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What are we to make of the current celebrity of child abuse? It is disconcerting to realize that child abuse provides the model topic for TV's confessional shows; it is intimate, embarrassing, disturbing, as shamefully riveting as television itself. The subject may seem in danger of a kind of trivialization—as if its seriousness were tainted by its daily role in the theater of tears presided over by the Geraldos and Oprahs. But this kind of theater, no less than that of the Elizabethans and the Greeks, reflects a cultural urgency. And child abuse seems to make a special connection to that urgency.
I think the surging interest in child abuse is not an accident or a fad, but a sign of its central role in the problematic of our culture. By “our culture” I mean, not simply TV or the nineties, but a familiar atmosphere of rather long historical duration, that dominant tissue of interests and concerns which emerges with the French Revolution and continues today. Broadly conceived, it is that sense of the human situation which makes Buchner and Ibsen and Dostoevsky and Freud and Beckett and Picasso immediate to us—and to each other—in ways that Voltaire and Bach and perhaps even Shakespeare are not. They are immediate because they breathe an atmosphere of difficulty we recognize as our own. Child abuse intersects many strands of that difficulty—social, psychological, philosophical, political—in surprising and important ways.
There is, for example, the suggestive link between child abuse and poststructuralism. It's been noticed that the issue of child abuse regularly raises the question—did it really happen? This is often thought of as an instance of the general problem of philosophical undecidability, of the gap between truth and representation. But I want to suggest that the question of child