notes on indifference and trauma

In the last few pages of Michel Houellebecq’s Platform, ostensibly about the subsuming of the sex trade under adventure tourism, the typically misanthropic narrator relates to us what is the true message of the work, perhaps of Hollebecq’s entire oeuvre. Broken, alone, his only chance of redemption having been taken from him in a terrorist attack, our narrator relates to us from across the distance of his oriental seclusion that “the absence of the will to live is, alas, not sufficient to make one want to die.”

When the will to live as such is evacuated from the subject there it is caught nonetheless in an abject persistence. Whatever else we might say of this we can easily see that in this place of emptiness the subject is no longer alive or dead, it can not fix its will on either life nor death and as such is caught in a zone of indistinction between both. The name of this indistinction properly is indifference. Crucially here Houellebecq’s anti-hero does not choose neither to live nor to die but is precisely incapable of making such a decision. Indifference is the expression of this incapacity. After his recovery from the terrorist attack that has killed the woman he loves (who is also the woman who is engaged in realising the perfect sex-trade holiday) our narrator’s actions become mysterious to him, they lose their intentionality, their sense of motive:

‘I know more understood the reasons for my return to Paris than I had the reasons for my return to Bangkok.’

So indifference is not only this blurred terrain that contaminates the dialectic of life and death but it is also a kind of desubjectivation. But let’s not suppose that this loss of subjectivity is the psychical withdrawal of the thinking and acting agent from the site it coextensively inhabits. This is a proper exorcism of the political subject, even in its body. Within the midst of indifference even the embodied subject is put at risk as Houellebecq perfectly relates when his narrator tells us of an injury he receives whilst in hospital after having walked into a door, even his spatial orientation has become confused as a result of the attack:

“There was a gash above my eyebrow; I had to be cleaned, have a dressing put on. It hadn’t occurred to me to call a nurse; in fact, I hadn’t felt a thing.”

Here we can see that minimal subject of indifference is even emptied drained of its affectivity. Not only does the protagonist not feel the pain of the wound, though surely it is aware of it, it also does not occur to him to relate this injury. Again, it is not that he chooses not to express the wound to another, specifically to a nurse who’s chief signification here must be that of a subject who cares, who empathises and is filled with the desire to heal the wounded, but rather that it does not even enter his horizon of possible action. He does not feel in these two reciprocal sense.

And again, more than this, the mode in which this lack of affect is related is telling. Though delivered as dead-pan as you like, as if the protagonist were a foreign correspondent reporting some alien scene, the form gives this notion the lie. Even within its cold rhythmic economy it is ramshackled, shot through with breaks and pauses. Its constitutive parts are held together despite, or perhaps because of, these semi-colons. Why are these interruptions marked onto the page? Why not mechanically say what is being said? Because even as we are being given the details of inoperative affectivity we are also witnessing a kind of erratic affectivity which must speak on even as it is saying that it has nothing to say.

What if the problem here is that something very precise is trying to be said which cannot be reached but which is nonetheless there, on the tip of his tongue? In trying to articulate this lost moment he cannot not speak but also cannot decide what to say: there is some “unknown known” in play which, as Zizek reminds us, is the unconscious. Doesn’t the use of semi-colon suggest that there is an effort going on, an effort which reflects a tension in the protagonist himself; to feel. So there is not nothing and nor is there very little… there is agitation, anxiety, a sort of linguistic panic. A crushed ego is giving way.

That all of this finds its causal root in an Islamist terrorist attack just at the moment when our protagonist is happiest is no accident or plot device. The terrorist attack is precisely the traumatic event which exposes the protagonist to an excessive reality. It strips him of all the ideological supports that maintains his fragile subjectivity to render him reduced. He does not feel his wound because he is already himself become a wound. His being as a wound is expressed in this indifference. And is it not obvious from the outset that he is traumatised? Isn’t this account that of the post-traumatic subject?

Take this piece of adverting blurb from the copy, and one can’t help note the Agambenian irony here, of Houellebecq’s earlier novel Whatever:

‘Is it European exhaustion? Is it the soul of man under late capitalism? Millennial gloom? Post-Christian despair? Is it the Death of Love? Whatever. But Houellebecq captures it perfectly.’

The prospect of an exhausted Europe, of late but not finished with capitalism, of the uncertain (possibly apocalyptic but more probably banal) future, of the nihilism commonly associated with the death of God and meaning, or the prospect of the death of what the consensus tells us is the most extreme form of affect. The whatever of the books title sums it up: nothing matters now that we are faced with the prospect of the End. We would certainly assert that any one of these would and perhaps have deliver a trauma to us. The Houellebecqian world is the post-traumatic world, even more so than that of Ballard who’s novels- though not holding out for redemption- offer us at least adaptation and occasionally a comfortable utopia. One cannot imagine Houellebecq writing a Vermillion Sands.

[Although, you might say that there is a sense in which Vermillion Sands and its outlying areas represent a kind of rehabilitation-world-ward.]

But the post-traumatic subject which exists as a kind of substantial indifference is not nothing. It is not not-a-subject. Here we ought to take Zizek’s Freudian insight on board

‘What [Freud] cannot envisage is that the victim as if were survives its own death: all different forms of traumatic encounters, independently of their specific nature (social, natural, biological, symbol...) lead to the same result - a new subject emerges which survives its own death, the death (erasure) of its symbolic identity.’

Nothing survives and yet there is this persistence and, more than that, there is the production of an entirely new subject. We must be careful to understand what this death means for Zizek. Most obviously we might think of death as the point of human finitude, the limit which one cannot pass beyond without being utterly destroyed. Yet this would be precisely that pure negation which Zizek is keen to tell us does not occur. Post-traumatic subjectivity is not simply a paradoxically subjectivity of absence wherein the evacuation is complete- it is not a zombie that walks the earth without anything ‘going on.’

The death of subject here, as is evident in the last line, is simultaneously a bizarre birth. I am immediately reminded of the old slogan, the new emerging from the shell of the old. But here there is no smooth continuity that the term ‘emergence’ implies. Rather we have this radical disjunction between two subjective positions, first old then new. A butterfly does not emerge from a caterpillar, first the caterpillar must putrefy.

Apollinaire said that the new exists besides from progress in surprise and isn’t the shock of trauma exactly this kind of sur-prise, this excessive forcing open of the subject. The traumatic moment descends upon the subject as a bomb from the sky upon a brickwork building; in the explosion the building is demolished, ripped apart- think of all those images of wartime homes completely exposed, their facades lying as rubble on the floor.

Lets stretch the Vermillion Sands reference that little bit further. In the concluding story, ‘The Thousand Dreams of Stellavista,’ Ballard conjures up the idea of psychotropic houses which ‘adjust [themselves] to strangers.’ The houses seem to operate by reading-storing-responding to the affective signals of all those who enter, the longer and more intense the stay the more the house absorbs and is physically shaped. It is the perfect example of a Burroughsesque neural-geographic terrain. The narrator of this short story informs us that

‘The responses [of the houses] may vary, a blend of past reactions to negative emotions, the hostility of the previous tenants, a traumatic encounter with a bailiff or a burglar (though both these usually stay well away from PT houses; the dangers of an inverting balcony or the sudden deflatus of a corridor being to great.’

Certainly these psychotropic buildings, locked as they are into a feedback loop with the world about them, display their own special hauntological subjectivity? How many houses has this house been? Isn’t there a sense in which these houses die only to be born in the exact same instant? And doesn’t this instant sometimes follow a ‘traumatic encounter’ with some outside force? In the moment of shock the house is no longer itself; it is, in a specific sense, a new house.

So too with the subject. As it’s death is the death of its symbolic identifications, that is with the coordination of its social order and its position therein [citizen, wife, daughter, accountant, middle-class and so on] it has broken with its form in precisely the same way as the psychotropic house.

But more than this, doesn’t Zizek mention death and place the word under a kind of erasure? That this word appears in brackets, secluding it in its own private context whilst remaining embedded in the milieu of signification, surely gives it the status of the secret truth of this subjective death. A secret which Freud did not utter. So what of this subject which is violently produced at the moment of erasure?

With Derrida we can say that erasure operates a self-reflexive mode of doubting the presence, the being, of that which we articulate. We announce the subject but we no longer know what it is we mean, we suspend the promise of a final explicit meaning- of a pure signification. So as the new subject violently comes onto the scene it seems that this subject is deferred in some sense, that it exceeds the limits of philosophical reflection. However, Derrida also emphasises the trace that remains in the moment of erasure and this remainder is precisely what escapes signification (or which escapes the logic of the count.) It is not a re-presentable presence but rather an absence that lingers. Much like with the psychotropic house which, even as it is no longer the same house, retains the trace of the ‘negative emotions’ and so on of its past instantiations, its radically anterior past. Of course for Derrida ‘the trace does not exist.’ And so too with the post-traumatic subject. The death of this subject’s constitutive symbolic identifications leaves a trace, an unrecoverable ontological absence that nevertheless remains prescribed within it as an odd field of virtuality. As the subject undergoes erasure it survives as its own trace, as a spectre of itself, neither entirely absent nor entirely present- neither alive nor dead. It is indifferent. Whatever. Spectral and generic.

In the same paper, ‘Censorship Today: Violence, or Ecology as a New Opium for the Masses,’ Zizek continues that this new spectral subject is

‘A subject who is no longer "in-the-world" in the Heideggerian sense of engaged embodied existence. This subject lives death as a form of life - his life is death-drive embodied, a life deprived of erotic engagement.’

Lets not make an issue of embodiment here, embodiment is not in question but rather the weight ought to fall on the term ‘engaged.’ Obviously the threat here is that post-traumatic overlaps, or may even be identical with, the post-political. It is possible that ultimate extreme of their coupling would result in, capitalism’s own religion becoming fulfilled in the cybergnostic wet dream that culminates in the complete disembodiment of the species. Between the present and this all-too-nightmarish ‘future’- all our futures retrograde- there is a space which is, once again, occupied by Michel Houellebecq.

In his latest novel, The Possibility of an Island, Houellebecq deploys two narrators, Daniel1 and Daniel25. The latter is the twenty fifth clone of the long dead Daniel1, an exact biological reproduction/representation of the original Daniel who is nonetheless entirely other than his source. Daniel25 is a part of a post-human species who’s society is upheld by their distance from their unenlightened human progenitors. In this, Possibility is in an almost continuation of Atomised insofar as this post-human self-reproductive society is the final chilling promise of that earlier work.

Here there is the obvious tension between the original and the copy, the authentic and the inauthentic, as well as the co-existence in one place, on the page of the book, of our present time and a dreadfully impoverished future. It is as though for Houellebecq history really is at an end, that techno-scientific capitalism has won the game and that our future really is that hollow extension and spuriously infinite modification of the species. A message of sheer hopelessness in which the present and future, the authentic and the inauthentic are both collapsed into each other in a state of minimal differentiation (for instance, we know the future because it is relayed to us by Daniel25, his numerical attachment being what most readily separates his half of the narrative from Daniel1’s.) In this post-human world there is no sexual pleasure, there is no physical proximity of bodies to one another, there is no communication except through internet codes, and one’s life consists of never stepping out of one’s compound. The sole task of these so-called neo-humans is to exact painfully rigorous examination of the life of their human source and of all their predecessors- a kind of endless closed hermeneutical narcissism. (Its tempting to say anthropocentric philosophy…or at least ego-psychology.) This is a life completely without affect- although there remains in Daniel25 a residual trace of human affectivity which is, without wanting to give too much of the plot away, what finally forces him to step outside of his compound.

Interestingly, this future that Houellebecq paints is entirely post-political and post-religious, Islam and communism being mentioned as the last obstacles to its full development. Yet we read this from Daniel25’s testimony:

‘The rigorous duplication of the genetic code, meditation on the life story of the predecessor, the writing of the commentary: such were the three pillars of our faith, unchanged since the time of the Founders.’

Many people have read these neo-humans as having achieved a moribund immortality, yet doesn’t this use of the word ‘faith’ give the lie to this reading? Isn’t it that they are in fact still profoundly tethered to mortality, to finitude, whilst at the same moment being able to ensure the persistence of their genetic code? And isn’t it odd also that this faith is founded on pillars, which cannot but remind us of Islam. So it ought to be fairly clear that these neohumans are neither immortal nor finite but are rather an extreme instantiation of a post-traumatic subject. A subject which lives beyond death and which for which futurity appears to be denied, indeed a subject for whom- in Houellebecq’s world- is even unable to inhabit the present but must, as a duty of faith, become one of many commentators of a never ending commentary on an atomised past: the desire to retrieve a time when love was possible.

Again Daneil25: “love seems to have been, [note the full implications of the past tense] for humans of the final period, the acme and the impossible…the focal point upon which all joy and suffering could be concentrated.” There is the constant struggle to reinvent, to return to, an effective symbolic inner world- to subjectivity.

It is not difficult to see from our own situation that this vision is a warning about what could happen if techno-scientific capitalism is given free reign to develop. In a sense Houellebecq is much more hopeful than anybody gives him credit for, for given that the truly post-traumatic subject is not already with us it is as though he is performing a kind of Benjaminian work of prophecy.

It also serves to remind us of how the religious may return when the concept of faith is repressed.


In a certain respect Houellebecq’s pallid future is already present in the forms of gated communities, home entertainment systems which displace the trip to the cinema, virtual worlds in which one can act according to desire without risk: it is already present in the shape of the relentless attempt to make the obscene reality of an aging, excreting body conform to the spectacle of perfection, in the apparent muscular safety of the Hummer, in technologies and architectures of alienation. We are living through and as the emergence of the post-traumatic subject. Our history is that of indifference becoming pervasive. What is love today? It is a reduced zero-sum game of commensurability with, as Match.com recently promised in an advertising campaign, a money-back guarantee. If you speculate and fail, don’t worry…the house will give you credit.

One of the most telling aspects of this situation also appears in Possibility as the fundamental necessary condition for the emergence of the neo-human world:

‘My generation was still scarred by different debates around the question of which economic regime one should wish for, debates that always concluded with agreement about the superiority of the market economy…. In Esther’s generation [Daniel1’s lover] those debates themselves had disappeared; capitalism was for her a natural habitat… to strike in protest of planned redundancies would have seemed to her as absurd as striking against the weather getting cold…’

All things that are solid melt into air? No longer. It is when capitalism is as the very air itself that the post-traumatic subject emerges as the generalised model of subjectivity. The loss of our being-in-the-world is precisely what Houellebecqian neo-humans represent to us, that blurring of life and death, and capitalism’s total conquest of the social, the symbolic and increasingly of the biological. The terms of debate that once tore societies apart, caused violent unrest between classes, betrayals between friends and lovers and the destruction of a family unit have disappeared in what we now call the post-political landscape. Politics now appears as a fetish, a perversion, the reserve of the weirdo who might once have been the local flasher or town drunk. Lets tease this connection capital-trauma-indifference further.

In today’s left, from Zizek to Negri to the ultra-left and anarchists, there is a blanket agreement that we have entered the period Marx termed the real subsumption of labour. There is no agreement on whether this period has fully actualised itself or whether we are still in transition. Ultra-leftist Gilles Duave, among others, is keen to remind us that Marx believed he was already living in the emergence of real subsumption. Incredibly minimally stated this term effectively means that everything that is is always already caught within capitalism: there is no position of anteriority, no outside. In other words this asserts that there is no place from which the proletariat can realise its full antagonism with capital, from which it could launch the revolution.

At a recent talk hosted by the Goethe Institute, along with Eric Alliez and Adrian Rifkin, Sylvere Lotringer set out to answer the questions ‘What is indifference’ and, of course, ‘What is to be done?’ Rather than answer the latter Lotringer inverted the question to ask ‘what is indifference doing to us?’ From the outset of this talk Lotringer asserted that indifference is unlike other attitudes (or subjective positions) in that it cannot be chosen, rather it is a systematic problem endemic within capitalism, that it is indeed a symptom of contemporary capitalism. For Lotringer the real problem that this manifests is our complete inability to act whilst indifferent, that we become impotent in the face of our own erosion, unable to distinguish between things we have no way to make efficient judgements which might propel or motivate us into action. Obviously this is the very threat to revolutionary action that the real subsumption of labour presents us with: everything is already, immediately, in-differentially capital. Indeed, this refreshing pessimism (against Negri’s ‘one more push to make capitalism become communism, and against Simon Critchely’s naïve insistence on impossible demands) is also deeply troubling. With the glib aside that ‘critical theory never saved anybody,’ one is left with the impression that this inability to act is properly an inability to think as well.

In J.G Ballard’s novel Crash we are presented with a representation of the indistinction of that same dyad of life and death. In this indistinction, as we have seen, the status of life and death as two distinct conditions, separate and separable, results what Lotringer refers to as the ‘dissemination of death.’ Doesn’t this correspond exactly with that most banal phrase that today capitalism has no centre but is everywhere and nowhere? So the condition of indifference is at one and the same time the condition that follows the capitalism’s mode of existence. The two exist in the same manner but the real relationship established in all of this is that between capitalism and death. This dissemination of death is at one and the same time the disappearance of death in just the same way that it is the disappearance/naturalisation of capitalism, which is of course not a negation (Hegelian or otherwise.) Recall the neo-human’s do not abolish death, they just make it disappear by covering up its reality (the Real of the body?) by reproducing the exact same genetic code.

For Lotringer, in full Virilian mode, the disappearance of death is also related, via techno-scientifically mediated perception, with the appearance of a ubiquitous because anonymous mode of terror and forms of impersonal warfare, the latter ranging from gas and chemical attacks to nuclear and other non-conventional weapons of mass destruction through aerial bombardment. To this we might add all manner of technologically mediated impersonal war, where the act of killing and the killing subject are put at a distance from one another via the physical and affective separation achieved through remote control drones, bombs that are launched and targeted on screen, media representations of battle fronts for us at home and so on. To this we might add a displacement of war, which is actually a de-militarised repetition of war. In this last instance war penetrates the entire social fabric. Isn’t it possible to understand the British phenomena of postcode killings amongst children in this manner? And isn’t it also in this same garb that extreme rendition and political assassinations are often spoken of as modes of disappearance.

This disappearance-displacement of death can be seen as exactly that death which the pt subject survives. In the hyper-pessimistic Marxism of Jacques Camatte we find that the consequence of the real subsumption is that ‘the human being is dead and is no more than a ritual of capital,’ just as the post-traumatic subject ritualises and repeats, is stuck in a certain pattern. Essentially, death has become life. Both are a question of ritualised patterns.

Camatte denies the possibility of a proletarian revolution and insists there are only three options open to us. The first is the ‘complete autonomy of capital’ where humanity is reduced to a mere ‘accessory.’ The second possibility is ‘mutation of the human being, or rather a change of the species’ which is obviously continuous with the first possibility in that it would deliver us into the neo-human age. The final possibility for Camatte is ‘generalised lunacy.’ All of these sound hopeless, as if capitalism really had won.

However, what if the final possibility were almost correct. What if lunacy is the way forward? But in the particular sense of the possible organisation of psychopathology. Why render the trauma harmless? What if the paralysis of thought and action that follows the traumatic death of affect which we survive doesn’t simply produce the post-traumatic subject unable to relate to the world in a meaningful manner? What if in assuming the trauma we might open other revolutionary possibilities? What if there might be the possibility of a trauma against trauma that might redeem revolutionary struggle? What if, when everything from class struggle to individuals have been subsumed into cocoons within cocoons, this other trauma might be precisely what we require? The trauma of an exposure which ruptures the enclosure of the world.

For Virilio the notion of the cocoon is best expressed in the exclamation ‘Everyone to the Shelters!’ Perhaps it is time we dared to smash our shelters open even before the bombs can fall? Or, which might be the same, we should dare to stand in the open even as they fall. If this endnote sounds vague, absurd or, even worse, vaguely sensible I apologise. I am not looking to make some kind of ‘hey man, lets all go crazy and then we’ll be free’ argument, nor am following suggestions of schizophrenia as liberation.

Really I don’t know what I’m groping for here. If communism is reduced to a hypothesis and needs to be reinvented then we might as well hypothesise a little wildly and a little blindly. Why not? According to all sources we've already lost anyway. Whether or not we follow Badiou's turn towards Eternal Ideas we would do well to remember that ideas are not sacred. Communism is not an Idol to be admired from afar.