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...the matter that violence, vibrant in its unconditional submission to the will to power, becomes a prophetic illumination, a manner of questioning and answering, a dialogue, a tension, and oscillation ... No solidarity is possible.
--Yambo Ouologuem Bound to Violence
The complex and ambiguous relationship between violence and representation has been the object of so much critical analysis that it could be assumed that at the beginning of a new millenium we are better equipped to understand the artistic and ethical implications of attempting to conceptualize what was often lived as incomprehensible and unnarratable. Undoubtedly, the experience and trauma of violence, as well as the role of violence in modern culture and our globalized world can be better understood in all its complexity thanks to the intellectual brilliance of critics such as Cathy Caruth, Zygmunt Bauman, Dominick LaCapra, Slavoj Zizek, Joan Copjec, Ariel Dorfman, to name but a very selected few. At the same time it could also be said that we are in a moment of receptive overload regarding both violence as an object of cultural analysis and its material consequences, in particular as explored in trauma studies. Ironically, such overload is parallel to, and indeed perhaps due to, the extraordinary popularity of what Hal Foster calls "trauma talk" in popular culture: talk shows, twelve-step therapies, confessional fictions, psycho-dramatic interventions. According to Foster if there is a consistency to this particular trauma discourse, "it has to do with a redefinition of experience, both individual and historical, in paradoxical terms--experience that is not experienced, at least not punctually, at the moment, that comes either too early or too late, that one is condemned either to act out compulsively or to reconstruct after the fact." ("Return"). These reenactments of trauma and crisis, as is well known,...
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