Ulysse's Sinthome

Trauma evacuates memory in that it perpetually disturbs one’s sense of being settled. Memory is poised to take flight whenever it is threatened, when there is a sense of a trauma returning or of a new trauma that is about to happen. This sense of impending catastrophe is an illusion, however, because the trauma never quite arrives. It never arrives because it has already happened; it is already in the present as an effect of some persistent past. The traumatized subject is continually uprooted. She might seem to be in a familiar place, in the sense that she has been there before, and she will most likely return there again and again through the force of repetition. Yet this place is neither an origin nor a final destination, keeping her suspended between a failed remembering and an incomplete forgetting. If trauma is understood as that which is in excess of frames of understanding, it is often impossible to positively speak one’s memory of a traumatic event or to know what really happened. Yet memory is also not bound by the subject who forgets. It materializes in the most unlikely places or fixes itself to things with no logical connection to the traumatic event. It yields an overvaluation of objects, as Freud called it, the condition in which something becomes so full of desire and longing and fear that it is hardly recognizable.

“What we call ‘normal’ is a product of repression, denial, splitting, projection, introjection and other forms of destructive action on experience. It is radically estranged from the structure of being. The more one sees this, the more senseless it is to continue with generalized descriptions of supposedly specifically schizoid, schizophrenic, hysterical ‘mechanisms.’ There are forms of alienation that are relatively strange to statistically ‘normal’ forms of alienation. The ‘normally’ alienated person, by reason of the fact that he acts more or less like everyone else, is taken to be sane. Other forms of alienation that are out of step with the prevailing state of alienation are those that are labeled by the ‘formal’ majority as bad or mad.”