CANCELED: Who Speaks from the Site of Trauma? Death and Life at the Site of Address

An announcement and posting will be made for rescheduling.

If you already paid for this presentation a refund will be issued.

Practitioners and General Public: $40

Students: $10

Tancred unwittingly kills his beloved Clorinda in a duel while she is disguised in the armour of an enemy knight. After her burial he makes his way to a strange magic forest which strikes the Crusaders’ army with terror. He slashes with his sword at a tall tree; but blood streams from the cut, and the voice of Clorinda, whose soul is imprisoned in the tree, is heard complaining that he has wounded his beloved once again. (Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, SE, Vol. 18, Chapter 3)

Cathy Caruth will consider the notion of trauma through the problem of address. What does it mean to establish the possibility of address from the site of its collapse? This presentation will examine texts and cases that trace the annihilation of the addressing subject in the traumatic encounter and the creation of a language of address that passes between death and life.

Cathy Caruth, PhD, is the Frank H. T. Rhodes Professor of Humane Letters and Professor in the Departments of Comparative Literature and English at Cornell University. She is the author of Empirical Truths and Critical Fictions: Locke, Wordsworth, Kant, Freud; a co-edited edition, Critical Encounters: Reference and Responsibility in Deconstructive Writing; Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History, recently reprinted in a 20th-anniversary edition with a new afterword; her edited edition, Trauma: Explorations in Memory; a series of essays, Literature in the Ashes of History; and a volume of interviews she conducted with thinkers and practitioners in a variety of disciplines, entitled Listening to Trauma: Conversations with Leaders in the Theory and Treatment of Catastrophic Experience.

Practitioners and General Public: $40

Students: $10