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1 " Trauma not only resists meaning, but it interrupts and damages the very means for meaning-making by inducing this aphasic self whose linguistic horizons have been significantly compromised. Consequently, I not only may be unable to put the event into words but may lack the means to even recognize what happened to me. In this manner, trauma dissimulates itself through its diminishing effects.The extermination camp survivor exemplifies such effects. Here is a case in which trauma induces a “saturated phenomenon of suffering.” Such an event is “so intense, so durable, and so all-encompassing” that this suffering becomes “a world unto itself.”39 In this sense, trauma can be said to deliver a new world. However, it is not an expansive one, opening us to a broader terrain. Instead, it forecloses upon “the shared world,” creating an “abyss” between my prior world and the one now inhabited. Concurrently, there is a “denegation of the carnal” and receding “from the public space.” This phenomenon remains thoroughly and invariantly “unsayable. "
― Brian W. Becker
2 " Trauma not only resists meaning, but it interrupts and damages the very means for meaning-making by inducing this aphasic self whose linguistic horizons have been significantly compromised. Consequently, I not only may be unable to put the event into words but may lack the means to even recognize what happened to me. In this manner, trauma dissimulates itself through its diminishing effects.The extermination camp survivor exemplifies such effects. Here is a case in which trauma induces a “saturated phenomenon of suffering.” Such an event is “so intense, so durable, and so all-encompassing” that this suffering becomes “a world unto itself.” In this sense, trauma can be said to deliver a new world. However, it is not an expansive one, opening us to a broader terrain. Instead, it forecloses upon “the shared world,” creating an “abyss” between my prior world and the one now inhabited. Concurrently, there is a “denegation of the carnal” and receding “from the public space.” This phenomenon remains thoroughly and invariantly “unsayable.”Others, in turn, may exacerbate this departure from my previous world by being unable or unwilling to bear my broken discourse. My trauma leads others to turn away in horror as I become their abject. As such, trauma moves in a counter-direction from the shared event and, principally, the erotic phenomenon. There is no futurition, no compossibles, no co-naissance—only a receding of the future as possibility fades in a diminishing hope that ultimately leads me to the indifference I thought I could evade through the possibility of love. Trauma begins in terror but ends in apathy. "
