Reviews for The Empire of Trauma: An Inquiry into the Condition of Victimhood

The average rating for The Empire of Trauma: An Inquiry into the Condition of Victimhood based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2018-08-18 00:00:00 Dina Padaliya A very enlightening read for anyone interested in the politics of memory, legacies of violence, and social constructions of victimhood. While not always easy to read, this is the type of scholarly work that truly changes your way of looking at concepts and categories we often take for granted. The following passage stuck with me: "Our critique neither refutes--nor confirms--either the diagnosis of trauma or the status of victim. (...) While scientific practice tends to examine a reality for what it is, we have studied what it is not. To be precise, we have focused on two aspects of the process of production of trauma and victims that most research leaves out: what does this process not allow to be said, and who are those whom it makes it possible to leave out? In other words, while trauma is a language that appears both neutral and universal in its account of victims, it significantly fails to throw light on certain signifieds and certain agents. Identifying these gaps gives us the means to grasp the figure of the victim delineated by trauma." The authors go on two highlight two of these gaps: first, "trauma obliterates experiences. It operates as a screen between the event and its context on the one hand, and the subject and the meaning he or she gives to the situation on the other." Second, "trauma--or rather the social process of recognition of persons as traumatized--effectively chooses its victims. Although those who promote the concept assert that it is universal, since it is the mark left by an event, study reveals tragic disparities in its use." In the end, "trauma is more of a feature of the moral landscape serving to identify legitimate victims than it is a diagnostic category which at most reinforces that legitimacy." The authors ask us to think about who in our society we think of at victims, and why, and what meanings and processes of recognition this category carries--and who or what is left out. What does it say about us and our relationship to the past and present that trauma has become a key way of relating to past suffering?

Review # 2 was written on 2016-01-16 00:00:00 Chen Wei An interesting review of the rise of humanitarian treatment of trauma. The most interesting parts to me were the discussions of trauma post WW1, where psychiatry began to see trauma as a condition in a normal individual suffering through an extreme environment, rather than an innate characteristic of the individual in question. The discussions of the rise of humanitarian treatment of PTSD (after earthquakes in Iran and Armenia, in which there were already adequate services for physical trauma, were also interesting; in the sense that the humanitarians created this zone of action for themselves.