The deferred, incomprehensible and unrepresentable aspect of trauma (see Caruth 1996; Elsaesser 2001; Rutherford 2013) haunts and challenges the theoretically heterogeneous approaches of trauma studies. The representability or communicability of trauma is most often dealt with as an aporetic issue: as addressing something that resists representation or memorialisation. Commenting on ‘the popular scepticism towards the visual representation of historical trauma’ Frances Guerin and Roger Hallas argue that ‘trauma studies consistently return to an iconoclastic notion of the traumatic event as that which simultaneously demands urgent representation but shatters all potential frames of comprehension and reference’ (2007: 3).

The communicability of trauma may be precluded by the corporeality and inaccessibility of traumatic memory that dislocates cultural and discursive practices of meaning making and the self-understanding of the subject. In a dissociated type of trauma – as in Cathy Caruth's approach (1995: 4–7) – the memory of a traumatic experience that is too overwhelming to be cognitively processed is delayed and becomes a special form of bodily memory that ‘tries to find a way into consciousness, but ends up only leaking its disturbing and ambivalent traces in the typical traumatic symptoms of flashbacks, hallucinations, phobias, and nightmares’ (Kaplan and Wang 2004: 5). However, the most debatable aspect of this approach is that it focuses ‘on the impasse of the psyche and on the paralysis of the subject’ and consequently it ‘is at risk of ignoring the possibilities of working through [trauma] and historical change’ (Kaplan and Wang 2004: 5).

Mick Broderick and Antonio Traverso in their edited volume surveying alternatives for critical trauma studies consider that ‘it is the analogical physicality of the traces left by the past in traumatic memory – a violent latency of the past in which memory is imagined as a wounded body – that complicates attempts to understand trauma in terms of cultural representation’ (2011: 5). Since trauma disrupts cultural strategies of memorialisation, narrativisation or symbolisation, attempts to integrate traumatic events into a narrative that confers a coherent sense or (historical) significance to them might eventually domesticate them within the comprehensible (or the teleological). Thus, an ethical account of trauma needs to acknowledge the unsayable and the unseeable within the traumatic, the ‘gaps, elisions and impossibilities of speech, the partial nature of it’ (Rutherford 2013: 85).