1 Pre-copy edited, author-produced version accepted for publication in Charles R. Figley, ed., Encyclopedia of Trauma: An Interdisciplinary Guide (London: Sage Publications, 2012) 754-756. Original citation: Sara Ramshaw, ‘Traumatic Inventions: The Ethics of Scientific Discovery’ in Charles R. Figley, ed., Encyclopedia of Trauma: An Interdisciplinary Guide (London: Sage Publications, 2012) 754-756. TRAUMATIC INVENTIONS AND THE ETHICS OF SCIENTIFIC DISCOVERY Trauma is explored here 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, it is the repeated trauma of the unprecedented, which 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, etc., 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 recognised” unsettles and destabalises 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