A Light that Burns to the Bone: Trauma and Banality in Jean Améry’s Essay on Torture

• In Event: Fragmented Experience: Toward a Poetics of Trauma and Melancholia

Abstract

The paper examines the epiphanic qualities of trauma in Jean Améry’s account of torture. For Améry, torture constitutes a form of iconoclastic revelation as it exposes a fundamental gap that underlies the two poles of human existence: the figurative capacity to represent and direct experience. As Améry notes in his essay, even though he had clear ideas about the manner in which his capture and torture by the Nazis would take place, his actual experience did not exceed his expectations, but rather exposed a fundamental gap between the imagination and the reality of torture. In Améry’s account, torture emerges as a unique site in which raw experience comes into conflict with the attempts to represent it, effectively shattering the figurative capacities of language and the imagination. However, in prioritizing the “reality” of experience over the “banality” of representation, Améry demonstrates his own failure to extricate himself from traumatic repetition. Instead of providing an account drawn from his own experience, his description of torture ultimately reenacts the moment in which the very capacity to experience collapses.

Author

• Noam Pines, University at Buffalo, SUNY