Trying LaCapra:

on loss, absence, and witness

Jordan Yentzer New York University

1

Opening Statements:

In history and in life one sometimes seems to glimpse a ferocious law which states: to he that has, will be given; from he that has not, will be taken away...

...For us, history had stopped.

Primo Levi, This is a Man (Survival in Auschwitz)

Subpoena ad Testificandum

Dominick LaCapra is accused of presenting absence. He is being held for suspicion of larceny of said absence. The public is already aware of Mr. LaCapras previous statements pertaining to certain distinctions, but for the record let them be represented, in part, here: I begin with this anecdote [regarding South Africas Truth and Reconciliation Commission at Yale] and my reflections about it in order to indicate the stakes of a distinction I would like to draw and elaboratethe distinction between absence and loss.1 His is a divisive strategy, and a dangerous one: to distinguish loss from absence is to already assume a link therein, and would stir a loss once again within absence. His project, as such, provides this quasi-judicial setting in which the truth [will be] sought and some measure of justice rendered... [in which the] stakes certainly include intellectual clarity and cogency, but they also have ethical and political dimensions.2 This quasi-judicial setting, is that in which we will work here, in a hyphenated space between the ethical and political, and between absence and loss; a space that attempts to evade us, but has been reigned and presented for our use here by the defendant, Dominick LaCapra. LaCapra would like to distinguish absence and loss by situating the type of absence in which [he is] especially...interested on a transhistorical level, while situating loss on a historical level.3 LaCapra would like a number of things, specifically to typify absence for his usage, to present it autonomously, to have it transcend history.4 The accomplishment of this desire would, as I believe

1 2 3 4

Dominick LaCapra, Writing HIstory/Writing Trauma, (Johns Hopkins UP; 2001) 44. Ibid., 43-4. Ibid., 48. In her coverage of another trial Hannah Arendt writes, From a humdrum life without significance and consequence the 3

wind had blown him into History, as he understood it, namely, into a Movement that always kept moving and in which

LaCapra has overlooked, require certain dependencies that would disrupt the process of writing History with which he works: namely, if absence holds no relation to the event and occurs all throughout History, as he suggests, it will thusly not move, nor will it come-to-be, nor will it ever cease. Absence, if transhistorical, depends upon History. This proceeding will seek to approach the grounds from which LaCapras absence is risen and buried, if it is, and to distinguish outright the judicial dimensions that have split LaCapras stakes both ethically and politically. In his anecdote, LaCapra returns to the New Haven Hotel in Connecticut, which houses the Temple Recovery Care Center (TRC, according to the elevator) on its third floor. He addresses an uncanny impression, left by the acronym upon members of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, subsequently calling the Commission, in its own way a trauma recovery center. What follows is either an implicit conflation (if we may dip into LaCapras lexicon) of the Center and the Commission, a loss of one or the other, or a substitution of the acronym for what it might signify. What remains in view is solely the acronym, standing in place of something suddenly unfounded, attempting to combine truth seeking in an open forum with a collective ritual, requiring the acknowledgment of blameworthy and at times criminal activity, in the interest of working through a past that had severely divided groups and caused damages to victims... 5 The impressive acronym impresses upon members of itself: its being a part of whatever

somebody like him...could start from scratch and still make a career. (Hannah Arendt, Eichmann In Jerusalem [Penguin; 1964] 33) On these grounds of History and Movement, LaCapra and Adolf Eichmann are met, in their respective trials. What is of importance here is Arendts capitalization of, and insistence that a proper Movement surrounds History itself. I will maintain this capitalization here, in order to work with a proper History, one that does not divide, one that entails already all of itself, already transhistory, and already its singularity.
5

Dominick LaCapra, Writing History/Writing Trauma, (Johns Hopkins UP; 2001) 44. 4

substrate, whatever foundation, permits its impression but only to leave an exteriority. Outside the impression, still on these grounds, is the other signification of the acronym. Where members of the Commission would bear witness to their own abbreviation pressing upon them, the Trauma Recovery Center stands coterminously, withstanding the same pressure, each pressing upon the Other at an impasse where each is grounded, and each is quite impressive. There is no conversion here. This is the case of the acronym, in which a part stands for its whole not alone as a representative, but as a remainder or a victim of loss. TRC, a vowelless trace, is left over and left after, giving rise to our quasi-judicial setting, where law can be written only insofar as abbreviation will allow. Abbreviation, shortening by removal, representation-with-loss seeks to work through the past, by presenting the past through an institution of its partial absence.6 Leaving the elevator, LaCapra claims his stakes, staking his claim in an abbreviated ground of which he has already lost track. The TRC vanishes, not to return, and remains absent, or at the very least unmentioned, for the remainder of his lecturebut it remains the foundation of his work. This absence occurs. It appears by a partial disappearance of the acronym. Absentia works again and again in this way, contrary to the transhistorical quality LaCapra suggests for it. Something is lost, and absence arrives.7 LaCapra stands trial upon a ground in absentia, not one spawned from loss, but one

6 7

Ibid., 44

The arrival of absence presents the ultimate problem that I find in LaCapras suggestive reasoning, and as such in his intimated demarcation of a foundational source. LaCapra will argue that losses are experienced differently for each victim, and that losses cannot be adequately addressed when they are enveloped in an overly generalized discourse of absence, including the absence of ultimate metaphysical foundations. Conversely, absence at a foundational level cannot simply be derived from particular historical losses, however much it may be suggested or its recognition prompted by their magnitude and the intensity of ones response to them. The means by which LaCapra is able to derive a notion of absence at all calls for some sort of historical event, be it loss or otherwise. His work depends heavily on the traumatic event and events of loss, and while perhaps he is correct in stating that the magnitude and the intensity of ones response to these events does not affect the very impossible Dasein of absence, he overlooks his own effect, which already brings absence into the 5

that writes loss into the history that precedes it. There is no announced event by which the acronym is lost, but it leaves the work in order to precede it in History, leaving a brief, clicking, vowelless trace only there where LaCapra begins. In the beginning, before this work, before the verdict, before his trial, something has come to pass. This is where LaCapra becomes arrested, and where we will stop his writing.8 This is where he hears his Miranda Rights. He will waive them subsequently, and the court will address this shortly. The remainder of his lecture stands on itself, on its own absence, suspended, doubly-bound, confounded. LaCapra is isolated now, untouchable, visible behind bulletproof glass, trying to stand. He stands trial. He will present himself in this court, or uncertain penalties will be incurred.

Subpoena Duces Tecum Nihil est sine ratione. Nichts ist ohne Grund.9 Martin Heidegger is called to the stand, called to
stand, to present evidence, to make a statement. Nothing is without reason. Nothing is without

ground. So opens his rumination on Leibniz, the address he gave twice in 1956 at Freiburg. Heidegger,
pensive of science, the opening of the atomic age, the words of Goethe, comes to no distinct conclusion in his work, but he aims toward a balancing of accounts. LaCapra will speak up after his arrest to express concern about these accounts, perhaps with good intentions, but it only shakes up

topos of his work. (LaCapra, 45-6) 8 An impossible suspension is at work. Readers are directed to a similar examination in Jacques Derridas essay, A

Silkworm of Ones Own. (Veils [Stanford UP; 2002] 21.) 9 Martin Heidegger, The Principle of Reason, (Indiana UP; 1996) 117.
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the ground, or lack thereof, on which he stands.10 Heidegger will continue, unpacking Leibniz developing principium rationis, as such: In showing the extent to which the principle of reason founds all principlesthat means, first of all, founding every principle as a principleLeibniz raised the nihil sine ratione, nothing without reason, to a supreme fundamental principle. This character of the principle of reason becomes clear in the complete Latin title Leibniz gave the Principle. Leibniz characterizes the principle of reason as the principium reddendae rationis sufficientis. We will translate this title while discussing its individual determinations. The principium rationis is the principium reddendae rationis. Rationem reddere means: to render the reason.11 The rendering of reason, of grund, of ratio, of the account (Heidegger will establish a synonymy here) comes under great scrutiny, as it remains to this day. Rendering must not stop, for accounts will be put on hold. Heidegger accounts for this holding of accounts, stating that, an account is an account only if it handed over. Therefore, ratio is in itself ratio reddendae; a reason is, as such, a reason that is to be rendered. When the reason for the connection of representations has been directed backand expressly renderedto the I, what is represented first comes to a stand [Stehen] such that it is securely established as an object [Gegenstand], that means, as an Object for a representing subject.12 Heidegger is dealing with a Cartesian I, messing about with a cycle of representative renderings in a subject-object sort of dialectic that results in a standing. Finally, he will stop the cycle at sufficiency:

10

We see LaCapra take an ethical stand against certain attempted methods of mourning, regarding a correct wordage:

Indeed the problem for beneficiaries of earlier oppression in both [post-Nazi Germany, and Postapartheid South Africa] is how to recognize and mourn the losses of former victims and simultaneously to find a legitimate way to represent and mourn for their own losses without having a self-directed process occlude victims losses or enter into an objectionable

balancing of accounts (for example, in such statements as Dont talk to us about the Holocaust unless you are going to talk about the pillage, rape, and dislocation on the eastern front caused by the Russian invasion toward the end of the war... (LaCapra, 45. My emphasis.) Perhaps here LaCapra outlines a conflation that I will agree should not be made due to the occlusive effect that he mentions, but it only works to demonstrate further an issue concerning accountability (and thus rationality and foundation, as Heidegger will work to outline) in his work. 11 Martin Heidegger, The Principle of Reason, (Indiana UP; 1996) 118. 12 Ibid., 119.
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But a rendered reason only affects such a bringing-to-a-stand of objects when it gives, in a sufficient way, an account adequate for the secure establishing of objects. The reason to be rendered must be a ratio sufficiens.13 Reason, ground must be rendered, and it must be sufficient in order for man to stand on it, stand for it, be responsible for it.14 Dominick LaCapra, at the stand, standing trial, upon an abbreviated foundation, is responsible for an account not fully accounted for, a ground not fully rendered. He is not yet fully responsible for his actions, for if he was, then his rationale and his reason would serve as a solid, adequate foundation deemed already necessary by the principle of reason. This is the very reason he finds himself here on trial: the grounds are shaken. The object of absence, if an object at all, necessitates an aporia within the principle of reason. LaCapras work is by no means set in stone; it is shifting back and forth irresponsibly. Nothing is done, it remains in movement, trying toward a verdict, a (punctuated) sentence. Absence, which we must situate as certainly not-nothing, but simultaneously not-something, or the non-presence-of-something from the past, something still remaining in part (and LaCapra will affirm this, establishing a temporal disjunction of all absence, and all that is lost, has

13 14

Ibid., 120. Jacques Derrida establishes this necessity in his address at Cornell in 1983: Beyond all those big philosophical

wordsreason, truth, principlethat generally command attention, the principle of reason also holds that reason must be

rendered. But what does render mean with respect to reason? Could reason be something that gives rise to exchange, circulation, borrowing, debt, donation, restitution? But in what case, who would be responsible for that debt or duty, and to whom? In the phrase reddere rationem, ratio is not the name of a faculty or power (Logos, Ratio, Reason, Vernunft) that is generally attributed by metaphysics to man, zoon logon ekhon, the rational animal...The question of this reason cannot be separated from a question about the modal verb must and the phrase must be rendered. The must seems to cover the essence of our relationship to principle. It seems to mark out for us requirement, debt, duty, request, command, obligation, law, the imperative. Whenever reason can be rendered, it must. (Eyes of The University: Right to Philosophy 2, [Stanford UP; 2004] 136.)
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been lost, was lost: The past is misperceived in terms of sheer absence or utter annihilation. Something of the past always remains, if only as a haunting presence or symptomatic revenant.15),

not annihilated, cannot fit into the principle. Absentium est sine rationem crumbles immediately, it
doesnt work, it does not establish a grounds for the work of mourning. But we know already that LaCapra is working on a ground of absence, and an absent ground.

LaCapras Tort: Conversion

LaCapra will make a statement before the court: With respect to the critique of foundations, one may argue that absence (not loss) applies to a ultimate foundations in general, notably to metaphysical grounds (including the human being as origin of meaning and value). In this sense, absence is the absence of an absolute that should not itself be absolutized and fetishized such that it becomes an object of fixation and absorbs, mystifies, or downgrades the significance of particular historical losses...One might ask whether the conversion of absence into loss is essential to all fundamentalisms or foundations philosophies. In any case, the critique of ultimate or absolute foundations is best understood as related to an affirmation or recognition of absence, not a postulation of loss.16 In what seems to be a direct response to the statements prior made by Heidegger, LaCapra returns to a question of conversion. I will maintain that absence is a consequence of lossabsence is always an absence of something lost; absence is always the trace of what is lost; absence is the uncanny acronym, and the impression left upon a traumatized foundation. What needs to be determined, and re-examined, is exactly how a conversion from absence to loss (which LaCapra has already said does not occur at a foundational level) comes to pass, if it ever does, and whether or not this conversion

15 16

Dominick LaCapra, Writing History/Writing Trauma, (Johns Hopkins UP; 2001) 49. Ibid., 50-1. 9

should be permissible here. Loss, as a metaphysical Event, functions and dysfunctions simultaneously in both space and time. It is important to remember that the loss of an object, or Loss1 is subject to Loss2, the loss and passing of the Event of Loss1. 17 Absence, as I have already asserted, requires a source (an of or from), and I deem that source Loss. Loss1 is the of or from it is that which simultaneously separates and joins an Object from/to its absence, permitting its partial remains, and the ongoing of a trace or remnant for the Subject who is the necessary witness to the loss. Loss1 is likewise not a necessarily permanent state, as the lost Object (what we have perhaps already seen earlier in the potential significations of the TRC acronym) withholds a propensity for revenance. Loss2, however, remains purely historical, never to return, always already in the past, passed away.18 It is Loss2 that imbues a

17

I will use Object here to delineate any thing or idea that might be lost from a Subject, tangible or not. In the context of

trauma studies, we might consider loss of liberties, rights, autonomy, property, relatives/loved ones, etc. Time passes, however. This is the ineluctable circumstance that throws any and every loss-of-an-Object (I will demarcate this as Loss1) into the past, and thusly into history. The fleeting characteristic of this Loss1 in time acts, itself, as a lossLoss2, or the loss of an Event necessary to the nature of the Event, as that which passes immediately upon its occurrence. As such, the entire structure and process of Loss is inherently and spatio-temporally split.
18

The concept of a divided loss that I have outlined here stems from postulations made by both Vilm Flusser and Michel

Foucault. Foucaults distinguishing of histoire as at divided into both development and structure/system casts a light on history as at once both open and closed. Development continues, and structure arrests. Flusser will likewise suggest a double meaning in history, as both process and narrative, stating, In the first sense, the word means a process, a course of events. In the second sense, it means a narrative. On the surface, these appear to be completely different meanings; yet, has there ever been a process about which no one told a story? This is a metaphysical question. On the other hand, are there any stories that are not based on processes? This is a rhetorical question. To express this in a more radical manner: For a process to be recognized, it must be narrated. And, for a narrative to be a narrative, something must happen. Every attempt to separate history in the first sense definitively from history in the second sense, which is to say, history from historiography, history from story, necessarily creates more confusion instead of eliminating confusion altogether. Added to this is the fact that storytelling itself is a part of the history being narrated; in other words, narratives make history. The Trojan War is a part of history, and it has The lliad to thank for this. Moreover, The Iliad is part of history, and it has the Trojan War to thank for this. Neither Schliemann's archaeological research nor the philological research of Homer interpreters can alter this fact. Still, both camps are able to place the double meaning of the concept of "history" before 10

lost Object with a certain irretrievability. When LaCapra places absence at a foundational level, on a level of transhistory, he does so in order to mark an impossibility of conversion between loss and absence. Although loss begets absence, I will agree that a conversion is not at work. Loss and absence hold a kinship in the lexicons of history and trauma, but they remain absolutely separated, even if one borders on the other. A conversion from loss to absence, or from absence to loss (which I find utterly problematic, as in such a case the absence would be unsourcedbut this is already LaCapras problem) would require some sort of overlap, a determinable cotermination of loss and absence, as loss converted from absence would mean the loss to have previously been absence.19 Conversion of absence and loss requires, at the very least, a partial conflation (perhaps, in such a case, we could examine absence as overlapping the permanence of Loss2, conceiving Loss2 as no longer an event, but rather a process of decay or a backwards becomingbut this would install a revenance, or a coming-back, in Loss2, thusly stripping it of its permanent functionality). Of course, this is the conflation that LaCapra condemnsbut is he not already guilty of committing it? LaCapra will not properly testify as witness to his foundations. Instead, he will intimate, and conditionally argue towards a suggestive witnessing that is, as such, ungrounded.20 As such, it is

our eyes. (Vilm Flusser, On the End of History. Writings, (University of Minnesota Press; 2002) 143.)
19

LaCapra submits to this in a footnote: Absence and loss could not form a binary in that the opposite of absence is These incidences, which I will call attention to here, include but are not limited to: I would argue that the response of

presence and that of loss is gain. (48)

20

even secondary witnesses (including historians) to traumatic events must involve empathic unsettlement that should register in ones very mode of address in ways revealing both similarities and differences across genres (such as history and literature). But a difficulty arises when the virtual experience involved in empathy gives way to vicarious victim-hood, and empathy with the victim seems to become an identity. And a post-traumatic response of unsettlement becomes 11

necessarily impossible to come to full consensus with him and his work, because it has established a defense system that resists any sort of permanence of opinion, affirmation, or assertion. Of course, this might be forgivable if we choose to empathize with his suspension, but as this trial seeks to foster justice, and to render a verdict (though impossible it may be), we must maintain a scrutinous legal rigor in our examination, and thusly assert that LaCapra is, in fact, guilty of conversion.21 He testifies to the effects of conversion, permitting their conflation: When absence is converted into loss, one increases the likelihood of misplaced nostalgia or utopian politics in quest of a new totality or fully unified community. When loss is converted into (or encrypted in an indiscriminately generalized rhetoric of) absence, one faces the impasse of endless melancholy, impossible mourning, and interminable aporia in which any process of working through the past and its historical losses is foreclosed or prematurely aborted. (46)

LaCapra is strictly liableloss and absence were not his property, yet he has tampered with them

questionable when it is routinized in a methodology or style that enacts compulsive repetition, including the compulsively repetitive turn to the aporia, paradox or impasse. I would like to argue that the perhaps necessary acting-out of trauma in victims and the empathic unsettlement (at times even inducing more or less muted trauma) in secondary witnesses should not be seen as foreclosing attempts to work through the past and its losses, both in victims or other agents and in secondary witnesses, and that the very ability to make the distinction between absence and loss (as well as to recognize its problematic nature) is one aspect of a complex process of working through. (47, my emphasis) as well as, I have intimated that , especially in a secular context, a commonly desired ultimate foundation or ground is full unity, community, or consensus, which is often, if not typically, figured as lost or perhaps lacing, usually because of the intrusive presence of others seen as outsiders or polluters of the city or the body politic...One may contend that the absence of absolute or essential foundations, including consensus, does not eliminate all room for agreement or all possibility of good (in contrast to absolute or ultimate) grounds for an agreement. But one need not confound agreement with full consensus, a uniform way of life, an avoidance of strenuous argument, or the exclusion or elimination of all significant differences. (60-1)
21

This is not a zone for ethics. I am upholding the notion of Georgio Agamben, who will make his mark here briefly, that To

assume guilt and responsibilitywhich can, at times, be necessaryis to leave the territory of ethics and enter that of law. Whoever has made this difficult step cannot presume to return through the door he just closed behind him. (Remnants

of Auschwitz [Zone;1999] 24.)

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regardless. Could this have been avoided? Or in the face of an already-present impasse, upon a post-traumatic encounter in the New Haven Hotel, was LaCapra culpable for a crime of which he was unaware? Supported upon himself, does he stare out upon the court from a glass box, and plead not guilty in the sense of the indictment?22

Witness to the Stand

Something impossible is at work here. Something has happened that perhaps never should have come to pass. Something has left a bad impression on Dominick LaCapra, and he looks guilty. Hes left a bad impression upon the court. It is time we deal with the witnesses, but immediately a question is brought forth: who can bear witness to an invisible impression upon an absent ground? No answer is given, no answer can be taken away. LaCapra is arrested; his work on history is seized and frozen. History has stopped for LaCapra and for our witnesses. We must ask who will continue to bear witness, despite this arrestto whom can this proceeding move? Primo Levi, survivor of Auschwitz, provided our opening statements here. He is, to a great extent, the reason this trial continues to

22

The famous plea of Adolf Eichmann in his trial at Jerusalem. Eichmann, once deemed normal, and later deemed

murderous; in court plead guilty insofar as he was unaware of the majority of the killings in Auschwitz for which he was accused, but elsewhere boasted his having killed five million Jews. Eichmanns lawyer, Robert Servatius, stated in a press interview: Eichmann feels guilty before God, not before the law, but this answer remained without confirmation from the accused himself. The defense would apparently have preferred him to plead not guilty on the grounds that under the then existing Nazi legal system he had not done anything wrong, that what he was accused of were not crimes but acts of state, over which no other state has jurisdiction...(Hannah Arendt, Eichmann In Jerusalem [Penguin; 1964] 21-2) Obviously, such statements were not considered within the court, and Eichmann, in the end, received his sentence regardless of whether or not he was aware of the goings-on, and whether they were acts of state, or acts of personal interest. 13

transpire. He has acquired the vice of writing.23 But can we hear the words of Levi, can we allow him to testify, to take the stand and take a stand on loss and absence? Georgio Agamben has interjectedno! In his analysis of the functionality of a witness, he brings in as evidence the proper etymology and source of witness: In Latin there are two words for witness. The first word, testis, from which our word testimony derives, etymologically signifies the person who, in a trial or lawsuit between two rival parties, is in the position of a third party (*terstis). The second word, superstes, designates a person who has lived through something, who has experienced an event from beginning to end and can therefore bear witness to it. It is obvious that Levi is not a third party; he is a survivor [superstite] in every sense. But this also means that his testimony has nothing to do with the acquisition of facts for a trial (he is not neutral enough for this, he is not a testis)...It seems, in fact, that the only thing that interests him is what makes judgment impossible: the gray zone in which victims become executioners and executioners become victims.24

...a gray zone where victims cause loss, and loss causes victims. This gray zone: does LaCapra not drive directly toward this place? Where victims and executioners are conflated and reciprocally converted, where impossible impressions are left on absent grounds, where he holds no authority, where he has suspended himself above an abyss? We can think toward other trials, toward those at Nuremberg and in Jerusalemthe attempts to resolve the horrors to which Levi was made subject. We can think toward Kafka, toward the Catholic Church and its Holy See, toward any process seeking to judge an act of violence, or to compensate for a traumatic trespass.25 The question will remain, however, as to how we might go

23 24 25

Primo Levi, Survival in Auschwitz: If This Is a Man. (New York: Orion, 2008) 258). Georgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz (Zone;1999) 16. Agamben points to the insufficiency of the judicial system in dealing with traumatic events examining briefly Kafkas The 14

Trial, and the words of Sebastiano Satta, who states that the only truly innocent person is not the one who is acquitted,

about approaching a proper legal proceeding that will provide the grounds necessary for enabling a witness to testify accordingly. Levi, Agamben points out, is stranded in the realm of the ethical, unable to move through the door and into the court: What is at issue here, therefore, is a zone of irresponsibility and impotentia judicandi (Levi 1989: 60) that is situated not beyond good and evil but rather, so to speak, before them. With a gesture that is symmetrically opposed to that of Nietzsche, Levi places ethics before the area in which we are accustomed to consider it. And, without our being able to say why, we sense that this before is more important than any beyondthat the underman must matter to us more than the overman. This infamous zone of irresponsibility is our First Circle, from which no confession of responsibility will remove us and in which what is spelled out, minute by minute, is the lesson of the terrifying, unsayable and unimaginable banality of evil (Arendt 1992: 252)26

Before good and evil, before judgment and the law, we find ethics, we find Levi, and, of course, we find
Kafkas man from the country. But unlike Kafkas character, a witness who is not welcomed or accounted for by the law, and finds himself physically before it, we must think at another time, at another meaning. The problem is of time. Before, in the past, prior: this is where we find the traumatic witness. It is a pre-law situation, before the arrival of the judicial system, the judging machine, where

but rather the one who goes through life without judgment. Agamben will continue, If this is trueand the survivor knows that it is truethen it is possible that the trials (the twelve trials at Nuremberg, and the others that took place in and outside German borders, including those in Jerusalem in 1961 that ended with the hanging of Eichmann) are responsible for the conceptual confusion that, for decades, has made it impossible to think through Auschwitz. Despite the necessity of the trials and despite their evident insufficiency (they involved only a few hundred people), they helped to spread the idea that the problem of Auschwitz had been overcome. The judgments had been passed, the proofs of guilt definitively established. (Ibid., 19) I mention the Holy See in reference to its incessant determination to cover up reported cases of child abuse committed by clergy members. This is not the space to delve deeply into the subject, but I will cite one Father Tom Doyle, who speaks toward his inability to witness thusly: Ive been a Catholic priest for 35 years. Ive been fired from two major positions and sidetracked through 2 careers as a priest in the church because Ive openly advocated for the victims of clergy sexual abuse and according to some been much too critical and much too vocal about the source of the cover-up: the manipulation, the dishonesty that comes from the top. (Deliver Us From Evil, 2006)
26

Georgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz (Zone;1999) 21. 15

the witness can testify. The court does not work for a witness of an aporia, or an impasse.

Mistrial
This is where Agamben resolves, at Levis Paradox, at a point where the true witness is s/he who cannot bear it, who cannot bear witness, for they are stuck, prior to the law. So where does this leave us, here? Dominick, impressed and unable to bear witness, barely able to speak without contradicting himselfdoes he know he falters in the face of the court, and that his own work is already imbued with an inability to deal with the traumatic experience? He has posited elsewhere: Being responsive to the traumatic experience of others, notably of victims, implies not the appropriation of their experience but what I would call empathic unsettlement, which should have stylistic effects or, more broadly, effects in writing which cannot be reduced to formulas or rules of method.27 The court is no place for ruling, no place for judgment. This has been, however, only a quasi-judicial setting, which means nothing specific. When we cast judgment, or attempt judgment, upon the traumatic, we falter, we make mistakes, and we shatter the ground beneath us. We have to call, thusly, for a mistrial. LaCapra has, yes, presented absence. He has grounded it. He has converted and conflated loss and absence, and he has resisted it insodoing. But already, as witness to the vowelless trace, secondary witness, he is thrown before the law, and into history. He cannot be tried, and cannot stand trial, for he has passed (as is the case with any witness) and as such he is the unannounced remains of the witness as well, thrown out of the court to precede it, leaving a brief, clicking trace.

27

Dominick LaCapra, Writing History, Writing Trauma (Johns Hopkins UP; 2001) 44. 16

Works Cited
Agamben, Giorgio. Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive. New York: Zone, 2000. Print. Arendt, Hannah. Eichmann in Jerusalem; a Report on the Banality of Evil. New York: Viking, 1963. Print. Cixous, Hlne, Jacques Derrida, and Geoffrey Bennington. "A Silkworm of One's Own." Veils. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 2001. N. pag. Print.

Deliver Us from Evil. Dir. Amy Berg. Perf. Mary Gail Frawley-O'Dea, Oliver O'Grady, Thomas Doyle.
Lionsgate, 2006. Film. Derrida, Jacques. "Mochlos: The University in the Eyes of Its Pupils." Eyes of the University: Right to

Philosophy 2. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 2004. N. pag. Print.

Flusser, Vilm, and Andreas Strhl. "On the End of History." Writings. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2002. N. pag. Print. Foucault, Michel. Archeology of Knowledge. London: Routledge, 2010. Print. Heidegger, Martin. The Principle of Reason. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1991. Print. Kafka, Franz. The Trial. New York: Vintage, 1969. Print. LaCapra, Dominick. "Trauma, Absence, Loss." Writing History, Writing Trauma. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2001. N. pag. Print. Levi, Primo, and S. J. Woolf. Survival in Auschwitz: If This Is a Man. New York: Orion, 2008. Print.

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