Summer 1999
Volume 25, Number 4

A recent conference at Yale brought together scholars, journalists, and public intellectuals working on the Holocaust or on the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), as well as members of the latter body. The New Haven Hotel, in which many participants stayed, had a floor that was indicated on the elevator by the initials TRC, standing for Trauma Recovery Center. At first the encounter with the acronym on the elevator created an uncanny impression, especially in recently arrived guests from South Africa. But it belatedly became evident that the TRC in the hotel had an elective affinity with the TRC at the conference. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission was in its own way a trauma recovery center. Its awe-inspiring and difficult, if not impossible, project was to provide a quasi-judicial setting in which the truth was sought and some measure of justice rendered (at least retrospectively) in a larger context where former victims were now rulers who were trying to find ways and means of reconciling themselves with former rulers and at times with perpetrators of oppression. The TRC also provided a forum for the voices--often the suppressed, repressed, or uneasily accommodated voices--of certain victims who were being heard for the first time in the public sphere. Indeed, as a force in the public sphere the TRC itself was attempting to combine truth seeking in an open forum with a collective ritual, requiring the acknowledgement of blameworthy and at times criminal activity, in the interest of working through a past that had severely divided groups and caused damages to victims (including damages inflicted by victims on other victims). This complicated past was now to be disclosed truthfully in order for a process of working it through to be historically informed and to have some chance of being effective ritually and politically in creating both a livable society and a national collectivity. Perhaps the most salient dimension of the TRC has been its attempt to engage this collective ritual process of mourning losses in order to create conditions for a more desirable future. It might even be seen as attempting what others have repeatedly called for in postwar Germany in the 1986 Historians' Debate and again in the controversy stirred up a decade later by responses to Daniel Jonah Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust.1

I begin with this anecdote and my reflections about it in order to indicate the stakes of a distinction I would like to draw and elaborate--the distinction between absence and loss. These stakes certainly include intellectual clarity and cogency, but they also have ethical and political dimensions. Postapartheid South Africa and post-Nazi Germany face the problem of acknowledging and working through historical losses in ways that affect different groups differently. Indeed, the problem for beneficiaries of earlier oppression in both countries is how to recognize and mourn the losses of former victims and simultaneously to find a legitimate way to represent and mourn for their own losses without having a self-directed process occlude victims' losses or enter into an objectionable balancing of accounts (for example, in such statements as "Don't talk to us about the Holocaust unless you are going to talk about the pillage, rape, and dislocation on the eastern front caused by the Russian invasion toward the end of the war" or "Don't talk to us about the horrors of apartheid if you say nothing about the killing of civilians and police by antiapartheid agitators and activists"). A crucial issue with respect to traumatic historical events is whether attempts to work through problems, including rituals of mourning, can viably come to terms with (without ever fully healing or overcoming) the divided legacies, open wounds, and unspeakable losses of a dire past.2

Of course the situations in Germany and South Africa have their historical particularity, not least of which is the near total elimination of Jews in Germany as opposed to the majority status, as well as the rise to power, of blacks in South Africa. Without slighting this difference or other significant differences, a basic point is that individuals and groups in Germany and South Africa (as well as in other countries) face particular losses in distinct ways, and those losses cannot be adequately addressed when they are enveloped in an overly generalized discourse of absence, including the absence of ultimate metaphysical foundations.3 Conversely, absence at a "foundational" level cannot simply be derived from particular historical losses, however much it may be suggested or its recognition prompted by their magnitude and the intensity of one's response to them. When absence is converted into loss, one increases the likelihood of misplaced nostalgia or utopian politics in quest of a new totality or fully unified community. When loss is converted into (or encrypted in an indiscriminately generalized rhetoric of) absence, one faces the impasse of endless melancholy, impossible mourning, and interminable aporia in which any process of working through the past and its historical losses is foreclosed or prematurely aborted.4

To blur the distinction between, or to conflate, absence and loss may itself bear striking witness to the impact of trauma and the post-traumatic, which create a state of disorientation, agitation, or even confusion and may induce a gripping response whose power and force of attraction can be compelling. The very conflation attests to the way one remains possessed or haunted by the past, whose ghosts and shrouds resist distinctions (such as that between absence and loss). Indeed, in post-traumatic situations in which one relives (or acts out) the past, distinctions tend to collapse, including the crucial distinction between then and now wherein one is able to remember what happened to one in the past but realize one is living in the here and now with future possibilities. I would argue that the response of even secondary witnesses (including historians) to traumatic events must involve empathic unsettlement that should register in one's very mode of address in ways revealing both similarities and differences across genres (such as history and literature). But a difficulty arises when the virtual experience involved in empathy gives way to vicarious victimhood, and empathy with the victim seems to become an identity. And a post-traumatic response of unsettlement becomes questionable when it is routinized in a methodology or style that enacts compulsive repetition, including the compulsively repetitive turn to the aporia, paradox, or impasse. I would like to argue that the perhaps necessary acting-out of trauma in victims and the empathic unsettlement (at times even inducing more or less muted trauma) in secondary witnesses should not be seen as foreclosing attempts to work through the past and its losses, both in victims or other agents and in secondary witnesses, and that the very ability to make the distinction between absence and loss (as well as to recognize its problematic nature) is one aspect of a complex process of working-through.

It should be emphasized that complex, problematic distinctions are not binaries and should be understood as having varying degrees of strength or weakness.5 Without conceiving of it as a binary opposition, I am pointing to the significance, even the relative strength, of the distinction between absence and loss. (I shall later elaborate the relation of this distinction to two further distinctions: between structural trauma and historical trauma--onto which it may perhaps be mapped--and between acting out and working through the past--to which it is connected in complex ways that resist mapping.) My contention is that the difference (or nonidentity) between absence and loss is often elided, and the two are conflated with confusing and dubious results. This conflation tends to take place so rapidly that it escapes notice and seems natural or necessary. Yet, among other questionable consequences, it threatens to convert subsequent accounts into displacements of the story of original sin wherein a prelapsarian state of unity or identity--whether real or fictive--is understood as giving way through a fall to difference and conflict. As I have intimated, it also typically involves the tendency to avoid addressing historical problems, including losses, in sufficiently specific terms or to enshroud, perhaps even to etherealize, them in a generalized discourse of absence. Still, the distinction between absence and loss cannot be construed as a simple binary because the two do indeed interact in complex ways in any concrete situation, and the temptation is great to conflate one with the other, particularly in post-traumatic situations or periods experienced in terms of crisis.6

In an obvious and restricted sense losses may entail absences, but the converse need not be the case. Moreover, I would situate the type of absence in which I am especially (but not exclusively) interested on a transhistorical level, while situating loss on a historical level.7 In this transhistorical sense absence is not an event and does not imply tenses (past, present, or future). By contrast, the historical past is the scene of losses that may be narrated as well as of specific possibilities that may conceivably be reactivated, reconfigured, and transformed in the present or future. The past is misperceived in terms of sheer absence or utter annihilation. Something of the past always remains, if only as a haunting presence or revenant. Moreover, losses are specific and involve particular events, such as the death of loved ones on a personal level or, on a broader scale, the losses brought about by apartheid or by the Holocaust in its effects on Jews and other victims of the Nazi genocide, including both the lives and the cultures of affected groups. I think it is misleading to situate loss on a transhistorical level, something that happens when it is conflated with absence and conceived as constitutive of existence. . . .

1. See Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (New York, 1996). On these issues, see Reworking the Past: Hitler, the Holocaust, and the Historians' Debate, ed. Peter Baldwin (Boston, 1990) and Unwilling Germans? The Goldhagen Debate, ed. Robert R. Shandley (Minneapolis, 1998), as well as my Representing the Holocaust: History, Theory, Trauma (Ithaca, N.Y., 1994) and History and Memory after Auschwitz (Ithaca, N.Y., 1998).

2. One may relate trauma in collectivities to what René Girard discusses as sacrificial crisis accompanied by the threat or occurrence of generalized mimetic violence, which sacrifice, at times unsuccessfully, functions to stabilize by concentrating violence on one (or a delimited set of) scapegoated victim(s). See especially his Violence and the Sacred, trans. Patrick Gregory (1972; Baltimore, 1977) and Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World, trans. Stephen Bann and Michael Metteer (1978; Stanford, Calif., 1987). Girard, however, remains committed to reductionism and monocausal explanations. In his brief discussion of mourning, he follows his general practice of moving from a possible connection (for example, with respect to the tomb as the site of the victim of stoning) to a necessary derivation, and he presents mourning as the result of mimetic reconciliation polarized around the sacrificial victim; see Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World, p. 81. He usefully stresses the interaction between life and death in mourning but does not explore the broader problem of the relation of mourning to ways of working through the past. Moreover, he provides little insight into the process of secularization in terms of displacements of the sacred and sacrifice, including their role in the Nazi genocide, about which he is surprisingly silent.

3 Eric Santner touches on a similar point when he indicates his reservations concerning certain responses (including Jacques Derrida's) to the discovery of Paul de Man's World War II journalistic writings: "Central to all of these texts is the notion that to attend to, and even in a certain sense to mourn, the death that de Man has explicitly identified as a fundamentally 'linguistic predicament,' is an adequate mode of coming to terms with one's complicity, however indirect or ambivalent, in a movement responsible for the extermination of millions" (Eric L. Santner, Stranded Objects: Mourning, Memory, and Film in Postwar Germany [Ithaca, N.Y., 1990], p. 19).

4. The distinction between absence and loss would also apply critically to Bill Readings's The University in Ruins (Cambridge, Mass., 1996). In it the current, putative university in ruins is contrasted with a university of culture that is conceived as a (welcome) loss but that would more accurately be understood as an absence--a status that places in doubt the idea of ruins that is its correlate and raises questions about the rather empty utopia that is proposed as its alternative. See my discussion in "The University in Ruins?" Critical Inquiry 25 (Autumn 1998): 32-55.

5. Of course, distinctions may operate ideologically as binaries and have important social and political functions, for example, in shoring up identity and fostering exclusion of those deemed outsiders. Indeed, binaries may be seen as excessively rigid defenses against the incidence or recurrence of trauma--defenses that are always dubious and that become especially fragile when they do not have institutional support. A scapegoat mechanism both depends on and performatively generates binary oppositions by localizing alterity (involving things one resists recognizing in oneself) and projecting it, as well as attendant anxiety, onto discrete others, and it may conceal both absences and losses in oneself or one's group.

6. Absence and loss could not form a binary in that the opposite of absence is presence and that of loss is gain. Presence is, of course, often identified or correlated with gain, and presence/gain may be opposed to absence/loss in a broader binary configuration. The problem, which cannot be formulated in binary terms, is the mutual interaction and marking of presence/absence and gain/loss in what Derrida terms a larger economy, and the difficult issue is to elaborate distinctions that do not function as binaries or sheer dichotomies.

7. There are, of course, absences on an ordinary or historical level as well as ambivalently situated absences. Moreover, by transhistorical I do not mean absolute or invariant. I mean that which arises or is asserted in a contingent or particular historical setting but which is postulated as transhistorical. In a different setting, the terms of the postulation may vary even though the postulation is meant as transhistorical.

Dominick LaCapra is professor of history, the Bryce and Edith M. Bowmar Professor of Humanistic Studies, and director of the Society for the Humanities at Cornell University, as well as the associate director of the School of Criticism and Theory. His forthcoming book is History and Reading: Tocqueville, Foucault, French Studies.