Social institutions are the proven paths of man's life in the world. They are lines of communication and mediation between man and nature. The institutions of society, like the habits of the individual, are the avenues of man's goings in the world. Even the most esoteric religious doctrine remains in these avenues; it remains oriented toward the “practical” in that sense.

At the level of the life-world, nature is the ambiguous dimension of the overwhelming, the inescapable, and the sustaining, all in one. It is sustaining: It surrounds, pervades, and supports man. It is overwhelming: It constantly threatens, and occasionally without warning engulfs, man. It is inescapable: Both as sustaining and overwhelming, nature is ineluctable.

With the defeat of the Axis forces in World War II, followed 45 years later my the end of the Cold War and the rise of George H. W. Bush’s “New World Order,” the Nazi death-camp system has now gone global, that’s all. The system had to get rid of Auschwitz as any distinctive place of unimaginable horror so that the whole world could at last become Auschwitz. 

Sometimes, the worst mischance can turn out to be the best chance. When that happens, trauma is transfigured.

To turn trauma, which is never there to make any effect, never meant to be “of use,” into something useful for effecting one’s own purposes, is to do with trauma what is not to be done, what is strictly prohibited. In that sense, to use trauma at all, rather than just to undergo it, to “suffer” it, is always to abuse it.