Trauma, technology and the ontology of the modern subject

Abstract

For later Heidegger, in the human sciences, technology involves enframing or ordering of human being into standing reserve, or resource, for the ends of a calculative rationality. With some similarity, Foucault takes up technology as a ‘grid of intelligibility’ for power/knowledge, and in those practices deploying the subject’s own ethical self-understanding. This article integrates dimensions of modern subjectivity articulated by Heidegger and Foucault, hermeneutically inquiring into the emergent intelligibility of modern subjectivity as depicted in psychological accounts of trauma in Janet, Freud, Caruth and others. It is argued that trauma, as a dispositif, technologically refashions the masterful subject that fell into crisis after the early Enlightenment. It is also suggested that technological enframing of trauma as the collapse of memory and language underwrites the subject’s own space of reflexivity, while concealing the subject’s fractured ontological and temporal horizon.