ABSTRACT
Trauma and the Ontology of the Modern Subject can be characterized as an elaborate meditation on Ian Hacking’s (1995) impudent observation, “One feature of the modern sensibility is dazzling in its implausibility: the idea that what has been forgotten is what forms our character, our personality, our soul” (p. 209). Roberts seems to believe that neither philosophers nor psychologists need be moralists, normative in intent, or idealists in order to successfully investigate this historical implacability, which is true enough, if “implausible.” He does warn that a social praxis can be opportunistic in response to such meanderings of history. Exemplary in this case, psychology’s current academic and disciplinary aims in “treating” and rehabilitating memory and trauma show little reflective genius. The field’s erasure of temporality as a subject’s province by referring its vicissitudes to the measure of time management and adaptive or maladaptive retrieval defer to either ideals of productivity or simply efficiency in information processing. The compression of temporality manifest as personal and cultural histories into proliferating social identities and support groups resorts to “reifying human beings… [leading] to crimes next to which those of the physicist’s scientism would pale” (Lacan, 1966/2006a, p. 177). The spectrum of slots may be wide. Nonetheless, contemporary disciplinary blinders leave the psychological field to the most slender slice of a question not to say an approach when it comes to the subject. Where, amid handing out badges and implementing whatever either alleviates or improves, is the appearance of a subject recognized, outside of a functionary of social utility or outcome variable personalized with a bio blurb? To see just what the missing piece may be, for a moment, one can rush into Foucault’s (1999) arms:
Not a critical philosophy that seeks to determine the conditions and the limits of our possible knowledge of the object, but a critical philosophy that 206seeks the conditions and the indefinite possibilities of transforming the subject, of transforming ourselves.
(p. 161) If a human subject is still a question, it is not immune to the historical “revolutions” that define its production and parameters. As Roberts poses it, a problem within human temporality continues to fester within modernity and a particular form of its expression can be traced as can be what necessarily emerged within a break that marked the modern and its sidekick, science. Of course, this is further tribute to Foucault’s influence on this text. On this note, Roberts’ book also serves to recall what can be done if we take Foucault at his best, or at least pursue further his most vibrant project.