The Ethics of the Wound

Abstract

“The ethics of the wound” is an expression borrowed from an essay by Jean Genet. Here, in the context of trauma and visual art, the title refers to art as testimony. The basis of the reflections that follow is the life experience of a diaspora artist who has survived what traumatized her and who continues to struggle with her trauma. This very personal background was presented to the attendants of the symposium and visualized in my next-door exhibition “Crossing the Void,” which provided the occasion for the conference.1 This is why I chose to omit it in the paper I presented. As a reminder, one image is included here from the Hidden Scars series “Birth Mask” about life forces being encaged by trauma, birth being intercepted.My investigations concern what is generally referred to as trauma studies, which developed in the USA in the 1990s as a multidisciplinary field of research covering a variety of cultural disciplines, with a particular focus on literature. Scholars in psychiatry and psychoanalysis joined colleagues in literary and cultural studies to analyze the origin and complications of literary and related works functioning as artistic testimonies to trauma. Shoshana Felman, Dori Laub, Cathy Caruth, and other pioneering researchers underlined how traumatic contexts could be understood to have influenced works by Charles Baudelaire, Paul Celan, Albert Camus, and others.2 My entry into this field of study — originally motivated by personal trauma experience and inspired by this relatively new discipline — subsequently determined my research into the visual arts in relation to trauma, in the sense that I focused on the visual in a way that has seen parallel approaches in Australia and the Netherlands.3