Abstract
In public discourse trauma is predominantly framed as an overwhelming event undergone by the individual. In this article I first provide a brief genealogy to trace the emergence of what is now the dominant temporal framework of psychological catastrophe. I supplement this evental nosology with a durational consideration of trauma by drawing on the works of Henri Bergson and his articulation of duration, memory, and lived experience. Durational trauma accommodates liminal and ongoing experiences of the catastrophic that are equally devastating to the paradigmatic exemplars of PTSD. This alternate account entails different modalities of reparation and responsibility to the systemic traumatization of others. For this I draw on Levinas and his intersubjective ethics drawing out the relevancy his work has for this concept of durational trauma. Levinas’s emphasis on expiation avoids the reification of the trauma of the other as spectacle and draws into focus one’s own participation in the circulation and continuation of ongoing traumatic networks. This contributes to the emergent alchemy of reading Bergson and Levinas together, but likewise, to philosophy of trauma and the ethical responsibility and temporality of ongoing systemic harm.
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Notes
Fitzgerald (2009, p. 69).
APA [American-Psychiatric-Association] (2014, p. 265).
Ibid. (p. 271). This is incongruous with experiences of subjectivity and temporality that undergo liminal and second-order experiences of trauma rather than PTSD. Collective trauma is rooted in the ongoing past and gives prominence to the historical unfolding of the embodied interpersonal time.
The DSM-1 listed Gross Stress Reaction, a reaction to catastrophic physical or mental stressors such as combat or civilian experiences resembling combat, stipulating that these experiences are universally overwhelming. The DSM-1 was published in partnership and collaboration with the Veterans Administration and the US Army.
This comparison extends into public discourse that designates exposure to neighborhood violence as akin to veteran experience and natural catastrophes as causing damage equivalent to war. War is the metric of seriousness. Prolonged or recurrent experiences of being unhoused, incarceration, systemic racism, chronic illness, or family separation are not considered properly traumatic and thus are not prioritized for sympathy, attention, or remedy.
Complex PTSD was first articulated by psychologist Judith Herman to capture the episodic or ongoing trauma of domestic violence and intimate partner violence. Complex-PTSD is listed in the ICD (The International Classification of Disease released by the World Health Organization), but this too relies on linear temporality as a series of events.
Care ethics and disability philosophy provide a compelling critique of the notion of self-sovereignty and individual autonomy showing how this philosophical abstraction is often absent in real life and the perpetuation of it as an aim is harmful in that it marginalizes and denigrates individuals who require chronic care and mutual dependence.
See the compendium of Critical Trauma Studies for examples of authors that innovate while still relying on the notion of the traumatic event (Casper and Wertheimer 2016).
Caruth (1995, p. vii).
Cvetkovich (2003, p. 3).
“The qualitative heterogeneity of our successive perceptions of the universe results from the fact that each, in itself, extends over a certain depth of duration, and that memory condenses in each an enormous multiplicity of vibrations which appear to us all at once, although they are successive.” Bergson (1990, p. 156).
Bergson (1913, p. 122).
Ibid., p. 100.
Bergson (2014, p. 337).
“It is, if you like, the unrolling of a spool, for there is no living being who does not feel himself coming little by little to the end of his span; and living consists in growing old. But it is just as much a continual winding, like that of thread into a ball, for our past follows us, becoming larger and larger with the present it picks up on its way; and consciousness means memory.” Bergson (2012 p. 164–165).
It is critical to conceive of this tape or thread as devoid of uniformity.
Lawlor and Valentine (2020).
While this bears a resemblance to Husserlian time-consciousness in its protention and retention structure, the divergences are significant. Pertinent to the work in this article is Bergson’s emphasis on the impression of memory and the structure of the memory cone. For a thorough comparison of the theories of time in Husserl and Bergson, see Winkler R. (2006) Husserl and Bergson on Time and Consciousness. In: Tymieniecka AT. (eds) Logos of Phenomenology and Phenomenology of the Logos. Book Three. Analecta Husserliana (The Yearbook of Phenomenological Research), vol 90. Springer, Dordrecht.
Bergson (1990, p. 151).
This is relevant in that trauma itself can habituate the body. In Levinas, one is ethically responsible to the incarnate other. Lingus, the translator of Otherwise than Being, states, "Responsibility is a form of recognition…recognition is not a cognitive act…[it] is effected in expressive acts…one…exposes oneself, to the other. These are incarnate acts; indeed exposure is being incarnate…It is as responsible that one is incarnated…Responsibility is enacted not only in offering one’s property…but in giving one’s own substance for the other. The figure of maternity is an authentic figure of responsibility.” (1998, p. xix). This speaks to the embodied register of responsibility, this embodiment in Levinas and Bergson, obtains temporally.
Bergson (1990, p. 150).
While Bergson focuses on individual memory, there is room to interpret the interpenetration of memory or instances of collective memory. Practically speaking, there is a sense in which one’s memory is intersubjective in that it unfolds and manifests on the plane of action and external experience.
Mallory (2020).
For example, in 1995, there were 735 heat deaths in Chicago. This instance of climate death was significantly less covered than Hurricane Harvey and Sandy, which combined resulted in 234 deaths (News n.d.). Impoverished neighborhoods are often, on average, 10 degrees hotter than affluent ones, and institutions such as prisons often lack air conditioning, yet heat is not discussed as traumatic in public discourse, despite how gruesome heat death is. These deaths and communities' grief are largely ignored in the public discourse.
It is not my intention to turn a social or political problem into a medical or psychological one, nor do I propose psychological or medical solutions. I am interested in trauma as a philosophical issue. I am troubling the concepts of the subject, the social, intersubjective embodiment, and time that underwrite a shared understanding of trauma. I maintain that the social or political, on the one hand, and the medical and psychological, on the other, cannot be demarcated as such.
Levinas (2000, p. 194). In the secondary scholarship on Levinas, Bergson is usually only invoked in the unabbreviated catalog of influences or as a historical footnote. The expanded version of this quote evinces the admiration Levinas had for the vibratory structure of Bergson's thought as focused on becoming: "There is, in my view, in the refusal to seek the meaning of reality in the persistence of solids. And in Bergson's reversion to the becoming of things, something like a statement of verbal-being, of event-being. Bergson is the source of an entire complex of interrelated contemporary philosophical ideas; it is to him, no doubt, that I owe my modest speculative initiatives.”
Miguel Paley, Levinas and Bergson scholar, speculates, “…excessive concerns about Heidegger, his thought and their relationship, have come to dominate Levinasian scholarship to a fault.” (2017, p. 1). The compendium Emmanuel Levinas Critical Assessments of Leading Philosophers cites or mentions Bergson sixteen times, whereas it cites Heidegger two hundred and sixty-two times. The tides are beginning to shift: Nicolas De Warren, Miguel Paley, and Leonard Lawlor all recently have written on Bergson’s influence on Levinas.
Chanter (1997, p. 20). Craig echoes this point claiming, “Traumatic imagery dominates Levinas’s texts.” (2010, p. 5).
In his text "At This Very Moment in This Work Here I Am," Derrida claims it is the daughter that is entombed in the text. (1991 p. 455).
Craig (2010, p. 4).
Because of Levinas's lived experience, it makes sense that his model of time and trauma is structured by the event, specifically the event that ruptures totalization.
Cohen (1998, p xxi). p. xii. Levinas argues, "The-one-for-the-other goes to the extent of the-one-being-hostage-for-the-other." (1998, p. 141).
It would be difficult to read this as Levinas saying that the trauma of the widow, orphan, or exile is not manifest in the present, so this relies on the meaning of “contracted.” It is not contrary to Bergson to insist that traumatic experience is enmeshed with traumas that exceed the individual.
Diachrony is the intrusion of the alterity of time. This takes many forms, such as the time of the other: a past and future that is intimately present in the intersubjective relation but is inaccessible and recalcitrant to assimilation to the self. Not unrelatedly, it is referred to as “transcendence-in-imminence.” Although unrepresentable, diachrony exists and has effects. One possible instance of this diachrony is the embodiment of memory, in which memory is expressed or enacted without being thematized. Notably, this is not discordant with Bergson's notion of the habituated body.
"All the negative attributes which state what is beyond the essence become positive in responsibility, a response answering to a non-thematizable provocation and thus a non-vocation, a trauma. This response answers, before any understanding, for a debt contracted before any freedom and before any consciousness and any present, but it does answer, as though the invisible that bypasses the present left a trace by the very fact of bypassing the present. That trace lights up as the face of a neighbor." Levinas (1998, p. 12).
Levinas (1998, 13).
To quote, “[The] accomplishment of saying…is in the risky uncovering of oneself, in sincerity, the breaking up of inwardness and the abandon of all shelter, exposure to traumas, vulnerability.” Ibid. p. 48. Levinas states, “The ego stripped by the trauma of persecution of its scornful and imperialist subjectivity, is reduced to the ‘here I am,’ in a transparency without opaqueness, without heavy zones propitious for evasion.” Ibid., p. 146. In other texts, Levinas refers to riveted-ness in its Talmudic connotations of the “Here I am” hineni (הנני), which Abraham says to God, revealing himself. This passage is read on the day of atonement. This is pertinent because Levinas uses the antiquated term of expiation in his discussion of the ethical responsibility to the other. Ibid. (1998, p. 14).
Ibid. (p. 56).
“…election is a strong term for Levinas, and it’s also a strong term in Judaism—the idea of chosenness…election is being picked out to carry an excessive burden.” Critchley (2015, p. 24).
Levinas (1998, p. 74).
"In maternity what signifies is a responsibility for others, to the point of substitution for others and suffering both from the effects of persecution and from the persecuting itself in which the persecutor sinks. Maternity, which is bearing par excellence, bears even responsibility for the persecuting by the persecutor." Levinas (1998, p. 75). One reading of this responsibility is the responsibility of bringing a child into the world that perpetuates persecuting, meaning taking responsibility for persecution in the world.
Levinas asserts, “The more I return to myself, the more I divest myself, under the traumatic effect of persecution, of my freedom as a constituted, willful, imperialist subject, the more I discover myself to be responsible; the more just I am the more guilty I am. I am ‘in myself’ through the others.” (Ibid. p. 112).
Levinas (1998, p. 111).
Ibid. p. 124.
This is non-experiential and pre-subjective for Levinas.
This is why Levinas claims that “Subjectivity is being hostage.” (1998, p. 127). Levinas states, “This coinciding in the same, where I would be an origin…is, from the start, undone by the other. The subject resting on itself is confounded by wordless accusation…More exactly, it is accusation which I cannot answer, but for which I cannot decline responsibility…It is from the first a substitution by a hostage expiating for the violence of the persecution itself” (also, p. 127).
While this may seem trite, what Levinas is endeavoring to do is provide examples of sacrifice or ethical action that cannot be framed as self-interested. As Daniel Smith states of Levinas, "if generosity is only understood as a complex and highly mediated form of self-interest, then it is no generosity at all." Smith (2017, p. 149).
Likewise, I am not staking a claim on whether time can be considered as properly one’s own.
Levinas (2000, p. 232).
Coe (2018, p.1). This is Levinas’s critique of Kant and Aristotle.
Levinas (2000, p. 233). This past that cannot be fully present is often referred to as the “immemorial past” by Levinas. A complete comparison of Levinasian and Bergsonian temporality would require a much more thorough unpacking which would detract from the aim of this paper, a discussion of their potential contributions to trauma theory. For a nuanced analysis, see Sophie Veulemans' "On Time: Levinas' Appropriation of Bergson." Levinas states, “Contrary to what is maintained in Creative Evolution, all disorder is not another order.” Levinas (1998, p. 191 footnote 6). This echoes Bachelard’s criticism of Bergson that duration cannot accommodate ruptures or separations of time. Bergson responded to these criticisms in Matter and Memory.
Sealey (2012, p. 155).
Ipseity, for Levinas, connotes affective, vital, and embodied selfhood. Often this term is invoked to articulate the sensuous ego that exists before or outside the intersubjective encounter.
Because trauma is often only recognized through familiar trauma narratives, there is often a public juridical demand that trauma legibly conforms to these narratives to acquire treatment or justice. However, following Levinas allows for divergences from these scripts and capaciousness in terms of that which cannot be articulated.
“In the duration, there is no juxtaposition of events; therefore there is no mechanistic causality. It is in the duration that we can speak of the experience of freedom…For Bergson — and perhaps this is his greatest insight — freedom is mobility.” Lawlor & Moulard-Leonard (2016).
Levinas (1998, p. 126).
Stating, “it is from the first a substitution by a hostage expiating for the violence of the persecution itself.” Levinas (1998, p. 127).
Another possible reading of expiation is reparation which resonates with contemporary debates.
Levinas (1998, p. 87).
Bergson (1913, p. 18–19).
Ibid. (1913, p. 19). While for Levinas, this would be “within Being” and brings in the complicated place that justice and politics have in his later work, there is less distance between this claim and Levinas’s account of substitution, or in the desire to suffer for the other albeit these are not conscious or willed acts for Levinas.
“True pity, therefore, involves not so much fearing pain as desiring it. It is as if ‘nature’ has committed a great injustice and what we want is to be seen as not complicit with it.” Lawlor & Moulard-Leonard (2016).
Levinas (1998, p. 88).
Levinas’s dialogue with and critique of Husserl and Heidegger is extensively discussed in secondary literature. I will not reproduce this here except to note the way this emphasis often overshadows a comparison of Levinas and Bergson.
On the other hand, this may be truer to their work in that it allows it to move, breath, and live, in ways beyond the fixity of its original claims. It countersigns the veracity of Bergson’s claim that “there is no feeling, no idea, no volition which is not undergoing change every moment: if a mental state ceased to vary, its duration would cease to flow.” Bergson (1998, p1-2). This flux is not equivalent with the Levinasian rupture, but it is a point of conceptual proximity that supports the reading of these two figures together in relation to the third term of trauma.
Levinas (1998, p. 166).
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Bacon, H.R. The intersubjective responsibility of durational trauma: Contributions of Bergson and Levinas to the philosophy of trauma. Cont Philos Rev 55, 159–175 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11007-021-09556-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11007-021-09556-7