Uncertain Turns: Addressing Animal Trauma

Abstract

Abstract: Since the development of modern trauma theory, the limits of the human have worn increasingly thin. Today, mounting evidence of psychological injuries in other species poses new challenges for trauma studies. How might we think trauma beyond the human? What would such an effort unsettle, which epistemic structures would it destabilize? Reading Cathy Caruth with Jacques Derrida and W.G. Sebald, this essay considers nonhuman trauma as an apostrophic address that provokes radical uncertainty. The inherently aporetic structure of trauma theory cannot a priori exclude this address without fixing in place, and therefore undoing, its own foundations. Address-ability in the face of animal trauma hinges on the collapse of all certitudes, rendering possible responses rooted in something other than power. Such exposure turns us away from the familiar, toward the ungraspable traumatic histories that are catching up with us in this very moment of climate change and mass extinctions.