Call to Remain Responsible as a Sign of Cultural Trauma
Call to Remain Responsible as a Sign of Cultural Trauma

Summary/Abstract: In this text, by analysing the message that envelopes strategies to deal with the COVID-19 pandemic, “Let us remain responsible”, the author points to the problem that cultural trauma can be witnessed only after the event (Nachträglichkeit) or during the event itself. The message by itself already produces at least three interwoven paradoxes: 1) paradox of addressee; 2) paradox of receiver; and 3) paradox of demand. Those paradoxes point to the existence of trauma inside the culture that becomes tangible in the time of crises and is reflected, among other things, as the awareness of the split in subject (Jacques Lacan). This awareness of the split as ‘extimate’ experience broadens the binary interpretation of cultural trauma proposed by Jeffrey Alexander, who situates trauma between the event and its representation, in which the representation is the source of trauma, not the event itself. The presented cases point to the conclusion that the event itself is already symbolic and, hence, representational, but in the inverse sense, as an object that is missing in the symbolic or Lacanian algebra as “object a” that is the source of traumatic repetition.

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