Trauma to Be Retold: An Interpretation of Walter Benjamin's "The Storyteller" and "Theses on the Philosophy of History"

This thesis reassesses Walter Benjamin's thinking on history by beginning with a re-reading of a canonical text in trauma theory: Cathy Caruth's Unclaimed Experience. I first reconstruct Caruth's influential account of trauma as an unassimilated event that resists integration into interpretive totalization, and her broadly Levinasian inflection, in which trauma's address to the other grounds an ethics of listening and witnessing. Against the common charge that Caruth is too deconstructive, I argue the opposite: the most consequential limit of her framework is that it is not deconstructive enough. Caruth turns too quickly toward an ethical imperative and thereby underdescribes how trauma operates at the level of signification itself—how it interrupts, displaces, and recomposes the sequences through which meaning and subjectivity are produced. This is a line of thought already foreshadowed in Derrida's grammatology and in Paul de Man's late reflections on the "materiality" of language. Against this limit, I radicalize Caruth's own recourse to Lacan and push the problem of trauma and history in a Benjaminian direction. I show how Benjamin counterposes the modern regime of "information", which compresses experience into explanatory transparency, to the ethos of storytelling—a mode of transmission that preserves interpretive openness, in a way analogous to the operation of free association in psychoanalysis. Such openness becomes a condition for reapproaching history: in Benjamin, the past returns as a demand for new constellations through which what was unrealized can be realized. "Realization" in this thesis therefore names a double operation: recognition (coming to realize) and actualization (making real), where "making real" is understood as a reconfiguration of the signifying field—new arrangements of words and relations. In this sense, Benjamin's language of redemption is read not as a theological withdrawal but as a rearticulation for a historical task, a responsibility for working through trauma in history: to seize openings in the present where the past's unrealized potentials can be recomposed. The theoretical hinge of this argument is Lacan's distinction between two forms of repetition, automaton and tuché. Automaton designates our enchainment to "second nature"—habit, routine, and the smooth reproduction of meaning along established signifying tracks. Tuché, by contrast, marks the repetition of what does not quite function within that second nature: the missed encounter, the breakdown, the parapraxis—the moment when the signifying machine seizes up and exposes a gap. I argue that it is precisely at such points of seizure that transformation becomes thinkable: not as final reconciliation, but as a rerouting of the signifying chain through which trauma and history can be rearticulated.