fact, one cannot speak properly of the transformation of subjective
time, since there has never been either a subject or time before the traumatizing encounter with the other. But it would be just as problematic to
assert that the time of the subject comes after the traumatic emergence of the
appeal of the other, for in order for there to be a trauma, there has to have
been a traumatized subject. Subject and trauma, intentional consciousness
and the event of alterity, my enjoyment and the suVering of the other are thus
simultaneous. Simultaneous and not contemporaneous, for, existing side
by side (or back to back), they cannot join up into a common time. They can
neither exist together nor exist without each other.
This strange simultaneity between the subject and the trauma that makes
of every subject a traumatizable subject, even when it is not actually traumatized, is, however, not the last episode of the stormy relation between the
subject and the trauma. From the moment that one tries to think of the
trauma as an event, one cannot continue to think of the traumatized or
traumatizable subject as a stable state. Since the event of trauma consists precisely in overthrowing the state of the subject, the subject is summoned to react.
Trauma is not solely the event of a strange alterity that concerns the subject in
its most intimate singularity, it is also the event in which the other and the self

THE TRAUMATIZED SUBJECT

175

alternately occupy center stage. Given what we have said about the originary
delay of the self in relation to the other, the tardy response that I make to the
appeal of the other remains marked with the stamp of the traumatic character
of the appeal. The subject who responds to the trauma does not respond by
itself, its response proceeds from the trauma and thus remains dependent
upon the trauma, even if as a response it does not coincide with the event
of the trauma. This is why Levinas says that the one who responds to the
trauma is a subject despite itself.

3. Conclusion: The subject who responds to and resists the trauma

In speaking of the simultaneity between the subject and the trauma, we
wished to show that the subject does not preexist the trauma or, more precisely, that no subject immersed in an experience of autoaVection is ignorant
of the vulnerability of this enjoyment. We need not conclude from this that
this restlessness of the vulnerable or traumatizable subject in any way protects it against a future trauma. This restlessness is not the anticipation of a
well-de ned traumatic event nor, of course, the exact memory of a past trauma.
The traumatizable subject is thus comparable to that trace of which Freud
speaks and which is situated between two traumatic aVections: it awaits an
unforeseeable traumatic event that, retroactively, gives meaning to a rst event
that, while belonging to the past, has not passed. But this restlessness of the
subject that bears the trace of a past trauma and that remains exposed to a
trauma to come is, however, not yet the response of a subject given over to
a present traumatic event.
Even if it is unavoidable that the subject who actually undergoes a present traumatic event will be completely changed by it, it must nd in itself
the resources to face up to the trauma. Its survival depends on it. But
understanding that it must react and respond to the trauma is not yet understanding how to do this. We have already said that in any case this response
comes too late, that is to say, when the injury has already occurred. We have
also said that the trauma and the subject, despite their simultaneity, are too
dissimilar to be able to encounter each other on a common ground and yet
too entangled to be able to ignore each other. The encounter between the
present traumatic event and the subject who reacts to it is thus composed of a
double impossibility: the impossibility of responding and the impossibility of
not responding. On re ection, this is what Freud already tried to make us
understand by saying that the trauma demands an eVort of appropriation on
the part of the subject and that this appropriation is obliged to take the form
of a rejection or repression. The subject has to respond to the trauma because it concerns it and, properly speaking, concerns only it. This response
thus implies that the subject can appropriate the trauma to itself. But this

176

RUDOLF BERNET

appropriationbeing for the subject the appropriation of something basically

strange and thus impossible for it can only take place under the form of a
misrecognition. The response of the subject to the trauma can never be
straightforward; it is always double in that it immediately denies what it
asserts. This duplicity of the subject in the face of an actual traumatic event is
thus, as Lacan did not fail to underline in his Response to the commentary of
Jean Hyppolite on Freuds Verneinung (E, 38199), a function of denial or
denegation.
This amounts to saying that the response the subject makes to the trauma
will, at least in the rst moment, always have the value of a symptom. It is a
response that remains deeply aVected by the weight of that which its response attempts to get rid of. This symptomatic response is nevertheless, despite
its painful character, a rst step in the transition from wound to scar, since it
is the production of a new meaning. The symptom is not a second trauma.
Insofar as it is the aYrmation of meaning that concerns the subject and that
concerns him more than the other, the symptom is, on the contrary, narcissistic in origin. The response that the symptom makes to the trauma consists
in an autoaYrmation of the subject, without however the subjects being in
a position to recognize himself in it. This means, rst of all, that in the symptom the subject undergoes passively and painfully this autoaYrmation of
which, nevertheless, it is unknowingly the active principle. Secondly, this autoaYrmation of the subject in the symptom is the expression of an irremediably
wounded narcissism. Thirdly, this aYrmation of a meaning that escapes
the subject consumed by its symptom is at once an appeal to the other.
Only the other has the power to relieve the subjects symptom, as well as the
traumatic memory it incarnates, by restoring to the subject the message
contained in the symptom. In producing a symptom, the traumatized subject thus responds to the trauma by taking up the response of the other.
This other, however, does not respond in place of the subject but is, rather,
the one charged with delivering to the subject the meaning of its own symptomatic response.
It goes without saying that the terms of the problem are in nitely more
complicated when the trauma the subject faces is caused by a suVering that
aVects the other before aVecting itself. One can say that in such a case the
other traumatizes me with his own trauma. This has the consequence that I
can neither accuse him of being the source of my trauma nor ask him to relieve me of its traces. When I am traumatized by the suVering of the other,
responding to my trauma inescapably amounts to responding to the other. Any
psychic working through of my trauma does not relieve me of my responsibility to reply to the traumatic appeal of the other. One does not recover
from this trauma, for any response that has as its purpose freeing me from the
trauma caused by the other has become impossible. In eVect, I am unable to

THE TRAUMATIZED SUBJECT

177

reply to the trauma provoked by the appeal of the other either by turning
away from his woes or by taking them upon myself. At the very most, I
might respond by rejecting the suVerings of the other, for example, by making
him responsible for them and declaring myself innocent. Unfortunately, this
avenue is not only contrary to ethics, as Levinas constantly repeats, but futile
as well. Once traumatized in its most intimate and carnal sensibility by the
appeal coming from the other, the subject is powerless to eVace the trace of
this trauma with arguments that restore its good conscience.
Thus if one cannot withdraw from the obligation of responding to the other,
it must still be the case that through the trauma that he in icts upon me, I
can recognize him. But how can I recognize someone whose face, as Levinas
says, is without form, who appears as a nonphenomenon, who is a trace the
absence of which deepens to the same degree that I approach it? Does not
this other rather belong to the order of that real that, according to Lacan,
resists all relation to the subject? Can there be a recognition of the other and
of his suVering that comes about without any symbolic mediation by a
common language ? Is there an apparition of the other beyond the symbolic
or the imaginary without its being a hallucination? How can I recognize,
through the traumatic event of the confrontation with the incomprehensible suVering of the other, a personal command that addresses itself to me in
my singularity? Otherwise than Being is perhaps nothing other than a long meditation upon these questions. Without going into the details, it has to be kept
in mind that for Levinas the encounter with the other is all a matter of carnal
sensibility. In eVect, I recognize the suVering of the other without knowing
it, in a sensation that, far from bathing in the autoaVection of my enjoyment,
interrupts it. I feel the bread snatched from my mouth. It is thus the traumatic character of my sensation that authenticates its provenance from the
other; it is my trauma that realizes my recognition of the other as other.
Responding to my trauma is for Levinas eo ipso the same as responding to the
other; and all response to the others misery that is not rooted in my trauma
would be counted as inauthentic.
Responding to another who has to traumatize me with his commandment
in order to make me recognize him through my sensibility is not exactly what
one would call a free act. Not only is my engagement vis--vis the other
coerced, but there is no reason to believe that it will relieve my trauma.
Everything leads us to believe, to the contrary, that a response that has the
form of an in nite responsibility is an experience just as traumatic as the appeal of the other. That Levinas prefers to speak of election does not change
things: Chosen without assuming the choice! If this passivity . . . can be conceived to be on the hither side of freedom and non-freedom, it must have
the meaning of goodness despite itself. . . . Goodness is always older than choice,
the Good has already chosen and required the unique one (OB, 5657). But

178

RUDOLF BERNET

if the response is as traumatic as the appeal and if Levinas in his own way
agrees with the Freudian doctrine of double trauma, is it really certain that
this is a repetition of the same trauma? Is being struck without any warning
by the incomprehensible suVering of the other and giving oneself over to him
without retaining anything for oneself really undergoing the ordeal of the
same strange alterity? Is responding nothing other than exposing oneself to
a new trauma coming from the other? Levinas does not always resist the temptation of embracing such a view, for example, when he writes: Exposure as a
sensibility is . . . like an inversion of the conatus of esse, a having been oVered
without any holding back, a not nding any protection in any consistency or
identity of a state (OB, 75). But one also nds from the same pen this description of the plot (intrigue) that binds the one to the other, the other to me,
the response to the appeal: To be in contact is neither to invest the other and
annul his alterity, nor to suppress myself in the other (OB, 86).
How is it possible not to suppress myself in the other when this other
demands of me that I sacri ce my reserve or consistency? The response to
this question a response that will also serve as a conclusion to our re ections
on the relation of subject and trauma is very simple: one responds by giving
oneself over to the traumatic appeal despite oneself. It is true that for Levinas
this formula serves above all to underline that the response I make to the
appeal of the other is again dependent on the other and demands a renunciation of my egoism. But is not this despite oneself equally the expression of a
resistance of the self to the appeal, and is not this resistance precisely what
prevents the subject from suppressing itself in the other? The resistance of
the self, far from entailing the renunciation of the duty to respond, is, on the
contrary, what endows it with its value. A subject despite itself does not
coincide either with the traumatic event of the intrusion of the alien other nor
with the feeling of its own enjoyment. It is composed of the double impossibility of abandoning itself to the trauma without resistance and of saving itself
from the trauma. The traumatized subject recovers itself despite itself, for
this recovery of the self is coerced and not spontaneous, and it takes place in
the surpassing of the self. What endowment of the subject is attested to by its
being traumatized without being annihilated, its giving itself without suppressing itself, its recovering itself in between periods of total self-forgetting? What,
if not the humble sensation, the incarnate consciousness of the ordeal undergone that introduces that minimal distance upon which the survival of the
subject depends? Without this sensation, delayed slightly from the sensed, there
would be no narcissism or self-givenness, no overcoming of trauma or consent
to trauma out of love for the other, no appeal or response. In the nal analysis, nothing resists trauma if not the sensation of the traumatized subject.
The traumatized subject survives by feeling itself violated and vulnerable des-

THE TRAUMATIZED SUBJECT

179

pite itself. It has available to it no other protection against annihilation by

the trauma than this feeling of vulnerability that, we have seen, is located neither within nor without, but between various traumatic events.
Translated by Paul Crowe
Husserl Archive Leuven

NOTES
1. E. Levinas, Otherwise than Being or beyond Essence, trans. Alphonso Lingis, Martinus NijhoV, The
Hague, 1981. Hereafter cited as OB.
2. S. Freud, Project for a Scienti c Psychology (1895), in The Standard Edition of the Complete
Psychological Works, trans. and ed. James Strachey, Anna Freud, et al., (London: Hogarth Press
and the Institute for Psycho-Analysis, 1966), I:35356 (hereafter cited as SE followed by volume and page); The Mechanism of Hysterical Phenomena, in Studies on Hysteria (1895), in
SE 2:811; Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis (1917), in SE 16:27585 and 35877; Beyond the
Pleasure Principle (1920), in SE 18:2933.
3. Project for a Scienti c Psychology (op. cit.), 35356.
4. J. Lacan, Ecrits (Paris: Seuil, 1966), 38493: hereafter cited as E; The Seminar of Jacques Lacan.
Book I: Freuds Papers on Technique, 195354, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. John Forrester,
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 18891, hereafter cited as SI.
5. J. Lacan, E, 385V.; S. Freud, From the History of an Infantile Neurosis, in SE 17:1122 (the account
of the hallucination is to be found on page 85).
6. E. Levinas, Totality and Innity: an Essay on Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingis ( The Hague:
Martinus NijhoV, 1979), passim, hereafter cited as TI; OB, 87.
7. S. Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920). in SE 18:2433; hereafter cited as BPP.
8. Cf. R. Bernet, Encounter with the Stranger: Two Interpretations of the Vulnerability of the
Skin, in Phenomenology of Interculturality and Life-world, ed. Ernst Wolfgang Orth & Chan-Fai
Cheung (Freiburg/Mnchen: Alber, 1998), 89111.
9. Levinas, OB, 72. Cf. ibid., 81: Pleasure, that is, the complacency in itself of life loving itself.
Cf. also TI, 112: Life is love of life.
10. Cf. Levinas, TI, 164: To be a body is on one hand to stand [se tenir], to be master of oneself,
and, on the other hand, to stand on the earth, to be in the other, and thus to be encumbered
by ones body.
11. Cf. R. Bernet, Lautre du temps, in E. Levinas, Positivit et transcendance; suivi de Levinas et la
phnomnologie, sous la direction de J.-L. Marion (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2000),
14363.