Trauma in the Future Anterior
Ruth Ronen, Philosophy, Tel Aviv University
In one of Henry James’ stories “The Beast in the Jungle” the hero wastes a whole life
time waiting for something grand to occur in his life, “something or other lay in wait
for him amid the twists and the turns of the months and the years, like a crouching
beast in the jungle”. This something, could either slay him or be slain by him, and
considered to be the real truth about him, it overshadows every other event in his life.
Near the end of the story, Marcher, realizes that his life faded away for no purpose at
all, as the something that awaited him was there before him all this time. While
awaiting something grand to take place he missed the love that was there. The beast in
the jungle was this recognition of love that stirred within him too late, retrospectively
turning his whole life into a tragedy.
When we say with Freud that trauma is decided retrospectively, Nachträglich, do we
also mean to say that trauma, like tragedy, is a way of coming up against a past event
unknown at the time of its occurrence? Is retrospection a moment of late recognition?
The tragic turn of events appears to be a way of making sense of events that were
incomprehensible while they actually occurred. What is the beast in the jungle? What
is it that makes Antigone act the way she does? As if the key, the cause of the events
taking place was missing and is given too late. Oedipus did not know in real time the
identity of the man on the road, Antigone did not realize she was giving up an alliance
of love while she extricated herself from the social order by consecrating a blood
alliance. Tragedy is hence a case of symbolic break, where the signifying key is
missing and is discovered too late.
What can we learn from the tragic retrospective turn of events?
It is true that in tragedy the late recognition seems to be anticipated by the events
themselves, and yet, when recognition occurs, it seems to be articulated in terms
alienated from the events themselves. We could say of tragedy that “had Marcher
understood the place of love in his life, he would not have awaited the beast in the
jungle”. Awaiting the beast in the jungle causes tragedy, and yet when the real cause,
the denial of love, emerges in the hero's recognition in real time, it carries an unreal
effect, as it fails to provide a denouement for tragedy. The usually lethal ending of
tragedy, while completing the chain, reveals the anterior cause as already missed, and
hence somehow irrelevant to the drama. Had Lady Macbeth known that the power of
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ruler will make her barren… but the cause is at this point incapable of determining the
course of events otherwise than the way they actually have happened.
This is the point I would like to isolate with regard to tragedy, that when the cause is
retrospectively exposed, it appears alienated from, even irrelevant to the events of the
drama. What tragedy reveals retrospectively indicates a misfit, that the key
retrospectively revealed has lost its validity apart from its power of bringing about a
tragic ending, as the tragic plot has already anticipated. The cause missed by the
actual events has now become almost unreal. [Can we think of Antigone wedded? Of
Lady Macbeth as a loving mother? Antigone clinging to her loyalty to her blood
relation turns out to have lost her life, thereby failing to secure proper burial for her
brother.] Marcher clings to the wait, and when he discovers that he has lost the
possibility of love, the wait for the beast becomes an unreal, fallacious cause. The late
recognition of cause sheds an unreal light on tragic causality itself.
The cause, when articulated in symbolic terms: Antigone's defiance of the law,
Marcher's blindness to love, Oedipus not wanting to know – is a cause that misfits the
tragic drama.
This is why tragedy demands a reconsideration of the cause guiding the tragic hero, as
Lacan has shown; the tragic hero acts outside the symbolic order, at its very limit.
Once we try to formulate the tragic hero's cause for action within the symbolic order,
we lose grasp of the tragic subject and of the logic of his/her actions.
My point is that while tragedy demands a retrospective understanding, we would not
refer to tragedy with the future anterior.
What is the difference between the retrospective recognition which turns a course of
events into a tragedy and Freud's concept of Nachtraglich? The future anterior cannot
be a case of signifying retrospectively because the temporal structure of the future
anterior affirms the necessity of the cause. Trauma refers to the cause anticipating
future events, the cause retrospectively revealed, as real, which means that the cause
of trauma is a determining cause for the future of events. In trauma the anticipatory
dimension introduced by the retrospectively revealed cause – turns out to be necessary
to explain its consequence. The cause is affirmed as necessary in trauma rather than
negated as alienated from the subject, as in the case of tragedy.
To explain this necessity introduced with the future anterior we should first address
the question of “when does trauma occur?” The future anterior, as introduced into
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psychoanalysis by Lacan after Freud's idea of the Nachträglich, suggests a
temporality which encapsulates two crucial aspects of trauma: it points to a future
anticipated event as anterior, that is, as already sure to occur once a prior event takes
place, and it refers to an event, retrospectively disclosed, as real cause. Real causality
means that there is something unavoidable and irreducible which links the two events
in one causal chain. In order to reveal the psychic implications of this temporal
structure, I will show that in trauma the relation between the events in the future
anterior obeys not only a logic of anticipation but also a pattern of repetition. The
prior event is a non-identical repetition of the future event, a repetition that
implicates the subject of trauma in this temporal structure.
So “When does trauma occur?” The case of trauma paradigmatically associated with
the retrospective structure of events is Freud’s case about the woman afraid of
entering shops. Freud presents the case thus:
Emma is subject at the present time to a compulsion of not being able to go into
shops alone. As a reason for this, [she produced] a memory from the time when she
was twelve years old (shortly after puberty). She went into a shop to buy something,
saw the two shop-assistants (one of whom she can remember) laughing together, and
ran away in some kind of affect of fright. In connection with this, she was led to recall
that the two of them were laughing at her clothes and that one of them had pleased her
sexually.
…Further investigation now revealed a second memory, which she denies having
had in mind at the moment of Scene I. Nor is there anything to prove this. On two
occasions when she was a child of eight she had gone into a small shop to buy some
sweets, and the shopkeeper had grabbed at her genitals through her clothes. In spite of
the first experience she had gone there a second time; after the second time she
stopped away. She now reproached herself for having gone there the second time, as
though she had wanted in that way to provoke the assault. In fact a state of
‘oppressive bad conscience’ is to be traced back to this experience.
Freud, Project for a Scientific Psychology
How does Freud invite us to understand the relation between the first and second
memory? The later event is the one retrospectively marking the earlier one as
traumatic. It is the later event that constitutes the onset of trauma while the cause lies
at an earlier point. When the prior event re-emerges from memory it illuminates the
psychic route along which the subject’s life has moved previously and thereafter
making the trauma retrospectively unavoidable. Trauma presents a cause
retrospectively emerging as necessary to explain the psychic movement essential to
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the subject; trauma is not a retrospective colouring of events in the subject’s life
course nor a predication of events, not even an absolute given. Trauma is the "holing"
of reality with pleasure, that is, trauma brings together a reality and its libidinal charge
by establishing temporal and causal relations between two occurrences. This is
marked in Freud with the onset of puberty, which changes the libidinal charge of the
prior event, thereby turning it into the cause of trauma.
Freud’s idea that trauma is a psychic operation of establishing a libidinal relation
between two events may lead to 3 related problems. First, in assuming that trauma
occurs at a time which retrospectively sheds a traumatic light on a prior event we
seem to posit trauma as having no definite temporal location. At most we could say
that trauma occurs in between its actual occurrence, which is in itself untraumatic, and
a later event which is also not traumatic yet is taken over by the prior event turning it
into a traumatic one. So trauma appears to occur nowhere if we measure it in the
absolute terms of linear time: it can be identified neither with the earlier scene nor
with the later one.
Second, in assuming trauma as occurring retrospectively, Freud registers trauma
doubly, once as a libidinally uncharged event and once as sexually charged and hence
traumatic. This double registration may seem to empty trauma from any possible
association with a constitutive core, with an actual event.
Third, the idea of retrospective registration seems to support the Freudian idea that
the unconscious does not admit of temporal differences, it knows no difference of past
present and future, which questions the whole idea of the future anterior as relevant to
trauma.
Taken together, these points may suggest that for psychoanalysis trauma is a
strictly mental event, having no underpinnings in reality, that for psychoanalysis, the
reality of the unconscious is disconnected from considerations of real truth and that
trauma is but a way of operating affectively on reality. But, as already suggested
Freud’s own terms of the nachträglich imply that trauma is a temporal structure and is
constituted by the subject’s psychic movement in real events.
How does the future anterior produce a structure of temporality in which a
necessary temporal liaison is created between two events implicating the subject in
this structure? In order to look into the matter we can read Lacan’s words about time
in the unconscious: it creates the past in its real form: not as a past that has been
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abolished, not a past idealized in memory, but a “past which manifests itself in an
inverted form in repetition” (“The Function and Field of Speech and Language in
Psychoanalysis” p. 318). That is, trauma means that a past event is produced as the
actual repetition of a later event – this is the type of temporal causality signalled by
the conditional known as the future anterior.
To clarify this point I would like to refer to the way Heidegger approaches past
present and future. The structure of past present and future times already belongs to
Dasein [Heidegger’s idea of the human subject], indicating the ways of involvement
of Dasein in his world. Away from the ordinary conception of temporality, Heidegger
claims that the future is being for the sake of itself, the present is that in the face of
which Dasein has been thrown into its world and the past is what has been and to
which Dasein has been abandoned. So the times are not measurable moments along an
absolute time sequence but suggest a way of temporalizing the world in which Dasein
temporalizes itself. The temporality of past and future indicates how Dasein is not “intime” but “steps forth” into time, ex-isting in the world that makes Dasein what it is.
Dasein, in other words, is what creates the movement of time where Dasein itself is
never present in any such moment.
Let us go back to the future anterior: a grammatical tense which refers to an event or
action in the future that will be completed by a time another future event occurs. [The
standard way of understanding the future anterior is that at the end of the sentence, the
consequences of the initial event become clear. The signifiers “float” until the given
sentence is finished.] “By the time they are inside the hall the bomb will have
exploded”. The future anterior means that the explosion will occur when the gathering
in the hall is complete. At the time of utterance it is not determined yet whether the
crowd will gather into the hall, but given that the bomb is going to explode anticipates
the gathering as necessary, turning the gathering into a determining cause of the
explosion. The peculiar structure of the future anterior implies that the prior event
turns out to be determined by the anticipated event, an anticipation that imposes a real
causality between the two events. We cannot say it is certain the bomb will explode
(the explosion being in the future tense), but the reference to the past guarantees that
from the point of view of the prior event being complete, the explosion can be
anticipated with certainty. There is a certainty, a real weight to the event assigned by
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the “will have been” as an event anticipated but not to be confirmed until a future
moment. The future anterior thus establishes two grammatical moments yet its
meaning leans on the crossing of the one by the other. The two events do not merge
but they are related in an impossible relation of anticipation of something uncertain in
the future made past and certain by the introduction of its cause.
Furthermore, the events do not simply condition each other: the later event turns out
to repeat something already there in the first event and to be repeated in it. What they
repeat, I will claim, is the subject’s ownmost being as cause, to be repeated in the
anticipated traumatic turn of events.
But what kind of reality can we ascribe to an event predicated as belonging to the
future anterior? Why claim that in trauma, unlike tragedy, the cause assumed by the
retrospectively recognized event, is necessary and real? Tarantino’s film “Inglorious
Basterds” (2009) can illustrate the certainty involved in an event of the future
anterior; in other words, it can clarify how a future event affects us as real because a
cause has been established retrospectively as necessary. Does not this film establish a
whole reality in the future anterior by supplying the cause that was missing from
actual history? Doesn’t the film provide an anticipated future that determines a reality
of an event prior to it, thus creating a real history at another register where revenge is
established as cause? Tarantino’s film is not a fantasy, nor a story about a virtual
reality. Tarantino describes anticipated events in the future anterior, that is, as what
must have been had another event been completed by that time. This is the future as
anticipated by introducing into the history of Nazism the revenge of the victims.
Revenge, as a way of being of the avenging subjects in time, is not an alternative
cause that changes the turn of events but the answer to the Nazi horror. Thus revenge
is a subjective position that creates a necessary anticipation in actual history. The film
shows us a history in which the Nazis actions are avenged – as real history, as what
must have happened rather than could have happened. When the cinema hall is fully
crowded with Nazi officials of all ranks, the bomb will have exploded killing them all.
Tarantino’s example can show us that the anticipated event gains a reality once a
subject has been introduced. This is the meaning of the future anterior; establishing
the reality of trauma in an event that anticipates what is to come in the subject’s life.
The future anterior hence indicates that we cannot question its necessary unfolding of
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events. Asking whether the girl's symptom of fright from shops could have been
caused by something else is a futile question.
The future anterior thus tells us that the temporality of the trauma is not a floating
temporality of an unlocatable event. The temporality of trauma involves the
anticipation created by an event that sets on the history of the subject thus turning this
history into a real enactment of the prior event revealed to be a cause. Trauma is not a
chain of nows, or a change in the status of the mental. Trauma obeys a temporality in
which the subject’s real being determines the past the present and the future in
history. So with trauma we deal with temporality of past present and future moments
whose relation is established by the subject’s own being in time.
We can clarify this matter with the example of love given by Jacques-Alain Miller in
connection with the eroticism of time: love repeats the contingent future by recording
time and again the encounter that could have not occurred by saying: we were
destined to each other. The similarity between love and trauma cannot be denied: for
the subject-being-in-love, the contingent future affirms a necessary past event which
assigns a measure of certainty to that future. The future of the love relation turns out
to be a necessary repetition of a past already decided as fateful.
“I identify myself in language, but only by losing myself in it as an object. What is
realized in my history is neither the past definite as what was, since it is no more, nor
even the perfect as what has been in what I am, but the future anterior as what I will
have been, given what I am in the process of becoming” (“The Function and Field of
Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis”, p. 299-300). Lacan like Heidegger ties the
subject's being with time. Being–in-time means that the future anterior exhibits and
encapsulates the idea of temporality as what defines the time in which the speaking
being is.
This quote from Lacan also reveals that it is the anticipated future that most
authentically relates to the subject’s being. Indeed both Lacan and Heidegger give
priority to the future in this respect: “The existential-temporal condition for the
possibility of the world lies in the fact that temporality [as an ecstatical unity,] has
something like a horizon…[ there belongs to each ecstasies] a ‘whither’ to which one
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is carried away” (BT, 365). [ecstasies being the places-moments of Dasein’s existence].
For Lacan just as for Heidegger, the history of the subject has a limit defined as his
death. Not death as the objective point terminating one’s life, nor the symbolic death
unto which is turned the hero of tragedy. It is rather death as that “possibility which is
the subject’s own most, which is unconditional, unsurpassable, certain, and as such
indeterminable” – the subject being understood as defined by his historicity”
(Heidegger quoted in Lacan). Being toward death indicates a limit present at every
instant of the subject’s history, in every moment already finished of this history. This
is the past in its real form: a “past which manifests itself in an inverted form in
repetition” (“The Function… p. 318).
The idea of anticipation and the priority of the future in the structure of temporality as
a structure of authentic Being-in-the–world, is what completes the picture provided by
the future anterior. The temporality of trauma involves the subject –being-in-theworld and not the world per-se. The past of the subject is the past repeated in
anticipation of the limit of this history. It is the limit toward which history moves thus
negating any possibility of repeating the same. In trauma, repetition is never repetition
of the same and yet repetition indicates that the past of the subject is where an
inversion of the past into the future has taken place.
The future anterior realizes the history of the subject in language as anticipating its
limit, as what the subject will have been, given what he is in the process of becoming,
to use Lacan’s formulation. That is, trauma occurs in the future anterior in the sense
that it makes time for what is the subject’s own most unconditioned being. It is in an
anticipated future that the subject’s historicity is manifested in time. At the moment
the woman walks into a shop in which she will see a shopkeeper looking at her cloths,
a past moment will become a determining event anticipating future moments. The
past moment could have been forgotten forever in another subject, could have eluded
its function as cause. But for this particular subject, the moment she steps into the
shop, becomes a determining moment for her history as the cause thus recognized is
related to her innermost, own most being. The woman-being-in-time is what will turn
the past event into a repetition. The later event will be repeated in a moment already
past setting forth the subject’s relation to the real time of her trauma.
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