A life – ruptured

I have been thinking about diagramming the violently traumatised lives in my writing. Here is a first attempt.

A life – ruptured.

Michael Richardson

Hi,

I’m Michael Richardson. I’m not yet sure how I might see my work in diagrams. I’m very textual — I’m writing a novel as part of doctorate with the Writing & Society Research Centre at UWS — so it’s both exciting and challenging to think in ways that radically deterritorialize the very significance of language. In some ways, this is precisely the site at which my own work operates. I’m writing (creatively and theoretically) about the torture and its traumatic remnants, and specifically torture in the war on terror. Torture’s terrible force resides in part in its attempt to both elicit speech (confession, information, etc.) at the same time as it destroys language through pain. Writing, I run up against this problem: how do you write the unspeakable? Perhaps diagrammatic thinking will open new potentalities for both theorizing and writing such trauma.

My diagram of “a life” will have to wait — a car horn is honking…