The empire of trauma: an inquiry into the condition of victimhood

Abstract

The Empire of Trauma: An Inquiry into the Condition of Victimhood makes a signal contribution to the genre of “the history of the present.” It uses the apparently unremarkable fact that victims of disasters as diverse as genocide, earthquakes, and industrial accidents are all brought together within the same framework of understanding centered on the diagnostic category of trauma. It asks, What does it mean that we take the concept of trauma as a given in these circumstances? The first part of the book provides a systematic examination of the archives of psychology and psychiatry to delineate the double genealogy of the diagnostic category of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). This is followed by an examination of three specific cases that the authors see as emblematic of contemporary politics of trauma. These cases are emergency psychiatric counseling for victims of an industrial accident in Toulouse in September 2001, the boom in humanitarian psychiatry in France since the 1980s, and, the use of PTSD for evaluating and certifying the truth claims of asylum seekers in France. The detail and finesse with which theory and data are woven together for each case makes this book compelling. For reasons of space, though, I will content myself with discussing two major claims of the book The first claim concerns the emergence of PTSD in the post-Vietnam period in North America. Didier Fassin and Richard Rechtman argue that, faced with media revelations of brutalities committed by American troops on civilians in Vietnam, the U.S. government was confronted with an impossible choice—either punish its own soldiers for crimes in which the chain of responsibility was hard to disentangle or accept its own culpability for these “crimes.” The diagnosis of PTSD for Vietnam veterans came as a solution of sorts. It took any moral judgment out of the clinical encounter, since the main premise was that ordinary people when put in extraordinary circumstances were capable of committing atrocities by which they could be later traumatized. Thus it became possible to condemn the event without condemning the perpetrators. It also allowed the government to set in place policies of rehabilitation for the veterans. Outside the clinical space, anger at the veterans was still evident in public condemnation of soldiers or their portrayals in films or other media as brutal killers rather than heroes. That the Vietnam War continues to be treated as a spectral presence on questions of warfare and culpability in the United States shows how these issues still haunt the political culture of the country. The second major claim of the book is that the processes of person-