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...condition, but one solution to the old knot of Fate, Freedom, & fore-knowledge;--the propounding, namely, of the double consciousness. --A page from Emerson's journal
JACQUES DERRIDA VISITED VILLANOVA UNIVERSITY IN 1994 FOR A PLENARY discussion of his Specters of Marx. Redressing those celebrating the death of Marxism, Derrida spoke about the specters of Marx to which we return in an effort to achieve the end of history, emancipation. (1) Cleverly comparing the "end" of philosophy to this matter, Derrida suggested that his thinking had never been a celebration of the "end" of philosophy or its close, as some have averred, but its turning. Thus any consideration of Marx that he would undertake would not be a consideration of the end of history, or its close, but its turning. This nutshell description of Derrida's lecture is as ridiculously brief as it is designed to feature one of its most provocative aspects: the alignment of Marx's desire (to wrest a realm of freedom from the realm of fate) with the work of mourning.
Derrida's determination to keep the word "emancipation" within the realm of "the event" is striking and brings to mind an essay Emerson composed while he was mourning Margaret Fuller's death in 1850. (2) Believing Fuller's loss would have terrible consequences for a country endeavoring to wrest a realm of freedom from the realm of fate, Emerson transformed that loss by endorsing Fuller's comparative analytic style. Emerson's famous invocation in "Fate" of "double consciousness"--where one shifts nimbly from one perspective to another like a circus performer--is the figure for this important theoretical endorsement. (3) By associating the work of history with the work of mourning in his "scene" before U. S. intellectuals, Derrida aptly conjured an "essential line of American history" already haunting Emerson. (4) Fuller's spectrality in Emerson's "Fate" tells a tale of the surprising and sometimes overwhelming possibilities she came to represent for those attempting to match the emancipatory rhetoric of U. S. culture with the practice of everyday life. (5)
For Fuller--one of our earliest and greatest comparativists--the task of the translator became the operative model for the task of reading and interpretation throughout her career. Her model of reading is highly interactive, forming a double strategy whereby one nimbly shifts between frames of reference. Fuller's interest in translation guided her thinking through many cultural issues because she saw that a hermeneutic maneuver deriving its authority from a struggle for mastery over meaning could have violent historical consequences. As she toured this country and prepared for her European visit, translation became less a conquest of meaning, a mastery that subdues and potentially annihilates an alien set of values, than the proliferation of meaning, of everything that might be found when new values open to view within both languages. Because Fuller brought this philosophical focus to bear on issues as diverse as the "vanishing" Americans and European socialism, her work provides an interesting precursor to that of Marx, a "reading before Marx" that is proleptic, far less systematic but also less restrictive because it is always attentive to the prolific turns of translation in a bulky array of manifestations. (6)
In her Tribune work, Fuller introduced the work of Marx and Engels in 1845 to a still larger audience by translating an article about them from an immigrant newspaper. Fuller's decision to translate from Deutsche Schnellpost is typical of her constant attempt to include a broad array of cultural and intellectual materials in her analysis and steady documentation of transforming social conditions. Such an eclectic comparative approach makes her an important and distinctive analytical force. (7) Known as one of the great "readers" of the nineteenth century, Fuller often focused on social issues that have remained only implicit in the work of other great readers (Emerson and Marx among them) through traditional canons of reading.
Fuller's clever application of translation to important cultural issues makes her analytic style proleptic in another sense. In her attentiveness to shifting standards of reference Fuller is sensitive as well to psychic registrations of history emerging through experiences of trauma. Her use of the case history of the German Seeress of Prevorst as a vehicle for comprehending her interaction with native Americans in Summer on the Lakes is just one example of her provocative conflation of political and psychic states. And indeed, in my brief encounter with Derrida, I realized how prescient Fuller is in her approach to the traumatic structure of freedom in this country. (8)
Trauma and Double Consciousness
Interest in trauma as a topic has grown considerably in the last two decades, in part because of the deepening awareness of the disabilities of returning war veterans and in part because of the new theoretical engagement with trauma as a spur to thinking the "unthought" in a host of symbolic systems. As is well known, Freud turned away from aktual trauma in order to establish his theory of repression and the unconscious. Historian and critic Ruth Leys reminds us, however, that Freud returned to the issue of trauma throughout his career, particularly after World War I. (9) Freud was haunted by the fact that his talking cure could not always have the result of bringing someone to the "newly created state" he hoped psychoanalysis as a science would provide. Again and again Freud was haunted by the fact that his method could not always be as efficient as or even take into account all that might be considered efficacious in the so-called magical cures of the past.
One of the efficacies of those magical cures may well be the recognition of traumatic historical events emerging through such practices. As historian Robert Fuller observes, what was lost in the gradual translation from mesmerism to psychoanalysis proper was the role of the entranced subject as cultural historian, critic and witness. Whereas the mesmeric trance was meant to put one in touch with "transpersonal domains," the psychoanalytic session was meant to make one accountable for the "perceptions of the finite ego. (10) In effect, the turn from many spiritualist practices and the hypnotic trance was also a turn from important critiques and understandings of history that are always part of any emancipatory moment. Fuller's work is marked everywhere by a recognition of the potential value held out by these strange practices, particularly as they tell stories of the traumatic value of experience for many outside the mainstream of power and history.
Simply put, trauma provides a vehicle for questioning the relationship between experience, memory and event. Thus an understanding of trauma can help to frame important issues of the literary and cultural history of the United States, a cultural history that until very recently has been characterized by a radical critical division, with the experiences, memories and events of male and female, white and black Americans rarely seen in dynamic interaction. Fuller was one of the earliest intellectuals in this country to understand the cost of this radical critical division. Intriguingly, her comparativist inclination, and her translating skills are vital to her efforts to bring the experience of these disparate cultural worlds into one another's view. Such a skill resonates rather quickly to traumatic experience, particularly its tendency to divide such experience into polarities.
Cathy Caruth observes that a common characterization of trauma is its bi-polar nature: a trauma victim is said to have undistorted flashbacks of the event that remain unavailable to normal waking consciousness. (11) An early student of trauma, Pierre Janet, called this bi-polar nature "dissociation," a term Freud sometimes used and at other times dismissed in his effort to understand trauma's "hidden" nature. Significantly, a sense of double-consciousness characterizes the problem that both Janet and Freud attempted at the turn of the century to assess. (12)
A student of American culture cannot help but hear in the phrase "double consciousness" the famous characterization of the experience of African Americans by W. E. B. Du Bois. Cornel West deepens the ironic cast of Du Bois' phrase by noting its appearance in Emerson's essay "Fate." (13) It is my larger argument that the relationship of these seemingly disparate worlds, the literary and philosophic traditions of Fuller, Emerson, Derrida, and Freud and the emancipatory project and tradition of Marx, Du Bois and West, can be more satisfyingly elaborated through an understanding of the "work of trauma." (14) Unlike the work of mourning, this "work" moves beyond a study of the conditions of trauma and its dissociations in individual consciousness to a study of the remarkable transformative potential embedded in the dualism at the center of trauma's deep structure. As Fuller tentatively began to make clear, such work opens an enlarged understanding of both historical events and their resonating symbolic character.
The Event as the Print of Your Form
In his expression of grief over Fuller's death, Emerson conflates his sense of the traumatic historical event with the personal trauma of Fuller's death; for him the overwhelming issues of the day seem bound up with her loss, and most acutely, the loss of her ability to provide such a reading for the culture. Many matters collide in this recognition, for Emerson's essay has been extraordinarily influential (it was one of Nietzsche's favorite essays), and emancipation, in all of its troubling characteristics, is vital to its center.
Emerson's elaboration of the "double consciousness" or "cunning co-presence" is perhaps his most famous elaboration of a method necessary for encountering the "event-ness" of history in a new way, the complex engagement with the missed opportunity that does the difficult work of emancipation. This reading helps to enrich rather than delimit the critique that West also seeks to establish in his analysis of Emerson's role in the prehistory of pragmatism.
In "Fate," Emerson transforms the notion of cause and effect into person and event, writing "Person makes event, and event person" (347). He does so to play upon and transform his earlier remark "every spirit makes its house; but afterwards the house confines the spirit." The complexities of this transformation emerge in his formulation "The event is the print of your form" (348); with it he disrupts the tidy imperative of cause and effect typical of historical narrative by revealing an opening, however small, to the activity of reading in surprising new ways.
On one level,...
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