Prof. Colin Davis (Royal Holloway, University of London)
Trauma and Ethics: Telling the Other’s Story
This paper explores the dangers and temptations of trying to understand or to participate in the story of others’ trauma. Auschwitz survivor Elie Wiesel insists that no one has the right to speak on behalf of the dead. Yet Giorgio Agamben comes close to doing this in his Remnants of Auschwitz by treating the Muselmann as the key figure for the understanding of the death camps. Shoshana Felman’s account of a class in crisis illustrates another aspect of the problem, in that it indicates a questionable desire to take on a share of other people’s pain. Charlotte Delbo’s Measure of our Days tells the stories of the suffering of others in a problematic first-person voice, but, as I shall try to explain, it avoids the lure of secondary trauma exemplified by Agamben and Felman.
Prof. Davis's
research is principally in the field of twentieth-century French
literature, thought and film. He has written on major canonical authors
such as Sartre, Beauvoir and Camus, Holocaust literature, recent French
fiction, and thinkers such as Levinas and Derrida. He is particularly
interested in ethical criticism and the links between philosophy,
literature and film.
