Abstract
This chapter examines the relationship between silence and trauma and discusses the possibility of expressing trauma through silence. This chapter proposes an alternative for the posttraumatic subject—to choose silence. Indeed, in a world in which human beings are sent to die for “justifiable reasons,” the very use of words constitutes a form of cooperating with the hangman. In this chapter, I seek to show that often the only way to enable silence to speak is through physical appearance. In a world of silence, working through the body can break the cycle of obsessive reenactment.
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Notes
- 1.
Here I do not discuss the issue of whether he did this deliberately or not. My intention in saying that Ka-Tsetnik “chooses” is that this is what happened. Whether Ka-Tsetnik chose to do this consciously or unconsciously is irrelevant to my argument here.
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Ataria, Y. (2017). This is the End: A World of Silence. In: The Structural Trauma of Western Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-53228-8_8
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