Psychoanalysis, Trauma, and the "Little Secret": The Resistance of Elie Wiesel and Anne-Lise Stern

?jyyhy this policing of territory of knowledge? (Felman 181) Shoshana Felman vtr asks this question in some exasperation as she observes a censorious tendency at work in some writing on trauma and trauma studies. She should not be so surprised, however, since knowledge is one of central issues of trauma studies as it has developed in recent years. As Felman puts it, referring to Cathy Caruth, the event of trauma destabilizes security of knowledge and strikes at foundation of institutional prerogatives of what is known (181). To respond to trauma is to experience as ethically urgent questions of who knows and what is known, of who can speak with authority and what can be communicated in intelligible form. In particular, nature and status of psychoanalytic knowledge is at stake here, given pivotal role that psychoanalysis has played in elaboration of trauma studies. Psychoanalysis has sometimes been characterized and caricatured as pursuit of sexual secrets underlying obsessive behavior. But trauma, understood as disruption of knowledge, upsets masterful position of analyst, who was famously described by Lacan as subject supposed (but only supposed) to know. This article examines problem of posttraumatic knowledge first by reviewing recent controversy over psychoanalytic underpinning of trauma studies, and then by looking at two texts which explicitly stage and explore psychoanalytic analysis of traumatic survival. The first is Elie Wiesel's novel Un desir fou de danser (2006), in which a troubled man undertakes a course of psychoanalysis, both rejecting his analyst's search to uncover hidden secrets and yet reluctantly conceding pertinence of her insights, until course is terminated by analyst herself. The second work is Le Savoir-deporte: Camps, histoire, psychanalyse (2004), a collection of texts by Auschwitz-survivor and Lacanian psychoanalyst Anne-Lise Stern. Angered by failure of psychoanalysts to heed effects of camps on post-war generations, she attempts to sketch what she calls le savoir-deporte, a mode of knowledge formed by camps rather than a dispassionate interpretation of deportees' experience. The article suggests that in Wiesel's writing there is a fascinated but determined resistance to psychoanalysis, whereas Stern's work enacts a resistance within psychoanalysis to appropriation of survivor's experience. Coming from very different positions, both Wiesel's novel and Stern's essays converge as they point towards a mode of post-traumatic knowing. It would be hard to overrate importance of Cathy Caruth' s work on development of psychoanalytically-informed trauma studies in humanities. Describing her as authoritative, most original interdisciplinary theorist of