The essay investigates what role the notion of trauma gets in the texts of Shoshana Felman and Cathy Caruth: trauma enables both authors to open up Paul de Man’s textually oriented deconstructive approach to questions of referentiality, history and ethics. After studying three main features of trauma theory (how does literature and the literary figure in trauma theory, what link is there between trauma and jurisprudence, and how does trauma become the paradoxical model of the relationship between consciousness and history), the essay confronts it with recent critiques arriving mainly from feminism and postcolonial theory.