Trauma & Philosophy

Philosopher Frank Seeburger's reflections on trauma as it relates to contemporary philosophical issues, especially those of truth, temporality, sovereignty, representation, politics, and the nature of philosophy itself.

Art After the Holocaust (1)

March 6, 2017 Frank Seeburger

Art—at least that art that has been purified of all artifice and flashiness, all grandiloquence and gaudiness—can call us back from the sort of forgetting of ourselves that shames us, and into the sort of forgetting of ourselves that honors us. It can call us back from forgetting ourselves negatively and into forgetting ourselves positively—back into forgetting ourselves precisely by honoring our obligations, and paying what we owe.

Holocaust Remembrance (5)

February 27, 2017 Frank Seeburger

Significantly, though he died in 1938, even before the Kristallnacht pogrom let alone the implementation of the “final solution,” and had no tattooed number on his arm, Sigmund Freud said much the same thing as Jean Améry, the Auschwitz survivor, later did.