Aftermath: Violence and the Remaking of a Self

"Well, now we move away from the world of state torture to the world of rape. This is a story of a female academic who goes jogging one day when she is on sabbatical in France. She is brutally attacked and left for dead in a ditch. Her assailant is captured and tried and she is a witness at the trial. In that sense it is a very simple story but the important thing is that the woman in question is Susan J. Brison, a Dartmouth Professor. She is also a very trained and skilled philosopher who had at her disposal the full resources of her training – the resources of Western thought. And she describes in a way that I really appreciate both the experience of her breakdown and the experience of reconstituting herself in a way that I don’t see in a lot of personal trauma writing. In this case you could say that the philosophical becomes personal. It is a very powerful book in which the essays are ordered in the way she wrote them so you get her raw emotion at the beginning and then see how she works through the process. For people like me who think they can think through everything, the encounter with violence is a very powerful thing because thought itself shatters in the face of it. And I think she captures this in a way I haven’t seen a lot of places. Towards the end of the book she talks about the relationship between tragedy and time which reminds me of a book from my childhood James Thurber’s Thirteen Clocks . For those who have experienced violence, time stops and what sets time back in motion and allows you to live again is love, laughter and serendipity. Things that are not necessarily at hand to the victim of violence. “For those who have experienced violence, time stops and what sets time back in motion and allows you to live again is love, laughter and serendipity.” The other thing that is extremely moving about the book is that it shows that good is not all of a piece, evil is not all of a piece and self certainly is not all of a piece. And she talks about outliving yourself where you even experience the death of yourself in order to try and reconstruct a new one. So my first selection was on the organisation of violence, the second was on torturers and what happens to them, and this one is a deeply thought-provoking insight into the world of victims."