Meditation on the Artist as Traumatized

The best and most creative artists, then, will need to have already undertaken the process of symbolically representing their most painful memories and of recording those symbolic representations in text, on canvas, in costume – however they choose or do not choose to reenact their preoccupation with death. The traumatized artist produces death-driven work, but the healed survivor, to use the cliché terms, produces life-driven, unfinalized art that necessarily comes from repeatedly accepting loss. The artist who has not always already accepted death, she who does not live her life in conscious, vigilant acceptance of death and therefore renewal from it, will not accept loss, and therefore cannot transcend that process to move on to accepting life. If Derrida tells us we must collapse the binary, then deconstruction is nihilistic only as long as the deconstructor stands in the suburb to his ruined city. But if the deconstructor, who is the trauma victim, sees his dis-construction and yet chooses to build from the ruins a new city, a city bracketed around the will of the individual, then can the individual at once stand both inside and out of the structure – insert your institution, establishment, or religion here – and be a master and a slave unto himself, even if at times to his split selves, in a cohesive way? Is there a way to congeal those multiple subjectivities into an unfinalizable, always already changed, and changing entity that both accepts and refuses a single structure and both accepts and refuses the multiplicity of structures? Is this utopia?