One of the idiosyncratic features of the new French phenomenology is to treat phenomenon as an affect, a trauma, an event that has always already occurred. The author of this event is never the subject; the subject is not merely receptive with regards to this event but is passive in the absolute sense to the point of being constituted by the event. This dependence on the primal trauma, and thus on the world shared with others, constitutes a historical dimension of subjectivity. The subject of the new French phenomenology has a body that is vulnerable, and in fact always already wounded. However, affectivity is not reduced to vulnerability or traumatic experience. A wound is not merely felt or shifted to the past, it is lived and worked through, transforming the structures of meaning. The living body of a subject becomes a kind of historical account written in a language of wounds, raptures, and catastrophes.