to approach trauma without considering the increasing role of the cultural media that

selectively choose, construct, and represent all facets of our lives.7

 "If experience is the transposition of the event to the realm of the subject," then

"the experience of an event is already a representation of it and not the event itself."8 The

issue of interpretation of trauma brings us to the vexed questions of the interpretation of

loss and the politics of mourning.

 The social context of traumatic incidents defines, conditions, and propagates

socially prescribed responses to certain types of experience, often setting up and

regulating the parameters of loss, memory, and mourning. Since traumatic events

foreground the fissures and gaps of the social symbolic, as well as the discursive limit of

representing experiences and incidents of extremity, they give rise to the politics of

mourning, which is propelled by the societal need to contain, tame, and control any force

disturbing its established order. "Politics," Jenny Edkins explains, "is part of what we call

social reality. It exists within the agendas and frameworks that are already accepted

within the social order."9 The role of the politics of mourning, the ultimate goal of which

is the maintenance, restoration, and reinforcement of the social order, is comparable to

that of rituals. The social rituals about losses, the burial of the dead, for example, suture a

tear in the social fabric by identifying and sublimating loss, absence, and departure.

Rituals transport them into the comforting communal context of the lives of the

remaining members of society. Patricia Yaeger admits the undeniable truth about our

relationship to the unbearable weight of the dead and their traumatic experiences: "the

trace of the specter's speech resides neither in the dead's wished-for presence nor in their