A Semio-semantic Study of a Sufi Narrative in Bahawalad’s Ma’arif

This study aims to investigate and analyze the consequences of trauma through the lens provided by Slavoj Žižek. He believes that the unexpected intrusion of the Real into the Symbolic order is called trauma, which gains meaning only in retrospect. Different subjects respond differently to a trauma. According to LaCapra, the usual responses of subjects to trauma are “acting out” and “working through”. The process of “acting out” contains traumatic symptoms including arousal, intrusion and constriction. But by “working through”, the subject tries to come to terms with the traumatic experience and the related loss through mourning. Žižek contends that the continuum of various reactions to trauma ends with the birth of a new subject known as the post-traumatic subject. The prominent consequence of indirect experience of a traumatic event is that an external crisis leads to an internal one, since trauma operates retroactively and attenuates the successful functioning of signification. Therefore, trauma becomes a disorder which entails traumatic symptoms that affect identity and meaning.