Trauma Politics

From Never Again to Ever Again
(With apologies to Simon Höher)

"What we’re witnessing now is a form of epistemic overload, the collective experience of ubiquitous visibility."

~ Armin Nassehi

"What we see now is the collapse of the legitimacy architecture that underpinned a century of productive hypocrisy. The exposure of a collective “performance of stupidity”.

 ~ Francesca Albanese 

There is a new pattern emerging: This shamelessness has become politics itself. The rotten is no longer hidden; it's performed, shown off, and rewarded.

The first victim of trauma politics is time, or rather our temporality:

We’ve all had to become familiar with the logics of terror. 9/11 marked a generation that eventually even in the West grew up with terror on a global scale – and most essentially its perfidious logic of potentiality over actuality: The fear that it could happen anywhere far outpaced the risk of it actually happening everywhere, and this anticipatory logic became central to the grammar of 21st-century geopolitics.

This is the real escalation in Trauma Politics. It bypasses formal governance and public discourse. It drills straight into the underlying architecture of how we organize emotion, outrage, legitimacy, and collective response. And from that position, every attempt to push back feeds into the system's compromised logic. The spectacle of transgression, paralysis , and recursive harm – all of it flows from that perpetual breach of boundaries.

Trauma politics governs the boundary between meaning and paralysis. It operates through a different logic: rather than instilling fear, through the creation of violence as spectacle, it produces and manages a collective feeling of inadequacy.

Systemic transgression makes any response inherently inadequate.

The way forward cannot be through the traditional responses because they all remain trapped within trauma politics’ logic.

To move beyond, we might have to become unreasonable.

This means confronting an uncomfortable truth: we are not just victims of trauma politics, we are its necessary participants. Our outrage, our sharing, our engagement, our rallies all feed the cycle of a shared sense of inadequacy.

Moving on, the art lies in finding again our own terms of engagement. What do we deem promising from here out? What do we aspire to – outside of the frames of revenge and escape? Where can we create spaces and infrastructures to build something genuinely new? It’s about reclaiming and reopening the option spaces that trauma politics aims to close, redefining what is possible from here on out.

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