Listening to Trauma

Cathy Caruth is Frank H. T. Rhodes Professor of Humane Letters at Cornell University. In addition to Trauma: Explorations in Memory, her previous books include Literature in the Ashes of History; Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History; and Empirical Truths and Critical Fictions: Locke, Wordsworth, Kant, Freud, all published by Johns Hopkins.

• ForewordAcknowledgementsIntroduction: Learning to ListenPart I: Death in Theory1. Giving Death Its Due: An Interview with Robert Jay Lifton (June 8, 1990, New York, New York)2. Traumatic Temporality: An Interview with Jean Laplanche (October 23, 1994, Paris, France)3. A Record That Has Yet to Be Made: An Interview with Dori Laub (June 15–16, 2013, Woodbury, Connecticut)4. Mad Witnesses: A Conversation with Françoise Davoine andJean-Max Gaudillière (May 18, 2012, Burgundy, France)Part II: A Revolutionary Act5. The AIDS Crisis Is Not Over: A Conversation with Gregg Bordowitz,Douglas Crimp, and Laura Pinsky. Conducted with Thomas Keenan (September 25, 1991, New York, New York)6. The Politics of Trauma: A Conversation with Judith Herman (May 16, 2013, Cambridge, Massachusetts)7. The Body Keeps the Score: An Interview with Bessel van der Kolk (June 17, 2013, Boston, Massachusetts)8. The Haunted Self: An Interview with Onno van der Hart (July 16, 2013, Amsterdam, The Netherlands)9. Words and Wounds: An Interview with Geoffrey Hartman (September 11, 1994, New Haven, Connecticut)10. A Revolutionary Act—The Video Testimonies of the Nia Project: An Interview with Members of the Grady Nia Team (October 2 and 9, 2012, Atlanta, Georgia)Part III: The System Is Weeping11. Apocalypse Terminable and Interminable: An Interview with Arthur S. Blank Jr. (January 23, 2013, Washington, DC)12. Filming Madness: A Conversation with Mieke Bal and Françoise Davoine (November 26, 2011, Vevey, Switzerland)13. A Ghost in the House of Justice: A Conversation with Shoshana Felman (August 7, 2013, Tel Aviv, Israel)Index

In this extraordinary enterprise, Cathy Caruth achieves what is by definition an impossibility: making familiar the unfamiliar country of trauma, the place of displacement par excellence; the lieu of an 'erasure', as Dori Laub would say, where language is at a loss and a new language struggles to be heard, thanks to the construction of a new channel created by the very act and presence of a totally committed listening. The International Journal of Psychoanalysis In this extraordinary enterprise, Cathy Caruth achieves what is by definition an impossibility: making familiar the unfamiliar country of trauma, the place of displacement par excellence; the lieu of an 'erasure', as Dori Laub would say, where language is at a loss and a new language struggles to be heard, thanks to the construction of a new channel created by the very act and presence of a totally committed listening.