Crisis, trauma, and testimony: The work of mourning in the 'Age of AIDS

This interdisciplinary dissertation argues that thinking with the concepts of crisis, trauma, mourning, and testimony serves to trouble the epistemological, political, historical, and literary models that have been mobilized---in different ways and to different ends---to render the "AIDS crisis" intelligible. Through these concepts, this dissertation provides an intertextual critical reading of the theoretical discussion occasioned by AIDS, and navigates the tensions, paradoxes, and structuring contradictions of its discursive construction. Central to the argument I work through is the contention that AIDS challenges the rhetorical rights of reference---the discursive ordering of the times, spaces, and subjectivities of AIDS---through which intelligibility is constructed and may be assumed. I also argue that isolating and undoing, two centrally important mechanisms of defense which attempt to foreclose difficult knowledge from thought, must be accounted for in discussions of the psychical affects of AIDS. Offering an intervention in contemporary discussions of trauma and the work of mourning (Trauerarbeit), I maintain that trauma---the interpretation of psychical injury---must be understood to be the other side of the work of mourning, and that it is imperative to think with the critical tensions between the two in addresses to and from AIDS. I explore the implications of these contentions for AIDS activism, AIDS historiography and histories, and German, French, and English literary testimony to the epidemic.;Throughout this dissertation, my concern is to sketch out the basis for an ethics of reading and writing that reflects on the limits, responsibilities, and implications of thought when responding to difficult knowledges. Insofar as AIDS challenges intelligibility and our assumptions of knowledge, I assert that any thinking that can take into account the difficult knowledges of AIDS must be understood in its recursive relationship to the subjects and objects it sets apart, interprets, and attempts to render intelligible. I call this recursive relationship of thinking to itself "afterthought." The concept of afterthought suggests a role for thinking in addressing and responding to the delays and relays of trauma and mourning. The work of afterthought is also central to what may be called an ethic of alterity in which the self works on itself in order to develop a critical responsiveness to that which it is not.