Trauma as an Assembling Point of Biopolitical Collective Body
The article attempts to describe the specific of the victim's figure in contemporary culture. As it was in archaic societies, present-day victim still induces a powerful social affect, through which communities can to experience themselves as a collective body. However, modernity could be characterized by the fact, that ineveryday speech and cultural space in general the sacred victim is replaced by the victim-sufferer, as well as by a clearly expressed habit of talking about the victim in the logic of the trauma narrative. The article analyzes the theory of the cultural trauma by Jeffrey Alexander and provides arguments that the trauma is a biopolitical concept, which gives a compromise be- tween the current biopolitical ethics (that affirms the absolute sanctity of life) and the basis of biopolitics related to the reproduction of the radical violence victim figure (so-called bare life). The internal request of the social system for the reproduction and demonstration of the victimized bare life takes the form of a sacred evil, a catastrophe that causes collective horror and grief, but is repeated here and there.