The Brokenness of Being

Abstract

In “The Brokenness of Being,” Mari Ruti investigates the impact that trauma can have on being. Informed by her own experience of breast cancer, Ruti argues that there are some traumatic experiences that entirely change one’s symbolic coordinates. She calls these types of experiences benchmark traumas. Diagnosed with terminal cancer, Ruti boldly explores how encountering a benchmark trauma forced her to recognize the brokenness of her being. She theorizes that this recognition reveals the split in the subject. Encountering this brokenness, as she calls it, at the heart of being can be completely debilitating. However, Ruti argues, there is a way to engage rather than repress this impossible reality. She theorizes that creativity is the one human expression that can grapple authentically with the split in the subject. To explore this idea, she collaborates with painter Dwight Smith. Smith’s twenty-two paintings respond to the benchmark trauma of the death of his twenty-two-year-old daughter. The twenty-two paintings are positioned throughout the manuscript and are in conversation with Ruti’s theory. Ruti is fascinated by both the paintings and Smith’s process, which is similar to her own. For Ruti and Smith, their creativity is how existential engagement takes shape.

Keywords:

• psychoanalysis
• trauma theory
• benchmark trauma
• auto theory
• breast cancer
• Mari Ruti

Notes

1 Although my writing has always revealed glimpses of the personal, a deliberate shift toward a more personal tone first emerged in Penis Envy & Other Bad Feelings – the last book I published prior to my cancer diagnosis.

2 Nietzsche’s ideal of living one’s life as poetry has followed me throughout my career. I discuss it in detail in A World of Fragile Things.

3 Lacan’s respect for creativity in the usual sense of the term is visible for instance in his reading of James Joyce in his Seminar 23.

4 See Lacan’s Seminar 7.

5 For a fascinating rendering of the short session, see Betty Milan’s first-hand account of having been analyzed by Lacan in the 1970s.

6 See Lauren Berlant’s Cruel Optimism.

7 See Ruti, Penis Envy & Other Bad Feelings.

8 This worry seems to drive some of the critiques of Lacanian theory coming from the rest of the left, especially from affect theory.

9 See Ruti, Distillations, Between Levinas and Lacan, and The Singularity of Being.

10 See the opening pages of Kristeva’s Black Sun.

11 See Lacan, Seminar 23 and Ruti, The Singularity of Being.

12 See Kristeva’s Revolution in Poetic Language.

13 Further discussions of my theory of sublimation can be found in The Singularity of Being, Between Levinas and Lacan, and Distillations.

14 For further discussion see Todd McGowan’s Capitalism and Desire.

15 See Ruti, The Call of Character.

16 A more detailed explanation of both examples can be found in my The Singularity of Being and Distillations.

17 As to which objects resonate with us and which do not is determined by the distinctive manner in which we experience the Thing’s absence.

18 See Ruti, The Singularity of Being and The Ethics of Opting Out.

19 See Ruti, Penis Envy & Other Bad Feelings.