Trauma and Transcendence

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.

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