Why the hell, I wonder, do I keep writing about trauma? It’s a good question, and one I’ve asked myself more than once. Here’s another good question: Why are Leftists always so fixated on the God-awful things that happen in our world when we know we’re usually powerless to do anything about them? Do we have a neurotic need to wallow in liberal guilt, or are we just congenitally morbid? I think there’s something else going on here, something that has to do with the difference between reality and the Real. Each of us inhabits a symbolic universe, the sum total of all the symbol systems—like language and culture, mathematics and science, religion and ideology—that organize and give meaning to the things we perceive. When we talk about “reality,” we’re talking about our own symbolic universes.

Our symbolic universes, our “realities,” are flawed in two basic ways. First, they’re hermetically sealed: because the mind depends on symbols to function, it’s impossible for the mind to move outside its symbolic universe. Second, our symbolic universes can’t encompass the complexity of whatever it is that allows symbolic universes to exist in the first place: the non-symbolic foundation of our symbolic universes is necessarily infinitely more complex than those universes could ever be. These flaws create fundamental contradictions in every symbolic universe, and we perceive those contradictions as threats to our reality. Contradictions can’t be reduced to the questions that remain unanswered within a given symbolic universe, but are instead the questions that can’t even be asked within that universe: they’re like questions posed in Mandarin to someone who only speaks English.

Contradictions in our symbolic universes express a fundamental negativity underlying every positive symbol, a negativity that, in contrast to symbolic “reality,” can be called the non-symbolic “Real.” The alternate timelines used as plot devices in science fiction stories provide a useful metaphor for understanding this negativity.

In these stories, time branches into multiple timelines, or parallel universes, whenever a decision is made, such that every possible decision that could be made in that moment is made in its own timeline: if in one timeline a character commits a murder, in another he simply commits an assault, in yet another he reconciles with his intended victim, and so on. The relationship between symbols and their underlying negativity, between reality and the Real, is similar to the relationship between one particular timeline and all timelines branching off from the decisive moment. Contradictions in a symbolic universe reveal the universe’s limitations, and suggest the possibility of alternate symbolic universes, alternate “realities.”

From an esoteric religious perspective, the Real is the noumenal world beyond all symbolic universes, beyond all reality—the Tao, Nirvana, Brahman, Ein Sof, the Godhead—and the contradictions that disclose it are discovered through revelations, epiphanies, and enlightenment: as Leonard Cohen sings in Anthem, “There’s a crack in everything/That’s how the light gets in.” From a materialist perspective, on the other hand, the Real is nothing besides the contradictions that expose reality’s inadequacy. In the forward to the second edition of For They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor (Verso, 2008), cultural theorist Slavoj Zizek writes that the Real is “a certain grimace of reality,” a “gap between two inconsistent phenomena, a perspective shift.” Whether they point to the Real beyond reality or are themselves the Real, the contradictions in our symbolic universes are crucially important.

Contradictions are uncanny, in the sense that they remind us of paths we haven’t taken, paths we’ve tried to forget about and can barely recognize anymore. The most powerful contradictions are typically traumatic: psychological trauma is itself a failure of our central nervous systems to process intensely charged emotional stimuli, to turn it into symbols that our minds can integrate. Finally, contradictions are fertilizing: to recognize a contradiction opens the space our symbolic universes need if they’re ever to evolve.

Take child abuse as an example. At least in urban civilizations, violence against children has been the norm in parenting for millennia, but in the last century it’s been going out of style. What’s driving this change?

Violence against children is inherently traumatic: children’s underdeveloped nervous systems simply can’t integrate the emotionally supercharged double-bind of being beaten by the people they turn to for protection. Children’s memories of abuse remain in the disintegrated form of powerful emotions and tensions that language can’t access. As children grow into adults, this disintegrated memory acts as a contradiction within their symbolic universes that they try to repress. The repression of traumatic memories of child abuse reinforces a culturally-shared symbolic universe that denies the psychological consequences of that abuse, which ensures that the abuse will carry forward into the next generation. Within this symbolic universe, the very idea of non-violent parenting is subversive, a perversion of parenting sure to spoil a child’s developing character. If, however, enough people dwell upon the trauma, if the contradiction within the symbolic universe is repeatedly brought into conscious awareness, then the symbolic universe is thrown into turmoil. The turmoil reveals possibilities for change, and reality begins transforming in ways that allow new and non-violent styles of parenting to develop. It is exactly this dialectical process rooted in the trauma of child abuse that in recent generations has been transforming parenting styles all around the world.

A similar dialectical process can be found in the histories of abolitionism, feminism, anti-imperialism, and many other progressive movements. The process can be broken down into discrete stages: (1) a culturally-shared symbolic universe produces a violence that inflicts trauma; (2) the trauma is repressed in order to maintain the symbolic universe, ensuring the violence will continue; (3) a few people begin drawing attention to the trauma, followed by many others; (4) the symbolic universe that maintains the violence begins to seem inadequate; (5) this inadequacy reveals a field of possibility within the symbolic universe; (6) the field of possibility allows the symbolic universe to transform in ways that may reduce the violence. The process is always resisted by supporters of the existing symbolic universe, who usually supplement reasoned argument with ridicule and intensified violence to preserve their reality’s integrity.

I think this dialectic is what Zizek is referring to when he writes, “This, then, is the point where the Left must not ‘give way’: it must preserve the traces of all historical traumas, dreams and catastrophes which the ruling ideology of the ‘End of History’ would prefer to obliterate—it must become itself their living monument, so that as long as the Left is here, these traumas will remain marked. Such an attitude, far from confining the Left within a nostalgic infatuation with the past, is the only possibility for attaining a distance on the present, a distance which will enable us to discern signs of the New.” When recalling traumas, there’s always a danger that we’ll try to incorporate them into our symbolic universes, to reduce them to mere symbols. Zizek writes, “The point is not to remember the past trauma as exactly as possible: such a ‘documentation’ is a priori false, it transforms the trauma into a neutral, objective fact, whereas the essence of the trauma is precisely that it is too horrible to be remembered, to be integrated into our symbolic universe.”

The attempted symbolization of trauma is, perhaps, best exemplified in the Zionist treatment of the Holocaust. By framing the Holocaust as an almost alchemical process in which the concentrated evils of the gentile world were an unholy crucible that produced the spiritually purified state of Israel, the traumatic dimensions of the Holocaust—that is, the Holocaust itself—have been domesticated or repressed. This repression helps maintain the symbolic universe of intensely racist militaristic nationalism that was responsible for the Holocaust, as shown by Israel’s increasingly genocidal treatment of the Palestinians, as well as by the Israel Lobby’s murderous attitude towards nations like Iraq and Iran. If trauma is a contradiction in a symbolic universe, then it is the Nakba, the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians and the occupation of Palestine, and not the Holocaust, that is Israel’s founding trauma, because the Nakba directly contradicts Zionist narratives of national purity.

In contrast, the Holocaust remains Germany’s trauma, as indicated by the way that the recent Wehrmacht Exhibition’s exposure of the murderous role played by ordinary German soldiers in the Nazi genocide triggered a deafening ultra-nationalist outcry. Similarly, the United States’ trauma resides in imperialism, the legacy of slavery, and the genocide of American Indians, while Canada’s trauma can be found in its complicity in imperialism and in the ethnocide of First Nations. Capitalism’s trauma lies in the oppression of the global proletariat and patriarchy’s trauma in the oppression of women. The trauma of speciesism, the ideology that gives humanity mastery of the biosphere, can be found in the violence that meat consumption, habitat destruction, scientific experimentation, and recreational sadism inflict upon animals.

Preserving the traces of traumas is quintessentially ethical, not only because doing so honours their victims, but also because it undermines the symbolic universes responsible for trauma-producing violence and makes dialectical change within those universes possible. This is why Leftists are so obsessed with trauma: the traces of trauma are a chisel forged from the Real that we can use to crack the walls of unjust realities, in the hope that their loosened stones can be used to build new and better worlds. This chisel is the best tool we have. It can never be taken away from us and it must never be abandoned, no matter how badly it bruises the hands that hold it.