Book Description

Traumatic Affect examines the intersection of trauma theory and affect theory, two areas of crucial relevance to contemporary thought. While both fields continue to offer insights into individual and collective experience, exploring their nexus offers timely and necessary critiques of film, literature, art, culture and politics. This collection of essays by established and emerging thinkers considers the dynamic relations within and between affect and trauma. Varied in style and approach, this volume asks how the relational subject conceived by affect theory might bring into question certain presuppositions common to trauma theory and how the ethical imperatives of trauma might require a rethinking of aspects of affect theory. Thus the contributors reimagine the unrepresentability of trauma, reveal its affective economies, and chart innovative understandings of experiences, embodiments, and events. From the silence into which Walter Benjamin fell after the suicide of his closest friend to the trauma of becoming the emblematic media figure of the London bombings, Traumatic Affect traverses diverse terrain: gesture and the everyday, cinema and torture, art and writing, civility and specters, media representation and Indigenous Australian film. Featuring essays by Shoshana Felman, Karyn Ball, Jennifer L. Biddle, Anna Gibbs, Ben O’Loughlin, Anne Rutherford, Magdalena Zolkos, Aaron Kerner, Ricardo Mbarkho, Jonathan L. Knapp, Michael Richardson and Meera Atkinson, Traumatic Affect ventures into bold new territories at the juncture between trauma and affect, illuminating pressing realities that demand engagement.