Trauma and Transcendence

Abstract

Within the humanities, specifically in the past decade, trauma theory has become a robust site of interdisciplinary work. Trauma resonates with scholars in and across disciplines and has become a trope with a distinctive significance. The scope of scholarship on trauma has always been challenged by the temporal, affective, and corporeal dimensions of trauma itself, yet it has recently been rendered all the more complex by theoretical and methodological issues that have emerged for these disciplines in their attempts to think trauma. This volume gathers scholars in a variety of disciplines to meet the challenge of how to think trauma in light of its burgeoning interdisciplinarity, and often its theoretical splintering. From distinctive disciplinary vectors, the work of philosophers, social theorists, philosophical psychologists and theologians consider the limits and prospects of theory when thinking trauma and transcendence. By bringing together scholars at the intersections of trauma, social theory, and especially the continental philosophy of religion, this volume draws attention to the increasing challenge of deciding whether trauma’s transcendent, evental, or unassimilable quality is being wielded as a defense of traumatic experience against reductionism, or whether it is promulgated as a form of obscurantism.