Trauma and Transcendence
Suffering and the Limits of Theory
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Trauma theory has become a burgeoning site of research in recent decades, often demanding interdisciplinary reflections on trauma as a phenomenon that defies disciplinary ownership. While this research has always been challenged by the temporal, affective, and corporeal dimensions of trauma itself, trauma theory now faces theoretical and methodological obstacles given its growing interdisciplinarity. Trauma and Transcendence gathers scholars in philosophy, theology, psychoanalysis, and social theory to engage the limits and prospects of trauma’s transcendence. This volume draws attention to the increasing challenge of deciding whether trauma’s unassimilable quality can be wielded as a defense of traumatic experience against reductionism, or whether it succumbs to a form of obscurantism.
Contributors: Eric Boynton, Peter Capretto, Tina Chanter, Vincenzo Di Nicola, Ronald Eyerman, Donna Orange, Shelly Rambo, Mary-Jane Rubenstein, Hilary Jerome Scarsella, Eric Severson, Marcia Mount Shoop, Robert D. Stolorow, George Yancy.
“For while it is in some sense true that ‘we’ all live in a global age of trauma, it is also the case that we do not share the burden of trauma equally, and that trauma takes different (shapeless) shape along the lines of race, gender, ability, and economic status . . .We must find a way to think—and to think clearly.”---Mary-Jane Rubenstein, from the afterword
In this diverse collection, Boynton and Capretto bring together thinkers from a range of disciplines in order to explore the contributions of particular disciplines to trauma studies and the limits of those contributions. This sort of intentionally interdisciplinary conversation is rare in trauma studies literature, so in that respect this book makes a significant contribution.
Mary-Jane Rubenstein is Professor of Religion at Wesleyan University, where she is also core faculty in Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and affiliated faculty in the Science in Society Program.
Eric Boynton (Edited By)
Eric Boynton is Professor and Chair of Philosophy and Religious Studies at Allegheny College.
Peter Capretto (Edited By)
Peter Capretto is Fellow in Theology and Practice at Vanderbilt University in Religion, Psychology, and Culture.
Acknowledgements
List of Contributors
Introduction: Limits of Theory in Trauma and Transcendence
Eric Boynton and Peter Capretto
Constructive Phenomenologies of Trauma
1. Two Trauma Communities: A Philosophical Archaeology of Cultural and Clinical Trauma Theories
Vincenzo Di Nicola
2. Phenomenological-Contextualism All the Way Down: An Existential and Ethical Perspective on Emotional Trauma
Robert D. Stolorow
3. Traumatized by Transcendence: My Other’s Keeper
Donna Orange
4. Evil, Trauma, and the Building of Absences
Eric Boynton
5. The Unsettling of Perception: Levinas and the Anarchic Trauma
Eric Severson
Social and Political Analyses of Traumatic Experience
6. The Artful Politics of Trauma: Rancière’s Critique of Lyotard
Tina Chanter
7. Black Embodied Wounds and the Traumatic Impact of the White Imaginary
George Yancy
8. Perpetrator Trauma and Collective Guilt: My Lai
Ronald Eyerman
9. The Psychic Economy and Fetishization of Traumatic Lived Experience
Peter Capretto
Theological Aporia in the Aftermath of Trauma
10. Theopoetics of Trauma
Shelly Rambo
11. Body-Wise: Re-Fleshing Christian Spiritual Practice in Trauma’s Wake
Marcia Mount Shoop
12. Trauma and Theology: Prospects and Limits in Light of the Cross
Hilary Jerome Scarsella
Prospects
13. Prospects of Trauma for the Philosophy of Religion
Mary-Jane Rubenstein
Notes
Bibliography
Index