Visual Politics of Psychoanalysis

Activists working in post-traumatic societies have tended to resist psychoanalytical terms because they fear that pathologizing individual suffering displaces the collective and political causes of traumatic violence. In a contrary direction, some thinkers about discourse and power have latterly embraced what Judith Butler insists is 'the psychic life of power'. An openly psychoanalytical modelling of trauma for approaching major historical events such as the Holocaust adds yet a third position. Drawing on all three strands, this book poses the question of visual politics to psychoanalysis. It also explores the relevance of the many psychoanalyses to the study of art and other images in post-traumatic conditions. Visual Politics of Psychoanalysis builds on maverick art historian Aby Warburg's project of combining social, cultural, anthropological and psychological analyses of the image in order to track the undercurrents of cultural violence in the representational repertoire of Western modernity.In this innovative collection, a distinguished group of international authors dare to think psychoanalytically about the legacies of political violence and suffering in relation to post-traumatic cultures worldwide. Drawing on post-colonial and feminist theory, they analyse the image and the aesthetic in conditions of historical trauma from enslavement and colonisation to the Irish Famine, from Denmark's national trauma about migrants and cartoons to collective shock after 9/11, from individual traumas of loss registered in allegory to newsreels and documentaries on suicide bombing in Israel/Palestine, from Kristeva's novels to Kathryn Bigelow's cinema.

List of IllustrationsAcknowledgements Series Editor's Preface: New Encounters: Arts, Cultures, Concepts Griselda Pollock Introduction: Visual Politics and Psychoanalyses Griselda Pollock I National Wounds and Contested Memory1 Contest-Nation: Denmark- A PSTD-Struck Nation Contesting Analysis Henrik Ole Holm2 Miniature Objects of Cultural Covenant: Transition and Translation in British North AmericaKristin Huneault 3 The Irish 'Holocaust" and the Commemoration of FamineEmily FitzGerald II Trauma and Allegory4 Courbet's Trauerspiel: Trouble with Women in the StudioJennifer Tennant Jackson 5 Astonishing Marine Living: Ellen Gallagher at the Freud MuseumSuzanna Chan III Fear and Surveillance6 Transfixed: The Expression of Emotion as a History of ImagesSharon Sliwinski 7 Dan Graham, Reality Television and the Society of SurveillancePaula Carabell IV Violence and Sexual Difference8 Towards an Iconomy of Violence: Julia Kristeva in the Between of Ethics and PoliticsMaria Margaroni 9 From Horrorism to Compassion: Re-facing Medusan Otherness in dialogue with Adriana Cavarero and Bracha EttingerGriselda Pollock 10 Encountering Blue Steel: Changing Tempers in CinemaNicholas Chare Contributors' BiographiesBibliographyIndex