MOBILISATIONS OF MEDIATION AND APORIAS: READING TRAUMA AS METAPHOR IN ULRIKE DRAESNER'S SIEBEN SPRÜNGE VOM RAND DER WELT WITH CARUTH, DERRIDA, AND AGAMBEN

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis article analyses Draesner's 2014 novel through the concepts of traumatic memory and relations between the unsayable and speech. It argues through Cathy Caruth's and Jacques Derrida's poststructuralist critical theory that we can understand the tension in the text between mediation and lost origins as a discourse on historiography and the archive, as well as a reflection on the ethics of writing the embodied experiences of others’ trauma. Through strategic mobilisations of the ideas of erasure, deferral, witness, and the non‐coincidence of language and the body, the text constructs multifaceted narratives of ‘ungraspable’ trauma centring on events which are constituted by their disappearance, such as forced sterilisation and the missed encounter with the death of a character killed while fleeing his home in Silesia in 1945. The foregrounding of ‘Flucht und Vertreibung’ hides another aspect of trauma – that of the persecution of the ill and disabled under National Socialism. Giorgio Agamben's philosophy is used to argue that the text can bear witness to these silences, but, given the all‐pervasive mediatised trauma culture – of which the text willingly partakes with its aesthetics of mediation, self‐reflexivity, and designated website – the danger is that silences are drowned out.