CHAPTER ONE

Introduction

General Background
Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it
tragically. The cataclysm has happened, we are among the
ruins, we start to build up new little habitats, to have new
little hopes. It is rather hard work: there is now no smooth
road into the future: but we go round, or scramble over the
obstacles. We've got to live, no matter how many skies
have fallen. (D. H. Lawrence Incipit of Lady

Chatterleys Lover, Early Last Century)

Ours is essentially a traumatic age, an age of mass production of victims. The disastrous 20th
century with its World Wars nightmares of Holocaust and Hiroshima and with its Cold
Wars promise of an Apocalypse has only ended in the post-9/11 World Order of the 21st
century. In both popular culture and critical theory, there is a widespread tendency to being
victimized by a wound that, gaping wider and wider, is about to devour everything in

everyday personal affairs, in politics, in history, and in media. Today, it seems that subject is
already a subject of trauma, history is possible exclusively as a testimony to a trauma, and
social organization may be founded upon the distribution of trauma through its
representations in media. A sense of being victims is injected, on a daily basis, to global
citizens. The word has been in such a common currency that, despite its complicated
terminological psychiatric senses, it sometimes comes to denote, simply and yet as
terminologically, a crisis, as Shoshana Felman did in her groundbreaking Testimony: Crises

of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History, where there is a question of

witnessing or, experiencing- the thing without being able to speak it, that is, simply a
confrontation with the unspeakable Real. The coincidence of trauma studies and the
ubiquitous deconstruction in the 90s led to a trauma hunt, in literary fields of critical theory,
that idealized trauma as an epic grappling with unspeakability. However, there are other
critics, like Linda Belau, who warn against the dangerous elevation of traumatic experience
to the level of an ideal:

That is, insofar as it remains beyond our understanding and comprehension, trauma can
easily be seen as a sort of exceptional experience. And victims or survivors of trauma,
consequently, may be seen as ambassadors of an exceptional realm, bearers of a higher
(albeit more terrible) knowledge than is available to the rest of us. (1)

Trauma studies seem to be either trauma hunts in literary or non-literary texts or

therapeutic treatises on recovery. Thanks to these studies, other brand new names of trauma
are constantly introduced to the already brimful hoard of hysterics, of the survivors of fatal
accidents, of the subjects of near-death experiences, of the shell-shocked at the war, of the
witnesses to forbidden scenes, genocides and terrorist attacks, of those wounded in love, of

the raped and of the returned from the camp. But studying trauma as such is missed in the
field of such fervent research. An inquiry of trauma must be warned against any
appropriation of the term, since it has always been in danger of being abused by totalitarian
powers. It is a vital warning because, in the natural path of the historical progress of any
discourse, there must be also emergency brakes so that the discourse can find an opportunity
to evaluate itself, to take a look back at itself, from without without denying any of the efforts
previously made to develop the discourse.
It is not difficult to see the dangers of an extremely violent civilization which is, despite
its insistence on human rights, busy producing victims and traumatized people in enormous
scales. As early as 1986, the defense attorney of the longest and most expensive criminal trial
of American history, Daniel G. Davis had warned against mass production of trauma and
hysteria. McMartin preschool trial1 was only an early example of how there could be a
possibility of being traumatized artificially and dragged into a fruitless litigation (Tuscaloosa

News- January 24, 1986) through a moral panic which was partly due to day care sex abuse
hysteria and spreading rumors of Satanic Ritual Abuse in the 80s and 90s. Therefore, it is
quite legitimate to view trauma as an empty signifier, or a blank space, which has been
occasionally filled in with the contents of the days moral panics and concerns that are subject
to distortion by the interest-seeking institutions and irresponsible media.
***

In 1983, McMartin family, running a successful day care centre, was accused of several acts of sexual abuse,
due to the bizarre complaints of a mother who was later diagnosed with acute schizophrenia and found dead
because of chronic alcoholism in 1986, leaving the long trial on the way alone with her claims. The trial lasted
seven years at a cost of $15 million. Now it is believed that the false accusations were made based on the highly
suggestive methods of questioning about the traumatic experience imposed on the children. Such aggressive
attempts to excavate a traumatic sexual abuse led to weird testimonies of seeing witches fly, travelling in balloons
and in dark underground tunnels. Now it is believed that it was a product of moral panics of the American
society in that time, aggrandized by Anti Cult rumors of satanic kidnapping and brainwashing children in an age
of flourishing social work and child protection i.e. day care centers to be looked at by families suspiciously.

The present thesis began around 2012 when the world was panicked by the rumor of another

apocalypse largely on media. Supposedly, we are the survivors of another apocalypse in

history, as the world has been frequently awaiting its end from the very beginning of
recorded history! So many times have been called apocalyptic and a lot others will be. It
seems that, dissatisfied with its present, each age considers itself as the most evil of all ages,
so corrupt that the end is surely very near. But what is wonderful with regard to the
apocalypse as a signifier is the subjectivity that has historically filled it with two seemingly
opposite senses, one etymological, the other practical. It is significant that apocalypse which
originally meant unveiling is used in the sense of the end of the world. But in unveiling, as
apocalypse originally means, there has always been this scene of a curtain being drawn to
reveal what is beyond and to let the light in. This scene is usually interpreted as the final
victory of the good over the evil of darkness and it is not merely an end but also indicative
always of the beginning of a new era that does not belong to history and is not a historical
epoch as Agamben puts it. In The Idea of Epoch, he writes:

The most hypocritical aspect of the lie implicit in the concept of decadence is the
pedantry with which at the very moment complaints are being made about the
mediocrity and decline, and predictions made about the coming end each generation
tallies its new talent and catalogues its new forms and epochal tendencies in art and
thought. (Idea of Prose 87)

He truly diagnoses the inextinguishable desire of each age, of no longer wanting to be

an historical epoch (87) and insists on its repetitiousness: If one feature of our sensibilities
deserves to survive, it is just this sense of impatience and almost of nausea we feel when faced
with the prospect of everything simply beginning all over again, even if for the best (87).
Therefore, if in our age the apocalypse and the apocalyptic have gained a fresh renown, if

the end of everything is fervently announced, it is not at all anything new. Concepts such as
post-modern, the new renaissance, humanity beyond metaphysics, all betray the seed of
progressiveness hidden in every conception of decadence and even nihilism (87), concludes
Agamben with regard to this sense of approaching end in our times.
Therefore, it is not surprising that our time affirms a bond between apocalypse and
trauma. Trauma studies offer plenty of examples of modeling trauma and its recovery upon
an apocalyptic sense that involves both a death and a rebirth into a new life. For example,
Parr talks about the blossoming industry of memorialization (1) while admitting of a
relation between trauma and apocalypse by asking how does culture answer to the
memories that linger on in the wake of a trauma collectively experienced and the feeling that
a community has been pushed to what seems like the end of the world (1); or Felman
dedicates a chapter in her Testimony on Paul De Man to After the Apocalypse, which may
also shed a light on a certain relation between apocalypse and bearing witness, since
apocalypse must always remain unattestable and without testimony for the one who has had
the impossible experience of trauma without being able to symbolize it. In this way, any
apocalyptic text can be regarded as a symbolic, and for that very reason inadequate, left-over
or residua of an experience of vision or revelation. Survival after the catastrophe can make
the apocalyptic text possible, as well as the attempts to represent what cannot be grasped in
representation. If the apocalyptic text is viewed as a testimony, it is the testimony both of a
not-yet-occurred (in case of the end of time) and of an occurred (in case of visions). Not only
does the apocalyptic text try to grasp a beyond time an attempt to historicize an ahistorical
time- but also it proposes strange relations between representation and the unrepresentable.
In other words, the end of time will be the end of representation too. However, a lot of
questions remain as to the relation of the apocalyptic to the traumatic. This relation forms

on borderlines that are easy to trace and to witness their being absolved in our age, as a
theoretical result of the advent of deconstruction. But what is this border itself? Where is the
meeting point of oppositions but in language, where the signifier apocalypse can announce a
union of repeated ends and beginnings?
***
The study of literature in the light of trauma has gained a major theoretical framework since
the trauma fever of the 80s and 90s. Through trauma studies, however, a modern critical
inquiry showed the hidden desire for endurance among all the ruins produced by the
constant process of modernist renewal. The debates over the over-idealization of the
unspeakable in the literary work are especially influenced by post-structuralist thought on the
limits of representation, confrontation with the unrepresentable Real, and the Void of
thought. However, the preoccupation with the Unrepresentable in any name, whether
trauma or the Real, may reflect the gnawing fear of losing the speech in our times. The
hidden suffering of modern man has appeared in the disguise of what resists any
representation, any entrance in thought or language. But the major problem with such an
approach to texts is that the literary text still remains, in this theory, a representation. In other
words, the literary text is still a representation of trauma in the strangely broad sense of
suffering and violence-, even when it claims to the unrepresentability of pain. Thus, if the
relation of the traumatic to the apocalyptic forms on a border which is necessarily also an
end that is, the end of representation-, an originally traumatic reading of the literary text
may take a route other than merely representing such and such a traumatic experience, which
is admittedly doomed to fail thanks to its unspeakability. Nevertheless, the Unspeakable, as
that which comes to mind but will not pass on tongue, is after all a pure surface in language, a
mere form, or a pure name. In this sense, trauma may be read as it occurs in the direct

formal experience of a text, whether in literature or in philosophy. Through trauma, the

confrontation is basically with the materiality of the traumatic experience or the traumatic
event as an empty signifier and a pure surface which resists any later attempts to be
symbolized. Agamben, in whose works the borders of poetry and philosophy are easily
absolved, inspires such approach when he writes, in The Idea of Matter,

the decisive experience, so difficult to talk about, it is claimed, for those who have had
one, is not even an experience. It is nothing but the point at which we touch the limits of
language. But what we reach obviously not a thing so new and awesome that we lack the
words to describe it; it is rather, matter. (Idea of Prose 37)

The materiality of the signifier, the body of sign well before it is bound to positive or
negative senses, when it communicates its surface, has remained to a large extent unspoken
and the lack of a speech on the speechlessness of trauma is still felt. It is necessary to
conduct a research on literary and non-literary through a traumatized reading where not
only literature is read literature as it is commonly done in academic literary theory- but also
philosophy is read like literature based on the forms and images that abstract ideas assume.

The Argument
Literature is a testimony, but not merely in a sense that entails trailing the instances of
recurring violence or traumatic scenes in a literary text. This study examines the moments of
traumatization of language in a text. It argues that the tracing of the origins of trauma in the
late 19th century as well as its transformations down to its ultimate professionalization in the
term PTSD (Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder) can reveal the idea of trauma, or trauma as

such, rather than its ever-growing various forms. From this point of view, what is significant to
the present research is the status of trauma acquires as a signifier in language. From the very
beginning, the metaphor of trauma, from Greek which originally indicated a
wound or hurt in a physical sense (Online Etymology Dictionary), came to denote a
psychic disorder in French psychiatry. It can be seen that the word trauma was originally a
name for a threshold state of suspension between psyche and soma, between the psychical
and the physical. In other words, in the term trauma, the dialectic relation of inside/outside
is held in abeyance. The same holds interestingly true for the metaphorical image of a
wound that reveals the inside on the outside, or, brings the content to the surface of skin.
Not only in etymology but also in function, trauma is bound to an aporetic liminality, since
trauma, as a scene that haunts the subject, is only present in memory through its repulsion. In
better words, the traumatic is not just any memory, but one that is present in memory
through a desire to efface it as long as it comes in spite of the subject. Through a close
examination of Freuds investigation on trauma, two significant elements of the traumatic
experience may be isolated: that is, the relation of the traumatic to repetition and death.
Again, a fissure could be discerned at the heart of the concept of trauma since it
simultaneously contains two completely reverse movements. On the one hand, there is a
compulsion to repeat the traumatic scene, and on the other hand, the desire to put an end
to its pain. To put it briefly, the traumatic is repeated over and over just to extinguish itself.
The two opposite and simultaneous movements toward repetition and end, as the
inherent structure of all trauma, lead the argument to the other important relation proposed
in this thesis the relation of apocalypse. Trauma as a decisive experience, in Agamben's
terms, always suggests a radical break and a fundamental rupture. It is a revolution that

10

triggers thought that, as Levinas notices in Ethics and Infinity: Conversations with Philippe

Nemo, probably begins through traumatisms or gropings to which one does not even know
how to give a verbal form: a separation, a violent scene, a sudden consciousness of the
monotony of time (21). In the sense of a radical break, the end of time, as the vital concern
in apocalyptic texts -either religious or literary ones-, can be related to the idea of trauma.
And exactly as a break, as a wound, the apocalypse expresses the very features of a decisive
traumatic experience. While apocalypse is an end, it is so only because it involves a rebirth into the annihilation of time and space. Like the traumatic, any apocalyptic involves a
simultaneous relation to the opposite movements of repetition and death. What is at stake
here is not only to see trauma as apocalypse, but also to see the reverse view of apocalypse as
a negative trauma negative in the sense that it is the trauma of the not-yet-occurred. But it
must be noted that apocalypse is only important to the present research as long as it is put to
the test of language and its relation to discourse is figured out. This may include etymological
examinations of the cleavage such a woundly sign- on the body of the signifier apocalypse
that, from the Greek , transliterated as apoclypsis , originally meant to
uncover, a revelation or disclosure and later came to denote end of time (Online

Etymology Dictionary). This research examines the relation of apocalypse to discourse

traumatically and through its aporetic unspeakability. Like trauma, which is beyond discourse
and hence ineffable, the end of time remains totally outside, in spite of any attempt to
represent it. To speak of the end of history, Maurice Blanchot says,

is simply to pose the question of the place of such words, henceforth without content
since, as soon as history comes to a close, speech loses the direction and the meaning

11

that are only given to it by the possibility of historical accomplishment. (Blanchot, The

Blanchot Reader 279)

Then the end, while being necessary to discourse, falls out of it. It is necessary because,
in Blanchot's own words, the end determines the coherence of the discourse (279). In
addition, by the suspension of the dialectic relation of inside/outside, as it occurs in the
liminality of both trauma and apocalypse, logos (language, discourse) approaches its
unsaying which is quite different from silence its dialectic twin.
The language that approaches its unsaying is called, in the next step of the present
research, traumapocalyptic and is examined in literature. It has been already noted,
especially by Blanchot, that literary experience is a confrontation with a language that is not
primarily involved, as in everyday language, with the communication of ideas, but that which
rather involves the word in terms of its form and attends to its outside. The

traumapocalyptic is not accomplished by representing this or that idea that is after all a
communication again. It is, rather, an unsaying. It is language but only as long as it
approaches its end a language not to be meant but to be experienced. It is modeled
upon a wound as it per-forms its content and never keeps the form and content in the
dialectic relation of inside/outside. That is, it does not keep form and content separate in the
relation of saying (there is a form that says the content): here form does, performs,
content -not expression but performance. It is an apocalypse of expressive literature into a
performative one. Literature thinks about its performativity in our age since the growing of
interactive entertainments is seriously threatening its attraction.

12

In the wake of Blanchots thoughts on literature, Foucault attends to the surface

language of I Speak, in which language reaches an extreme where form not only says but
also does the content. In other words, for the statement I speak, form and content are the
same, simultaneous, and on a border of indifference. In his Thought from Outside, Foucault
examines the consequences of such thought on language when it comes to the surface and on
the significance of a language that passes on the pure exteriority. From the moment
discourse ceases to follow the self-interiorizing thought and, addressing the very being of
language, Foucault writes,

returns thought to the outside; from that moment, in a single stroke, it becomes a
meticulous narration of experiences, encounters, improbable signs language about the
outside of all language, speech about the invisible side of words. And it becomes
attentiveness to what in language already exists, has already been said, imprinted,
manifested a listening less to what is articulated in language than to the void circulating
between its words, to the murmur that is forever taking it apart; a discourse on the nondiscourse of all language; the fiction of the invisible space in which it appears. (25)

By exposing both thought and language representation in general- to their void,

thought from outside effaces the border of fiction and reflection, of poetry and philosophy,
as in Blanchots work, since it is a thought that never yields to self-interiorizing. It is in this
regard that the form of ideas gains a greater importance than the ideas themselves. A close
examination, for instance, of Foucaults style in his monograph, reveals not only an outline of
the main concerns of thought from outside, but also a performance of this thought in
language: a language which in describing anything whatsoever only describes itself, a language

13

in whose synchronous saying and doing, comes up to its surface. This is not a surface that is
formed on an inside (since, in this case, there would be another opposition between form
and content), rather, it is a pure exteriority. In traumapocalyptic writing, language is not
merely experienced as a waiting for the realization of the meaning behind or beyond the
signifier, and it cannot be reduced to a carrier of big ideas. Agambens Experimentum

Linguae is an important continuity to Foucaults Thought of Outside and is an ample

performance in the form of discursive writing.
Finally, it is argued that Becketts later work can be regarded as traumapocalyptic. In
this step, a language that will not communicate such and such an idea, one that will not
communicate but its own communicability its I speak- and is there only to reveal the
exteriority, this language that, as it was seen, approaches its unsaying, is compared to the
emergent eye in Becketts later work which originates in the mid-60s in his critical, dramatic
and prose works. This comparison is possible because firstly, for the eye/camera, saying and

seeing are the same and synchronous. The synchronous seeing and saying grants sort of
performativity to the eye-writings of Beckett, which will be called matiagraphic2 texts; and
second, it is also possible to trace the history of a weakening eye in later Becketts work
which, most of all, is an eye that approaches its end, that is its unseeing. The performance
of a spectacle which is nothing but the very act of seeing is experienced in Becketts
stripping of stages and of language in his later works. In other words, the matiagraphic
experience involves seeing the eye itself as from outside, as it sees anything else, in the way
an I always says also itself in anything it says about anything else.

The word is coined from the Greek word, mati (), meaning eye.

14

In summary, the argument of the present thesis consists of three parts: (1) Developing
an experience of traumapocalyptic out of the examination of the terms trauma and
apocalypse; (2) Examining the ways in which such traumapocalyptic experience takes form
in representation (in the language of literature as well as that of philosophical reflection); and
(3) Analyzing the traumapocalyptic movement of Becketts later writing. However, through
the argument of the present study, it can be shown that representation in general consists of
limit moments, of thresholds origin and end- that work as ungraspable moments of
representation (its voids). However, the duality of thresholds or impossible moments
basically constitutes the foundation of thought and of representation. Since the rule of
causality governing thought and language is marked by the priority and anteriority of the
cause and the effect, and since priority and anteriority are but structures of temporality, time
appears as the intrinsic structure of signification. In better words, signification is only possible
in a mode of representation that presupposes this linear temporal mode. Therefore, the
apocalypse, the end, of causality/temporality/representation is naturally the concern of any
representation as its vital question: a question impossible to understand because causality
perceives chance not as pure but as chance still interiorized by causality, as chance in
language and opposed to regularity and system.
In summary, the present research answers the following questions:
How can the idea of trauma in relation to that of apocalypse, as two
prevalent paradigms of the thought of our age, develop a new view of literary text?
What are the characteristics of a traumapocalyptic writing?

15

In what ways is traumapocalyptic writing to be observed in non-literary,

theoretical texts? Rather, how is it possible to read theory as literature as much as
literature is read upon theory?
Is it possible to trace a discontinuous history of the negative thought of

outside?
How does representation approach its apocalypse of un-representing without
being lost in silence, in Becketts later work?
In what ways is Becketts later writing involved in unwording the text? How
does his work found a synchronous seeing and saying, which brings the text to its
exteriority? How is this seeing and saying related to the traumatic idea of testimony?
Why is the idea of language approaching its unsaying a theoretical step
beyond the deconstruction of the conceptual pair of logos and silence? Or, how does
the eye see its unseeing?

Literature Review
The concept of trauma has been theorized in relation to literary texts since the 1990s.
Shoshana Felman and Dori Laubs Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature,

Psychoanalysis, and History (1992) is usually taken as a groundbreaking work in trauma

literary studies. Through an examination of the relation of literature to testimony, it develops
a theory of reading that turns the reader into a witness. The foreword specifies that through
an alternation of a literary and a clinical perspective, the present study strives to grasp and to

16

articulate the obscure relation between witnessing, events and evidence, as what defines at
once the common ground between literature and ethics (xiii). The book uses an extensive
hoard of sources ranging from the fin de sicle writers such as Freud, Dostoevsky and
Mallarm, to more recent works by Camus, De Man, Celan, videotapes of Holocaust
testimonies and Lanzmanns film, Shoah. What is significant in Felman and Laubs work is
their consideration of the act of testifying as central in the analyses of literature and trauma.
In the present study, however, any concern for trauma testimonies always points toward
establishing a relation between seeing and saying, since for the traumatized, it is not only a
question of witnessing the event, but also, and more importantly, the attempt to put the
experience into words, which usually fails. The selection of works to be studied, in Felman
and Laubs work, is also restricted mainly to the disastrous aftermaths of the WWII, which
may be unfortunately mistaken with a reduction of the name of trauma to Holocaust in our
age.
Also Cathy Caruths Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (1996) is
a key work in the field as it explores trauma in a consistent theoretical framework in which
the term trauma theory is used for the first time. Freuds notion of traumatic neuroses, as
developed in different stages of his work, helps Caruth to consolidate a notion of trauma,
formed around belatedness which is investigated in literary works of Duras, Resnais and
Kleist, as well as De Man and Kants theories: The event is not assimilated or experienced
fully at the time, but only belatedly, in its repeated possession of the one who experiences it
(4). In Caruths view, trauma is treated culturally, and its incomprehensibility is discerned as a
main irresolvable symptom. An irresolvable paradox in understanding, trauma insists and
repeats this very ir- resolvability. In her investigation of trauma through literary texts, Caruth

17

puts the relation to what insists on remaining unknown at the center of the traumatic
experience.
Dominick LaCapras Representing the Holocaust: History, Theory, Trauma (1994) as
well as his Writing History, Writing Trauma (2001) deal with, among other things, how
trauma surpasses mere referentiality to enact some shattering of the experience. Literature is
proper to trauma because of its inherent escape from referential language. He works on the
nature of trauma writing as an attempt to represent a beyond-representation. He also warns
against those theoretical relations of trauma to the un-representable, as in literature, that may
dangerously turn trauma into a sublime and ideal. The discovery of middle voices as
prevalent vehicles in trauma writing, in Writing History, Writing Trauma, may also be
considered as a good theoretical achievement in analyzing the stylistic sides of trauma writing.
Ruth Leys Trauma: A Genealogy (2000) is a major critique of the contemporary
tendency of reducing trauma to the psychiatric model of PTSD. Reading the history of the
concept of trauma instead of adding a new theory in the light of other unseen forms of the
traumatic experience, Leys discerns an oscillation between mimesis and anti-mimesis in
different trauma theories. The grounds for such an evaluation of the concept of trauma had
been already made by Paul Antze and Michael Lambeks compilation of different authors
works on memory, Tense Past: Cultural Essays in Trauma and Memory (1996). This
collection of essays extended the discussions of trauma to such diverse fields of investigation
as anthropology, psychiatry, history and philosophy of science.
Roger Luckhursts The Trauma Question provides a summary of the history of the
term trauma. It traces trauma not only in narrative fiction and memoirs but also in

18

techniques of photography and cinema. It may be referred to as a valuable source of various

experiments in representing trauma.
Since the present study approaches apocalypse from a limited point of view, more
precisely, the modern views of the Messianic and the End of Time, the sources consulted
are not at all historical or biblical accounts of apocalypse. In other words, the works are
consulted in which apocalypse is treated in terms of its theoretical structure, notwithstanding
its religious implications or historical contextualization that fall out of the scope of the present
research . In a delicate harmony between Marxist analysis and Biblical undertones and
Expressionist techniques of writing, Ernst Blochs Spirit of Utopia (English translation 2000),
for example, reflects on the nature of an end which is also a rebirth: the Apocalypse
reflected in various artworks and regimes of representation. Or, Derridas Of an Apocalyptic

Tone Newly Adopted in Philosophy is a deconstructive examination of the word apocalypse

originating in a mysterious meaning of unveiling. Derridas lengthy essay shows that the
West has always been involved in and dominated by the apocalyptic programs of discourses
of the end. In this regard, it is also important to refer to Agambens theorization of the
Messianic as a linguistic matter, in various essays collected under the title Potentialities, such
as Walter Benjamin and the Demonic: Happiness and Historical Redemption, Language
and History: Linguistic and Historical Categories in Benjamins Thought and The Messiah
and the Sovereign: The Problem of Law in Walter Benjamin. In his examinations of the
Messianic, Agamben notices a mode of communication without communication and a Law
which is outside itself. What is inspiring in Agambens view is the way he examines the
Messianic in terms of the forms it imposes upon language and the linguistic structures
implied in it. In Benjamin and Agambens readings, the Messianic becomes a status in

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language, a very poetic solution to escape entrapment in the imposed regimes of

representation based on the exchange of meaning.
In Freuds Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920, the compulsion to repeat is
examined in relation to the death drive to make up an understanding of the wound as that
which suspends the opposition of inside and outside, or psyche and soma. It is also
significant that Freud discerned, in the movement of Eros toward pleasure, a
countermovement of Thanatos toward Death. Also Moses and Monotheism (1937) shows a
change in Freuds view of trauma toward a rather collective and social form that puts a
wound, like castration, as a trace on the body of men. An important feature of a traumatic
experience, that is, its belatedness, is studied by Freud with an emphasis on the in-betweenness of the psychic wound.
Walter Benjamins Theologico-Political Fragment (1937) may be read for its genius
tracking of the trauma at the heart of the Messianic. He notices the impossibility of drawing a
distinguishing line between the Messianic and the profane, which could be summarized in its
famous excerpt,

if one arrow points to the goal toward which the profane dynamic acts, and another
marks the direction of Messianic intensity, then certainly the quest of free humanity for
happiness runs counter to the Messianic direction; but just as a force can, through acting,
increase another that is acting in the opposite direction, so the order of profane assists,
through being profane, the coming of the Messianic Kingdom. The profane, although
not itself a category of this Kingdom, is a decisive category of its quietest approach
(Reflections 312)

20

The in-between-ness of the apocalyptic is an important point of Benjamins essay. The

movement and counter-movement of the profane and the Messianic, in Benjamins work,
may be interestingly seen in formal harmony with Eros and Thanatos in Freud.
Maurice Blanchots L'Espace Littraire (1955) enquires into the relation of literature to
death and is informed by his insights into poetic language that attends to the materiality of
the medium. It is there that the apocalyptic power of words is noticed when, he writes, for
instance,

words, we know, have the power to make things disappear...But words, having the power
to make things arise at the heart of their absence - words which are masters of this
absence - also have the power to disappear in themselves, to absent themselves
marvelously in the midst of the totality which they realize, which they proclaim as they
annihilate themselves therein, which they accomplish eternally by destroying themselves
there endlessly. (43)

The space of literature is realized in a language which is freed from the exchange of ideas and
values. This interruption in the act of communication, as what characterizes the language of
literature for Blanchot, may also be seen in its Messianic implications of the end of time as
the pause to any exchange of values.
Blanchots Pas au- del (1973) is a fragmentary inquiry into the eternal return of the
same, which is examined in relation to the insistence of the traumatic in the present study.
Also, his L criture du dsastre (1980), is another fragmentary reflection on non-concepts
which are produced out of the discontinuity of the disaster:

21

The disaster ruins everything, all the while leaving everything intact. It does not touch
anyone in particular; I am not threatened by it, but spared, left aside. It is in this way
that I am threatened; it is in this way that the disaster threatens in me that which is
exterior to mean other than I who passively become other. There is no reaching the
disaster. Out of reach is he whom is threatens, whether from afar or close up. (1)

Writing of the Disaster may also be read as an experiment of turning trauma into a
both constituting and disrupting principle of the text. Through a seemingly paradoxical
structure, another possibility, for both writing and thinking, emerges in this work where
philosophy and poetry merge in a delicate border of inseparability. In this sense, Blanchots

The Instant of My Death and Derridas seminar on it, Demeure, are found useful in that
Blanchots text is an attempt to grasp an ultimate moment of death which always escapes the
representations of the subject. This is accomplished in a fiction that cannot be told from a
philosophical text that inquires the fundamental question of how to write (non)-experiences.
Foucaults La Pense du dehors (1966) constitutes the major theoretical framework of
the argument of the present study. In this book, Foucault speaks of the experience of an
outside in the sense of a beyond-representation- that is not easily the outside in opposition
to an inside. This is an outside that is not comfortably the product of an exclusion. This
notion of outside is in concordance with the notion of the wound examined in our study as
that which forms in the surface, as a rupture on the symbolic that has made the invisible
visible: it is the visibility of what is not seen, that is vision itself. The thought never begins
except in the assumption of an outside for itself, a void, like a wound. He also proposes a
possibility of the disappearance of the subject in the language:

22

If the only site for language is indeed the solitary sovereignty of I speak then in
principle nothing can limit it not the one to whom it is addressed, not the truth of what
it says, not the values or systems of representation it utilizes. In short, it is no longer
discourse and the communication of meaning, but a spreading forth of language in its
raw state, an unfolding of pure exteriority. And the subject that speaks is less the
responsible agent of a discourse (what holds it, what uses it to assert and judge, what
sometimes represents itself in it by means of a grammatical form designed to have that
effect) than a non-existence in whose emptiness the unending outpouring of language
uninterruptedly continues (Thought from Outside 11).

In the wake of Foucaults monograph on Blanchot, Agambens Experimentum Linguae

(1989) is worth studying. As a preface to his Infanzia e storia and in the disguise of a preface
on the preface, Agamben elaborates on threshold moments and on the experience of voice
(voce), that is a perfectly empty dimension. In experimentum linguae, the matter of language
appears and the unsayable occurs exactly within language and not beyond it.
Another work of Agamben, Idea della Prosa (1985), is an interesting example of
confounding the borders of theory and poetry. Pure potentiality of representation is worked
out through the titled fragments of the book. It can be read as a confrontation between theory
and literature. Indeed, literature poses the problem of language to thought as it questions the
limits of representation. Idea della Prosa should be read as a community of fragments in
which philosophy approaches poetry, not to integrate, analyze, or appropriate it. These
fragments write the Idea as it reaches its dead-end and makes recourse to poetry only to
escape totality a totality which is disrupted in the fragmentary form of the work.

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Thesis Outline
The present thesis consists of five chapters three of which serve as the main chapters. Each of
the main chapters can be divided in 2 parts since the argument of each chapter is
traumatically double and insists on such a cut in each chapter. Generally, the movement of
the main argument could be seen as (1) finding a relation between two prevalent mental
contents of our era, trauma and apocalypse, although it does not claim that such relation of
wound to its recovery is unique to this age; (2) tracing this traumapocalyptic relation in
representation, in language and thought or, in the relation of language and thought-,
especially finding good examples of such language in a mutual approach of poetry and
philosophy, on a border, on a thought limit, where thought meets (un)thought of outside,
when representation represents its surface, its materiality where it is performance, rather
than expression; (3) finding this type of writing instantiated in Beckett, one of the most
explained yet the most un-explained figure of writing in our age. The critical attention to
Becketts work after 1950s puts him on a border where, while seemingly being the most
included by diverse critical methodologies, he is usually excluded as being the inaccessible
revolutionary outsider.
As the organization of the ideas in the present thesis may be considered improper to
the title of the thesis, Traumapocalyptic Experience of Language in Later Beckett, in that less
than one third of the thesis is dedicated to later Beckett, it must be taken into account that
the present thesis does not primarily take the traumapocalyptic experience of language for
granted. In other words, first, such an experience must be delimited before tracing it in
Becketts work. In this research, a theoretical bond between trauma and apocalypse is
worked out, which has not been theorized before. That is why putting the emphasis in the

24

title on later Beckett will lead to a lost sight of the significance of a traumapocalyptic writing
which has not been delimited before. It is only after examining the theoretical characteristics
of traumapocalyptic writing that one is able to discern it in various literary and non-literary
texts.
The second chapter, The Traumapocalyptic Relation, can be cut discursively into two
main parts: Trauma and Apocalypse. First, after admitting the long journey the word
trauma has taken to our modern times and the acceleration of this movement since its first
psychiatric appearance since the late 19th century, the state of trauma as a pure signifier in
language is examined. A genealogy of the word shows that, in the course of its modern
terminologisation, it has suffered an undecidability between psyche and soma. In better
words, the main characteristic of the term trauma was that it could not be located exactly as
a physical or a psychical disorder. In Freuds later elaboration on trauma, it was
conceptually related to two simultaneous while opposite functions of repetition and death.
This undecidability can be recognized in the state of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder where a
painful memory repeats itself only to put an end to itself. In other words, traumatic event is
only present in memory only to be excluded fearfully.
The second part of the Chapter 2, on the other hand, deals with another prevalent
paradigm of thought in our time -that is, Apocalypse. It is shown that, in the wake of the
disastrous Second World War, the thought of apocalypse was oriented in a direction in
which the basic features of the traumatic, as discussed in the previous part, namely
repetition and end, can be easily isolated. Reading Benjamins elaboration on the
Messianic reveals a movement and a counter-movement of profane happiness and
messianic redemption that meet on a delicate border in which the movements are the same

25

and synchronous. The apocalyptic, then, takes form on the limits of representation where the
end announces a beginning, and the death a repetition in rebirth. In Agambens work,
the bonds between the concept of the end of time and the discourse are even more
strengthened. It can be argued that the messianic is related to language and law in the sense
that representation essentially needs an original trauma or an ultimate apocalypse in order
to function. In other words, both trauma and apocalypse are viewed as limitrepresentations in which the un-representability is touched.
Consisting in its turn of two major arguments, the third chapter opens in a part that
treats literature theoretically and ends in one that treats theory like literature. It means that,
while the first part works out a philosophy of literature based on the previous findings on
trauma and apocalypse, the second part methodologically reverses the usual direction of
sacrificing literature to theory and takes up a path in which theoretical texts are read, as in
literature, based on their formal features and network of images. By this methodology, the
third chapter becomes both theory and practice because of in-between-ness it traumatically
enjoys in middle of the present thesis. First, a traumapocalyptic poetics is formed through
readings of Blanchots works on the idea of literature. For example, in Blanchot, literature
stands at the limit of common language by attending to its own materiality, by insisting on its
form to interrupt the closed regime of communicative give and take, by testifying to the
surface and revealing the hollow inside. But this question still remains that, by disregarding
the content and by wanting to refer to its own immediate materiality, what remains of
representation? Literature shows the possibility that communication is stopped in language in
order to open up to another language, and of course another thought. What is a language that
does not communicate and demands to be experienced to affect- as it is spoken? What is a

26

language that does not say? These are the questions that are dealt with next in the chapter.
A line of thought is traced in philosophy, introduced by Foucault as thought of outside in an
essay by Foucault in the same name in the late 60s, written on the work of Blanchot.
Foucaults essay is read, and the argument of the thesis goes on by comparing the
traumapocalyptic language to the state of I speak Foucault recognized as the exteriority of
any language which is not only said but also done. In this language, like in the sentence I
speak, the form performs. A pure form, it is not a matter of saying and, it is located on the
border of representation. This is the most extreme site of the beyond-language (the
unsayable) that language can imagine for itself. Therefore, it is on the surface of form that the
dialectic of inside/outside is really traumatized, wounded. In this regard, Agambens dense
work, Experimentum Linguae, is read very closely in which Agamben, in the wake of
Foucault, elaborates on the traumatic original experience of language, that is, the voice before
it is turned into the language; that is, the body of word before it is bound by meaning to
signification, to communication. Agambens work is also read in the light of its form, since
the form of the ideas in performance is as important as the ideas themselves. This is surely
another expression of Agambens form-of-life which is a life linked so closely to its form
that it proves to be inseparable from it (Agamben, The Highest Poverty xi). It is seen that
the unrepresentable, or decisive experience in language, is only the body, the matter of word.
By falling into the unrepresentable, the traumatized only reaches the matter of words, in this
sense, the traumatic experience itself. That is why any testimony is improper to the traumatic
experience itself, and any testimony is already a testimony to the failure of testimony.
Finally, the fourth chapter is a reading of Becketts work since the mid-sixties as
traumapocalyptic writing and in the light of what was developed theoretically on language

27

when it approaches its unsaying. The chapter develops a critical stance toward the

experimentum linguae in Becketts work. Instead of immersing his work in an accumulation

of allusions and scholarly references, they are treated as performance, that is, of saying and

doing at the same time. It is argued that language approaching its unsaying (or unwording, in
Becketts own terms) could be compared to an emerging eye/I, in Becketts later work.
Similarly, the eye in question in Beckett approaches its unseeing. In both cases,
representation comes to its surface, to its exteriority, and what is represented is not such and
such a thing but the very end of representation. Becketts work is examined in all areas of
his later less-read writing: in his critical work where he speaks of an art that turns way from
expression in disgust; in his dramatic work that reaches a degree zero of spectacle and thus
questions the very existence of the eye, the scene, and seeing, in these dramatic
experiences; and finally, in his later prose work, of which Ill Seen Ill Said is an explicit
lingering on the border of seeing and saying which is a traumatic question of testimony.
How to say what has been seen?, that is the question. It is shown that Becketts language
tends to a performative mode which primarily demands the company of the reader that is
synchronized to the text and this is what puts Becketts text on exteriority and blocks clear-cut
interpretations. In simple words, his works are rather to be experienced than to be
interpreted.

Approach and Methodology

The present thesis is methodologically library-based with the use of electronic sources. The
theoretical approach taken in the thesis is inspired by deconstruction of text through close

reading of its form. Deconstruction surveys the zone of indifference, the threshold moments

28

which pass in language, in the name of diffrance where the meaning is suspended. In
Derridas deconstruction, it is impossible to reach an ultimate meaning. This suspension of
meaning, then, is thought as beyond-language and the unspeakable. What Agambens
elaborations on language may add to the deconstruction of a text is his observation that the
limit of representation, as a border, partly belongs to the inside of language and is not totally
outside. In fact, as it is developed through readings of Foucaults Thought of Outside, this
outside which is and not has- also an inside, this pure exteriority, happens but not in the
realm of signification which is still bound to the depth and interiority of meaning, but in
the matter of language, in Agambens words. But how does language escape its signification,
or, how does it enter the realm of unsaying which must not be simply mistaken with
silence, since silence is still the dialectic opposite of discourse? What is the pure
potentiality of representation? Through his discourse on the I Speak of language, Foucault
highlights the performative side of language where saying and doing are the same and
synchronous. The performances on the form of a text are the major concerns of this thesis.
The methodology of the present study owes a great deal to Agambens modification of
our view of oppositions. Through deconstruction, it is shown that difference and
opposition is produced by language and will lose its power in certain threshold moments in
a text. For Agamben, however, those oppositions may be viewed in terms of the relation of a
potentiality to its actuality. In this view, not only are inside and outside, content and
form, opposite aesthetic terms, but also form is considered as an actualization of content.
Agamben looks for the ways in which the pure potentiality of representation is taken into
account. These are the points in which language resists against its actualization into
representation and reveals its impotentiality, or, the potentiality not to represent. In this

29

sense, content is not to be merely interpreted but also to be experienced in form an

experience of language. Agambens notion of experimentum linguae orients the reading
strategy of the texts in the thesis. In this way, a text is read according the moments when it
approaches its unsaying and tends to perform the idea at stake.
The way Agamben approaches the metaphysical dualities is reflected in the

experimentum linguae or infancy. Methodologically, for him, speechlessness cannot be

approached as such, but always in language. By entering language, voice becomes the name
of the state before acquiring language, of the undifferentiated flow of forms that have not yet
taken meaning. This move from voice to language, this fundamental scission of human
proper being, is irreversible, and thus, the state of speechlessness, or pure voice, is never
accessible by man after entering into language. The pure potentiality of representation,
representation before its being actualized, exists or occurs in language only as a name that is

infancy. Thus, the materiality of the medium itself also acquires certain significance, where
materiality means an immediacy of experience before getting contaminated by representation
and deep interpretations that excavates different senses. In the common model of
representation and communication, the materiality in question is suppressed and treated only
as a means, a sign to exchange. The involvement with the unrepresentable or the unsayable
in any discourse either literature or philosophy- consists this very confrontation with the
matter of language that occurs only in language and not in any illusory beyond.
Another important matter in the thesis is the approach it takes with regard to concepts
of trauma and apocalypse. In fact, at stake here are not their merely psychological or
religious sides. Rather, they are also studied for the experience they entail in language. That
is, if they are going to found a basis for a philosophy of literature, they are so because,

30

through them, states of being in language appear. Therefore, the findings of trauma studies
and apocalypse studies are examined here in the light of the language experience they may
bring about.

Definition of Terms
Trauma
A history of the meanings attributed to the word trauma is sketched in the second chapter.
But a brief and accessible definition of the term could be J. Laplanche and J. Pontaliss in

The Language of Psycho-Analysis:

An event in the subjects life defined by its intensity, by the subjects incapacity to
respond adequately to it, and by the upheaval and long-lasting effects that it brings about
in the psychical organizations. In economic terms, trauma is characterized by an influx of
excitations that is excessive by the standard of subjects tolerance and capacity to master
such excitations and work them out psychically. (465)

The term trauma is extensively used in this thesis to imply a state of undecidability between
inside and outside, between psyche and soma. However, it has been applied, in various
contexts, to denote a break, a rupture, or a shock. It might be taken as an experience that
leads language and representation to its unsaying and unrepresentable extreme.

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Apocalypse
The word apocalypse is not primarily intended here in its religious senses. Like trauma, it
is taken into account as a term that denotes an end or death- which is also indicative of a
rebirth and beginning. In its terminological sense, it includes two seemingly opposite senses
of revelation and end. According to Martha Himmelfarb in The Apocalypse: A Brief

History,

For most people the term apocalypse summons up images of the cataclysmic end of
the world, images that derive in large part from Revelation. But in Greek the term

apokalypsis has nothing to do with the end of the world. Its basic meaning is
uncovering, thus, more figuratively, revelation. The association with eschatology
derives not from the meaning of the term but from the content of the book of Revelation
and other related works. (1)

The apocalyptic, in the present thesis, takes form on the limits of representation where the
end announces a beginning, and the death a repetition in rebirth.

La Pense du Dehors/ Thought of Outside

Thought of Outside is used by Foucault in 1966 to designate Maurice Blanchots work. It
could be summarized as the thought of the elimination of the subject. Foucault examines this
thought completely other than the interiorizing representational thought and writes when
language is revealed to be the shared transparency of the origin and death, every single
existence receives, through the simple assertion I speak, the threatening promise of its own

32

disappearance, its future appearance (58). By thought from outside, Foucault attends to the
surface language of I Speak, in which language reaches an extreme where form not only says
but also does the content. In other words, for the statement I speak, form and content are
the same, simultaneous, and on a border of indifference. In his Thought from Outside,
Foucault examines the consequences of such thought on language when it comes to the
surface and on the significance of a language that passes on the pure exteriority.

Experimentum Linguae

Experimentum Linguae, according to Paolo Bartoloni, in Agamben Dictionary, is

an investigation into the development of language from sound to speech via the
acquisition of voice. Within this framework, sound is the elemental state, comparable to
Aristotles dynamis, while speech is the transformation of language into discourse, and as
such close to the opposite of dynamis: energeia. (105)

In other words, experimentum linguae is an experience in language where it is not intended

for saying such and such a thing. Also called infancy by Agmaben, it refers to both
immemorial childhood and speechlessness (in+fans) of the infant (and exactly immemorial
because speechless). But it is merely the name given to that speechlessness; it is the speech of
speechlessness. Experimentum linguae, then, is language as it approaches its limit of

expression. In the present thesis, this has been examined as the unsaying of language which
tends, especially in our age, to performance and doing rather than saying.

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Traumapocalyptic Writing
The term is a coinage in this thesis by the conceptual affinity of trauma and apocalypse in
bringing crises to representation. The idea of the limit of representation, when made a
question in representation any writing- makes up traumapocalyptic writing. A
traumapocalyptic writing, as it is developed throughout the study, is governed by the relations
of form and content only as far as writing reveals its content through the performances on
form.

Matiagraphy

Matiagraphy is another coinage of the present thesis where writing an eye (matia) is
intended. The relation between seeing and saying in this thesis is regarded in terms of the
question of unsayable. It is always the question of an eye/I that has seen something without
being able to say it. Related to both traumatic unspeakability and the attempts to reveal the
revelations in writing as in apocalyptic, matiagraphy puts serious questions to representation
according to its principle that eye, in everything it sees, also reveals itself. A mataigraphic
examination, for example, does not look at a painting of such and such an object for the
verismilitude of the object represented but for the eye that has seen it.

***
The next chapter tries to theoretically establish a relation between trauma and apocalypse
and seeks this relation in the limits of representation and language. In better words,
traumapocalyptic is seen as a problem or failure of language which is usually interpreted as

34

its struggle with the unsayable. The main characteristic of this relation is proven to be a
fusion of beginnings and ends two essential extreme points- which leads to repetition
repetitive images in the traumatized head being an example. Merging of extremes in this
chapter paves the way for an insight, in the third chapter, into the relation of philosophy to
literature which, instead of exhausting literary texts in favor of philosophical truths and critical
meanings, pays attention to language in both philosophical and literary texts- as a
performance or experience. Becketts later work is investigated, in the fourth chapter, in
terms of such a traumapocalyptic relation in which the limits of language and representation
are really at stake.