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SUMMARY:The Now always comes After: Post-Traumatic Bodies and Creaturely S
 ubjectivities in Ilse Aichinger’s 'Der Gefesselte' - Alexandra Hills (UC
 L)
DTSTART:20120528T160000Z
DTEND:20120528T173000Z
UID:TALK37649@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Kaleen Gallagher
DESCRIPTION: In this paper\, I wish to discuss the idea of Nowness in rela
 tion to historical trauma with reference to Ilse Aichinger’s collection 
 of short stories\, Der Gefesselte (1948-1952). Whilst these stories are pa
 rables and are not explicitly located within a historical context\, their 
 insistence on themes of pain\, freedom and redemption betrays their releva
 nce to post-war concerns of trauma and recovery. Furthermore\, the stories
  dramatise the process of building and adapting to a ‘now’ which is al
 ways after a particular traumatic\, pregnant but absent past\, which sheds
  light onto the potential of the parable to register the reverberations of
  the Second World War\, the Holocaust and Austria’s collaboration with t
 he Third Reich in new creative configurations. \n\n‘Der Gefesselte’\, 
 the title story of the collection\, sees a man wake up to find himself bou
 nd by thick ropes. Unable to move as freely as a normal human\, but able t
 o move to the extent the ropes allow\, the bound man’s body begins to ad
 apt to and find freedom in its new constraints. He has no idea why he has 
 been bound\; although he assumes that this is the result of some violent a
 ttack\, he cannot be sure. The traumatic cause of his constriction is cons
 tantly present\, ‘now’ because the ropes remind the Gefesselte of it c
 onstantly to the extent that they define his identity post factum. As Slav
 oj Žižek maintains\, the foundational trauma of the emergence of subject
 ivity is permanently ‘now-ed’ through its echoes in the signifying pro
 cesses: ‘it is through its repetition\, through its echoes within the si
 gnifying structure that the cause [of trauma] retroactively becomes what i
 t always already was.’  The ropes are therefore both ‘after’ the mom
 ent of violence and the omnipresent reminder of its ‘nowness’. \n\nThe
  bound-man joins the circus and discovers a new kind of physicality\, more
  akin to that of a powerful animal than to a man’s. He begins to live a 
 ‘now’ similar to the ‘now’ of animals\, adapting to his environmen
 t and those who share it physically rather than socially. Hence\, I would 
 like to devote the second part of my analysis of Aichinger’s work to the
  blurred boundary between animal and human that occurs after the moment of
  trauma. It is my hypothesis here that the post-traumatic subject and body
  can be described as ‘creaturely’\, in the sense that Santner uses it 
 in his On Creaturely Life. The ‘creaturely’\, the new physicality that
  emerges at the moment of trauma\, testifies to the excess of the now whic
 h is haunted by the indigestible past which it is always after\; this over
 whelms the bound man physically and ontologically. Santner gives the follo
 wing definition of the creaturely as ‘a kind of life in excess both of o
 ur merely biological life and of our life in the space of meaning.’  In 
 ‘Der Gefesselte’\, the moment of trauma\, the tying of the ropes\, wil
 l not become memory until the ropes are cut\; therefore the bound man’s 
 physicality becomes organised around the traumatic kernel of the moment of
  binding and his body is absorbed into the nowness of trauma which cannot 
 be digested. \n\nThus\, the dialectic of Now-As-After in trauma is crucial
  to help us understand the formation of a post-traumatic subjectivity whic
 h defines itself through the re-evocation of the traumatic absence of trau
 ma (when were the ropes fitted? Who tied them?) as well as a post-traumati
 c physiology which re-enacts the moment of traumatisation. \n
LOCATION:Grad Seminar Rm\, 3rd Fl. Raised Faculty Bldg.\, Sidgwick Site
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