A HOME HAUNTED BY STRANGERSis, as ways to ‘‘speak’’ the past while securing the continued existence of a testimonial
community thanks to a Jewish state that will prevent a repetition of the ‘‘unspeakable.’’
Both in Israel and among Palestinians, it has been right-wing political groups who
have most explicitly appropriated the vocabulary of testimony, to shore up political proj-
ects centered on a neat overlap of physical state borders and ethno-religious identity.
The quasi-normalization of trauma-influenced discourses of identity, however, makes it
difficult for political forces that seek to take a distance from traumatic genealogies (e.g.,
most of the left) to relate to national insecurities in ‘‘secular’’ terms, that is, as historical
realities subject to the grammar of linear time, causality, and mundane justice. At a mini-
mum, even these groups must somehow engage the testimonial legacy of the past in ways
that are respectful of taboos such as that against even hinting at some form of mutual
comparability between the Shoah and theNakbah. More generally, the question of how
to engage this legacythrough moral witnessingis present even in initiatives aiming to
restore ethical and political agency to Israelis and Palestinians as ethno-national commu-
nities by delivering Israeli-Palestinian politics from the all-consuming preoccupation with
avoiding repetition of past traumas.
One of the key obstacles confronting these projects is that the combination of recur-
rent evocations of traumatic histories with insecurities born of ongoing conflict tends to
interpellate the bearers of each ethno-national identity as subjects whose existence (both
physical and as bearers of identity) depends upon the pursuit of a pure, sovereign space
emptied of all potentially ‘‘traumatizing’’ others. In other words, this combination seems
to intensify and in a sense to ‘‘individualize’’ what Derrida calls an ‘‘ipsocentric’’ tendency
of sovereignty (as well as of democracy) in general, in the sense of a logic of affirmation
of the self-centered, tendentially exclusionary power of the self or of a community of
‘‘semblables’’ or peers.^6 At least on the surface, this seems to invite a generalization of
individual trauma theory on a broad socio-political scale: in Freud’s work, the etiology of
psychic trauma is marked by the psyche’s attempt retroactively to master a moment of
utter powerlessness (i.e., the traumatic event). Specifically, trauma results from a momen-
tary defeat of psychic mechanisms tasked with defending the inner metabolism of human
life, which in turn depends on the successful mediation of organic individuality coexisting
with its ‘‘other’’ (i.e., the world, in the form of stimuli constantly testing the quasi-inertial
pace of organic life).^7 Hence trauma results from an interruption in a sort of ‘‘filtering’’
process through which individuals maintain a sense of mutual compatibility between the
pace of organic existence and that of ‘‘the other/world.’’ Since it reveals the precariousness
of that compatibility, trauma generates for Freud a need retroactively to annul its own
occurrence, which may lead to neurotic symptoms, such as the compulsive repetition by
a trauma victim of elements of a traumatic event. In addition, contemporary studies of a
‘‘post-traumatic stress syndrome’’ (PTSD) stress the role played by symptoms such as
‘‘avoidance,’’ that is, behavior that aims to create around the individual a space emptied
of all elements that might evoke the trauma or its causes/agents (i.e., all ‘‘others’’), as
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