Traumatic Inventions and the Ethics of Scientific Discovery

This entry explores trauma deconstructively, through the subject of scientific invention and the writings of the late French philosopher Jacques Derrida. Trauma, for Derrida, emanates from the unprecedented, from our lack of understanding or inability to constitute the new. In its very strangeness, the unprecedented frightens us, causing trauma and pain. At the same time, though, the repeated trauma of the unprecedented brings hope and promise to society. It ensures that change is possible and perhaps even inevitable. This promise of social change produces an ethics of hope, that is, an openness to the “other” and to the unknown and unprecedented. The traumatic invention is thus not as negative as it first sounds. Instead, it is through trauma that possibility emerges.

Invention is always traumatic. Be it in science, technology, art, music, and so forth, invention must, by definition, create something entirely new; it must make known that which was hitherto unknown or mysterious. As such, invention constitutes a singular event, which, when read through the work of Derrida, generates trauma: Any first appearance of the “not yet recognized” unsettles and destabilizes our current knowledge and understanding of the world. Like a monster that shows itself, the etymological meaning of monster as something that has not yet been shown, nothing can prepare us for the arrival of the wholly new, thereby eliciting fear and trauma. For Derrida, though, as soon as a monster is perceived as a monster, it enters into culture and becomes the subject of analysis and normative judgment; the process of normalization has begun. Put more simply, and in Derrida's words, once a monster is named as a monster, it is tamed.

Bringing Derrida's reasoning to bear on the topic of invention in science, one finds that scientific discovery, similar to Derrida's monster, must, by definition, show something that has not yet been shown; it must offer the wholly new and the heretofore undiscovered. Scientific discovery must be an unprecedented event that is unique and singular. However, to appreciate the discovery of the scientific discovery, such must be captured within a system [Page 755]of rules and conventions of understanding that will ensure its position more generally in culture and society. The scientific discovery, in other words, can only be analyzed or understood through preexisting or prevailing laws of language and science.

It is therefore a paradox, or what Derrida calls aporia, that scientific discovery is constituted by its originality and yet wholly dependent on established conceptions of what constitutes originality to recognized or legitimized as original, as discovery. The aporetic nature of scientific discovery rests on the fact that a “true” discovery, one that shows itself as a first time ever, must also be a last time. It must be singular, complete, and containable. To be so completely and utterly present, so in and of itself, would deprive us of all relation with it and we could not know it as scientific discovery.

Equally, if science, as a systematic and formulated knowledge, was completely devoid of discovery, it would cease to be science. Instead of being a vibrant, ever-changing pursuit of “truth” and understanding, it would instead become completely predictable, calculable, and programmable. If science remained forever the same, there would be no need for science. Thus, a science that would not be at least somewhat traumatic would not be a science.

...