Abstract

The philosophical study of trauma involves considering this concept in a circle of apparently abstract examples, commenting on it from the perspectives of ontology, metaphysics, aesthetics, and ethics. The difficulty with trauma is not simply that it stands as a subject for disciplines of a different kind and intentionality, but that it is inherently bound to resist all theoretical reasoning at all. This notion is not so much contradictory as actively negative in relation to the usual application of theoretical apparatus to it and its like. But the further one deals with trauma, even if one is not a metaphysician, even if one is at its mercy, the more clearly one realizes that thought cannot deny itself for the sake of earthly pain, no matter how much it may feel the urge to accomplish this self-overcoming, that it will remain itself even in the analysis of trauma, i. e., a movement from fact to essence. And accordingly, the trauma will be abstracted and revealed from paradoxical and formal sides, in its otherness and ambiguity.