Call to Remain Responsible as a Sign of Cultural Trauma

Abstract

In this text, by analysing the message that envelopes strategies to deal with ‎the COVID-19 pandemic, “Let us remain responsible”, the author points ‎to the problem that cultural trauma can be witnessed only after the event ‎(Nachträglichkeit) or during the event itself. The message by itself already‎ produces at least three interwoven paradoxes: 1) paradox of addressee; 2) paradox‎ of receiver; and 3) paradox of demand. Those paradoxes point to the existence ‎of trauma inside the culture that becomes tangible in the time of crises ‎and is reflected, among other things, as the awareness of the split in subject‎(Jacques Lacan). This awareness of the split as ‘extimate’ experience broadens ‎the binary interpretation of cultural trauma proposed by Jeffrey Alexander, ‎who situates trauma between the event and its representation, in which‎ the representation is the source of trauma, not the event itself. The presented ‎cases point to the conclusion that the event itself is already symbolic and, ‎hence, representational, but in the inverse sense, as an object that is missing‎ in the symbolic or Lacanian algebra as “object a” that is the source of traumatic ‎repetition.‎