Spirals: Spacing, Trauma, Becoming, and Autoimmunity with Caruth, Derrida, Freud, Itō, and Miyazaki.
Abstract
This thesis studies trauma through the works of Japanese popular culture to propose a spiral model for the form of trauma. I analyse trauma as it is re-presented in the Dark Souls I, III, and Junji Itō’s Uzumaki. Applying contemporary trauma theorists such as Catherine Malabou and Cathy Caruth alongside Gaston Bachelard and Jacques Derrida, I seek here to present a becoming-space of time and becoming-time of space as a new way of approaching trauma. This phrase is briefly mentioned in Derrida’s Rogues and has been reworked here to describe trauma as it behaves in space and time—or, rather, a mixture of the two. I then apply the Derridean notions of spacing and autoimmunity to illustrate a non-linear model of time and trauma, which allows for a discussion of the methods by which we (re)orient ourselves when we have been affected by a traumatic event or image.