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Traumas and Catastrophe Today
Christian Hoffmann
To cite this version:
Christian Hoffmann. Traumas and Catastrophe Today: Editorial. Recherches en psychanalyse, Uni-versité Paris 7- Denis Diderot, 2015, Traumas ; Passages à l’acte ; Cliniques contemporaines /Trauma; Acting; Contemporary clinical explorations, 2 (20 ), pp.98a-99a. �hal-01511869�
100 Journal of Psychoanalytic Studies.
Hosted by the Department of Psychoanalytic Studies, Paris Diderot at Sorbonne Paris Cité University.
Recherches en Psychanalyse – Research in Psychoanalysis 20│2015
Traumas and Catastrophe Today
Editorial
Traumas et catastrophe aujourd’hui
Éditorial
[Online] Dec. 30, 2015
Christian Hoffmann
Our current era makes regular mention of new catastrophes, and the word trauma is now part of our ordinary vocabulary. As Freud had already said, it is no longer possible for contemporary humankind to draw on a vision of the world that produces a narrative and makes sense in a space and time that could be perceived as homogenous.
1. The Contemporary Problematic
Traditionally, the catastrophe was the concluding moment of a drama. Nowadays, catastrophes come at a rhythm that is of an ever faster pace, piercing the screens of our contemporary life without us being able to integrate them in a way that makes sense or to articulate them in concepts. These ruptures may be natural or social, but increasingly they stand at the junction between the two. They take effect in the most diverse domains: the meteorological, the nuclear, the chemical, the sanitary, the economic, the political, the social, but also the individual, at the point where a subject encounters life or death.
At first, trauma designated a major and exceptional subjective accident that could not be integrated into the psychical economy. One of the questions that our contemporary context poses is that the exception is tending to become ordinary, without us being aware, for the time being, of the means by which to bring appropriate responses. What is more, the
contemporary catastrophes are lending trauma an individual or collective scale that is without equivalent in this day and age.
The response to these catastrophes, just like their potential anticipation, is of utmost interest today to the scientific and academic community as a whole. In a world where the real is mastered less and less, and which examines the traditional compartmentalization of disciplines that came from the classical distinction between nature and culture, it is becoming indispensable to initiate research and common responses to a situation that is for the most part unprecedented.
II. Violence in All its Different States,
Speech, the Body, and Death
The contemporary real is marked by the violence that is generating a calling into question of speech, its conditions and its efficiency. We are noting the effects of this calling into question, among other places, in the increasingly univocal and functional relationship that we maintain with science, with technology, with information, and with religion. An ideal of pure functioning is tending to replace possible questions about the subject or the social bond, without meeting the limits that are made possible, in principle, by the exchange of speech.
The result of this is catastrophes and traumas that are unprecedented in the fields of nature and the social.
101 Journal of Psychoanalytic Studies.
Hosted by the Department of Psychoanalytic Studies, Paris Diderot at Sorbonne Paris Cité University.
Recherches en Psychanalyse – Research in Psychoanalysis 20│2015
Nowadays, the body is appearing as a major stake where the effects of this problematic meet, and in particular the gap that is increasingly palpable for the human subject between his or her own body and the body that is in function as required by technology. The limits of this body are regularly being modified, and its very relationship with the limit, and consequently with death, is emerging as a difficulty.
Furthermore, we observe that the accounts that relate this violence usually fall short of what has actually been experienced.
III. The Paris Attacks
The unpredictability of these conflicts in time and in space is giving to its extreme forms of violence, through the dread that is being produced, the characteristic that has been sought by an armed organization, namely the characteristic of terror, where the worst can be produced whenever and wherever.
Dread is produced at a moment when the subject is grasped by an act of violence in the real and in his or her body, without any symbolic preparation to precede the act. This absence of preparation is the major cause of trauma, through the explosion in the real that touches the body.
Reality, one could say “the real”, has today outstripped the discontent in our culture and is placing us collectively in a subjectivity, as Christine Angot has put it, that is immersed in war by the enemies of democracy who want “Everything to be Real.”
It is a war of the real, in order to install a dictatorship of the real by means of this real. Today, as is the case for the scientist, the narration of this real, and notably the narration of a catastrophe, presents a great difficulty, given that one can only grasp it, as does the scientist, by pieces.
So, people have been going back to Freud’s major text: “Why War?” where he appeals to Law against violence and the union of everyone. But, war is no longer the traditional war between states that is organized around a triptych of policy, law and ethics. Frédéric Gros has suggested precisely a new concept of war, that of a “diffuse war.”
Thus, we can see that this real, the real of a catastrophe, could find a meaning that is able to allow the subject, as here, by the declaration of war (a narrative), to invest in a different way in the coordinates of time and space and to anticipate, at least a little, the effects on subjectivity of the possible imminence of a catastrophe in the social dimension.
This issue of our journal shows the contemporary aspect of the traumas that are linked to individual and collective catastrophes, and the importance of psychoanalytical research as a way of contributing to the apprehension of this real that lies beyond meaning and which modifies the classical coordinates of subjectivity, by making it precarious through the dread of possible passages à l’acte on oneself and on others.
The author:
Christian Hoffmann, PhD
Practicing psychoanalyst.
Professor in Psychopathology, Paris Diderot University at Sorbonne Paris Cité.
Université Paris VII Diderot Campus Paris Rive Gauche Bâtiment Olympe de Gouges 11, rue Jean Antoine de Baïf 75013 Paris
France
Electronic reference:
Christian Hoffmann, “Traumas and Catastrophe
Today, Editorial”, Research in Psychoanalysis [Online], 20|2015 published Dec. 30, 2015. This article is a translation of Traumas et catastrophe aujourd’hui, Éditorial. Full text
