Throughout Cathy Caruth’s introductions, I kept thinking about a concept in chemistry called Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle. The principle states that the more we learn about the location of a moving particle, such as an electron or photon, the less we know its speed, and vice versa. In other words, there is a paradox of knowing. “The more we satisfactorily locate and classify the symptoms of PTSD,” Caurth writes, “the more we seem to have dislocated the boundaries of our modes of understanding…The phenomenon of trauma has seemed to become all-inclusive, but it has done so precisely because it brings us to the limits of our understanding” (3-4).

This tension of what it means to know, understand, and remember trauma seems to be central to both the reading. The tension of time: trauma as something existing both in the past and present (and outside of both). The tension of knowing: the experience of trauma being predicated on the forgetting of the original event (8). The tension between individual and community: the power of witnessing and/or of the witness. All of these tensions in trauma make me excited about the role of performance as it relates to trauma, as a space that holds similar tensions around time, space/place, and witnessing.

In the Freud reading, I was also very interested in the binary that he seems to set-up between repetition and remembering, specifically as it relates to acting out past traumas when he writes “the patient does not remember anything of what he has forgotten and repressed, but acts it out. He reproduces it not as a memory but as an action” (150). I think I was drawn to this idea in part because Freud seems to privilege verbal memory or description over embodied memory and close off the possibility that memory can be an action. Both readings left me with the question of what it really means to remember and in what ways can that memory be shared, and does it need to be shared?