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When we think about history in the aftermath of the 20th century, we must inevitably think about trauma. To construct a contemporary philosophy of history is in some way to construct a philosophy of engaging trauma because the historical events that have the deepest claim on us as thinkers of history are traumatic. If we fail to grasp adequately the traumatic events of history, we perpetuate the trauma or, at least, do nothing to extirpate it. This is what Theodor Adorno (1992) suggests in Negative Dialectics when he claims that “a new categorical imperative has been imposed by Hitler upon unfree mankind: to arrange their thoughts and actions so that Auschwitz will not repeat itself, so that nothing similar will happen” (p 365). The problem is, however, that to think about history is also to theorize about it, and to approach history theoretically is to miss its traumatic dimension and thus to violate Adorno's “new categorical imperative.”
A theoretical approach places trauma of history within a meaningful framework, and this activity necessarily dissolves the nonsensical status of trauma. Trauma is always nonsensical; it is traumatic precisely because we can't render it sensible within a universe of meaning. It is Real in the sense that it resists symbolization absolutely, and we avoid it because it would reveal the truth of our existence. Hence, any effort to render the trauma of history through a theoretical understanding must be doomed to failure, insofar as apprehending the trauma forces it to signify and breaks down its resistance to sense.
But as Walter Davis argues in Deracination, there is a way out of this dilemma. In contrast to theorizing, aesthetic experience allows us to engage history in a way adequate to the experience of it. This is because aesthetic experience enables us to engage trauma without turning away from it or rendering it significant. The truth of history is traumatic, and aesthetic experience renders this trauma approachable. But aesthetic