Visual Politics of Psychoanalysis: Art and the Image in Post-Traumatic Cultures 9780755603480, 9781780763156

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ILLUSTRATIONS

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Introduction Alfredo Jaar (b. 1956), Let There Be Light, 1996, detail, ten lightboxes with black and white text and one quad vision light box with four colour transparencies. Overall dimensions: 167.6 × 1168 cm. Courtesy the artist, NY. Alfredo Jaar (b. 1956), Let There Be Light, 1996, detail, ten lightboxes with black and white text and one quad vision light box with four colour transparencies. Overall dimensions: 167.6 × 1168 cm. Courtesy the artist, NY. Alfredo Jaar (b. 1956), Real Pictures, 1995, installation shot. colour photographs in archive boxes, screen print. Courtesy the artist, NY. Alfredo Jaar (b. 1956), Real Pictures, 1995, detail, colour photographs in archive boxes, screen print. Courtesy the artist, NY. Chapter 1 C.W. Eckersberg (1783–1853), View through Three of the Northwestern Arches of the Third Storey of the Colosseum. A Thunderstorm is Brewing over the City, 1813–16, Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen. ‘The Father of Danish Painting’, figuring prominently on the Canon of Art list as the first oil-on-canvas work of art. Astrid Noack (1888–1954), Standing Woman, 1937–1941, Göteborg Kunstmuseum, Sweden. Asger Jorn (1914–1973), Stalingrad, No-Man’s Land or the Mad Laughter of Courage, 1957–60. 1967. 1972, 296 × 492, oil-on-canvas, Asger Jorn’s Collections, Silkeborg Museum of Art, Jutland, Denmark. Chapter 2 Mary Ann Knight, Captain Norton Teyoninhokar’awen, a Chief of the Mohawks, One of the Five Nations in Upper Canada, RA 1805, Watercolour on ivory, 9.2 × 7.3 cm (oval), Ottawa, Library and Archives Canada. Photo: Library and Archives Canada C-123841.

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Matilda Jones, Kahkewaquonaby, Reverend Peter Jones, 1832, watercolour on ivory, 10.7 × 8.0 cm, Toronto, Victoria University Library, University of Toronto. Photo: Victoria University Library. Matilda Jones, Kahkewaquonaby, an Indian chief, 1831, watercolour on ivory, 11.3 × 8.7 cm, Ottawa, National Gallery of Canada. Photo: National Gallery of Canada. Matilda Jones, Eliza Field Jones, 1837, watercolour on ivory, 10.3 × 7.2 cm, Toronto, Victoria University Library, University of Toronto. Photo: Victoria University Library. T.A. Dean (after Matilda Jones), Kahkewaquonaby Peter Jones Missionary to the Chippeway Indians, 1833, engraving, 11.4 × 8.8 cm (image), Ottawa, Library and Archives Canada. Photo: Library and Archives Canada, e002282935.

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Chapter 3 Famine Memorial, 1994, Swinford, Co. Mayo. Erected by Action from Ireland. 63 Western New York Irish Famine Memorial, 1997, Buffalo, NY. 65 Gairdín an Ghorta (Famine Garden), 1999, Newmarket, Co. Kilkenny. 71 Elizabeth McLaughlin, Roscommon County Famine Memorial, 1999, Roscommon, Co. Roscommon. 71 Robert Shure, Boston Irish Famine Memorial, 1998, Boston, Massachusetts. 73 Glenna Goodacre, Philadelphia Irish Memorial, 2003, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. 74 Chapter 4 Gustave Courbet (1819–77), l’Atelier du peintre: allégorie réelle déterminant une phase de sept années de ma vie artistique (The Painter’s Studio: A real allegory summing up seven years of my artistic and moral life), 1854–5, oil-on-canvas, 361 × 598 cm, Musée d’Orsay, Paris. © RMN-Grand Palais (Musée d’Orsay)/Gérard Blot/Hervé Lewandowski. Gustave Courbet (1819–77), Portrait of Charles Baudelaire, 1847, oilon-canvas, 61 × 53 cm, Musée Fabre, Montpellier. © RMN-Grand Palais/Agence Bulloz. Gill André (Gosset de Guines André, 1840–85), Courbet by himself and by Gill, cartoon in La Lune, 9 juin, 1867, no. 66. Chateau de Compiègne © RMN-Grand Palais/image Compiègne. Gustave Courbet (1819–77), Les Amants dans la campagne, Les Amants Heureux, ou Walse (The Lovers in the Countryside, The Happy Lovers, or Waltz), 1844, oil-on-canvas, 77 × 60 cm, Lyon, Musée des BeauxArts. © RMN-Grand Palais/Droits réservés. Gustave Courbet (1819–77), Woman seated and asleep, holding a book, right hand on a table, 1849, pencil and fixative, 470 × 306 mm, Paris, Musée d’Orsay. © RMN-Grand Palais (Musée d’Orsay)/Michèle Bellot.

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Gustave Courbet (1819–77), Detail of the right hand side of l’Atelier du peintre: allégorie réelle déterminant une phase de sept années de ma vie artistique (The Painter’s Studio: A real allegory summing up seven years of my artistic and moral life), 1854–5, oil-on-canvas, 361 × 598 cm, Musée d’Orsay, Paris. © RMN-Grand Palais (Musée d’Orsay)/Gérard Blot/Hervé Lewandowski. 87 Illustration from Toussaint: Gustave Courbet (1819–77). 87 Gustave Courbet (1819–77), Portrait de l’artiste dit L’homme blessé (Portrait of the Artist, called The Wounded Man), 1844–54, oil-on-canvas, 81 × 97 cm, Musée d’Orsay, Paris. © RMN-Grand Palais (Musée d’Orsay)/Hervé Lewandowski. 90 Gustave Courbet (1819–77), La Sieste champêtre (Country Siesta), (before 1849), charcoal or black crayon on paper with curved top, 26 × 31 cm, Besançon, Musée des Beaux Arts et d’Archéologie. © RMN-Grand Palais/Droits réservés. 90 Julien Vallou de Villeneuve (1795–1866), Nude Study, daguerreotype (registered 1853, Paris), Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, Cabinet des Estampes. 95 Bruno Braquehais (1823-75), Academic Study – no. 7, 1854, Paris, Bibliotèque Nationale, Cabinet des Estampes. 96 Montage of details from Vallou de Villeneuve, Braquehais and Courbet. 98 Joel-Peter Witkin (b. 1939), Studio of the Painter (Courbet), Paris,
 handpainted gelatin silver print with encaustic, unique,
73.1 × 98.5 cm, Paris, Fonds National d’Art Contemporain. 101 John de Andrea (b. 1941), Allegory: After Courbet, 1988, oil and synthetic polymer paint on polyvinyl acetate and silicone rubber, 172.2 × 152.2 × 190.2 cm. Perth: State Art Collection, Art Gallery of Western Australia. Purchased 1989. 101 Chapter 5 Ellen Gallagher 
Odalisque, 2005. 
Gelatin silver print with watercolour and gold leaf, 
20.3 × 25.4 cm. 
Courtesy the artist, Two Palms Press New York and Hauser & Wirth, Zürich 
London. Installation view at the Freud Museum, London, 2005. 
Photo: Mike Bruce. 104 Ellen Gallagher, 
Abu Simbel, 2005. 
Photogravure, watercolour, colour pencil, varnish, pomade, plasticine, 
blue fur, gold leaf and crystals, 
62 × 90 cm. 
Courtesy the artist, Two Palms Press New York and Hauser & Wirth Zürich London. 109 Installation view at the Freud Museum, London, 2005. Photo: Mike Bruce. 109 Ellen Gallagher, 
Watery Ecstatic, 
2005, watercolour, ink, oil, varnish, collage and cut paper on paper, 
83 × 107.6 cm.
Courtesy Private Collection. Photo: Mike Bruce. 113

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Visual Politics of Psychoanalysis Installation view at the Freud Museum, London, 2005 
Photo: Mike Bruce. 113

Chapter 6 Unknown photographer (no. 3029 from here is new york). 116 Unknown photographer (no. 5032 from here is new york). 116 Doug Hamilton (no. 3240 from here is new york). 117 Jeff Jacobson (no. 2566 from here is new york). 117 From Gulnara Samilova (no. 5119 from here is new york). 117 Alya Scully (no. 1880 from here is new york). 118 Rachel Shaw (no. 2944 from here is new york). 118 Unknown photographer (no. 1540 from here is new york). 118 Unknown Photographer (no. 2365 from here is new york). 119 ‘Terror, from a photograph by Dr. Duchenne’. Heliotype from The Expression of the Emotions of Man and Animals, 1872. Reproduced with permission from Darwin on line. 121 6.11 G.B. Duchenne de Boulogne. ‘Fright’ from Mechanics of Human Physionomy 1862. 122 6.13 Unknown photographer (no. 5112 from here is new york). 125 6.12 Unknown photographer (no. 2087 from here is new york). 125 6.1 6.2 6.3 6.4 6.5 6.7 6.8 6.6 6.9 6.10

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Chapter 7 Dan Graham (b. 1942), Alterations to a Suburban House, 63 × 64 × 93 cm, painted wood, synthetic material, plastic. Reproduced courtesy of Marian Goodman Gallery, New York. Dan Graham (b. 1942), Public Space/Two Audiences, 220 × 700 × 220 cm, installation, two rooms, each with separate entrance divided by thermopane glass, one mirrored wall, muslin, florescent lights, wood. Reproduced courtesy of Marian Goodman Gallery, New York. Big Brother House 6, outdoor living area, Elstree Studio, Hertfordshire. Reproduced courtesy of Glenn Dearing Photography, London. Dan Graham (b. 1942), Cafe Bravo, 405 × 405 cm (each cube), two-way mirror, opaque glass, transparent glass, polished steel frame, reflective aluminium walls, Kunst-Werke, Berlin. Reproduced courtesy of author. Chapter 9 Newsweek Cover: Suicide Bombing 14 April 2002. To Die in Jerusalem (Hille Medallia, HBO, 2007) DVD cover. To Die in Jerusalem (Hille Medallia, HBO, 2007), still. Peter Paul Rubens (1577–1640), The Head of Medusa, c. 1618. Oil-oncanvas. cm 68.5 ×118.cm. Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum. Inv. 3834© 2012. Photo Austrian Archives/Scala Florence.

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Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, (1571–1610), The Head of Medusa, 1598, oil on panel Florence, Galleria degli Uffizi. © 2012. Photo Scala, Florence. Courtesy of the Ministero Beni e Att. Culturali. Jewish women and children are ordered to undress prior to their execution. Photograph #17876) Mizocz, Rovno: Ukraine formerly Poland, Wednesday 14 October 1942. Institute Pamieci Narodowei. Photo: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum by Agency Agreement). Jewish women, some of whom are holding infants, wait in a line before their execution by Ukrainian auxilliary police. (USHMM Photograph #17877) Mizocz, Rovno: Ukraine formerly Poland, Wednesday 14 October 1942. Institute Pamieci Narodowei. Photo: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum by Agency Agreement.. A German policeman prepares to complete a mass execution by shooting two Jewish children, who were shot with the others in connection with the liquidation of the Mizocz ghetto. (USHMM Photograph #17879) Mizocz, Rovno: Ukraine formerly Poland, Wednesday 14 October 1942. Institute Pamieci Narodowei. Photo: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum by Agency Agreement. A German police officer shoots Jewish women still alive after a mass execution of Jews from the Mizocz ghetto. (USHMM Photograph #17878) Mizocz, Rovno: Ukraine formerly Poland, Wednesday 14 October 1942. Institute Pamieci Narodowei. Photo: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum by Agency Agreement. Bracha Ettinger Eurydice no. 17, 1994–96, photocopic dust and oil on paper mounted on canvas, 26 x 52 cm. Private Collection. Montage of details of 9.7 and 9.10. Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1571–1610), The Sacrifice/Binding of Isaac 1594–96. Florence, Galleria degli Uffizi. Oil-on-canvas. cm 110 × 92cm. © 2012. Photo Scala, Florence – courtesy of the Ministero Beni e Att. Culturali. Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1571–1610), Sacrifice of Isaac – detail. Florence, Galleria degli
Uffizi. © 2012. Photo Scala, Florence – courtesy of the Ministero Beni e Att. Culturali. Chapter 10 Blue Steel (Kathryn Bigelow, Artisan Pictures, 1989): In Eugene’s Sight. Blue Steel (Kathryn Bigelow, Artisan Pictures, 1989): In Eugene’s Sight. Blue Steel (Kathryn Bigelow, Artisan Pictures, 1989): Getting a Grip. Blue Steel (Kathryn Bigelow, Artisan Pictures, 1989): Getting a Grip. Blue Steel (Kathryn Bigelow, Artisan Pictures, 1989): Letting Go.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Chapter 6 is reproduced by permission of Taylor & Francis Group, LLC., http:// www.taylorandfrancis.com. Copyright (2012) by Sharon Sliwinski from The Review of Education, Pedagogy and Cultural Studies. The authors and publishers are grateful to all those individuals and organizations listed above who have granted permission to reproduce the images. Every effort has been made to obtain permission to use copyright material but if for any reason a request has not been received the copyright holder should contact the publisher.

SERIES PREFACE NEW ENCOUNTERS Arts, Cultures, Concepts Griselda Pollock

How do we think about visual art these days? What is happening to art history? Is visual culture taking its place? What is the status of Cultural Studies, in itself or in relation to its possible neighbours art, art history, visual studies? What is going on? What are the new directions? To what should be remain loyal? New Encounters: Arts, Cultures, Concepts proposes some possible ways of thinking through these questions. Firstly, the series introduces and works with the concept of the transdisciplinary initiative. This is not a synonym for the interdisciplinary combination that has become de rigueur. It is related to a second concept: research as encounter. Together transdisciplinary and encounter mark the interaction between ways of thinking, doing and making in the arts and humanities that retain distinctive features associated with disciplinary practices and objects: art, history, culture, practice, and the new knowledge that is produced when these different ways of doing and thinking encounter each other across, and this is the third intervention, concepts, circulating between different intellectual or aesthetic cultures, inflecting them, finding common questions in distinctively articulated practices. The aim is to place these different practices in productive relation to each other mediated by the circulation of concepts. We stand at several crossroads at the moment in relation to the visual arts and cultures, historical, and contemporary, and to theories and methods of analysis. Cultural Analysis, Theory and History (CATH) is offered as one experiment in thinking about how to maintain the momentum of the momentous intellectual, cultural

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revolution in the arts and humanities that characterized the last quarter of the twentieth century while adjusting to the different field of analysis created by it. In the 1970s–1990s, the necessity, or the intrusion, according to your position, was Theory: a mythic concept with a capital T that homogenized vastly different undertakings. Over those decades, research in the arts and humanities was undoubtedly reconfigured by the engagement with structuralist and poststructuralist theories of the sign, the social, the text, the letter, the image, the subject, the postcolonial and, above all, difference. Old disciplines were deeply challenged and new interdisciplines—called studies—emerged to contest the academic field of knowledge production. These changes were wrought through specific engagements with Marxist, feminist, deconstructionist, psychoanalytical and discourse theory. Texts and authors were branded according to their theoretical engagements. Such mapping produced divisions between the proliferating theoretical models (could one be a Marxist and feminist, and use psychoanalysis?). A deeper split, however, emerged between those who, in general, were theoretically oriented, and those who apparently did without theory: a position that the theoretically-minded easily critiqued because being atheoretical is, of course, a theoretical position, just one that did not carry a novel identity associated with the intellectual shifts of the post-1968 university. The impact of ‘the theoretical turn’ has been creative; it has radically reshaped work in the arts and humanities in terms of what is studied (content, topics, groups, questions) and also how it is studied (theories and methods). Yet some scholars currently argue that work done under such overt theoretical rubrics now appears tired; theory constrains the creativity of the new generation of scholars familiar, perhaps too familiar, with the legacies of the preceding intellectual revolution that can too easily be reduced to Theory 101 slogans (the author is dead, the gaze is male, the subject is split, there is nothing but text, etc.). The enormity of the initial struggles—the paradigm shifting—to be able to speak of sexual difference, subjectivity, the image, representation, sexuality, power, the gaze, postcoloniality, textuality, difference, fades before a new phase of normalization in which every student seems to bandy around terms that were once, and in fact, still are, challengingly difficult and provocative. Theory, of course, just means thinking about things, puzzling over what is going on, reflecting on the process of that puzzling and thinking, A reactive turn away from active engagement with theoretical developments in the arts and humanities is increasingly evident in our area of academe. It is, however, dangerous and misleading to talk of a post-theory moment, as if we can relax after so much intellectual gymnastics and once again become academic couch potatoes. The job of thinking critically is even more urgent as the issues we confront are so complex, and we now have extended means of analysis that make us appreciate even more the complexity of language, subjectivity, symbolic practices, affects and aesthetics. So how to continue the creative and critical enterprise fostered by the theoretical turn of the late twentieth century beyond the initial engagement determined by specific theoretical paradigms? How does it translate into a practice of analysis that can be constantly productive?

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This series argues that we can go forward, with and beyond, by transdisciplinary encounters with and through concepts. Concepts, as Mieke Bal has argued, are formed within specific theoretical projects (Travelling Concepts in the Humanities: A Rough Guide, University of Toronto Press, 2002). But, Bal suggests, concepts can and have moved out of—travel from—their own originating site to become tools for thinking in the larger domain of cultural analysis their interplay produces, a domain that seeks to create a space of encounter between the many distinctive and even still disciplinary practices that constitute the arts and humanities: the fields of thought that puzzle over what we are and what it is that we do, think, feel, say, understand and live. Our series takes up the idea of ‘travelling concepts’ from the work of Mieke Bal, the leading feminist narratologist and semiotician, who launched an inclusive, interdisciplinary project of cultural analysis in the 1990s with The Point of Theory: Practices of Cultural Analysis (University of Amsterdam Press, 1994) and The Practice of Cultural Analysis: Exposing Interdisciplinary Interpretation (Stanford University Press, 1999). In founding the Amsterdam School of Cultural Analysis (ASCA), Bal turned the focus from our accumulating theoretical resources to the work—the practice of interpretation—we do on cultural practices, informed not only by major bodies of theory (that we still need to study and extend), but by the concepts generated within those theories that now travel across disciplines, creating an extended field of contemporary cultural thinking. Cultural analysis is theoretically informed, critically situated, ethically oriented to ‘cultural memory in the present’ (Bal, 1999: 1). Cultural analysis works with ‘travelling concepts’ to produce new readings of images, texts, objects, buildings, practices, gestures, actions. In 2001, a Centre for Cultural Analysis, Theory and History was founded at the University of Leeds, with initial funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council, to undertake what it defines as a transdisciplinary initiative to bring together and advance research in and between distinct but inter-relating areas of fine art, histories of art and cultural studies: three areas that seem close and yet can be divided from each other through their distinguishing commitments to practice, history and theory respectively. Founded at a moment of emerging visual studies/visual culture contesting its field of studies with art history or inventing a new one, a moment of intense questioning about what constitutes the historical analysis of art practices as a greater interest in the contemporary seemed to eclipse historical consciousness, a moment of puzzling over the nature of research through art practice, and a moment of reassessing the status of the now institutionalized, once new kid on the block, Cultural Studies, CentreCATH responded to Mieke Bal’s ASCA with its own exploration of the relations between history, practice and theory through a exploration of transdisciplinary cultural analysis that also took its inspiration from the new appreciations of the unfinished project of Kulturwissenschaft proposed by Aby Warburg at the beginning of the twentieth century. Choosing five themes that are at the same time concepts: hospitality and social alienation, musicality/aurality/ textuality, architecture of philosophy/philosophy of architecture, indexicality and virtuality, memory/amnesia/history, CentreCATH initiated a series of encounters (salons, seminars, conferences, events) between artists, art historians, musicologists,

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musicians, architects, writers, performers, psychoanalysts, philosophers, sociologists and cultural theorists. Each encounter was also required to explore a range of differences: feminist, Jewish, postcolonial, ethnic, sexual, politico-geographical, and historical (see ). Each book in this new series is the outcome of that research laboratory, exploring the creative possibilities of such a transdisciplinary forum. This is not proposing a new interdisciplinary entity. The transdisciplinary means that each author or artist enters the forum with and from their own specific sets of practices, resources and objectives whose own rigours provide the necessary basis for a specific practice of making or analysis. While each writer attends to a different archive: photography, literature, exhibitions, manuscripts, images, bodies, trauma and so forth, they share a set of concerns that defy disciplinary definition: concerns with the production of meaning, with the production of subjectivities in relation to meanings, narratives, situations, with the questions of power and resistance. The form of the books in this series is itself a demonstration of such a transdisciplinary intellectual community at work. The reader becomes the locus of the weaving of these linked but distinctive contributions to the analysis of culture(s). The form is also a response to teaching, taken up and processed by younger scholars, a teaching that itself is a creative translation and explication of a massive and challenging body of later twentiethcentury thought, which, transformed by the encounter, enables new scholars to produce their own innovatory and powerfully engaged readings of contemporary and historical cultural practices and systems of meaning. The model offered here is a creative covenant that utterly rejects the typically Oedipal, destructive relation between old and young, outdated and new, while equally resisting academic adulation. An ethics of intellectual respect—Spivak’s critical intimacy is one of Bal’s useful concepts—is actively performed in engagement between generations of scholars, all concerned with the challenge of reading the complexities of culture. CentreCATH is dedicated to the contemporary exploration and translation of the legacy of Hamburg art historian Aby Warburg who disowned what he called ‘aesthetizing art history’ in favour of the attempt to create a ‘historical psychology of the image’. This feeds into one of the key research strands of CentreCATH: memory, history and amnesia. While these terms might locate us either in philosophy or historiography, either in cognitive science or psychology, our specific orientation was the image and the modes of analysing the imaginary, which clearly led through art history and visual cultural analysis to psychoanalysis. The latter, however, appears to be at the opposite end of the spectrum from the historical, focusing, so it would seem, on the individual, the ahistorical in terms of recurrent psychic structures and hence the apolitical, since the latter are not subject to change by means of willed agency. This collection arose out of an interest in how this paradox might be reconfigured so that we might understand both the political value of psychoanalysis and the psychic dimensions of the political, and in both cases the political and the psychic are linked to the mediation of the image, or representation in general. Finally the framing of the collection in terms of the post-traumatic registers a deep sense throughout the

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arts and humanities that the concept of trauma has become a necessary resource for confronting the structural challenges of Modernity and its aftermath as well as the specific historical catastrophes within it. ‘Post-traumatic’ both registers a sense of retrospect and reconsideration and marks the continuing after-affects of traumatic shocks, individual and collective, even to the encounter with the representation of events. The artworks and the images that are considered in this volume addressing trauma in Ireland, Canada, Israel/Palestine, Denmark, France and the United States range in time and space, vary in media, and also work with different psychoanalytical traditions and resources. The chapters are all contributions to taking up the challenge of conceptually informed approaches to artistic and media practices in cultures marked differentially by traumatic events ranging from colonization and enslavement to famine and terrorist assault while including the individual register of the trauma of love and loss. Divided into sections, this transdisciplinary collection addresses national or group trauma and contested memory articulated through images or the use of art. Bringing Freud and Benjamin into conversation with personal loss and aesthetic negotiations of the legacies of enslavement and the Middle Passage, trauma meets allegory in the second section. Affect is one of the dimensions of trauma in so far as the traumatic event exceeds cognitive recognition and the entry into conscious memory while impressing its shapeless impact through aesthetic means: sound, hallucination, smell, colour and sensation. Affects such as fear are written on the body through gestures that can be deciphered as a visual testimony to the impact of traumatic witnessing, an issue taken up in relation to what photography disclosed in its record of witnesses to 9/11. Another key affect is anxiety, and none is so intimately connected with both the body and its projective spaces such as the house as uncanniness. Uncanniness is linked with doubling but also the sense of being watched, opening up debate about the visual politics and affects of reality TV, notably in relation to the Big Brother house, now a worldwide phenomenon. Its counter-force might be hospitality, and linked with compassion, it affects form the basis for the final section that explores specifically feminist contributions to theories of the image, subjectivity and sexual difference in confronting both actual violence and the violence of and in representation across literature, art, the media and cinema and imagining counter-valences emerging through psychoanalytical interventions. Centre for Cultural Analysis, Theory and History University of Leeds 2012

EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION Griselda Pollock

Psychoanalysis, critical and dissolvent, cuts through political illusions, fantasies and beliefs, to the extent that they consist in providing only one meaning, an uncritizable ultimate Meaning, to human behaviour. If such a situation can lead to despair within the polis, we must not forget that it is also a source of lucidity and ethics. The psychoanalytical intervention is, from this point of view, a counterweight, an antidote to political discourse, which, without it, is free to become our modern religion: the final explanation. Julia Kristeva ‘Psychoanalysis and the Polis’1 Preamble: The Eyes of Gutete Emerita (1996) Ultimately, Photography is not subversive when it frightens, repels or even stigmatizes, but when it is pensive, when it thinks. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida2 Between 1994 and 1998, Chilean New York-based artist Alfredo Jaar (b. 1956) dedicated himself to a series of works he called collectively The Rwanda Project. He considers most of this work a failure, not aesthetically, but politically. No image would suffice when faced with the trauma to which he felt compelled to bear aesthetic witness in the world. He sometimes calls the project, in honour of the novelist Ben Okri, The Lament of the Image. The series held his attention on a trauma that took place in and is now known by that country’s name as Rwanda. One work involved placing in the well-distributed poster sites of a European city a poster bearing simply the word Rwanda, repeated numerous times. This functioned as a call: a visual declaration, naming but also shouting out this name to the passing public, an invocation to remember, to engage, to pay attention.

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‘Rwanda’ names horror that acquired a certain public currency in 2005, that is over a decade after it hit the headlines in 1994, with the Hollywood film, Hotel Rwanda. This film told the story of the heroic Hutu hotel manager, Paul Rusesabagina, who defied the militias and rescued Tutsis, giving them refuge in the international hotel he managed. The film, as is the manner of commercial cinema, recycled; it gave to the African genocide its ‘Schindler’.3 Alfredo Jaar explored a range of visual strategies for responding to the complex relays of visibility and invisibility, knowing and denial under which the brutal murders of almost a million people occurred in the tiny and beautiful country of Rwanda while a small but disempowered unit from the UN was present and the world was apparently watching, discussing and deciding not to intervene in what they labelled a civil war and not a genocide, against which the UN convention, forged after the Holocaust in 1948, required world powers to intervene. Jaar’s series operates across the double space of attention and inattention to the trauma of the Other and to the trauma of Africa in particular. He looked at the scenes of atrocity and made images as the sign of his looking and the proof of what he saw. But he also made images that register the experience that others had been obliged to witness. It is this element that marks the singularity of his work in creating encounters for viewers far away from the event that force them to recognize a gap that has been cut into a living person’s life by proximity to atrocity, by the wound that is trauma: an event too shocking to be assimilated. Jaar does not show us, and thus repeat the deadly killing with a second murderous look exposing the already abjected dead to further, visual violation in their extreme vulnerability of unburied death. He makes us confront the gaze of those whose eyes have seen horror that was not stopped. The Eyes of Gutete Emerita (1996) forces us to contemplate the eyes of a woman who witnessed the murder of her husband and two sons. Each one framed separately in quad vision light boxes, these eyes only appear after a text is screened for 45 seconds telling of her invisible ordeal. For a further 30 seconds, a new text is projected, speaking of her eyes and her gestures. Finally a third text appears, for 15 seconds. ‘I remember her eyes. The eyes of Gutete Emerita.’ From the impersonal historical mode to the discursive statement ‘I remember,’ Jaar has prepared the viewer to have a comparable and shocking, first-hand encounter with the eyes of this named, located, historicized survivor. The implied question: will you too remember her eyes – eyes that look at you but forever see murder? The work produces the impossible meeting with eyes that seem to belong to a person who has somehow died too, as they look upon an invisible scene as if its horror was burned onto her retina from inside. The viewer is shielded from seeing as an image what she witnessed (if shown as a news image, would it not be iconized and thus commodified?). But in meeting these eyes and what they reveal unshown that she has seen, might this moment not sear the soul of the viewer also to remember, and in remembering Gutete Emerita’s eyes, the eyes of this one woman, be jolted from the kind of consumption of the image that makes images out of atrocity without inducing a political response. The Eyes of Gutete Emerita was the second work to emerge from Jaar’s encounter with post-genocidal Rwanda that dared to show an image he had taken. The first,



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Let There be Light, shown in France in June 1995, plotted an installation made up of names written in light against the black matte of ten light boxes. The names were sites of genocide that might one day resonate with the same terribleness as the now familiar names of concentration and extermination camps of Nazi Germany. But in 1995, Jaar’s point is that they did not have such currency beyond those who knew all too well that in Kigali, Cyangugu, Amahoro, Rukara, Shangi, Mibirizi, Cyahinda, Kibungo, Butare and Gikongoro one million people had been killed by hands wielding machetes and guns in three months in 1994. The visible, the unremarked and the sign are set into tense relations made poignant by the final light box across which in measured sequence a series of still images recur. Two young African boys, arms around each other, stand in open ground with their backs to us. They are watching something first opposite them. They turn their heads and see something off screen. They draw closer into their embrace. They turn away and one rests his forehead on the other’s cheek. It is hard to put into words the impact of this sequenced, stilled,

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Alfredo Jaar (b. 1956), Let There Be 0.2 Light, 1996, detail, ten lightboxes with black and white text and one quad vision light box with four colour transparencies. Overall dimensions: 167.6 × 1168 cm. Courtesy the artist, NY.

Alfredo Jaar (b. 1956), Let There Be Light, 1996, detail, ten lightboxes with black and white text and one quad vision light box with four colour transparencies. Overall dimensions: 167.6 × 1168 cm. Courtesy the artist, NY.

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yet cinematic capture of human anxiety: the larger field of the historical event is obscured – we cannot be voyeurs watching from afar. What we have to encounter is the embodiment of children exposed to events that cause them to suffer – registered in delicate human gestures – the pathos formulae – of mutual comfort and ultimate despair.4 Only by creating a dialectic of particularity – in this case the historical event of genocide in Rwanda, something of which is being seen by two vulnerable young people, with only each other to bring the comfort of human tenderness in their fear – and the larger context in which that particularity is denied through the troping of Africa, can art pierce the frames of viewing which enabled something to happen while the rest of the world was ostensibly watching. This work seeks, perhaps too emotively through the focus on children, but necessarily so, to produce a Barthesian punctum, a breach in the studium of over-familiar images of Africans and suffering, that can leave its own traumatic trace in the viewer, its disturbing imprint as the signifier of human pain, not as the icon of atrocity. Jaar’s earlier installation, Real Pictures (1995), is all about asking how the distant/ distanced bystander can be brought to confront the real of an event, which is so often documented by pictures in the media, made real to people only through such pictures, but which are, by the same token, also reduced only to pictures, derealized as icons. How do we renegotiate the ethical and the necessary affective relation to human suffering so that we undo the short-circuit between knowledge and understanding facilitated by the iconized and mediatized image of suffering in the still actively ‘colonial’ troping of Africa.

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Alfredo Jaar (b. 1956), Real Pictures, 1995, installation shot. colour photographs in archive boxes, screen print. Courtesy the artist, NY.



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Editor’s Introduction

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Alfredo Jaar (b. 1956), Real Pictures, 1995, detail, colour photographs in archive boxes, screen print. Courtesy the artist, NY.

In Real Pictures, there are no images to see. They are present, however; enclosed, encased, entombed in sculptural forms that actively determine the physical environment with references to archives, monuments, floor tablets, tombstones. They are also references to the mute purism of a minimalist sculptural aesthetic, now made to house the evidence of a wretched history which involves not merely the barbarism of genocide, but the terrifying question of how it could have been allowed to happen in a world that was looking on, gathering information, being shown photographs, receiving reports, registering appeals for help? Printed texts on the tops of linen-covered black boxes that house the photographs describe the hidden images. The viewer is required not merely to see the formal installation and be positioned variously by its different forms and heights, but to take time read the words that both replace/displace the image (that our scopophilia, heightened to voyeurism, makes us long to see) and redraw it, but in our mind’s eye. The words Jaar provides as the tools for such a redrawing force an encounter with named individuals. Just as the testimonial literature that emerged following the Holocaust makes us realize that ‘it’ happened one by one – with each person a world was destroyed – so Alfredo Jaar’s focus on invisible images that mark his encounter with a named survivor-witness rejects the dangerous fascism inherent in mere enumeration and the annihilatory massification inherent in the media/photography and cinema – yet we must understand that each story is to be multiplied by one million to begin to realize the extent of the atrocity and its significance for the totality of all who wear a human

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face in the face of the breach of that fundamental solidarity on which the possibility of any human society exists. Between the dismal archive or badly preserved, cropped, degraded, often black and white imagery that constitutes the visual memory of the Holocaust and the moment in the 1990s approached by Alfredo Jaar in his work Untitled (Newsweek) lies a revolution in technology and news reportage. Rwanda’s genocide took place in a different world from the closed spaces of a war-riven Europe, a fascist empire, an indexical production of images by single-lens reflex cameras. Rwanda took place in a world where news magazines and television supported a massed cohort of news journalists, able to dispatch reports by instant satellites and computerized technologies. We had just watched a war in Iraq–Kuwait in 1991 on television, with daily doses of the views from the bombers delivering their directed payloads. The world was watching, daily. This is how and why Jaar’s piece Untitled (Newsweek) (1994) acquires its shocking ferocity. In the performance version of the piece, a man, the artist, stands on stage and reads a small news-like item. Each item plots the unfolding of events in Rwanda from 6 April 1994 when the plane carrying the Presidents of Rwanda and Burundi returning from the peace conference in Tanzania was shot down as it approached Kigali airport – an assassination that triggered the massacres of the Tutsi minority by the Hutu majority led by the Interahamwe militia empowered by the immediate coup d’état that followed. Each report details the swelling numbers of the dead. Each report is juxtaposed to the cover of Newsweek magazine. The covers indicate what appeared during that week to the editors of the magazine to be the major political, economic, cultural issue of which its readers needed to take note. The enormity of the gap between the rising death toll and the indifference of the world’s leading news magazine, the educator and indicator, tells us more than any other visual source about the unforgivable perversity of those in charge of news reporting and news making. Alfred Jaar’s work reveals something truly dreadful about the mediatized world and the choices that were made by news editors. In not showing what was happening, in not selecting an iconic image to represent a genocide taking place at a horrendous pace, in not using its forum to shake up reluctant bureaucrats or beleaguered political decision-makers, we have to confront something more than a state of denial: what appears from Jaar’s simple plotting out of the time it took Newsweek to place Rwanda on its covers is a failure to inform the world by those whose job it is to be informers. Alfredo Jaar’s Untitled (Newsweek) uses time politically. In the sequencing of matching 17 covers, over 17 weeks, to the numbers of people brutally killed in Rwanda before Newsweek finally raised this genocide to the dignity of a cover photograph by showing a brutal image of piled corpses, Alfredo Jaar makes the viewer (it is now shown as an installation down whose alternating line of text and image the viewer must walk) experience vicariously the disjunction between daily murder and mediatized indifference, ignorance, looking away that may have contributed to the rising death toll. Jaar’s work exposes the dangerous power of the media when it fails to act, fails to make things visible, even in the bad faith of seeking images to sell papers. The intersections of commodification, information,



Editor’s Introduction

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and aesthetics are politically exposed to show how dangerously powerful is a failure to make and show images. This brief discussion of a few of Alfredo Jaar’s Rwanda series, all of which the artist felt were a failure before the challenge of the event and aesthetic responses, poses some of the questions addressed by this collection under the catechresis (misuse of words) Visual Politics. It locates the issue of the aesthetic work performed by an artwork in creating images but also in addressing the image culture into which an aesthetic gesture might intervene critically but also affectively. What are the politics of what is seen and what is not, what is shown and what is not, what is registered and how it is used? How do we interpret what we find in images – be they grand paintings, novel media art forms, memorial sculptures, films, TV series, media or unofficial photographs? What is interpretation itself ? What relation does the image have to a politics of contestation in a post-traumatic era? In his admiring obituary, Freud referred to his teacher, the French neuropsychologist Jean-Martin Charcot who had named himself ‘un visuel’.5 Freud has, however, been identified with the acoustic. Psychoanalysis is named ‘the talking cure’. Analysts listen to the words of their analysands. So what has psychoanalysis to do with visual culture? Despite Freud’s own scepticism towards and disinterest in the movies, during the twentieth century psychoanalysis became an important resource, theoretically, for the analysis of its major cultural spectacle: cinema.6 Through Lacan’s theses on the mirror phase, the Imaginary and the gaze, post-structuralist psychoanalysis became intensely identified in cultural theory with the visual in the study of both the image and spectatorship.7 In feminist hands, psychoanalysis was a political weapon, according to Laura Mulvey, in deconstructing visual pleasure of narrative cinema that was identified as an ideological apparatus manufacturing and reinforcing patriarchal modes of sexual difference as well as classed and racialized hegemonies.8 The specular aspects of subjectivity and the scopic domain of both psyche and cultural representation now lie at the forefront of work in photography, film and visual art studies. But in what sense can we now propose a visual politics for psychoanalysis in relation to art as an aesthetic of affects? The concept of trauma may provide the bridge. Borrowed from medical science, the word trauma, which means a piercing wound in Greek, took root in later nineteenth- and twentieth-century psychology. The major forms of psychic wounding were either forms of political violence – industrialized trench war notably – or the spatial, temporal and mechanical dimensions of technological modernity itself. Freud and Janet, rivals in the emerging practices of psychopathological research and clinical practice, both confronted the suffering of the soldiers traumatized by their experiences at the front between 1914 and 1918. In the aftermath of ‘survival’ of the attempted genocide of European Jewry, psychoanalysts were again confronted with traumatic legacies they could not accommodate to existing models. The effects of dehumanizing torture and suffering mark the survivors. Yet analysts also began to register the transmission of trauma across generations, marking unexpectedly a second and sometimes even a third

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Visual Politics of Psychoanalysis

generation. By the early 1990s, this relay between historical violence and suffering and the analytical field began to register in the arts and humanities and an area of literary and cultural analysis – trauma studies – emerged to register the public and the personal accumulation of trauma from wars such as that waged in Vietnam in the 1960s, to the first Iraq War in 1992, to the social acknowledgement of sexual abuse of children and women in domestic violence and other forms of institutional violation.9 The misuse of the concept trauma risked creating a trauma industry, a culture of self-indulgent victimhood or what Mark Selzer called ‘wound culture’ which privatized and deradicalized psychoanalytical insights into the relations between individual subjectivities and social systems of power.10 Worse still, the radical misunderstanding of trauma’s genesis as a cultural as well as a clinical concept could easily lead to another misdirected application of psychoanalysis to political situations as a mode of pacifying or even effacing the reality of the conflict and violence within modern societies. Thus many activists in post-traumatic societies, such as those emerging from the trauma of dictatorships in which many citizens were disappeared and murdered, resist the tendency of aid agencies to psychologize such politically induced trauma in the survivors of such conflicts. Pathologizing as individual suffering what needs to be grasped as a collective wounding from political violence displaces the political causation and response. In confronting the escalating violence of both terrorism and longstanding wars on many continents, yet other thinkers have insisted on the necessity to individuate death and suffering even where it occurs on a massive scale precisely as an act of political refusal of an unacknowledged hierarchy between a West and its others. The mass death of others appears not to solicit the same quality of attention offered to the death or suffering of those considered and singularized as belonging to ‘us’. Judith Butler names this reorientation as precarious life.11 Loss of the political, the ethical turn and the locus of the aesthetic There are many signs of current despair over a loss of the political. Faced with the desperate need for political grounds for action in many quarters there has been a turn towards ethics, as if the grounds of self/other relations might lead us beyond the dead ends of the grand political schemes of Modernity that appear bankrupt before globalization and new world (dis)orders. In turn, there is also evidence of a shift from ethics to aesthetics to search for new perspectives on affectivity in the face of major historical events such as the Rwandan Genocide or 9/11.12 Our current dismay before political bankruptcy arises from confrontation with new and dangerous realities but also from a sense that the legacy of modern politics included fascism and totalitarianism while Modernity never realized fully its democratic aspirations. Our societies and even identities are fractured by competing alliances, claims, groupings and needs. The world scale of inequalities, far from declining through wealth and better distribution, increases steadily. Marxism and Fascism share, from opposite positions, a tendency, as Kristeva points out above, towards theology: defining a foundational cause and promising a single solution.



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Ethics offered resources for rebuilding our foundations for political analysis and action on the basis of relations with others with whom we inhabit the earth, an idea derived from Hannah Arendt’s post-totalitarian theory of the Human Condition.13 So the ethical turn is founded on a desire to contest injustice and inequality in the name of a social but also human bonding with, and responsibility for, others. What then are the relays between politics, ethics and aesthetics in this present situation? This collection is a small contribution to that enormous question. This collection about art and the image in post-traumatic cultures declares its interest in politics upfront: struggle, contestation and collective initiatives for radical change. But politics can also mean critical questioning, asking what is going on, whose interests are being served, what effects will be the result. What might a politics of the visual mean and what might visual cultural analysis offer to the current aporias of politics and ethics? Is it a contestation about the interpretation of images that seek to affect or imagine, thus that work as art? Is it about the uses to which art works are put in political contests? Can it include exposing deep relays between mythic dimensions once treated in canonical artworks that now surface across the multiscreens of media imagery? Can images sometimes become dangerous or be experienced as assaults so radical that real violence erupts? Can the making of new forms of art/images function transformatively in relation to historical legacies of political violence and violations of personhood through enslavement, colonization and economic exploitation? What are the politics involved in not seeing, not acknowledging affliction and loss when complex artworks are created to mourn both? What do we learn through images about human fragility before and response to trauma? The chapters of this book address these questions through their own detailed case studies. The book, however, shifts this concept of the politics of representation through thinking with and about with a specific analytical tool: psychoanalysis and particularly its theories of affect that redefine the understanding of the aesthetic. A concept running through many of the chapters is trauma, which is on occasion considered in very personal terms (Tennant Jackson on Courbet) or in social and cultural terms (Holm on Denmark as a nation exhibiting symptoms of post-traumatic stress syndrome; Chan on the legacies of enslavement; Mark-FitzGerald on memory, memorials and the Irish Famine) or traversing both (Huneault on portraiture and the effects of colonization and indigeneity). It was in response to the ‘hysterical’ afflictions of soldiers exposed to the terrible industrial horrors of World War I that Freud turned his attention to trauma. ‘Thoughts for the Times on War and Death’ was written mid-war in 1915 but Freud’s most sustained reflections occurred post-war in ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’, published in 1920. Current trauma theory draws powerfully on Freud’s discovery there of the death drive and the repetition compulsion that possesses the traumatically afflicted subject. Through the terrible years of the 1930s as his cancer grew more excruciating and Nazism took over Germany and then annexed Austria, forcing the aged doctor to flee for his life, Freud wrote his most ‘political’ series of studies on trauma and history collected as Moses and Monotheism and published in 1939.14 There Freud

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Visual Politics of Psychoanalysis

offered to contemporary political history a specifically psychoanalytical contribution, that is, a way of reading acts, violence and identifications that did not displace the realm of the willed decision and political agency but alerted us to a level that should not be overlooked. Psychoanalysis is not a theology, offering one explanation that displaces all others. As Kristeva insists above, it is an attitude ‘critical and dissolvent’; it offers a form of analysis that … is true only if it triggers other associations on the part of the analysand, thus expanding the boundaries of the analysable. In other words, the analytical interpretation is only, in the best of cases, partially true, and its truth, even though it operates with the past, is demonstrable only by its effects in the present.15 Not explanatory, psychoanalysis is dynamically oriented towards transformation. Thus there is an inherent, dialogical dimension, a partnership that is fragile and open, prepared to allow silence and to admit of that which remains enigmatic, on the edges or limits of language. There is an aesthetic dimension where affect surfaces to allow change. Psychoanalysis is presented by Kristeva as ‘the only modern interpretative theory to hypothesize the heterogeneous in meaning’ and to make that ‘heterogeneity so interdependent with language and thought as to be its very condition, indeed, its driving force’.16 Can we use Freud’s interpretative method politically? Two small examples suggest different ways. Derrida and Said read Freud on identity, the stranger and estrangement Jacques Derrida and Edward Said both participated in the renewed interest during the 1990s in Freud’s difficult and last text Moses and Monotheism, which has been the critical source for much current theorization of trauma in the arts and humanities, taking trauma out of the consulting room and private suffering to become synonymous with history: history as trauma. Derrida’s engagement was a response to another’s, that of historian Josef Hayim Yerushalmi’s Freud’s Moses: Judaism Terminable and Interminable (1991). Reviewing Freud’s highly contentious argument that Moses was an Egyptian whom his Hebrew followers murdered – this trauma and the return of its repressed being the basis, according to Freud’s reading, of subsequent attachment of the Jewish people to Mosaic teaching – Yerushalmi’s book was an investigation into Freud’s thesis about trauma, cultural memory and tradition and the constitution of national or cultural identity. What readers of Moses and Monotheism have generally failed to recognise – perhaps because they have been too preoccupied with the more sensational aspects of Moses the Egyptian and his murder by the Jews – is that the true axis of the book, especially the all important Part III, is the problem of tradition, not merely its origins, but above all its dynamics.17



Editor’s Introduction

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The book’s deeper purpose was Yerushalmi’s desire to understand Freud’s own relationship to Jewish tradition: ‘The difficulty of interpreting Moses and Monotheism is directly related to the difficulty in grasping the nature of Freud’s Jewish identity.’18 Yerushalmi concludes his erudite historical and textual study of Freud’s texts with a monologue addressed to the dead author: ‘Dear and most highly esteemed Professor Freud.’19 The ghost of this dead ‘father’ is invoked by this device to confirm once and for all the Jewishness of psychoanalysis. It was this monologue and its compulsive drive to know for sure, to have the truth from the ghostly horse’s mouth, that Derrida took as his text at the 1994 Colloquium: ‘Memory: The Question of Archives’, later published as Mal d’Archive/Archive Fever.20 The untranslatable title suggests a cultural affliction: the psychopathology of memory as Freud’s fundamental lesson. Yerushalmi’s invented monologue with Freud is a conversation with a spectre or, like Hamlet, with a dead father in a line of dead fathers who, in being thus addressed, acquire the authority that is being created and interrogated in the same performative movement. This is the double space of the archive. Derrida argues that without this possibility of our phantasmatic investment in and memory of the dead others that are the archive in which we imagine ‘they speak’, there would be neither history nor tradition nor culture.21 Culture becomes a sublimated hero-worship, and following Freud’s thesis, it is, therefore, a conflicted enactment of both devotion and guilt-ridden murder. Interrogating tradition as a necessary haunting of the present by what is past but what is only belatedly animated as memory is, of course, the anamnesiac core of psychoanalysis itself that tries to bring us face to face with the always determining complex of archaic sexual desires and aggressive impulses forged in infancy that create what we might call the psyche as archive, always containing the spectres with whom we are in permanent, phantasmatic conversation and interrogation. Derrida has learnt Freud’s lessons better than Yerushalmi. The latter desires his spectral Freud to confirm his identity by affirming Jewishness: a single meaning or answer to the trouble psychoanalysis causes. In effect, deconstruction works as the literary methodologization of psychoanalysis. Through his own reading, Derrida reveals how historian Yerushalmi has failed to integrate into his historical method Freud’s monitory lessons. Yerushalmi wants to offer a psychological history of Freud and his relation to his father, but without reference to psychoanalysis: that is, without Freud’s teaching on the unconscious, on the return of the repressed, on the unrecognized force of desire. To want to speak about psychoanalysis, to claim to do the history of psychoanalysis from a purely apsychoanalytical point of view, purified of all psychoanalysis, to the point of believing one could erase the traces of any Freudian impression, is like claiming the right to speak without knowing what one is speaking about, without even wanting to hear anything about it. This structure is not only valid for the history of psychoanalysis, it is valid for all the

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Visual Politics of Psychoanalysis

so-called human and social sciences, but it receives a singular inflection here …22 (My emphasis) To study anything psychoanalytically involves asking ourselves: what do we desire? Repress? Fail to see? Need to find despite ourselves? What do we want? If we adopt the analytical position proposed by psychoanalysis, we neither aim for an answer nor seek mastery. We engage in the ceaseless work of interpretation, critical and dissolvent of final certainty. The subtitle of Mal d’Archive is ‘a Freudian impression’. Derrida plays with this term, as is his wont, throughout the book, catching the perfectly psychoanalytical dialectic between something that leaves a mere impression, like the writing on the superficially erased wax block of the child’s toy – what Freud called the mystic writing pad – a pressure that leaves a memory-trace or affect and, on the other hand, something that is an impression, an imprint, a text which must be read for both what it says and what is concealed beyond knowing – a condition that causes the effect of the mal d’archive, the fever of knowing, the burning passion for the truth offered/ veiled by a haunting past, the promise of a secret forever hidden. We are both sick of, and made ill by, memory and its feints.23 Derrida’s book ends with some speculations on what can never be archived: the secrets concealed beyond even the intention to conceal – which makes a mockery of the historian and the archaeologist who seek secrets, which by definition can have no archive. Derrida does not pose the question of Freud’s secrets to Freud biographically, deluded as was Yerushalmi, but only of Freud, and hence of all of us caught in this game; afflicted by the mal d’archive. The archive is thus the textualization of cultural memory populated by our own ghostly projections and phantasies, the encryption of both a conscious record and an unconscious impression. Using psychoanalysis deconstructively as a reading process balances delicately between an anti-biographical attention to constitutional predicaments of all subjects determined by language and its otherness, and a sense of the subjectivized particularity of each utterance or text marked precisely as such by that which is secreted within it. If the aesthetic is a form of knowing that is not quite cognition and a form of sensing that is not merely perceptual but, as the French verb sentir retains, is also tinged with affects, perhaps we might think the space between history, memory and subjectivity through the aesthetic ‘impression’. Hence art in a post-traumatic era is not testimony to the trauma; it becomes an affective process of deconstructive interpretation of its traces, allowing some movement, never a cure. In 2003 – shortly before his untimely death – Edward Said lectured at the Freud Museum on Freud’s Moses and Monotheism. The lecture was published under the title Freud and the Non-European, with introduction from Christopher Bollas and response by Jacqueline Rose.24 As literary and postcolonial critic, Said studied the aesthetics of Freud‘s ‘late style evidenced in the Moses book’. Said drew contemporary relevance out of the contradictions and unevenness that disfigure Freud’s Moses text as it struggles with ethnicities, cultural memories and identities. Freud’s text interests Said for the opposite reasons to Yerushalmi, as one would expect. Said endorses Freud’s



Editor’s Introduction

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continuing struggles against the secret fixity of ethnic, national or cultural identity by his shocking conviction that Judaism was created by the African monotheist: ‘If Moses was an Egyptian …’ being Freud’s key thesis, and locating strangeness at the heart of one of the most long-lived collectivities: the Jewish people. Said also showed, however, that the historically and culturally situated Freud could not escape his own inner necessity to reclaim the Europeanness of the Jewish people – he names them a remnant of Mediterranean peoples – faced as he was at the time of writing with an anti-Semitism that sought to render Jewish Europeans alien not only from the German nation but foreign to humanity itself. None the less, Freud’s possibility for post-European insight, according to Said, was to think this problem of the radical instability of identity resulting from the legend of the foreigner at the origin of a tradition, inside which so many have suffered as forced exiles, as not a mere plea for ‘tolerance and compassion’. Said endorses Freud’s insistence on the problem of traumatically created alienation at the heart of cultural identity as a ‘troubling, disabling, destabilizing, secular wound’ – ‘the essence of the cosmopolitan, from which there can be no recovery, no state of resolved Stoic calm, and no utopian reconciliation even within itself ’.25 Said uses Freud’s thinking about the traumatic ambivalence of identity as a means to imagine ‘a condition of a politics of diaspora life’ in which two currently warring peoples of Israel and Palestine are imagined as parts in a bi-national state rather than as ‘antagonists of each other’s history and underlying reality’.26 Said’s strong sense of worlded creative practice and politically engaged intellectual practice, therefore, claims Freud as a mediating figure for a contemporary crisis of racialized violence and ethnic conflict giving back a contemporary politics to the aesthetics of his late style. Both Said’s and Derrida’s insights inform this collection. Two encounters: what’s the use of psychoanalysis politically? We need, therefore, politically to situate the engagement with psychoanalysis and notably with the concept of trauma associated with what lies beyond graspable knowledge but may be accessed through the processes of aesthetics. Trauma and agonism In the course of delivering a series of lectures on trauma and aesthetic transformation at the Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi in 2011 – a series that drew heavily on psychoanalytical theory in relation to historical events of extremity, notably the Holocaust – I was questioned by a leading Indian art critic, Geeta Kapur, about the politics of the turn to trauma in the Western studies of art, cinema and literature. Why, Kapur asked, has trauma become a paradigmatic category in the arts and humanities in the West since the 1990s? Is it means of escaping responsibility for colonial violence by refocusing on history as trauma and everyone as a victim? Does it deflect from unfinished settling of accounts between the West and its former and recent sites of Empire? In a context still vividly remembering the long and painful struggle for national liberation from colonization and a foreign imperium, Kapur also asked about the

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continuing relevance of the politico-cultural theory of Agonism. In a post- but not anti-Marxist context, the political theory of Agonism, associated with thinkers such as Bonnie Honig, Chantal Mouffe and Ernesto Laclau, deems conflict as both inevitable and desirable in terms of the understanding democracy as a constantly struggled-for process that allows for and sustains plurality precisely by never imagining its work complete. Instead of false hopes of resolution of the conflicts caused by major differences within societies, Agonism understands contestation as dynamic. A leading theorist, Bonnie Honig argues that ‘to affirm the perpetuity of the contest is not to celebrate a world without points of stabilization; it is to affirm the reality of perpetual contest, even within an ordered setting, and to identify the affirmative dimension of contestation’.27 Does the focus on trauma displace history and its still urgently political contests? Furthermore, I was asked if the insistence on a kind of vigilant memory of past trauma might not lead perhaps to a culture trapped in and even overdetermined by a past that is used to justify its own acts of violence against others? What Geeta Kapur had in mind was clearly the way in which she perceived that the memory of the Holocaust is mobilized in Israel’s selfdefence, while that memory-burdened nation stands itself accused by many in the world of terrible violence against the lives and life-worlds of the terminally displaced Palestinians. This encounter in India, however, was telling and pertinent to what this collection will explore: a relation between, on the one hand, a particular psychological theory about suffering, shock, extremity with its concomitant debates about representability or legibility as well as responsibility and, on the other, a political understanding of the world and its violences and paranoias mediated through art and the image. Initiated in literary theory in the early 1990s, now disseminated through historical as well as art historical disciplines, trauma theory introduces a psychic condition of shock which overpowers the subject’s capacity to comprehend and hence to remember an extreme event or sequence of accumulating suffering. It also suggests more metaphorically that regimes of representation may be inadequate to the novelty and extremity of events that surpass all precedents. Thus it also thereby changes our understanding of representation since trauma, by various definitions, falls outside of our cognitive and representational systems. The Visual Politics with which this volume contends arises not from accepting the impossibility or refuting the representability of traumatic events – which has become a major debate in contemporary cultural theory notably in the aftermath of the Holocaust. They arise from close readings of various ways in which different forms of extreme event, historical such as colonization, indigeneity, the Irish Famine, or 9/11, or structural, as indicated by certain trends in cinema (Chare on Blue Steel), or yet again personal in the case of specific artists, nevertheless, have found ways into visual representation that may or may not be legible without some reference to psychoanalytical theories not just of the gaze or the image, but of subjectivity and its aporias. This takes us back to the relay between politics, ethics and the aesthetics, played out in the second encounter I wish to discuss.



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Politics and ethics On YouTube, you can watch a recording of a lecture given at the European Graduate School in July 2011 by Judith Butler. She is elaborating her long-term engagement with issues of precariousness, interdependence, liveable and grievable lives, distributions of life and bare life, and the nature of the ethical call of the other in terms of mobilizing our resistance to current political asymmetries and violations. What kind of responsibility do we have to those near and distant who share the earth with us? Can we philosophically decipher the nature of the social relation in which ‘I’ am already implicated irrespective of my will? Butler has been working on these questions since her move into the study of The Psychic Life of Power in the late 1990s. From Antigone’s Claim on, Butler has studied and lectured on the complex legacy of Emmanuel Levinas and most recently has deepened our understanding of the significance of Hannah Arendt’s thinking formed in the wake of crimes against humanity such as state-sponsored genocide and the camps of totalitarian states. In her lecture, Butler deployed her philosophical armoury urgently to address the unsolved agonies and worse of the Israel/Palestine situation and the effects of American foreign policy under President Bush that led to the war on terror, the invasion of Iraq and continuing military presence in Afghanistan. One question that came from the floor invited Butler to address the role of the image in soliciting an ethico-political response. Can images of the other’s suffering, from war for instance, constitute a ‘call’ or mobilize an ethical response? The ghost of Susan Sontag stalked the room without being named. Sontag had written so movingly of her own initial traumatic shock before the images of concentration camps in 1945, but wondered if repeated exposure to images of atrocity could sustain the initial wounding. She returned to that question in her later years in her study of Regarding the Pain of Others.28 Abu Ghraib was also on the questioner’s mind. Judith Butler had invited fellow EGS Professor, Bracha L. Ettinger to respond to her lecture and to engage in dialogue. Bracha Ettinger is a painter, working with the traumatic archive of catastrophe that runs from European theatre of racist genocide to her daily struggle as an Israeli with the conditions of the lives of Palestinian co-inhabitants of that traumatized and traumatizing geopolitical space, Israel/ Palestine. The ground of the dialogue with Butler was Ettinger’s intervention in psychoanalytical theory that arose from reflections on painting translated into that analytical vocabulary for theorizing the potential of an aesthetic and proto-ethical dimension in subjectivity. What struck me watching this recorded encounter was the relay between the political philosophical grounds of Butler’s discourse, which acknowledges the issue of the subject – the subject of ethics and the subject of politics, hence has some truck with notions of psychic life – and Ettinger’s entry into the same field via her radical psychoanalytical thesis of the Matrix and its indirect but pertinent perspectives on how we might move from the aesthetics of connectivity to the ethics of responsibility and thence to the decisions and agency of political action. For Ettinger, ethics cannot replace politics, however much we theorize social responsibility. There must also be psychic inclination otherwise grounded that creates a form of desire expressed as the

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coupling of hospitality and compassion, i.e. an affective ground to be consciously mobilized as political action. In response to Ettinger’s contribution, however, Butler skillfully queried Ettinger’s proposition that there is more to subjectivity than even classic Freudian psychoanalysis, let alone feminism or philosophy, have imagined. Prompting Ettinger to elaborate her Matrixial theory, Butler asked how one might accommodate Ettinger’s conceptualizations of archaic, even pre-natal, psychic formations as preconditions for post-natal ethical responsiveness and subsequently political decision. In a sense, Butler indicated that philosophy might struggle specifically with the affective and hence the aesthetic (not as beauty or sublimity, but as a sub-cognitive sensibility and affective passage to making sense of the world) and with whatever might be the role of the image as other than shock, document, representation. Butler offered Ettinger a space to place a specifically psychoanalytical aesthetics in dialogue with her own philosophically-derived passage to a shared issue. Ettinger elaborates an aesthetics of affects that line the subject and orient the subject differently towards an other as a partner-in-difference rather than a discrete other. Ettinger does not posit a foundational cause in the psychic disposition that predates and determines ethical and political action. That would be a form of theology, psychologism or psychological essentialism. She introduces into the field of thinking about responsibility (the ethical call) its psychic potentiality or its resources in an earlier psychic disposition, what she calls response-ability. She asks: what are the conditions, perhaps already engendered within subjectivity, that might make us able not only able to respond, but yearning to respond to the call of the other in their suffering as if this responsiveness were an originary condition of an already intimated co-humansubjectivity and not something to be fabricated through philosophical gymnastics? If the affect most associated with psychoanalytical aesthetics is anxiety, notably paranoia or uncanniness, Ettinger suggests that we might also have to explore another kind of affective, aesthetic orientation in subjectivity that offers us a passage through a current roadblock. Ettinger elaborates this in a novel interpretation of the pairing of compassion and hospitality (explicated in Ch. 9). Ettinger maps a passage – poros in Greek, which relates to the aporia of which Maria Margaroni writes in her chapter on Kristeva and the aesthetic – from a proto-ethical trans-subjective potentiality arising from the most archaic moments of the initiation of subjectivity to a post-natal, even post-Oedipal ethical orientation towards the other on the basis of which a defined, individuated subject can make a political decision. Unlike those who, despondent about the current dead ends of political theory and recent political histories, turn to ethics alone to source a new political imagination based on responsibility and a social relation that is always already binding us with others near and far (so Butler argues), Ettinger does not suggest that the ethical, understood in such social terms, is alone sufficient for us to develop a politics, a set of understandings, decisions and actions. She maintains distinctions even as she posits a new psychic foundation for the nonOedipal ‘desire’ for sharing and com-passion. We have been taught since Lévi-Strauss that the other of, or in, the political sphere, is a person or a group who confronts me as either like me or other to me. According



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to classic psychoanalytical notions of subject formed by initial separation and then identification, we incorporate what is like and reject or fear what is unassimably different. This informs our political imaginations in nationalism, ethnocentrism, racism, homophobia, sexism. Marx argued that the history of all societies was class struggle, suggesting, as post- and non-Marxist political philosophers of Agonism do now, that some kind of conflict or contestation between contradictory positions is not only inevitable but can itself be productive of a continuing dynamic towards the democratic. Thus in the realm of subjects who make decisions and act, the relation to the other is not primarily ethical; it is agonistic or, its opposite, in terms of solidarity with one’s own, identificatory. If we approach recent history, however, with a view to the cost, in terms of human suffering of the fall-out from extremes of regularized naked aggression, rapacity and ever deepening structural asymmetries of access to even the most basic conditions such as water, food, earth and minimal security of person, property and livelihood, we might want to modify the Agonistic view by stressing the urgent need of primary ethical questions of responsibility worldwide for the human condition, in Arendt’s terms, of others. Ettinger raises the question, however, from her psychoanalytical revision: is the ethical only and exclusively on the side of the subject, she or he who is formed as an ‘I’, confronting an other, a ‘not-I’? What would happen were we to posit and develop other potentialities that always-already connect a non-oppositional co-relating I and a non-I in a poietic, creative, co-emergence and co-affection? Positing such a possibility challenges our deeply embedded phallic notions of both subjectivity and sociality (+ v –), which are premised on separation, the violence of the cut and the law and its threat. Hence one of the critical questions we currently face is violence, no longer confined to theatres of formal war, but endemic, proliferating, inventive and worse. It has been made central to the cultural imagination in many forms of entertainment, play and information that deal with crime, destruction and apocalypse. Maria Margaroni’s contribution to this volume touches obliquely on these questions by means of a reading of Julia Kristeva’s deployment of psychoanalytical thinking to get beyond the aporia, the lack of passage, that emerges with the increasing suspicion towards the concept and prevalent political forms of mediation in post-/anti-Hegelian Political Theory and Continental Philosophy. In her reading of both Kristeva’s theoretical trajectory from Hegel to the sacred, associated with the maternal feminine and the unspeakable, and of her novel, Possessions which focuses on an extremely violent crime that leaves a decapitated victim, Margaroni explores what she names an ‘Iconomy of Violence.’ She explores Kristeva’s sense that a deep psychoanalytical understanding and hence transformation of violence and sacrifice at the heart of all subjectivity is needed. Through acknowledging its centrality to our entry into the social/cultural order, violence may be projected, acted out, figured. Literature, namely the aesthetic space, dares to mediate this transfer between the inside and the outside, the psychic forces and the social bonds that anthropology, notably studies of sacrifice, sometimes glimpses.

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In my own chapter, this implicitly feminist enquiry into violence moves in an Arendtian direction through a discussion of Italian feminist philosopher Adriana Cavarero’s theses on the novel forms of contemporary violence – horrorism – that constitute an ontological crime. Cavarero’s delineation of violence against the unarmed, the vulnerable, is placed in dialogue with Bracha Ettinger’s daring theses on compassion as a continuing aesthetic legacy of our earliest inklings of subjective life that can offer its potentiality to current ethical and concrete political conflicts such as Israel/Palestine. Their debate is framed by the reading of media images and a documentary film on a suicide bombing that killed two young women, an Israeli and a Palestinian, whose severed heads became confused, raising the spectre of Medusa and the meanings of the face not of the other but of the woman as the monstrous. Nicholas Chare offers an Ettingerian reading of the visual and acoustic politics of contemporary film, Blue Steel (Bigelow, 1989), that ostensibly narrates and represents visually a phallic identification on the part of a woman who becomes a New York cop because she wants to shoot people. Reading the aesthetic counter-force of the film by Kathryn Bigelow, Chare tracks its dialectical interweaving of Phallic and Matrixial logics played out in the currently classic locus of the police procedural drama on screen between violence and connectivity, and the renunciation of the exposed phallic illusion. Psychoanalyses? I wanted to title this volume Visual Politics and Psychoanalyses. The neologism risked being read as a misprint. Yet it signifies an important plurality. Kristevan and Ettingerian theory do not coincide; indeed there is a major difference even while both argue for a major reconceptualization of the maternal-feminine on the basis of radical re-readings of psychoanalytical traditions in the light of urgent politics of life. Psychoanalysis is a theory of subjectivity, that is, of the process of becoming an ‘I’ that is revealed by this theory to be itself an illusion; the ego is a fiction. Not only is the ego but one precarious agency within a subjectivity that is also formed by an unconscious and a super-ego, but the unconscious is neither individual nor entirely personalized. Lacan’s intervention in the mid-twentieth century was to liberate Freudian psychoanalysis from residual nineteenth-century notions of collective or universal elements and also to challenge American appropriations of ego psychology that oriented psychoanalysis to normative adaptive therapies for malfunctioning individuals. Lacan made the unconscious structural, and hence supra-individual but not collective in a Jungian sense, because, via Lévi-Strauss’ interpretation of semiotics, Lacan linked the unconscious with language, the treasurehouse of signifiers. Language is at once the grid of signifiers that make meaning possible and the locus of specific, if deep-seated and long-lasting, cultural rules. It is the process, therefore, of each individual subjectivity’s enmeshing with the big Other that is the cultural system in its deepest structural yet historically contingent forms. Thus subjectivity is a process that defies the notion of the social contract: the individual confronting the world, culture, society as other. The traffic between what is inside and becomes the lining of my singular subjectivity and the rules, systems,



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structures of the outside, the Other – Culture as Language or Language as Culture – is internalized by access to language as the architecture of a subjectivity that, clothed in particularity and contingency, is at once determined and dynamic. The notion of discrete selves is a necessary fiction for the ego but not one to believe uncritically. Indeed Jean Laplanche, another key French psychoanalytical thinker, posits subjectivity as the effect of what he names ‘seduction’. He argues that the utterly vulnerable and intensely sensate neonate is swamped – traumatized – by undigestible stimuli and by signs coming from the world and others, notably its carers, that it cannot yet decipher. It is in response to the traumatic impact of what it has no apparatus yet to ‘digest’ that the infant has to develop a psychic apparatus in order to metabolize the ‘enigmatic signifiers’ of the world and the adults with whom it interacts for survival. It is what comes from the outside that generates what then returns to engage the world from inside as drives and fantasies oriented towards what is outside. The British psychoanalyst Wilfrid Bion imagined the origins of thinking in processes that start with the mother functioning as the mind or the metabolizer of the undigested shocks of postnatal life, taking in to her own processing the raw intensities that afflict the baby, detoxifying them and returning them to the infant in a modified and humanized, affective and proto-symbolic form: materials for thinking with.29 The Hungarian psychoanalysts Nicholas Abraham and Maria Torok also suggested something similar in terms of the baby being defenceless before the mother’s unconscious, which thinks for the child in a primary dyadic bonding from which the child must ultimately disassociate itself.30 But this primary bonding also transmits unconsciously to the child some of the mother’s unspoken traumas, secrets and also her inherited legacies from her own exposure to her parental unconscious. Ettinger participates in these expanded understandings of subjectivity as intersubjectivity that clearly indicate that the psyche/mind cannot be understood as confined within one body or entity. Ettinger posits trans-subjectivity operating side by side with, and occasionally knocked out by, the powerful processes of the formation of Phallic subjectivity which enables the illusion of discrete, separated and territorialized subjecthood: I versus not-I. This is not to fall into fantasies of telepathy and psychism, which lie outside of theoretical respectability, although they haunted Freud and have one day to be understood. They form the misunderstood and exploited forms of a real insight that psychoanalysis ‘knows’ already from its own practices and theorizes critically in terms of transference, intersubjectivity, fantasy, seduction and in Ettinger’s case, trans-subjectivity enduring from the latest phases of the prenatal-prematernal co-emergence. Listing these many names and different theories of subjectivity and its formations reminds us that there is no single psychoanalysis. Hence the pluralization of this book’s title: psychoanalyses. Put simply, psychoanalysis is a proposition that human subjectivity is defined by the unconscious. The formation of subjectivity is never achieved by arrival at a destined point: the adult. The illusory ego is trying to be in charge of the various elements of subjectivity. The ego does function as a regulatory agency but it is the continuous plaything of the other two thirds of the subjective iceberg, the unconscious and its time-reversing or even timeless processes

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layered into that which constitutes the subject. Subjectivity is, therefore, not identity. Identity (as man or woman, for instance) as Jacqueline Rose argues, is shown by psychoanalysis constantly to fail. Like Marxism, psychoanalysis sees the mechanisms that produce those transformations as determinant, but also as leaving something in excess. If psychoanalysis can give an account of how women experience the path to femininity, it also insists, through the concept of the unconscious that femininity is neither simply achieved nor is it ever complete. The political case for psychoanalysis rests on these two insights together – otherwise it would be indistinguishable from the internalization of norms … The difficulty is to pull psychoanalysis in the direction of both these insights – towards a recognition of the fully social constitution of identities and norms, and then back again to that point of tension where they are endlessly remodelled and endlessly break.31 Against this generic condition, however, we have to place the historical and political realities of nations, ethnicities, classes, genders, racialized communities and so forth which constantly produce such powerful illusions of identity that we consider ourselves endemically nations or religions and reject or even kill on the basis of dividing the human population into such identities, denying their fragility. We suffer from identities, to paraphrase Freud’s notion that hysterics suffer from reminiscences. Moreover, the site of many of our traumas may often be a shattered, dislocated or unsupported identity, deprived of a means of social recognition through which to acknowledge both who we are and what we have suffered. The first two chapters of this book address such issues, through Henrik Holm’s study of the case of Denmark and its Muslim citizens and through Kristina Huneault’s history of two men of the First Nations in Canada and their relations with their country’s colonizers mediated through a series of portraits. Henrik Holm offers a subtle analysis of a double crisis for which Denmark is the case study. On one hand, Holm analyses the two events of 2005–06 in Denmark that concerned the international uproar over the cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed drawn by Danish artists that went viral on the Internet and the declaration by the right-wing Danish government of an official canon for the arts of Denmark. Reasserting the key works that constitute Danishness and cultural heritage, the canon is at once a work of institutionalizing memory and exclusionary amnesia. Contested and reasserted national identity and xenophobia were, however, played out via images. Do they have power? Are cultural actions in response to imagined or unexpected power of images susceptible to not only critical analysis but to psychoanalytical interpretation? This is the question explored in Holm’s careful plotting out of the psychic dynamics and underlying ideologies of this moment of cultural crisis in Denmark, a country in which Holm traces the symptoms of post-traumatic stress syndrome. The case of Denmark becomes, therefore, from its seemingly marginal place, symptomatic of both a crisis in Europe as a whole and of the interactions of the provinces of Europe with world shifts in economic and



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political power which express themselves at the level of cultural identities, and hence render cultural histories and the images that sustain the myth of history potent instruments against disintegration or change. These challenge notions of identity and culture wars become significantly a site of the crisis. Holm’s specific intervention into these cultural politics is to test out psychoanalysis as a tool of cultural analysis. Emily Mark-Fitzgerald provides a counter-instance in which the deployment of trauma and post-memorial affectivity in relation to a historical event – the Irish Famine – is subjected to critical evaluation and found wanting both in terms of ethical implications and representational ideologies. She tracks the increasing use of trauma in the discourse around the 150th anniversary of the Irish Famine that also led to the erection of a range of monuments which are framed in a redemptive model of past trauma now offered the possibility of post-memorial healing. MarkFitzGerald argues that the psychological turn, coupled with the play of imagination and fantasy through visual representation inviting projective identification across six generations, might betray both the politics of the historical event itself and the historical accuracy of the Famine’s legacy in Irish culture. In yet another collision of psychoanalysis – this time in Freud’s own mind and working space – with historical traumas of enslavement and racism, Suzanna Chan offers a reading of an aesthetic intervention by African American artist Ellen Gallagher in the Freud Museum, London, in 2005. Reminding us of Freud’s early fascination with marine biology, Gallagher’s strategically placed works expose the repressed ‘racial discourse’ displaced onto sexual difference in Freud’s theory. Chan then explores the counter-force of Gallagher’s imaginative creation of marine fantasy forms to uncover the trauma of enslavement that cast many African bodies into the Atlantic from the slave ships while also generating a transformative feminine aquatic. Kristina Huneault offers a subtle reading of the role of miniature portraits painted of two men belonging precariously to First Nation identities as they move in different directions, one back from having been raised in Scotland to re-identify with First Nation identity, the other becoming a Methodist minister embracing the colonizer’s religion and culture. In both cases identity has been compromised by colonization and dislocation. But it is not to be redeemed as the political ground on which both men could articulate themselves is not within their control. The traces of the personally endured trauma of political processes are indexed but not shown in portraits that survive to inscribe both men into a visual history. That these images touch trauma requires, however, attuned psycho-political interpretation. In her reading of one major painting by French artist Gustave Courbet, which also touches once again on the subjective conditions of his anguished but masked masculine identity, Jennifer Tennant Jackson links traumas of loss and mourning with Walter Benjamin’s concept of allegory in order to offer a reading of a painting whose ‘real allegory’ has remained undeciphered by the many art historians who have fought over the interpretation of Courbet’s ‘political’ painting. Hunting the woman in the painting and across Courbet’s oeuvre, Tennant Jackson ‘speaks’ its gendered trauma of love and loss from the margins, enabled by a feminist attention to the Benjaminian concept of allegory as ruins.

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Two other chapters are linked under the sign of affect: fear and uncanny anxiety introduce photography, TV and architecture into the discussion. Paula Carabell moves between the artist Dan Graham, whose work in early video and then architecture returns us to a classic locus of psychoanalytical and cultural theoretical interconnection: the gaze. Not a position of mastery, Lacan’s theory of the gaze reminds us of the subject’s constitution in a field of vision in which s/he is not the centre. We know from Foucault that being seen and being watched are a source of paranoia institutionalized by the modern society of surveillance and discipline. But what of institutionalized exhibitionism, for instance in glass-walled houses that render transparent the boundaries between inside and out, rendering uncertain who is looking out and who is looking in? What of the politics of that modernist architecture translated into a multi-million pound TV reality product: Big Brother? Can psychoanalytical theories of the uncanny, das Unheimliche in German, literally the Unhomely, speak to the visual politics of this phenomenon beyond surveillance? Sharon Sliwinski’s chapter returns us to the opening preamble. What does fear look like? What do photographs reveal to us, not as intentional documents of an event such as 9/11, but through visually registering the inscription, through unconscious bodily gestures, of affects on the traumatized bystanders, both subjected to and the witnesses of a major terrorist attack on the city of New York and the people of the United States? Working with the largest photographic archive devoted to a single historical event, Sliwinski studies the signs of terror in those transfixed by seeing the attacks on the Twin Towers as indices of trauma, that which cannot be assimilated or known but is testified to. Trauma’s relation to testimony has largely been considered in relation to the spoken or written word. Investigating the situation in the visual realm, Sliwinski turns to the history of gesture, the body, and expression from ancient sources through to Darwin’s influential mid-nineteenth evolutionary study of human expression. Aby Warburg, the art historian who focussed on the historical psychology of the image to study affect and trace the menace of violence, placing art in intimate relations with psychological states of anxiety and intense suffering, drew richly on Darwin’s insights. Sliwinski brings Warburg’s approach to bear on the photographic archive of New York on 9/11 across which she traces recurring gestures of gaping mouths covered by shocked hands, or hands rising to cover they eyes of shocked and disbelieving witnesses. Transfixion. Seeing, not-seeing, fearing what we see, failing to see, form one axis of the visual politics of art and the image in post-traumatic times. The other axis is what is offered in an expanded and not homogeneous field of psychoanalytical investigations into subjectivity, its formations, its capacities, its anxieties, and the sources of both violence or indifference towards the other and compassion and response-ability for an-other who is never outside the shared human compass, and hence, while being different, is sensed as a co-being on this shared planet.32 Faced with trauma, terror and horror, can we work across aesthetics, ethics and politics towards sustaining human life? Is there specifically a psychoanalytical and an aesthetic contribution to this urgent question? Where does a study of the image open onto such enormous questions?

1 CONTEST-NATION

Denmark: A PTSD-struck Nation Contesting Analysis Henrik Ole Holm

We have no need for experts and judges of taste to decide on our behalf … Prime Minister of Denmark Mr Anders Fogh Rasmussen (Liberal Party) on his first State of the Nation Speech, 1 January 2002.1 In this chapter I will explore the contestations occurring between politics of nationalism and psychoanalysis, in the continuing contest over who controls the power of imagery, society and politics for the future.2 I shall use some notions and examples well known from psychoanalysis, and occasionally even some Foucauldian concepts, in order to think about the political with the psychoanalytical in the visual arts. My example of a post-traumatic culture is my native country Denmark, and the visual arts are represented by a Canon for the Arts (‘Kulturkanon’) released by the government in 2005 (see ) (1.1). The framework in which this canon-making can be placed reveals a nation acting as if afflicted by post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), despite being at the periphery of Europe and its current conflicts, and being far away from those recent acts of terror or warfare. The horror of my case lies not in its reflection on suffering on a grand scale, but in the uncanny appearance of trauma in places where it ought not to be found. Nevertheless, Denmark is indeed acting as though it has been the victim of serious distress. Strong nationalistic moods and sentiments in the public arena have been setting the agenda for domestic politics for a decade, paving the way for a right-wing government, culminating in the elections held in 2001, just a few months after the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center in New York. At the very beginning of his first term the Prime Minister banned ‘experts’ and ‘judges of taste’, and in his second year in office in 2003, a full-blown cultural war

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C.W. Eckersberg (1783–1853), View through Three of the Northwestern Arches of the Third Storey of the Colosseum. A Thunderstorm is Brewing over the City, 1813–16, Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen. ‘The Father of Danish Painting’, figuring prominently on the Canon of Art list as the first oil-on-canvas work of art.

was launched in an interview with a Danish newspaper. The Prime Minister said: ‘The outcome of the Battle of Culture determines the future of Denmark. Not the economic policy. Nor technocratic changes in the systems of legislation.’3 The cultural war turned out to be a real one, leaving no vital part of society untouched by it. Quick to follow after the speech was the closing down or reorganization of councils, boards and institutions made up of experts who did not share the views of the government. Apart from reorganizing the systems that provide artists with official funding, the Ministry for the Environment was cut to pieces, while the notorious denier of the fact that human activity has caused global warming Bjorn Lomborg became head of the ‘Environmental Assessment Institute’, advising the government.4 The universities in general, but especially the humanities, were to be hit hard, due to the fact that any kind of critical judgement or analysis was metaphorically castrated by the ‘no’ of the new fathers in politics. The longstanding tradition of universities being relatively self-governing was annulled and all democratic forums were replaced by a new hierarchical order where students as well as employees lost their voice. The basic educational system was changed so that all initiatives would be measured by numbers. The police were reformed. The municipal system was centralized. Taxes were lowered. Museums had to rely on

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private funding as never before (which will cause them serious concern, now there is a major financial crisis). Coincidentally, visual phenomena played a crucial role when Denmark finally found its reason to act as if it were suffering post traumatic stress disorder. The ‘aesthetics’ of the 9/11 attacks did not go unnoticed, and the impact of the visual footage has been used with great enthusiasm to keep fear alive in everyone owning a TV. The pictures of torture from Abu Ghraib appearing in 2004 showed atrocities not easily explained away. The photographs held the promise of a possible defeat for the Coalition Forces in Iraq, sending governments in the US, Spain and Britain on a serious detour from which they were never to recover. But the shock did not come to Denmark. It was as if the nation were numb to the implications of the photographs. The Danish government was never as forcefully contested by the opposition as in other countries, and only a few of those in favour of sending the troops off to war began to think the unthinkable, that the mission in Iraq might not turn out as planned. The decision to pull out of Iraq was not motivated by a terrorist attack on the nation. Nor was it motivated by the casualties suffered by Danish soldiers or by a change in attitudes in the public. Denmark just had to leave because the much stronger British forces left the sector around Basra, where the Danes were deployed. So, it was a non-decision with no emotional background or political reasoning on behalf of the success of the operation or the possible defeat of the entire operation. It was just a tactically based regrouping of the troops from Iraq to Afghanistan. Instead, 12 cartoons in a newspaper showing the Prophet Muhammad as a terrorist caused the disturbance while, at the same time, the government released a ‘Canon for the Arts’. In the explanations offered for why Denmark needed this affirmed Canon, and in the general background offered to support the declaration, I detect through a psychoanalytically-informed analysis symptoms of a nation struck by PTSD. After having read Naomi Klein’s brilliant analysis of the devastating impact of neoliberal economic theory and practice titled The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, first published in 2007, I realize that it is just another version of management through disaster that we are witnessing here.5 Klein shows how the Chicago School economists, led by Milton Friedman (1912–2006), used disasters of all kinds to pave the way for private corporations to profit relentlessly from the destruction of public welfare systems through privatization. When disaster hit, the economic shock therapy offered by the Friedmanists can easily be hailed as the only way out of it, since politicians are ready to accept any cure at hand that promises a quick change and also provides the goodwill of financial institutions and private investors. Yet no great shock or disaster providing the opportunity for fast and awesome reforms had hit Denmark. The economy was booming, employment only increasing and wealth was spreading to a degree never seen before. A disaster was wanted, and Denmark went to war in Iraq as part of the ‘Coalition of the Willing’, and continued to partake in the operations in Afghanistan. But no real crisis came out of it.

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As 2004 turned into 2005, Denmark, however, did indeed become breaking news worldwide because of the so-called ‘Satanic Drawings’.6 The cartoons were published in October 2004. They were made as a gesture to show how the Danish media would not succumb to any prohibition from Islamic traditions on showing the face of the Prophet. An artist had just declined a commission to draw the Prophet in a book on Islam. His colleagues wanted to show that they were not afraid to draw the Prophet and so they did. One of the drawings showed Muhammad as a terrorist with a bomb placed in his turban. The whole setup was meant as a parody on Muslims inside the country. They had for years, on an everyday basis, been the target of xenophobia, and now the time had come to show that no respect was left for their religion or culture. The international media commented on these cartoons, which spread on the Internet in no time. Riots broke out in the Muslim world at the beginning of 2005, and several people died in the confrontations between police and demonstrators. For the politicians it was the worst diplomatic crisis since World War II. The power of images As mentioned above, it was at the peak of the major diplomatic crisis following the release of the cartoons that the Danish government made public the Canon for the Arts, proclaiming that it was produced in order to ward off both globalization anxieties and local cultural radicalism. The 9/11 footage, the photos from Abu Ghraib, the cartoons and the Danish Canon seen together articulate what is not easy to describe or to defend, namely that images possess a power which can, sometimes, under certain conditions, be very forceful. When speaking of the visual politics of psychoanalysis in a post-traumatic world, we might say that it all bears witness to the fact that imagery works on the public consciousness and that it can produce an unwanted and troubled self-awareness which might form the basis of criticality. My point here will be, however, to propose the opposite. It can also lead to mental stupor and resistance towards analysis. Resistance to analysis is a common problem. But if pictures can shake otherwise solid constructions of egos and ideologies, and if cultural analysis of a visual politics of psychoanalysis knows the diagnosis and performs the talking cure needed, then post-traumatized cultures worldwide could be the last to be engaged with psychoanalysis due to the very reactions defining their illness, such as amnesia and numbness. But for the sake of art and psychoanalysis I will leave a little space for the opportunity that the visual arts can perhaps possess the power to penetrate that resistance anyway, by working slowly, unconsciously and irresistibly on the minds and acts of some people. Perhaps. A canon full of imagery is indeed produced to shake up something while consolidating something else. It is made to end all doubt and foreclose analysis. The intention is, of course, to re-establish or to furnish already powerful institutions, individuals and ideologies. Canonization in the arts has by no means been an uncontested way of dealing with our cultural heritage, but those in charge of the Canon project do not seem to have been bothered by such doubts. If they were, they reacted by finding it necessary to produce even more canons in order to silence criticism. The national critique of the Canon for the Arts came from experts and

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the newly marginalized ‘judges of taste’, including many women who were familiar with using psychoanalysis as a tool for understanding the ‘psyche’ of a society or a culture. Although their arguments were heard, no real consequence of the critique can be measured; soon many intellectuals just chose not to bother about the Canon any more, continuing their work as though nothing had happened. Mothers against canonization We can approach the Canon in polarized terms, having the ‘no’ of the father as the inaugural act, and the protest against it as marked by the maternal. Thus the women who criticize canonization as a tool for exercising power relations stemming from narcissism not only focus on the installation of the indispensable (phallus), but also identify the process that creates a void (vagina or asshole) for the rest to fall into. From Nanette Salomon’s concluding remarks in her article ‘The Art Historical Canon: Sins of Omission’, we know that in canonization ‘the deeper stratifications of gender, race, and class continue to operate within the culturally expressed power relationships that he [Vasari] articulated’.7 Griselda Pollock took on the job of ‘Differencing the Canon’ in her 1999 book of that title, and she noted that ‘the canon is fundamentally a mode for worship of the artist, which is in turn a form of masculine narcissism […] The excessive valorisation of the artist in modern Western art history as a “great man” corresponds with the infantile stage of idealisation of the Father’.8 In the Danish Canon for the pictorial arts only one woman is included. Her name is Astrid Noack (1888–1954), and she appears among 11 men or unknown artists. The statue by Noack shows a nude female in a contrapposto entitled Standing Woman (1.2) Noack stands out for not being a spectacular or noteworthy exception among artists, since she belonged to a group of traditionalists who searched for classical, eternal beauty in modernity. Her work has no real significance in Danish art history; measured by that standard the inclusion of her work is a kind of differentiation of the canon, although not on any large scale, to be sure.9 The sculpture fits the idea of a canon perfectly, harking back to Polykleitos and his most canonical work, the Doryphoros (c. 450 bc), clearly visible as the model for Noack’s rendering of the solid young woman. She looks protective and perhaps even a little frightened, balancing between awareness and introversion. It is perhaps a precise figuration of the ambiguous feelings shared by many in the period in which she was made, from 1937 to 1941, during the Nazi regime and the first years of World War II, before the Battle at Stalingrad turned out in favour of the Allies, and before many ordinary citizens dared to hope that the Nazis would lose the war. Her attitude is articulated as the timeless, eternal, and common expression of the feminine as such. Allow me to make a rather far-fetched comparison making it possible to connect Noack’s figure with the thought of Freud and others. Compared with the Vatican Gradiva, a bas-relief of which Freud had a plaster replica in his consulting room – a sculpture he named after a novel called Gradiva, which he analysed in a famous article of 1903 – the statue by Noack is not walking joyfully forward, as does the

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1.2 Astrid Noack (1888–1954), Standing Woman, 1937–1941, Göteborg Kunstmuseum, Sweden.

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young girl in the Roman relief. Freud used the example of Wilhelm Jensen’s novel Gradiva (1907) to unravel the double face of art in which the figure stands as both the ‘memory-bearer of its own culture [but also] as the screen for our own recognized memories’ as Griselda Pollock has it in her reading of Freud’s text.10 If Noack’s sculpture reveals the dreams and memories of the canonizers, and thus unveils their hidden dreams, they share her nostalgic longing for a mankind as fragile, but nevertheless as solid, enduring and unchangeable, as this figure seems to be. But this woman would presumably be the very last one to stand up against the Canon. And when the ‘Mothers of Feminism’ are on the move against it, Noack’s figure will be perhaps standing just as still as I presume most traumatized reactionary nationalists would be. But for art’s sake, I am willing to grant the sculpture by Noack the potential to stand firm also against canonization and even its own traditionalism. If Nanette Salomon is right when she says ‘the art historical canon is among the most virulent, the most virilent, and ultimately the most vulnerable’, this sculpture cannot just refuse every incoming problem or threat.11 It must bear them all, or somehow take them in and contain them, or ward them off, or risk becoming obsolete. Turning Doryphoros into a female must signal some kind of action against canonization anyway. But if we ask this artwork what it wants, perhaps it just feels that it is OK to be included, considering her silent, fearful, but perhaps caring kind of strength. Or does it want to stand up against it all, be it canonization or analysis? It just stands there, traumatized and unwilling to move. As we know from the clichés of nationalism, the Fatherland can change its gender and be turned into a woman, and here she is, naked, stiffened and frightened, the nation of Denmark, resisting analysis in general and agency on behalf of feminism and psychoanalysis in particular, and unable to avoid canonization whatever kind of resistance it might offer. Dad’s fever and society’s docile bodies Immediately after the release of the Canon for the Arts in 2006 a fierce debate broke out on the pros and cons of such an undertaking. The filmmaker Lars von Trier videotaped himself burning the national flag, and he wrote to a newspaper: ‘Dear Brian. I’ve just heard about your canon. I think it’s a dreadful idea and I hope to be kept out of it as much as I hope to see the works of art I love escape the destiny of being marked as national icons. If there is one thing I do not desire, it is to be national.’12 Moralizing intellectuals spoke of fascism and nationalism, while the Minister spoke of the Canon as a tool to fight off radicals of all kinds, be it cultural radicals or radical Islamists. Furthermore, he asserted that the Canon should ‘strengthen the sense of community by showing key parts of our common historical possessions’ and offer ‘… reference points and awareness of what is special about Danes and Denmark in an ever more globalized world’.13 The debate itself showed the basic value of democracy and freedom of speech at its best, and the public responded with enthusiasm, making the Canon a bestselling ‘scientific’ book by local standards, selling more than 20,000 copies. It is perhaps the most successful cultural event in the history of cultural policymaking

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since 1964, when it was decided that artists could be awarded a Civil List Pension.14 Perhaps the idea of publishing a Canon for the Arts could be forwarded to other countries? Similar processes were initiated in Lithuania, the UK and the Netherlands as representatives from Denmark were called upon to share their experiences. But canonization does have a contested history. The Nazis surely had a canon, and reviving such an undertaking as creating a national canon does mark the return of the ghost of nationalism. Ideology and politics mingle with the free arts in ways unseen since the age of enlightened despotism. It also has a touch of religious fervour to it. The Bible contains only the canonized books. And the experts involved had their integrity and independence questioned.15 Alternative lists containing women only, and lists of artworks chosen by the public were soon to follow. In fact a veritable canon-fever broke out. Practically every month a new, nationally-based canon list was presented: one for best video game, one for most important species in nature, one for historical events, one for democracy, one for literature forming part of the examination requirements and so forth. It is all a matter of settling the question of ‘what is good art?’ once and for all. Donna Haraway speaks of ‘the god-trick of seeing everything from nowhere’ in her polemical essay, ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’, and that is exactly what is done when a canon is made.16 Canonization is an ‘end-ism’ if ever there was one. It is made to end all discussions. It is a symptom of resistance to critical analysis. Resistance to analysis is institutionalized when nationalism rises, as demonstrated by the Prime Minister’s words in his first State of the Nation speech about having no need for experts. Furthermore, if an analysis concerning the visual politics of psychoanalysis knows the diagnosis and performs the talking cure needed, posttraumatized cultures worldwide could be the last to bother, due to the very symptoms defining their ‘illness’, such as feeling one’s integrity threatened, being numb to criticism and emotion, and showing a general rejection when confronted with issues concerning the causes and effects of the trauma. Paintings of landscapes are unavoidable in a national canon, and in the Danish canon you will find a rather large portion of the artworks chosen to be landscapes (three out of 12). Landscape painting makes it possible visually to make a connection between geography and identity, both terms being closely connected to nationalism. W.J.T. Mitchell has pointed to landscape painting as a dynamic ‘instrument of cultural power’ that ‘circulates as a medium of exchange’, that is, as a ‘focus for the formation of identity’. It literally makes (national) history possible by working to efface its own readability.17 In other words we find resistance to analysis in artworks directly related to nationalism and identity. Landscape painting’s ‘exhaustion’ as a powerful medium in art history marks its uncanny return as a powerful interlocutor in mass culture. The impact of imagery on the masses seems to be able to change world history, if it also burns its way through to the mind of those in charge. Art can be dangerous since it tends to fuel the same primitive feelings, as Sigmund Freud diagnosed it: Why collective individuals [Völkerindividuen] in fact despise, hate, and detest each other, even in peaceful time, each nation the other, remains, it is true, a

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mystery. I cannot say why this is so [Ich weiβ es nicht zu sagen]. In this case it is as though all the moral achievements of individuals were obliterated once many [eine Mehrheit] or indeed millions come together, and only the most primitive, most ancient, and crudest attitudes survive.18 Every culture desiring to be in charge of the past, present and future must try to somehow gain control of the power of imagery, in order to control the crude attitudes. But as we all know, the image is one thing never to succumb to such desires, as one example shows. The one and only moment former Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld thought of resigning from office before he actually did so in November 2006 was when the photographs from Abu Ghraib hit the news in 2004.19 On 8 February, President George W. Bush commented on the drawings of Muhammad, admonishing the press that its freedom comes with ‘the responsibility to be thoughtful about others’.20 On 12 February the former Secretary General to the United Nations, Kofi Annan, reacted strongly towards the drawings of Muhammad, speaking of them as being ‘insensitive’ and ‘offensive’.21 In those days the Danes gazed with a mixture of disbelief, terror and excitement at the power of images. But the ‘Muhammad Crisis’ did not lead to any second thoughts about exploiting the power of images in a Canon, on the contrary. Both events turned out to make the Danes feel like the heroes of the day. The Canon was the breaking news at home; the riots following the ‘Satanic Drawings’ were breaking news worldwide. And the Danes grew even more resistant to critical analysis as the feeling of self-sufficiency grew. This resistance, however, can be seen otherwise, as shown in Foucault’s analysis in Discipline and Punish of art used in order to produce ‘docile bodies’ in historic moments of discipline: The historical moment of the disciplines was the moment when an art of the human body was born, which was directed not only at its growth of skills, nor at the intensification of its subjection, but at the formation of a relation that in itself makes it more obedient as it becomes more useful, and conversely. What then was being formed was a policy of coercions upon the body, a calculated manipulation of its elements, its gestures, its behaviour … Thus discipline produces subjected and practised bodies, ‘docile’ bodies.22 And indeed, the Canon of the Arts came about as a tool for working on the body of the Danes at a historic moment of discipline and punishment in Danish history, and it made the artworks in it (and outside it) seem as docile as they were seen to be only during the time when absolute monarchy ruled at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Father’s illness: PTSD If we look now upon some of the features underpinning the desire for a Canon of the Arts, it seems to fit almost too well into some of the characteristics of post-

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traumatic stress disorder often caused by a threat to integrity and characterized by numbness, amnesia, passivity alternating with aggression and rejection of criticism. The nation’s integrity was threatened from the outside – from other religious and cultural spheres spreading propaganda against democracy, using radical Islamist rhetoric and violent terror as justifiable means to reach their goal. This was a threat requiring immediate reactions by politicians, who were willing to do whatever it took to fight the invincible enemy, even if it took the violation of fundamental, democratic, civil rights, such as freedom of speech and the right to privacy. Thus laws against terrorism were hastened through Parliament calling for higher degrees of unrestricted surveillance and more severe punishment of offenders against the law.23 This went on simultaneously with the fight for freedom of speech. The real enemy of the state to be warded off by the Canon was, however, cultural radicalism. For more than a decade the Danish nation had been threatened from the inside by cultural radicals, who espoused radical communist sympathies and favoured international theory and global politics. Studying psychoanalysis and taking an interest in social welfare went hand in hand for the radicals. The first radicals of this kind in Denmark made possible the breakthrough of Modernity in the 1870s. They spoke of art for art’s sake and of free love and of the equal rights of women. They were named ‘Europeans’ to make clear their lack of veneration for local national interests. So, the crisis that caused the PTSD-like symptoms to develop in society, for which the Canon was the cure, has lasted for almost one and a half centuries. Numbing of feelings is found everywhere in politics and in the people as such. It is acted out against any kind of non-normal behavior, be it towards native citizens unable to work properly, or towards refugees from foreign nations. They are sent back by force to a destiny only too well known, in spite of the recurring protests from the UN, the EU, Amnesty International and others. At the same time it shocks the entire nation, including politicians, to see the inhuman treatment of mentally disabled in a Danish reception centre filmed by candid camera. Those responsible were severely punished.24 But when exposed to reminders of what caused it all put forward with the aid of critical analysis, the answer from the Prime Minister is always the same, now a cliché in mundane language and among members of government: ‘There is nothing there to find’ he says, thus turning the critical assessments to naught. Psychologically informed insights do not lead to fast and enduring change in politics, they must rely on having a long, but slow-working, effect on memory. But loss of memory prevails also in the issuing of a national canon, even though it is meant to speak of the history of the nation, because it excludes so much more than it includes. The most canonical words of Theodor W. Adorno in the final sentences of his essay ‘Cultural Criticism and Society’ that ‘to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric’ were not at the forefront of the experts’ memories to prevent them from issuing a very poetic canon of national art, with no artworks that could raise controversy any longer, since all those included had lost most of their original ability to cause contestation. But Adorno’s attitude did haunt the Canon.25 Some immanent

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criticism of the whole project and its pervading odour of self-satisfied contemplation is traceable nevertheless, since the experts chose the large-scale painting by Asger Jorn (1914–73) named Stalingrad, No-Man’s Land or the Mad Laughter of Courage (begun 1952, finished 1972) to finish off the list (1.3). This work of art can be seen as Jorn’s painterly comment on Adorno’s dictum on the fate of poetry and art after Auschwitz, although Jorn did not know Adorno when he started, but he surely did as he finished it. For a long time Jorn had had his own, very similar thoughts on what art was to be like in the face of human suffering. Jorn’s last wife, Nanna Enzenberger discussed Adorno with Jorn, since she found many similarities in their thoughts. Indeed, writings by Jorn show passages very close to those written by Adorno in the same period, published under the titles ‘Kulturkritik und Gesellschaft’ [Cultural Criticism and Society] (1951) and ‘Engagement’ [Commitment] (1962), asking how it is possible to write poetry at all ‘after Auschwitz’? In Jorn’s writings, questioning art’s role in the face of atrocities to mankind goes back to 1923, when a book by the Danish poet Johannes V. Jensen was published. Jensen reported from the Soviet Union that although many were driven from their homes by force and sent on deadly, endless journeys towards Siberia, at least some of them managed to survive. Jorn noted that behind Jensen’s apparent cynicism, the real important question the writer raised was this: ‘How can one live and write comfortably, when such things can happen?’26

1.3

Asger Jorn (1914–1973), Stalingrad, No-Man’s Land or the Mad Laughter of Courage, 1957–60. 1967. 1972, 296 × 492, oil-on-canvas, Asger Jorn’s Collections, Silkeborg Museum of Art, Jutland, Denmark.

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The aftermath of World War II also forms part of the framing of the Danish Canon. The Prime Minister spoke out about his dissatisfaction with the compliant policy adopted when Denmark was occupied during World War II. Never again should the Danes just sit back and watch it all happen without taking an active part in the conflicts. Passivity changed into aggression forms the backdrop for Denmark’s engagement with the ‘Coalition of the Willing’ fighting terrorism in Iraq and Afghanistan. The launching of the Canon of the Arts was seen as a necessary part of a process of healing a trauma, the intention being to put the old, well-known pieces of art to work regenerating the souls of the victims of trauma caused by lack of will to stand up against the enemy past, present or future, be it the Nazis, the cultural radicals, or the Islamists. Father’s trauma: facing a ‘minus in the origin’ How can a nation like Denmark become a victim of PTSD? Not everyone in a killing zone suffers from it, and the statistics for its occurrence vary from 5 to 80 per cent (which only bears witness to the unpredictability of the long-term consequences of experiencing trauma). But the world of art, media and politics seems to feed on traumatic events. In the virtual world of video games the risk of getting close to disaster must be around 100 per cent. The larger part of our everyday life is absorbed, digested, and secreted through the spheres of art, analysis, media and politics, and the product of it all, society, is best understood as a container filled with trauma and PTSD-like symptoms, filtered and nursed by these participants in the quest for power. Trauma is caused by a feeling of not being there at the right moment, by not being able to react accordingly and by not being able to prevent the disaster. This goes for the individual as well as for a nation or a civil society. Any nation, large or small, must feel somehow stripped of its sovereignty in what Donald Preziosi in one of his pertinent papers on national museums has called ‘the current age of transnational neo-feudalism and corporate gangsterism euphemistically called globalization’.27 As long as a nation clings to the old idea of being one, as hard as any of us clings to the idea of having an ego of some integrity and stability in times of risk and fortune, the nation and the subject are bound to succumb to PTSD-like reactions from time to time. Perhaps being in a state of mind close to PTSD is the general, ‘normal’ situation to be in, only rarely to be disturbed by the occasional invasion of art, friends, lovers, children, dreams or ideologies and so forth which can serve as both a relief from trauma and as reminders of the limits of our capabilities. In order to get any relief from all the stress and trauma, you have to forget and to let go at will, but in the world of symptomatic readings, forgetting is not a voluntary act, and amnesia is one of the characteristic symptoms of PTSD. Indeed it seems to be a founding premise for the events occurring which serve to reinstall the feelings and traditions making up nationalism, here seen as a PTSD symptom in itself. In the following, we will have a closer look at the importance of the notion of forgetting to the notion of nationalism.

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In his ‘DissemiNation’, Homi Bhabha dissects the uncanny, the unconscious and the anomies drifting through a modern society as it tries to establish its nationness. In doing so, Bhabha has to take leave of the elsewhere very influential thesis about what formed nationalism put forward by Benedict Anderson. According to Anderson, nationalism is made out of something characterized by the opposite of trauma, namely the existence of an empty, homogeneous time called the ‘meanwhile’, in which nationalism suddenly appears in ways imperceptible to the normal narrative of realist history writing. Bhabha says that ‘… Anderson misses the alienating and iterative time of the sign …’. The ‘meanwhile’ is in fact ‘the time of the people’s anonymity [and] it is also the space of the nation’s anomie’.28 Bhabha returns to Ernst Renan (1823–92) in order to point out the fallacies in Anderson’s concept. In his 1882 discourse Qu’est-ce qu’une nation? [What is a Nation?] Renan pointed out the grounding preconditions for establishing a national history, one of them being forgetting. Bhabha says that ‘… the signification of a minus in the origin … constitutes the beginning of the nation’s narrative’. In ‘strange’ times, where one tries to forget in order to remember, nationalism emerges where a ‘minus in the origin’ is found. A Canon for the Arts is exactly forged in order to fill in the gap (block out the vagina), caused by a ‘minus in the origin’. In such strange moments it is also possible to shift the grounds for knowledge entirely and to mark out positions one knows very well are doomed to cause conflict. Bhabha argues that when forgetting seems plausible, contestation arises in the cultural field. The symptoms of such contestations are clearly marked in the signification processes following the forgetting: what you get are signifiers being overpowered by ‘exalted language’.29 The release of the Canon was of course a splendid occasion for doing exactly that. If expulsion and forgetting are regarded as both necessary and justified in order to fill in gaps in modern culture, resistance to analysis must follow, because analysis will set out to find the traces left of the work of the unconscious beneath the surface of things recurring as those canonized for the benefit of the cause. Since nationalism is part of modernity, and the ‘meanwhile’ is the (not so) normal condition time that we are considered to be in within modernity, then Modernity is also marked by the desire to forget on purpose. Cultural contestation follows as the bitter result of this forgetting. In modernity the urge to analyze and the resistance to analysis must also be part of the ‘normal’ condition in which we find ourselves. The only condition left for the dissident at times when nationalism is on the rise as it is currently, when resistance to analysis is the dominant condition, is to feel trapped with one’s discontent about what the consequences might be when nationalistic tendencies try to get at hold on memory. In this context art could find itself put to work as a tranquillizer, separated as it may be from the actual situation by virtue of its assumed autonomy or separated by time and space. Art, therefore, can be even better suited as a vehicle to show continuity and to establish a narrative articulating the love of art and the faithful remembering of great things past. But the very same artworks can also work as containers of the remainder of the original forgetting which allowed them to appear as canonized in the first place.

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Canonization could turn out to be a threat to the integrity of the masterpiece, since it demands a choice coming from the outside offering a kind of occupational therapy not well suited for an archive of masterpieces which should be able to show off as such by virtue of their inherent qualities. Constructing a canon also casts a shadow on the sovereignty of the people of the nation it is supposedly serving. The people of the nation might become aware that they have no control over the process of choosing the artworks. Even the Minister for Culture who came up with the idea of having a Canon for the Arts turned out to be surprised by the choices made. The Canon showed its potential for creating a division between the people and the most prominent artworks of their nation. In our unstable and diverse communities, dynamic and unpredictable forces work in order to build up identity, while others work to undermine it. According to Julia Kristeva, cited by Bhabha, the nation as a symbolic denominator is a powerful repository of cultural knowledge, like the one found in critical judgement, in feminism and in other political ideologies. Little by little everybody is forced to reflect upon the rationalist and progressivist logics of the ‘canonical’ nation as if it were part of the law of gravity. The borders of the nation and the canonical are constantly faced with a double temporality: the process of identity constituted by historical sedimentation, where we will find the pedagogical aspect of a canon suited for the education of the people; and the loss of identity in the signifying process of cultural identification, which we recognize as the performative level of living our everyday lives.30 In the face of this modern desire to allow forgetting, expulsion, excommunication, or repression to take place in order to fill in gaps, I would argue that the resistance to analysis is what makes art, friendship, and dialogue so necessary. Only through the kind of interaction with the other, which is offered on rare occasions by art, friendship and dialogue, is it possible, at least for a while, to get rid of the fear of facing the forgotten. Psychoanalysis would never have been born were it not for the need to scratch holes in the common condition of resistance towards interpretation, caused by the urge to justify forgetting. ‘Father, don’t you see I’m burning?’ Interpretation does not, of course, always prevail. In fact, a great deal of today’s art may be understood as motivated by a flight from interpretation. Susan Sontag: Against Interpretation, 1964.31 Resistance to analysis is a common problem and, as Susan Sontag pointed out in her famous 1964 essay ‘Against Interpretation’, even art can be motivated by a more generally felt desire to escape from interpretation that permeates the society it is made in. Sontag diagnosed a general loss of sensibility and sharpness caused by the ‘crowdedness’ of modern, urban life. In this era of excess, the critic must try to ‘recover our senses’, never taking for granted the sensory experience of art, no matter where or when it was originally made. I suppose the proper use of psychoanalysis for the benefit of interpreting the arts has its point of no return here. If the analysis

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does not exactly manage to recover our senses, it turns into the strangulating kind of interpretative practice, named ‘hermeneutics’ by Sontag. The importance of Freud’s psychoanalysis for the interpretation of art lies within the emotional impact coming from the stories he analyzed, such as this one, which leaves open a small, irksome scar in the soul of the reader equal to the mark left by the experience of seeing a good piece of art: A father had been watching beside the child’s sickbed for days and nights on end. After the child had died, he went into the next room to lie down, but left the door open so that he could see from his bedroom into the room in which the child’s body was laid out, with tall candles standing around it. An old man had been engaged to keep watch over it, and sat beside the body murmuring prayers. After a few hours’ sleep the father had a dream that his child was standing beside his bed, caught him by the arm and whispered to him reproachfully: ‘Father, don’t you see I’m burning?’ He woke up, noticed a bright glare of light from the next room, hurried into it and found that the old watchman had dropped off to sleep and that the wrappings and one of the arms of his beloved child’s dead body had been burned by a lighted candle that had fallen to them.32 Freud says the dream is striking because of its direct relation to a reality outside, making the father able to react as if he had been awake all the time. Then interpretation sets in for Freud; he needs to explain why the dream caused the delay in the father’s ability to react and why it was necessary. Firstly, even if only ‘real’ for a few moments, it fulfils the wish of the father, by transforming the dead child into a still living child. Secondly, it reveals the fact that the dumb reality of the child being dead cannot be overcome except in the fiction of a dream. But Freud is not satisfied with his own explanatory power. He is struck by the problem of why dream at all rather than wake up? He makes the suggestion that consciousness has a wish to undo itself. Consciousness desires to be blind to a violent reality. Jacques Lacan picks up on this story, pointing to the traumatics involved here. Sleeping makes the father miss the opportunity of being there at the right time at the right moment. He missed the encounter, and he was only able to pay attention belatedly. Waking up, only to find you missed it, causes trauma. To make this point clear, Cathy Caruth, from whom I took the reading of Freud and Lacan’s interpretations of the story of the father’s trauma, entitled her article ‘Traumatic Awakenings’. Caruth concludes that the trauma is something from which the father has not yet woken. Caruth further concludes that the waking up to face the trauma of having failed is an ‘ethical imperative of an awakening that has yet to occur’.33 Psychoanalytically-informed analysis of visual phenomena should be obliged to perform that kind of wakeup call. But it can seem as if analysis of this kind is only a dream or an awakening that has not yet occurred. None the less, at the core of the cogito Freud found an unconscious wish to fall asleep and dream away in the face of reality. Art may indeed be used in the service

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of staying asleep, and canonization may indeed be a way to do the job of putting its audience to sleep, while at the same time disguising the trauma of not being there to prevent the disaster, by evoking a dreamlike feeling of being in close contact with the very best of (Danish) art. The art in the canon might be seen as performing the role of the dead child, and the experts who choose the artworks might be seen as playing the role of the old watchman murmuring prayers before falling asleep. If I listen very hard, I might hear the voice of the art included in the canon whispering reproachfully to the Minister for Culture: ‘Father, don’t you see I’m burning?’ What if the father does not want to wake up, like the loving one in Freud’s story? Then he will never be able to react accordingly to save his dead child from being severely disfigured, and he will not even feel traumatized, since he never woke up to realize he missed out on the occasion. Father’s canon psychoanalyzed I suppose the Prime Minister had not read Freud the night before he came up with the idea of launching a war to change the culture of the society. But Freud did base his analysis of Civilisation and its Discontents on the question of why humans battle over culture at all. Freud writes that culture has to call up every reinforcement necessary in order to erect barriers against the aggressive instincts of human beings. Surely the Canon of the Arts fits all too well into this scheme, while there is no trace left of the discontent and mockery towards such attempts to stall the libido as those Freud mentions, when he writes that neurosis is caused by ideals imposed by a society on a subject unable to bear the renunciations demanded. The struggle between Eros and Thanathos is presumed to be silenced by measures no more efficient than those of a nursemaid seeking to mitigate between those giants with their lullaby about heaven that Freud describes.34 In Freud’s analysis culture is there to weaken aggression. Culture dismantles and guards aggression as a garrison during the siege of a city, making culture a faculty of the subject’s own interior will to hold at bay the destructive forces. Guilt and self-blame are the result of not having the character necessary to understand culture itself. Thus a Canon of the Arts is the perfect tool for filling in the gaps of consciousness that it itself produces. The Canon performs the job of being the super-ego of culture, and it calls for obedience and for ethics. Freud states that the ethics projected through the super-ego of culture is to serve a purpose not obtained by culture that has no ethical dimension, namely to put an end to the constitutional tendency towards aggression inherent in all mankind. But the cultural super-ego making claims for non-violent civil self-conduct has a major flaw. It does not question if it is at all possible for people to live up to the ideals it enforces upon them. It just assumes that the ego is capable of having perfect control of its desires. The call for order can produce a short-lived narcissistic bliss, but in the long run it will inevitably lead to nothing but aggression and the loss of love for culture. So, perhaps, the days of the Canon are numbered? In spite of all the criticism of canonization, the solid tradition of having a canon has not melted away. Some fundamental terms coming from Lacanian

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psychoanalysis might help us to understand why, by stating that installing a canon is like postulating the need of a paternal signifier, a non/nom-du-pére (Lacan) in order to avoid the engulfing of art and the viewer by the universal ‘mother’ of all art being as good as any other art. The position of the Symbolic Father is held up by the Minister for Culture, who ensures that the function of canonization is effectuated, and he launched it in order to control desire manifested by the Oedipus Complex. He ensured the possibility of performing a phallic signification. In the text following the declaration of the Canon we find the language spoken by the Imaginary Father, that is, all the reasons and thoughts why this or that artwork is worthy of the honour, and why the experts themselves are trustworthy in their judgements. The reason they gave was: ‘Only those works one of us burned [with desire] for, were admitted.’35 The since long-contested ‘love of art’ is here reinstalled, as though Bourdieu had never demolished this kind of argument in The Love of Art, written in 1969, stating that ‘… if the love of art is the clear mark of the chosen … museums [or canons] betray their true function, which is to reinforce for some the feeling of belonging and for others the feeling of exclusion’.36 Those who made the choices served as agents of the Real Father – they were the agents performing the symbolic castration a canon demands, and the Real Fathers also allow for there to be some uncertainty about who the ‘biological’ father is. Is it in the quality of the art itself, or is it only a matter of love and expertise, or is it the politician’s or whoever’s choice, anyway? The return of psychoanalysis? The ‘other’ of psychoanalysis could perhaps be said to be rationality, philosophical aesthetics, logic and mathematics, all leaving their mark on canonization, and all perfectly capable of performing analysis, but all also being close to being resistant to destructuralization. From a pragmatic point of view, the dangers of culture turning forgetting into a virtue and the arts into a matter of good taste can be exposed to its own fallacies by the tropes and concepts developed by psychoanalysis, as well as by Foucauldian theorists. The vanishing subject of knowledge is as threatened in Foucault’s analysis of force and knowledge as it is in the analysis of the image performed by Lacan or Freud. It is a positive potential for the postmodern condition for knowledge that it is no longer able to attribute absolute power to any methodology, be it feminism, psychoanalysis or Foucauldian tropings of history. We are bored by any kind of essentialism and very bored with any kind of banishment of ‘dirty’ analysis drawing on several conflicting approaches. Whatever the theoretical standpoint, any kind of uncanny returns of abject heroes or heroines repelled by men of good taste are welcomed by feminists, Foucauldians and psychoanalyticallyinformed intellectuals alike.37 We still have to test the efficiency of each approach by the strength of the argument and the insights revealed to us, not on behalf of a specific theory, but on behalf of the many layers of possible meaning inherent in the artwork and in the concepts we produce to test against the object.

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But we are now forced to analyze the desire for psychoanalysis and for tracing the currents of violence in culture, because the men of good taste are back in power supported by ‘the people’, who ‘tend toward identity and homogeneity internally while posing their difference from and excluding what remains outside of it’. The people are ‘prepared for sovereignty’. They are more than ready to turn those who form an ‘inconclusive constituent relation’ comforted with multiplicity, the so-called ‘Multitude’ of Hardt and Negri, into an endangered species.38 When the Danish government issued a Canon for the Arts, housing 12 immortal masterpieces of national art in each category, film, music, literature, architecture, the pictorial arts etc., it suddenly found itself armed with a most efficient weapon against psychologism or critical analysis of any kind. By infusing a kind of dialectical approach to this schism, I suppose that every time voices are raised to defend the assets of an aesthetics of good taste, the criteria for good art dependent on inner consistency, the timeless truth in painting, hierarchies and numbers, that is, every time a call for order is raised, psychoanalysis – as well as a set of Foucauldian notions – can be put to work in order to find the hidden uncanny as well as power relations. It could turn out to be the only weapons at hand, when nationalism comes to the fore exploiting all the criteria mentioned above for selection and promotion of its cause. The analysis itself will be made before the possible collapse of a PTSDstruck society, but society itself will only acknowledge it belatedly, when the sick structure has collapsed involuntarily due to weaknesses inherent to it. Whatever role a psychoanalytically-informed analysis of the contestations may possibly have had on the implosion and the understanding of it, is a matter of power, knowledge, and desire.

2 IN MINIATURE Trauma and Indigenous Identity in Colonial Canada Kristina Huneault

Imagine this: it is late on a Saturday evening in the April of 1805 and the candles are burning brightly in the windows of London’s Somerset House. Many of England’s most powerful and prestigious men have gathered together for the opening banquet of the annual Royal Academy exhibition. The Prince of Wales is in attendance, along with a string of dukes, marquisses, earls, lords, bishops, baronets, ambassadors and lesser luminaries. Among them is the unaccustomed and undoubtedly somewhat perplexing presence of Teyoninhokarawen, or John Norton: a 34-year-old Mohawk war chief from across the ocean, whose accent is Scottish, whose manners are gracious and whose conversation runs the gamut from the challenges of translating biblical texts to the question of whether the Mohawk should have full legal title to the lands granted them by the British Crown. Norton has come to London to secure this title and he is working the crowd, confident of his ability to charm. The popular novelist Walter Scott is clearly captivated, and Norton has had a personal assurance of assistance from William Wilberforce, the prominent anti-slavery parliamentarian.1 Here, warmly welcomed by the men who run an empire, he is optimistic of success. Perhaps, before he leaves, he takes a moment to visit the pictures. If so, he can hardly help but notice his own face looking back at him from among the dozens of miniature paintings on display (2.1). Jump forward now three decades: in a private home in the City of London, a visiting Ojibwe missionary named Kahkewaquonaby, or Peter Jones, poses for his portrait.2 A fastidious man, he wears the European clothing that he is now most comfortable in, and sits upright with his shoulders straight. The cold light of a late November day filters into the room, illuminating his face and the tiny ivory working surface of the miniaturist Matilda Jones (fl.1825–43).3 Recently arrived from the

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Mary Ann Knight, Captain Norton Teyoninhokar’awen, a Chief of the Mohawks, One of the Five Nations in Upper Canada, RA 1805, Watercolour on ivory, 9.2 × 7.3 cm (oval), Ottawa, Library and Archives Canada. Photo: Library and Archives Canada C-123841.

backwoods of Canada, the sitter is a far cry from the family members that the artist usually paints, for in spite of the coincidence of their shared last name, the two are not related. They do, however, share a religious faith. Peter Jones is a rising star of the Methodist missions and soon to become Canada’s first ordained Aboriginal minister. Possessed of the fervour of the convert and the energy of youth, he has persuaded his entire band to adopt Christianity and, along with it, English social organization and agriculture.4 His faith is both a profoundly personal choice and a highly politicized endeavour to secure land, education, and financial security for the Ojibwe. In pursuit of these latter goals, he has come to England on a fundraising tour. Matilda Jones’s brother has been among the first in their evangelical circle to

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befriend him, and the artist herself will soon act as intermediary in arrangements for Jones’s private audience with King William IV.5 Over the course of the coming months, she will paint two versions of her miniature. One (2.2) will be found, many decades later, amongst the papers of Peter Jones and his English wife Eliza. The other portrait (2.3) will be proudly exhibited by the artist in the 1832 Royal Academy exhibition. She will keep it in her possession for the rest of her life, a memento of a remarkable man.6

2.2

Matilda Jones, Kahkewaquonaby, Reverend Peter Jones, 1832, watercolour on ivory, 10.7 × 8.0 cm, Toronto, Victoria University Library, University of Toronto. Photo: Victoria University Library.

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Matilda Jones, Kahkewaquonaby, an Indian chief, 1831, watercolour on ivory, 11.3 × 8.7 cm, Ottawa, National Gallery of Canada. Photo: National Gallery of Canada.

Trauma and the possibility of mutuality The essays in this volume are tied together by their interest in the intersection of postcolonial critique, psychoanalysis and visual culture in the wake of trauma. Trauma is a term not often associated with the genteel art of miniature painting; certainly it seems a world (or at least an ocean) away from the polite social encounters I have just described. But the men who sat for these miniature portraits had come to England as a direct result of the trauma experienced by North American First Nations in the wake of colonization, and both men were survivors of terrible violence. Norton’s Cherokee father had been brought to Scotland as a child by a

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soldier in the British army that had razed his village and killed his family.7 Three decades later, this orphan’s son – John Norton – would desert that same army during a Canadian posting and gain adoption into the Mohawk nation, which had recently been dispossessed of its ancestral homelands. Though the Mohawk had fought as Britain’s staunchest allies in the American Revolutionary War, they were betrayed at the Treaty of Paris in 1783 when the boundary between Canada and the United States was drawn indiscriminately through their territory. Distrustful of the Americans, Mohawks south of the new border fled north, to Canada, where they were relocated on lands too small to sustain traditional hunting and fishing. Among other First Nations, the situation was worse. Acting under misapprehension of British intent and without a concept of private land ownership, the Ojibwe had begun surrendering their territory to the British Crown in the 1780s. By 1820, the entire ancestral lands of the Mississauga band that Peter Jones was born to had been reduced to 200 acres – less than one third of a square mile – over which the band had no firm title.8 The results were disastrous: animals were annihilated and along with them the food supply; imported diseases ran rampant among a population with no natural immunity; alcoholism followed on the heels of despair. In the decade preceding Jones’s birth, his mother’s band was decimated by fully one third.9 When Jones’s Welsh surveyor father stepped in to assume custody of the boy from his Mississauga mother, it was for fear that the child might otherwise die of starvation. Against this background of traumatic dispossession, art historical discussions of paintings of First Nations peoples have pointed to representation’s complicity with the ravages of colonialism. The historical trauma experienced by North America’s indigenous people is now understood to have been reinforced by colonial representational practices that denied Aboriginal subjects their individuality and entrenched them within brutalizing stereotypes.10 Rarely considered within the imagery of colonialism, however, are miniature paintings, such as those of Norton and Jones. These highly portable objects made easy ocean crossings and functioned to sustain personal and political ties across the vast spatial expanses of empire. Inevitably, many of their subjects were European colonizers: military personnel, administrators and emigrants to the colonies. But colonized subjects were also painted, and not infrequently. Indeed, fully half of the portraits of non-European sitters exhibited at the Royal Academy prior to 1840 were miniatures.11 A few titles will give their flavour: in 1788 a Portrait of Hussen Riza Khan, Prime Minister to the Nabob of Oude; in 1796 a Portrait of Wy, alias Brown, a Native of Owyhee [Hawaii]; in 1801 Portrait of Mizra Aboo Taleb Khan; in 1818 Portrait of Ràden Ràna Dipura, a Javanese Chief; in 1820 Shaik Mohamed, a Native of Bengal; and in 1838 Mustafa, an Egyptian Interpreter. The specificity of these titles is striking. While European artists conventionally adopted strategies of anonymity and blatant fictionalization in their portrayals of non-European subjects, these miniatures offer a precise and detailed recognition of individual identity. Their sitters are, by and large, neither denizens of some ‘Imaginary Orient’ nor prototypes for the ‘Imaginary Indian’;12 rather, they are men like Howqua, Senior Hong Merchant at Canton, China (RA 1831).

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It is difficult to know just what to make of this specificity. Did miniature portraiture depart from the reductive representational tactics that were so broadly useful to the colonial project? If so, is there something specific to the miniature format itself which, in the right circumstances, might assist painters to exceed the boundaries of objectification and move towards a genuine recognition of indigenous subjectivity? Some support for this possibility may be found in the scholarship of Ruth Phillips. Writing not about European miniature painting but about the tiny canoes, wigwams and birch-bark containers produced by Iroquois, Mi’kmaq and Anishnabe artisans for sale in the nineteenth-century tourist trade, Phillips highlights ‘the particular suitability of the miniature to transcultural exchange’, drawing on the insights of anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss and literary theorist Susan Stewart to remind us of the almost universal appeal of tiny versions of larger objects.13 In her consideration of the role of art in mediating relations between First Nations and settlers, Phillips emphasizes the special ability of the miniature to bridge cultural gaps by speaking to a shared sense of preciousness. And it is, indeed, just such a preciousness that marks out the miniature portrait, which was typically exchanged as a token of affection and esteem between family members, loved ones, or close friends. Of course, such optimism for the possibility of transcultural mutuality is necessarily tempered by the historical record. Given the relentless nineteenth-century encroachment on First Nations lands and the aggressive reduction of the cultural and symbolic space available to First Nations people, the aesthetic circumscription of indigenous subjectivity within the spaces of miniature portraiture carries the bitter aftertaste of historical aptness. There is, indeed, a rather grim fittingness at work in an art form that confined the recognition of indigenous selfhood to a few square inches of ivory, fragile and little-noticed; for space was the primary spoil in colonial conquest. As Peter Jones put it on a Scottish fundraising tour in 1845: ‘The Indian territories have been taken away till our possessions are now so small that you would almost require a magnifying glass to see them.’14 How apposite, then, that his own portrait should have been undertaken with the assistance of the magnifying glass that was so unfailingly part of the miniature painter’s equipage. I have argued elsewhere that British miniature painters were not always willing or able to acknowledge a shared subjectivity with their First Nations’ sitters.15 In the miniature portraits of John Norton and Peter Jones, however, viewers are presented with two strikingly individualized images. They are images in which the different personalities of the two men are apparent. At the time of their making, moreover, these objects betokened deep personal affections that bridged the chasm of colonial power inequities. In this chapter, I would like to draw out the implications of this back and forth movement between recognition and disavowal of First Nations subjectivity for an understanding of miniature portraiture in the colonial context. It is a movement that is paralleled in the acts and statements of the sitters themselves, as they balanced their own connection to and distance from the colonizing power. Such a dialectical process, I will suggest, is powerfully embodied in the format of the

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miniature painting itself – a format that is inherently possessed of a special connective potential at the same time that it is shot through with an impulse to detachment. This dual dynamic speaks in a poignant and powerful way to the challenges of subject formation in the context of First Nations trauma. The questions here are complex: how did miniature paintings work to negotiate the boundaries of the self at a time when the material foundations of First Nations identity had been taken or destroyed, and when survival itself seemed to hinge on assimilation to the way of life of an other whose rhetoric of friendship and alliance was upheld even in the face of betrayal and usurpation of resources? How, moreover, to make sense of that betrayal when, at the personal level, genuine bonds of esteem, friendship, and indeed love, existed between individuals of each culture? How, finally, even to comprehend identity when the realities of intermarriage had already begun to blur the boundaries between First Nations and British subject positions? Teyoninhokarawen – John Norton John Norton’s miniature (2.1) bears witness to the complexity of subject positioning in colonial Canada. After his desertion from the British military, the young ScotsCherokee found work first as a schoolteacher, then as a trader and a translator of indigenous languages. In this last capacity he came to the attention of Joseph Brant, an Iroquois chief and key British ally during the American revolutionary war. Norton was adopted into the Mohawk nation and elected as a war chief. He became Brant’s political lieutenant and in that capacity visited England in 1804–5, to work for First Nations’ sovereignty. In England, Norton skilfully employed a variety of opportunities for strategic acts of self-presentation, working both the public and the private corridors of power to win influence with those who ruled the British Empire. ‘There is a Mohawk Indian in town’, commented the poet Thomas Campbell, ‘who whoops the war-whoop to ladies in drawing-rooms, and is the reigning rage of the town this season’.16 Analyzing such reactions alongside Norton’s own writings, literary historian Timothy Fulford emphasizes the deliberate mix of alterity and familiarity that Norton deployed in furtherance of First Nations’ sovereignty: ‘Like the trickster-figure admired in many Indian cultures, Norton improvised different roles, mimicking Britain’s prejudiced versions of Indians then appearing, almost in the same moment, in white people’s guises – officer, gentleman, agricultural improver.’17 The combination was compelling: at the highpoint of Romantic sensibility, Norton’s calculated displays of Indianness captured the attention and imagination of his influential audiences, while his urbane manners, rational address and wide-ranging knowledge of British culture transformed fascination into respect. The visual cues of Norton’s miniature are entirely in keeping with this deliberate deployment of a dual cultural heritage. While Norton’s long face, narrow nose and curly sideburns read as European, his dress comes across as patently exotic. Boldly theatrical in tone, the miniature’s air of sartorial flourish might give rise to suspicions of artistic licence were it not for a description of the sitter’s appearance at a Cambridge soirée, where he regaled the men of Trinity College with an evening

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of Iroquois stories, songs and dances. A manuscript account of the event coincides closely with the dress painted by the professional London miniaturist Mary Ann Knight (1776–1851): a chintz handkerchief was bound about the head under which was a piece of red silk of the same texture as our officer’s sashes on one side was put an ostrich feather … Now to describe his shirt; it was made of blue Calico with small streaks of white in it … closely studded with silver broaches … Over the shirt upon state occasion is thrown a loose unornamented and unhemmed piece of cloth … There were depending from his ears large silver earrings, this was the only part of the dress that I would wish omitted, as it was the only article that reminded you of a barbarous, that is an uncivilized nation.18 Chintz, calico, military silk: while Norton’s clothing might have coded for Indianness, it was in fact heavily reliant on non-indigenous materials. The Mohawk had been trading with Europeans since the mid-sixteenth century and the silver jewellery so unpalatable to the eyes of the Cambridge gentleman was a significant currency within that exchange, symbolizing social status. After silver, the African ostrich feather was among the more prestigious trade goods available to chiefs in the Eastern woodlands, who used rare and elaborate items of dress to display their efficacy in negotiating with Europeans.19 Norton’s adoption of what appears to be a British military collar conveys a clear understanding of the forces that increasingly called the shots in that relationship, but his alteration of European military dress according to Mohawk conventions gives equally clear notice of his determination to shape the process of cultural contact. Self-possessed and worldly, Norton looks out from the miniature, his watchful but heavily lidded eyes suggesting an alert intelligence behind a veneer of sleepy complaisance. A smile plays at the corners of his mouth and hints at a knowledge shared but not spoken of. There is a slight suspicion of irony, a stronger impression of decisiveness and an air of acumen entirely befitting a man whose trip to England was, in effect, a savvily attempted end run around Canadian colonial administrators. Indeed, Norton’s portrait can readily be understood as a facet of this larger diplomatic campaign, for it brought with it opportunities to deepen political contacts. Its exhibition at the Royal Academy brought Norton into contact with key government ministers and public opinion makers, including the Earl of Camden and Lord Castlereagh.20 As the past and current Secretaries of State for War and the Colonies, both men would take an active interest in Norton’s mission, and Camden in particular would prove to be an invaluable connection, instructing the Lieutenant Governor of Upper Canada to look into Mohawk land claims, and working to bring the matter before the Privy Council.21 Norton’s friends and supporters in England were men and women who combined the intellectual curiosity of the Enlightenment with a keen sense of civic responsibility: men like the Quaker businessman Robert Barclay, and members of the evangelical Clapham Sect of Anglican social reformers such as William Wilberforce,

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as well as Zachary Macaulay, an advocate of colonial reform, and Lord Teignmouth, the newly elected president of the British and Foreign Bible Society. Indeed, the society’s first biblical translation – of the Gospel of St John into Mohawk – would be undertaken by Norton, who became fast friends with society secretary John Owen. After Norton’s departure from England the two men corresponded warmly for more than a decade, and their letters draw out another aspect of the miniature’s function, for it is clear that the men’s regard for each other was not exclusively a function of the colonizing role that the British and Foreign Bible Society all too evidently represented. Owen also valued Norton as a friend, and cherished his miniature portrait as the most tangible marker of the friendship available to him, going so far as to ask the initial owner of the painting if she would consent to have it copied so that he might keep the original. Owen’s recorded thanks for this gift (which were fulsome even by nineteenth-century standards) indicate his genuine pleasure in it.22 In her work on eighteenth-century American miniatures, Anne Verplanck has persuasively delineated how the commissioning, exchange and recognition of these material possessions served to mediate and reinforce personal friendships and social networks of belonging.23 In London, Norton’s miniature was closely tied up with precisely such a network, and the artist who painted him, Mary Ann Knight, would later execute miniatures of other members of Norton’s social circle, including Owen himself, William Wilberforce’s wife and Robert Barclay’s cousins.24 The significance of this network was both personal and political. For Norton, the painting presented another opportunity to perform the public identity that he so adroitly deployed in furtherance of First Nations interests. At the same time, the affective history of friendship and attachment that underlies the miniature testifies to its role as an agent of mutual connection. Peter Jones – Kahkewaquonaby For Peter Jones, such mutuality would deepen to the point of love and marriage. Indeed, the manufacture and exchange of portraits was an integral part of Jones’s courtship. Jones met Eliza Field, his future wife, during his English sojourn, and the exercise of taking his likeness provided a blameless opportunity to spend time with him. Once Jones had returned to Canada, his portraits helped to keep him constantly in mind while Field worked to convince her reluctant parents to consent to their unorthodox union. Her fondest possession at this time was a likeness of Jones done by her own hand, and she wrote frequently in her diary of this and other images of him, noting their creation, refinement, adornment and display amongst her friends.25 In speaking of the portraits, Field’s language was emotive: ‘Miss Brown called with my loved one’s likeness,’ she recorded plaintively. ‘I welcomed it, but ah! It was not he.’ Or again: ‘Saw my dear love’s likeness but it would not speak.’26 Lonely, Field visited the miniaturist William Gush (active 1833–74) who had previously painted her fiancé, and commissioned her own likeness to send to him.27 Like his wife, Peter Jones was himself sensitive to the affective ties that portraits could sustain, and his letters home from a subsequent British trip are full of references to them: first to a photograph of himself and then to a painting that his

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friend and supporter John Dunlop was commissioning.28 Copies of each were made as gifts for Jones’s family in Canada, and in return Eliza embroidered Dunlop a pair of slippers. While the letters’ account of this exchange is tinged with the excessive deference that would characterize so many of his dealings with the British, Jones’s genuine affection towards his Scottish supporter is also apparent, and Peter and Eliza would eventually give one of their sons the middle name of Dunlop.29 The interpretive balance between personal affection and social power is difficult to strike, and I do not seek to obscure behind a rosy veil of friendship the very real inequalities that thwarted genuine closeness between Europeans and First Nations. The portraits of Jones were enmeshed in a web of mediations that served a variety of purposes, not all of them predicated on reciprocity. What are we to make, for example, of this entry in Jones’s diary: ‘Early in the morning a young gentleman, a Mr Curlock, commenced taking my portrait for his own collection’?30 Nineteenthcentury European images of Aboriginal people were often the product of one-sided encounters that secured colonial power through the pictorial assertion of knowledge, and while Mr Curlock’s identity is now lost to history, the whiff of the ethnographic specimen collector is clearly in the air. The affective history of the 1832 miniature (2.2) is also ambivalent. Six years after the painting was made, on a visit back to England, Eliza Field Jones cemented its status as one half of a marriage portrait by employing the same artist to execute a companion likeness of herself and framing the work identically (2.4). The initial reason for the commissioning of the 1832 miniature is uncertain, however, and the fact that the image was subsequently taken as the basis for one in a series of engraved portraits of prominent Methodist ministers raises the possibility that this copy of the original miniature may have been executed with this purpose in mind. In its engraved version, the miniature of Peter Jones was used to proselytize among First Nations peoples in Canada and was published in the pages of the WesleyanMethodist Magazine, where it signalled the church’s missionary success.31 The same church would later be instrumental in the systematic traumatization of First Nations children through the residential school system that forcibly separated families, forbid the use of indigenous languages, worked to destroy First Nations culture, and actively fostered the physical, psychological, and sexual abuse of generations of First Nations people. Iconographically, the miniature was well suited to the church’s mission to acculturate, then assimilate, First Nations people. Jones’s dual cultural heritage is didactically proclaimed: around his waist he wears a finger-woven sash of native origin; around his neck hangs a medal of King George III. Despite this nominal balance between indigenous and English elements, however, the whole is dominated by the pictorial hegemony of the black European topcoat. Whereas John Norton’s silver jewellery had marked an exchange between trading partners, Jones’s silver medal was granted to him along with a Union Jack by the Indian Department; it confirmed his status as chief and signalled both loyalty to the Crown and the British right of intervention in First Nations governance.32 And while Norton’s blanket of brooches remains unequivocally on the surface of his shirt, the medal’s mobilization of a

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Matilda Jones, Eliza Field Jones, 1837, watercolour on ivory, 10.3 × 7.2 cm, Toronto, Victoria University Library, University of Toronto. Photo: Victoria University Library.

kind of miniature-within-a-miniature motif creates a mise-en-abyme, thus fostering an interiority that instates the body of the English king at the very heart of the sitter.33 Talk of hearts and bodies here is no mere rhetorical convenience – or at least it is not my own – for Peter Jones publicly referred to the chiefs’ medals as ‘their hearts’.34 Then there is the background. Again, the message of dual cultural heritage is explicit: on the left side of the figure a settler’s log cabin, on the right a wigwam. The only surprise is that the two vignettes are not reversed so as to read from left to right in an evolutionary narrative of acculturation. Such a narrative is apparent, however, in the two different versions of the miniature itself – the 1831 original (2.3) and the

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1832 copy (2.2). Comparing the two portraits, Jones’s biographer, Donald Smith, asserts that Jones looks more European in the later ivory.35 He certainly seems more proper. A generous word would be decorous, a less forgiving one would be domesticated. Beyond the obvious neatening of the hair, the whole body has been slightly turned to the front: made direct, open and decent. Consider the difference in the mouths: the same full lips appear in both, but where the 1831 version is relaxed in an almost voluptuous curl, the smile in the 1832 miniature is tighter, more uniform. Other differences are harder to identify, but their effect is nonetheless pronounced: a shadow at the base of the chin in the copy, for example, suggests a forward tilt of the head, just slightly more deferential. The Peter Jones of 1831 is Romantic, almost dashing; the Peter Jones of 1832, priggish and didactic. To push the contrast into caricature: swashbuckler and schoolteacher. The creeping tightness in the 1832 miniature is doubtless partly the product of its status as a copy, yet it is this version of Jones that appears on the cover of his biography, and the choice is not unjust, for it is this more wooden Jones who emerges from the pages of biography and archives alike: the Jones who met his self-described ‘carnal mind’ with a rigid daily schedule of prayer and self-denial; the Jones whose insistence on English discipline sparked a rebellion among Ojibwe parents who refused to permit corporal punishment of their children in school; the Jones who upheld private land ownership in the face of its devastation of the Ojibwe nation.36 This is the Jones whose 1832 address to King William IV was framed in the heartbreaking language of the assimilated: When the great Spirit found us, we had no fields, no houses, no Cattle, and were altogether destitute of the comforts of this life, but since our eyes have been opened to see this good way, we have been very anxious to have lands to cultivate, to have houses to live in, and to enjoy all the blessings & comforts that our white Brethrens enjoy, and to live like the good white farmers.37 Comparing the 1832 miniature to the 1804/5 portrait of Norton, the sitters’ very different attitudes towards their transcultural positions are in evidence. Whereas John Norton embraced his First Nations identity abroad, Jones, by contrast, would grow to despise his ‘odious Indian Costume’, which he donned reluctantly in order to raise funds during his ‘begging’ tours.38 Both men were Christians and believed that adaptation to European settlement and agriculture was inevitable, but Norton was to grow less and less sanguine about its possible benefits to First Nations. ‘Unfortunately’, he wrote in the margins of a letter from the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, ‘the approach of Christian Settlements destroys the temper of mind necessary to receive the seeds of Christian morality … [and] though it does not civilize yet it certainly subjugates to subserviency and vice the wildest of the tribes’.39 There are differing interpretations of the place Norton occupied on the transcultural spectrum between Briton and Indian, and doubtless that position changed over the course of Norton’s life. Historian Timothy Willig labels Norton’s

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agrarian, Christian vision for ‘civilizing’ the Mohawk as patently acculturationist and Carl Benn describes him as an anglophile, but both men recognize that these characterizations are complicated by Norton’s ‘deep commitment to indigenous concerns’ and especially by his championing of First Nations sovereignty.40 ‘The more John Norton spoke of establishing a seminary and agricultural missions’, Willig writes, ‘the more he envisioned a new, politically independent Native community, one distant from British influence’.41 Such a stance, though it might appear paradoxical, is in keeping with the strategic deployment of transcultural identity that Timothy Fulford recognizes in Norton’s writing. Examining the text of Norton’s extensive travel journal, Fulford explores the ways in which Norton enlisted British cultural and aesthetic codes only to use them in order to undermine the racial and political loyalties that they conventionally supported.42 Certainly, there is a defiance to British authority in this man who deserted the army in his youth and waged diplomatic warfare with the Indian Department in his maturity. By contrast, Jones more often sought to subject himself and others to a higher power; the concepts of sin and redemption were ones he rode hard in his sermons and he opposed consensus governance as time-consuming and old-fashioned. Where Norton had a vision of pan-Indian federation, Jones was caught up against his will in divisive sectarian arguments within Canadian Methodism. Where Norton urged chiefs to use the term Brothers, not Father, in their address to the English, Jones had largely given up the battle. It is hard not to prefer Norton, but such a comparison is somewhat unfair, for it does not account for the tremendous differences in the two men’s situations. Temporally, Norton and Jones lived on different ends of the War of 1812 – a war in which First Nations had been the only undeniable losers, as their strategic position within the balance of power was neutralized by the stabilization of North America’s geopolitical boundaries. Geographically, the two men had been born on opposite sides of the ocean. Raised and educated in Scotland, Norton’s eagerness to abandon his European identification was doubtless born partly of his confidence in its fundamental inalienability. Jones had no such confidence; his formative years had been spent amongst the Ojibwe, and his forced acclimatization to European culture came late. At roughly the same age that John Norton was able to shed the controls of the British Army and the education system in favour of a more independent life, Peter Jones was pushed in the opposite direction by threat of starvation. Living with his father, the 16-year-old boy received a crash course in cultural indoctrination. He was baptized, educated to read and write English and, above all, taught to value private property. In short, whereas John Norton had become Teyoninhokarawen, Kahkewaquonaby became Peter Jones. The message of assimilation that Augustus Jones drummed into his children was mixed with constant reminders of the ultimate impossibility of that goal, however. On the death of Peter’s half-sister, Elizabeth, his father wrote to him in fond remembrance of the child: ‘She used to ask am I English we said No, What am I then? You are a little Indian Girl, She would say O, I wish I was English they are a fine people.’43 Like her brother, Elizabeth was of mixed parentage, but in

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nineteenth-century Canada attempts to pull these identities together into a truly transcultural amalgam were increasingly beset by almost insurmountable difficulties. In Peter Jones’s miniature, the strained appearance of the portrait and the agonistic nature of its iconography reveal the tremendous price that the dual subject was forced to pay. The sense of Peter Jones that emerges from his writings and his biography is of a man who held himself together through force of will, prayer, and discipline, but the essentially fragmented nature of his subject position emerges in representation. It does so most clearly in the engraved version of Matilda Jones’s miniature (2.5). Below the image, the sitter’s two names are inscribed: The Rev. Peter Jones and Kahkewaquonaby. Both names have the appearance of signatures, but the handwriting is completely different: one a flowing, forward-slanted hand, the other a harsher script that runs straight up and down. Like Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, the Reverend Peter Jones and the Indian Kahkewaquonaby were irrevocably divided, even at the very points – name and signature – that have, historically, served as markers of identity. Transitional objects – translational objects The miniature portraits of John Norton and Peter Jones thus stand in a complex relation to the sharing and crossing of boundaries during a period of particular flux and re-stabilization in North America’s history. In both the public domain of geopolitical power and social organization, and the private sphere of friendship and love, these portrait objects mediated between subject positions. And while the paintings were undoubtedly testimony to heartfelt affective connections, they also served a colonizing culture’s pressing need for symbolic representations of its global hegemony. There is, then, a contradictory dynamic at play here. While the miniatures’ histories speak of attachment between individuals and a genuine recognition of First Nations selfhood, the paintings are also implicated in broader historical forces that worked to deny the material foundations of indigenous subjectivity, reinstating a dominant logic of Otherness. This dual thrust of connection and detachment between self and other is more than an historical peculiarity of the Norton and Jones portraits. It is also characteristic of miniature portraiture more generally. At issue here are the phenomenological effects that miniature paintings engender, for these are inherently caught between intimacy and distance. On one hand, the intimacy of the miniature is palpable. Its intimate aesthetic space is closely allied to the body; to hold a portrait miniature in one’s hand, to peer intently at its polished surface, to lower one’s head and enter its world, is to be drawn into an intensely interior space that intrinsically mitigates against the detached and objectifying perspective of the colonial gaze. As the hand becomes the measure of the miniature, scale creates a link with the body that reinforces the call to intersubjectivity, tying viewer and sitter together in an unusually proximate relation. The preciousness of the little combines with the affective eloquence of the body to endow the represented face with a special intensity of appeal, and through this appeal the miniature portrait speaks, however silently, of connection. On the other hand, however, the miniature’s engrossing material presence is multiply undermined

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T.A. Dean (after Matilda Jones), Kahkewaquonaby Peter Jones Missionary to the Chippeway Indians, 1833, engraving, 11.4 × 8.8 cm (image), Ottawa, Library and Archives Canada. Photo: Library and Archives Canada, e002282935.

– not only by the culture of physical separation that occasioned nineteenth-century miniatures (through wars, emigration, and mercantile expansion) but also by the position of transcendence that viewers assume in relation to them. Beholders tower over the tiny objects, dominating them physically, and the effect of this is to underline viewers’ separation from the little world that so persuasively draws them towards it.44 Like the fairytale appeal of Thumbelina’s walnut-shell cradle and rosepetal blanket, the attractive power of the miniature is matched only by the poignancy of its inaccessibility. Thus, through a dialectical play of proximity and distance, the miniature induces a bittersweet recognition of boundaries. The effect is reinforced by the physical frame or casing that delimits the object’s edges and retains an assertive presence within the

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beholder’s field of vision. In the case of portraiture, these boundaries are rehearsed at the level of the subject. We can come infinitely close to the other individual that the miniature portrait represents, but always remain separate, differentiated. Marcia Pointon does the dynamic justice when she writes that miniature portrait objects are ‘historically, quintessentially, about the oscillation between self and other’.45 In elaborating the implications of this insight with respect to the structures of subjectivity, Pointon skilfully draws out the miniature’s status as a transitional object – that is, something that affirms the position of the subject by insisting that ‘its bearer is at one and the same time socially attached and individually separate’.46 Considered as transitional objects, miniature portraits function as participants in the delicate dialectic between selfhood and otherness that is so central to the formation of the subject. The miniature portraits of John Norton and Peter Jones present a persuasive case for extending Pointon’s insight from the sphere of the viewer (or bearer) to that of the sitters themselves. Taken within their subjects’ colonial context, I would further propose that these miniatures are not only transitional objects, but also translational ones. Indeed the two terms may be mapped onto each other, as the attachment and separation negotiated by the transitional object are reconfigured through translation into politicized relations of sameness and difference. Consider that John Norton and Peter Jones were both translators. Indeed, it was as an interpreter working for the Indian Department that Norton had become Brant’s strong ally. Translation, too, was at the heart of Jones’s missionary work, and his renditions of English hymns into Ojibwe were central to religious life among Mississauga Christians. Both men translated parts of the Gospels for the British and Foreign Bible Society. In effecting such linguistic conversions, Norton and Jones were participants in one of the most complex practices of intercultural contact. To translate a text from one language to another is to partake in an intimate encounter with a form of linguistic alterity that asks simultaneously to be recognized on its own terms (as separate) and to be rendered comprehensible in the terms of another (attached). It is a potentially paradoxical position, and postcolonial theorists have emphasized different aspects of the directional lines of force that operate in translation. For social anthropologist Vicente Rafael, translation’s suppression of difference has made it an ‘indispensable channel of imperial conquest and occupation’.47 Rafael emphasizes translation’s subordination of the speaker’s words to the codes and structures of the target language; one’s thoughts and actions are reshaped ‘in accordance with accepted forms’, and in exchange for this submission, ‘one gets back the other’s acknowledgment of the value of one’s words and behaviour. In this way, one finds for oneself a place on the social map’.48 A very different perspective on the translational encounter is offered by Gayatri Spivak, however. While Spivak preserves submission and recognition as the reciprocal axes of translation’s social map, she suggests that the surrender involved in a skilful translation is not only that of the source statement to the codes of the target language, but of the translator too (as agent of the target language) to the rhythms and nuances of the source. That source, Spivak points out, demands recognition in its full

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complexity, and the untranslatable quality that every language preserves functions in resistance to attempts to transform it.49 Thus, in the intimacy of translation, efforts to achieve sameness are unavoidably underwritten and undermined by awareness of the unassimilable difference that remains between texts. John Norton delighted in precisely such difference and turned it to his advantage, whooping the war whoop with a playful sophistication far removed from Jones’s agonized moralism. Yet Norton’s strategy, too, had its limitations, and to the extent that he emphasized his indigenous credentials, Norton was eventually caught in the snares of the rigid separation of cultural identities that was so central to colonial ideology (no matter how far removed it was from the realities of colonial practice). On what seemed to be the verge of Norton’s success in London, letters arrived from Canada calling attention to his Scottish upbringing and parentage (his mother was a maidservant from Fife). However wrongly, Norton’s claims to represent the Mohawk people were dismissed as fraudulent.50 Norton was an impostor, Canadian officials insisted, and from that moment the very transcultural identity that had hitherto served him so well became the grounds for his undoing. Ultimately, neither John Norton nor Peter Jones achieved their goals. The men and the cultures they represented foundered on opposing shoals of attachment and distinction, sameness and difference. But though resolution effectively exceeded their grasp, the participants in the Canadian encounter were fully cognizant of the nature of the challenge. That they understood it in terms not so very different from those I have used here is suggested by the metaphors that structured the earliest treaty between First Nations and European settlers. Dating from the late seventeenth century, the treaty was dedicated to establishing the tenets of friendship and peaceable coexistence between peoples, and it was effected through the assistance of two visual images. For the Onkwehonweh, or ‘the People’ of the Iroquois confederacy, the image was that of Kaswentha, a wampum belt with two rows of purple shells symbolizing two boats, one Native and one newcomer, each travelling side by side in mutual respect and non-interference.51 For the Dutch, and the English who followed them, the symbol was the Covenant Chain: a chain first of rope, then of iron, and finally of silver that bound the two peoples together in bonds that could neither break nor rust. Where Kaswentha offers the harmony of parallel lines that never cross, the Covenant Chain represents the rewards but also the perils of lives bound inextricably together. Each culture accepted the other’s symbolism, but the images themselves represent very different ways of conceiving the terms of a relation between self and other. The first is based on separation and distinction, the second on connection and unity. The wampum’s clarion call is for mutual respect, dignity, and integrity, but it is based on a clarity of identity that was impossible to maintain in a post-contact world. The chain captures the interconnectedness of peoples, whether social, economic, political or psychological, but it remains a potential instrument of bondage and coercion. Trouble was unavoidable from the beginning. One version of Iroquois oral history has it thus:

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The whiteman said, ‘What will happen supposing your people will like to go into my vessel?’ The On-kwe-hon-weh replied, ‘If this happens, then they will have to be guided by my Canoe’ … The whiteman said, ‘What will happen if any of your people may someday want to have one foot in each of the boats that we placed parallel?’ The Onkwe-hon-weh replied, ‘If this so happens that my people may wish to have their feet in each of the two boats, there will be a high wind and the boats will separate and the person that has his feet in each of the boats shall fall between the boats; and there is no living soul who will be able to bring him back to the right way given by the Creator, but only one: the Creator himself ’.52 John Norton and Peter Jones, Teyoninhokarawen and Kahkewaquonaby, exemplify this precarious position. As realists they recognized the impossibility of cultural isolation; as idealists they refused to link that recognition to resignation, and both men worked to shape the fortunes of their nations. Each man’s work assumed a different orientation: for Norton, raised and educated as a European, the recognition of the rights and claims of difference would be paramount; for Jones, given no choice but to assimilate into the regime of his father’s European life, the emphasis would be on belonging and sameness. Considered together, the two men might thus be taken to embody opposite approaches to colonial coexistence, and their represented portraits go some way to confirming this: Norton, self-confidently arrayed in Mohawk dress; Jones, deferential in a frock coat. Yet both men were translators, and their miniatures – when they are considered as miniatures – may both be situated in the transitional space of intersubjectivity that complicates such clear divisions. As transitional and translational objects, shuttling back and forth between self and other, Norton’s and Jones’s portraits each play out the miniature’s special phenomenological dialectic of connection and detachment. In the end, the works are most eloquently a negotiation of this dialectic. Taken together, these miniature portraits may be understood as optimistic assertions of belief: that it will someday be possible to live according to the principles of both Kaswentha and the Covenant Chain; that connection can be made without loss of autonomy; that belonging may be achieved without subservience. Living in the midst of traumatic colonial violence, neither man was fully able to realize this vision, and it remains for us to determine whether, and how, the belief can be justified. Acknowledgements I have been fortunate in the support of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and the Fonds québécois de la recherche sur la société et la culture, and more fortunate still in my colleagues, students and friends. My warmest thanks are due to Carl Benn, David Capell, Brian Foss, Avery Larose, Ruth Phillips, Johanne Sloan and Donald Smith. Earlier versions of this chapter have previously been published as ‘Miniature Objects of Cultural Covenant: Portraits and First Nations Sitters in British North America’, RACAR: Revue d’art canadienne/Canadian Art Review 30/1–2 (2005), pp. 87–100, and as ‘Miniature Paintings as Transcultural

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Objects? The John Norton and Peter Jones Portraits’, in J. Codell (ed.), Transculturation in British Art, 1770–1930 (Aldershot and Burlington: Ashgate, 2012), pp. 39–58.

3 THE ‘IRISH HOLOCAUST’ Historical Trauma and the Commemoration of the Famine Emily Mark-FitzGerald

For well over a century the horror of the event and the guilt of the survivors meant that the Famine was rarely represented visually. Only now is it possible to claim the dead as ours …1 In the mid-1990s, Irish and Irish diasporic communities worldwide marked the 150th anniversary of the Great Famine of 1845–50. Though Ireland is by no means a stranger to the panegyrics of national commemoration, the occasion of the Famine’s anniversary revealed a remarkable shift in public attitudes towards this conflicted and deeply destructive period of Irish history. Prior to the 1990s memory boom the Famine had only rarely formed the subject of any kind of commemorative or memorial activity, with the exception of isolated, scattered efforts across Ireland and the diaspora. Aside from the commissioning of a volume of historical essays (not published until 19562) and the Irish Folklore Commission Famine survey undertaken from 1944–45, the 100th anniversary of the Famine in the 1940s passed in Ireland without widespread official or popular acknowledgment. Although the lack of response to the Famine centenary has since drawn the opprobrium of some 1990s commentators, it is not altogether surprising that the newly emergent, economically precarious independent state seemed disinclined to commemorate a devastating event whose dimensions were still not fully understood.3 Ireland’s heavy economic reliance on the United Kingdom at the time probably discouraged calls for national commemorations; as the former Minister of State Avril Doyle recently noted, ‘I’m sure there wouldn’t have been too many of them that would have wanted to rattle the cage’.4 Indeed severe food shortages experienced in Ireland in 1946 and 1947 rendered famine a subject very close to the bone, as debates raged in the Dáil over exportation of goods from Ireland to a war-torn Europe.5 If the St Patrick’s Day edition of the American magazine Collier’s in 1951 is any indication – its cover emblazoned ‘Ireland Today: From Great Famine to Great Future’ – there existed considerable feeling that improvements to Ireland’s economic and political condition

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could only be achieved through a forward-looking confidence – a future where the Famine past held little relevance. If the government made for an unlikely instigator of centenary commemorations, what of the general public? Here too little evidence of activity can be found: no pageants, parades, memorials or other forms of commemoration appeared. The absence of extensive commemorative activity at the popular level has since frequently been interpreted as reluctance or overt avoidance of deep and painful Famine memories, as the elderly alive during the 1940s were often separated by only a generation or two from direct experiences of the Famine. However, the imprecise nature of the Famine itself – its lack of central characters, key dates, or names to be celebrated – sat awkwardly with Irish traditions of both national and popular commemoration. In any case the very complex genealogy of those who suffered or benefited from the Famine’s effects made a totalizing narrative of the Famine far more unlikely. In contrast, the 50th anniversary of the 1916 Rising in 1966 was celebrated with great fanfare and pageantry both nationally and locally; not only was the commemorative subject (a revolutionary gesture) more innately suited to traditional forms of celebration and heroic mythologizing, its ultimate purpose (a celebration of nascent nationhood) elided more comfortably with the ideological objectives of the de Valera government.6 Yet what is important to distil from the example of the 1940s is that the chronological fact of a commemorative anniversary does not in itself constitute the sole precondition for stimulating widespread interest in history or memory. Rather, commemoration must be understood as a collective act tightly wrapped in its contemporaneous social fabric, the unravelling of which will no doubt reveal more than speculative retrospective moralizing. If the Ireland of today would have seemed unrecognizable to the 1940s generation, so too would its methods of commemoration: in retrospect Cormac Ó Gráda’s description of a 1990s ‘famine fever’ that swept the country seems an accurate diagnosis.7 In a complete reversal of the muted Famine centenary, the 1990s witnessed an explosion of Famine historical writing and commemorative activities: on the media front, Cathal Póirtéir’s 16-part RTÉ radio series Famine Echoes (broadcast in 1995) did much to keep Famine history alive in the popular consciousness, along with numerous television documentaries and dramas broadcast on Famine subjects during the commemorative period and the plethora of one-off theatrical events, lectures, poetry readings, musical performances, exhibitions and other activities carried out locally and nationally.8 Opportunities for consumption of Famine commemorative products were in abundant supply, ranging from the serious (academic tomes of all varieties), to the popular (Kerby Miller’s pop-up history book/memoir Journey of Hope9 is but one example), to works for children (How I Survived the Irish Famine10 among many others), to kitsch mementoes (such as the Irish Independent’s offer of limited edition emigrant collector dolls for £795 per pair11). Indeed the erection of memorials to the Famine across Ireland and the diaspora proved a ‘monumental’ undertaking in its own right: more than 100 public memorials have been unveiled in the last 15 years in Ireland, Northern Ireland, England, Scotland, Wales, Canada, the United States and Australia, ranging from grassroots

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community-led commemorations to complex multimillion-dollar public artworks. No small amounts of energy or resources have been expended on these memorials: the number and geographical spread of Famine monuments has expanded rapidly since the 1990s and continues to generate new commissions, especially across the Irish diaspora. In 2002 Brian Tolle’s $5 million Irish Hunger Memorial was unveiled in Lower Manhattan, just blocks from the World Trade Center Site; in 2003 Glenna Goodacre’s $3 million Irish Memorial unveiled in Philadelphia in a prime location along the city’s historic waterfront; and in July 2007 the $3.5 million Ireland Park opened to great fanfare in Toronto. As the most visible legacy of the anniversary, these public Famine monuments reflect a plurality of Famine memory discourses – witnesses to the clash of history and memory articulated through the visual language of commemoration, and signposts along the search for an adequate representational approach to Famine: In the case of the Famine, it is the event itself which eludes definition. There is no single clear consensus as to what constituted the Famine … there are no framing texts; there is no ceremonial beginning, no ceremonial ending … Like all past events the Famine is primarily a retrospective textual creation. The starvation, the emigration, and the disease epidemics of the late 1840s have become ‘the Famine’ because it was possible to inscribe those disparate, but interrelated events in a relatively cohesive narrative. For those of us born after the event, the representation has become the reality.12 Yet undoubtedly one of the dominant discursive paradigms of the Famine to emerge during the 1990s was (and is) the inscription of the Irish Famine experience within notions of psychological and historical trauma, postmemory and modes of traumatic remembering. The failure of the 1940s generation to foreground the Famine anniversary was increasingly characterized as ‘silence’, ‘repression’, or ‘amnesia’ in the wake of a profoundly traumatic cultural memory. Evidence of this shift includes the development of the ‘Famine curriculum’ in the US that teaches the Famine alongside the Holocaust and African American slavery, the revival of genocidal arguments with respect to British culpability for the Famine and the publication of personal Famine memory narratives ensconced in the language of post-traumatic stress disorder. Trauma, silence, shame, guilt, therapy and healing: how and why has the Famine, an event over 150 years in the past, come to be understood in such terms? Can we truly speak of a ‘traumatic paradigm’13 guiding the efforts of communities to remember and ‘work through’ the suppressed memory of Famine, or are we witnessing, as Roy Foster has argued, ‘the intersection of the affirmation of personal identity with the epic’?14 This chapter will review the characterization of Famine trauma that appeared in the popular and academic press around the time of the anniversary and its correspondence with the phenomenon of sculptural commemoration, arguing that the rapid monumentalization of Famine in recent history – in both

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phenomenological and formal terms – unequivocally demonstrates the burgeoning influence of traumatic interpretative frameworks. In the early 1990s a number of factors combined to propel Famine remembrance to the top of Irish and diasporic agendas. The first was its revival within the academy, benefiting from the shifts which occurred within Irish historical practice in the aftermath of the revisionism controversy of the 1970s and 1980s, as well as from renewed interest in the subject outside of Ireland and increasing interdisciplinary interest from sociology, economics, archaeology, cultural and literary studies; more books have been published on the Famine since 1990 than in all previous years combined. The second factor was the new emphasis given to relationships between Ireland and its diaspora, epitomised by Mary Robinson’s address to the Houses of the Oireachtas in 199515 and the subsequent focus on the Irish immigrant diaspora as the major repository of Famine memory and sorrow. Finally, pressing issues of Third World famine and debt relief (strongly championed by Robinson at home and abroad) created for many the moral imperative to address contemporary Famine, derived from a sense of historical responsibility and sympathetic suffering. Indeed in Ireland the first moves to commemorate the Famine were initiated not by government agencies but by the development aid organizations Action from Ireland and Concern, who began their well-known ‘Famine Walks’ in 1988 and were first off the block with four Famine monuments erected in 1994, heavily layered with visual and textual references to social justice and contemporary Famine issues (3.1).

3.1

Famine Memorial, 1994, Swinford, Co. Mayo. Erected by Action from Ireland.

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This context must be understood as the backdrop of the commemoration, influencing why in the 1990s the Famine received millions of private and government commemorative pounds and dollars, while the deaths of Daniel O’Connell and Thomas Davis, as Roy Foster has observed, all passed the 150th mark during the same period with little public reaction or note.16 The convergence of these factors also goes some way towards explaining how the Famine increasingly came to be understood as an instance of historical trauma which contemporary society was uniquely positioned to address, as Ireland entered into the most pronounced period of economic growth in its history during the mid-1990s: In Ireland, for example, the dislocations produced by rapid economic growth may help explain the recent surge of interest in the traumatic experience of the 1840s famine … there remains a demand for some historical continuity, a collective identity rooted in a distinctive ‘Irish’ past; and the Famine appeared to many to offer a focus that was at once catastrophic, local, diasporic and relevant to the modern world.17 Viewed from a wider frame of reference, the positioning of Famine memory within the discourse of historical trauma forms part of a much larger and widespread movement (both academic and popular) to transfer the symptomology, diagnosis and therapy of clinical trauma to the historical and cultural realm. Nevertheless, as the work of Ruth Leys and Dominick LaCapra has demonstrated,18 trauma remains a deeply contestable and politically constituted epistemology whose utilities in the case of Famine bear close scrutiny. The ascendancy of trauma theory as hermeneutic is in plentiful evidence across the humanities, most influentially in the literary criticism of Cathy Caruth and Marianne Hirsch.19 Caruth’s articulation of trauma merges neurobiology and theories of language and representation in an effort to proclaim the centrality of traumatic experience to history, insisting that trauma remains an essentially unrepresentable, repressed episode that divides us from the past. Her emphasis on its repetition, unspeakability and transferability across generations has ensured its wide applicability to countless historical examples, most centrally the Holocaust. Hirsch’s work expands on Caruth’s, focusing specifically on the concept of postmemory, the sense that subsequent generations bear some particular responsibility for grappling with the experiences and traumas of their forebears, and do so through ‘imaginative investment and creation’ rather than recollections of lived memory.20 While their work is valuable for its explorations of the limits of representation and suggestions of new systems of symbolic signification, Caruth and Hirsch’s elision of clinical notions of trauma with history, personal memory and identity has reinforced and reflected tendencies to conflate categories of victimhood across indefinite spans of space and time. In the case of the Famine, a motley variety of traumatic ‘symptoms’ was claimed during the commemorative period, serving to both define and legitimize contemporary relationships with the past. In particular, the notion of a pervasive official and popular ‘silence’ on the Famine (stretching

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Western New York Irish Famine Memorial, 1997, Buffalo, NY.

from the nineteenth century to the present) was to become a key touchpoint for commentators in the 1990s, usually interpreted as evidence for the Famine’s lingering traumatic effects, and constructed as a void aching to be filled with the efforts of contemporary remembrance. References to the role of the contemporary ‘witness’ in giving voice to the Famine can be found in numerous monuments’ inscriptions, as in the Philadelphia Irish Memorial’s declaration that ‘the time to take away the silence has come, to commemorate’, or in the Western New York Irish Famine Memorial’s design (Buffalo, NY, 1997) of a standing stone placed in an empty well with the names of descendants encircling the space (3.2), its symbolism described in an inscription: The granite standing stone from Carraroe, County Galway, is set off / center to represent the Irish Diaspora. The well surrounding the / standing stone

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symbolizes ‘The Great Silence’ – that period following / in the Famine when no one dared speak of it. / The biblical inscription in Irish below the standing stone is an / expression of a culture and language and a memory nearly lost. It / translates … “If these were to be silent, the very stones would cry out.” / The circular memorial field, filled with names of Famine victims, / those who survived, their descendants and friends symbolically ends ‘The / Great Silence’.21 The influence of postmemorial concepts and the support for the transgenerational transmission of Famine memory can be found frequently across popular and academic writing on the commemorations, as this passage that appeared in the Irish studies anthology Ireland in Proximity demonstrates: Separated from the Famine by 150 years, and with documented accounts foregrounding silences and ellipses, our reconstructions operate at a double remove from that traumatic history. Whilst no Famine survivors remain to bear witness, we become the interlocutors of that history; we bear witness to the witnesses. Precisely by listening to silence and sharing the struggle to articulate, we begin to discern a Famine ‘experience’.22 The intense commemorative period during the 1990s can thus be understood as motivated by such a desire to bear empathetic witness and fill perceived narrative gaps, and the visual strategies adopted for many memorials have precisely this aim, in their reconstructions of Famine experience and search for ‘authentic’ visual representations which will fill the lacunae of memory. Yet what do such contemporary declarations of the ‘silence’ of the Famine assume? Paradoxically at the same moment when commemorations sought to speak for the ‘voiceless’, new surveys of Irish folklore (primarily based on the 1940s Famine Survey) and Famine-era literature emerged to refute simplistic notions of Famine silence, and warn against the dangers of such interpretations of the written and spoken record. As Niall O Ciosáin remarked there was some irony in the emergence of the ‘Famine silence’ trope at a time when more was being said about the Famine than ever before,23 enquiring in 1995: ‘What are the implications, particularly for historians and for commemoration, of the assumption of absence of memory? … is the diagnosis accurate? Has the Famine been forgotten, ignored or suppressed?’24 His essay answers the final two questions substantially in the negative, a point of view further affirmed by the work of Cormac Ó Gráda, Christopher Morash, Carmel Quinlan and Patricia Lysaght.25 Nevertheless the widely held belief in Irish society’s historic and shameful ‘silence’ on the Famine was a key motivating factor in its extensive visual and material memorialization worldwide, referenced extensively in interviews held between the author and members of commemorative committees in Ireland and the diaspora, and indelibly shaping the nature of the sites, forms, and symbols adopted for physical commemorations.

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Though the traumatic thesis of Famine has continued to attract criticism since the 1990s and beyond (particularly from Ó Ciosáin as well as Roy Foster, Edna Longley, Cormac Ó Gráda and Fintan O’Toole26), its effect on popular and academic discourse has been profound. Within Irish postcolonial studies (as in the work of David Lloyd and Stuart McLean) the experience of the Famine is frequently parsed as evidence of the inherited, lingering legacy of colonial violence casting long shadows over a tortuous evolution towards Irish ‘modernity’. Yet here too the implications of traumatic discourse are uneasily noted, in its tendency to elide differences between varieties of traumatic experience, restrictedly proscribe narrow means of ‘therapeutic’ recovery tactics (as particularly critiqued by Lloyd27), and reinforce what McLean terms ‘the self-legitimation of the modernizing state.’28In 1998 the Notre Dame historian Kevin Whelan discussed the Famine’s delayed impact with an Irish Times reporter, stating that ‘sometimes things hurt so much that they can’t have articulation. It takes a long, long time for them to work through; slavery in America is one, the Famine in Ireland is another and the Holocaust’. The same reporter went on to consult the president of the Irish Psychoanalytical Association who suggested that ‘the public needs to remember and re-live events and then forgive, which mirrors the principles of psychotherapy and the process the individual goes through to expunge the hurts of the past’.29 The chair of the Irish National Famine Commemoration Committee Avril Doyle also frequently deployed metaphors of trauma, therapy, and healing in her public addresses: ‘It is only by facing the trauma caused by this immense tragedy honestly and openly in seeking genuine understanding that we can heal some of the hurt caused throughout Irish history. Despite the pain and its complexity, we must not repress our history.’30 Others like TD Kathleen Lynch (Labour) suggested that the Famine was a trauma biologically imprinted on anyone of Irish descent: ‘Each one of us is the survivor of survivors of the Famine … We have an inherited memory which is part and parcel of our DNA, and, to a great extent, it has formed our opinions and attitudes to other countries stricken by famine … We have a genetically inherited memory which will not allow us to forget.’31 The language of trauma, repression, and healing recur in both official rhetoric and in many personal narratives published in honour of the commemoration; in California senator Tom Hayden’s edited collection of essays, Irish Hunger,32 contributors refer to the ‘symptoms’ of Famine trauma evidenced in their own lives; in the instance of one writer, this genetic repression finds expression in her inexplicable tendency to buy too much food at the grocery market.33 Hayden himself explores the ‘transgenerational shame’ of the Famine which has served to oppress the potential of the contemporary Irish people: ‘Each of us carries a legacy of the past that stretches back far before our parents’ time. While most therapists or biographers focus only on our parents’ effects on us, we also carry the legacies, spirits, trauma, and qualities of our invisible and even unknown ancestors.’34 Perhaps inevitably, the Holocaust emerged in Famine commemorative discourse as comparative example par excellence, reprising its increasingly commonplace role (as articulated by Andreas Huyssen) as global ‘cipher’ for articulations of traumatic

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memory.35 While accusations of English genocidal intent have long held sway within a minority Irish nationalist tradition, the Famine commemorative period saw such views voiced stridently in the mainstream. Sean Kenny, author of a contemporary Famine novel where the protagonist time travels to experience first-hand the horror of Famine, asks whether the Famine constituted Ireland’s ‘Final Solution’;36 Terry Eagleton refers to the ‘Irish Auschwitz’;37 and a PhD dissertation submitted in 2000 in Massachusetts discusses the psychological impact of the Famine, diagnosing subsequent generations of Irish people and their descendants as suffering from genocide-induced post-traumatic stress disorder.38 On the memorial front, fringe activist Chris Fogarty has attempted to erect markers around Ireland which note the location of ‘mass murders’ of the Irish by British regiments;39 the president of the Philadelphia Irish Memorial Committee also explicitly rejected the term ‘famine’ in connection with their memorial: ‘How can the failure of one crop constitute a famine? There was no scarcity of food … The English stole land from the Irish.’40 Such issues of blame and recrimination played out on a wide international stage, culminating in the public spat between the British ambassador John Kerr and the New York Governor George Pataki in 1996–97 over the newly adopted New York Famine curriculum, which teaches the Famine alongside slavery and the Holocaust and prompts students to determine whether the Famine can be considered genocide;41 Grand Marshal John Lahey’s emphasis on English genocide during the 1997 New York City St Patrick’s Day Parade raised similar controversy.42 Though opinions voiced on genocidal and culpability issues during the 1996 Dáil debates on the Famine commemorations varied (and later Taoiseach Bertie Ahern’s own expressed views made a decisive shift after his transition from opposition leader to head of government responsible for moving peace process talks ahead), Avril Doyle officially rejected the genocidal explanation on behalf of the government.43 In 1996 David Andrews questioned Doyle on her encounters with the genocidal interpretation of the Famine during a American lecture tour in which she took part: ‘It is not good for continuing Anglo-Irish relations to term the famine as a deliberate act of genocide’, stated Andrews, to which Doyle agreed: … it goes way beyond the boundaries of acceptable analysis to argue that there was a genocidal intent on the part of the British Government at the time and that the Irish Famine is therefore directly equivalent to the Holocaust… In my comments in America and elsewhere, I have made my position abundantly clear. The British response during the Famine was entirely inadequate, but the genocidal argument has no validity …44 More recently Doyle reaffirmed these views, recalling how they often clashed with Irish American sentiments she encountered during the Famine lecture tours run during the 1990s commemorative period: I don’t subscribe to any of that … Of course we can blame the government of the day for all sorts of things they did wrong about the Famine – you can

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focus on their lack of action or the types of action they chose at the time – but if you go down the genocide route you lose all credibility in terms of being able to fling the arrows where they deserve to be flung at this issue, against the government of the day. I found when I was in America there was plenty of this sort of stuff too, but it came from a rather extreme nationalist viewpoint, which was totally blinkered in its anti-Britishness.45 Yet the gap between the official British and Irish governments’ position and that of many American commemorative groups (as well as Irish and American individuals) has persisted,46 with John Waters’ views in Irish Hunger neatly summarizing the latter point of view: ‘When you talk about the Famine, you have to cut the bullshit. When I speak about it in public, I make a point of saying, unequivocally, that the Famine was an act of genocide, driven by racism and justified by ideology … It is the truth … the truth as we have felt it all our lives.’47 Though the association of Famine commemoration with ideologies of trauma and genocide runs rife in academic and public accounts from the 1990s, viewing the collective monumental output of the same period raises interesting conundrums. Given the ubiquity of the Holocaust as ‘a floating signifier’,48 liberally colouring the lenses through which many Famine memories were perceived and publicly expressed, one might expect sculptural engagements with Famine memory to adopt the minimalist or interrogative visual strategies common to Holocaust memorial sites, focusing on issues of displacement, loss, silence and crises of representation.49 Any visual correspondence to Holocaust memorialization has, however, proved, the exception rather than the rule; such contrasts are particularly striking in diasporic cities (like Boston) where Famine and Holocaust monuments, erected only a few years apart, lie in close physical proximity to one another yet have adopted entirely antagonistic visual approaches. Few Famine memory projects evince the depth of reflection and struggle with representation common to Holocaust memorials, and a fairly standard typology of representation has developed based on nineteenth century heroic modes and nostalgic reification of artefactual fragments of Irish stone and other materials: in the place of the minimal, spare and suggestive there is the theatrical, romantic, and explicitly representational.50 Paradoxically, the visual strategies often associated with a Holocaust ‘aesthetic’ have been largely rejected by Famine commemorative committees, even as they profess similar objectives. The formal diversity of Famine memorials is remarkable in its own right: reconstructed thatch cottages to heart-shaped fountains, bland laser-etched granite markers to elaborate bronzes, community gardens to a quarter acre of Irish landscape cantilevered in the middle of New York City. Nevertheless with the exception of a few major urban memorial artworks, the majority of contemporary Famine monuments worldwide display an intensely conservative visual approach, with a significant number relying on a small body of nineteenth-century prototypes (such as newspaper engravings or high crosses) and megalithic reconstructions. Though the meaning of some signifiers assumes a different role depending on the national context (as with more explicit religious significance of the high cross in Ireland

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as opposed to America or Canada), the deployment of Famine clichés and Irish ethnic stereotypes still abounds – there is no shortage of shamrocks, coffin ships, or Bridgets on plinths, particularly in the diaspora. Conceptual approaches common to explorations of Famine within contemporary art (as in the work of Dorothy Cross, Kathy Herbert, Alanna O’Kelly, or Patricia McKenna) are generally absent from public monuments, with the significant exceptions of Brian Tolle’s Irish Hunger Memorial in New York (2002), Hossein and Angela Valamaneshes’s monument in Sydney (1999), and Cornet and Gilbert Associates’s new memorial on Grosse Île in Quebec (1998). Yet even in the case of the New York Famine memorial, in spite of its formal qualifications as a ‘postmodern’ memorial and its creator’s background as a conceptual artist, the public response to the memorial has often focused on an appreciation of its mimetic accuracy and veneration of the ‘pieces of Ireland’ it presents. In Ireland, much of the material emphasis at the time of the commemoration focused on the renovation of dozens of existing Famine graveyards, and the erection of memorials in these previously unmarked spaces. These new graveyard monuments (often crosses or simple stone markers) are generally restrained in form and utilize minimal interpretative text, designed to evoke Christian contemplation of past generations’ suffering in spaces charged with powerful resonance and local memories. Mass graves from the Famine period are frequently located beside local workhouses on the periphery of towns and villages; as a consequence the public memorials marking them are remote and difficult to access; some have already begun slipping into decay despite their recent vintage. The acknowledgement of the Famine’s presence within the physical boundaries of the landscape and its local recognition (even if only temporarily) provided a key point of engagement with Famine memory in Irish community-based commemoration, accompanied as it often was by the production of local Famine histories and the stream of activities occurring at the national level. Yet the official marking of these spaces enacts only an initial phase of the therapeutic programme as outlined by commentators: that of recognition, if not repair or reconstruction. The few Irish commemorative projects with more explicit therapeutic or reconstructive aims generally suffer from poor formal execution: the Gairdín an Ghorta located in Newmarket, Co. Kilkenny (3.3, constructed at a cost of £250,000 in 1999) urges viewers to confront ‘the Ghost of the Past – The terrible legacy that the famine has endowed on the Irish psyche has been described as a pain that we have passed silently to one another’.51 The pedantically symbolic garden memorial begins with a simulated nineteenth-century thatched cottage and moves the viewer on a path through contemplative spaces designated ‘Path of the Living’, ‘Path of the Dead’, ‘Valley of Sorrows’, ‘Bridge of Hardship’, ‘The Silent Era’ and finally the ‘Garden of Hope and Reconciliation’. The Roscommon County Famine Memorial Garden (1999) foregrounds a bronze statue by sculptor Elizabeth McLaughlin (3.4) against an abbreviated reconstruction of a workhouse gable; the figures offer a reinterpretation of the well-known Illustrated London News engraving ‘Bridget O’Donnel and Children’ (1849), exaggerating the nudity of the central female figure and her ravaged body

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3.3

Gairdín an Ghorta (Famine Garden), 1999, Newmarket, Co. Kilkenny.

3.4

Elizabeth McLaughlin, Roscommon County Famine Memorial, 1999, Roscommon, Co. Roscommon.

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and calling to mind Margaret Kelleher’s critique of the use of the female body in literature as a vehicle for Famine spectacle.52 Kelleher’s remarks on the limits of Famine representation seem prescient in light of the anniversary’s sculptural output: … the direct lineage between famine victims and descendant [is] increasingly suspect. Characterizations of the Irish today as descendants of Famine victims have produced some gross oversimplifications, and risk producing a complacency about the past and present. An alternative tendency is to insist that the contemporary Irish are instead the descendants of survivors; yet this argument, countering martyrdom with guilt, can yield equally generalized and sterile results.53 Such representational strategies serve as visual embodiments of the traumatic agenda in their attempt to evince viewer empathy with the Famine victim, affirming the transferability of traumatic experience across time and space. Without question this assertion found its most forceful visual expression in the US, where numerous Famine monuments palpably signify their creators’ (and viewers’) desire to affirm genealogical relationship with the Famine sufferer. Whereas in Ireland the focus of much Famine monumental commemoration concerned the marking of burials and recognition of Famine relics within landscape, in the US committees have tended towards elaborate reconstructive fantasies of suffering, emigration and triumph. Yet while the rhetoric of traumatic experience and healing has been expressed frequently by committee members and artists in interview with the author and in inscriptions surrounding the memorials, the works themselves have frequently adopted aggressively heroic figurative forms: the perceived silence and absence wrought by the Famine is filled with the literal mimetic body. The Boston Irish memorial (3.5), erected in 1998 at a cost of $1 million and created by artist Robert Shure, posits Famine within a narrative binary: one figural group suffers starvation in Ireland, the other, newly arrived in America, strides well fed into the future (the Soviet Realism parallels are no doubt unintentional). Another more modest memorial in nearby Cambridge (Maurice Harron, 1997) plays on the same emotional register, as a father carrying his small child leaves an aging mother to her fate. In both cases the works address themes of displacement and emigration which are central to most US Famine monuments, couched within a re-enactment of historical experience, and presenting an imagined Irish ancestor with whom the viewer might identify. A former governor of Vermont’s reaction to the Boston memorial echoes this intent: ‘My great-grandparents are in residence at the corner of School and Washington Streets in as striking, and monumental a memorial as has been conceived by man.’54 The virtual embodiment of the Irish ancestor stands here as a proxy for memory, elevated for our attention and literal in the extreme. In November 2007 Shure unveiled his second Famine memorial located in Providence, Rhode Island, which combines the two groups of his Boston work in a pietá-like composition and includes a granite wall set with bronze narrative plaques, depicting a linear and compacted narrative of Irish experience (work in the fields, starvation

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Robert Shure, Boston Irish Famine Memorial, 1998, Boston, Massachusetts.

and death, emigration on coffin ships, and concluding with images of the Irish finding opportunity and success in America). A central plaque set in the midst of this sequence depicts an Irish and Irish American family together in one composition – a fitting memorial to the teleology of Irish American identity. One of the largest US Famine monuments, the Philadelphia Irish Memorial (3.6) was constructed at a cost of $3 million and unveiled in 2003. The sculptor Glenna Goodacre is best known in the US for her modelling of the Sacagawea $1 coin, and for the Women’s Vietnam Veteran’s Memorial, built in part to pacify those unhappy with Maya Lin’s minimalist memorial (1982). Forty life-sized figures follow a narrative progression from the poverty and death of Ireland, depicted on the lower sloping end of the memorial, through the ordeal of immigration (represented as a movement away from the landscape and into the structure of a ship), and finally, a hopeful arrival into America as figures descend a gangway. The complicated composition presents a continuous narrative that unfolds on all sides of the work, the crowding of figures intended as metonymy for the millions.55 The sculpture is elevated on a large plinth, contributing to the overall theatrical effect: a tableau of figures pose in various exaggerated expressions of despair, anguish, and elation. With some poses taken from engravings from the Illustrated London News and costume details described as ‘authentic’ by the artist, the piece is bound within a

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Glenna Goodacre, Philadelphia Irish Memorial, 2003, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

series of fictive strategies designed to evoke identification with the figures’ emotional states through its recourse to sentimental figuration and fantasy: ‘People can walk up and touch it … They want to look in the eyes. They want to think about it or smile.’56 Goodacre described her own empathy with her subject as occurred during the sculptural process: ‘When I was so tired and worn out. I’d look at the figure I call the Famine – torn, tired, hungry – and really identify.’57 News reports on the memorial and Goodacre’s own description of viewers’ reactions to the piece repeat many times how ‘they all came to see it, and it was very emotional … men just walking around the original clay, just crying’;58 the committee’s then president John Donovan remarked in interview how on a rainy day, the sculptures themselves appear to weep.59 The image of the Famine body intended to evince an empathetic response is by no means a new development in the visual history of Famine; most depictions of the Irish poor from the mid-nineteenth century (whether graphically executed or painted as narrative) have similar intentionality. These nineteenth-century representations (though often treated as factual source material by contemporary users) are themselves constructed imaginings to one degree or another. Yet while these older images’ recourse to the sentimental can be interpreted as clear avoidance of the political, the reverse is true of contemporary projects, especially in Philadelphia. The title of the Philadelphia project, ‘The Irish Memorial’, reflects the erecting

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committee’s goal to eradicate usage of the term ‘famine’ in the Irish context. The education of viewers on the subject of English culpability for the Famine was an explicit aim of the monument carried through on the interpretative stations whose text focuses on English cruelty and oppression in the face of Irish helplessness. Goodacre recalled during the preliminary modelling of the work that committee members urged her to embody this message in her visual design: … one thing in that tableau that … they wanted me to say, but I couldn’t figure out how, that the English were to blame for all of the starvation. There wasn’t a famine, it was a starvation, and that the English starved the Irish … and they wanted somehow for me to get that in the expression on the faces … they were disappointed that I couldn’t say that more, though I cannot figure out how you do that in a figure.60 Yet what defines such contemporary engagements with Famine memory from their antecedents is the proximity of relationship – indeed of self-identification – sought with the recreated Famine victim. Trauma theory offers a tool for collapsing historical difference, for rendering the experience of the past more knowable to the present – an operation beset by potential pitfalls: Cormac Ó Gráda (one of the most strident critics of the ‘traumatization’ of Famine) has argued the conflation of diverse and complex nineteenth-century social categories into a single, pitiable class of Famine sufferers oversimplifies and ignores historical reality, and serves to offer ‘a version of famine history in which the descendants of those who survived all become vicarious victims’.61 The exceptionalism which often accompanies selfcharacterizations of historical victimhood is clearly not always benign as the author Sean Kenny’s remarks reveal: ‘Studies of the Famine are making their way onto the American school curriculum. Now, for the first time since they were obliged to blend in, the Irish will stand out again, just as blacks, Jews, Hispanics and Chinese do.’62 Similarly Deborah Long warns: … the universal availability of the postmemorial position carries the potential for distinctly unethical exploitation … Imagination and creation, after all, contain the possibility of unregulated fantasy that need pay no attention at all to either historical accuracy or to the otherness of the other.63 Despite the therapeutic intent articulated by many monument-builders, there is little evidence to suggest that the repetitive revisiting and representation of the ‘traumatic Famine experience’ has done anything to alter historical understanding or repair old wounds. The atavistic nature of contemporary Famine commemoration seems to cycle infinitely, with three new projects unveiled in 2007, ten years postdating the ‘official’ commemorative anniversary, and the annual National Famine Commemoration Day now a regular fixture on the government calendar. The conscription of Famine memory within traumatic paradigms and its leverage by commemorative committees raises serious epistemological questions: whether it is

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possible to ‘bear witness’ to individuals separated from us by five or six generations, what purpose this serves where Famine ‘survivors’ seem an indefinable category and limitlessly extensible; and the ethical implications and problems of subjectivity raised by descendants adopting a privileged position in relation to the ancestor.64 If Famine is to be understood as ‘an estranging but palpable memory in Irish culture, an insistent force resisting the memorializing gestures and strategic forgetting that have sought to counteract or harness its traumatic effects’,65 does such a characterization imply a return to the Famine sublime, where moral elevation is achieved through a surrender to forces beyond individual control? Any interpretation of the Famine as trauma where commemoration is recommended as a tool for ‘healing’ may further ultimately privilege a perspective that emphasizes the redemptive, not destructive, legacy of the Famine in the service of political exigencies. The assumption of postmemorial responsibility by latter day descendants most strongly reveals the fragility of Famine memory, its impulses rooted more firmly in 1997 than 1847. To retrospectively characterize ancestors’ relationships with Famine memory as wilful ignorance, deliberate neglect, or repressed shame and guilt remains highly questionable, as it ignores the fact that the cathartic endgame of much contemporary commemoration is not one that has inspired transhistoric acceptance nor belief. As Nuala O Faolain has remarked, ‘It may be that late twentieth century beliefs about personal pain and the healing of pain will go the way of other great popular faiths’;66 there is every reason to suspect subsequent generations will read 150th anniversary Famine memorials as relics of an outmoded ideology.67

4 COURBET’S TRAUERSPIEL Trouble with Women in the Painter’s Studio Jenny Tennant Jackson

Reading The Painter’s Studio, then – and now L’Atelier du peintre: allégorie réelle déterminant une phase de sept années de ma vie artistique, 1855 (4.1) is a monumental painting by Gustave Courbet (1819–77) whose translated title reads The Painter’s Studio: A Real Allegory Determining a Period of Seven Years of my Artistic Life. Here is Courbet, sitting painting in his studio, surrounded by visitors. The painting, Courbet’s The Painter’s Studio, is frequently read politically because the artist is a socialist; or so the books tell us. Even though the full title, The Painter’s Studio: A Real Allegory Determining Seven Years of My Artistic Life, hints at an allegorical translation, if the art work is read allegorically, it is always in a political context, that of the post-1848 revolution, where it becomes a coded commentary on the rule of Emperor Napoleon III. The painter’s studio is thus a world stage: the people in it merely political players. Allegory, here, is symbolic, dead people from a lost age. Allegory can be read otherwise. Walter Benjamin’s study of Trauerspiel acknowledges an allegorical form where death is accepted as part of life: life as political and as psychic trauma. Understanding Benjamin’s analysis of these German mourning-plays can provide us with a remarkably useful approach for thinking posttraumatically, especially with regard to the troubling representation of such events. In this chapter, I suggest that an allegorical reading of The Painter’s Studio as a mourning play, as Trauerspiel, recovers the traumatic element lost in previous readings. The trauma, almost tangible in the play of paint on canvas, moves metonymically in the troubled forms of Courbet’s women. They are ideal and fragmentary, appearing and disappearing in space and time. The wounded artist struggles with the trauma of his loss. The Painter’s Studio as allegory is not a direct representation; here Realism moves

4.1

Gustave Courbet (1819–77), l’Atelier du peintre: allégorie réelle déterminant une phase de sept années de ma vie artistique (The Painter’s Studio: A real allegory summing up seven years of my artistic and moral life), 1854–5, oil-on-canvas, 361 × 598 cm, Musée d’Orsay, Paris. © RMNGrand Palais (Musée d’Orsay)/Gérard Blot/Hervé Lewandowski.

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into allegory. This chapter rethinks The Painter’s Studio as Trauerspiel, as mourning on stage, played out over time as a constellation of ideas that construct the lost ‘object’, the (non) representational figure of trauma – Virginie Binet and Courbet’s son. A letter to Champfleury, 18541 Courbet was ill in 1854. Between bouts of cholera and jaundice he had returned home to Ornans to be nursed, primarily by his sister, Zoé. Lying in bed, he wrote to friends and planned his works for the Exhibition in Paris, 1855. His thoughts are documented in the letters kept in the archive at Musée d’Orsay, Paris, two of which are of particular importance: one to the critic Champfleury and one to his patron Alfred Bruyas. The first, the more often quoted, lists, over four pages, the 27 or so characters on which he is working: ‘la vie triviale, le peuple, la misère …’ [everyday life, the people, poverty]. Almost life-size, evoking a tableau vivant, they stand, or sit, quietly posed on a black bitumen ground. Centre stage, the artist alone moves, his brush touching the landscape. Seated to the left is a poacher, said to symbolize the ruler Napoleon III, surrounded by the lumpenproletariat, as Marx famously described the electorate of 1848. This motley crowd consists of, amongst others, a hunter, a banker, a seller of clothes, a Jew, an undertaker and a sans culottes. Such figures have been decoded to explain the construction of the government of the Emperor in the context of a revolutionary history of Europe in 1855: Napoleon III and his retinue of contemporary politicians and European revolutionaries. Based on readings of Courbet as a ‘socialist’, T.J. Clark, James Rubin, Linda Nochlin, Hélène Toussaint and others have thus added to the accepted reading of the allegory as political, and so it may be. It is the dominant interpretation that remains fixed in art historical discourse – but it is not allegory. At least, that is my argument here. Turning from lumpenproletariat to high society behind the artist, there are all Courbet’s friends and supporters, including Champfleury playwright, Realist and critic to whom the letter was addressed, Proudhon, the anarchist, and Alfred Bruyas, his friend and patron. There is no attempt to employ allegory here. Each stands clearly as they are, as contemporary portraits of Courbet’s friends and supporters. Let’s now look differently for a real, actual allegory: allégorie réelle determinant. A denial of allegory As Courbet comes to the end of his letter he writes ‘I ought to have begun with Baudelaire, but it would take too long to start again’. Represented in the painting too is indeed Baudelaire, the poet and allegorist (4.2). Yet reviewing the Salon of 1855, Baudelaire does not acknowledge allegory either in Ingres or Courbet. Actually Baudelaire did not think as Courbet and Champfleury did, not at that moment. He had wished for a different painter of modern life than Courbet. Baudelaire mentions the obvious suggestion of the painting, The Painter’s Studio, that he was part of Courbet’s circle. He states he has no wish to join: ‘I have not the necessary conviction, docility, or stupidity.’2 A disappointed Baudelaire viewed the display of Ingres’s paintings at the Exposition Universelle, 1855.3 He noted a ‘deficiency’, indeed a ‘shrinkage in his

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Gustave Courbet (1819–77), Portrait of Charles Baudelaire, 1847, oil-on-canvas, 61 × 53 cm, Musée Fabre, Montpellier. © RMN-Grand Palais/Agence Bulloz.

stock of spiritual faculties’ in these exalted works of the French academician. Although Ingres seemed to have nothing in common with Courbet and his pavilion of Realism, Baudelaire was surprised to find a similarity between the works of the two painters; namely a massacre of the imaginative faculties. To Baudelaire, both painters were searching for something other than ‘Imagination’, but in the process of sacrificing that Imagination they killed off the very thing they were searching for. He, therefore, sees no allegory in Ingres and Courbet. One must realize the impossibility of attaining the ‘real’ through mimesis. To find the ‘real’, Baudelaire advises the use of the artistic faculties to collect the fragments – and to arrange them allegorically. Then, the painting was Realism: now, to read it allegorically … A Trauerspiel, or an allegory read otherwise Baudelaire’s poetry was much admired by Walter Benjamin, whose study of Trauerspiel, the bloodthirsty Lutheran dramas concerning the Thirty Years’ War, 1618–48, provide a valuable understanding of allegory.4 Sharing the idea of the world as a stage, these German mourning plays have a counterpart in Shakespeare’s Hamlet,

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thought by Benjamin to be a consummate example of the genre. His thesis Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels, written c.1916–25, studied classical, romantic and baroque plays and poetry in an attempt to map the distinctive historical development, use and consequent degradation of ‘allegory’ in relation to its antonym, ‘symbol’, as expressed through the dialectic relationship between Nature and History. Eighteenth-century tragedy, with its neoclassical elements, has been confused with the German tragic dramas of the earlier Baroque period, Trauerspiel, to the latter’s detriment. It was to disentangle and to reinstate the Trauerspiel, and its key trope, allegory, from this misconception that Benjamin’s thesis was written. In the seventeenth century the word ‘tragic’ was applied to drama and history alike, and although both history and drama were ‘tragic’ encounters, ‘Tragedy’ deals in myth, whereas Trauerspiel attends to the telling of history. The key trope of classic Greek tragedy is the symbol; that of Baroque Trauerspeil is allegory. Benjamin laudably reinstated allegory from its misuses by post-Enlightenment thinkers, by means of an enlightened reading of the true nature of man: the real state of human existence and knowledge. When, as is the case in the Trauerspiel, history becomes part of the setting, it does so as script. The word ‘history’ stands written on the countenance of nature in the characters of transience. The allegorical physiognomy of the nature-history, which is put on stage in the Trauerspiel, is present in reality in the form of the ruin. In the ruin history has physically merged into the setting. And in this guise history does not assume the form of the process of eternal life so much as that of irresistible decay. Allegory thereby declares itself beyond beauty. Allegories are, in the realm of thoughts, what ruins are in the realm of things. This explains the baroque cult of the ruin.5 In my reading of the Trauerspiel, Benjamin’s sense of History is that which is represented by all events set out on the stage, as the stage of life. Whereas tragedy will show only heroic acts of emperors, princes and heroes, in these ‘mourning plays’ all the events of war, the horrors and the earthly, bodily human conditions are displayed as they are, without selection or censorship. Trauerspiel shows life, and indeed death, as it is. History, here, can only be understood in its dialectical relationship to Nature; the transference of History to Natural History is at the point of convergence. As events of History exist only as part of the timelessness of Nature, historical events are mere elements, fragments simultaneously relating the whole construction of the world. The historical event, then, is an abbreviation of life’s patterns. History, as a part of the staging, or ‘setting’, is the play’s script. It is that written, meaningful, significant part of History that makes its mark on the countenance of Nature, transient and impermanent. The emblem standing for the characteristic of human life that History inscribes in Nature is the ruin, that which man in society has made, that which has changed over time with the forces of nature until the significant part of humanity becomes part of the natural landscape. This is the life cycle of human history. It is eternal, yet not in a heavenly way, but in the earthly

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condition of corporeality, decay as part of life. History on the stage of Trauerspiel is secular, stripped and vulnerable; its significance is in its becoming, its unfolding. Such being is left to the natural thought process, not by forcibly seeking of knowledge as solution, but allowing the passive state of contemplation. Meaning reveals itself through contemplation. Meaning emerges in the piling up of fragments of History, all the events and allegories pertaining to the human condition, the essence becoming, revealing itself as meaningful. Allegory is not fixed. Allegory constantly tries to resolve itself into the symbol, or slopes off into deep contemplation of melancholia where it only ends in the sadness of introspection and no knowledge is gained. But, if allegory is appreciated for its own sake, with acceptance, then it gives the greatest human joy: allegorical beauty in contemplation, understanding. ‘Allegories are, in the realm of thoughts, what ruins are in the realm of things.’ The issue here is death; death of which the dramas tell. One form of death is the symbol, the closure of meaning, of signifier and signified. The other form is allegorical. In the first, death is seen as a closure as in the Christian conception of everlasting life, transfiguration. In allegory, there is no redemption, no resolution into symbol, but a movement from life to death and decay. A long contemplative moment is the life cycle of man. Acceptance of the eternal transience is then not a melancholic pose but a beauty of its own, an understanding. Next, we examine the relationship of allegory to symbol. Generic use of the word ‘symbol’ has nothing in common with what Benjamin wants to call the ‘symbol’. For Benjamin, if the symbol is the unity of form and content, it loses its dialectical quality in its relationship to allegory, one that he tries to re-establish in Trauerspiel. In the fixed use of the ‘symbol’ beauty merges with the divine, which, as Benjamin suggests, derives from the theosophical aesthetics of the Romantics. But once the ethical is absorbed by the individualism of post-Enlightenment philosophy, it leads to the Romantic notion of the perfect, beautiful individual. The Baroque apotheosis is dialectical, and not the harmonious inwardness of classicism. Perhaps we could say that desire is a motivation for the way allegory unfolds, or, rather, desire is the motivating force. I am not concerned here with the originary desire, or with the cause of the motivation per se, but the process itself. Neither do I want to make broad generalizations, to oversimplify, nor to extend into the discursive field of psychoanalysis too far, but to limit the discussion to where it impinges on a new reading of The Painter’s Studio. It is, however, useful here to agree with Joel Fineman’s observation that psychoanalytical procedure itself arises in the same ‘desire to know’.6 Thus Lacanian psychoanalysis not only explains the desire for allegory, it is the desire for allegory in its practice, as indeed Freud used implications implicit in classical myths. Allegory reads itself; allegory always carries its own commentary.7 The analysand and the analyst both read the dream; they, therefore, both re-read a reading of desire that motivated it. Psychoanalysis bases its scientific presence through its own inherent desire to know. It is the metathesis that I am interested in, the allegory of the allegorical art historical discourse. Allegory, as dream, thus prescribes its own critique.

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Courbet’s Trauerspiel: an allegory read as trauma What, then, if this painting, The Painter’s Studio, is read as Trauerspiel, a supremely tragic drama, a mourning play, a real allegory of the last seven years of Courbet’s life? What has died (and is dying) in the studio? What ruins can be seen? Reading The Painter’s Studio, as Courbet’s trauma, is the ‘real’ depicted in allegorical form where death is accepted as part of life – life as political and as psychic trauma. An allegorical turn, now, is read in the fragments, between the spaces of discourse. Who is Courbet (4.3)? Who was Courbet? Was he the blunt, boasting, big-mouthed rebel he pretended to be or was he, essentially, a sensitive person who hid his vulnerability behind a pot-belly, loud laughter, and a swagger? Was he an unpolished boor, a savage who had learned to paint whilst watching the cows, or was he, in fact, quite cultured and knowledgeable?8 For Courbet the alcoholic, Courbet the father of an abandoned bastard, the idea that his public personality was no more than a mask was not just rhetoric.9 In 1854 Courbet is recorded as having written: Under the laughing mask you are familiar with, I hide myself chagrin, bitterness, and sadness that grips my heart like vampire.10 As Courbet considered The Painter’s Studio an allegory of seven years of his life, he invites viewers to engage with the question: ‘What sort of self-portrait, or persona can we construct for Courbet?’ Importantly, The Painter’s Studio was conceived and begun in autumn 1854, and it is noteworthy that it is exactly seven years prior is a memorable date for the painter – 17 September 1847, the day of the birth of his son, Désiré-Alfred-Émile. Furthermore, on that anniversary, as he lies ill in Ornans, he hears that his ‘wife’ – mistress – Virginie Binet, is to marry … and he still has a vast canvas to conceive, plan and execute for the exhibition of 1855. On the other hand, it could be argued that Courbet’s mask/persona has been so successful that we cannot see the trauma hidden in the fragments of the studio, the ‘troubling’ women, the loss/death of his son and ‘wife’. Désiré-Alfred-Émile was not the ‘abandoned bastard’ to whom T.J. Clark, quoted above, refers. After the break-up with Virginie, Courbet visited Dieppe in September 1852.11 Castagnary, friend and supporter of Courbet, met the artist in 1860, and also met his son with whom Courbet seems to have kept in touch although it is not clear to what extent. He was certainly saddened by Désiré-Alfred-Émile’s death in 1865.12 Yet, in his investigation of Courbet the socialist, the political painter, T.J. Clark speaks derogatively about this relationship. Clark argues that Courbet’s brash and rural patois and bombastic ignorant persona were a deliberate intention to mask his true partisan colours, to disguise his socialist leanings.

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Gill André (Gosset de Guines André, 1840–85), Courbet by himself and by Gill, cartoon in La Lune, 9 juin, 1867, no. 66. Chateau de Compiègne © RMNGrand Palais/image Compiègne.

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So to return to the ‘last seven years’ of Courbet’s artistic life … Courbet has painted himself with a young woman. G. Mack, 1951, ‘makes the girl Justine’; G. Riat, 1906, identifies ‘the girl as Joséphine … It seems that the gossip handed on among Courbet’s friends there was some confusion between this Joséphine and Virginie Binet’; R. Fernier, 1969, writes ‘the young woman is apparently Joséphine, who was, for a long time, the artist’s model and mistress’.13 An entry accompanying The Lovers in the Country (4.4) in the exhibition catalogue of 1977 reads:

4.4

Gustave Courbet (1819–77), Les Amants dans la campagne, Les Amants Heureux, ou Walse (The Lovers in the Countryside, The Happy Lovers, or Waltz), 1844, oilon-canvas, 77 × 60 cm, Lyon, Musée des Beaux-Arts. © RMN-Grand Palais/ Droits réservés.

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Courbet is seen here with one of his conquests, thought to be Virginie Binet, the only woman with whom he carried on a liaison for any length of time; she bore him a son in 1847. Virginie was the daughter of a Dieppe shoemaker and was eleven years older than Gustave. Apparently they grew apart in 1851 or thereabouts and finally parted in 1855, to judge from a letter from Champfleury telling him that Virginie was getting married (cf. The Painter’s Studio (137).) In actual fact she never married; either she changed her mind or she was lying to Courbet to put pressure on him. She died in 1865.14 By contrast we have Toussaint’s view of the relationship published in the same catalogue Gustave Courbet (1819–1877), in which she suggests the identification of two further characters in The Painter’s Studio: Thèrèse Adélaïde Virginie Binet and Désiré-Alfred-Émile Binet, Courbet’s son (4.5, 4.5a and 4.5b).15 The plaster medallion deserves a moment’s attention. It shows the profile of a woman who appears in many of Courbet’s paintings and drawings, and whom

4.5

Gustave Courbet (1819–77), Woman seated and asleep, holding a book, right hand on a table, 1849, pencil and fixative, 470 × 306 mm, Paris, Musée d’Orsay. © RMN-Grand Palais (Musée d’Orsay)/Michèle Bellot.

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Gustave Courbet (1819–77), Detail of the right hand side of l’Atelier du peintre: allégorie réelle déterminant une phase de sept années de ma vie artistique (The Painter’s Studio: A real allegory summing up seven years of my artistic and moral life), 1854–5, oil-on-canvas, 361 × 598 cm, Musée d’Orsay, Paris. © RMN-Grand Palais (Musée d’Orsay)/Gérard Blot/Hervé Lewandowski.

4.5b Illustration from Toussaint: Gustave Courbet (1819–77).

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we believe to be Virginie Binet, his well-loved and fugitive mistress, of whom he speaks in the letter to Champfleury. Thus, by a touching thought, he has followed the fashion of former times, when the departed were included in the group portraits as though they were still alive.16 ‘Devinera qui pourra’17 Guess Whoever Can! Courbet writes: Maybe you’d like to know the subject of my painting – but it would take so long to explain that I’d rather you guess when you see it. It is the history of my studio, everything that goes on there morally and physically. All pretty mysterious – good luck to anyone who can make it out!18 Although Toussaint identifies the ‘mistress’ and the son, it is important to bear in mind that neither she, nor any other historian interpreting The Painter’s Studio seem to include the relationship in connection with the interpretation of the painting, even though it is a self-portrait. Furthermore, we recall the title, L’Atelier du peintre: allégorie réelle déterminant une phase de sept années de ma vie artistique, thus The Painter’s Studio is an allegory of a self-portrait of seven years of Courbet’s life up until the winter of 1854–55. Reading ‘allegorically’, then, I will pursue the possibility of the traumatic personal loss leaving traces, ruins and fragments on the surface, and/or beneath the surface, of history as the action of history on the countenance of nature, and thereby demonstrate that The Painter’s Studio would indeed be a real allegory of the last seven years of Courbet’s artistic life. Considering allegorical fragments Fragment one. Toussaint refers to the letter written to Champfleury in autumn 1854. Towards the end of the letter, after describing in detail his intensions and plan for The Painter’s Studio as I referred to above, Courbet writes: [B]ut somehow or other I must get it done … I feel very depressed – my soul is quite empty, my live and heart full of gall. At Ornans I drink at a sportsman’s café with ‘Gay Savoir’ people and go to bed with a servant girl. None of this cheers me up. You know my ‘wife’ got married. I no longer have her or the child – apparently she was forced to it by poverty. That’s how society devours people. We had been together for 14 years … pride and probity will be the death of us all. At this moment I cannot do a thing, but I absolutely must be ready for the exhibition.19 Although Courbet’s letter is often reproduced in art historical documents, and is used on numerous occasions to ‘explain’ the meaning of The Painter’s Studio, this final paragraph is omitted. Toussaint writes that the letter is printed ‘for the first time in its entirety’ in her catalogue of 1977. After being in private hands, the letter had been

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recently donated to the Louvre.20 However, the entire letter must have been known as various authors quote only the first part of the letter reducing the section on his personal sadness and its cause to be replaced by a series of dots (………..):21 the absent presence of the last paragraph is noteworthy. It is the section that referred to Courbet’s traumatic loss of his ‘family’. Fragment two. Courbet’s nineteenth-century contemporaries and many later writers repeat that Courbet had a son. Castagnary, Courbet’s contemporary biographer and supporter, (1860), Riat (1906), Mack (1951), Clark (1973) … In fact just about everyone in the historical world knew! In 1880, Gros-Kost wrote: ‘This illegitimate son could not be legitimised by law ….’22 Courbet’s son has been around in discourse for some time, though not ‘confirmed’ until Fernier instigated the search of the registers in Dieppe in spring 1951, and the ‘century old mystery’ was solved. The boy was Désiré-Alfred-Émile Binet, son of Thérèse-Adelaïde-Virginie Binet unmarried, who was born at Dieppe on 18 April 1808 and who died there on 7 May 1865. He was an ivory carver in Dieppe.23 He may be depicted in Les Cribleuses de blé, and in The Painter’s Studio, though there is no known portrait. If he is mentioned at all it is to inform us that Courbet has a ‘bastard’ son, or that his father was very proud of his drawing abilities and very upset when Virginie and the boy left for Dieppe.24 Fragment three. The other, Courbet’s ‘mistress’, remained equally obscure: ‘mistresses were changed too often for their names to be recalled’.25 Despite Robert Fernier, the painter and Courbet scholar, having established the fact of Courbet’s relationship with Virginie Binet, and despite this fact being common knowledge prior to the publication of the letter from Courbet to Champfleury, most of these ‘histories’ are anecdotal or careless gossip. No one, not even Hélène Toussaint, directly reads The Painter’s Studio with particular attention to Courbet’s love and traumatic loss. The characters of transience In the passage quoted earlier, Benjamin writes: ‘The word “history” stands written on the countenance of nature in the characters of transience.’26 Courbet the wounded, or a ‘death’ perhaps, is present in the painting of 1854, the year of the loss of his ‘wife’ and son (4.6). Revealed beneath Courbet’s self-portrait as a wounded man is another image the outline of which is identical to one of his previous sketches shown here (4.7) Other women were painted over in Courbet’s work. Proudhon is depicted in The Painter’s Studio, and, in a later painting of the philosopher (1865, Paris, Petit Palais), Courbet disappears Mme Proudhon by repainting her as a basket.27 We do not know why. Rubin writes ‘Proudhon’s descriptions of women as physically weak, cerebrally unendowed, and naturally lascivious were perhaps more extreme than those of most of his contemporaries, but they echoed popular attitudes toward the “weaker sex”’.28 Returning to Baudelaire, the story continues with another woman painted out by Courbet – Jeanne Duval. Baudelaire had a relationship with her for 19 years, and due to the nature of their relationship, I find the word mistress is ‘inadequate’, as does Griselda Pollock.29 It has been suggested that Courbet painted Jeanne out of

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4.6

Gustave Courbet (1819–77), Portrait de l’artiste dit L’homme blessé (Portrait of the Artist, called The Wounded Man), 1844–54, oil-on-canvas, 81 × 97 cm, Musée d’Orsay, Paris. © RMN-Grand Palais (Musée d’Orsay)/Hervé Lewandowski.

4.7

Gustave Courbet (1819–77), La Sieste champêtre (Country Siesta), (before 1849), charcoal or black crayon on paper with curved top, 26 × 31 cm, Besançon, Musée des Beaux Arts et d’Archéologie. © RMN-Grand Palais/Droits réservés.

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The Painter’s Studio – her ghostly trace is now emerging through the paint – because Baudelaire was having an affair with Mme Sabatier, the ‘art lover’ in the foreground of The Painter’s Studio. Toussaint refers to Duval as Baudelaire’s ‘mulatto mistress’; Édouard Houssaye, 1855, ‘M. Baudelaire is leaning against a woman of the yellow race’30 (4.5b). The [black] woman, who was almost certainly Jeanne Duval, was painted out, possibly at the request of the poet, who at that time was involved in an affair with another woman; but her ghostly outlines still show faintly through the overlying pigment.31 Werner Hoffman, 1961, writes that Courbet’s painting demonstrates ‘the pure and the impure’: Another of the dominant themes – the metamorphosis of womanhood – is distributed over various parts of the picture. We have the mother, and not far from her the harlot still dressed in her plain country clothes (to the right behind the grave-digger’s top hat); and we have the central figure of ‘Truth’. In addition to these Courbet had originally painted the elemental female figure, the animal-like femme fatale, giving her the features of Jeanne Duval, the mistress of Baudelaire. Originally she had been discernible next to the poet’s head.32

‘When, as is the case in the Trauerspiel, history becomes part of the setting, it does so as script.’33 In The Painter’s Studio women are as fragmentary and as ephemeral in the painting, as they appear in art historical texts. To truly understand The Painter’s Studio we have to turn away from the canvas to explore the discourse further – into the extent of Courbet’s œuvre, and the way his painting of women has been discussed by the Courbet experts. Let me introduce three comments from James Rubin, writing in 1980: Anecdotal evidence of Courbet’s relations with women abounds in his letters to suggest a man of powerful sexual appetites and little long-term commitment.34 Should we feel sorry for a man whose raucous café life and sexual antics may reveal profound loneliness; or should we be appalled by such aggressively selfcentred masculinity? There is no simple answer.35 Rather than turn his back on women – something which he was incapable of doing – in order to devote himself to art, Courbet channelled his neverending quest for fulfilment into an aesthetic vigour that affirmed his manhood through potent performances with the brush. Women, then, were ever the vehicles for measuring manhood.36 Here is Kenneth Clark in 1956:

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Courbet is the arch realist whose own impulse is to grasp, to thump, to squeeze, or to eat was so strong that it communicates itself in every stroke of his palette knife. His eye embraced the female body with the same enthusiasm that it stroked a deer, grasped and apple, or slapped the side of an enormous trout … A solid weight of flesh does in fact seem more real and enduring than elegance, and the woman who stands beside him at the centre of his realised dream, that vast canvas known as l’Atelier du peintre … has the patient carnality of the life class ….37 Clark again: ‘[T[he bovine unselfconsciousness of Courbet’s women gives them a kind of antique nobility.’ K. Clark, 1956.38 As if to prove the point, the eminent historian recalls that, on viewing this painting, Emperor Napoleon whacked the canvas with his cane. Gerstle Mack in 1951: Courbet liked full-blown women with voluptuous contours, and Joséphine, the model for this nude and his mistress of the moment, was a perfect example of his favourite type.39 René Huyghe in 1944: After all, are the women not metamorphosed into those light-quivering creatures whose soft fur is so charged with warm life? Do roe deer and stags arouse exactly the same love in Courbet as women do?40 Finally, Castagnary in 1868: Courbet would not be the great painter we admire if he had not also struggled with the difficulties of the flesh … Courbet attacked the problem of flesh, first with vigour – a vigour that caused an outcry – then with a softened grace that finally delighted art lovers. From the Bathers of 1853 … who were accused of being gross and sordid, he proceeded to the elegant nudity of the Parisienne. His palette, which was a little rough in the beginning, gradually became softer … The flesh – the true flesh – emerged from under his palette knife: He acquired a passion for that kind of work, which is one of the most beautiful triumphs of painting. Without abandoning reality, without ever giving in to convention, he painted women of all complexions … the famous paintings of Khalil Bey, Indolence and Luxury and the redhaired Bather of Brussels, which are the most important ones. One is here at the culmination point of art. The modeling of those beautiful breasts, of those arms, of those torsos … one does not tire of

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looking at them. Name, if you want, the greatest names in painting. I believe that one has never come so near to life.41 Fragments of women and fragments of art historical commentary bind to make new allegorical forces in the examples of Courbet’s woman, as fragmentary remnants and ruins of memory. ‘… what ruins are in the realm of things’ The discourse relating to Courbet’s paintings of women frames The Painter’s Studio in a way that has hardly changed for almost two centuries: women are dissected into body parts, especially the central nude figure (4.1). Delacroix’s diary entry for 3 August 1855, reads ‘there are some parts that are important in their execution; the haunches, and the thigh of the nude model and her bosom’.42 Kenneth Clark writes on the central nude figure: A solid weight of flesh does in fact seem more real and enduring than elegance, and the woman who stands beside him at the centre of his realised dream, that vast canvas known as L’Atelier du peintre although she has the patient carnality of the life class, is, after all, more representative of humanity than the Diana of Boucher. Nor is this effect due solely to the body. It is, above all, in his faces that Etty falls short of Courbet, for on bodies of ageless health he places heads of fashionable coyness; whereas the bovine unselfconsciousness of Courbet’s women gives them a kind of antique nobility.43 Again, there is a moved body part: ‘To place on a naked body a head with so much character is to jeopardise the whole premise of the nude.’44 Hoffman describes the contrast between the central idealized group and the surrounding representation of contemporary society. Even Kenneth Clark sees a ‘realized dream’ in the three figures: the artist, his model, and the boy. Hoffman continues: The artist, the woman and the child – it is these who still see in the world the aboriginal freshness of the first day of creation … They stand … quite apart from the groups on each side of the picture. They embody the world of the simple and the true. Their relation with the real world is not severed by the process of reflection nor is it burdened by the weight and weariness of mundane trivialities. In contrast to themselves, their surroundings represent something entirely different – the complex world of civilization with its disguises and masquerades. In these three figures, however there is a real spontaneity and a real freshness of vision and feeling. It is there in the child whose feelings are unregulated by any convention. It is there in the woman whose self is unconcealed by any artifice who reveals the truth of nature and the essential honesty of all that is truly natural. It is there in the artist himself who sees the process of nature in terms of female fruitfulness which

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he is engaged in transforming into a work of art. This female figure must be understood neither as a model, nor a muse, nor as a mere companion - she is the natural measure of things, she is herself the rounded fullness of life. ‘The perfect woman of all ages’ says Nietzsche … ‘is the creator’s recreation on the seventh day of his civilizing task, the resting of the artist in his work’.45 A letter to Champfleury, 1854: in search of a photograph It is time to recall the letter that Courbet sent to Bruyas from Ornans, November– December, 1854. Toussaint had made much of the letter he sent to Champfleury describing his composition of The Painter’s Studio, and now a second letter sent that same month to his patron Alfred Bruyas not only explains the sadness hidden behind his mask, but also adds an important request for a photograph, which deserves attention. It reads thus: My life is so difficult that my moral faculties are wearing out. Behind this laughing mask that you are familiar with, I hide, deep down, grief, bitterness, and sorrow that clings to my heart like a vampire. Courbet asks for ‘… that photograph of a nude woman about which I have spoken to you. She will be behind my chair in the middle of the painting … Send me as soon as possible … the photograph of the nude woman’.46 Aaron Scharf has suggested that the source for the model was from a series by Julien Vallou deVilleneuve (1795– 1866), but he does not confirm unequivocally that it was Vallou de Villeneuve’s daguerreotype that was used (4.8). He writes: Despite the protests of the virtuous, photographs of nude subjects proliferated from the early 1850s … providing, equally, information for artists and pleasure for voluptuaries … Among the photographers who were occupied in producing nude studies for the ateliers of Paris was Julien Vallou de Villeneuve … it is quite likely that Courbet knew and used his photographs in the 1850s.47 Some art historians take the source as fact, as does Rubin (1997), that Courbet ‘requested a photograph of a nude, undoubtedly another one by de Villeneuve … a nude model (based on the photograph) stands behind the artist’.48 In a footnote Chu also cites Scharf as the source of the suggestion, but carefully adds: ‘Though the exact photograph … is not known, it probably was one of the many nudes photographed by Julien Vallou de Villeneuve ….’49 It is well documented that Courbet used daguerreotypes of nude studies of women, which, to avoid accusations of pornography, were registered as ‘académies’, or artist’s models with the Préfecture de Police. Incidentally, Courbet’s friend and fellow Realist, François Bonvin worked there in 1854, which gives another possibility for Courbet to access images. Much of this record is now stored at Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris. Several photographers’ work has been connected with Courbet’s

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Julien Vallou de Villeneuve (1795–1866), Nude Study, daguerreotype (registered 1853, Paris), Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, Cabinet des Estampes.

art, including Félix Nadar, Vallou de Villeneuve and Bruno Braquehais (1823–75). I am particularly interested in the work of Braquehais, as he was working at the ‘lower’ end of the market. Indeed, Braquehais’s series entitled Musée Daguerrian – Photographie Aristique and Étude Académique were registered in 1854. Although the series represented a small portion of his works, Braquehais ‘represented the legal tip of a much larger and mysterious iceberg of illicit imagery’.50 Bruno Braquehais, Academic Study – no. 7, 1854 (4.9) has the ‘feel’ of The Painter’s Studio. Taking a closer look at the reflection of the woman in the mirror, the Braquehais model looks much more like the model in The Painter’s Studio, than the Vallou de Villeneuve identified by Scharf. Is this the photograph used by Courbet

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Bruno Braquehais (1823-75), Academic Study – no. 7, 1854, Paris, Bibliotèque Nationale, Cabinet des Estampes.

for The Painter’s Studio? As the suggestion of the Vallou de Villeneuve source is not ‘proven’, I suggest that it is equally possible that it was one of the series produced by Braquehais that Courbet requested (4.9). Elizabeth McCauley describes the image thus: A fourth Braquehais académie presents the most ambitious and puzzling tableau of any of his works. An older, heavier female stands in a skylit space and caresses an incorporeal being – a pair of trousers, coat, gloves, tie, cap, wig and mask that are held up by strings to simulate a kneeling suitor … The smiling woman herself, draped in a black lace shawl and adorned with earrings and bracelet, chucks the chin of her fleshless and impotent counterpart … no one

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ever constructed a pre-symbolist fantasy like this one. What the photographer was trying to depict is difficult to decipher. The skull and flowers traditionally symbolize vanitas, the leering middle-aged woman suggests luxury of lasciviousness, and the masked effigy implies male groveling, subservience, and weakness. There is a danse macabre feeling created, with the woman (and flesh) as temptress, man as victim, and death the ultimate winner. This image cannot be neatly fitted into an iconographical pattern, however, and is inconsistent with Braquehais’s other nudes.51 ‘Behind laughing mask’ indicates the reason for Courbet’s sadness, the loss of ‘wife’ and son to another. Rather than looking ‘behind’, the mask straightforwardly reveals both the tragic and the comic. There he is in the photograph, the painter in his studio, masked by tragedy and comedy and kneeling before the woman, as muse or whore; but of course, it is only my contemplation. Academic history painting with its montage of multiple fragments was part of the impetus for photographers to provide images full of motifs. Braquehais systematically exploits a theatrical vein, of both the tableau vivants and the complete warehouse of props used by painters and photographers of his time. Sylviane de Decker Heftler names Braquehais the pioneer of this ‘dubious enterprise’: In the fantasy académies by Braquehais, props multiply frantically. The spectator is entering the studio of the painter and discovers an unlikely (assortment of) bric-à-brac. The photographic composition is an accumulation of studies; poses, props, backgrounds, draperies. The photograph itself is a demonstration of disorder all of which in the service of painters. He has put a nude under a draped shawl, beside a still-life; he has given her a lover, false and masked; and finally, he has situated the scene in a painter’s studio, because everywhere else this assemblage would be impossible.52 A study supervised by M. Dagen of the University of Paris I (Panthéon-Sorbonne) collates the many works by Braquehais that Courbet used for his compositions. One of the comparisons is between Bruno Braquehais, Nu à l’oiseau, 1850, daguerreotype and Courbet’s Femme au perroquet, (1866, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York).53 There is no evidence to prove which photograph Courbet requested from Bruyas. However, the monograph written by Huyghe et al. presents evidence that Bruyas had in his collection some plates of the Musée Daguerrien by Braquehais and Peruche: Behind Courbet, is his Muse, la Realité, watching him paint. One remembers the proposal Courbet had put to Bruyas ‘that photograph of a nude woman which I have talked to you about’. What is he concerned with? What is Courbet beseeching from him? Without doubt it is one of the photographs of models use by painters which by then had started to be distributed; we cite, notably, for 1854, the series published by Moulin, Delessert, Vallou de Villeneuve, the Études d’après Nature de Dolliver and the five plates in the Musée Daguerrien

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by Braquehais and Peruche … That he would demand such a photograph, is evidence of an attitude, a pose that has been struck; women in profile are rare in photographs and that genre, perhaps in the meantime we found the proof in the words of Courbet, a nude woman, legs crossed, leaning with her elbow on a plinth and which appeared in the Musée Daguerrien about which he spoke very highly. With regard to the type of the woman, it seems quite close to a Baigneuse of 1865 (on Courbet’s female nudes see Paul Mantz GBA 1878 p. 526 and other reference to Bruyas’ Gallery); her face we already know, it is a woman with broad face, and equally broad outlines, which are found on many occasions, and in neighbouring poses, of Courbet’s paintings between 1847 and 1855; that is the Bacchante belonging to M.Dezarrois (dated 1847) and the Fileuse endormie of 1852.54

4.10 Montage of details from Vallou de Villeneuve, Braquehais and Courbet.

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Is this the photograph Courbet used (4.10)? I recall a passage from Benjamin’s Trauerspiel: The creature is the mirror within whose frame alone the moral world was revealed to the baroque. A concave mirror; for this was not possible without distortion. Since it was the view of the age that all historical life was lacking virtue, virtue was also of no significance for the inner constitution of the dramatis personae themselves. It has never taken a more uninteresting form than in the heroes of these Trauerspiel, in which the only response to the call of history is the physical pain of martyrdom.55 Inconclusive Seven years after the birth of Désiré-Alfred-Émile, mother and son are established in Dieppe and the relationship comes to an end – ‘husband’ and father Courbet, ill and overcome with sadness, conceives The Painter’s Studio, the ‘allégorie réelle déterminant une phase de sept années de ma vie artistique’. These circumstances have never been used directly to give meaning to The Painter’s Studio. Yet neither has the painting been read allegorically with reference to Courbet’s trauma. By 1973 it was well known that Virginie Binet was the mother of Courbet’s son, and several respected historians published the fact. It looks as if the relationship was common knowledge prior to the acquisition of the letter from Courbet to Champfleury in 1977. In 1973 both Lindsay and T.J. Clark reference Courbet’s relationship with Virginie, and their son becomes established by Fernier (1951), and mentioned by Mack (1951), Riat (1906), Gros-Kost, (1880) and Courbet’s contemporary and supporter, Castagnary.56 Clearly, this information on Courbet’s mistress and son is important in the general sense. But how it is actually used in discourse matters. Beyond the identification, Toussaint does not use ‘Virginie’ to further any ‘meaning’ for the political puzzle of The Painter’s Studio. The identification of the women in Courbet’s artwork remained confusing. Neither in his book on Courbet, 1969, nor in his catalogue raisonné of 1977 does the painter and Courbet expert Robert Fernier mention either the boy, or acknowledge Virginie as having a son by Courbet, even though he confirmed the ‘facts’ in 1951.57 Lindsay takes it into the interpretation of Courbet’s work in 1973, though he does not identify Virginie’s portrait in The Painter’s Studio. ‘She’, in part(s) appears and disappears in the painting, as ‘she’ does in the writing about The Painter’s Studio. She is the confusion of names, never really identified, the ever-mistress, Virginie, or Justine, or Joséphine … She is in the body parts of women, discussed as ‘thighs’ or ‘flesh’ … she is, moving in and out of discourse like Jeanne Duval, muse and whore, pure and impure. Once painted out, she now eerily reappears, as the paint surface changes over time. She is the background moving forward to occupy the Baroque space of allegory. In the Braquehais no. 7 she, ‘woman’, is the model in the mirror and the ‘real’ in the studio, or vice versa. As a Muse, she is Truth, she is pure. Yet as the ‘other’, she is not pure. She is in the position of mistress, prostitute, impur, real, dirty and ugly. All these descriptions are

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used. ‘Woman’ in The Painter’s Studio is not a person, nor a fact; she is an action, a dialectical and allegorical apparition. For the ‘Courbet’ discourse, she activates the ‘mask’ and moves his character between ‘good’ and ‘bad’. Out of these oddities, we are unsure how to regard women in his paintings. If the daguerreotype by Braquehais is the source for Courbet’s The Painter’s Studio I cannot prove it, but I can read the painting, its discursive fragments and ruins allegorically, and continue in contemplation of all that a significant work of art can promise – an understanding of the human condition. Even if there is no isomorphic relation between figure and text, there is, however, an archival relation between them, in the violence of their juxtaposition, their coming together as overlaps and slithers, and in the unexpected chidings and scoldings of opposing explanations. Through an awareness of the impossibility of one finalizing meaning, by realizing that there can never be a way of closing the gap, an allegorical approach demonstrates the desire for closure, whilst acknowledging that if a solution is found, all understanding will be lost. To keep things in suspense, then, is to understand historically. Ruin is the status of allegory. Referential meaning being left in the ruin implies a shell, or a mask, wrought through the passage of time. That which survives is the most allegorical and, therefore, the most significant. Allegory arrives as critique and provides knowledge in the remnant. Allegory and the ruin: allegory is the evidence left in the discursive, as ‘fact’, as Courbet’s mask is treated as art historical ‘fact’. It is that which remains over time. It is also in the absent presence, the mirrored fragments that may be lost from the ruin, but helped over time to create its significance. Virginie Binet, as mask on wall of The Painter’s Studio, the figurative ruin, and the ruin of the discourse, is evidence of the play of allegory. In this reading of Courbet’s The Painter’s Studio as allegory, I am certainly not suggesting that he deliberately composed it so, or that was in any way his intention. I am suggesting the possibility that the tragic drama of his life over seven years is told through the theatrical mirroring, looking differently, at the fragments of the relationships scattered and ruined in the fold of the discourse and the details of the painting. Between word and object there is a mourning play unfolding: ‘Courbet’s Trauerspiel: Trouble with women in the Studio’. Allegory, in its own awareness of all the possibilities of meaning, grows out of acceptance, out of search for understanding, rather than truth. Allegory offers understanding, contentment in contemplation rather than control through solution. Allegory’s power is through a critical commentary that keeps the artwork alive as an object in discourse. And allegory is always on the verge of disappearing, either into melancholy or otherwise into the symbolic; and its consequence is the dangerous closure of interpretive interest. Whereas, although it appears that allegory looks back into the past, at the same time it pushes the narrative forward to a point never reached. It is by way of revision that critical theory reinvests paintings with interest. Indeed allegory is the trope by which the gap between past and present is both bridged and breached, dissolving the separation by its acceptance of that very gap. Allegory never ends … so this chapter can never conclude … But the resonances continue … (4.11 and 4.12).

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4.11 Joel-Peter Witkin (b. 1939), Studio of the Painter (Courbet), Paris,
 hand-painted gelatin silver print with encaustic, unique,
73.1 × 98.5 cm, Paris, Fonds National d’Art Contemporain.

4.12 John de Andrea (b. 1941), Allegory: After Courbet, 1988, oil and synthetic polymer paint on polyvinyl acetate and silicone rubber, 172.2 × 152.2 × 190.2 cm. Perth: State Art Collection, Art Gallery of Western Australia. Purchased 1989.

5 ASTONISHING MARINE LIVING Ellen Gallagher’s Ichthyosaurus at the Freud Museum Suzanna Chan

Ichthyosaurus: codifying desire This chapter considers the racialized politics of psychoanalysis, psychoanalytical explanations of the traumatic operations of racism, and Afro-Futurist-inspired myths of diasporic feminine identity brought to confluence through Ellen Gallagher’s installation Ichthyosaurus at the Freud Museum in London in 2005. Comprising two 16 mm films, sculptural objects and works on paper, Ichthyosaurus was Gallagher’s empathetic and complex engagement with Freud’s space of work and contemplation. The installation encompassed one work legible for its critique of a masculineimperialist ideological formation of psychoanalysis, which can be extended to diacritically address Frantz Fanon’s psychoanalytic accounts of racialized sexual struggle. Other works bespeak the artist’s affinity with Sigmund Freud’s early interest in evolutionary models of the unconscious, and marine biology. Fifteen of Freud’s drawings of the lamprey, a primitive fish he studied between 1876 and 1877 to gain insight into the evolution of nervous systems, were displayed in conjunction with Gallagher’s installation. While Freud left his marine studies behind along with his youthful desire to be an oceanographer, Gallagher’s early research in marine biology effloresces in representations of radical maritime identity-formations in her ongoing series titled Watery Ecstatic (2001–), works from which featured in Ichthyosaurus. In the Watery Ecstatic series, Gallagher looks to the sea as the birthplace of an evolved feminine aquatic. She pursues and reworks the myth of a Black Atlantis called ‘Drexciya’, posed by the eponymous music collective. They describe the inhabitants of Drexciya as an amphibious species of ‘Drexciyans’, which evolved from the offspring of enslaved pregnant African women thrown from slave ships during the Atlantic crossing of the horrific Middle Passage, who somehow managed to give birth before drowning.1 Gallagher’s pursuit of the myth offers feminine

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identities which exclaim an audacious vitality, and one offered no account within the Oedipal kinship relation that gives the psychoanalytic symbolic its intelligibility. ‘Ich’ was the code word the smitten adolescent Freud used to describe Gisela Fluss, a young girl upon whom he had a crush, in his early letters.2 The term refers to Ichthyosaurus, a dolphin-like marine reptile that lived some two hundred million years ago, having evolved from what was a land dwelling reptile, which slid back into the water. The creature was viviparous, giving birth to live young, and the locations of its fossils suggest it was a river-dweller, which sparked the obscure connection Freud made between the creature and Gisela, whose surname Fluss also means ‘river’ in German. A warping desire for secrecy codified Gisela Fluss outside of the category human, and a warping desire also propels the Drexciyan evolution into an aquatic species, but it is a survivalist one. For Amna Malik, how the Ichthyosaurus connects with the installation’s politics of ‘race’ or psychoanalysis is not clear.3 Here, I show that it is only by attending to the artist’s reference to the Afro-Futurist Drexcyian myth in her Watery Ecstatic series that the resonances become apparent at symbolic and morphological levels. The interlaced themes of the Drexciyan evolutionary mutation, traumatic memory, the early Freudian phylogenetic model of the unconscious, and ‘unknowable’ femininity are coordinates for Gallagher’s Ichthyosaurus, its cultural politics located in a Black Atlantic. Her engagement with Afro-Futurist expression allies with the material manifestations of Freud’s antiquarianism to unfold the Freud Museum as a diaspora space. It is a place of historical exile, established following Freud’s flight from the Nazi annexation of Austria in 1938 on the eve of the Holocaust. Gallagher’s engagement also underscores Freud’s heterogeneous, boundary blurring viewpoints testified in his eclectic array of antiquities. However, not without first pinpointing the question of psychoanalysis’s historical period in imperialist modernism. The rebounded gaze of the ‘dark continent’ The photo collage titled Odalisque (2005) (5.1), depicts Gallagher reclining in an alcove on heavily patterned fabrics, propping her upper body on an elbow, wearing loose harem pants and an anklet, with her feet bare. The image was placed in the midst of Freud’s collection of antiquities, hung on the wall just behind a clothcovered table holding a replica Pharaoh mask and a statue of a reclining Buddha, the pose of which Gallagher mimics in Odalisque. Supine next to the late Sigmund Freud, who is represented as very much alive, she is an Orientalist fantasy for a senescent Freud returned to the artistry of his younger self. Harking to Freud’s rendering of Gisela Fluss into the unknowable ‘Ich’, Gallagher represents herself according to the erasing terms of a colonial stereotype which controls and contains difference. This stereotype uses, according to Edward Said, a ‘median category’ to control a threat to an established order by casting it as a previously known thing.4 Gallagher is elevated to face-to-face level with Freud, whose attention is concentrated on pressing his hand against his drawing pad, while she warily regards him. Does his unseen drawing feature the concubine’s gazeless narcotic reverie aided by the substances on the shimmering tray? Yet her canny look reveals Gallagher to be

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5.1

Visual Politics of Psychoanalysis

Ellen Gallagher 
Odalisque, 2005. 
Gelatin silver print with watercolour and gold leaf, 
20.3 × 25.4 cm. 
Courtesy the artist, Two Palms Press New York and Hauser & Wirth, Zürich 
London. Installation view at the Freud Museum, London, 2005. 
Photo: Mike Bruce.

entirely cognisant and rather than his phallic gaze, we see Freud scrutinized by his other, as compromised viewers of this fictional scene of her objectification. Herself the object of a phallic gaze between viewer and image, Gallagher has manoeuvred to become a protagonist by exercising a gaze which speaks of a different sphere of identifications. Commanding the viewer to look at her looking at Freud, Gallagher offers both a critique of Freudian psychoanalysis as a phallocentric Eurocentric proposition and subversion from within its discourse. His occasional draughtsmanship as a young scientist hardly offers an explanation for why Gallagher cedes the role of artist to Freud. But through the reversal she can reveal the non-exchangeability of their positions as Father of psychoanalysis and black woman artist. The curtain is pulled back to show Gallagher ensnared in the thematic of ‘dark continent’.5 Freud’s ‘dark continent’ dips into the European

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colonialist lexicon to render femininity and primitivity substitutive, but as Lola Young contends, over-investing in the gender component misses its colonial and racial implications.6 Gallagher mimics both the ‘dark continent’ trope and the subject position Mary Ann Doane argues the term erases, that of the black feminine subject, without which the European femininity Freud spoke of in a colonialist idiom would have no meaning.7 She also reworks the photographic medium which offered Europeans the ethnographic visibility of Africa and the image of the colonized African woman as a metaphor for the penetration and conquest of the continent. In her analysis of the significance of Freud’s ‘dark continent’ for feminist film studies, Doane argues that the structuring binarisms of Freud’s colonialist imagination have sprouted a struggle in psychoanalytically informed feminist theory, with the tension between analyzing racial and sexual difference. Unlike sexual difference, the fabrication of ‘race’, as Hannah Arendt so illuminatingly demonstrates, has a discernible epistemological history.8 Racial difference and sexual difference, sexuality and racialization are always interlinked but a sole focus on sexuality is the privilege of a normatively racialized subject. Additionally, the social sciences, the dominant discipline for investigating racism, have been slow to pick up a role for psychoanalysis, despite openings. For example, the pioneering feminist sociologist Colette Guillamin argues that categories known as ‘races’ are a product of racism as an ideology and once constituted, are assigned operative signifiers. ‘The ideology of race (racism) is’, she tells us, ‘a universe of signs’.9 And given the Lacanian focus on the signifier, psychoanalysis can productively interweave with social science towards understanding the psychic workings of race.10 It is also worth stressing, as Michel Foucault does, that the period in which psychoanalysis emerged was that of intensifying state-directed biological racisms, furnished with eugenicist theories of perversion-heredity-degenerescence, and thematics of blood purity. Psychoanalysis is, he acknowledges, to be credited with breaking from the neuropsychiatry of degenerescence and grounding sexuality in the symbolic order.11 Foucault also recognizes that the psyche services the oppressive normalization which works the body over, securing as Judith Butler argues, a role for psychoanalysis in understanding the function of the unconscious in and of power, and in our occupation of and resignification of the injurious term.12 The interrogation of its injurious terms can however be inhibited if ‘race’ is considered an extra-symbolic phenomenon. For example, Hortense J. Spillers claims ‘The individual in the collective traversed by “race” – and there are no known exceptions … is covered by it before language and its differential laws take hold’, to invoke a pre-symbolic, pre-imaginary articulation of race.13 She turns to psychoanalytical terms to approach the psychic operations of race, situating its reality and politics in the Real by claiming, ‘its face as an aspect of the Real, brings to light its most persistent perversity’.14 Drawing upon Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen’s readings, she characterizes the Real as ‘pure and simple’, ‘undifferentiated’, ‘non-human’, ‘without fissure’ and ‘always in the same place’, which, she claims seems to match the mythical behaviour of ‘race’, yet without further elucidation or enquiry into how psychoanalysis might allow us to understand the potency of ‘race’. 15 Spillers is concerned with the possibility of articulating the

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interior intersubjectivity of subjects of difference, which she insists will come from reading human performances in the life world, rather than a psychoanalytical model for it. She charges that psychoanalytic discourse has yet to be shown to be effective in illuminating the problematic of ‘race’ in the context of the United States and the intellectual history of African Americans; and that we have yet to know how to historicize the psychoanalytic object and objective and destabilize it through social and cultural forms that are disjunctive to its originary imperatives. Kalpana Seshadri-Crooks pursues a Lacanian analysis of ‘race’ and its mythical relation to the Real, having identified race’ as the property of a historicizable discourse. It is, she argues, produced and captured by a symbolical language which has no access to the body in its otherness, though its legitimacy depends on the notion of an extra-symbolic racial body.16 According to Seshadri-Crooks, the system of race is based on an unconscious master signifier of Whiteness, which generates a combinatory with its own set of determining inclusions and exclusions. It attempts to signify the extra-symbolic aspect of the subject, by promising wholeness and blocking access to lack, but it is merely a signifier that appears in the place which should have remained empty, to connect to the fantasy that the subject could unite with the ‘objet a’ and achieve wholeness and mastery.17 Yet she does not elaborate on the distinguishing anatomy of a master signifier. Lacan emphasizes the signifier but not a strand of master signifier.18 If a master signifier Whiteness, lodged in the unconscious, needs to be anchored to a signified, it inhibits the ‘glissement’ or sliding of signifiers over the chain of signifieds. The ‘glissement’ is arrested in the operations of the symptom, dream or unconscious manifestation, where the signifier is tied to a particular significance.19 But this is a mythical stopping point and something new always appears, and it is not established that the operations of the unconscious manifestation can apply to a distinctive variety of master signifier. Notwithstanding such divergent conceptual challenges posed by Spillers and Sheshadri-Crooks, the tension Doane observes between analyzing sexual and racial difference frequently involves a privileging of the former but it does not render them mutually exclusive. As Jean Walton insists, strikingly little has been made of the fantasy of racial difference central to Joan Rivière’s foundational text ‘Womanliness as a Masquerade’ amongst its subsequent discussants.20 The fantasy historicizes Rivière’s analysis within its racist socio-symbolic, but hardly renders unusable its paradigm of masquerade and non-essentialist gendering. Rivière established the masquerade of femininity as that of a feminine whiteness structured in white patriarchy. In Odalisque, where we might see Gallagher critically perform ‘black womanliness’ to underscore the racialized politics of psychoanalysis, the masquerade is organized according to phallocentric white patriarchy laced with instabilities. The woman of colour and the off-white man Its exclusion of those ‘races’ and classes associated with the primitive from psychoanalytic subjecthood historicizes psychoanalysis, but deconstruction offers us the understanding that the excluded are its constitutive terrain.21 And this terrain includes the racialized model of the Jew that Freud himself internalized and

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transferred onto ‘woman’, according to Sander Gilman’s consideration of Freud’s transformation of the rhetoric of Jews as a ‘race’ into that of gender. According to Gilman, Freud translated the anti-Semitic discourse about the pathological body of the ‘dark Jew’ which interpellated him and which was underpinned by popular ethnological opinion that Jews were ‘black’, into a discourse about ‘blackness’ as the inexplicability of woman.22 To secure his own position as ‘neutral scientist’, Freud could know neither the essence of the male Jew, nor the essence of female sexuality at a time when both were considered unknowable. The mystery of ‘woman’ was due to a characteristic insincerity and secretiveness, paralleled in anti-Semitic descriptions of the hidden nature of the Jew which were widely circulated at the turn of the century.23 Read in the light of the racialization of its subjects in a particular historical moment, Odalisque offers invested legibility of Freud authoring his masculine whiteness by way of what, following Gilman, we could call a translation of his own racialization, to become the persona of neutral male scientist engaged in the observational sketching of his early days. Gallagher’s masquerade in the position of subaltern as woman who cannot speak is rendered through what Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak has described as the masculineimperialist ideological formation which shaped Freud’s initial desire to give the hysteric a voice into ‘the daughter’s seduction’.24 If Freudian psychoanalysis involves, as Spillers claims, the patient and the one who is supposed to know, Gallagher is precluded from knowing or being known through self-disclosure, yet is equipped with a gaze that prevents Odalisque from reading as a simplistic representation of the subaltern encountering a Freudian colonialist imaginary. Her subversive gaze is the agency of the subject for whom, historically, as Spillers contends, racialization has required her to earn, repeatedly, the linguistic right to a place in the social economy.25 And her sexual difference marks this as resistance to phallocentrism in both colonizing and colonized patriarchies. The writing of Frantz Fanon, the inaugurating psychoanalyst of the traumatic operations of racism, makes clear this necessity. In contrast to the a-historicity psychoanalytic discourse is often charged with, Fanon focuses on the relationship between psychic processes, attendant physical effects, and their structuring by political forces. 26 He fuses the psychoanalytical and materialist by interlinking sexuality and fantasy with labour and economics and focuses on the interplay of sexuality and racialization which constitute the subject within colonial societies. Yet he carries Freud’s erasure of black feminine subjectivity into a stunting and vitriolic script. ‘I know nothing about her’, he confesses of his experience of black women’s psychosexuality and as Lola Young argues, does not even offer black women the inner life of a psyche which he at least grants white women.27 As though in an act of avoidance of the subject at large, Fanon relies on the textual rather than the experiential and finds his case study for ‘The woman of colour and the white man’ in the autobiographical account of Mayotte Capécia in Je Suis Martiniquaise. Since she does not divulge her dreams, he finds himself without access to her unconscious, but proceeds nonetheless to characterize her entire motivation as a kind of white penis envy.28

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Locked in her grim desire for a white man, Capécia is nothing insofar as she has nothing by way of status to offer him. As she puts it, ‘I should have liked to be married, but to a white man. But a woman of colour is never altogether respectable in a white man’s eyes. Even when he loves her. I knew that’.29 Fanon always compellingly attends to the trauma of racism as experienced from the masculine perspective but he is dismissive and disdainful of the woman of colour, who is ‘revolting’ and ‘ridiculous’.30 Her sense of inferiority, he insists, drives the woman of colour to aspire to redeem the race by entering the white world. In this endeavour she enlists the assistance of what he terms ‘affective erethism’, a pathology of hypersensitivity which Fanon adumbrates as the woman of colour’s rejection of the man of colour. Its initiator is the man of colour because he might cause her to ‘lose’ whiteness, indeed like whites, she too finds ‘the Negro is a phobogenic object’.31 Analyzing the corrosive psychosexual interface between the woman of colour and the white man, his interest remains the traumatized psyche of the black man, whose hypersensitivity is initiated by the rejections of the woman of colour. He must step forth in the white world in search of the attentions of the white man and the protective qualities afforded by being like him. To conclude his chapter, Fanon returns to his case studies, ‘Nini and Mayotte Capécia: two types of behaviour that move us to thought. Are there no other possibilities? But those are pseudo possibilities that do not concern us’.32 They are pseudo possibilities since they concern women who remain for Fanon, pseudo subjects, and this is not simply because he has only come to know them through the pages of a book. In Fanon’s diminishing and blaming account, Gallagher’s feminine subject in Odalisque would be ‘revolting’ and ‘ridiculous’, with no room for resistance. Since he only conceptualizes women as potential or actual childbearers, Young suggests that Mayotte and the other women of colour he dismisses may be read as subjects who resist the powerlessness of their situation by refusing to be objects of exchange within the community, and this may be part of Fanon’s rage.33

Watery Ecstatic. Astonishing marine living If Odalisque faces psychoanalytic discourse with its historical repressions, other works in Ichthyosaurus unfold a bolder vista of resistant identifications through cultural and social forms beyond the foundational imperatives of psychoanalysis. A photogravure of Abu Simbel, which hangs in the library of the Freud Museum was replaced, for the duration of the installation, by Gallagher’s Abu Simbel (2005). This is a reproduction of the photogravure of Abu Simbel overlaid with bling sequins, a collage of figures and a space ship evocative of that which featured in avantgarde jazz musician Sun Ra’s film Space is the Place (5.2 and 5.2a). Sun Ra’s creative resistance of black liberation, with its ecstatic epiphany, articulated outer space as a realm beyond, ethically, politically, and aesthetically, racist, post-slavery 1970s United States.34 Sun Ra and his Arkestra performed at the Egyptian pyramids in 1971 and perhaps the reworked Abu Simbel photogravure fancifully has them travelling through the region in their mythical music-powered spacecraft. Gallagher describes her work as ‘a tricked-out, multi-directional flow from Freud to ancient Egypt to

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5.2

Ellen Gallagher, 
Abu Simbel, 2005. 
Photogravure, watercolour, colour pencil, varnish, pomade, plasticine, 
blue fur, gold leaf and crystals, 
62 × 90 cm. 
Courtesy the artist, Two Palms Press New York and Hauser & Wirth Zürich London.

5.2a

Installation view at the Freud Museum, London, 2005. Photo: Mike Bruce.

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Sun Ra to George Clinton’.35 She reorients the photogravure image towards African diaspora cultural production and Sun Ra’s Afro-Egyptian myth, and locates Freud’s appeal to Egypt in a history of parallels drawn between African and Jewish diasporas, by their thinkers.36 In Freud and the Non-European, Edward Said on the one hand charges that antique Egyptian history interested Freud for its use by European scholarship, and on the other recognizes that in his last work Freud insists on Moses, founder of Judaism, as Egyptian.37 For Said, there is something compelling in Freud’s insistence, and the openings maintained by his excavations of the non-Jewish foundations of Judaism and its Arabic past stand in contrast to their erasure in a contemporary official Israel and Jewish identity.38 Moreover, though Said attributes the shadow of antiSemitism to Freud’s comparatively milder insistence on Jews as the remnants of Mediterranean civilization and thus as Europeans, he overlooks how this manoeuvre speaks to a coeval discourse of Hellenism versus Hebraism.39 In Ulysses James Joyce’s experiments with binary blurring extend to Matthew Arnold’s hierarchical dyad of Hellenism and Hebraism, ‘Woman’s reason. Jewgreek is Greekjew. Extremes meet’.40 Similarly, Freud attempts a reconciliation of the Arnoldian opposition of Greek national culture and Jewish nomadism. His interest in the cultures of the ancient world for Griselda Pollock ‘spoke to and of his desire and his childhood dreams framed in a still potent Jewish heritage within a Germano-Christian culture’.41 As such, it could be considered the interest of a diasporic trans-national subject, during a period in which diasporic peoples were, as Nicholas Mirzoeff insists, seen as a disruption to the natural economy of the nation state and an excess to be disposed of through colonial resettlement, migration, and ultimately, extermination.42 If as Mirzoeff contends, the nineteenth-century national museum and the disinterested category of art both, in their creation of a visual rhetoric of nationality, excluded diasporic peoples, then Freud’s quarters in Vienna and later in London were the sites of a subversive non-nationalizing, deterritorializing antiquarianism and connoisseurship. Gallagher finds another source for emphatic dialogue in the young Freud’s research in marine biology and his drawings of the nervous system of lamprey. The installation engenders interplay between Freud’s early interest in evolutionary mechanisms in the origins of the mind and Gallagher’s interest in the Middle Passage as both originary and evolutionary futurist myth which works to transcend historical discourses of racist taxonomy. If as Doane argues, the trope of ‘dark continent’ casts the figure of black woman outside of femininity, Gallagher’s works cast the figure outside of the category human, in a risky play with injurious signifiers of the black body.43 Francette Pacteau contends that in a phallocentric Eurocentric regime the difference between black and white women is ‘one of degree’, but there are many instances where racial difference is articulated as one of species.44 For example, reading Ernest Hemingway’s To Have and Have Not, Toni Morrison draws attention to how the white protagonist likens his sexual encounter with a black woman to one with ‘nurse shark’, to reassure and flatter his white wife by reaching for a notion of the black woman as not even mammal but fish.45 Consider then, the risk in

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proposing a species of evolved aquatic descendants of enslaved African women. The etymology of ‘ecstatic’ in the Greek terms ekastsis, meaning astonishing, and existanai, that is, to derange or displace, offers an apt description of the marine life Gallagher’s Watery Ecstatic series represents. Gallagher has referenced and titled works after the Detroit techno music collective, Drexciya, who pose an outlandish claim about the traumatic Atlantic crossing of the Middle Passage. What if pregnant enslaved African women who were thrown overboard for being disruptive cargo during their labour, still managed to give birth? And what it their offspring were born an aquatic species in the Atlantic through an extraordinary and accelerated evolution, which returned them to a marine vitality? Drexciya propose a masculine warrior myth, ‘Did they migrate from the Gulf of Mexico to the Mississippi River Basin and to the Great Lakes of Michigan? Do they walk amongst us? Are they more advanced than us?’46 However, Gallagher appropriates this myth to create a feminine aquatic cyborg identity resonant with the African American science fiction writer Octavia Butler’s post-human alien life forms which rearticulate the terms of black feminine subjectivity at a threshold between determination and unknowability. Gallagher’s interrogations of the injurious term of ‘race’ necessitate that it be written, following Jacques Derrida, as black, or put under erasure to signify the inaccuracy of the signifying unit and its simultaneous retention as a site of critical resignification.47 Many of Gallagher’s works play on debasing signifiers of ‘blackness’ and differently invested, idealizing signifiers of ‘whiteness’, which are in some works unmoored from signifieds, and in others clumped in the burden of racial signification as the excess of determination. Teeming forms which reference the injurious lexicon of ‘blackface’ minstrelsy, popping eyes, flipped wigs, extended tongues and distended lips, return to disorder the denial of imperialist histories within the modernist white space. There is however an absence of representations of the black body and the images inscribe the enslaved body’s obliteration and replacement with ‘white’ imaginings of ‘blackness’. Watery Ecstatic re-imagines the myth of other than human life engendered by reworking death, the trauma of the Middle Passage, of slavery and of post-slavery, in an Afrofuturistic survivalist culture of resistance. The young Freud limited his coastal field trips to the Irish sea, but had he glimpsed Gallagher’s amphibious black Atlantic in the waves, in what symbolic could he have placed them? In a footnote submerged beneath the body text of Freud’s Totem and Taboo, he quotes a verse from Ariel’s song, from The Tempest: Full fathom five thy father lies; Of his bones are coral made; Those are pearls that were his eyes: Nothing of him that doth fade, But doth suffer a sea-change Into something rich and strange.48

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Freud proposed totemism’s twin prohibitions of murder and incest as the foundation of moral law, through his myth of the murder of the Father of the primal horde. Though the memory of the murder itself might fade, for Freud ‘the less it itself was recollected, the more numerous must have been the substitutes to which it gave rise’.49 Yet the dead primal father is transformed into nothing as rich and strange as Gallagher’s mythical Drexciyans. What on earth could the Oedipal drama, foundation of the moral law in the incest taboo and the kinship relation that gives the psychoanalytic symbolic its intelligibility, mean for Gallagher’s feminine aquatic narrative? The enslaved subjects of the Middle Passage were positioned outside of the moral law and precluded kinship within the family structure, prior to any imaginary evolution into a radically non-oedipal aquatic species.50 The work titled Watery Ecstatic (2005) (5.3 and 5.3a) was hung in the place above Freud’s couch usually occupied by a print of André Brouillet’s painting Leçon du Mardi, Salpêtrière, which depicts a woman in a hysterical faint being held by the assistant of Jean-Martin Charcot, who lectures to an all-male medical assembly. Rendered in watercolour, ink, oil, varnish and collage on paper, Watery Ecstatic depicts an uncanny creature, simultaneously familiar and unfamiliar. It is evocative of a sea anemone which sits like a swollen ochre globe on a cluster of egg-like forms and extends a skirt of plump pink tentacles. The imagery implies knowability but does not accurately illustrate any known life form and so preserves unknowability. The anemone-like form floats in the upper central space of the white sheet of paper and long curling green watercolour ribbons extend from beneath and behind its pink tentacles, dotted with tiny signs of black faces framed with collaged long white spikes of hair, and embellished with cut out discs overlaid with letters ‘o’ and the odd letter ‘e’. Reading as feminine, the faces in Watery Ecstatic are like encodings on the tentacles, at first suggesting ghostly genetic traces. In her perceptive reading of Ichthyosaurus, Amna Malik notes that Gallagher has expressed interest in the idea of an unconsciously transmitted trauma which ‘lives in patterns or is passed around like a virus’.51 Gallagher’s assertion might seem to plug into biological or essentialist notions of trauma as a kind of genetically inscribed, transgenerational ‘race’ memory, yet her emphasis is on the structure of trauma rather than its inherence. Moreover, by attending to the iconography of Watery Ecstatic we can find the terms of an alternative symbolic sphere for engagement with trauma. All of the elements of Watery Ecstatic are co-dependently linked in a systemic marine form that evades taxonomy. Gallagher’s reworking of the Drexciyan myth casts it as not only a feminine and pre-oedipal one in a Freudian sense, but in Watery Ecstatic, offers it a prenatal psycho-spatial realm. The signs of black faces have not achieved separation from their marine life support system where sameness coexists with alterity. The imagery of the painting can on a topographical, symbolical level be offered legibility through Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger’s writings on the matrixial sphere as a complex psychic sphere of encounters, ‘imprints of traumatic encounters not of me, but of my non-I(s), transmitted to me and trans-scribed’.52 The matrixial sphere does not idealize pregnancy or denote an organ but a psychic apparatus modelled on this site of feminine/prenatal encounter. Perhaps where

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5.3

Ellen Gallagher, 
Watery Ecstatic, 
2005, watercolour, ink, oil, varnish, collage and cut paper on paper, 
83 × 107.6 cm.
Courtesy Private Collection. Photo: Mike Bruce.

5.3a

Installation view at the Freud Museum, London, 2005 
Photo: Mike Bruce.

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initially in Watery Ecstatic we see an unclassifiable organism, we can also recognize a cartography of the ethics of a pre-oedipal matrixial psychic zone. This is a psychic sphere for processing trauma, where the m/Other processes events too traumatic for the fragile foetal ego. In the matrixial psychic sphere, my imprints will be trans-scribed in the other, and to begin with in the m/Other, thus my others will process traumatic events for me, like my m/Other processed archaic events for my premature and fragile subjectivity.53 Issuing from the traumatized, pregnant female bodily specificity which initiates the Drexciyan survivalist myth, Gallagher narrates a web of interlinked feminine subjectivities alive in a marine uncanny, and in an act of commemoration which marks a place of maternal absence as one of her horrific elimination. Some of Gallagher’s works which were not included in Ichthyosaurus also offer an extra-Oedipal kinship relation. Kabuki is one of five animated films that comprise the series Murmur, made in collaboration with Edgar Clejine, which explore the concerns of the Watery Ecstatic series. In Kabuki, a single ‘wiglady’ forms, according to Gallagher, ‘a fractal composition of herself ”, before ‘becoming a migratory flock’, rendered through computer animation and rotoscopy.54 The ‘wiglady’ references flipped wigs taken from ‘blackface’ minstrelsy’s debasing signifying lexicon but here, they flock, loop and descend into Drexciya. The repetition of the wiglady motif to produce a swarming mass, and repeated images frequently feature in Gallagher’s work, begs mention of Freud’s conception of repetition-compulsion, in Beyond the Pleasure Principle. The survivalist myth of Drexciya attests to a traumatic witnessing of the murderous horror of the Middle Passage, but the repetition-compulsion goes beyond the death drive and its paradoxical operation of life preservation, to a communitarian, sexual-life instinct, Eros. In Dancehall culture the DJ calls, ‘come again.’ And the Selector must rewind the track, so it all happens again … The point is not to begin again. Rather, it’s to continue in a heightened fashion … The game begins when you start and it’s over when you finish, but other players enter and leave the field continuously. You must understand repetition in terms of pure pleasure to cotton to repetition as a figure of black culture.55 Gallagher’s Watery Ecstatic and Kabuki do not attempt restitution or an idealizing origin myth, but offer instead mutability and potential through a resignification of the signifiers behind the wounding racist image, which strain to be cast adrift from their signifieds. What will the legacy of Oedipus be for those who are formed in situations, where positions are hardly clear because of divorce and remarriage, because of migration, exile and refugee status, because of global displacements of

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various kinds, move from one family to another, move from a family to no family, move from no family to a family, or in which they live, psychically, at the crossroads of the family, or in multiply layered family situations where the place of the father is dispersed, where the place of the mother is multiply occupied or displaced, where the symbolic in its stasis no longer holds.56 Both the daughter and half-sister of Oedipus, Antigone sacrifices herself to her incestuous kinship through the act of burying her dead brother prohibited by the state. For Butler, Antigone’s predicament offers an allegory for the crisis of kinship. Her impossible situation represents the deformation and displacement of kinship in its ideal form, and raises the question of ‘what makes our lives possible for those of us who confound kinship in the rearticulation of its terms? What new schemes of intelligibility make our lives legitimate and recognizable?’57 Lacan’s reading of Antigone centres on the function of the beautiful in the aim of desire and instates an uncompromising adherence to desire rather than a wish to ‘do good’ as the ethics of the analyst. Antigone sacrifices her own being to preserve the family Atè, that is, the family limit, a limit that human life can only briefly cross.58 Her desire aims beyond this limit, which Lacan also describes as the separation of being from language, and through her sacrifice she chooses to be the guardian of her brother’s Being. By contrast with Lacan’s isolation of Being from its historical drama, Judith Butler reads Antigone for the radical ambiguity of the terms of her kinship, her confounding position in a web of equivocal relations, and to amplify her as a non-conformity to the symbolic law.59 Antigone is concurrently entangled within and outside of the normative terms of kinship and her act refuses heterosexuality in its normative sense. Configuring the realm of deterritorialized women and children, Gallagher’s Drexciyan myth both resonates with and exceeds Antigone’s nonconformity to idealized, normalizing, heterosexist forms of kinship, and the moral law. Butler avers that Antigone’s legacy is an insistence on publicly grieving a prohibited grief, on speaking the unspeakable and on executing a proscribed action as one who has no right to act. Her legacy for kinship as the precondition of the human is radical, for she occasions a ‘new field of the human, achieved through political catachresis, the one that happens when the less than human speaks, when gender is displaced, and kinship founders on its own founding laws’.60 Gallagher’s Watery Ecstatic series unfolds the topology of an extra-Oedipal realm of being and its non-conformist, non-heterosexist feminine kinship inscribes a black feminine presence in the historic project of European modernity, which testifies to the horrific obliteration of historical subjects. Her visual practice of resignifying the site of injury and the injurious term of ‘race’ is a labour towards its destruction. Note A version of this chapter will appear in Suzanna Chan, Critical Diasporas. Art, Women, Migrations (London: I.B.Tauris, forthcoming).

6 NEW YORK TRANSFIXED Notes on the Expression of Fear Sharon Sliwinski

The question is: What is the genesis of spoken or pictorial expressions, by what feelings point of view, conscious or unconscious, are they preserved in the archive of memory, and are there laws by which they are set down and force their way out again? Aby M. Warburg1 This chapter is about nine photographs and what may be seen in them (6.1–6.9). The images are part of a much larger collection conceived of and organized by a group of four friends – Alice Rose George, Gilles Peress, Michael Shulan and Charles Traub – shortly after 11 September 2001. Their idea was to document what had happened and what was still occurring on the streets of New York City that infamous autumn. The 6.1 Unknown photographer (no. 3029 from here is new york). group also decided that this makeshift project should be open to ‘anybody and everybody’ and they sent out word as widely as possible that any photograph submitted on this topic would be displayed in an exhibition at Michael Shulan’s SoHo gallery.2 Images began pouring in. Over 5,000 photographs were submitted in all, taken by some 3,000 (mostly amateur) photographers. A small army of volunteers carefully scanned each submission, reprinting the photographs uniformly so they could be 6.2 Unknown photographer (no. 5032 from here is new york). hung floor to ceiling in the gallery without

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names or frames, ‘like laundry drying in the alleyways of Naples’.3 here is new york: a democracy of photographs eventually opened on 25 September 2001. By the second week there was a long line at the door and the crowds would continue for months afterwards. All of the images have been subsequently uploaded to a website, various exhibitions have toured worldwide, and a massive book containing nearly one thousand images was 6.3 Doug Hamilton (no. 3240 from here is new york). published by Scalo in 2002. In terms of sheer quantity of artefacts, here is new york may be the largest archive in world history devoted to a single event. The construction of the collection as well as the nature of its specific contents raise a number of questions for the field of historiography, or what is sometimes called historical memory. Here the form in which we remember events is thought to have a direct effect on public life. Indeed, the very prospect of justice may rely 6.4 Jeff Jacobson (no. 2566 from on such constructions and their associated here is new york). practices of remembrance and forgetting. As Jacques Derrida bluntly declared: ‘There is no political power without control of the archive, if not memory. Effective democratization can always be measured by this essential criterion: the participation in and the access to the archive, its constitution, and its interpretation.’4 In this respect, here is new york: a democracy of photographs lives up to its name, for each of Derrida’s criteria – participation in and access to the archive, its constitution and interpretation – have 6.5 From Gulnara Samilova (no. indeed been organized under the principle 5119 from here is new york). of egalitarianism. The friends collected photographs from ‘anybody and everybody’ and the entire archive is accessible to anyone with a computer and Internet access. But the archivists nevertheless bear the authority of what Derrida calls ‘consignation’, which is assuming the right to gather together the signs. That is, they bear the responsibility but also the authority for putting the archive together and for putting it into an order. This authority involves the reproduction of the original documents (as physical prints and digital files), as well as providing access and controlling publication rights, the arrangement of the images in the various

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exhibition spaces, the editing and ordering of the pictures for the book, the classification of images into 50 odd categories on the website, and perhaps most importantly, the initial choice of what to collect, namely photographs. There can be no doubt that each of these decisions has an effect on our interpretation of the event known as 9/11. Or as Derrida might say, each decision leaves its own distinct impression upon historical memory. But political implications aside, Derrida proposes that we create and preserve archives because there is something in them that defies understanding but that we desperately, indeed feverishly, wish to hold onto. These apparatuses are usually constructed as an attempt to house memory that would otherwise be lost. 6.6 Unknown photoArchives appear, in other words, precisely at the point grapher (no. 1540 of breakdown in memory; they are the remainders from here is new york). and reminders of the destruction of memory. At the heart of the archive, one could say, lies the problem of trauma. As Sigmund Freud first noticed, trauma profoundly affects the very way in which we experience events.5 Its character is generally regarded as twofold: trauma consists of the violent shattering of perceptual experience as well as the compulsive drive to contain or master the incident afterwards. Traumatic stimulus breaks into the psyche, so to speak, flooding the mind in such a way that the shocking event cannot be immediately 6.7 Alya Scully (no. 1880 from here is new york). contained as an experience which occurred in a specific time and place. Some of the common effects of trauma can include hallucinations or traumatic dreams in which the subject is returned to the scene of the trauma. The individual finds him- or herself back within a terrifyingly literal reproduction of those moments in which they were helpless. Using Derrida’s thesis, Herman Rapaport suggests that archives such as the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington DC can be read precisely within this enigmatic logic: as 6.8 Rachel Shaw (no. 2944 from here is new york). structural forms that attempt to replicate

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or re-present the traumatic events in such a way that the experience can be mastered retrospectively.6 With its special emphasis on photographic representation, here is new york no doubt aspires to a similar goal. The archive houses visual reproductions, ‘imprints’ which presumably open the possibility for an engagement with the historical event in such a way that the experience can be registered, and indeed, worked through. After all, the archivists of the collection have constructed a complex technological apparatus (using computers, scanners and printers) that is specifically designed to visually reproduce the horrific event through the continuous production and distribution 6.9 Unknown photoof photographic facsimiles. In short, the here is new grapher (no. 2365 york collection is profoundly circumscribed by the from here is new york). dynamics of trauma. While there is much to be said about this relationship between the structure of the archive and the structure of trauma, I have not yet come any closer to the nine photographs themselves, those fragile paper inscriptions that appear to depict witnesses’ immediate reactions to 9/11, indeed, which seem to show the traces of the event right on the surface of their bodies. These nine photographs can all be found in the category on the here is new york website called ‘onlookers’. As I browsed through the tiny thumbnails one morning, I began to notice a repeated gesture, one I came to think of as a state of being transfixed. In picture after picture, this strange posture in which one or both hands are placed over an opened mouth or grasp some part of the head started appearing with an unnerving regularity. What made the discovery particularly uncanny was not simply seeing this expression repeated on the streets of New York on that clear September morning, but also the fact of its recurring documentation. What would possess so many people to turn their cameras away from the spectacle and to point them at spectators? The first part of this problem involves the mystery of the expression itself: what is the significance of this extraordinary shared gesture? How can we interpret its genesis and how is it preserved in that other archive called the unconscious? And what can this particular expression tell us about the nature of the event known as 9/11, what Jean Baudrillard called ‘the ‘mother’ of all events, the pure event uniting within itself all the events that have never taken place’?7 The second aspect of the problem involves the mystery of the recurring image, the curious, or indeed, compulsive rendering of this particular expression into another visual impression, namely, a photograph. Given the repeated appearance of such records in the archive, perhaps the images should be read as a kind of symptomatic sign or as an artistic motif. But what does it mean to fold the psychology of human expression into a history of visual images? Or put another way, what is the nature of the relationship between individual and collective memory, between expression and impression?

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My proposition is that these traces – both the bodily gestures and their photographic documentation – represent ‘visual testimony’ of the event known as 9/11. History is not only a narrative form that is recorded some time after the events it seeks to represent. History is first written with the stylus of the body. This thesis immediately runs aground, however, because such emotive gestures are almost always performed unconsciously. The history written with the medium of the body is expressed in a language that no one speaks, or, rather, in a language that few are aware they speak. We do, however, possess a fairly good translation machine, a device that can record this unconscious language and help render it intelligible. I am speaking, of course, of the camera and its photographic products. The camera is itself caught up in the enigma of trauma for this device helps reveal the astonishing and paradoxical fact that our bodies receive traumatic stimulus in a time and form other to that in which it may be perceived. These images register that which could not be seen at the time.8 This thesis follows directly from Shoshana Felman’s argument that trauma does not only involve the enigma of a human agent’s unknowing acts but also the enigma of historical transmission.9 Trauma has a strange way of calling others to witness events which the agents involved cannot fully know. According to Felman, this bewildering aspect of trauma is transmitted principally through verbal testimony, a special kind of speech act composed of bits and pieces of experience that have not yet settled into understanding. ‘To testify’ is to vow to tell what one has experienced – even though the experience has not been fully assimilated into understanding. Felman suggests that far beyond its usual legal context, testimony has come to the fore in the contemporary cultural narrative. In this chapter I try to decipher this discourse as it functions in the visual realm. In collections like here is new york, the human experience of the event is not communicated verbally. Here the impact of the incident is expressed through bodily action and relayed through the medium of photography. In this case testimony is a ‘visual language’ made up of empathetic signs. But like all testimony, the aim of this strange address is to express the impact of an event that was felt – indeed, which produced real terror – and simultaneously exploded conceptual reification.10 The face of terror My thesis calls for a relatively short theoretical tour since the analysis of gestural expression has a very long history. In ancient Rome, Quintillian advised young men on the art of chironomia: how to use recognizable hand gestures to good effect in traditional oratory (a practice that continues in politics and the theatre). In 1832 Andrea de Jorio published what is considered to be the first treatise on gesture entitled La Mimica degli antichi investigata nel gestire napoletano [Gestural Expression of the Ancients in the Light of Neapolitan Gesturing]. The book sought to show how the expressive practices of antiquity have been preserved among the ordinary people of Naples. De Jorio was among the first to show that gesture is not only a universal language but also the product of social and cultural differences. More recently, the analysis of gesture has begun to draw much scholarly attention, serving as the basis for studies on the origin of language and language development, symbol formation and the history

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of the culture of everyday life.11 Anchoring one corner of this interdisciplinary field is Charles Darwin’s massive 1872 volume, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. The book aims to provide a systematic account of the expression of emotion and moreover attempts to show that many of these physical expressions are a product of evolution. The tome was a bestseller in Victorian England; some 9,000 copies flew off the shelves in the first four months. As the title suggests, Darwin proposes that neither our expressions nor our emotions are uniquely human; many animals have the same emotions and some of their expressions resemble our own. In a late chapter, Darwin focuses on the expressions pertaining to surprise, astonishment, fear, and horror. He notes that normal attention may quickly graduate into what he calls ‘stupefied amazement’ which is a frame of mind ‘akin to terror’.12 This particular emotion finds outward expression in the raising of the eyebrows as well as opening the eyes and mouth. The degree to which the eyes and mouth are opened, Darwin argues, corresponds directly to the degree of surprise felt. To establish the universality of the expression, he quotes examples from literature (Shakespeare gets particular mention), draws from psychological research and relies on an enormous number of correspondents to provide anecdotal evidence from around the world. One other source that cannot go without mention is photography. As a Victorian enthusiast of the camera, Darwin acquired hundreds of photographs of facial expression from portrait studios as well as from the photographer Oscar Rejlander, who furnished him with more than 70 images specifically designed for the book. Darwin also looked to the work of French neurologist G.B. Duchenne de Bologne, who was conducting experiments with electricity, galvanizing the muscles of the face in order to study expression. Darwin had several of Duchenne’s photographs rendered into engravings so they could be included as illustrations in the book (6.10 and 6.11). This inclusion, however, was not without a subtle editing. Darwin both promotes Duchenne’s artificially produced expressions as evidence and illustration of natural history and moreover mutes their constructedness by giving specific instructions to his engraver to ‘omit galvanic instruments and hands of operator’.13 Midway through his chapter on fear, Darwin pauses to mention another little gesture, ‘expressive of astonishment, of which I can offer no explanation; namely, the hand being placed over the mouth; or on some part of the head’.14 He provides 6.10 ‘Terror, from a photograph by Dr. Duchenne’. Heliotype no visual illustration for the gesture, but this from The Expression of the short description could serve as a caption for Emotions of Man and Animals, any one of the nine transfixed photographs 1872. Reproduced with pertaken in New York. Darwin further notes mission from Darwin on line. that the gesture has been ‘observed with so

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many races of man that it must have some natural origin’. In the scientist’s terms, this means that the expression of this particular emotion is not learned but rather a direct action of the nervous system.15 When the mind is powerfully affected, nerve force is generated in excess and is subsequently transmitted into a variety of directions. Following Duchenne’s work, Darwin speculates that the character of the particular expression is dependent upon the connections of the nerve cells as well as the development of the muscular system. He spends several pages trying to distinguish the differences between fear and terror by entering into a debate with doctors about the importance of the platysma 6.11 G.B. Duchenne de myoides muscle (which stretches over the frontal Boulogne. ‘Fright’ from surface of the neck). In Darwin’s view, therefore, Mechanics of Human our emotions – those most intimate affective states Physionomy 1862. of mind – are made evident through the subtlest gestures of the body. The English scientist walks a fine line with this thesis. On one hand, he is deeply indebted to the pioneering anatomical research of doctors such as G.B. Duchenne and Charles Bell who laid the foundations for the study of physiology as a scientific discipline. This debt is evident visually (aside from reprinting reproductions of Duchenne’s photographs, Darwin also uses one of Bell’s diagrams as his opening figure, indeed, one could say that the modern psychology of expression is completely underwritten by the new technologies of mechanical reproduction). But on the other hand, Darwin’s book poses a direct challenge to these doctors’ mutual belief that man’s expressions held a transcendental purpose. Like many in their day, Duchenne and Bell believed that expressions were given by God to serve as a kind of natural language for communication between the souls of men. Of course, Darwin made it his life’s work to reject such origins. To the Englishman, expressions were not the designs of a grand Creator but rather products of evolutionary processes. Outward appearance was an amalgam of physiology, habit and inherited responses – including those derived from animals.16 The expressions that fleetingly pass over our faces are daily living proof of our archaic inheritance. The beauty of a simple smile is not a gift from above, but a profound human work that has been thousands of years in the making. Although one cannot help but be in awe of the reach and character of Darwin’s project, he offers remarkably few words about the inner world of feelings. The psychical nature of emotion is so scarcely discussed that one gets the sense his book should simply have been called The Expressions of Man and Animals. However, less than a generation later a young Viennese doctor would try to bridge this gap. Sigmund Freud famously began his scientific training as a zoologist studying the gonads of eels. To Freud, the English scientist was always ‘the great Darwin’ and

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one finds traces of his admiration even in the last of his writings.17 Moreover, Freud initially built his theory of emotion as Darwin did, using a neurological model. In the beginning of his psychoanalytic research, Freud was preoccupied with describing the psychical apparatus as a conductor for the expression of the emotion. And even as he elaborated his Structural Theory in the 1920s (which posits psychical life as dominated by the conflict with three masters: the outside world, the super-ego and the instincts), Freud continued to view emotion primarily in terms of its ‘quota’, that is, in terms of quantity rather than character. However, psychoanalysis offers a crucial component to our thinking about expression, for here the body’s surface is not merely a mechanical apparatus, an amalgam of ancient hardwiring, but rather a sculpted convergence between the impress of the external world and the express of subjective feeling.18 To Freud, the expressions that fleetingly pass over human faces were not only a daily living proof of our archaic heritage, but also an externalization of the drama unfolding in our internal theatre. Similar to Darwin, Freud’s notion of affect includes feelings and emotions as well as somatic responses that we commonly regard of as the expression of emotion (shortness of breath, a racing heart). What distinguishes psychoanalytic thinking about emotion is Freud’s innovative notion that affect may come undone from its corresponding idea or representation. In other words, one’s (conscious) feelings may be cut off from their object of association: one may experience sadness without knowing exactly what one has lost. While we think of emotion as a recognizable state, as ‘ownable’ so to speak, Freud argued that affect may also remain unconscious, become displaced, or even transform into its opposite (love into hate and vice versa). Indeed, he suggests one of the most common ways in which unconscious affect is expressed is through bodily sensation.19 In one of his last essays, ‘An Outline of Psychoanalysis’, Freud compactly describes one of the ‘fundamental assumptions of psychoanalysis’, which simply put, is to disregard the traditional philosophical and scientific division between mind and body. Rather than regard consciousness as belonging to one distinct ‘place’ and bodily processes as belonging to another, Freud argues that: ‘the allegedly somatic “accompanying processes” are the really psychical things.’20 In other words, the body and its mechanisms are not simply subject to the external laws of biology; rather, the body is the pre-eminent conductor of psychical reality, serving as a kind of canvas to express our emotions. Or as Joyce McDougall has proposed, the body can be thought of as a kind of theatre, a stage upon which some of our most dramatic psychical conflicts are played out.21 In the early psychoanalytic archive, Freud encountered this mind-body dynamic in his hysterical patients’ medically unexplainable symptoms: Dora’s nausea and difficulty breathing, Elizabeth von R’s leg pains, the conductor Bruno Walter’s brief but devastating arm paralysis.22 In each of these cases Freud surmised that the individual had mobilized a physical symptom as a way to express psychical feelings that were deemed consciously unacceptable. The physical symptoms served as surrogates, a way to express the dangerous feelings in disguise, so to speak. In this way Freud read his patients’ physical symptoms as retroactive signs, unconscious outcomes of the patient’s history of affect and experience. This interpretation echoes Darwin’s

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theory of the expression of emotion in which specific physical gestures represent the outcomes of an evolutionary history, diminished traces of events that occurred in the past. Both Freud and Darwin read our states of affect – and the state of fear in particular – as directly shaped by history. With these theories on the expression of emotion in mind, let us return to the here is new york photographs in attempt to provide an interpretation of the witnesses’ strange, transfixed expression. From Darwin we can surmise that the people on the streets of New York were, in some sense, predisposed to react in this particular way. As his archive of expression shows, the bodily expression of affect is the older, the more ‘primitive’ way of conveying emotion. Using the body as a medium is an archaic form of functioning that is reminiscent of both of animality and infancy – states in which emotion is primarily expressed with the body (in Latin infans means those who cannot speak). The fact that Darwin describes the transfixed expression in 1872 suggests that 9/11 was immediately recognized as a familiar danger, or at very least, perceived as reminiscent of something familiar. The re-enactment of this gesture on the streets of New York on 11 September means that the event was immediately (if unconsciously) ‘classified’. Indeed, despite the ideological attempts to frame the incident within a history of terrorist assaults (the Pearl Harbour analogy was briefly floated by the media, for instance), the shared gesture among the witnesses seems to suggest that the event resonated with something more like a genealogy of disaster: the Hindenburg explosion, the sinking of the Titanic, the great Lisbon earthquake and perhaps even the destruction of Pompeii.23 As Jean Baudrillard proposes, the event also evokes a history of ‘all the events that have never taken place’, a history of all the ‘wished for’ events, all the disasters we have ever dreamt.24 This step into the world of the imaginary returns us to Freud, from whom we learn that physical responses are, in fact, ‘really psychical’. That is, the transfixed gesture can be seen to represent one of the first significations of the traumatic event. Indeed, trauma can be defined as that which resists the symbolization of language and is therefore confined to bodily expression. Freud himself might have described the nature of the gesture as an instance of ‘identification’ which is the original form of emotional tie with others, a primitive way of taking in or introjecting the object. Identification is a derivative of the first, oral phase of life, which perhaps sheds some light on the movement of the hands to the mouth (6.5– 6.9): a sign of where the violent spectacle penetrated into the internal theatre of the psyche. Indeed, although the attacks were principally designed to be a visual assault – a spectacle for the eyes, so to speak – for those individuals who were on the streets of New York that morning, the disaster was actually ‘taken in’ through the mouth. Perhaps it helps to think of this emotive gesture as a form of mimesis. This is to say these transfixed expressions may be read as part of a powerful human compulsion to become similar and to behave mimetically. Certainly this is evident in the mirroring between spectators (and especially where spectators mime each other within the frame of a single photograph (6.1 and 6.2). However, as Walter Benjamin points out, the realm of mimesis is ‘by no means limited to what one person can imitate in another. The child plays at being not only a shopkeeper or teacher, but

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also a windmill and train’.25 Following Benjamin, this transfixed expression can perhaps be read as an expression of attachment to the World Trade Center itself, a kind of painful miming of the spectacle, a way of becoming the towers. ‘From time immemorial’, Benjamin says, ‘the mimetic faculty has been conceded some influence on language’.26 Indeed, the word transfixed has two principle meanings which share a mimetic relation: 1) to root (a person) to the spot with horror or astonishment, to paralyze the faculties; and 2) to pierce with a sharp implement or weapon.27 We should keep in mind the second definition – the action – is the older of the two definitions. So transfixed may refer to the actual action of impaling an object or person, or to the imaginary sensation of feeling as if one were impaled, paralyzed with horror. In this light too, the transfixed gesture can be seen to mimetically reflect the event itself – namely, the impaling of the two World Trade Center towers by United Airlines Flight 175 and American Airlines Flight 11 (6.12). In this way the emotive gesture can be read as indicator of similarity, a powerful assimilation of the subject to the object in its most intense form. All this to say, the transfixed gesture that was fleetingly recorded on the streets of New York offers a remarkable example of our capacity to symbolize, to visually testify to traumatic experience using the medium of our own bodies. Visual culture and testimony It bears pointing out that there is a difference between the gestures themselves and the two-dimensional photographs of them. Gestures have 6.12 Unknown photographer (no. 2087 duration and movement; they are from here is new york). embodied expressions that occur in a specific time and space. Perhaps we should be wary of conflating the images with the actions they purport to represent. After all, theorists from Walter Benjamin to Roland Barthes have consistently argued that the most common judgement about photography is not one of aesthetic quality but identity. In exhibitions such as here is new york the images are valued less for their aesthetic treatment than for their ability to provide material traces of the event. That is, the photographs 6.13 Unknown photographer (no. 5112 from here is new york). are thought to bear an imprint of the trauma, as if some invisible line connected these representations to phenomenological reality. All we can say of them is: This happened. I saw it. These are symbolic representations, in other words, that have lost their symbolic quality.

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And yet a similar dynamic appears to be at work in verbal testimony. Shoshana Felman describes testimony as ‘a point of conflation between text and life … which can penetrate us like an actual life’.28 For Felman, literature is an ‘alignment between witnesses’ and reading certain literary texts is inherently related to ‘facing the horror’ itself. There is a certain paradox in this notion, for literary testimony rarely seeks to represent the traumatic event. More precisely, testimony testifies to the witness’s inability to represent the traumatic event, to the subject’s struggle to give the experience significance in the time of afterwards. In Michihiko Hachiya’s remarkable journal about the bombing of Hiroshima, for example, the bomb never appears. The journal begins on 6 August 1945: Clad in drawers and undershirt, I was sprawled on the living room floor exhausted because I had just spent a sleepless night on duty as an air warden at my hospital. Suddenly a strong flash of light startled me – and then another. So well does one recall little things that I remember vividly how a stone lantern in the garden became brilliantly lit and I debated whether this light was caused by magnesium flare or sparks from a passing trolley. Garden shadows disappeared. The view where a moment before all had been so bright and sunny was now dark and hazy. Through swirling dust I could barely discern a wooden column that had supported one corner of my house. It was leaning crazily and the roof sagged dangerously. Moving instinctively, I tried to escape, but rubble and fallen timbers barred the way … To my surprise I discovered I was completely naked. How odd! Where were my drawers and undershirt? What had happened?29 The next 200 pages detail the injured physician’s struggle to make his way through the devastated city to his hospital as well as the hospital staff ’s collective struggle to understand the horrors that begin to assault the bodies of the survivors. There is no such thing as an atom bomb or radiation poisoning yet. Significance must been made out of these terrible phenomenon. Pikadon becomes the accepted new word in their vocabulary [pika: bright flash; don: loud sound], although those who where near the centre of the city simply call it pika. For those like Hachiya who were nearest to the epicentre of the bomb, there was no sound, only a flash. This paradoxical fact calls for pause. For those closest to the bomb, there was no bomb. The doctor’s remarkable journal is, then, a testimony of his grappling with this event that occurred but which eluded his capacity to register it. This bald struggle to understand that which has exploded human comprehension brings the reader face to face with the horror. Can we bring these insights about testimony to the visual realm? Is testimony merely a literary form, a speech act set down in literature or can it be articulated in bodily gesture and transmitted through pictorial images? What kinds of images testify to trauma?

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Similar to the long history of gesture studies, such questions about the nature of pictorial images do not so much open a new programme of research as return us to an old one. At the turn of the last century, German cultural historian Aby Warburg embarked on a similar project in his visual culture studies. Today, Warburg’s name is usually remembered in connection with his unique research library – the Library for the Science of Culture that later became the Warburg Institute – which he set up in Hamburg and was subsequently evacuated to London in 1933.30 Occasionally one may find his name cited in connection with the art historical discipline called iconology.31 But like the writings of Walter Benjamin, which slowly filtered back into the intellectual consciousness of the post-war world, interest in Warburg’s work is slowly being renewed for its detailed observations and interdisciplinary approach to the interpretation of cultural phenomena. Warburg drew indiscriminately from a range of disciplines to construct an interdisciplinary method whose aim, as he put it, was to study the ‘historical psychology of human expression’.32 At the heart of this project was the attempt to grasp the significance of visual images as something more than mere artwork, indeed, as something closer to a psychological necessity. Anchoring this method of research was an overriding concern with gesture. Working with a remarkably wide range of visual material, Warburg organized visual images by emphatic expression. Particular gestures are arranged into topoi, groupings for which he coined the phrase Pathosformel [pathos formula]. One of the key inspirations for this unorthodox classification system was Charles Darwin’s book on the expression of emotion.33 Following Darwin’s lead, Warburg gathered certain works of art together on the basis that they possessed a common expressive purpose (rather than a formal similarity). In an early paper, for instance, he draws attention to a sculptural detail from a Roman sarcophagus housed in the Palazzo Ducale in Mantua. The small relief sculpture depicts a partially robed woman whose right arm is raised in distress. Warburg brings this ancient work into conversation with a sixteenth-century Titian painting that depicts an altogether different historical figure who is also in the throes of grief.34 Some 16 centuries separate these two works but the similarity of gesture is unmistakable: two women caught mid-stride, arms raised to the heavens, fingers outstretched to their limit, mouths open in shattering cry of anguish. Even to our modern eyes, this gesture of lamentation expresses an unambiguous state of emotion through the cracked pigment and marble in which it is rendered. In Warburg’s view, visual images are vehicles of ‘emotional release’ designed to provide expression for profound human suffering.35 In this unique way of apprehending history, pictorial images offer a record of our cultural dilemmas and can be placed into relation to one another in ways that burst the traditional linear narrative of cultural progress – a prototype of the method Walter Benjamin would later call the ‘dialectical image’. By gathering images together based upon their sheer intensity of expression, Warburg diffracts traditional notions of temporality, opening up multiple extraordinary relationships between objects and images all in effort to find a path – or rather to make visible all the existing paths – between the present and the past.

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The re-enactment of the transfixed gesture on 11 September is perhaps but one stop in ‘the international migration of images’,36 but this singular expression – spectators standing transfixed, eyes staring at a spectacle in the distance, hands held protectively over gaping mouths – marks the way in which this trauma impressed itself upon the bodies of the spectators, returning them to their most primal, mimetic relationship to the world. The photographs serve as vehicles of transmission, carriers of the visual act that functions as a historiographical report. Even without verbal narrative – history’s traditional form – viewers of these photographs are able to receive the message which, simply put, is something happened.37 Indeed, if such disastrous, traumatic events affect our capacity to narrate history, creating a gap in discursive understanding, then perhaps we may look to the pictorial record for memory of these human experiences that have become lost. As Michael Shulan presciently suggests in his introduction to the here is new york collection: ‘Seeing is not only believing. Seeing is seeing.’38

7 DAN GRAHAM, REALITY TELEVISION AND THE VICISSITUDES OF SURVEILLANCE Paula Carabell

During the late 1970s, Dan Graham began to exhibit a series of architectural models, which addressed the notion of the suburban home. Although he had already expressed an interest in domestic space with his ‘Homes for America’, published in Arts Magazine in 1966, the models represent not only an exploration of structure, but investigate how architecture reifies institutional codes of behaviour within postmodern culture.1 At approximately the same time that Graham began constructing his own, small-scale suburban housing tracts, he began to consider in writing the relationship between the domestic life-style that had developed between the prefabricated walls of the countless subdivisions across America and the everburgeoning medium of television. An Architectural code both reflects and determines the social order of public/ private space and the psychological sense of the self. This code has become increasingly modified and overlaid by the code of video/television. As cable television images displayed on wall-sized monitors connect and mediate among rooms, families, social classes, and public/private domains, connecting architecturally (and socially) bounded regions, they take on an architectural (and social) function.2 The late 1940s ushered in a profound change in the nature of domestic architecture, a new post-war aesthetic whose ideas were taken up by the likes of Bill Levitt, the well-known founder of Levittown, Long Island and its counterpart in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. Levitt was committed to the construction of affordable housing for returning GIs and had perfected a system that enabled large numbers of homes to

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be built in record time. The Levittowner, the most popular of the early models, was a ranch-style structure that featured an open-plan design, marked by a minimum of interior walls.3 While this scheme was employed to make the most of limited space, it also served to forge a link between the family’s private and more ‘public’ activities. In addition to open planning, glass was used widely and played a central role in both structural and family dynamics; the Levittowner featured floor-to-ceiling picture windows both in front and in back and came equipped with transparent sliding doors that opened out on to a patio, a feature that encouraged indoor/ outdoor living. The notion of joining inner with outer was further articulated by a key transformation; while the earliest models were equipped with a fireplace that served as focal point, by 1950 a built-in 12½ inch Admiral TV set replaced the hearth as centre of family life, drawing attention away from the large expanses of glass and establishing itself as the new window on the world.4 Television had usurped the function of the picture window, the hallmark of suburbia by offering families a view that extended far beyond the confines of their own street. No mere replacement, however, TV served to problematize the distinction between private and public realm to an unprecedented degree, calling into question the very notion of the real. It is the nature of this shifting dialectic that represents a major field of inquiry for Graham, one where his understanding of the dual nature of architectural space stands in close association with the most salient aspects of the medium of TV. In 1978, Graham created a small-scale (63 × 64 × 93 cm) model entitled, Alterations to a Suburban House (7.1), where: The entire façade of a typical suburban house has been removed and replaced by a full sheet of transparent glass. Midway back and parallel to the front glass façade, a mirror divides the house into two areas. The front section is revealed to the public, while the rear, private section is not disclosed. The mirror as it faces the glass façade and the street reflects not only the house’s interior but the street and the environment outside the house. The reflected images of the facades of the two houses opposite the cutaway ‘fill in’ the missing façade.5 Modernist architecture of the 1920s had, of course, already introduced the notion of the glass house. One needs only to look at Mies van der Rohe’s Barcelona Pavilion of 1929 or Phillip Johnson’s private estate completed in 1949 to see that the desire to transgress spatial boundaries and to unite inner with outer forms part of a venerable tradition. The modernist’s decision to overthrow the limitations of traditional building materials was not, however, without its inherent contradictions. While the extensive use of glass seems to ensure a democratic environment where knowledge passes easily back and forth through transparent walls, it in fact possesses a dual aspect, where reflection turns the image back upon itself and obscures the very information it claims to offer. In this situation, the subject is ‘suspended in a difficult moment between knowledge and blockage’, estranged from the absolute and immersed in the multivalent.6

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Dan Graham (b. 1942), Alterations to a Suburban House, 63 × 64 × 93 cm, painted wood, synthetic material, plastic. Reproduced courtesy of Marian Goodman Gallery, New York.

Central to the conception of Graham’s Alterations to a Suburban House is an earlier project, Public Space/Two Audiences (7.2). The installation was created for the 1976 Venice Biennale and was part of an exhibition entitled ‘Ambiente’, where individual room-environments created by separate artists addressed contemporary concerns. Public Space/Two Audiences is comprised of two chambers, each with a separate entrance and divided by thermopane (soundproof) glass. One of the rooms has a mirror on its back wall, while the other has its rear wall painted white. As Graham notes, without visitors, the glass structure can be read as a Minimalist construction that calls attention to its own materiality, much like Mies van der Rohe’s work in Barcelona.7 As soon as it is peopled, however, it is apparent that the divider serves as both a window and a mirror, objectifying each of the room’s inhabitants to the other. However, the multivalent dimension of glass forms only part of the spatial, and ultimately inter-subjective, ambiguity of the installation as the dynamic is further complicated by the presence of an unequivocally reflective surface. In practice then, visitors to the room which faces the mirror not only see the individuals in the other chamber, but see themselves twice reflected; once by the glass and once by the specular device. Those in the room that contains the mirror also see other visitors, but can only see themselves repeated once as ghostly images in the glass. Each of the rooms, therefore, offers a different phenomenological experience. Depending on

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Dan Graham (b. 1942), Public Space/Two Audiences, 220 × 700 × 220 cm, installation, two rooms, each with separate entrance divided by thermopane glass, one mirrored wall, muslin, florescent lights, wood. Reproduced courtesy of Marian Goodman Gallery, New York.

one’s position, the beholder is not only seen, but is able either to perceive him- or herself clearly in the position of both see-er and seen or merely manage to apprehend an indistinct image of him- or herself in this same dualistic role. Public Space/Two Audiences can thus be read as an account of the dialectics of vision made manifest, a demonstration that offers the visitor evidence of their own multivalent presence. Such an experiment takes place, however, within the circumscribed environment of the gallery and, as a result, offers a limited number of structural and intersubjective possibilities. It is, however, through Graham’s revived interest in the nature of postwar housing, that his work on the dialectic between see-er and seen takes renewed direction, expanding its scope and moving on to the streets of suburbia. Alteration to a Suburban Home represents a house divided and exposed to view; inside, it is bisected lengthwise by a mirror while its facade remains open to inspection, thus creating an environment that is clearly structured along the same principles as Public Space/Two Audiences. But whereas the latter was conceived of as installation, Alteration moves, in theory, into the realm of the quotidian and in the

Dan Graham, Reality Television and the Vicissitudes of Surveillance 133 process promises to reframe the day-to-day experience of the twofold nature of being. Alteration places domesticity on show; the glass-plated facade serves as an expanded version of the picture window whose original purpose was to mediate between public and private spheres. The artist’s decision to augment this interface bears, of course, a close affinity to the work of Gordon Matta-Clark, whose project Splitting was well known to Graham. According to Graham, the incisions made by Matta-Clark to his chosen architectural sites ‘reveal private integration of compartmentalized living spaces, showing how each individual family has coped with the imposed structure of his container’.8 Graham extends this notion, however, and rather than remain with the dynamics of suburban life, he delimits and defamiliarizes both private and public space, a move that will ultimately invoke the presence of the uncanny. The picture window, initially developed to permit greater access to the external environment, has, through Graham’s interventions, become treacherous through its own design; as a result of its increased size, inside and outside, real and ideal are brought closer together and are ultimately forced to collide.9 The properties of glass, which enable it to break down the distinctions between inner and outer, private and public, are, however, matched in power by another element of suburban life, the TV monitor. This equally multivalent object not only replaces the window as primary instrument of voyeuristic pleasure, but engenders a progressively complex relationship between the equivocal states of transparency and opacity. In 1971, television producer Craig Gilbert took a bold step in documentary filmmaking with the creation of An American Family, a 12-part, weekly, one-hour series aired on PBS.10 Craig had chosen to film the Louds of Santa Barbara, California, a family of seven whose lifestyle seemed to reflect the changing values of a new decade. For seven months, day and night, the Louds (parents Bill and Pat, sons Lance, Kevin and Grant and daughters Delilah and Michelle), were filmed both inside and outside the home. Over 300 hours of footage were shot under the conditions that Craig had stipulated: They were to live their lives as if there were no camera present. They were to do nothing differently than they would ordinarily. This would be hard at first, but would, I promised, become increasingly easier. We would never ask them to do anything just for the camera. In other words, we would never stage anything and we would never ask them to do or say something over again if we happened to miss it.11 When the programme was aired in 1973, it played to an audience of over ten million viewers who remained transfixed by the images of what seemed like everyday domestic life. Its observational style, which let the Louds guide the general narrative content, kept people riveted to their TV sets as they became involved in the lives of the seven participants. While each of the subplots held its fascination for the public, two events represented the show’s radical position in TV history: the on-

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air dissolution of Pat and Bill’s marriage and the presence of TV’s first openly gay character, Lance. As one might expect, the disclosure of such intimate moments and non-traditional lifestyles engendered an enormous amount of controversy; one of the many objections to the programme was that it represented an invasion of privacy and appealed to the viewer’s voyeuristic tendencies. Graham himself was well-acquainted with the show and in his essay, ‘Video in Relation to Architecture’, observes: An American Family highlighted for viewers a self-consciousness of their own voyeurism. Typically video (and film) smooth over, camouflage, and conceal their manipulation of viewer’s psychological positions. The troublesome ‘closeness’ of ourselves, as spectators, to the family, was dealt with, as the series progressed in time, by the birth of the cult of the family as stars. Their personalities were no longer ‘like’ ours, but had an aura … they themselves became objectified as market commodities.12 This process was so overwhelmingly evident that even the participants could identify its presence thus, Lance Loud, paraphrasing Andy Warhol’s well-known statement, ‘In the future, everyone will be famous for 15 minutes’, said ‘Everyone wants to star in their own TV series, don’t they?’13 An American Family raised crucial questions in regard to the role of vision in suburban life and to the nature of subjectivity within the domestic environment. The TV set had become analogous to the picture window, offering a voyeuristic gaze to its viewers and promoting exhibitionism to its participants. The need to see and be seen had thus found its perfect vehicle; it found its ultimate form of expression, however, in the medium of reality TV. The term ‘reality television’ derives first and foremost from such forms of video footage as surveillance tapes and crime reconstructions. The genre then grew to include: Constructed factual programmes … where situations were devised for the purpose of shooting them and docusoaps … which impose on real events the conventions of soap opera including editing techniques of parallel montage, character-focused narrative structure and basis in a single, geographical space and community.14 One can easily see how An American Family exists as prototype for this particular kind of programming; set primarily within the home, it highlighted the everyday and focused on the participants’ emerging and changing identities. In addition, it offered its viewers the chance to watch the family from a relatively omniscient point of view and in this manner gave rise to a union of domestic life and Orwellian surveillance. Michel Foucault has played a considerable role in reintroducing into contemporary discourse the relationship of vision to power. Central to his discussion is Jeremy Bentham’s late eighteenth-century penitentiary plan the Panopticon, a model of

Dan Graham, Reality Television and the Vicissitudes of Surveillance 135 governance that initiated an institutional trend towards control through surveillance. According to Foucault: The principle was this. A perimeter building in the form of a ring. At the center of this, a tower, pierced by large windows opening onto the inner face of the ring. The outer building is divided into cells each of which traverses the whole thickness of the building. These cells have two windows, one opening onto the inside, facing the windows of the central tower, the other, outer one allowing daylight to pass through the whole cell. All that is then needed is to put an overseer in the tower and place in each of the cells a lunatic, a patient, a convict, a worker, or a schoolboy. The back lighting enables one to pick out from the central tower the little captive silhouettes in the ring of cells. In short, the principle of the dungeon is reversed; daylight and the overseer’s gaze capture the inmate more effectively than darkness, which afforded after all a sort of protection.15 He goes on to note that, ‘if Bentham’s project aroused interest, this was because it provided a formula applicable to many domains, the formula of “power through transparency,” subjection by “illumination”’.16 Foucault’s observations regarding the centrality of glass and light to the process surveillance, bring us back to the structural realities of the picture window, to its role in suburban life and to its analogical relationship to reality TV. The observer’s all-encompassing gaze alters the nature of domestic space and in so doing, decentres the individual’s sense of self and transforms the subject into an object of intense investigation. Interestingly, it is Britain, a nation where reality television has become an integral part of popular culture, that currently exists as the most closely watched country in the world; the consensus is that the average city dweller is recorded on CCTV at least 300 times a day.17 Such vigorous observational techniques cannot help but function as a significant factor in how we regard ourselves as individuals and how we experience the social space we inhabit; the subject becomes the object seen, captured on camera and potentially exposed to public view. In the UK, as well as in the rest of Europe, the reality TV show Big Brother has surpassed all other programming in this genre in terms of both the narcissistic and voyeuristic pleasure it affords. The series first appeared in the Netherlands, developed by the Dutch company Endemol, who sold the format to the UK in 2000; since then, Endemol has commissioned the series in over 40 countries around the world.18 In Britain, Big Brother (sponsored originally by Channel 4 and subsequently sold to Channel 5 in 2010) became a palpable presence in viewer’s lives during the almost three-month period during the summer in which it is shown. Seven nights a week, BB is aired in hour-long segments that depict the highlights of the past 24 hours. This editing process, however, created a disruption of the show’s temporal and narrative structure and as a result, it is presented as a mediated event. The activities of the housemates (who are chosen through a lengthy and competitive process of auditions and interviews) were thus chronicled and contextualized via voice-over for

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the home audience. While such modification does not significantly interfere with the immediacy of the viewer’s experience, it does leave the beholder with the desire to fill in gaps of time and space. A more direct experience of the Big Brother house can, however, be obtained through the 24-hour live-streaming which was for the first few years available on both Channel 4’s cable network, E4 or through their internet site, and then it has been intermittently available on Channel 5’s 5* network and through their internet site. Channel 4 dropped it as too expensive, Channel 5 now runs occasional live feeds on cable. These alternative methods of visual access have the power to facilitate a more authentic relationship to the house, one in which the architectural structure and quality of transparency can potentially play a significantly more powerful role. It has been noted that it is hardly a coincidence that Big Brother was first developed in the Netherlands, where, as part of the Modernist movement, Mies van der Rohe favoured glass in the construction of domestic space.19 Architecturally, the Big Brother house follows this convention; it has large windows, internal and external glass walls and an open plan interior. Although this environment appears to have been designed, at least in part, for its functionality, its structure reflects the needs of the production team and, of course, the viewing public, with the presence of multiple camera angles and lines of sight that are not obscured by opaque walls.20 In addition to its high level of internal transparency, easy access has been provided between inside and outside space via the presence of sliding glass doors. This coalescence of inner and outer was so pronounced that in 2006 the show thematized the idea, placing the dining and one of the living spaces in the open-air garden (7.3). Psychologically, this manoeuvre served to underscore the lack of boundaries between public and private areas and made clear the fluid and unsettling nature of the housemate’s domestic setting. But despite its own internal expansiveness, the Big Brother house is otherwise entirely separated from everything beyond by high walls, barbed wire and a team of security experts. Thus, although the house has been built according to the principles of transparency, it remains isolated from its larger environment and dialogue between the two spheres is totally non-existent. Housemates are forbidden to venture into or learn anything about what is occurring beyond the walls of the compound; any attempt to do so results in immediate expulsion. Such a highly controlled and hermetic environment is, of course, immediately reminiscent of Peter Weir’s The Truman Show (1998), where Truman, an unwitting actor in his own reality show, is denied all knowledge of a larger existential sphere in order to provide the director with narcissistic gratification and the public with viewing pleasure. Thus, like Truman, the housemates are caught in a dilemma; whether to remain within the strangely safe world of fabricated reality, where the self is constructed through media manipulation or to escape the confines of this highly circumscribed arena and enter into one in which the individual must, on their own, come to terms with the dialectical nature of being. The Big Brother house bears little resemblance to most homes in Britain or, for that matter, to most homes anywhere. According to Big Brother architect Patrick Watson, the initial brief was to make the house ‘as aspirational as possible while still

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7.3

Big Brother House 6, outdoor living area, Elstree Studio, Hertfordshire. Reproduced courtesy of Glenn Dearing Photography, London.

being tricky to live in and claustrophobic … Minimalism is good because it promotes a lack of comfort and privacy. Its very open plan feels almost like an establishment building’.21 In keeping with the terms of the remit, the decor of each of the Big Brother houses has been aggressively modern and the sparse furnishings and extensive use of glass have all but eliminated private space. But despite its open plan, entrants to the house immediately comment on its small size as well as a sensation of confinement. An institutional feel is achieved through the deployment of colour and space; the living-to-kitchen areas of Big Brother House 7 contain moulded foam chairs and sofas that appear far from welcoming, the bold colours are stimulating rather than restful and work against the participants’ ability to feel either physically or psychologically at ease. Sliding glass doors separate the main living area from an informal lounge and kitchen, while another set of glass doors leads into the garden. Rather than creating a spacious and tranquil domestic scene, the fluid transitions facilitate close and dialogical observation, where housemates unwittingly function as both see-er and seen. For example, the kitchen area of Big Brother House 6 gave easy visual access to the bedroom where inhabitants had the chance to peer back at their onlookers, each

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group implicitly struggling for ultimate specular control. However, as in the panoptic model, residents are equally disempowered and remain unequivocally alone in their role as object seen, suffering under the omniscient gaze of Big Brother; the sparse and well-lit sleeping area leaves housemates fully exposed, ignoring the conventions of what traditionally functions as private space. Even the bath and the toilet are under surveillance. In addition to the numerous tracking cameras that are placed in each of the rooms, a blacked-out passageway circles the perimeter of the house, where filming takes place with live crews 24/7. Thus, despite their prior knowledge of Big Brother’s regime, the highly conspicuous nature of surveillance techniques exists as an initial shock, leaving housemates with little doubt that they are constantly being watched even as they perform the most mundane of tasks. The conflation of surveillance and domestic life that defines existence in the Big Brother house makes clear that home can no longer be identified with safety and refuge. While day-to-day surroundings attempt, in part, to imitate traditional notions of modern, suburban living, they more often surpass the realm of the familiar, producing an effect that is both strange and alienating. Such an observation cannot help but invoke the notion of the uncanny formulated by Freud in 1919.22 Although the concept first appears, most notably, in E.T.A. Hoffmann’s short story ‘The Sand-man’, it is Freud who codifies it to form a unique psychological phenomenon. Traditionally, expressions of the uncanny have been located within a domestic environment. As Freud notes, ‘the German word “unheimlich” is obviously the opposite of “heimlich” [homely], “heimisch” [native] – the opposite of what is familiar; and we are tempted to conclude that what is “uncanny” is frightening precisely because it is not known and familiar’.23 However, as Freud later reveals, the uncanny amounts to a commingling of what is familiar with what is not, stating that ‘heimlich is a word the meaning of which develops in the direction of ambivalence, until it finally coincides with its opposite, unheimlich’. ‘Unheimlich’, he notes, ‘is in some way or other a sub-species of heimlich’.24 The Big Brother house is clearly emblematic of the familiar turning on itself; although it is fashioned as domestic space, the homely is transformed into an uncomfortable environment. Rather than serving as a safe haven, the house is a place that is defined by its ambivalence, its structure causing residents to experience rapid shifts between pleasure, anger and fear. Within this context, the uncanny can be seen as synonymous with anxiety and uncertainty. Although Vidler has aptly suggested that ‘the resurgent interest in the uncanny [serves] as a metaphor for a fundamentally unliveable modern condition’, life in the Big Brother house engenders a sense of disequilibrium that surpasses postmodern malaise.25 The coupling of an inverted sense of domesticity with the reality of constant surveillance produces in its inhabitants a level of discomfort so intense that the very notion of self is ultimately called into question. The confluence of see-er and seen and of strange and familiar evident in the Big Brother house creates a situation in which the liminal is stressed; the lack of clarity between internal and external disorients the individual to the point of psychic and physical dislocation. Interestingly, it has been noted that Freud himself suggested that ‘the feeling of the uncanny implies the return to that particular

Dan Graham, Reality Television and the Vicissitudes of Surveillance 139 organization of space where everything is reduced to inside and outside and the inside is also the outside’ – a theme that was explicitly stressed by the architect of the Big Brother house.26 As we have seen, the dialectic between inner and outer is one that commonly appears in the modern suburban house; the extensive use of glass not only allows for an increased interface between home and environment, but also enables voyeurism, exhibitionism and surveillance to enter into the routine of daily life.27 While this dynamic is central to the domestic environment of the Big Brother house, it shares its structural values and finds theoretic expression much in the same way as does many of the architectural construction created by Dan Graham. In my discussion of Alteration to a Suburban House, I found that Graham had removed the facade of a domestic dwelling, a manoeuvre that ultimately called into question notions of inner and outer, private and public, self and other. As Graham observes: The traditional disposition of the family space is altered. The interior mirror shows the external observer as well, situating him or her in the outdoor environment and revealing the position of his or her gaze. The mirror’s reflection shows the relation of the house to its social context. Thus, one could see the cut-away façade as a metaphoric billboard, but one depicting a nonillusionistic view: a cut-away view of a family in their house surrounded by greenery and other houses in the background. Unlike a billboard, however, the image the outside spectator observes is in actual space and in the house, as well as the actual space he or she occupies.28 Like the Big Brother house, Alteration undermines the core assumption of domestic life; rather than providing a sheltering environment, both dwellings disclose the presence of their inhabitants to external forces. The use of mirror and glass creates a confluence of interior and exterior, viewer and viewed, self and other, making residents doubly exposed, visible to themselves as well as to unseen observers. Graham’s Alteration has often been considered an unrealized project, produced at a transitional point in the artist’s career. It was at this time that Graham moved away from video and model making and towards the building of large-scale outdoor pavilions, which he constructed primarily of two-way mirrored glass. One such work is Cafe Bravo (Berlin, 1998), which occupies the courtyard of Kunst-Werke, a former margarine factory, which now functions as exhibition space (7.4). The cafe is formed of two adjacent angled cubes, and is built from opaque and transparent glass, twoway mirrors, a polished steel frame and reflective aluminium walls.29 Characteristic of most of Graham’s pavilions, Cafe Bravo presents a complex set of visual strategies, most notably the multiple overlays that define the structure’s theoretical core. The two-way reflective glass ensures that the visitor experiences both inner and outer aspects simultaneously; the beholder not only finds themself looking through the glass wall but also at its surface, a trope that, as we have seen, found earlier expression in Mies van der Rohe’s Barcelona Pavilion. As a result of these properties, the beholder is projected into the three-dimensional space of the pavilion, while at the

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Dan Graham (b. 1942), Cafe Bravo, 405 × 405 cm (each cube), two-way mirror, opaque glass, transparent glass, polished steel frame, reflective aluminium walls, Kunst-Werke, Berlin. Reproduced courtesy of author.

same time is reflected onto its two-dimensional facade. This dialectic can, of course, be traced back to the Renaissance, where the picture plane itself was simultaneously theorized as both window and wall.30 But as in painting, neither depth nor surface can coexist at the same time; as the beholder attempts to maintain their focus, either one or the other properties will be forced to dematerialize. This perceptual reality produces in the observer a state of dual awareness that is ultimately destabilizing, causing the individual to question the very nature of subjectivity. Graham’s interest in the use of glass and in its inherent contradictions can be traced back to his youth. As Graham recalls, ‘when I was fourteen, I read Jean-Paul Sartre’s Being and Nothingness and I realized how, when we are young, we develop the notion of Ego the moment we feel that someone is watching us’.31 Graham is, of course, referring to the philosopher’s well-known description of the dialectical nature of being, where subject and object exist in a mutually reinforcing relationship.32 Cafe Bravo reifies this notion, inspiring the viewer to question how vision is made manifest. Because the visitors see themselves simultaneously as viewing subjects and objects seen they are imbued with a sense of alienation that indicates a fragmented sense of identity as well as to a loss of spatial security. But

Dan Graham, Reality Television and the Vicissitudes of Surveillance 141 while Sartre’s most famous description of the existence of self as both subject and object, a duality brought about through the vicissitudes of vision, centres on an account of a voyeur surprised by the gaze of an oncoming visitor, the significance of Graham’s pavilions is, of course, based more clearly on the presence of mirror reflections. This reality brings us squarely into the realm of the specular and as such cannot help but invoke the work of Jacques Lacan with which Graham was well acquainted.33 Lacan’s Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, a work that remains in direct dialogue with Sartre’s earlier treatise while equally engaging with the later phenomenological work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, makes clear the notion that outside of the individual there is a pre-existing gaze that is crucial to the formation of self. According to Lacan, we are ‘beings who are looked at, in the spectacle of the world’ ‘… I see only from one point, but in my existence I am looked at from all sides’.34 This point is made clear by Slavoj Žižek who observes that ‘the eye viewing the object is on the side of the subject, while the gaze is on the side of the object. When I look at an object, the object is always already gazing at me, and from a point at which I cannot see it’.35 This so-called split between the eye and the gaze finds expression in Graham’s Café Bravo, where the visitor is confronted by two cubes that appear simultaneously opaque and translucent; each square possesses its own material presence, but equally presents itself as impalpable as its reflective surface merges with surroundings. As the visitor approaches, their own image not only becomes one with the structure where it looks out upon itself, but also combines with the landscape where it finds itself again confronted by the object of its own regard. This visual and architectural strategy effectively dislocates the observer both optically and corporeally as they are forced to see themselves twice over in the role of both viewer and viewed; the beholder is displaced and as a result of conflicting visual cues, remains uncertain of their own physical location and of the spot from which the ‘object’ returns their gaze. As long as the viewer’s attention is focused on their own dual presence, it is the opaque or reflective aspect of the pavilion that remains intact, thus enabling those inside to go undetected. Lacan, himself, recognized such a dynamic and observes: I can feel myself under the gaze of someone whose eyes I do not even see, nor even discern. All that is necessary is for something to signify to me that there may be others there. This window, if it gets a bit dark, and if I have reasons for thinking that there is someone behind it, is straightaway a gaze. From the moment this gaze exists, I am already something other, in that I feel myself becoming an object for the gaze of others. But in this position, which is a reciprocal one, others also know that I am an object who knows himself to be seen.36 This notion, that ‘I am already something other’, that is, something strange unto myself, a familiar entity clothed within the unfamiliar, recalls our discussion of the uncanny, particularly in relation to domestic space. Although Cafe Bravo does not function as a home, it nevertheless exhibits properties associated with the unheimlich,

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its ‘seeing walls’ transforming the individual into something strange and unknown. Lacan himself discussed the uncanny in terms of such a relationship, ‘claiming … that it was through the very structure of the unheimlich that anxiety might be theorized’.37 One only needs to recall Freud’s own experience with his ‘double’, that occasion when the analyst failed, at first, to recognize his own reflection in the mirror of his wagon-lit, to realize that the uncanny is a specular event.38 The relationship between mirroring and the uncanny returns us, of course, to the realm of domestic architecture and, in particular, to the Big Brother house, a dwelling where the gaze of the other is an inescapable reality. An important aspect of Big Brother concerns the ongoing transformation of the self in a world where the subject is constituted as spectacle. As we have seen, the structure of the Big Brother house depends on a combination of open planning and mirror-covered walls behind which cameras record the inhabitants around the clock. Mirrors and cameras are not, however, merely tools of surveillance nor do they exist only to provide housemates with a Lacanian form of intersubjective feedback, but most importantly serve as a source of alienation. Observation reveals that while inhabitants are fascinated by their own mirror images, they nonetheless endeavour to see beyond the mirror’s surface in a futile attempt to penetrate its opacity and to pinpoint the location of the gaze. This activity makes clear that although the self is a dialectical construct, its relationship to the other is one that can never be realized, existing as it does, beyond the grasp of the viewing subject. The Big Brother housemates function as both the subject and object of vision. Surrounded by glass walls that are at once opaque and transparent, they watch themselves and each other and seek with desire the gaze of the other, their dual existence fostered by the structural dynamics of the suburban home, an architectural stage that defines the boundaries between inner and outer, while simultaneously calling their very existence into question. Like the proverbial window on the world, the Big Brother house resides at the juncture between public and private space, a spot where the individual finds a home that is defined by feelings of both comfort as well as uncertainty.

8 TOWARDS AN ICONOMY OF VIOLENCE Julia Kristeva in the Between of Ethics and Politics Maria Margaroni

Face-to-face with a postmodern aporia This chapter seeks to inscribe the necessity for a critical re-evaluation of Julia Kristeva in the context of what seems to be a distinctively postmodern aporia. On the one hand, and especially after the end of the Cold War and the strengthening of the homogenizing tendencies of Western capitalism, we (global citizens in both the ‘centre’ and the ‘periphery’) are confronted with increasingly mediated (and mediatized) realities. As geographical and cultural borders give way under the pressure of economic or political interests and at a time when all sorts of heterophobias threaten to erupt into violence, the need for mediators (i.e. translators, individual or institutional go-betweens, facilitating tools or practices) is becoming more and more urgent. On the other hand, one can hardly ignore the fact that a significant body of postmodern theory demonstrates a firm suspicion towards any practices (the very concept of) mediation. In his chapter on ‘“Rights of Man” and the “Rights of the Citizen”’ in Masses, Classes, Ideas, Etienne Balibar associates postmodernity with the bankruptcy of those forms of mediation on which both the theory and the practice of modern politics depended.1 According to him, the modern trust in the political value of the third term has exploded, following the eruption in postmodernity of a host of incommensurable differences, the very differences repressed by the mediating function of the third term. As more and more theorists in different areas of the Humanities acknowledge, the result of such eruption has been a turn away from politics (as the realm of shareable and, hence, mediated singularities) to ethics,

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the realm where one plus one (i.e. a singularity in its relationship with another) never makes two. The work of Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida is exemplary in this context, demonstrating that what lies at the heart of the postmodern privileging of ethics is an ‘unbelief ’ in the desirability of mediation, a term that is still understood within the legacy of Hegelian dialectics.2 The two philosophers’ engagement with this legacy is well known. In Totality and Infinity (1961; 1969) Levinas includes Hegel in the philosophical tradition that constitutes his target in the book, a tradition that, as he contends, has privileged egology (i.e. a logos around the self) and has consistently reduced the other to the same.3 In his 1974 reading of Hegel in Glas Derrida makes a similar point, throwing into relief the ultimately autistic movement of dialectical mediation, which he defines as ‘unity’s self-return’.4 What needs to be noted is that in both philosophers mediation becomes synonymous with violence, a violence inflicted on the other either through the self ’s struggle for recognition (as exemplified in the Master/Slave paradigm) or through the erasure of the other’s difference in the dialectical resolution of this struggle (figured in Hegel by Christian love and the theo-anthropic community of Geist). It is to redress such violence that Derrida and Levinas turn to a non-dialectical account of intersubjectivity and to a form of ethics centred on the other. To the ‘sovereign ingratitude’ of Hegel’s Geist which forgets in sublating the movement that has produced it,5 they oppose a radical ingratitude, this time on the part of the other who refuses to return the self ’s gift of self in mutual, reciprocal love and who remains ‘on the other shore’,6 beyond the self ’s acquisitive grasp. In many ways, we are only beginning to appreciate the value of this alternative, other-directed ethics, an ethics we are in desperate need of in the context of a global system where the political seems to function more and more in terms of the Master/ Slave paradigm. Indeed, from Hannah Arendt to Charles Taylor, cultural theorists have come to associate the ‘new’ world order with the eruption of arbitrary violence brought about by the proliferation of conflicting demands for recognition between which (in the absence of a third term, a mediating inter-space) there seems to be no chance of reconciliation or adjudication. It is in this light, of course, that Levinas’ intervention, in particular, needs to be appreciated, for he has succeeded in shifting the emphasis from the fear of risking the self ’s life (a fear that is decisive for the development of the Master/Slave narrative) to the concern over the possibility, the risk of the other’s death. Given this state of affairs and precisely because of our debt to this intervention, I believe it is important to re-think what, in the opening of this chapter, I have called an aporia, this absence of poros (passage) that keeps ethics and contemporary political practice separate. For Levinas, Derrida and Maurice Blanchot (among others) the aporia or, as Simon Critchley puts it, the ‘hiatus’ between ethics and politics needs to be preserved for it guarantees the unconditionality, the absoluteness of the ethical relation.7 From their perspective, the anarchic potential of this relation can only be safeguarded by what Gillian Rose has called ‘a broken middle’. As she argues, however, the cost of this ‘broken middle’ might be that Revelation (as ‘the incursion

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of unique alterity, divine singularity’) is denied any chance of realization.8 Indeed, one might well argue that, despite our attempts to extricate ourselves from the Hegelian dialectical narrative, we are still in the throes of it. For, in our insistence on keeping totalization and ethics, the violence of politics and the hospitable reception of the other separate, we have merely shifted paradigms: from Alexandre Kojève’s reading of Hegel and the Master/Slave paradigm to Jean Wahl and the Unhappy Consciousness, permanently caught in a state of crisis, having to live with the antinomy of two irreconcilable laws.9 Faced with what feels like a double-bind, my task in this chapter is to make a few suggestions that do not seek to mend what is broken (an aspiration Rose cautions us against), though they aim at restoring faith in the middle in all its inadequacy and ambiguity, in all its violence. As I propose to argue, it is in relation to this much-needed faith that Kristeva’s contribution as a postmodern thinker can be most appreciated. The inner and outer limits of ethical democracy In her discussion of contemporary debates around multiculturalism and pluralism, Beatrice Hanssen draws attention to the common vision animating the (sometimes) conflicting perspectives of interlocutors in these debates, a vision of what she calls, quoting Chantal Mouffe, a ‘democratic ethos’. As she points out, ‘[t]he outer limit of such a democratic ethos is constituted by violence, or the use of force, its inner limit by the political recognition of difference’.10 In what follows, I want to situate myself in the unstable site of these limits, which reconfigure the postmodern aporia we began with and between which, it seems, all our stakes or, perhaps, all our chances for a convergence between ethics and politics lie. As we have seen, violence is taken to be the distinctive mark of contemporary political experience, an experience in the context of which both individual and collective struggles appear condemned to reproduce the adversarial conflict of the most tragic of Hegelian pairs. Considering that the emergence of a host of warring particularities has invariably been seen as responsible for the hiatus between ethics and politics that concerns us, it might be worth taking the distinctiveness of contemporary violence seriously, especially, perhaps, because this distinctiveness seems inextricable from a challenge on the level of immanence/particularity. If we are prepared to do this, however, we may need to rethink such immanent violence no longer as the displaced outer limit of a democratic ethos but as the site of crisis within and between the different forms of transcendence that, in my view, remain indispensable in the context of an ethical democracy: on the one hand, the forms of political transcendence made possible through a (re-)formulation of universal rights; on the other hand, the forms of ethical transcendence opened by the singular encounter of the face-to-face. Admittedly, such a perspective complicates our aporia significantly, for it is clear that what is at stake today is not the possibility of a dialogue (‘peace itself ’) between Greek and Jew;11 i.e. the abstract universal principles that legitimate a political being-with and the intimate response/responsiveness of an ethical beingfor the other.12 At issue, instead, is an understanding of what has functioned as the remainder of both Jew and Greek and is, as a result, what they (reluctantly) share.

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In the context of modern liberalism, which has determined our notions of political transcendence, the attainment of universality is predicated on the overcoming of the particular situatedness of individual agents (the very situatedness that affects their participation in such universality) and on the containment of violence (perceived as a Hobbesian status naturalis). In the context of Levinas, whose thinking has been decisive in re-defining ethical transcendence, the face-to-face encounter excludes violence, which is significantly associated with the elemental (what Levinas calls ‘il y a’), the facticity of a life in the oikos and the materiality of embodied desire. Rather than the irreconcilable extremes of what constitutes our postmodern dilemma, then, the Hellenic legacy of political universality and its Jewish corrective, the turn to ethical singularity, appear complicitous in perpetuating ‘the ban’ that Giorgio Agamben has placed at the heart of ‘the state of exception’ which led Western modernity to the Nazi camps and which is gradually becoming the rule of our contemporary political life.13 The ban, according to Agamben, needs to be understood as the abandonment of ‘bare life’ in its contingent thrownness (its Dasein) at the mercy of a violence that erupts at the threshold between the transgression and the execution of the law. It is this threshold that he calls ‘the state of exception’ in the context of which life (zoeˉ ) becomes ‘sacred’, not because it is precious and demands respect, but, paradoxically, because it is expendable. As Agamben argues, sacred life is life that ‘may be killed and yet not sacrificed’.14 In other words, it is life excluded from both human and divine law, ‘mute’ life that is denied not only the meaning (the Said) of a communal bios but also the distinctive Saying animating the Levinasian face.15 If, however, bare life in the particularity of its being-there constitutes a scar on the political figures of man and citizen as well as on the ethical infinity of the face, the question of a passage between ethics and politics can only be raised from the site of this scar. This is, no doubt, because such a passage demands our persistent interrogation of the double exclusion that renders life ‘sacred’, but it is also because, as Agamben’s Homo Sacer demonstrates, the challenge of bare life (as ‘the nonrelational’)16 lies in confronting us with the need to (re)think relation. Whereas Agamben wonders whether a new politics is ‘thinkable beyond relation and, thus, no longer in the form of connection’,17 I believe that no ethical democracy can afford to ignore the challenge of re-figuring relation. As I have suggested, this re-figuration entails an opening (an expansion) towards what, according to Hanssen, is the outer limit of a democratic ethos. At the same time, it involves a kind of contraction for it necessitates a retreat to its inner limit, namely, ‘the political recognition of difference’. The concept of ‘Recognition’ has been seen as part and parcel of the Master/ Slave paradigm.18 Hegel borrows the term from Fichte and re-invests it in his attempt to understand the problem of the autonomous self and its relation to an other. In contrast to Fichte, he foregrounds the violence entailed in the process of recognition and the uneasy mirroring between self/other, which is responsible for this violence. It is because it privileges the self and its desire for autonomy that the concept of ‘recognition’ becomes suspect in the context of postmodern ethics. Indeed, such ethics, as we have seen, comes to define itself as the disruption of the transferential process involved in recognition whereby the self loses the self

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only to retrieve it in the mirroring gaze of the other. In the context of postmodern politics, however, the concept has not been so easy to abandon. As Hanssen points out, ‘[t]he category of recognition has moved to the centre of contemporary political and philosophical discussions about multiculturalism’ precisely because the psychic and political need of particular individuals or groups for respect, visibility or acknowledgement remains imperative.19 Once more, we are face-to-face with yet another configuration of the double-bind between ethics and politics, a double-bind which I want to insist on understanding as the mark of a crisis within the existing forms of transcendence that structure our experience of both the ethical and the political. On the level of politics this crisis can be traced in the bankruptcy of the modern figures of transcendence (i.e. the people, the nation, the state, the proletariat, etc.) that concerns thinkers such as Balibar and Jean-Luc Nancy (among others).20 On the level of ethics, the crisis has taken the form of the hiatus that prevents ‘Revelation’ from having any concrete realization and that renders humanitarian discourses powerless to contest the dominant strategies of a calculated ef/facement of human beings. As I have suggested, what is at issue in the context of this crisis is the responsibility to develop a relation to the nonrelational (i.e. bare life) that might thwart the ‘thanatopolitics’ whose logic Agamben is so astutely dissecting.21 What is also at issue, if the contemporary persistence of an immanent politics of recognition is not to be dismissed as the resurgence of dangerous, obsolete ‘-isms,’ is the necessity to reconceptualize the nature and limits of the dispossession (i.e. the willing denial of the self ’s priority or autonomy) that all forms of transcendence demand for the sake of either a political ‘being-with’ or an ethical ‘being-for’ the other. It is because both these tasks (which, if we share Hanssen’s vision, are the tasks of an ethical democracy) lie at the heart of Kristeva’s psychoanalytic project that I would like to turn to her work in the remainder of this chapter. In re-inscribing the ethics/politics double-bind (as I have reformulated it) within a psychoanalytic context, I am aware that I cannot do justice to the complexity of the issues involved. I am hoping, however, to offer a perspective that is missing in current debates around these issues. As Agamben acknowledges, ‘Western politics has not succeeded in constructing the link between zoeˉ and bios, between voice and language’ or (as he comes to qualify this) ‘between what is incommunicable and mute and what is communicable and sayable’.22 If psychoanalysis (especially as Kristeva has theorized it) has been more successful in articulating this link, then it may function as a site of resistance against the abandonment of bare life. It may also help us develop an economy (and I am using the word tentatively at the moment) as much of the violence directed at the sacredness of life as of that seen as inextricable from the desire for recognition driving contemporary identity struggles. This is, perhaps, what Hegel had in mind when he wrote of the ‘labour of the negative’, a labour that, significantly, demands a readiness to respond to ‘the suffering’ and ‘the patience’ of the negative.23 Or, as I shall emphasize in my discussion of Kristeva, a labour that demands a working through of its suffering and an opening up to the promise of its patience.24

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The remains of Hegel Even a cursory reading of Kristeva’s early work will disclose her commitment to a rethinking of Hegelian dialectics, a framework that she obviously considers significant for her project, as she begins to formulate it in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Indeed, Hegel’s non-metaphysical, non-dualistic understanding of consciousness as well as the world, his concern with intersubjectivity and his insistence on thinking the relationship between the Infinite and the Finite, transcendence and immanence, have had a determining influence on her theorization of the interplay between semiotic/ symbolic and her introduction or re-investment of such concepts as dialogism, signifiance, genotext, chora, intertextuality and metaphorein (to mention the more familiar of these concepts). In ‘The System and the Speaking Subject’ (1973) she openly admits that what she calls ‘semanalysis’ ‘can be thought of as the direct successor of the dialectical method’.25 At the same time, however, she makes clear that this ‘method’ needs to be revised (‘because of and in spite of Hegel’, as she puts it),26 a task she takes up in Revolution in Poetic Language. As she goes on to demonstrate in this work, Hegel’s dialectical thinking is limited by what Otto Poggeler describes as a kind of ‘forgetting’,27 the forgetting precisely of the labour of the negative, which is subordinated to the teleological movement of Hegelian ‘Becoming’: i.e. ‘the immediate disappearance of the one into the other’.28 What is more, as she contends, Hegel divorces this labour from its concrete base in the self-organization of matter; hence, her decision in Revolution to re-read ‘Hegel through Freud’ and his dialectical, materialist theory of the drives.29 In reclaiming the force of Hegelian negativity, which is for her the neglected ‘Fourth “term” of the dialectic’, and in reinvesting this force in the self-differentiating movement of the drives,30 Kristeva seems, interestingly, to reiterate the question Derrida raises in Glas (a book published in the same year as Revolution in Poetic Language): ‘what, after all, of the remain(s), today, for us, here, now, of a Hegel?’.31 What needs to be noted, however, is that, unlike Derrida, Kristeva insists on using the Hegelian remainders (namely, negativity and materiality) in her attempt to rethink the nature of mediation and to open up dialectical passageways beyond the limits of the Hegelian legacy. If, in her work, mediation is never experienced as ‘unity’s self-return’, this is because a materialist operation of rupture and renewal is always at work in it, preventing the closure of the Hegelian ‘auto-affective’ circle.32 In contrast to Hegel, any movement across in Kristeva unfolds at the site of a paradox; a site, in other words, where opposing claims are made, different positions occupied, conflicting experiences suffered – side by side (which is the meaning of the prefix ‘para’ in Greek). Indeed, Kristeva does not hesitate to claim the heterogeneity of the drive and to insist that it leave its trace in the social. She advocates the necessity of preserving both a life in intimacy and a bios (in Hannah Arendt’s sense), a shareable existence within a community of speaking beings. A sober disciple of the Law, she preaches the value of compromise (as com-promissum, the joint agreement that guarantees politics) and, at the same time, turns into an apostle of Revelation (as the unmediated disclosure of the Other that lies at the heart of ethics). In The Broken Middle Rose draws our attention to the possibility of thinking an ‘and’ (a connection) that is not conjunctive

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but diremptive. Diremption, she writes, ‘may only be manifest as paradox’. Whereas ‘Contradiction’ implies ‘resolution’ and presupposes an opposition of terms which become ‘progressively polarized and conflictual’, diremption connotes ‘torn halves of an integral freedom to which, however, they do not add up’. It draws attention to a trauma, ‘the trauma of separation of that which was, however … not originally united’.33 It is in this light, I believe, that we need to understand Kristeva’s ambiguous commitment to Hegelian dialectics, a commitment that can be traced in her consistent attempts since the late 1960s to produce different configurations of ‘a reversible’ (as she puts it)34 space where mediation is experienced as ‘an open debate’ not as ‘a resolution of oppositions’ (this is precisely how she defines the term ‘dialectic’ in Visions capitales).35 Though a detailed discussion of these configurations is beyond the scope of this chapter, it is worth mentioning some of the spaces that have occupied the middle in Kristeva’s work: – the ‘rhythmic space’ of the chora, formed at the intersection between the semiotic and the symbolic;36 – the Father of Individual Prehistory, this ‘imaginary space’ of a heterogeneous transference that facilitates as it negates the emergence of the subject;37 – finally, the space of the paternal signifier, which she defines as ‘the essence of ambassadorship’ in The Old Man and the Wolves.38 Each of these psychic spaces has repeatedly been associated with different cultural, discursive, ethical or political spaces, from art and literature to love and an ‘other’ metaphor, narrative, the experience of motherhood, the practice of psychoanalysis itself. What brings all these spaces together is their openness to a mediating movement (a transference) between flesh and word, the mute or incommunicable and the communicable, the invisible and the visible, the timelessness of the drive and the social. What these spaces also share is an emptiness, an impasse unfolding at the heart of this transference and which we have come to know under a variety of names: negativity, nothingness, trauma, wound or kenosis, a term she adopts in Visions capitales.39 Among all these configurations of an ambiguous middle I find Kristeva’s concern with what she calls ‘the sacred’ compelling, and it is to this concern that I want to devote the last part of my chapter. I have no doubt that her turn to the sacred would render Rose uneasy, confirming what she sees as the proliferation of ‘holy middles’ in postmodernity, in other words, the displacement of mediation to a space outside law, logic, political institutions and discourse.40 From my perspective, however, this turn is interesting precisely because the sacred (as Kristeva understands it) unfolds, not outside law or the political but in the between of what we have already discussed as the outer and inner limits of a democratic ethos. In his influential book on the sacred René Girard emphasizes its inextricability from violence. ‘Violence’, he writes, is ‘the heart and secret soul of the sacred’,41 not only because it is in itself an enactment of violence (epitomized in the sacrificial

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rite) but also because it functions as an economy of violence, that is, as a means of restoring the difference between ‘impure’ and ‘purifying violence’.42 It is this economy, according to Girard, that institutes the political as the realm of universal law in relation to which everyone is the same though not equal, for the realm of law in Girard is also the realm of order and hierarchy.43 Girard’s account of the sacred is clearly indebted to a Kojevian reading of Hegel and a liberal understanding of the political.44 In many ways then, and despite its originality, it can be seen as reproducing a number of the problems that we have already discussed as aspects of the aporetic situation we are currently experiencing. Thus, political transcendence in the universality of the law is predicated on a denial of the value of particularity, the recognition of which could only result in a struggle among equals, a war of ‘all against all’, which is precisely what the sacred aims to end.45 It is also predicated on the denial of violence which, though constitutive of the political, is posited outside of it as ‘a separate, impersonal entity, a sort of fluid substance that flows everywhere and impregnates on contact’.46 In addition, the process of recognition is reduced to the doubling resulting from the self ’s encounter with an other, the threatening aspects of which are contained in the ritualistic elimination of the pharmakos whom Girard calls the ‘monstrous double’.47 Finally, the production of community is inscribed in the Hegelian movement of self-othering whereby the community retrieves the identity it has lost through substituting absolute difference by relative difference, in other words, difference relative to the community’s law. Because radical difference is expelled, the ethical moment of the face-to-face is never allowed to erupt within the political, so Girard’s democracy remains without an ethos,48 confusing its inner with its outer limit and, as a result, reducing the middle to a single point, a cut: ‘The birth of the community is first and foremost an act of separation,’ he tells us.49 As we shall see, it is here that Kristeva’s engagement with the sacred makes a difference, for she restores to the moment of Girard’s cut its suffering and patience, hence, its endurance in the time of the community. She also restores to it a transference that is enabling not a threat to the self while paradoxically keeping the self possessed by the other. Towards an iconomy of violence My focus will be Kristeva’s 1996 detective novel Possessions and Visions capitales, the book published on the occasion of an exhibition organized at the Louvre in 1998. Both books unfold around different violent remainders, the stabbed, decapitated body of Gloria Harrison in Possessions and a succession of skulls, funereal masks, bodiless heads or headless faces in Visions capitales. The impetus behind both books is to produce an economy of these remainders and of the violence to which they testify. In Visions capitales Kristeva insists, following Marie-José Mondzain, that the polysemy of the word ‘economy’ needs to be taken into consideration.50 Rather than associate the term with the oikos, the home, the domestic and, hence, with the domesticization of what disturbs the boundaries of the proper and the self, Kristeva connects it with the word ‘icon’ which she sees as the ‘operator between two resemblances’ or, better still, between two different kinds of ‘relations’ (she uses the Greek word: skésis).51 On

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the one hand, the absolute relation between the divine and its transubstantiation in flesh, on the other, the relative relation between the divine and its images.52 ‘Economy’ (or, as I would prefer to call it, ‘iconomy’) can be seen, then, as Kristeva’s attempt to think the relation between the terms that make up the ethics/politics double-bind; in other words, the relation between transcendence and immanence (the divine and its transubstantiation in flesh, in Kristeva’s terms) but also the relation between two forms of transcendence, namely, the absolute transcendence to the asymmetrical Other and the relative transcendence to the figurations of this Other. What I find interesting in Kristeva’s understanding of iconomy is her concern with the problem of representation (the problem of the image), which, unlike Girard, she places at the heart of the sacred. At the end of Visions capitales she writes: ‘… the sacred … resides above all neither in the sacrifice nor in any religious or aesthetic tradition, but in that experience which is uniquely human, that is, the ability to represent.’53 As Kristeva emphasizes, the problem of representation raised by the icon cannot be reduced to that of mimesis, for the icon is not meant as a copy of the divine, but seeks to (re-)inscribe an absolute form of relatedness onto another order (a relative order).54 What is at stake, then, in Kristeva’s iconomy is the possibility of reinscribing absolute singularity and the transcendence opened by it through the sign, the medium of universality. Re-thinking our aporia in these terms might be valuable precisely because, as Nancy has suggested, the postmodern crisis of the political is inextricable from a crisis on the level of representation, a crisis traced in our growing resistance to existing figurations of community and our difficulty with inventing new satisfactory figurations. By foregrounding the problem of representation in her analysis of sacred iconomy, Kristeva acknowledges this difficulty and demonstrates that she shares Nancy’s concern with renewing our capacity to represent and our faith in communal representations. Significantly, for both Kristeva and Nancy this renewal is predicated on the reclamation of a process of identification that cannot be reduced to the demand for recognition and that involves the opening of a shared transferential space. Before we can trace this process in detail, however, we need to return to Visions capitales and Kristeva’s discussion of iconic economy. Again drawing on Mondzain’s Image, Icone, Economie, she isolates two contexts within which she invites us to understand the mediating value of ‘iconomy’. The first context is the maternal body that, in dispossessing itself, opens up a space for the revelation on the level of immanence of the transcendent, singular Other. The second context is sacrifice, the experience of what she calls kenosis that initiates a process whereby the suffering of the immanent (flesh or ‘bare life’) accedes to the order of meaning.55 As we shall see, a different sort of dispossession is involved here, a voiding, a ‘hemorrhage’ of what, paradoxically, is to be re-encountered across a distance, the intimate distance unfolding in the sharing of the sign.56 According to Kristeva, it is the ‘double movement’ between these two forms of dispossession (a dispossession for the sake of the singular Other and a dispossession for the sake of opening a shared space) that constitutes the ‘dialectic’ of iconomy.57

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As the title suggests, it is precisely this double movement between ethical devotion and a communal being-with that constitutes the main concern of Kristeva’s Possessions. The epigraph to the novel is Dostoyevsky’s ‘Je crois au diable personnel’ [I believe in a personal – or, perhaps, an intimate – devil] and it is true that all three female protagonists are described as possessed by an intimate devil. Gloria, a welloff translator, is utterly devoted to Jerry, her deaf son whose birth has immersed her into a life of mourning for a loss that cannot be alleviated by his physical presence and that renders her relation to him a reaching out across an invisible void. ‘There is no chance to encounter the divine’, the narrator writes, ‘but through our exposure to the child’.58 This is all the more so, of course, when (as in Gloria’s case) the exposure is to the radically singular, an ‘anomaly’ of a child.59 Pauline, Jerry’s orthophonist, is similarly immersed in a life of mourning for the premature death of her brother whom she seeks to retrieve in the figure of Jerry. Finally, Stephanie, the detective-journalist and narrator of the novel, is possessed by an other who has never been present, unconsciously mourning after the repressed experience of a recent miscarriage. In his discussion of Derrida’s reading of Hegel in Glas, Critchley draws attention to Derrida’s concern with the ethical role of the family in Hegel, especially, as this is ‘exemplified’ in the figure of Antigone.60 As Critchley explains, for Derrida Antigone stands for an ethical relation that is both contained within and, at the same time, exceeds the Hegelian dialectical system. To quote Critchley: Antigone marks a place (‘an impossible place’) within the Hegelian system where an ethical moment irreducible to dialectics is glimpsed. Such an ethics would not be based on the recognition of the other, which is always selfrecognition, but would rather begin with the expropriation of the self in the face of the other’s approach. Ethics would begin with the recognition that the other is not an object of cognition or comprehension, but precisely that which exceeds my grasp and powers.61 According to Critchley, the ‘formal structure of such an ethics’ can be found in Sigmund Freud’s understanding of mourning. ‘In mourning’, he writes, ‘the self is consumed by the pain of the other’s death and is possessed by the alterity of that which it cannot possess: the absence of the beloved’. He goes on to ask: ‘Might not the death of the beloved, of love itself, and the work of mourning be the basis for a non-Christian and non-dialectical ethicality and friendship?’62 The reason I have quoted Critchley’s perceptive analysis of Derrida in such length is that the ethical moment he is describing, understood as the ‘feminine work of mourning’,63 is crucial not merely in the context of Possessions (as we have seen) but in the context of Kristeva’s work as a whole.64 What I want to argue, however, is that Kristeva’s distinctive mark as a thinker lies in her insistence on opening this moment to the space of the polis where it could form the basis of (indeed, the figuration for) a shared existence.

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It is important to note that for Kristeva, as for Derrida, this opening, this transference or translation of the ethical is not without violence. As Derrida writes in Glas: ‘The passion of the proper name: never to let itself be translated – according to its desire – but to suffer translation – which is intolerable to it.’65 In many ways, both Visions capitales and Possessions re-enact the passion of the singular. Interestingly, in Visions capitales the emphasis falls on the head (skull and face), the site of thought, which is also the site of human intimacy. What concerns Kristeva is the violence directed against this intimacy which lies at the heart of any form of ethics for, as she tells us, it is inextricable from a gesture of supplication. By contrast, in Possessions it is precisely the head that is missing, a fact that dehumanizes Gloria’s corpse, divorces it from all singularity and condemns it to a state of anonymous particularity.66 Whereas the head is the connecting link between the human and the divine, the social other and the invisible elsewhere, the decapitated body is ‘monstrous’ because it is neither the one nor the other.67 Like Bataille’s Acéphale (which Kristeva discusses in Visions capitales), Gloria’s decapitated body is a boundary, one however posited after the elimination of all boundaries for without a head there is no conscience, no prohibition.68 As such, it is ‘an impasse’. It confronts us with ‘an open wound’, ‘the sacrifice that inhabits us’.69 In the presence of this impasse Stephanie’s task is very different to that of Rilsky, the inspector in charge of the crime. As a representative of the law, the major dilemma he has is how to ‘reconcile his taste for justice’70 and ‘the impossibility of applying it in … a society that did not want it’.71 His problem, then, is juridical (what concerns him is precision to the letter of the law) and political (in the modern liberal sense of the term): his mission is to defend the social contract against the upsurge of savage, animal nature. Stephanie’s task, on the contrary, is how to render the impasse of Gloria’s decapitated body ‘fertile’,72 how to translate her open wound into a womb, in other words, how to produce an iconomy out of it. If the social contract concerns her (and it does), her understanding of it is very different to Rilsky’s. For it has nothing to do with precision to the letter of the law and it is not grounded on a repudiation of ‘animal’ instinct.73 What she would prefer to call ‘the social bond’ is based, instead, on memory and the ability to represent, the ability to transform the passion of life (zoeˉ ) into a narratable, shareable bios. At the same time, in her insistence on opening herself (through memory and empathy) to Gloria’s intimacy, the secret of her suffering, Stephanie demonstrates that she is equally concerned with ethics, this ‘invading proximity’ of the other, a proximity which, she acknowledges, is dangerous for a journalist cum detective.74 Positioned between ethics and politics, Stephanie (the ‘lonely hunter’, ‘the female voyageur’, the ‘migrant’)75 finds herself once more on the border. And it is from this site of passage that what seemed like a senseless murder or (as everybody around her prefers to think) the violent manifestation of a wider political scandal begins to appear as a sacer-facio, a performance of the sacred, a sacrifice. Indeed, the collective nature of the murder can hardly be ignored. Gloria was poisoned, strangled, stabbed and finally decapitated. Though Rilsky has become used to looking for the ‘author of a murder’,76 it is clear that more than one person

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was involved in this one: Michael Fish, Gloria’s opportunist lover who was pushing for his financial security, Pauline, who feared Gloria was giving in at the expense of her commitment to Jerry and a passing serial killer attracted by the smell of death. However, in her analysis of Gloria’s relation to each of her friends and acquaintances, Stephanie uncovers an unconscious resentment against her, a deep hatred that renders every one of them complicit in her murder or, as Stephanie would put it, ‘guilty and responsible’.77 Even Stephanie herself, for was she not too ‘continuing to attack her post-mortem’? Wasn’t she ‘set against her as the others, with the others …’?78 From the moment she is confronted with Gloria’s decapitated body, Stephanie concerns herself with understanding the reasons that have rendered this ordinary woman (the mother of a difficult child, a translator at a time when ‘very few people write and a lot fewer read’)79 the target of so much hatred. In Violence and the Sacred Girard sketches the portrait of the pharmakos, the ‘“sacrificeable” victim’ on whom the community deflects ‘the violence that would otherwise be vented on its own members’.80 As he emphasizes, the pharmakos is ‘a marginal individual, incapable of establishing or sharing the social bonds that link the rest of the inhabitants’.81 Gloria is, indeed, a foreigner who has never made much effort to integrate herself in the community of Santa Varvara, the fictional country where the action is taking place. What is more, her blind dedication to her handicapped son has kept her apart from the others all too eager to forget, get on with their lives, change channel.82 This was seen as ‘her unreason’,83 this passive openness to a possession by the other, by him or, indeed, ‘it’ (ça) for, as Stephanie reminds us, the child (especially this ‘anomaly’ of a child) is part of a world that is not ‘ours’.84 Yet, according to Stephanie, ‘this is not enough’. ‘She must have made a mistake’ or, indeed, committed a hubris.85 For Girard, the hubris of the pharmakos consists, not so much in his/her exteriority with regard to the community, but in his/her ability to ‘partake of all possible differences within the community, particularly the differences between within and without’.86 The pharmakos, he writes, ‘passes freely from the interior to the exterior and back again’.87 Similarly, Gloria (a translator not merely of texts but of the colours, textures, smells, saliva, caresses that make up the world of Jerry) is a frequent trespasser of ‘the sacred border’ between outside/inside, a life of speaking proximity and ‘la-bas’.88 It is this trespassing that renders her vulnerable to the hatred of others, a sacrificial victim par excellence, for, as Stephanie realizes, ‘a translator, who is by definition trained to love, is herself incapable of hatred’.89 But what are we to make of the fact that the sacrificial victim (who appears to have a generic status in Girard)90 is here distinguished by the particularity of her identity? In her comparative essay on Kristeva and Girard’s theories of sacrifice, Martha Reineke emphasizes Kristeva’s contribution to the development of a ‘gendersensitive’ theory of sacrifice.91 As she argues, in revealing ‘the first victim of sacrifice as female’ (namely, the mother), Kristeva, in contrast to Girard, draws attention to the historical and embodied nature of social prohibitions which, in Reineke’s view, continue to shape us in our secular age.92 In this light, it is important not to interpret Kristeva’s re-staging of the mother’s sacrifice as the reproduction on her part of

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what has consistently been represented as an anthropological or psychological ‘given’. Kristeva is aware of the ethico-political stakes of a violence that is not arbitrary and that seeks to produce the social at the expense not only of the particularity of the female body but, more importantly, of the singularity of the ethical relation associated with it. Possessions opens itself to these stakes, foregrounds them and sets out to reinscribe the remainders of the expenditure that gives birth to the social. Hence the significance of the novel’s departures from Girard’s sacrificial economy. In his analysis, the violence directed at the sacrificial victim is ‘generative’ because its ‘purpose … is to restore harmony to the community, to reinforce the social fabric’.93 It is, therefore, ‘a radically new type of violence’ that aims at putting an end ‘once and for all to violence itself ’.94 This is precisely the function of the sacred, according to Girard. ‘The language of pure sacredness’, he writes, ‘detaches violence from man to make it a separate, impersonal entity’.95 Seen in this light, the concluding act of Gloria’s sacrifice seems fitting. Under the direction of Larry Smirnoff (a journalist, master of spectacular political scandals) and with Rilsky’s tacit approval, the community of Santa Varvara stages its return to order in the ritualized trial and imprisonment of the serial killer who takes all the social and moral blame. In doing so, the community restores its identity by breaking away from both the violence that threatens it (Gloria’s ‘unreason’, the serial killer’s transgression) and the violence that (re)constitutes it. As Girard explains, though ‘the community owes its existence to the sacred’, ‘it is “good” [only] when it returns to the exterior’.96 In many ways, the serial killer’s punishment can be interpreted as a serious contestation of the ban that, according to Agamben, inscribes bare life into a logic of exception. For bare life is brought back into the realm of human law and is endowed with rights that render any violence perpetrated against it punishable. This is achieved, however, at the cost of displacing the ban within the legal figure of the subject who Agamben understands as ‘a curious oxymoron’: in other words, as both the bearer of bare life and the bearer of rights, ‘what is below and, at the same time, most elevated’.97 The doublet victim/accused that marks the conclusion of Rilsky’s investigation exemplifies precisely this oxymoron. What is more, the return of bare life into the realm of law does not take place without leaving a remainder, namely, the gaping hole of Gloria’s decapitated body, which the mediating operation of the law abjects in/through the figure of the serial killer. In contrast to Girard, Kristeva draws attention to the desire for identification that is an inextricable part of any performance of the sacred. As she demonstrates in Visions capitales, the sacrificial victim is not abjected but consumed, ritualistically incorporated in order for her attributes to be assimilated by the community. In addition, violence does not return to the outside, but remains as the mark of a wound within it. In Possessions it takes Stephanie, a woman, to throw light on the operations of such a sacred iconomy. ‘No’, the narrator insists. ‘He [Rilsky] has certainly not discovered the same thing as Stephanie […] Did the dear inspector know the world of a woman? […] This has nothing to do with Existence, Man, men, the social and all their subtle rhetoric. One feels it or one doesn’t. It’s a different world on the side of the world.’98 Stephanie herself opens to this alternative iconomy when the last piece of the puzzle

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is restored, that is, when she discovers that it was Pauline who decapitated Gloria’s corpse. Throughout the novel, Pauline’s function in relation to Jerry is that of a mirror. Her job is to send him back a visible reflection of his missing sounds. In decapitating Gloria, then, Pauline has simply performed the definitive act of a process of dis/possession that Jerry himself has initiated in his obsessive copying of Picasso’s La Femme à la Collerette. Interestingly, Jerry himself serves as a mirror to the community of Santa Varvara, re-enacting, in his mimetic decapitation of his mother, the violence that the community harbours against the particularity of the female and the singularity of the maternal. Indeed, his desire to ‘defend himself ’ (as his psychoanalyst, Professor Jorine puts it)99 against his love for an intimate though overwhelming other appears to parallel the community’s desire to defend and restore its identity, first through the release of its unconscious violence against the foreign trespasser of societal borders, then through its negation of this violence by projecting it on the figure of the serial killer. In this light, it is no wonder that Axel Honneth uses the mother-child relationship as the key paradigm for understanding the contemporary socio-political struggles for recognition.100 According to him, in both contexts the attainment of selfhood and autonomy are the result of a necessary act of violence intended to resist or contain the reciprocal violence of the other. In her discussion of Honneth, Kelly Oliver warns against the uncritical adoption of psychoanalytic paradigms that posit the emergence of the social as predicated on a break from the mother. As she argues, the necessity of this break can be assumed ‘only if we imagine the mother-infant relationship as anti-social’.101 She also warns against the acceptance of theories of recognition that take for granted a preformed subjective identity, evading the question of ‘how the subject is produced or comes into being’.102 If we proceed by heeding Oliver’s warnings, we may find ourselves in a position to appreciate the significant differences between the motherchild relationship (as portrayed in Possessions) and the theorization of communal or subjective identity-formation based on the Girardian model of sacrifice or on the master/slave dialectic. Thus, Jerry’s obsessive decapitation of Gloria (through the interposition of Picasso and Pauline) points to a desire on his part neither to abject nor to appropriate his (m)other but to release her of her intimate devil and to carry her love (the ethical relation of the one-for-the-singular-other) over to the order of the social. It is only when he has released her (literally dispossessing himself) that he can re-cognize a distinct self that remains response-able to the other. Significantly, in his compelling re-reading of Hegel Robert Williams places the gesture of ‘a mutual releasement’ at the heart of the Hegelian concept of recognition,103 which, he insists, cannot be reduced to what is ‘one of its possible instances’: i.e. the master/slave paradigm.104 As he argues, it is precisely because Geist has its origins in this gesture that it is ‘a fundamentally social concept’.105 In Possessions the mutual release of mother and son is inextricable from a transferential process traceable in Jerry’s copying of La Femme à la collerette and reaching its climax in Pauline’s decapitation of the dead Gloria. In her discussion of the primitive cult of the human skull in Visions capitales, Kristeva draws

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attention to this transferential process which aims at opening a new, shared space between the visible and the invisible, the world of the living and that of the dead.106 Positing it ‘at the beginning of the trajectory’ that leads to the establishment of the sign, Kristeva also emphasizes the function of this process in returning human intimacy, in its suffering and mortality, to the invisible.107 It is in this gesture of transcendence that what is mortal and can be killed (i.e. bare life) becomes sacrificeable or, as Agamben would put it, ‘redeemed’.108 Rather than part of the community’s violence, then, Pauline’s loving severance of the mother’s head is an attempt to repair the damage done by this violence and constitutes the final stage of what we have called an ‘iconomy’, which Kristeva understands as ‘the inscription of an emptiness that gives birth’.109 The emptiness here is, of course, the gaping hole of Gloria’s decapitated body. But it refers also to Jerry’s own sense of loss and to an emptiness more intimate to Pauline, the emptiness that has taken over her life when her younger brother died. Therefore, in releasing Jerry and rendering the impasse of Gloria’s death fertile, Pauline is herself reborn. At the same time, she translates a senseless violence, an act of hatred directed against the female, maternal body, into what Stephanie calls the ‘tenderness of violence’110 that takes the form of both ‘a loved intimacy’ and ‘a loving cut’.111 If this ‘loved intimacy’ suspends politics (and Rilsky’s understanding of justice), this is because what is shared in love remains a secret and cannot be passed on. In Possessions this secret lies in the wound traced in Jerry’s voice,112 a wound pointing to the loss that bore the word, but also to an excess before and beyond it (remember: the ‘torn halves … do not add up’). It is ‘a virtual caress’ for this wound that brings the three main female characters together,113 opening Stephanie to the violated intimacies of Pauline and Gloria, gradually taking her back to the memory of what she feels is her own ‘decapitation’ (i.e. her miscarriage).114 If ‘the loving cut’ performed by the sacred suspends ethics, it is because the secret is always inscribed in ‘a tendency towards’,115 that is, in a movement that promises a future life for the secret (which is how I understand the patience of the negative Hegel talks about). According to Kristeva, this futural movement that carries the impasse of the secret is narrative, which, in a recent interview, she defines as the ‘sharing of a singular story in a political space’.116 It is precisely the possibility of this sharing that, as Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub argue, was annihilated in the Nazi concentration camps where human beings were reduced to bare life. ‘The historical reality of the Holocaust’, they write, ‘became, thus, a reality which extinguished philosophically the very possibility of address, the possibility of appealing, or of turning to another’.117 In seeking to restore this appeal, Kristeva’s mediating iconomy (as I have traced it in this chapter) cancels the logic on which the double abandonment of bare life is based, for it reclaims (through Pauline’s performance of the sacred) its face (its bond with a transcendent Other) and (through Stephanie’s narration) renders its suffering shareable in the polis, among responsive and responsible others. If the suspensions discussed above constitute a violence, this violence is both a transfer and transferable (Is ‘a transmissible disorder no longer a disorder?’ Stephanie wonders).118 It is both a transition and transitory. For Kristeva this is, indeed, where

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the power of the sacred lies, which, she warns, should not be allowed to feed into any ideological or religious nostalgia.119 As she acknowledges at the end of Visions capitales, the sacred entails a wink without which it can become murderous.120 This wink epitomizes, of course, the passing of the sacred. It also points, however, to a certain complicity that lies at the heart of it, a knowing smile that permits us ‘to die of laughter while keeping a cool head’.121 In The Feminine and the Sacred Clément and Kristeva call this wink ‘the atheism of the work of meaning’. According to Clément, this is the ‘most feminine’ of the fundamental elements of the sacred122 and it is certainly the mark of any detective – including Stephanie Delacour who is the only character capable of carrying Pauline’s demon ‘in the logical landscape of Paris’.123

9 FROM HORRORISM TO COMPASSION Re-facing Medusan Otherness in Dialogue with Adriana Caverero and Bracha Ettinger Griselda Pollock

Isaac was compassionate toward his father, because, as Infant, he had already been compassionate toward his mother, apprehending her compassionate hospitality uncognizingly, and emotionally feel-knowing the trauma he had been to her in her bringing him to life. Bracha Ettinger1 In the ample repertoire of human violence, there is one particularly atrocious kind whose features I propose to subsume in the category of horrorism. This coinage, apart from the obvious assonance with the word ‘terrorism’ is meant to emphasize the particularly repugnant character of so many scenes of contemporary violence, which locates them in the realm of horror rather than that of terror. Adriana Cavarero2 Preamble On 29 March 2002, 18-year-old Ayat al-Akhras, a Palestinian living in the Deheisheh refugee camp in Bethlehem, walked into a suburban Jerusalem supermarket in Kiryat Hayovel with an explosive belt strapped to her body. Stopped by a security guard who became suspicious when Ayat al-Akhras warned Arab women selling vegetables outside the supermarket to leave, the young Palestinian detonated her bomb belt, apparently killing only herself and the security guard who had stopped her. Her body was shredded. Bomb belts, however, cleanly sever the head from the pulped flesh. Gruesome as it is to know this, this fact is often used in post-martyrdom publicity images that juxtapose the headshot before the action and the resulting severed, but intact head. We, the general public, are, however, carefully shielded by the media

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from seeing the effects on the bystanders’ bodies which may psychologically scar those who must deal with the atrocious effects on human bodies when they service these catastrophes. In the aftermath of the explosion on 29 March 2002, the bomber’s body parts were linked with another, only later recognized, victim’s body, that of an Israeli teenager, Rachel Levy. The bodies or heads of two young women were confused in the chaos of the shattered supermarket. Israeli Rachel Levy had gone to the Supersol shop on Friday at about 1.40 p.m. and entered it at the same moment as Ayat AlAkhras walked in and detonated herself. Hearing the explosion, Avigail Levy, the mother of Rachel Levy, immediately feared the worst but later, seeking information on her missing daughter, she was watching the news where it was reported that the bomber was about 16 and a half years old. She came to the horrifying conclusion that, her daughter had also been killed, and that her body had been confused with the bomber’s. In subsequent reports, the media juxtaposed ‘before’ headshots of the two very similar young women which open up a channel to the ancient myth of Medusa, making their faces now a site of an arresting fascinum: what Lacan suggested was a confrontation with death that freezes us with horror. On the cover of the American newsmagazine Newsweek in April 2002 (9.1) we see the heads of two young women both with olive skin and long dark hair. Focusing on these detached headshots is nothing unusual in terms of cropped images or even the art historical convention of the portrait bust. No whiff of the severed head of Medusa spontaneously arises. Yet here they form a doubled Medusan image. While never meeting, their bodies mingled in death, these two young women were destroyed in a scene of contemporary violence that Italian feminist philosopher Adriana Cavarero, proposing a new concept for understanding the specifically traumatic nature of contemporary violence, names horrorism. Cavarero writes: Nor can the crude realities of bodies rent, dismembered, and burnt entrust its meaning to language in general or to an particular substantive. Yet on closer inspection, violence against the helpless does turn out to have a specific vocabulary of its own, one that has been known, and not just in the Western tradition, for millennia. Beginning with the Biblical slaughter of the innocents and passing through various events that include the aberration of Auschwitz, the name used is ‘horror’ rather than ‘war’ or ‘terror’ and it speaks primarily of crime rather than strategy or politics … To coin a new word, scenes like those I have just described might be called ‘horrorist’, or perhaps, for the sake of economy and assonance, we could speak of horrorism – as though ideally all the innocent victims, instead of their killers, ought to determine the name.3 Cavarero differentiates terror from horror. Terror derives from a Latin root that refers to shaking and trembling. What terrifies us causes the body to become agitated in preparation for flight. Horror has quite different roots. It relates to things that make our hair stand on end, or our flesh to come out in goose bumps. Horror leads to a state of paralysis, not flight and panic. ‘Gripped by revulsion in the face of a form

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Newsweek Cover: Suicide Bombing 14 April 2002.

of violence that appears more inadmissible than death, the body reacts as if nailed to the spot, hairs standing on end.’4 What causes profoundest horror is disfigurement, since figura – like the French word figure it means face – is the site of singularity; it represents our constitutive vulnerability as a human before another. Cavarero, therefore, defines horrorism as an ontological crime. It is a crime against fundamental human being, with the term human understood according Hannah Arendt’s retheorization of ‘the human condition’ that required reconstitution and redefinition in the aftermath of what Arendt identified as the radical totalitarian experiment in the concentrationary universe that sought to annihilate the human within a living being.5 Cavarero states, therefore, that the ontological crime ‘concentrating on an offence to the human being as essentially vulnerable, makes of wounding a disfiguring and a dismembering repugnant to the singularity of every body’.6 In identifying this novel crime, Cavarero invokes the trope of Medusa not only in relation to the severed head of a dismembered body, but because the face functions as the locus of subjective singularity:

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Medusa reminds us that the ‘killing of uniqueness’ as Hannah Arendt would say, is an ontological crime that goes well beyond the inflicting of death. Medusa confirms that this crime is visited on a body not just vulnerable but reduced to the primary situation of absolute helplessness.7 The questions I want to pose in this chapter, stemming from the tragic deaths of the two young women under the rubric of horrorism as a new form of violence, are as follows. How can feminist thought break the cycle of crimes against humanity that are so symbolically bound up with both the negation of humanity to the feminine and the identification of death with woman as no-face or the face of horror that kills? Why is gender the repressed question in the analysis of contemporary violence? Or does sexual difference specifically inflect contemporary forms of violence? Could feminist theory help us not only to understand, but to transform, our current cultures saturated by violence and death? Might there be a role for aesthetic practices, inflected by a novel psychoanalytical conceptualization of a feminine dimension in subjectivity beyond the phallus, in assisting transformations of culture through attention to its gendered imaginaries and the potentiality of aesthetics as a site of ethical transformation? To answer these questions, I shall introduce two thinkers, one from philosophy and the other from aesthetics and psychoanalysis. Horrorism and the trauma of the vulnerable Adriana Cavarero’s Horrorismo: Overro Violenza sull’inerme (2007) was translated in 2009 as Horrorism: Naming Contemporary Violence, losing Cavarero’s original concept of the helpless one.8 L’inerme is literally unarmed, the vulnerable par excellence. Vulnerable comes from the Latin noun: vulnus meaning ‘wound’. To be vulnerable is to be at risk of being wounded. In Greek the word for the piercing wound is trauma. Thus trauma might be understood metaphorically as the wounding of the utterly vulnerable, the unarmed, the defenceless. Originally a medical concept, trauma was adopted in the later nineteenth century by psychology to signify a form of psychic wounding. Yet unlike the organic wound, which can heal, leaving perhaps a scar, psychic trauma is not subject to such organic reconstruction. Its characteristics are timeless presentness, semantic absence, belatedness and transmissibility.9 Psychoanalytically however, trauma is a structural disposition of all subjectivity at whose formation the becoming subject is overwhelmed by events or stimuli which it cannot yet digest for lack of a psychic apparatus, whose formation will be incited precisely by such assaults of the unintelligible Real, the ‘enigmatic signifiers’ coming from the human world around the infant, as Jean Laplanche named them.10 But for us culturally, trauma happens in the realm of the historical; it names the accidents and events lived, experienced, suffered, although its contingencies are overdetermined in their effects by the structural disposition of the ‘grooves’ carved into the psyche by the founding traumas of birth, separation, abandonment, loss of love and fear of mutilation and non-being: castration is its Freudian name. I want to suggest that feminist theory contributes both to theories of violence and of trauma, as well as to their counter-

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force in daring to plot out other structuring dimensions of subjectivity that foster compassion and might found peace as something other than the momentary pauses between violence. In the film Miss Congeniality (2000, Donald Petrie) Sandra Bullock plays a tough FBI agent forced undercover at a beauty pageant. When, in the final round, she is asked the typical question: ‘What do you most want?’, Bullock answers in her feminist FBI mode: ‘Gun control.’ The outraged audience gasps; she realizes her slip and simperingly offers the expected reply: ‘World Peace.’ Trivialized by being the conventional ambition of otherwise unconsidered, empty-minded beauty queens, it has become almost impossible to think of peace. What are its signs, its artefacts, its conditions positively beyond being the mere absence of war? Just as the masculine/ feminine difference can be superseded, so the war/peace must be transcended to endow peace with an originary as well as future potential as a human, social artefact, a life-long work, as Bracha Ettinger will later suggest. Yet the connection popular culture has made between peace and the feminine is not a ludicrous relay, once we pass it through a psychoanalytical rather than an essentializing prism. Women are not naturally the champions of peace qua women, as indeed the actions of women soldiers and suicide bombers/martyrs demonstrate. This chapter explores a feminist philosophical analysis of violence and a feminist psychoanalytical thesis about peace, both of which detach the concept of the feminine from such cultural associations of ‘femininity’ to rescue its potential as a potential logic in ethical relations. Cavarero stresses that horrorism does not happen between declared enemies militarily confronting armed others as in war. It is a violence inflicted specifically and often randomly on the vulnerable, the helpless, and the unarmed; it is, therefore, violence against their human singularity which exists precisely in their vulnerability. In her chapter ‘When the Bomb is a Woman’s Body’, which examines female suicide bombers in general and tells the story of Ayat Al-Akhras in particular, Cavarero reminds us of the response of Ayat’s neighbours to her gesture: the Israelis have killed children and innocent people. This is a fair response. By this ‘aberrant logic’, Cavarero remarks, however, that ‘the slaughter of innocents becomes a criterion that justifies, indeed demands, the slaughter of other innocents’. 11 I have read several different versions of Ayat Al-Akhras’s suicide bombing. One is offered by an American journalist, Barbara Victor, who published a series of accounts of the novel phenomenon of women suicide bombers/martyrs that began in the Occupied Territories in early 2002.12 Her project was to uncover other, often non-political and personal pressures on each individual bomber/martyr and her family that might further explain their acts as gestures of desperation in often personally fraught situations of family problems. Victor suggests in her account that Ayat Al-Akhras was motivated in part because her father earned his living as a construction worker in Israel and was targeted for remaining in his job after the second Intifada created pressure on solidarity amongst all Palestinians by refusing to work for the Israelis.13 Victor claimed to be exposing the complex gender politics around the now heroized lives of several of the women who became suicide bombers after the first,

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Wada Ifris, immolated herself on 27 January 2002. It appears that Wada Ifris was a young woman whose husband was forced to divorce her aged 23 because she could not bear a child. Her only child had been stillborn. Suffering intense post-partum grief at her loss and social shame in her procreative failure she had no access to the kind of medical assistance or psychological counselling that might have altered her prospects. Rejected, unmarriageable, derided and shamed in her community, Wafa Idris became an emergency paramedic, witnessing terrible effects of Israeli retribution on her own people for their acts of defiance before she herself found a way to redeem herself in her own community by an act of political martyrdom. Reviewing Victor’s book, Jacqueline Rose was highly critical. Rose fears that producing a purely psychological profile of troubled Palestinian women with ‘blighted inner lives’ resulting from either aspects of Islam or the gendered assymetries of Palestinian culture radically privatizes and hence depoliticizes the conditions of unliveable daily violence and violation of human rights inflicted by the Occupation and sustained by actively cultivated blindness within Israeli society to the conditions imposed on Palestinians by their own state. Thus Rose concludes: It may indeed be that your desire to solve the problem is creating it, that burrowing into the psyche of the enemy, far from being an attempt to dignify them with understanding, is a form of evasion that blinds you to your responsibility for the state they are in. There is one thing that nobody will disagree with: the story of suicide bombing is a story of people driven to extremes. ‘Children who have seen so much inhumanity,’ El-Sarraj states, ‘inevitably come out with inhuman responses.’ We need to find a language that will allow us to recognize why, in a world of inequality and injustice, people are driven to do things that we hate. Without claiming to know too much. Without condescension.14 Rose at first seems to be disallowing psychologically oriented readings of political situations. Yet we know that applying psychoanalytical terms to the analysis of nation states, notably those of Israel and South Africa, has long been a distinctive, and indeed controversial if illuminating, part of Jacqueline Rose’s long-term project of analysis of the historical agony of the Middle East.15 But psychologizing the agent is distinct from psychoanalytical thinking about psychic forces that operate in larger political formations through desire, fantasy, identification and sublimation. In 2007 American-Israeli director Hilla Medalia made a documentary for the American company HBO, titled To Die in Jerusalem (9.2), whose cover image again uses the juxtaposed head shots. This documentary tracked Rachel Levy’s mother, Avigail Levy, in her five-year-long attempt to make contact with the mother of Ayat Al-Akras, Um Samir (born Khadra Kattous). In her unrelieved grief, Avigail Levy, against the advice of her friends, decided that she needed to talk with the mother of her daughter’s ‘killer’. Yet the film reveals that she only does so in order to demand that Um Samir condemn her own daughter for an act of wanton violence. Thus she refuses to allow a political ground for the tragedy in which both young women

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To Die in Jerusalem (Hille Medallia, HBO, 2007) DVD cover.

died. Living less than 15 km apart, the two mothers ultimately can only meet via a satellite connection. Um Samir cannot cross the checkpoint, having no freedom of movement into Israel. When Avigail Levy is taken for a drive by a Palestinian Christian to Bethlehem and to the edge of the cinder block refugee camp’s narrow alleys, the unfamiliarity of the territory so close to her world and yet in a world absolutely other to her lived space and conditions, causes Avigail Levy anxiety. When the two mothers are finally hooked up by satellite, Um Samir commiserates with Avigail Levy (9.3) as a mother for the common losses of beloved daughters. She

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To Die in Jerusalem (Hille Medallia, HBO, 2007), still.

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wishes above everything that she had not lost her daughter thus. But she will not bow to the imperious demand by the Israeli mother who dismisses as extraneous ‘politics’ the Palestinian mother’s attempt to explain that the subjective and hence politicizing effects of the horrors of living under Israeli Occupation and its daily violence may have driven her daughter to an act she wishes with all her heart she had not committed, since it bereaved her and the rest of the family. In an interview for her American alma mater university, the director Hille Medalia explained that the two women had remained in conversation for over four hours, with harsh words spoken on both sides. Yet they hung on, both determined to remain together until some kind of resolution occurred.16 The knowledge of their persistence helped me. As a viewer, I had found myself deeply disturbed by the scene between an aggrieved Avigail Levy who, it seems, could imagine neither the life-world of Ayat Al-Akras and her family, nor her own part as an Israeli in creating the young Palestinian’s unliveable life. The interpretation of the scene from what I saw on the film suggests that, despite her own grief, she had allowed compassion to be utterly destroyed. By compassion I mean more that mere empathy for another woman who is also a mother, hence offering some kind of shared experience. It is the way in which an other, unknowable through her difference can, none the less, be imagined in her life-world and networks of affective connections and political realities in ways that demand a response. We shall explore a fuller theorization shortly. Avigail Levy, it seemed to me, could turn her own grief only into an instrument with which verbally to batter another mother whose grace is often extraordinary in the face of it, but who argues from her own passion and suffering that the lifeviolating fact of living under Occupation demands another kind of gesture and a different form for bridging their shared grief within a politically framed asymmetry. It requires another kind of imagining of how to move from this mutually aggrieved cycle of harm to and by innocents towards the creation of something called peace which is not merely the cessation of violence between two states or peoples. It is their condition of life. One unexpected aspect of the film was that the Israeli filmmaker herself journeyed for the first time in her own life across these internal borders in this coinhabited land between the two families’ homes, and her camera records the two worlds that live side-by side while being cut off mentally and physically. Thus the film shows the narrowed alleyways of run-down housing that forms the displaced homes of Palestinians compared to the modern streets and airy spaces of urban Jerusalem. The women are thus placed in homes and urban settings even while within the film they find themselves rendered into filmed, media images to one another as they struggle with words to speak of incompatible sensibilities across a common grief as bereaved mothers. Abu Samir, the father of Ayat Al-Akras, having accompanied his wife in public, attempts to speak to Avigail Levy to explain that they are all victims of the Occupation, all reshaped and distorted by this condition, Palestinian and Israeli. He thus articulates an understanding of not only political but also ethical imbrication that acknowledges real violation but also shifts the eternal battle of words about

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whose land it is to the mutual if asymmetrical trauma whose continuous acting out leads to horroristic violence with casualities on all sides. Surveying these different representations allows us to grasp the challenge the events present to understanding because the violence is not merely to be located in the binary of perpetrator and victim or even in standard forms of military retaliation against armed insurgency. The attempted and frustrating encounter between two women bereaved in one of the deepest ways – having to outlive, hence bury, what remains of one’s own child – none the less touches the symbolic hinge of life and meaning, what Kristeva theorized as the sacred, which is, for her, profoundly bound to the psychic significance of the maternal-feminine because that space bridges the unspeakable body and the spoken sign.17 In this case bodies were so destroyed that their remains were confused and intermingled. This is not only horrifying to contemplate. Body parts have been used somehow to ‘speak’ a trauma through the juxtaposition of images of their heads. This raises anxious questions about an antidote. From aesthetics to Matrixiality Bracha L. Ettinger is a painter who also works as a psychoanalyst and health professional moving across the dividing line between Israel/Palestine. From reflection on what occurred in her own painting practice as the inheritor of familial trauma, she has evolved a major theoretical intervention in psychoanalysis. She offers a transformative feminist supplement to dominant theories of subjectivity and hence relations of self and other. As a painter, Ettinger labours in the sphere of trauma and memory transmitted in her own family that touch on Jewish, European, national and intercommunal histories in the Middle East. As an Israeli leftist and activist, she is also a witness and performs her own wit(h)ness to trauma as an accumulating and daily event in Palestinian lives, as she works beside Palestinians in voluntary psychological health care. Over 30 years as an artist she has built a complex theoretical architecture of what she names Matrixiality, a psychoanalytically articulated theorization arising from contemplating the trauma of the twin twentieth-century catastrophes of the Shoah and the Nakhbar, one Hebrew term meaning destruction, the other Arabic term meaning catastrophe, both being historically entwined. With Matrixiality, Ettinger offers a novel definition of a feminine sexual difference as an originary form of a non-Oedipal sexual difference that generates a specific proto-ethical dimension in all human subjectivity irrespective of later gender identifications as masculine or feminine subjects under the sign of the Phallus. Ettinger recognizes a supplementary logic that does not replace – and this is so important to avoid any notion of inversion – the still necessary phallic organization of subjectivity that generates access to language and gendered identifications. Phallic is not synonymous with masculine. As speaking subjects we are all formed, subjectively, by the phallic logic that enables the distinction between I and not-I to create the space for subjectivity, intersubjective relations and language. In phallic logic – (+/-) on/off, presence/absence – masculine becomes identified symbolically with the plus and presence and feminine with the minus and absence. A logical

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distinction is projected in fantasy onto the corporeal difference between men and women’s sexual parts. Hence the embodied subject is obliged to live in their own body and mind a symbolic logic of presence/absence with pretty catastrophic results for those marked by the sign of absence, femininity. As a supplementary logic, Matrix also involves difference and relations between subjective entities but not between the binary masculine and feminine created by phallic logic and its Oedipal categories of sexual difference defined by castration. Matrixial difference primordially occurs in the archaic encounter between two nongendered, proto-subjective partners-in-difference in the scene in which human becoming occurs in the last phases of prenatality/prematernity. Matrixial difference is the subjective effect of the way human beings become human beings in an encounter with another but unknown presence. Ettinger’s radical move is to include within thinking about the formations of subjectivity the latest – this too is very important – phases of the prolonged process of human becoming that lies in the joint but differentiated partnership of prenatality and prematernality. In that joint, prolonged and mutually asymmetrically affecting encounter there is a sensed difference, thus a not-yet-thought or imaginable, i.e. a traumatic encounter with otherness. Matrix ‘thinks’ pregnancy/ prebirth as a structure (not a body or a place and never an organ – organ-thinking is phallic). This structure is a sexual one, resulting from the effects of the specificity of feminine sexual body, desire and fantasy in which it occurs for two reasons. One is that as embodied subjectivities we live, think and feel through corporeality invested psychically with affect and fantasy. The other is that the access to this hinge between a process of becoming alive organically and becoming a human life occurs in the sexually specific dimension of a human body. Matrix is not a sexual difference (of or between) masculine/feminine. It tells of a difference that stems from the feminineM intimated between a co-emerging severality. Thus Ettinger liberates the feminine from its exclusively negative position in phallic logic and also refuses essentialist inversions that, still within phallic logic, value wombs over penises or mothers over fathers. She invites us to think with a radically other structure that comes psychocorporeally before men and women, mothers and fathers, and genital difference. The feminineMatrix as I shall need to signal its difference concerns a subjective capacity initiated in human becoming that lays down foundations for us to think self/other relations beyond the phallus, that is in terms of I and non-I, rather than I and not-I. In Oedipal, phallocentric thought there is first fusion and symbiosis (pregnancy and gestation), then separation through a sequence of splits (birth, losing the breast, castration). The subject emerges as a self only by rejection and separation from the non-subjective maternal body (wombs, placentas breasts etc. without a subject), rendering the maternal body abject and dangerous as the voluptuous or terrifying void of non-life. Matrixiality proposes that the domain that phallocentric thought considers an asubjective void of undifferentiation is, in fact, both subjectivizing and differentiated by a logic, however, of encounter, shared events and co-emergence. Its generative and affecting severality is composed not only of the becoming mother, already gendered and sexuated but being involved anew in anamnesiac reengagement with her own archaic moment of becoming-infant-ness in relation to a

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m/Other, and a becoming infant sensing a co-presence of an unknown otherness that is ‘traumatically’, that is, aesthetically and not yet thinkably, ‘of the feminineM’. By refusing to render maternal subjectivity a subjective void in which human animals are inhumanly incubated, Ettinger invites us to ask: what might be the singular gift of feminineM sexual specificity (severality/encounter) to the potentialities of humans as ethical and political beings if we were to acknowledge its conditions of emergence and recognize its already affecting traces in our postnatal fantasies and thoughts awaiting symbolic elaboration? If the foundational or most archaic sensations of subjectivity are based on severality and encounter, in which human being is effectively seduced into life by a desiring other who desires life and sharing, Matrixial theory elaborates a new way of thinking ‘compassion with full empathy’ that becomes a basis for postnatal ethical and ultimately, by choice and decision, political responsibility towards an other who is not conceived phallically as that which is not-I (self v. other), but as that which is non-I-yet-co-affects-with-I, experiencing a shared borderspace while borderlinking, in what what Ettinger names a shared encounter-event. Ettinger thus arrives at her definition of peace that goes beyond responsibility – itself premised on responseability as she reformulates it. Compassion is not only a basis for responsibility. It is also the originary event of peace. Peace is a fragile encounter-eventing, an ever re-co-created and core-created fragile and fragilizing encounter-event in terms of the particular epistemological parameters of Matrixiality. From the point of view of compassion peace is not in dialogue with war. I do not have to feel empathy for my perpetrators, nor do I have to understand them, but this does not mean that I will hand them the mandate to destroy my own compassion, which is one of my channels for accessing the non-I.18 Ettinger thus proposes compassion as an active capacity that can become an act of resistance not to violence but to what violence destroys in me: To suffocate my own compassion would be a kind of mental and affective paralysis, this would be a ‘second death’ (Lacan), since primary compassion is a spontaneous way of trans-subjective knowing of/in the unknown Other before and beyond any possible economy of inter-subjective exchange. It is in that sense that in compassion one is always fragilizing one’s self and becomes vulnerable. As a resistance to bestiality as such, it has nothing to do with the perpetrators, since it is working-through on a dimension without symmetrical exchange.19 Matrixial thinking arose for Ettinger out of her own aesthetic processes in art, whence, translated into psychoanalytical concepts, it can also be taken up thoughtfully to develop active political work or analytical practice. This occurs because the primordial foundations of compassion in Matrixial severality can be mobilized

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postnatally as a responsi(a)bility that is practised in the encounter with that other who remains other and unknown: namely a difference that our present modes of tolerance, multiculturalism, even dialectical transcendence cannot integrate and thus pacify. Compassion is also a dimension of a shared humanity that is now founded in more than philosophical rhetoric about the ethical moment of meeting face to face. It has a psychological resource in the very history of the pre-facial but coattuning humanizing becoming human that occurs at the hinge between corporality, subjectivity and meaning. The Matrixial wills, desires and is hospitable to the life of its other-partner. It can animate such life-desiring. It lays down the tracks for that capacity and for yearning for the life of/with the other. As Ettinger stresses, using Jean Laplanche’s reclaimed ideas about seduction as the effect of the world’s effects on the emergent psyche, mediated through the impact of adults’ unconscious on the traumatically vulnerable infant, Matrixiality is important because it seduces into life. The passion offered by the analyst (as a responsible compassionate m/Other) to the analysand is bringing the subject’s psyche into ‘life’ out of ‘eternal’ freezing repetitions, and allowing the subject to feel-know by passion and through fascinance and to be seduced into life (in the sense of the primal phantasy of seduction [Laplanche]. Primary compassion gives birth to responsibility while responsibility gives birth to adult compassion to the extent that they are not thinkable apart when the Matrixial horizon penetrates the phallic angle. Although we can think and talk about compassion and responsibility separately, their combination is not a thought but a practised affective encounter-event that becomes, in its turn, a point of view.20 Re-facing Medusa Adriana Cavarero is not interested in Barbara Victor’s probing back stories that indict the sexism and gender politics of Palestinian society. She is caught in the news stories by the mythic dimension of the severed head, the Medusan ghost in this contemporary form of political violence she names horrorism. The Greek legend of Medusa has persisted, since Freud’s phallic theorization of sexual difference, to become the very figure of the castrating terror represented by the site of female sexual difference as anatomy: woman’s sex which is of course the threshold of birth (9.4).21 Freud’s sexual focus loses something of the significance of Medusa’s function as the one dehumanized through the atrocity committed against her face. Derived from the Sanskrit, the Greek term from which Medusa is derived means guardian or protectress, from the verb medein, to rule or protect. In Greek mythology, Medusa was originally a Gorgon, a chthonic figure, born with two sisters from archaic marine deities. In the later Roman version, Ovid rewrites this myth with a narrative of sexual violence and jealous retribution. Ovid makes Medusa mortal, hence killable, and tells us that she was a once beautiful young woman who served as a priestess in Athena’s temple. Her sexual transgression willingly – or by force, she may have been raped – with Poseidon, Athena’s arch-enemy, led to a fearful punishment: the woman’s beauteous sign – her hair – was turned into a nest of vipers and her face rendered so

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Peter Paul Rubens (1577–1640), The Head of Medusa, c. 1618. Oil on canvas. cm 68.5 ×118.cm. Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum. Inv. 3834© 2012. Photo Austrian Archives/Scala Florence.

atrocious that the sight of it turned others to stone. She became the evil eye: fascinum. A trace of a more ancient sense of the power of the feminine as protectress is erased by the virulent rage of the daughter of Zeus, a woman born from a man’s head, Athena against this priestess. Medusa then becomes the embodiment of horror in that new phallocentric order. Seeking in archaic human responses to human powerlessness and the precariousness of life, the much more ancient sources for the personifications in Greek myths that emerged very late in the process, the early twentieth-century classical feminist scholar Jane Harrison reads Medusa’s origins quite differently. Harrison reclaims Medusan power: ‘her potency only begins when her head is severed, and that potency resides in the head; she is in a word a mask with a body later appended … the basis of the Gorgoneion is a cultus object, a ritual mask misunderstood.’ And Harrison adds: ‘the Gorgon was made out of the terror, not the terror out of the Gorgon.’ Harrison then insists that the Gorgoneion – a mask that deflects terror in the face of terror – comes first and is only later elaborated into a figuration and provided with a gendered narrative to explain its origin as the face of pure horror.22 A vast psychosocial edifice is, however, embedded in Western culture through the stronger impression of the Roman narrative of which some of us are the inheritors and now its feminist critics.23 It witnesses a transposition of a primal, archaic human projection of horror or fear before a non-human non-face – animal or natural configuration – harnessed as an apotropaic symbol to ward off what terrifies, into a mythical embodiment, gendered female, sexualized and punished and then disfigured so as to make the site of her transgression, her sexuality, become

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the source of her horrifying power and effect. In a sense, woman becomes both the face of horror, a terrifying locus of the evil eye, the gaze that arrests and kills, and the defaced, face-less site of horror as this general anxiety before the otherness of the world is transformed from Ovid to Freud into a specifically phallocentric construction that deflects fear and otherness into a physiological emblematization of sexual difference – female genitals, whose very sight Freud suggested was the originating fright in which was forged masculine sexual difference. Medusa was famously painted by the Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1571– 1610) Caravaggio’s painting (9.5) is striking not the least because the features of the once beautiful Medusa are the queer masculine painter’s own. Transgendering this ultimate image of the petrifying gaze of the woman, Caravaggio, however, endows her with a gaze that registers her own horror at what has happened to her. Thus Medusa’s gaze is oblique, even as it is suggested she is seeing herself and being stunned by recoil from her own deadliness. Her mouth is agape in horror, her howl

9.5

Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, (1571–1610), The Head of Medusa, 1598, oil on panel Florence, Galleria degli Uffizi. © 2012. Photo Scala, Florence. Courtesy of the Ministero Beni e Att. Culturali.

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strangled in her throat, her gaze with eyes starting out of her head, which slews down to the right from whence is coming the blow that will sever it, but which has effectively already done so. Death itself petrifies her; thus she becomes the face of death as that which is suffered not afflicted. Of Caravaggio’s painting, Mieke Bal has written: Fear not. This woman cannot kill. She is only an image … But no, she won’t kill. Because she is without a look … Medusa looks away and she looks terrified herself. What could possible frighten her who cannot see the frightening snakes on her head? … Medusa looks away in order to get you to look away with her, to escape the myth that binds her into an evasion from that frightening role. Medusa ‘speaks’ visually, in an exhortative mode, enticing ‘you’ to look, with her, for the true source of the fright, in the ideology that turns women into monsters.24 Phallocentric culture identifies Woman as Death, life-generating Woman is reversed into a deadly and monstrous inhuman thing. At its deepest this imaginary has woman as no-Thing and no-Face. This reappears in psychoanalytical theory in Lacan’s formulation allying Woman, Other, and Thing (the unthinkable and unimaginable). These fantasies are deep in Western culture’s imaginary. I dare to suggest that this terrible perversion of the ethical position of the feminine accommodates us all to killing by the dehumanization, and desubjectivization of the source of life, identifying it, the feminine, with death not life. Defacing is effacing. Killing her is killing, period. Adriana Cavarero takes Medusa as a feminist guide to understanding violence against the vulnerable. Medusa belongs to the female gender. We must gaze straight into her eyes, without yielding to the temptation to look away: according to mythology horror has the face of a woman … As in every theatre of violence that we know of to date, men continue to be the unchallenged protagonists. But when a woman steps to the front of the stage of horror, the scene turns darker and, although more disconcerting, paradoxically more familiar. Repugnance is heightened, and the effect is augmented, as though horror, just as the myth already knew, required the feminine in order to reveal its authentic roots.25 The head is decapitated, thus evoking a body itself dismembered. Yet what has been torn away from its body is the face, the site of a figural unity of a human being and the locus of the individual personality: the face stands for the uniqueness and the vulnerable humanness of a person. Hence the ontological crime is committed against the very order of being as a human whose essence is revealed to us by the face as ontological vulnerability. Yet mythically and representationally, Medusa becomes

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a mask behind which violence is veiled as if her own monstrosity is the source of violence that stems from her in her gendered, sexed difference. Yet why do we accept this ordering of knowledge, this set of projections, these terrified men who make the maternal-feminine in her glorious and generative sexuality that every born human being has encountered as a potential for co-affecting partnership-in-difference so horrifying to them that the ethical potential that inheres in the generative shared space of the maternal-feminine/prenatal other is exiled absolutely from the thinking space of the ethical and hence ultimately from that of the political? Caravaggio’s tragic Medusa is not mere iteration of female monstrosity. The painting’s own compassion makes us share with her the fact that she must watch her own destruction: hers is not the image of horror or death as Freud would have it. Bal shows how to read for Medusa as the painting’s subjected subject. Cavarero, furthermore, re-reads this representation of the ancient mythology in very contemporary, post-Arendtian, feminist terms. ‘Medusa alludes to a human essence that, deformed in its very being, contemplates the unprecedented act of its own dehumanization’ (my emphasis)26 Arendt argued that not only the extermination but also the concentration, camp experimentally elaborated a destruction of the human within the human being by means of subjecting the inmates to a triple violence. Firstly they were subjected to the total loss of civic identity – name, passport, family, nationality. This effacement is compounded by destruction of the field of moral action in relation to the other in the illogic of the camp system. Finally the human is destroyed by the severe reduction to bare life through starvation and overwork so that the body’s compulsion to survive cannibalizes the subject’s own physical resources to the extent that personality and spontaneity are ultimately erased. The deteriorated person, a living corpse, what Auschwitz slang named named the Muselmann, remains alive, just, to witness his or her own progressive loss of individuality and agency. Medusa’s appeal and modern horrorism Travelling from the sixteenth century and mythology to a traumatic real of modern history, we must now turn to this recent history. In a series of images we find not Medusan Gorgoneion but the counter-gaze of appeal from the space on the edge of annihilation, calling for a suddenly unimaginable human solidarity at the moment of its systematic abolition. Of the images we have of genocidal mass murder few actually document the gas chambers and none the gas vans used extensively in the less famous killing centres such as Chelmno. Some certified photographic documentation does exist, however, of the scenes of the direct massacres of men, women and children shot by special units, all men, following the invading German army and ethnically cleansing great swathes of Lithuania, Latvia and the Ukraine of their considerable Jewish populations. One infamous set of verified photographs records the stages of a punishment massacre of the Jewish inhabitants of a ghetto at Mizocz on 14 October 1942 (9.6– 9.9). The sequence is harrowing to show but necessary in the context of this book project. The Jewish inhabitants of the Mizocz ghetto in the Rovno district of what is

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now Ukraine, but was then Poland, were about to be liquidated on 12 October 1942. Some resisted. Many fled. As a punishment for the uprising, the remainder were rounded up and taken to a nearby ravine where they were separated by gender and forced to undress. A series of four photographs makes us witness to the massacre of women, many of them mothers with children – the inerme, the quintessentially vulnerable – forced into depersonalized nakedness in which the pornographic gaze enacted by the photographer tries to make tolerable the sadistic act of killing the defenceless one by one. The final two images of the sequence show the hillside littered with white bodies while one or two policemen wander through their mass ‘polishing off ’ the merely wounded, including a mother struggling to reach her stillliving child. In the grain and greyness of these terrifying images – why and how can they exist? – the traumatic affect of being made witness to a dying that has been dehumanized by inhuman violence lies for me in part in the manner in which the black and white photography inverts the Western pastoral aesthetic trope of the nude female nymph frolicking in fertile nature by making appalling the nakedness now lying dead upon an inhospitable ground. In those movements of the not-yetdead, in the compassionate gesture of the maternal adult towards the inerme, the defenceless child, a deeper horror is held before us, if we can see past, or beyond, the eyes of he who watched and photographed the women’s final subjugation to pure horrorism. It is beside a fragment of this iconic locus of horrorism that the painter Bracha Ettinger has lived and painted for over 30 years, unable to abandon those spectral figures she names Eurydice, calling up the mythic figure of a woman forever suspended between two deaths in this indexical trace of horrorism. The beloved nymph, Eurydice, bride of poet Orpheus, died on her wedding day, descended to the Underworld whither the grief-stricken Orpheus dared to descend to reclaim her, only to kill her a second time by his backward glance as he led Eurydice once again towards the light. Ettinger is drawn into the image of the women lined up to walk nakedly to their massacre. The photograph comes before the women’s deaths; it also comes back to us after their deaths, and holds both moments before us when it is frequently used in documentaries such as Alain Resnais’s Night and Fog (1956) or in many books and museum displays on the Holocaust.27 The women are suspended forever by the image between the death that awaits them in the time after the photograph was taken and the death we might re-inflict as we look back, like Orpheus, at their vulnerable nakedness possessed by the photographer’s aim and ‘killed’ perpetually with his ‘shot’. Moving into ever more proximate close-up, Ettinger selects from the frieze of many women three or four women in this unimaginably terrifying procession (9.10). Over a lifetime of patient reverie through painting at this technically freeze-framed and reclaimed threshold of past and present, life and death, Ettinger returns again and again to two mothers holding their children, to catch whose depth of significance/ resonance she herself cannot fully articulate, and to a woman whose face is invisible but looks towards the inhuman to come and another who, in turning from the forward movement to execution, stays the flow, confronts and thus launches a

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9.6

Jewish women and children are ordered 9.7 to undress prior to their execution. (USHMM Photograph #17876).

Jewish women, some of whom are holding infants, wait in a line before their execution by Ukrainian auxilliary police. (USHMM Photograph #17877).

9.8

A German policeman prepares to complete 9.9 a mass execution by shooting two Jewish children, who were shot with the others in connection with the liquidation of the Mizocz ghetto (USHMM Photograph #17879).

A German police officer shoots Jewish women still alive after a mass execution of Jews from the Mizocz ghetto (USHMM Photograph #17878).

9.6–9.9 Mizocz, Rovno: Ukraine formerly Poland, Wednesday 14 October 1942. Institute Pamieci Narodowei. Photo: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum by Agency Agreement. human appeal to the photographer who ‘shot’ the picture and hence to whomsoever stands in his place now as viewer of the scene he recorded. This face, detached from its body hidden in the frieze of women, shifts the Medusan face from terrorizing horror to site of appeal for a human response even as the blurred photographic origin becomes unstable before the preliminary transfer process and the abstract painting that follows (9.11). Passing the photograph, or rather, her selected moment from it through a photocopy machine, the once deadly photograph, indexical of the actual killing, is translated into ashen black grains. The paper is extracted from the machine whose process the artist interrupts before the image is heat-fixed in replication. This precarious materiality that is the grainy deposit of a blind light reading (photocopiers have no lens and use light to create an electro-magnetic field) of an indexical

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9.10 Bracha Ettinger Eurydice no. 17, 1994–96, photocopic dust and oil on paper mounted on canvas, 26 x 52 cm. Private Collection.

9.11 Montage of details of 9.7 and 9.10. photographic trace is then the tenuous spectral screen upon which the painter lays her ever more elaborated membranes of glazes of grieving oil colour. Her gesture and her surfaces enact a sightless touching-gaze, inducing a different orientation in the viewer (from the photographic ‘shot’) to the very act of seeing/touching through and across time. These paintings take many years – between two and eight – to complete as repeated passes by her own, blind, hence abstract hand gestures running across the surface undertaken in reverie, indifferent to the relics of the image, yet in communion with the virtual strings of connectivity between that moment and hers, layer the touches of this impossible time-space of the threshold of death which, she came to recognize only very recently, was above all shattering as the death of mothers, life-willers. Killing women with children or women who might bear children is,

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of course, the horrific core of genocide. War kills the men and uses rape of women against other men. Genocide locates a future in the feminine. Hence genocide must destroy all women and children; they carry a future.28 Physical layers of colour that enact the temporalities of Ettinger’s painting practice gave rise to what she elaborates theoretically as a Matrixial gaze. Such a gazing through touching and sensing, enabled by materiality, colour and the light that paint creates (not represents) is produced by Ettinger’s aesthetic practice that is bathed in its own ethics. Its effects emerge into theoretical articulation as fascinance, the Matrixial counterforce to the fascinum of the Medusan look: arresting and killing. Fascinance is the process that performs and induces the aesthetic gesture of compassion: Fascinance is an aesthetic event that operates in the prolongation and delaying of the time of the encounter-event and allows a working-through of Matrixial differentiating-in-jointness and co-poiesis. Fascinance can take place only in a borderlinking within a real, traumatic or phantasmatic, compassionate hospitality. Fascinance might turn into fascinum when castration, separation, weaning, or splitting abruptly intervenes.29 Under a phallic logic, the other, if it is not like me and hence cannot, through radical difference or threatening abjection, be incorporated, is to be rejected, its otherness menacing my own narcissism, my belief in my self, body, colour, position as the one, as whole and desirable. Under a phallic regime, difference, threatening the one with otherness, hence relativity, becomes deadly and must be destroyed. At the ultimate end of this treatment of the other as enemy is the idea that s/he cannot live if I am to be myself: genocide. Genocide dehumanizes the other not only through their representatives – the other’s soldiers – but the other as expunged members of the human community in their entirety. If we are to create peace, it is not through mere tolerance of others. It is in a radical rethinking of how integral a relation of otherness might be to what any ‘I’ is. This difference is not, as in phallic logic, either like me – to be incorporated – or other – hence to be rejected. It is a difference/otherness whose life I desire should persist as a fundamental but not oppositional relation of co-emerging, co-constituting, copoietic difference that constitutes our lives as plural humanity. If we think through how we become human beings, allowing into our thinking apparatuses the condition of very late prenatal/prematernal severality – difference-in-jointness, proximity-indistance – we will not be thinking about likeness and unlikeness, or asubjective fusion versus subjectivized separation. Ettinger invites us to think about radically unknown and unknowable partners in an asymmetrical but humanizing and subjectivizing relationship (without relating) of co-emergence and co-affection, which do not erase difference but redefine its terms of asymmetrical relationality as hospitality (prenaternity) and compassion (prenatality). Instead of the armed versus the vulnerable, the Matrixial dimension recognizes asymmetry since the prematernal is already a subject and the prenatal not yet one. But there is, none the less, in the shared borderspace that defines the inner and

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outer limits of one and the other, a sensing of co-otherness, without knowledge or identity, that engenders affects and, in the prematernal partner, responsibility for the life of another becoming with her. This occurs only, I stress, in the last trimester and thus has no impact on notions of women’s right to choose; secondly, its significance lies furthermore not in the real of the womb but in its own Nachträglichkeit: its retrospective recovery and animation after our being born. Bracha Ettinger’s thought emerged out of her prolonged wit(h)nessing at the threshold of deadly traumatic events in Europe and the Middle East. Her thesis of a supplementary track in subjectivity named the Matrixial originates precisely in the traumatized history of Palestine/Israel that prefigures the death of the two teenagers with whom I opened. It also speaks to the Arendtian problematic of rethinking the human condition for our own times that are post-Auschwitz but also beside continuing horroristic destruction of conditions of human life. The Palestinians are not being wiped out in a genocide, but their humanity is as compromised and attritioned in prolonged desolation. Arendt confronted the logic of phallic difference that led to the idea of genocide with the proposition that humanity must be understood as quintessentially plural. She did not know how to base this philosophical claim in psychic terms. Arendt drew on theology, namely St Augustine’s notion of natality in which each birth is a new beginning for humanity and the endless source of indelible human plurality on a shared earth. Etttinger offers a psychoanalytical theory to locate the proto-ethical foundations for plurality’s survival through introducing us to the significance of the gift to postnatal subjectivity of later prenatality/prematernity. Matrixiality supplements – and I stress it is not an alternative in a binary way – the conceptualization of the human with a specific dimension derived from, and which is the gift of, the specificity of maternal-femininity that is characterized by a proto-subjective severality. Evoking the maternal body makes feminists and nonfeminists alike uncomfortable. For good reasons. The fertile body of woman and its procreativity has been, and is, a tool in patriarchal oppressions of women. It has trapped us in what Spivak named the ‘uterine economy’.30 But that is no reason to allow ourselves to be deprived of other knowledges and other meanings that might be relevant to our intense struggle now against violence through radically novel points of interpretation of this threshold between life and meaning that is, and must be acknowledged to be, incorporated, to be specific to the human inheritance from the humanizing maternal-becoming-child severality. Our culture’s abuse of and phobia about the maternal – reducing it to a bodily cavity or biological forecourt without its own fantasizing and unconsciously memory-bearing subject, should be analyzed critically, not acted out again and again within feminism. I want to shift from the face, gaze and strangled voice that Cavarero identifies in the Medusan fable to other registers of subjectivity and trans-subjectivity that involve traumatically, that is preverbal, preiconic registers. These are nevertheless able to generate humanizing sensations that later become thinkable as meaning: besidedness, wit(h)ness, attunement, co-affection, and resonance.

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Compassion: the aesthetical, the Matrixial and the feminineM Bracha Ettinger elaborates an antidote to horrorism in retheorizing of compassion as a primary capacity generated prenatally in Matrixial co-existence, and which is afterwardly re-animated postnatally. Matrixial subjective capacities are neither about nor derived from bodies or organs, wombs and placentas. As a post-Lacanian theory, Ettingerian Matrixiality has no essentialist overtones; it is entirely psychoanalytical even while daring to imagine a psychic significance for very late prenatality in the Lacanian sense of the traumatically corpo-Real, as a trans-subjective partnership with prematernality. Matrix evokes sensate affective sharing and hence aesthetic encounters resonating in different registers along the strings that connect the asymmetrical but co-eventing partners in a shared time-space. This time-space precedes the severances and separations upon which psychoanalysis has, to date, premised all subjectivity, making pregnancy a merely biological prelude, outside all human meaning. Let me introduce a second painting by Caravaggio (9.12) showing an arrested act of paternal violence against his vulnerable, trusting son. In the book of Genesis Abraham, an old man, finally has a legitimate son in advanced old age, Isaac, the single offspring through which his line and the promise of being a nation will be continued. Having given him this miraculous late child, his God now fearfully orders him to sacrifice the child on Mount Moriah (the site of the Al-Aksah mosque in Jerusalem rendered sacred to the Muslims for this association with Abraham). Obediently, Abraham takes Isaac to the place. Isaac goes trustingly. Leaving his entourage below, Abraham takes the boy up the mountain, binds him, places him on an altar and prepares to slaughter him. His hand is stayed at the last minute by an angel’s call and a ram miraculously appears to be offered as the sacrifice in the boy’s place. In Judaism this legend is called the Binding of Isaac because the boy was not killed. The story is interpreted as an allegory of the transition from an archaic system in which child sacrifice had been practised in other cultures into one in which symbolic acts of substitution replace the acting out of fear with moral obedience to a divine code. Christian theology, however, calls it the Sacrifice of Isaac, reading the scene Christologically so that Isaac becomes a prototype for the sacrificed son Jesus and hence for all martyrs, while the lamb/ram also becomes the symbol of the reversion to the human/divine sacrifice foundational to Christianity. Caravaggio’s painting (9.12) presents us with the dramatic moment of the angel’s intervention, suspending the impending act of violence against the helpless child who is shown crying out in protest and terror as he father wields the deadly knife, the child’s terrified eye paralleled in reverse by the eye of the ram (9.13). The story and its representation are horrifying and horroristic. Bracha Ettinger daringly asks us to ‘… to imagine Isaac’s compassion for his father, Abraham’.31 How could the victim have compassion for the apparent parental perpetrator of violence against the vulnerable: the child, l’inerme? How can the child encompass his father’s action but not in a gesture of mere forgiveness? What is compassion as an affective mode of understanding self and other in their intricated but also

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9.12 Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1571–1610), The Sacrifice/Binding of Isaac 1594–96. Florence, Galleria degli Uffizi. Oil-on-canvas. cm 110 × 92cm. © 2012. Photo Scala, Florence – courtesy of the Ministero Beni e Att. Culturali.

9.13 Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1571–1610), Sacrifice of Isaac – detail. Florence, Galleria degli
Uffizi. © 2012. Photo Scala, Florence – courtesy of the Ministero Beni e Att. Culturali.

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elaborated worlds? How would the feminist reclamation of this ancient anti-sacrificial Jewish legend, turning it through a radical psychoanalytical retheorization of the feminineM, undo the paternal murderousness it recounts, and reveal the Matrixial bond between father and son, deflected in phallocentric thought onto the notion of the mother’s deadliness, the sexual and birthing woman as the originating horror and monstrousness? Indeed the rite of circumcision can be read as a cultural erasure of birth and the severed cord, the father reclaiming the son as reborn a second time into a monosexual community of men. How deeply will we have to excavate the foreclosed potentiality of the maternal-feminineM to generate a thinking system that can shift the sacrificial cults of death that have now recruited women as their bomb-bodies? Ettinger argues, in counterpoint, that the compassion of Isaac – the child, the vulnerable in its nakedness – is primary: it is not a result of the formation of selfother relations that typically ground the discussion of ethics. Matrixial compassion predates them and hence exceeds, while shifting through the prism of an-other sexual difference, their remit. This compassion is primary; it starts before, and always also beyond, any possibility of empathy that entails understanding, before any economy of exchange, before any cognition or recognition, before any reactive forgiveness or integrative reparation. It is woven with-in primordial trans-sensitivity and co-re-naissance. But such compassion is too fragile and cannot withstand the impact of post-natal conditions of psychic survival. It is repressed and ‘To return beyond originary repression to primary compassion in adulthood is a long, long journey within Matrixial voyaging, unless it has never undergone such repression at all’.32 Ettinger argues: In my view such primary compassion could be a kind of psycho-aesthetical and psycho-ethical archaic unconscious basis for the Levinasian ‘an-archic’ and feminine kernel of the ethical sphere. It is first revealed, however, in the presubject’s transconnectivity to its m/Other as a subjectivizing agency.33 The core of Ettinger’s intervention is that, far from being the faceless biological container, exit from whose symbiotic envelope alone initiates the possibilities of subjectivity, there is an archaic Other sensed by the prenatal proto-subject, an Other than is not yet the Mother of postnatal object relations and drive theory. This m/Other is the maternal-feminineM sensed as a partner in co-emergence and co-affection whose traces are carried aesthetically (that is sub-symbolically and aniconically) across the frontier of birth to form the substrate of a supplementary dimension of human subjectivity that has major implications for understanding the ethical nexus of compassion, hospitality and responsibility toward the other who now has a different status from otherness on the phallocentric track. I and non-I is different from I and not-I.

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To make her case, Ettinger engages in dialogue with the Jewish philosopher of post-Auschwitz ethics Emmanuel Levinas, who writes in an essay on vulnerability and subjectivity on the theme of compassion. In Hebrew, compassion, Rakhamim, derives from the root word for wombs, rehem. The merciful God – El HaRakhamim – is a God of wombs: a metaphor derived from imaginatively investing human bodies with metaphysical correlates. Compassion is for Levinas, therefore, the ‘emotion of the maternal womb’ and is linked by that means to hospitality and futurity: giving life that will live beyond my own. For Levinas this womb-emotion – mercy or compassion – cannot be erotic since the only Eros he admits is active, masculine and paternal. Thus the womb compassion is passive and risks becoming sacrificial. The feminine is Otherness, identified with sacrifice, giving its own life for the future. Ettinger counters this: However, in my view such vulnerability in a misericordial approach must turn sacrificial only when the woman-as-feminine stands, as she does for Levinas (and for Lacan 1973), for absolute Otherness and infinite disappearance from light. From the perspective of the feminine-maternal sphere I have named Matrixial (womb-matrix), the binding and connecting potentiality of Eros lies at the heart of subjectivizing feminine-maternal misericord.34 From her earlier re-reading of Diotima’s discourse in Plato’s Symposium, Ettinger reminds us that already in Socrates’ thought Eros is understood as a figure of mediation and connection. Thus she poses a Matrixial Eros, which is not desire for the other to make the fractured subject whole again – the phallocentric legend of the self and desire – but a yearning to experience connectivity and besidedness with an unknown yet intimate other. At the heart of the Matrixial dimension is both a seduction into life of the other and, on the side of the maternal-feminineM, a desire to live beside the human life that is co-engendered. Ettinger continues that her reorientation of the feminine-maternal sphere that … subverts the Levinasian connection between generating-begetting and paternity and also deconstructs the fatal link between death and the maternal, and infiltrates Ethics with a perspective concerning femininity where life is linked to the maternal, as pregnancy assumes being alive in giving life … The phallic knot composed of sacrifice, death and the feminine dissolves in favour of the co-incidence of death and life, sacrifice and solace with-in the feminine.35 Ettinger then distinguishes phallic thought’s privileging of birth from the Matrixial proposition that pregnancy can be thought of as participating in the register of trans-subjective subjectivity. No baby containers, no wombs as organic cookers for the future: but relations without relating between an already human subject fragilizing herself in hospitality to a human future.

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In thinking this cluster in terms of pregnancy rather than the moment of birth-giving, an originary jointness-in-differentiating and besidedness, rather than disappearance and death, becomes the kernel of the feminine-maternal. It is qualified by a special kind of non-relating relationality by connectivity and by reattunement of approximations in originary jointness.36 Like most phallocentric thinkers, subjectivity can only begin for Levinas precisely with the abjection of the corporealized maternal-feminineph that to which he has to deny, for the sake of his masculinity, any meaning in his own becoming: birth already anticipating the myth in Abraham and Isaac. God gives back the son to the father through sacrifice later symbolized by circumcision of the penis as a substitute cutting of the umbilicus. So we find in Freud’s account the following comparable mythical installation of the father in the formation of the subject with its corollary, particularly devastating for feminine subjects, the hatred of the mother: The paternal thus comes to stand not only for the guarantee of the symbolic order but also for the principle of love and life-giving in the subject, and the infant (as masculine subject by definition) loves (‘love’ being love by and for the father by definition) through originary pre-objective identificatory direct link to the paternal. In parallel to this, in Freud, a fatal connection between maternity and ‘hate’ is established at the originary level, and the individual subject (mostly female individuals) originarily and then also secondarily (in the post Oedipal position) hates her first object mother/Other, fears her devouring tendencies and blames her for what I call not-enoughness. Both devouring and not-enoughness are phantasmatic qualities for whose persistence in girls Freud endlessly tries to find ‘causes’ in the female girl’s sexual inferiority in relation to boys (Freud 1933: 124; Freud 1931: 232) in terms of ‘penis envy’ and ‘castration’, that is, in terms of a feminine sexual difference that starts from the masculine and returns to the masculine.37 Ettinger underlines the difference the Matrixial shift makes: In my Matrixial perspective, womb-misericordiality as pregnancy-emotion stands for com-passionate hospitality in living-inter-with-in the almost-Other. The Matrixial principle works as long as the feminine-maternal agent lives in mental and psychic besidedness to its non-I. The womb-misericord with-in the almost-m/Other does participate in subjectivity as transsubjectivity since it is precisely between conception and birth, in the real, imaginary and symbolic shareable psychic spaces that the I and non-I – presubject and becoming-m/ Other – are forming and are informing a psychic mental and affective continuity, and the womb (as psychic place of co-emergence and in-visible female corporeality) stands for a subjectivizing potentiality by transgression of

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affective and mental waves and by sharing in the same mental, affective and sensitive resonance time-space.38 This Matrixial scenario or shared time-space of traumatic non-visual fascinance lays down a different track of desire for life-oriented energy or potentiality that opens onto ethical predispositions because Matrixial Eros posits a non-psychotic ground for transgressing the individual’s boundaries while ‘Relations-without-relating leads the subject toward responsibility on the unconscious level of partiality and transgressivity treasured upon traces of the archaic co-implication and co-affection’ so that ‘compassion in the relational present is always an appeal to futurality’.39 Birth is a trauma of expulsion from the Matrixial web but it is also a trauma for the maternal subject because of the reopening of the moments of archaic transsubjectivity once again in the Real. This leads to a rethinking of the psychic trauma of maternity from the side of the maternal subject but also its potentiality as an ethical position – an idea recently adopted some ten years after Ettinger formulated it by Julia Kristeva. Ettinger offers a radical re-reading of the effects of the prematernal/ infantal encounter on a woman-subject. The mother, now as I, will never get over that trauma of the corporeal, phantasmatic and mental co-incidence with the Other (now: the infant) who is emerging into the world inside her entrails. From the side of the womanmother as subject – a woman in the unicity of her individuality – we must recognize a triple trauma of maternity and prematernity: the traumatic proximity to the Other during pregnancy, the traumatic regression to a similar archaic sharing (of the mother as infant with her own m/Other) and the traumatic separation from the non-I during birth-giving. The consequences of the ‘normal’ pregnancy and ‘normal’ child-birthing qua ‘normal’ traumaplus-jouissance in terms of the in-formation of trans-subjectivity have not been taken into account by psychoanalytical theory which, for that reason, brings forth and further creates traumatic tears in the human Matrixial webs … The Matrixial transsubjectivity of pregnancy imprints both the infant and what I call the archaic m/Other. The womb-like compassion is a key to access the Other in its nude vulnerability. I see this nude vulnerability as femininematernal openness to fragilizing self-relinquishment.40 On the other side, the mother in psychoanalysis, unacknowledged as a subject herself, is turned into what Ettinger calls the ready-made mother monster whose devouringness, abandonment and not-enoughness – all imaged in the Medusa figure – is misrepresented as the causes of all our psychic griefs. ‘The prefabricated mothermonster readymade is always in stand-by readiness as the cause for any infantile suffering arising to consciousness.’41 Psychoanalysis identifies the following as primal fantasies – that is fantasmatic explanations of the enigmas confronting the psychically naked infant: Origin

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in terms of Birth or Primal Scene, Seduction, Castration, and Oedipus. To these Ettinger wants to add: these three recurrent phantasies (disguised as ‘memories’ of the unremembered period): a. Not-enoughness – regrouping representations of the originary disattunment with the outside into phantasmatic originary not-enough mother, b. Abandonment – the primal phantasy of the abandoning mother, and c. Devouring – the primal phantasy of the devouring mother. The characteristics of these phantasies correspond to all the basic requirements of primality.42 While both Freud and Lacan noted the recurring fantasy of the devouring mother projected onto her vagina as a mouth neither made ‘this perhaps radical step of realizing that these phantasies correspond to the basic human enigmas of existence regarding the source of anxiety and the source of psychic pain’. So instead of attributing these feelings to a cause in the real failures of mothering by actual mothers, so often the case in psychoanalytical practice, I have argued that they actually register in phantasmatic form the trauma and violence of post-natal life as it experienced after the mediated resonance and attunements characteristic of the besidedness of the late prenatal Matrixial severality. The occurrence is itself an index of the encounter with the Matrixial sphere. Thus the postnatal world is traumatically excessive in its impact on the infant, now totally defenceless before it, while also being insufficient and introducing the trauma of isolation or solitude: all dimensions that have meaning precisely because they are the difference from the Matrixial domain of mediated attunement, resonance and shared borderspaces regulating for the most part the forms of co-emergence and shared events. Thus we must understand that The not-enough mother is a primal phantasy that arises as a reply to the enigmatic question: what is the origin and source of my disharmony with my environment? … Thus, it joins the primal mother-phantasies of abandonment and devouring and it sometimes contains them. These primal mother-phantasies organizing painful disattunement are earlier than those that organize the enigma of sexuality and diffeence in terms of castration and Oedipus. They are, also in that sense, ‘feminine’. 43 To avoid projecting the existential failure of the world as the neonate encounters it post the real of its pre-subjective or proto-subjective Matrixial time-space onto the postnatal Mother, we need to recognize this insufficiency but also then accommodate it to the necessity of the phallic structuring of subjectivity at the same time. It is from the aesthetic resources of the Matrixial domain that an ethical disposition can be post-natally regenerated so that violence against the failing world is not perpetually acted out in aggression towards some, any, other who becomes its scapegoat. But to act as an ethical or political subject, to act in responsibility on that foundation, requires what phallic structuring creates: the distinction between I and not-I. I and my Others. Thus Ettinger insists that the Matrixial is not a panacea, an alternative,

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but a supplement or a shifter of the equally necessary phallic organization of some dimensions of subjectivity upon which responsibility is based, because a political action is an act of a singular subject towards a recognized other in difference. But its ethical foundation relies on the capacities engendered in earlier Matrixial transsubjective encounter. Yet at the same time as being necessary we must ‘watch’ our own phallic gaze: Responsibility is a phallic notion inasmuch as it requires the obligation of a separate subject toward the Other. The idea of the ‘phallic’ subject within a phallic relational space must be conserved by whoever insists on the idea of responsibility which necessitates the individual unicity of a subject. Indeed responsibility, like choice and liberty, requires the irreplaceable subject. The phallic subject with its gaze is unavoidable on certain levels of identity and on many dimensions of reality, and it is an ethical obligation to recognize the phallic gaze, not in the other, to begin with, (and not by projecting), but inside each subject, because with its negation, denial or projection, it (the gaze, operating in the subject) becomes dangerous (paranoia being one of its dangerous modes). The phallic subject within each subject in separate identity is both responsible and a potential perpetrator (the perpetrator is not a ‘them’, but a potentiality of each and every identity). And only individual identity can take responsibility for direct witnessing and sign it. In the Matrixial stratum, however, the subject is wit(h)nessing.44 Now we come to a key neologism created by inserting provisionally an h into the word witness and inventing a condition called withness. Wit(h)nessing heals by stitching the collapse of the other’s capacity to elaborate loss. Where for the artist transitivity, vulnerability and oversensitivity to the other and to the Cosmos remain open and expanding, new art-and-healing strings emerge. The I grows new psychic antennae or sensors pointing towards a new trans-sensed radius. As compassionate response-ability and transitivity of waves are archaic affective-mental methods of accessing knowledge, they function earlier than the Ego to support primary survival but are quasi-totally foreclosed, taken over by more adaptative survival mechanisms and reappear only at moments of extreme vulnerability. Stepping toward compassion in adulthood is progressively reconnecting with a repressed or foreclosed archaic dimension for compassion.45 Thus we can access or activate the Matrixial dimension partially through art: The Matrixial desire – expressed by compassionate hospitality and fascinance – creates an invisible aesthetical ‘screen’ on the level of the real and the virtualreal, a screen which, through both art and ongoing continual encounters of healing, is glimpsed and becomes accessible … It can only be reached by

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non-defensive self-relinquishment in fascinance and by participating in a subjectivizing occasion offered by the compassionate hospitality of a m/ Othernal non-I or the generosity of the artwork as aesthetical and psychoethical environment.46 But to underline this not being a panacea, a redemptive fantasy of maternal goodness, Ettinger situates the Matrixial possibility in relation to current mediatic virtualized and technologized cultural modes of encounter and representation: The Matrixial compassionate hospitality is proto-ethical since by definition it does not reach symbolic obligation. In an era of technical gazes and anonymous global eyes, the choice of witnessing to, rather than ignorance, of the internal and external phallic gaze becomes crucial. Direct witnessing is painful, since one cannot ignore and deny one’s own participation in the phallic gaze. When a subject documents traumatic humiliation it runs the risk of temporarily organizing itself around a phallic gaze and of partially joining it. But since the question of direct witnessing is also the question of the personal responsibility of each identified subject, if we ban the subject completely (which is the claim of some contemporary mythology – the death of the subject – and the aim of some contemporary technologies) and over-embrace the dimension of endless fragmentation or technical eyes, responsibility disappears. What I have named the Matrixial gaze does not ‘replace’ the phallic gaze but aids in its moving aside from its destructive aspects, a moving which is, however, a lifelong unending process. Embracing instants of Matrixial borderlinking orients the subject toward responsibility.47 Ettinger argues that the archaic conditions for laying down the hospitality/ compassion complex are re-animated by thought, decision, choice and politically conceived responsibility. Originating in the archaic Real of structural trauma, the Matrixial continues into subjective formation as a capacity that has specific relations to the ethical proto-ethically. This capacity operates through the aesthetic, rather than the cognitive. The Matrixial is, logically, formally, and psychically of and from the feminineM, but a feminine radically redefined in relation to vulnerability of the proto-subject before its co-emerging m/Other. Femininity is the borderlinking of subject and Other in and beyond copresence. It allows for proto-ethical, ‘aesthetical’ wit(h)nessing, that paves the path to ethical witnessing. In that sense, on the unconscious psychic sphere, the originary events that counter-balance the primal phantasies of not-enoughness, abandoning and devouring are the assembling of the infant’s presubjective compassion and the maternal compassionate hospitality in com-passion and co-response-ability; they form the foundations of responsibility and freedom of each separate I who is ready to put its self at risk of vulnerability brought about by compassion.48

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Conclusion There is everything in the world to make the Israeli a deadly other to the Palestinian, and vice-versa. But the trace of how all of us, men and women, of every later differentiated cultural origin, gender, class, once shared in a trans-subjective coemergence, a sharing of trauma and jouissance, of being willed into life by another life, can be a means of activating this complex web of connectivity with the almostOther who is not some generalized same as we find in idealistic and universalistic discourse suggesting that all humans are the same. The point is that we are not the same. Our experiences, delivered by real political histories, are agonistic. As humans, we are unique each one and our socially, historically and politically inflected humanities are plural and diverse. What we share is not a common pre-social, pre-political origin by means of which to transcend the temporariness of current conflict. We are, however, the product of an aesthetic pre-social, pre-political protoethical situation rich in possibilities for subsequent imagined and symbolized humanto-human-relation precisely in conditions of agonized and agonistic conflict where both have to survive, but humanly. This requires different acts from within the asymmetries of power and oppression. This situation is based on an asymmetrical connection between compassionate and non-sacrificial hospitality, on the part of the pre-maternal subject and primary com-passion on the part of the pre-infant. Both positions are available to all, men and women and all those who define themselves as neither or across this binary. Ettinger’s proposition of a Matrixial dimension, a sexual difference from the feminineM beyond and before but also beside the phallus that organizes the phallocentric Symbolic is not offering a gendered alternative. In the Matrix there is no gender (m/f). Yet there is sexual difference from the feminine that chronologically and traumatically predates the formation of Oedipal sexual differentiation. If Adriana Cavarero has diagnosed a deadly contemporary sickness in horrorism linked in imagination to a source in the monstrously othered and castrating woman, feminist artist and thinker Ettinger has dared to bring to us from her prolonged painterly fascinance with her own submergence in the traumatic histories of two peoples of the twentieth century a potential resource for shifting the phallic order. Matrix supplements the latter’s capacities and blunts its terrible, paranoid violence by theorizing the psychic resources in hospitality/compassion for ethical dispositions and political responsibility in the face of violences with real historical conditions but also with imaginary, phantasmatic structurations. … The Matrixial ‘aesthetical’ yet proto-ethical com-passion, aroused inside maternal compassionate hospitality in meeting with primary infantile compassion, cannot be ‘obliged’; but as a psychic move this is precisely what inflects the individuated subject toward responsibility where each unicity of being can, and often does indeed, instead choose relations of cruelty or abandonment. Matrixial compassion is then the unconscious psychic basis for ethical responsibility.49

10 ENCOUNTERING BLUE STEEL Changing Tempers in Cinema Nicholas Chare

There is no way in which we can produce an alternative out of the blue. Laura Mulvey1 Opening credits From the 1970s to the 1990s, as Lucy Bolton sums up in Film and Female Consciousness, the backbone of feminist film theory was psychoanalysis characterized as ‘an examination of the operation and effects of […] apparatus theory, with its rigid allocation of gender to the constituent aspects of the cinematic apparatus, such as the male spectator, camera, and the director, and the spectacularized female image’.2 She identifies the foundations of this approach to be what she perceives as the cornerstones of psychoanalysis, ‘Freudian and Lacanian concepts of the constitution of the subject, the entry into language, and sexual difference’.3 Recently, however, psychoanalytically informed analyses of this kind have been declining, steadily replaced by readings of film that seek to move beyond scopic models of interpretation and that refuse to treat it solely as a signifying system. These alternative approaches to the study of cinema have been informed in large part by the ideas of Gilles Deleuze or, alternatively, Luce Irigaray.4 The study of the crime thriller Blue Steel (Dir. Kathryn Bigelow, USA, 1990) which follows can be read as in dialogue with the latter. Feminist film scholars such as Caroline Bainbridge, Lucy Bolton, Catherine Constable and Liz Watkins have all recently sought to foster new feminist discourses on sexual difference and film.5 Bainbridge’s and Bolton’s projects share marked similarities. Bolton describes her aim as to draw upon Irigaray’s ideas as a means by which to identify and describe instances in filmic texts ‘that mimic, subvert and rewrite generic conventions in order to demonstrate how the female voice can be heard’.6 Bainbridge similarly wishes to understand how ‘women’s cinema works to



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open up space’ for the evocation of a feminine imaginary.7 Their modes of analysis in relation to the films they identify as enabling the emergence and expression of female subjectivity are also comparable in that they both focus heavily on character, dialogue and narrative. It is noteworthy in this context that Bainbridge fails to acknowledge Watkins’s work as part of her list of contemporary film theorists working with Irigaray’s ideas.8 Watkins differs considerably in that she places far greater emphasis on sub-narrative elements within film, paying closer attention to cinematography, effects of colour and light and specific acoustic qualities.9 It is this reading in detail which allows her, in her own words, to discern ‘not the vision of feminine subjectivity in the cinematic medium, but a femininity which moves against, but is irreducible to the symbolic ordering of it’.10 Watkins’s approach is in tune with my own in that it recognizes that phallocentrism is only fundamentally questioned when aspects of the film that operate beyond signification are allowed to attain prominence and resonate within a given analysis. The cinematic effects described by Watkins, which are inscribed within narratives yet cannot be equated to them, are too often marginalized, mentioned, if at all, as asides. The ensuing work, whilst placing these kinds of effects at the centre of the film analysis, is not, however, beholden to Irigaray’s ideas. It draws, by contrast, upon the writings of Julia Kristeva and Bracha Ettinger. This is, in part, because of the significant difficulties that arise in relation to Irigaray’s terms of reference which are seemingly relational (such as fluid to solid, touch to vision, proximity to distance, excess to customary) and therefore bound to a phallic oppositional logic of difference. The difficulties of operating within this framework surface in Watkins’s film analysis in which she struggles with Irigaray’s language as she strives to describe the phenomena she detects, claiming within the space of a page that these are both not an excess and excessive.11 Watkins gestures towards a reading of film that is not against the grain, which requires acknowledging a pre-existing texture, text, but beyond it. The difficulty she encounters is that Irigaray’s language of excess is one that requires relationality to the phallic and cannot therefore account for the phenomena she perceives. Watkins is registering phenomena that are not recognizable within an Irigarayan frame. Ettinger’s matrixial aesthetics offers a way to avoid this relational pitfall. The matrixial provides a vital bridge between the feminist and the psychoanalytical that holds tremendous promise for feminist film theory. Kristeva’s current work in relation to the maternal appears indebted to the insights Ettinger provides on early psychic life and the recent narrowing of the differences in their positions will be examined.12 The chapter exposes the limitations of Kristeva’s early work, tied as it is to the castration paradigm, and explores ways in which the insights of Ettinger and, more recently, Kristeva offer a possible means of moving beyond the economies of violence associated with that paradigm.13 These insights can be seen to be embodied in Blue Steel, which is a film that acutely addresses the issue of violent conduct generated by the enduring power of phallocentrism in contemporary culture.

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Into the blue Blue Steel begins and ends in violence. The film’s dramatic denouement includes a total of 20 gunshots in a fight between the main protagonist, police officer Megan Turner (Jamie Lee Curtis) and serial killer Eugene Hunt (Ron Silver). Towards the end of this sequence, as Turner struggles to reload her gun, Hunt steps out from behind the hotdog cart he has been hiding behind and slowly takes aim at her. At the moment he is about to fire, a car comes around the corner, tyres squealing, distracting him. He shoots at it instead. Turner takes the opportunity to sprint to the car, opening the driver’s door. The criminal fires in her direction, the sound of the gun blast shortly followed by that of the driver’s side window smashing as the bullet bursts through it. Turner urges the driver out, then climbs into the vehicle, puts it in gear and begins to accelerate towards Hunt, the tyres burning rubber, smoking, as she speeds forward. He fires twice, each bullet holing the windshield, before the automobile collides with him. Hunt is thrown into the air by the impact, landing on and bouncing off the roof, coming to rest near the sidewalk. Turner has braked and stopped the car. She finds herself adjacent to Hunt. He appears indestructible, sitting up and aiming his revolver at her. She ducks. He fires two more times, the first bullet shattering the remaining front side window, the second impacting a headrest, before he finds his own gun empty, pulling the trigger twice to no effect. There is a look of confusion on his face, of disbelief, as if it were unforeseeable, impossible the gun could run out of ammunition. Turner, hearing the click of the hammer and firing pin followed by no gunshot, begins to get up. The frame of the car door is out of focus, two bands of bright light blue, against which the sharp features of Turner are contrasted as her head rises into view, her eyes, her nose, her top lip. The camera shot switches to her perspective, panning up Hunt’s face, Turner is slowly sitting up. The sound of Hunt’s quick, agitated breathing can be heard. The camera returns to Hunt’s viewpoint. Turner slowly, deliberately points her gun at the killer. The barrel is out of focus. He is not looking at it but into her eyes (10.1). The camera returns to her line of sight then swiftly back to his, showing his continuing concentration on her face, which is now intent, determined, without obvious emotion. Then it returns to hers, to the sight of Hunt drawing deep breaths, to the sounds of saliva being sucked through his teeth. In this prolonged exchange of looks, so far, neither character has blinked. The camera goes back to his gaze, fixed on her impassive profile. She is silent. The gun comes into focus for a split second. Finally, he is looking at it (10.2). She pulls the trigger. The bullet strikes him and a hole opens in his chest from which blood then spurts out. He blinks repeatedly, but continues to look at the gun as smoke drifts between them. We hear her fire again. Then, shortly afterwards, see her fire again. The final bullet rocks Hunt backwards. He remains upright briefly before toppling forwards. The audience is shown the gun in focus then the camera shifts to a sharp shot of Turner’s still unblinking face. Her lips part slightly and a film of saliva briefly forms between them before popping, disappearing. She gradually lowers the gun,



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10.1 Blue Steel (Kathryn Bigelow, Artisan Pictures, 1989): In Eugene’s Sight.

10.2 Blue Steel (Kathryn Bigelow, Artisan Pictures, 1989): In Eugene’s Sight drops it. It falls on the empty car seat beside her, bounces there, sending several shards of glass from the shattered windows bounding and tumbling, as the camera focuses on it. The significance of this instant – the giving up of, giving up on the gun – has been overlooked in existing readings of the film and will be returned to in more detail later. In the background, slightly blurred in contrast with the sharp contours of the service pistol, Turner’s right arm falls into view, her hand coming to rest against the upholstery of the driver’s seat, the cuff and sleeve of the blue shirt spotted red with blood. The sound of sirens can be heard, faint but growing steadily

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louder, as the shot of the gun is replaced by one of Turner’s face in profile, her eyes downcast. She is motionless and emotionless. The shot, held for several seconds, is interrupted by a moving patch of blue haze in the bottom right foreground, the out of focus uniform of a police officer peering into the car. A police car also pulls into view, again unfocused, in the background: a fuzz of blue, black and white. More figures now walk in front of the camera, a black silhouette, another smudged shape, this one more obviously someone in uniform. In the background an officer holding a gun with two hands appears aiming it into the car. The sounds of sirens and of the score, of a synthesized acoustic turmoil pierced by a shrill electronic violin, can be heard.14 A police officer opens the driver’s side door and reaches in, over Turner, for the abandoned gun. He retrieves it, passing it behind him to another officer, and then helps Turner to her feet, and he and his colleague take hold of her, leading her away from the car. At this point the end credits roll, beginning to scroll up the screen against a setting of a blurred police car and officers, a blue haze. The images then dissolve to a plain black backdrop. The electric violin is replaced by a markedly different piece of music, if it can be so described. There is the sound of what appears to be breathing, long drawn out inhalations, accompanied by a noise like a steady drip and punctuated by taps, by what might best be described as the pat of water fallen from a great height impacting a surface, resonating, a prominent acoustic roil. These noises all contribute to the sense of a cavernous space. They are joined by what could be called panting, sequences of short, quick gulps. Then a sharp, steady electronic sound pierces this symphony of breaths and splashes, is interrupted by a slash of louder synth, returns to prominence and fades away. The same sound returns again, bisected as before, just before the credits conclude. The final noises are, however, of a steady drip. The film ends on a repeated note. This summary of the conclusion to the film illustrates the way in which a careful narrative staging is supplemented by a powerful affective dimension. It is this dimension, which works to colour and inform that narrative yet is not bound to it, that will be my focus. Re-opening credits Analyses of Blue Steel do not usually begin by a consideration of the film’s ending. It is customary to concentrate instead on the film’s beginning. The opening credits have generated considerable commentary. This is, arguably, because they introduce Blue Steel’s central character, a revolver. Its prominence is established in the closeup sequence of a Smith & Wesson that accompanies the credits. This scene is usually understood to foreground the status of the gun as fetish. Yvonne Tasker, for example, describes how the sequence ‘plays soft, ghostly music over images that move slowly in close-up around a police handgun, emphasising the different textures of the metal, the bullets and the grip. After the gun is slipped into her holster we see fragmented images of Megan Turner dressing in her police uniform of blue shirt over lacy bra, patent lace-up shoes, black tie, white gloves and a shiny cap.15



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During this intimate encounter with the pistol the name of the film is momentarily overlaid on a zooming in on the gun’s barrel. The inscription of the name of the film onto the firearm serves a number of purposes. We are directed by the words to note both the colour and substance of the revolver. In simple terms, it reaffirms that it is made from a hard material that looks blue (the themes of colour and materiality declared in this moment are of key import for making sense of the film as a whole). Blued steel is steel that has had an oxide film applied to it. This film protects against corrosion and also, as a US patent for bluing steel reveals, imparts a ‘peculiar beauty’.16 That this aesthetic quality is recognized as a notable attribute is made clear by the fact that it is referred to more than once in the patent. The film, it is later stated, imparts ‘a very beautiful finish to [a] product by making its blued surface glossy’.17 In the context of the revolver, by way of its bluing, a sign of society’s ugliness comes to possess a beautiful aspect. Additionally, mapping the title onto the gun cements the latter’s connection to the male member. As Anna Powell has pointed out, ‘blue steel’ is American slang for an erection.18 It is also the actual name of a male sexual supplement, taken either as a tablet or as a strip applied to the tongue, that claims to stimulate the penis.19 Cora Kaplan reads the sequence as a miniature blue movie in which ‘against a highpitched background of electronic music, in a blue light, the camera dismembers the gun, caressing the weapon’s rounded surfaces and hollows in a parody of an artily shot sex scene’.20 The hard gun stands for the penis but also, as becomes clearer as the narrative develops, for the phallus, the phallus here not being understood as the male genital organ in its anatomical reality but rather as what that organ has come to signify in patriarchal fantasy: male power. Most readings of Blue Steel revolve around this weapon’s symbolic value. For Christina Lane, for example, the film articulates an alternative vision of femininity that is achieved, in part, through ‘a recontextualization of the phallic status of the gun’.21 Along similar lines, Linda Mizejewski interprets the appropriation of the phallus-gun cliché as a strategy to remind the spectator that ‘a gun is a tool of equalization that can disturb the tidy binary structure of heterosexuality’.22 Powell suggests that the concept of penis envy, the feeling of deprivation and desire that accompanies the little girl’s discovery of her anatomical distinction from boys, can be ‘usefully applied to Megan’s fetishistic usage of guns’.23 Cora Kaplan sees the film as obsessed with the ‘symbolic effects [of guns] and most of all with their association with male fetishism and phallic femininity’.24 Steven Schaviro calls Blue Steel ‘a satirical send-up of psychoanalytic theories of the phallus and castration anxiety’ in which ‘guns are photographed, over and over again, in extreme close-up and with lovingly fetishistic attention’.25 The shared recognition in these readings of the gun as phallus and of Blue Steel as forming a commentary on phallocentrism is not disputed here. The existing interpretations, however, miss the presence in the film of a beyond to the phallic economy, one which exists underneath it throughout. This elsewhere to the phallus, forming another aspect of psychic life, is what Bracha Ettinger has termed the matrixial. Ettinger, building on Jacques Lacan’s later work, broadens ideas about the

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Symbolic, arguing that there is an aesthetic dimension to subjectivity outside that of a castration paradigm. This other dimension exists as subjacent to the castration paradigm.26 Ettinger describes it as the ‘matrixial stratum of subjectivization’.27 It carries traces of the subject’s pre-subjective intrauterine interactions with the maternal, residues of the co-emergence of partial subjects, vestiges of archaic linkages and connections. It can therefore be positioned in contrast to the castration paradigm which, centred as it is upon the phallus, is grounded in experiences of separation and loss. Ettinger’s language, her repeated use of hyphenation and of neologisms, is a symptom of the difficulty of catching the ‘differentiation-in-co-emergence’ that characterizes the matrixial within the detached terms and rigid structures of phallocentric language. The matrix is typified by diffusion rather than discretion. It is exemplified by exchange and transformation, accommodating. It is also distinguished by its shifting intensities which contrast with the stable temperance, the enforced order, of the phallocratic. Ettinger explains that the originary metamorphoses in the field of joint matrixial sensibility are connected to oscillations of touch and pressure, fluctuations of motions and balance (kinaesthesia), changing amplitudes of voices and light-and-dark variations – diffuse, shared sensorial impressions that enable the construction of partial object-relations and their loss, and that subjectivize the partialsubjects (partial I and partial others) as matrixial.28 It will be argued here that the matrixial register of subjectivity, this economy of oscillation and fluctuation, is recognized and attested to, brought to bear, by way of Blue Steel’s cinematography and soundtrack, registered at the levels of chromatics, luminosity, repeated gestures, recurring vibrations. The visual field of the film, in particular, is at odds with the tighter focus maintained by many mainstream modern and contemporary action films. Disturbances in the fields of sound and vision First, however, I want to advance the idea that disturbances in the visual and acoustic fields can function not just, as Jacqueline Rose has convincingly argued, as reminders of polymorphous perversity, haunting traces of the sexual uncertainties which were sacrificed in order for the subject to attain the sexual differentiation needed to be accepted and acceptable as a subject within a culture which extols heterosexuality as the norm.29 These optical and aural commotions can also serve to affectively signal the presence of a matrixial aspect of subjectivity. For Rose, troubled scenes from early infancy, misrecognitions and disavowals can potentially be exploited ‘as theoretical prototypes to unsettle our certainties once again’.30 This unsettling is framed as a breaking and rupturing.31 There are, however, other ways of disturbing perceptual fields, through for example, blurring and conjoining. These latter disruptions do not trigger a re-staging of the infant’s pre-Oedipal clasping towards difference, a re-viewing of its visual incomprehension, but, instead, insinuate the matrixial into



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perception. This subtle introduction of the matrixial, which will be discussed in more depth subsequently in relation to Blue Steel, provides a supplementary sexual politics which can be impressed upon an audience, articulated by way of perceptual disturbances. This sexual politics is communicated by way of a marked visual politics: one which permits a logic other than the phallic, which would usually remain suppressed, to emerge. This m/Other politics comprises an accompaniment to the castration paradigm. It manifests itself by way of elusive, atypical communications.32 The matrixial resists the unyielding pretensions of the signifier.33 It reaches out from around the signifier, extending towards the subject, summoning encounter, from at its edges. The matrixial is registered as trace rather than as an ostentatious presence. Images, sounds, words, in their discretion, cannot possess this sub-symbolic register of psychic possibility.34 This renders the matrixial difficult to conceptualize. It cannot be accommodated in language grounded in opposition and separation, in differential relations. The matrixial, as material for a politics, is against borders and their enforcement. It is at odds with the stand-alone solitude of all signifiers. A visual practice which endeavours to foster the matrixial rejects the rigid outlines, settled composition, favoured by forms of representation which betray an underlying complicity with the castration paradigm. Mainstream cinema provides an important example of such collusion. Its imagery is predominantly filmed as crisp, sharp, clear. This high definition ensures the distinct separation of actors and objects, the clear delineation of foreground and background. It strives to make the edges, the beginnings and ends of things, their disconnections, obvious. There are always instances of disturbance in the visual and acoustic fields in such cinema but these usually serve to secure rather than challenge the dominance of clear boundaries. This can be seen, for example, even in films such as Charlie’s Angels 2: Full Throttle, which superficially embraces emancipatory sexual politics. Charlie’s Angels 2 is a work which exemplifies so called ‘Girl Power’ and is designed to appear empowering for women. The three angels are exponents of what Martha McCaughey has called ‘physical feminism’.35 Their self-defence skills form a corporeal challenge to entrenched ideas about physical prowess as a masculine attribute. Beyond the phallus: loosening up and letting go Blue Steel contrasts with Charlie’s Angels 2 in that ultimately it refuses to condemn disturbances in the perceptual field. It can be seen instead to cultivate such troubling, embracing and rejoicing in it. This is, however, not to suggest that the film welcomes acoustic or visual chaos. There is a balance struck in Blue Steel between clarity and dissolution. The edge is frequently taken off the image yet what is being seen is seldom, if ever, placed in question. This quality is most apparent in Bigelow’s use of blue filters which produce images bathed in azurine. The colour unites otherwise discrete objects, connects, links them. It also softens their contours. The scene of Turner and her fellow women officers in the locker room, for example, is bathed in a blue light which reduces the figures to silhouettes, eats into their solidity, depriving the officer nearest the window of her lower body.

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The visual style of Blue Steel, its use of low-key lighting, causing soft, vaporous luminosity, cultivating frequent shadows, can be seen to embody a film noir aesthetic. The title of the film also echoes dialogue from the noir classic Murder my Sweet (Dir. Edward Dmytryk, USA, 1944). There is a scene in this film in which innocent stepdaughter Ann Grayle (Anne Shirley) confronts her femme fatale step-mother Helen Grayle (Claire Trevor) and describes women like her as ‘big league blondes, beautiful, expensive babes who know what they want, all bubble bath and dewy morning and moonlight, and inside blue steel, cold, cold like that, only not that clean’. The mother is accused of promoting a soft, feminine facade that conceals her dirty, hard, phallic reality. Ettinger has described the position of Woman that a girl should eventually come to occupy by way of passing through ‘matrixial relations-without-relating’ as being that of a ‘ffAm: femme-fatale-Autre/mère, femme-fatale-Other/mother’.36 This employment of language that connotes film noir is coincidental. It is, however, noteworthy that subjective processes are described by Ettinger in visual and luminous terms. In the matrixial borderspace it is possible, for example, to speak of ‘a wit(h) ness-Thing that is carried to the screen of vision and appears in the image not behind a veil, but as a veil’.37 Within the matrixial, ‘partial subjects co-emerge and cofade through returning and transformations via external/internal borderlinks within and with-out’.38 This diffusion and suffusion, this veiling, is not illustrated through ostensibly comparable visual phenomena in cinema. These phenomena, however, do supplement narrative in a way that can articulate, by way of affect, something at odds with the narrative. In a subsequent scene in Murder my Sweet, Helen Grayle is shown seated in shadow in a cliff-top apartment, her presence initially only signalled by an amorphous, evanescent pall of cigarette smoke. This veil does not somehow signify a wit(h)nessThing. Such an effect, however, particularly when it is used repeatedly, as occurs in Blue Steel, does impact on the narrative and exert a pressure on the spectator. It can come to resonate with them, and invite affective connection. Blue Steel’s stylized, cerebral cinematography is comparable, on a formal level, with some of the artworks produced by Ettinger which, whilst rooted in a photograph, undo the usual clarity of the photographic image and refuse fixity.39 The images in Ettinger’s Eurydice series, for example, appear blurred and indistinct. There is the suggestion of figures but as if seen through a mist, a veil of bled colour. The matrixial is gestured towards by those visual or acoustic disturbances in Blue Steel which act like a veil, obscuring the signifier. These aural or optical commotions point towards subsymbolic tunings which ‘do not function on the level of distinct units of signification’ yet ‘nevertheless make sense’.40 This sense is not cognitive but, instead, as suggested already, affective. It is registered as ‘awe, com-passion, horror, stupefaction, intuition, and languishing’.41 The downbeat feeling some display at the conclusion of the film can be read as evidence of stupefaction. Linda Mizejewski, for example, draws attention to its sad ending.42 It is, however, more at the level of intuition, not immediate, but gradual, by way of an unthinking perception emerging



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from out of pressures, vibrations exerted on consciousness by repeated motifs, that the matrixial is registered. The use of repetition in Blue Steel repays careful attention. There is a visual and, at times, verbal insistence, for example, on having a grip. To get a grip on things signifies to exercise control or mastery over them. This assertion of the importance of having a hold is first signalled during the supermarket hold-up in which a closeup of Turner’s grip on her service revolver is shown just before she turns into the aisle that leads to the cashier and the thief. It is this grip which comes to fascinate Hunt. Usually the gun is interpreted as the locus of his fantasy. Crucially, however, as is evident from his careful restaging of the conditions of the robbery later on, it is the gun being grasped firmly that he desires above all. He says to Turner in this scene: ‘Take off your gun and hold it […] both hands – two hand grip’. The detective Nick Mann (Clancy Brown) shares Hunt’s desire to see Turner’s grip on things. In an exchange between the two detectives, Turner suggests ‘You didn’t think I could handle it’. To which Mann replies: ‘I wanted to watch you handle it.’ This want, this need for grip, indicates a fear about not having it or losing it. In the scene in which Hunt confronts a handcuffed Mann, the murderer’s grip on his gun is not steady. His thumb twitches nervously, either through anxiety or excessive excitement. This jumpiness threatens Hunt’s hold. The anxiety surrounding grip is also suggested in the film by the continual references to fastening and tightening, and also to unfastening and loosening. These begin in the locker room where Turner is filmed getting dressed in preparation to graduate from police academy. She buttons her shirt, the light blue cotton rapidly obscuring the white lace bra she is wearing. Then Turner stamps her dress shoe against a wooden bench raising a cloud of dust. The shoe’s laces are shown being pulled tight, taut, as they are tied. The lace-up rests just above a nail which is not firmly hammered into the bench, which has, perhaps, worked loose over time. In this brief shot themes of tightening and loosening are brought together. The fastening of the shoe laces is immediately followed by the tying of a tie, which is then followed by the putting on of a glove, its pulling close against the hand (10.3). Later, after Hunt has stolen the gun from the supermarket crime scene he is shown in his apartment unbuttoning his jacket in order to remove the concealed revolver and then, seemingly, doing up the jacket again. The lawyer Dawson echoes this last gesture, doing up his own jacket after he successfully gets Hunt off the hook for the murder of Tracy, Turner’s best friend. That an anxiety about undoing, about a loss of rigidity or shape, haunts the acts of doing up and securing is brought to the fore in a scene showing Hunt revelling in the murder of a prostitute. He takes off his clothes and uses the woman’s bloodsoaked yellow woollen top to smear himself in gore. During this action, Hunt makes a series of non-verbal vocalizations, grunts and snarls. His growls are accompanied at one point by the sound of him unbuckling his trouser belt. Here the undoing of clothing is linked to what seems like a regression to an animal or infantile state. This state is, of course, triggered by a violent, fatal act. It occurs whilst he wipes grume across his face and chest. The loss of discrete signs, the descent into indiscrete

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10.3 Blue Steel (Kathryn Bigelow, Artisan Pictures, 1989): Getting a Grip. contiguous noise, is here coded as deadly and, through the presence of blood, as feminine. The recurring tropes of fastening and unfastening in the film form repetitions as they are understood in Rose’s sense of the term. For Rose, repetition is a kind of insistence, ‘a constant pressure of something hidden but not forgotten – something that can only come into focus now by blurring the field of representation where our normal forms of self-recognition take place’.43 What pushes into focus here, what is transmitted whilst remaining unseen, what is registered by way of these insistences, is what Ettinger has described as a wit(h)ness-Thing.44 Wit(h)nessThing relates to traces of Thing-encounters in the Real that can register affectively in aesthetic experience. Ettinger is here building on Lacan’s idea of the Thing as the lost object desired by the subject-in-language, the subject in the Symbolic. For Lacan it is unattainable. Ettinger, however, postulates that tinges of the Thing can be transmitted, shared via aesthetic encounter. These traces, engraving as affected events in the viewer at a sub-symbolic level, are registering as impressions, intensities, as feelings, but not recognized as signs. They form an intuitive communication. Ettinger calls this co-poiesis, an experience in which the ‘matrixial memory of the event, paradoxically both unforgettable and in/of oblivion – a memory carrying a load no linear story can convey – is transmitted and cross-inscribed’.45 It is most evident in the dream sequence in Blue Steel which demonstrates that Turner is also afraid of a loss of grip, specifically of being let go, of disconnection. Her nightmare is of Hunt failing to keep hold of her after she falls out of a helicopter and of allowing her to fall to the city streets below. The dream sequence, however, provides an example of displacement. Displacement is, as A. Kiarina Kordela explains, ‘the sliding or transfer, not of meaning, but of affects and intensities, from the initial concept or image that produced them to other images or concepts that



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are less emotionally invested and are in some way associatively linked to the initial, overinvested concept or image’.46 The loss of grip is therefore not, ultimately, about grip. It is, I would suggest, about the suppression of the linking and relating that characterized the subjectivizing stratum of the matrixial.47 It is about the violence of the cut of the castration paradigm that casts aside, overrides, the pre-natal space of co-emergence that constituted the intrauterine. Fastening is, in fact, connected to early mother-child relations by association through Turner’s act of humming whilst she buttons her shirt in the locker room at the beginning of the film. Ettinger describes the matrixial as forming a kind of sense that ‘vibrates and resonates from jouissance and not from signification’.48 These affective pulsations echo those experienced in the womb. The hum, like the pressure exerted by way of repeated gestures of doing up and undoing, of clasping and releasing, invites the spectator to reflect on metramorphosis: an out-of-focus passageway composed of transgressive borderlinks that transform, simultaneously and differently, co-emerging partial-subjects, partial Others, partial-objects, and tracing elements, and of slippery borderlines between subjective and objective ingredients in the process of becoming thresholds that allow for floating and transgressions, transforming the borderspace between several elements known and unknown.49 Near Dark The hum and the repetitions do not signify metramorphosis but do communicate it affectively. They contribute to the production of a mood. The emergence of this mood is, in part, enabled by decisions taken by Bigelow. The auteur and the viewer, like the artist and viewer as they are conceived of by Ettinger, are linked by desire. Ettinger writes, using the trope of the Möbius strip, that ‘the artist’s desire slides along the strip, which, twisting and turning, also catches the desire of the viewer’.50 Film is, of course, markedly different from most other forms of modern and contemporary art making in that it often involves input from diverse sources including the director, the producer, the actors, the scriptwriter (Blue Steel was cowritten by Bigelow and Eric Red), and the cinematographer amongst others. It emerges from out of an interweaving, a plaiting, of different encounters. There is, however, sufficient continuity of vision between Bigelow’s early films, particularly Near Dark (1987), Blue Steel, and Point Break (1991), to read her work at that time as forming a distinct aesthetic project with a singular vision. In Near Dark, for example, there is a similar quality of light to Blue Steel. The recurring setting or rising sun, those repeated instances of half-light, are comparable to the use of the blue filter in that they take the edge off things. In the scenes of sunrise the landscape beneath the sharp orb, especially in the shot of the hillside backdrop, or of the sky above the treetops backdrop, is hazy, indistinct. These scenes therefore resonate with the way Steven Shaviro has interpreted Blue Steel in terms of it possessing ‘no clear-cut opposition between night and day, or shadow and light, but rather an uncanny sense of luminous darkness’.51 It is in bright sunlight, the

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usual provider of sharp contour, that the vampires of the film begin to smoulder, their bodies enveloped in smoke and, ultimately, flame. This capacity of the sun to threaten contour is also evident in the scene in which Loy Colton (Tim Thomerson) visits his local police station. The sheriff, Eakers (Bill Cross), is shot in backlight. The sun streams through Venetian blinds behind him bleaching out this figure of the law. Eakers appears faded. It is as if he is being looked at through a veil. This veil, produced by way of a particular intensity of light, is ethereal yet impactful. The repeated motifs of pulsing, of puncture, and of pumping, exert a similar pressure to those of doing and undoing in Blue Steel. They assert the absent presence of a trauma, the proximity of a pressing memory. Near Dark is explicitly about boundaries in jeopardy. The film begins with a shot of a mosquito sucking blood from the arm of Caleb Colton (Adrian Pasdar). He swats the insect, producing a red stain on his skin. This blemish constitutes the first of many in the visual field in the film. It also forms a miniature version of the larger splat of blood that impacts the window when Tracy is shot in Blue Steel. There are also numerous other visual disturbances in Near Dark. It is a dusty film, in keeping with the spirit of a Western, and also a misty one (as is most evident in the scene just prior to the barroom brawl and in the scene in which Colton rides into town to rescue his sister), and a smoky one. The nebulous patches that appear throughout Near Dark convey a mood of uncertainty, of unease. The loss of intensity, the reduction in the clarity and vigour of the image in these moments, does not tell a story but does inspire a sense of ‘languishing’ in Ettinger’s sense of the term. The spectator is able to partially share traumatic memory through the ‘transferential borderspace’ offered by the film which is ‘the condition for its apparition’.52 The cinematography of Bigelow’s early films acts as a register through which something other than the castration paradigm is forcefully articulated. End credits: post-traumatic acoustic and visual politics In Julia Kristeva, Sara Beardsworth writes that the presymbolic affective relations Kristeva discovered need to ‘take on some kind of symbolic form’ if both the subject and culture at large are to benefit. Beardsworth stresses that ‘insofar as secular modernity lacks signifying ideals, the subject is left exposed to the impact of want/ loss’. The lack of a language capable of communicating these affects leaves the subject restricted in terms of a capacity to relate to themselves and to others.53 Beardsworth is referring to a conception of subjectivity, in Kristeva, that is still grounded in the castration paradigm even as it is excluded by it. It is its constitutive outside, apart from, yet also irremediably a part of, it.54 Beardworth’s foregrounding of the necessity of opening up spaces of communication to enable the articulation of, so far, missed experiences and through that to engender a capability to foster relations with the self and others is, however, a key one. The expression of the matrixial, the apparition of affects encountered initially in pre-birth, is vital if an alternative to the violence that accompanies the ‘sadisticaggressive structure of separation and radical alterity signified by the Phallus and Castration’ is to emerge.55 If matrixial encounters in the aesthetic sphere can be



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fostered then the potential for connecting with rather than abjecting the m/Other will open up. It is impossible to escape economies of violence associated with the castration paradigm when it forms the only acknowledged template of subjectivity. This may explain why Kristeva’s recent thinking has moved towards a conception of subjectivity that is very close to that of Ettinger. Her recent essay ‘La reliance, ou de l’érotisme maternel’, for example, posits a maternal eroticism she terms ‘linkage’.56 This maternal connectivity does not comprise a signifier but, rather, arises as a passion, an intense, sudden, dazzling immediacy of feeling.57 Before it becomes a ‘container’, in Wilfred Bion’s sense of the term, it exists as an in-between state.58 This sounds remarkably similar to Ettinger’s description of the matrixial as generating ‘in-between states’.59 Kristeva’s description of maternal eroticism as ‘always within and without, I and Other, neither I nor Other, in-between’ and as ‘separation and linkage, rupture and join’ also resembles qualities attributed to the matrixial.60 It is described by Ettinger as ‘jointness-in-separation’ between subjects.61 Kristeva’s claim that psychoanalysis has hesitated to confront this dimension of subjectivity therefore rings hollow as far as Ettinger’s pioneering work is concerned. Ettinger and Kristeva now share in the desire to acknowledge the beyond of the castration paradigm. The effect of operating exclusively within a phallic paradigm, the violence that accompanies living completely within its terms, is evident in Blue Steel through the theme of domestic violence. This subject matter is introduced acoustically at the start of the film during the first credits and before any scene is actually on screen. A man argues with a woman threatening to kill her. There is the sound of a baby crying in the background. It later emerges that Turner’s own father, Frank (Philip Bosco), has subjected her mother, Shirley (Louise Fletcher), to domestic abuse. That this violence is a continuing problem for the parents is made obvious when Turner goes home to see them after the death of her friend Tracy (Elizabeth Pena). She embraces her mother and then grips her right arm. Shirley winces. The arm is bruised where Frank has grabbed her. Turner places her father under arrest and begins to drive him to the police station. Eventually, however, she stops the car and simply asks: ‘Why?” Frank responds with unawareness: ‘I don’t know – I get mad.’ The film, however, does provide a specific answer to the question. The violence encountered by women, and, to a lesser extent, men, is the product of an over-investment in the phallus, in the castration paradigm, at the expense of the matrixial. Zeev Winstok has suggested, in the context of a discussion of intimate partner violence, that ‘violence and context delineate each other in the same way images and background do in a picture’.62 He goes on to argue that ‘it is imperative to address violence in context to obtain a comprehensive view’.63 The turn to a visual analogy to explain the relationship between aggression and environment is noteworthy. The implication is that insight can be derived from a close examination of what lies behind the frontal assault as if everything is available to view if one looks hard enough. The way forward, however, is not to engage in a detailed analysis of what is in plain sight, or in a close scrutiny of detail. It is, in other words, not to understand the system within which violence occurs. Instead it is to understand what that system

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excludes, what is not there to see, what cannot be thought about but needs to be allowed to resonate. Winstok’s recourse to context (be it socio-cultural, relational (spouse or stranger) or situational (place and time)) as an explanatory framework for understanding the motivations for domestic violence is deficient. Judith Butler’s remarks on framing are pertinent here. Butler argues that ‘there is no context without an explicit delimitation of context’ without the placing of a frame around whatever requires contextualization.64 In Winstok’s case the motivation for domestic violence is to be understood through framing it in a particular way, by way of the production of a specific context (constituted through the seeking out of relevant texts such as socio-demographic characteristics, personality traits and life history) and then its interpretation. This approach has much merit. Winstok, for example, perceives violence to emerge ‘as part of an attempt to control a situation’ to keep its contours within the aggressors expectations, and as frequently the product of one party trying to force their position on another.65 Violence derives from efforts to regulate a set of circumstances, to keep it within familiar parameters, retaining an accustomed edge. It is about enforcing boundaries to keep out the unexpected, the unfamiliar and the unwanted. Restricting explorations of the causes of domestic violence to a consideration of context, however, as a text-based endeavour is insufficient as it cannot account for the role played by what is excluded from signification, what is not inscribed with the castration paradigm, in the perpetuation of violence because of its marginalization. If the matrixial were articulated, apprehended, more often, if it were registered more frequently by way of aesthetic encounter, then an alternative to the trauma of separation and loss that characterizes the castration paradigm and haunts it, promoting anxiety and aggression, would be opened up. Context-based approaches, however, enact a framing that usually absents the affective from analysis. If it does account for it, as Kristeva’s ideas do, then it still formulates a feminine affective register, in this case the semiotic, which interacts with the phallic, is defined in relation to it, and depends upon it. In this sense, Tatum’s approach to violence against women, which advocates understanding the sacrificial logic (comprehending the processes by which the feminine is forfeited, victimized, and repressed to guarantee the castration paradigm) of the Symbolic order as a precursor to ‘establishing an anti-sacrificial logic’ is inadequate.66 It is also necessary to communicate the real alternative that exists to this logic: the matrixial paradigm. It is such a communication that occurs in Blue Steel and provides its powerful acoustic and visual politics. This politics enables something beyond the phallic to be registered. There is a different kind of cinematic pleasure to the prescriptive phallic pleasure identified by Laura Mulvey present in the film.67 It is not legible in the narrative, which interrogates, deconstructs, phallicism without escaping it, yet is powerfully intimated through the cinematography and soundtrack. Shaviro has suggested that in Blue Steel ‘outburts of violence and gradations of light arouse, agitate, and unsettle the spectator’.68 He reads these unsettling instances as interrupting narcissistic gratification and instead drawing the spectator into a



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condition of ‘excessive, undischargeable excitation’.69 I disagree with Shaviro’s remarks about excitation but there is undoubtedly a visual and acoustic displeasure invoked at key moments within the film. The many patches in the film, the blurred shots and puffs of smoke described in the first section of this chapter, the haze produced by the use of blue filters and the continual dissolution of boundaries, the many bullets that crash, explode, pierce and shatter, so obvious in the excessive gunfire of the denouement but present throughout, form disturbances in the fields of hearing and vision, irritations to the ear and eye. Visual pleasure is contained in sharp images, acoustic pleasure in lyrical sounds. The disturbances in Blue Steel function like the pan as Georges Didi-Huberman describes it.70 They are pieces of sight and of sound which disfigure, which function as ‘a not-yet, an uncertainty, a “quasi”-existence of the figure’, which permit the apparition of something not figurable.71 These unsettling elements in Blue Steel, along with the numerous doing-ups and undoings, instances of gripping and letting-go, form symptoms (10.4). Ettinger defines a symptom as ‘a disguised, repetitive substitute for ideas connected to wishful childhood impulses that have been repressed’.72 Didi-Huberman submits that it is ‘characterized simultaneously by its visual intensity, its value as radiance, and by what Freud calls […] its suitability to “conceal” the “unconscious fantasy that is at work”’.73 He sees it as forming a hinge between the phenomenological and semiological field. In Blue Steel it is more informative to attend to it as linking the semiological and the affective. It does not figure affect but gestures repeatedly to the pressure it exerts. It shows there is an outside to the image in mainstream cinema, clear, defined, that supports the castration paradigm. There is a steady tension in the film between holding in place and giving way, between fixity and fading, between

10.4 Blue Steel (Kathryn Bigelow, Artisan Pictures, 1989): Getting a Grip.

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bounding and connecting, between recognition of the power of the phallus and the felt force of the matrixial. The film ends with the violence underpinning the castration paradigm finally being exposed and rejected. Turner turns against the gun she had previously thought would empower her. She has come to understand the limitations that inhere in phallocentrism. When Turner shoots Hunt she destroys the values she too has endeavoured to acquire and embody. Hunt’s suggestion earlier in the room that the two are similar in outlook (‘I have found my brightness – I’ve seen that brightness in you’) is true up to the point the policewoman relinquishes her hold on the firearm (10.5). It is then that she decisively rejects the phallic. Her spent appearance at the end of the film can, of course, be read in narrative terms as evidence of the punishment enacted upon her for deigning to transgress the behaviour expected of her gender. There is, however, a powerful sub-narrative at work here as well. It is through this that the existence of another economy, subjacent to the phallic one, is brought to the fore. This occurs by way of the blurred imagery which can be seen after this moment but also, more importantly, by the score that replaces the electric violin during the end credits, the ‘vision’ and sound point towards, without signifying, a beyond to the phallic. Ettinger has written of the feminine in textile terms: ‘in the Matrix, something of an originary co-emergence with-in an impossible position of “and”–“and” drips from the Real to the Imaginary and the Symbolic [which] are plaited together in a knot, and is transmitted in intersubjectivity.’74 The matrix therefore braids the Symbolic, winding into the ‘cracks of the phallic subject’ as a ‘supplementary subjectivity’.75 These end credits, particularly the sounds resonant of pre-natal existence, form such an interweaving. Their depth and enigmatic beauty provides relief from trauma: a metramorphic wit(h)nessing. These sounds absorb traumatic traces through

10.5 Blue Steel (Kathryn Bigelow, Artisan Pictures, 1989): Letting Go.



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apprehending and communicating affect. They permit the pressures evident in the repetitions in Blue Steel a kind of release, attest to them. The matrixial ‘feel’ of these final sounds is not of loss and violence but of connection and care. The sounds echo the scenes in the film in which spaces are bathed in slate-blue or steel-blue light, serving to soften the edges of things, of individuals and objects, such that they commingle, come together, chromatically unite. This use of colour blurs boundaries and facilitates connections. It fosters a matrixial politics from within a form of filmmaking which usually privileges the castration paradigm by way of its high definition, its obedience to clarity and discretion. The dimension to Blue Steel and to Bigelow’s other early films that can be understood through Ettinger’s propositions is one that is vital if connections with others and social bonding, rather than abjection and violent rejection, are to be achieved.76 Butler has drawn attention to how the matrixial can be understood to provide a pressing ethical framework.77 This framework is one that opens the way towards a different kind of policing to that practiced by Turner for much of Blue Steel. In the chapter of her book Gender and Community Policing titled ‘Competing Police Roles: Social Workers or Dirty Harry/Harriet?’, Susan L. Miller examines how community policing is not regarded as real police work because it is ‘touchyfeely’.78 Community policing is based on contact and connecting with a public, often emotionally. The police work practiced by Turner is one in which police officers are isolated from the social environment. Their work is reactive, responsedriven and rarely involves their connecting with law-abiding citizens. This kind of policing conforms to the masculinist image of police work which promotes ‘the fierce warrior-robot, devoid of emotions or personality’ who relies ‘on technology, expertise in marksmanship and their courage to bring criminals to justice’.79 The condemnation of the castration paradigm that occurs at the end of Blue Steel, the giving up on and of the gun, can also be read as a political comment on a particular style of policing, inherently violent, and its manifest failings. The film’s acoustic and visual politics combine to mend the break the law of the castration paradigm has instituted and provide a heartfelt, connective alternative.

NOTES

The editors have sought to ensure that all URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press, unless otherwise stated. Introduction 1 Julia Kristeva, ‘Psychoanalysis and the Polis’ [1981], in The Kristeva Reader, ed. Toril Moi (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986), pp. 302–29, p. 304. 2 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida, trans. Richard Howard (London: Fontana, 1984), p. 38. 3 See also Sometimes in April (Raoul Peck, HBO, 2006); 100 Days (Nick Hughes, Broadcast Features Facilities, 2001). 4 The concept of pathosformel was created by Hamburg art historian Aby Warburg (1866– 1929) as a necessary term to understand the foundation of the image in ritual and gesture associated with anxieties, suffering and violence of human communities faced with forces they could not control but on which their survival depended. Opposing the aestheticizing tendencies in art history, Warburg was attempting to elaborate a psychological history of the image which survived beyond the gestures and rituals as a mnemonic device, storing up the affective energies, transmitting them to societies in need of such recharging. I am taking over this term from Warburg’s genealogy of classical pathosformulae that resurfaced in the revival of classical antiquity we name the Renaissance. I suggest that the conditions of modern suffering explode the classical archive or legacy. Contemporary artists create novel forms of formulation of suffering in order to meet the novel conditions of modern trauma, violence and suffering. See Adi Efal, ‘Warburgs’s “Pathos Formula” in Psychoanalytical and Benjaminian Contexts’, Asaph, 5 (2000), pp. 221–38: http://arts.tau. ac.il/departments/images/stories/journals/arthistory/Assaph5/13adiefal.pdf accessed 09.09.2009. 5 Sigmund Freud, ‘Charcot’ [1893], The Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. III 1893–1899: Early Psychoanalytical Writings (London: Vintage Books, 2001), p. 12. 6 Janet Bergstrom (ed.), Endless Night: Cinema and Psychoanalysis, Parallel Histories (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009); on Freud and the movies, see Griselda Pollock, ‘Freud’s Egypt: Mummies and M/Others’, parallax: Special Issue: Aspects of Egypt 13:2 (2007), pp. 56–79. 7 Christian Metz, Psychoanalysis and Cinema: The Imaginary Signifier [1977], trans. Celia Britton et al. (Basingtoke: Macmillan,1982). 8 For a collection of her major writings on psychoanalysis, cinema and art, see Laura Mulvey, Visual and Other Pleasures (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1989).

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9 Arthur Kleinman, Veena Das and Margaret Lock (eds.), Social Suffering (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999); Michael Rossington and Anne Whiteread, Between the Psyche and the Polis: Refiguring History in Literature and Theory (Aldershot and Burlingham VT.: Ashgate, 2000); Kelly Oliver and Steve Edwin, Between the Psyche and the Social: Psychoanalytical Social Theory (Lanham and New York: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers Inc., 2002); Jenny Edkins, Trauma and the Memory of Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Didier Fassin and Richard Rechtman, The Empire of Trauma: An Inquiry into the Condition of Victimhood [2007], trans. Rachel Gomme (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2009); Mick Broderick and Antonia Traverso, Trauma, Media, Art: New Perspectives (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2010). 10 Mark Selzer, ‘Wound Culture: Trauma in the Pathological Cultural Sphere’, October, 80 (Spring 1997), pp. 3–26. See also Wulf Kansteiner, ‘Genealogy of a Category Mistake: A Critical Intellectual History of the Cultural Trauma Metaphor’, Rehtinking History 8:2 (2004), pp. 193–222. 11 Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London: Verso, 2004). 12 Jill Bennett, Practical Aesthetics: Events, Affects and Art after 9/11 (London: I.B.Tauris, 2012) 13 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition [1958] (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998). 14 Sigmund Freud, Moses and Monotheism: Three Essays [Der Mann Moses and die Monotheistische Religion: Drei Abhandlungen] (Amsterdam, Verlag Albert de Lange, 1939; London: Hogarth Press and Institute for Psychoanalysis, 1939; trans. Katharine Jones, New York: Knopf, 1939). In the Standard Edition Vol. 23, pp. 1–137, the translation is by James Strachey. The first two essays were published in Imago 23/1, pp. 5–13 and 23:4, pp. 387–419, translations of which appeared in the International Journal of Psychoanalysis 19/3 (1938), pp. 291–98 and 20/1 (1939), pp. 1–32. Part of the second essay was read by Anna Freud on her father’s behalf at the Paris International Psycho-Analytical Congress on 2 August 1938 and it was separately published as ‘Der Fortschritt in der Geistigkeit’. The first draft of the book was completed in 1934. The prefaces explain the conditions of his hesitation in bringing it into public view. 15 Kristeva: ‘Psychoanalysis and the Polis’, p. 309. 16 Kristeva: ‘Psychoanalysis and the Polis’, p. 312. 17 Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, Freud’s Moses: Judaism Terminable and Interminable (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991), p. 29. 18 Yerushalmi: Freud’s Moses, p. 8. 19 Yerushalmi: Freud’s Moses, p. 82. 20 Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression [Mal d’Archive; une impression freudienne], trans. Eric Prenowitz (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995 and Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). 21 ‘There would be neither history nor culture without that possibility.’ Derrida: Archive Fever, p. 62. 22 Derrida: Archive Fever, pp. 54–5. 23 Sigmund Freud, ‘A Note upon “The Mystic Writing Pad” [Wunderblock]’, [1924/5], trans. James Strachey, On Metapsychology, Vol. 11, The Pelican Freud Library (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1984), pp. 427–34. 24 Edward Said, Freud and the Non-European (London: Verso, 2003). 25 Said: Freud and the Non-European, p. 54. 26 Said: Freud and the Non-European, p. 55. 27 Bonnie Honig, Political Theory and the Displacement of Politics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), p. 15. See also Bonnie Honig, ‘The Politics of Agonism: A Critical Response

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to “Beyond Good and Evil: Arendt, Nietszche and the Aestheticization of Political Action” by Dana R.Vila’, Political Theory 21/3 (1993), pp. 528–33. Susan Sontag, On Photography (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1977); Regarding the Pain of Others (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2003). Wilfred Bion. ‘A Theory of Thinking’, International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 43 (1962), reprinted in Second Thoughts (London: William Heinemann; reprinted London: Karnac Books 1984), pp. 110–19. For an excellent account of Nicholas Abraham and Maria Torok’s theories see Esther Rashkin, Family Secrets and the Psychoanalysis of Narrative (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), pp. 13–48. Jacqueline Rose, ‘Feminism and the Psychic’, in Sexuality in the Field of Vision (London: Verso Books, 1986), p. 7. On the notion of the planetary as a counter-position to the global see Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ‘Planetarity’, The Death of a Discipline (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), pp. 71–102.

Chapter 1. Contest-Nation 1 Author’s translation of Anders Fogh Rasmussen: ‘Vi behøver ikke eksperter og smagsdommere til at bestemme på vore vegne …’ ( (last accessed 24 September 2012)). In the speech the Prime Minister of course commented on the 9/11 attacks by reiterating the announcements by President G.W. Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair that the fight for personal freedom, democracy, human rights and tolerance had begun. 2 The status of and interest in nationalism has had a troublesome history in academia. Marxist historians like Antonio Gramsci show a deeply felt nostalgia for a utopian past before nationalism when the working class presumably lived in a cultural milieu based on values of decency and mutual aid and connected with languages of religious solidarity and social idealism, an utopia that faced corruption as nations were built up by the bourgeoisie. Social theorists for their part have underestimated the appeal of national sentiments for the masses. But in the 1980s, Ernest Gellner’s modernist point of view served as the cornerstone for the so-called ‘classical approach’ to the phenomenon of nationalism, arguing that the changes that shook Western society from the heyday of the French Revolution onwards and nationalism must be taken together. Now historians gathered to analyze the phenomenon of Nationalism. In the classical approach, changes leading towards nation building do not just destroy something, they rather promote transformations. Post-classical attitudes to the study of nationalism include feminist approaches, which investigate the relationship between the history of nations and gender and show a general interest in socially and culturally situated theory. The feeling of suffering from a genuine, irretrievable loss of confidence, control, and influence is more widely accepted and handled within the post-classical attitudes towards the study of nationalism. 3 Weekendavisen, 17 January 2003. 4 Lomborg was chosen for Time Magazine’s 2004 top 100 list of most influential intellectuals

(last accessed September 2012). 5 Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (London: Penguin Books, 2008).

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6 This title of course refers to Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses of 1988. The Iranian Ayatollah Khomeyni issued a fatwa on Rushdie, and publishers of the book worldwide were killed or threatened. On the severity of the diplomatic crisis following the publication of the cartoons, see (last accessed 24 September 2012). 7 Nanette Salomon, ‘The Art Historical Canon: Sins of Omission’, in The Art of Art History: A Critical Anthology, ed. Donald Preziosi (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 355. 8 Griselda Pollock, Differencing the Canon: Feminist Desire and the Writing of Art’s Histories (London: Routledge, 1999), p. 13. 9 The owner of the statue, Göteborg Konstmuseum in Sweden, does not show it on their homepage together with their other extracts from the collection of sculpture (last accessed 24 September, 2012). 10 Griselda Pollock, ‘The Image in Psychoanalysis’, in Psychoanalysis and the Image, ed .Griselda Pollock (Boston and Oxford, Blackwell’s, 2006), p. 23. 11 Salomon: The Art Historical Canon, p. 344. 12 Lars von Trier, Politiken, 11 December 2004. Author’s translation. 13 Homepage in English explaining the reasons for having a Danish Canon of the Arts (last accessed 21 August 2007, now only available in Danish, since the English site shows international initiatives taken by the current minister of culture). 14 In August 2007, one year after the Canon’s homepage was uploaded, experts were called upon by the media to discuss why fewer than 30.000 had visited it so far. They all focused on the homepage not being appealing enough to young people. 15 The experts who chose the works to be included were some of the most prominent Danish professionals in the field: Hein Heinsen, theologian and sculpter; Sophia Kalkau, writer and artist; Bjorn Norgaard, sculpter; Hans Edvard Norregaard-Nielsen, Director of the New Carlsberg Foundation; Bente Scavenius, art critic and art historian. 16 Donna Haraway, ‘Simians, Cyborgs, and Women. The Reinvention of Nature’, A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth-Century (London: Routledge, 1991), p. 189. 17 W.J.T. Mitchell, Landscape and Painting (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London, 2002), pp. 1–3. 18 Sigmund Freud, Thoughts for the Times on Death and War, 1915, cited in Hent de Vries and Samuel Weber (eds), Violence, Identity, and Self-Determination (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), pp. 85–6. 19 (last accessed 24 September 2012). Saturday 5 February, Washington (CNN): ‘Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld says he twice offered President Bush his resignation during the height of the Abu Ghraib prison abuse scandal, but the president refused to accept it. In an interview Thursday on CNN’s Larry King Live, Rumsfeld said: “I submitted my resignation to President Bush twice during that period and told him that … I felt that he ought to make the decision as to whether or not I stayed on. And he made that decision and said he did want me to stay on”.’ 20  (last accessed 24 September 2012). 21 (last accessed 24 September 2012).

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22 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish [Surveiller et punir, naissance de la prison 1977], trans. Alan Sheridan (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975), p. 137–38. 23 The Law concerning the definitions and punishment for terrorism was passed through Parliament on 30 September 2003. ‘Greenpeace Denmark’ was the first organization to be sentenced by the new laws on 10 June 2005. A fee of DKK 30,000 (£2,701) was to be paid for offending the domestic peace, for flying a banner on a public building against the use of GMOs in animal food (last accessed 21 August 2007). 24 Adam Dyrvig Tatt, ‘Er du aandssvag?’ (Are you mad?), a documentary from the independent broadcasting company TV2, TV2 DOK 13 February 2007. 25 Theodor W. Adorno, ‘Cultural Criticism and Society’ [Kulturkritik und Gesellschaft, 1951], in Can One Live After Auschwitz? A Philosophical Reader, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006), p. 162. 26 Author’s translation from Asger Jorn, Held og Hasard [Luck and Chance] [SISV 1952] (Copenhagen: Borgen, 1963), pp. 164–65. 27 Donald Preziosi, ‘Myths of Narrativity. Interrogating National Museums’, unpublished paper delivered at the NAMu Conference, ‘National Museum Narratives’, University of Leicester, 18–20 June 2007 (last accessed 21 August 2007). 28 Homi Bhabha, ‘DissemiNation’, in The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 2003), p. 159. 29 Bhabha: ‘DissemiNation’, p. 162. 30 Bhabha: ‘DissemiNation’, p. 153. 31 Susan Sontag, ‘Against Interpretation’ (1964) (last accessed 21 August 2007). 32 Sigmund Freud, Interpretation of Dreams [1900], Vol. 4, Penguin Freud Library (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975), p. 652. 33 Cathy Caruth, ‘Traumatic Awakenings’, in Hent de Vries and Samuel Weber (eds), Violence, Identity, and Self-Determination (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1977), p. 222. 34 Sigmund Freud, ‘Civilization and its Discontents’ [Das Unbehagen in der Kultur, 1930], in Civilization, Society and Religion, Vol. 12, Penguin Freud Library (London: Penguin, 2002), p. 75. 35 Kulturkanon, p. 40: ‘kun de værker kom med, som en af os brændte for ….’ Author’s translation. 36 Pierre Bourdieu and Alain Darbel with Dominique Schnapper, The Love of Art: European Art Museums and their Public [L’amour de l’art, 1969] (London: Polity, 1997, reprinted 2002). p. 112. 37 Martin Jay, ‘Abjection Overruled’, in Cultural Semantics, Keywords of Our Time (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1998). ‘For the crisis of the subject has cleared the way for a competing cultural figure, which we might ironically call, following the literary critic Michael André Bernstein, the “abject hero”’, p. 145. Jay is referring to Michael André Bernstein, Bitter Carnival: Ressentiment and the Abject Hero (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992). 38 Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt, Empire (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), p. 103.

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Chapter 2: In Miniature 1 See the Daily Advertiser, Oracle, and True Briton, 29 April 1805, n.p., and the Morning Herald, 29 April 1805, n.p. The principal work on Norton is Carl Klinck’s ‘Biographical Introduction’, in Carl Klinck and James Talman (eds) The Journal of Major John Norton (Toronto: Champlain Society, 1970), pp. xiii–xcvii. Except where otherwise indicated, I am indebted to it for all biographical information on Norton. A second edition of the journal, with a new introduction by Carl Benn, was published by the Champlain Society in 2011. 2 I will generally refer to both men by their English names. In Norton’s case, the rationale for the choice is fairly clear: John Norton was the sitter’s birth name, and Teyoninhokarawen is more accurately a title than a name, conferred on him upon his election to chiefdom. For Peter Jones, the choice was more difficult, and an earlier version of this chapter used his birth name, Kahkewaquonaby, throughout. It seemed to strike a false note, however, for the chapter deals primarily with the terms of Jones’s relation with the English, and in these dealings he appears generally to have preferred his English name. I have respected this preference. 3 The sitting took place on 25 November 1831 in Matilda Jones’s home at Number 8 Coleman Street. See Peter Jones, Life and Journals of Kah-ke-wa-quo-na-by (Rev. Peter Jones) (Toronto: Wesleyan Printing Establishment, 1860), p. 305. 4 See Donald Smith, Sacred Feathers: The Reverend Peter Jones (Kahkewaquonaby) and the Mississauga Indians (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1987). Smith’s book is the principal work on Jones and I have relied on it except where otherwise indicated. 5 Jones: Life, pp. 322–24; National Gallery of Canada file on Matilda Jones; Mrs Vansittart to Miss Jones, 3 April 1832, Peter Jones fonds, Victoria University Library, University of Toronto. 6 The 1831 work, which is now in the collection of the National Gallery of Canada, was purchased directly from the artist’s great grandniece. 7 Norton’s birth date can now firmly be established as 16 December 1770. Church of Scotland, Parish Church of Crail, Old Parochial Registers, 1655–1857 (accessed 27 November 2007). 8 Smith: Sacred Feathers, p. 39. 9 Smith: Sacred Feathers, p. 30. 10 See Marcia Crosby, ‘The Construction of the Imaginary Indian’, in Stan Douglas (ed.), Vancouver Anthology: The Institutional Politics of Art (Vancouver: Talonbooks, 1991), pp. 267–91, and Daniel Francis, The Imaginary Indian: The Image of the Indian in Canadian Culture (Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 1992). 11 The statistic is based on the first 25 per cent of entries from Algernon Graves, The Royal Academy of Arts: A Complete Dictionary of Contributors and Their Work from Its Foundation in 1769 to 1904 (New York: B. Franklin, 1972). After the advent of photography in 1839 miniature production began to decline. 12 Linda Nochlin’s ‘The Imaginary Orient’, Art in America (May–June 1983), pp. 46­–59, has provided the paradigm for understanding European representations of Canada’s First Nations; see note 10. 13 Ruth Phillips, Trading Identities: The Souvenir in Native North American Art from the Northeast, 1700–1900 (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1998), p. 73. 14 Smith: Sacred Feathers, p. 223. 15 See Kristina Huneault, ‘Always There: Aboriginal People and the Consolation of Miniature Portraiture in British North America’, in Timothy Barringer, Geoff Quilley

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and Douglas Fordham (eds) Art and the British Empire (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007), pp. 288–308. Timothy Fulford, Romantic Indians: Native Americans, British Literature, and Transatlantic Culture 1756–1830 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 4. Fulford: Romantic Indians, p. 213. Klinck: ‘Biographical Introduction’, p. i. My thanks to Ruth Phillips and Guislaine Lemay for their input on Norton’s dress. Daily Advertiser, n.p. Timothy D. Willig, Restoring the Chain of Friendship: British Policy and the Indians of the Great Lakes, 1783–1815 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2008), p. 176. Robert Owen to Mary Ansted, 20 January 1806, John Norton papers, Ayer Ms 654, Newberry Library, Chicago (copies in the collection of Library and Archives Canada, M-7963). Norton, too, was pleased with the likeness and ten years later he asked Knight to make another copy. See Mary Ansted to John Norton, 17 December 1815, John Norton fonds, F 440, Archives of Ontario, Toronto. Neither copy has been located. Three other portraits of Norton exist. One, in the collection of the Canadian War Museum, was commissioned from Solomon Williams in 1804–5 and gifted by Robert Barclay to the Bath and West of England Society for the Encouragement of Agriculture, Art, Manufactures and Commerce. Another, by Mather Brown (c. 1804–5), is at the Yale Centre for British Art, and an undated oil by Thomas Phillips is at Syon House. Thanks to Carl Benn. Anne Verplanck, ‘The Social Meanings of Portrait Miniatures in Philadelphia, 1760– 1820’, in Ann Smart Martin and J. Ritchie Garrison (eds), American Material Culture: The Shape of the Field (Winterthur, DE and Knoxville, TN: Winterthur Museum, 1997), p. 196. For an account of Knight’s career and list of her sitters, see George Williamson, Andrew and Nathaniel Plimer (London: G. Bell and Sons, 1903), pp. 135–50. See, for example, the entries of 31 March, 19 and 26 May and 6 June 1832: ‘Sketched my dear friend’s face this morning’; ‘Took a drawing lesson on the most interesting subject that ever employed my pencil’; ‘ordered a frame for my picture at Cooper’s, Piccadilly’; ‘I ventured to leave [with Miss Brown] the likeness of my beloved K’. Eliza Field Diary, Peter Jones fonds. Field diary, 9 June 1832, 14 February 1833. See Field diary, 14, 15 and 19 February 1833. Field considered her nine separate sittings to Gush to be an ‘unpleasant ordeal’. Both miniatures are now lost. Peter Jones to Eliza Field Jones, 4, 12, 14 and 16 November 1845, Peter Jones fonds. My thanks to Donald Smith for pointing this out. Jones: Life, p. 305. The image appears in the June 1833 volume. Jones was ‘highly pleased’ with the 300 prints he received to circulate in Canada. Jones: Life, p. 356. Smith: Sacred Feathers, p. 104. See Marcia Pointon, ‘‘‘Surrounded with Brilliants”: Miniature Portraits in Eighteenthcentury England’, Art Bulletin 83/1 (March 2001), pp. 62–3. Smith: Sacred Feathers, p. 104. Smith: Sacred Feathers, p. 139. Smith: Sacred Feathers, pp. 119, 156, 43, 154–5. Copy of an address of the Chiefs at Lake Huron to the Chieftans of England, 17 February 1831, delivered to King William IV by Peter Jones, Peter Jones fonds. Peter Jones to Eliza Field Jones, 29 October 1845, Peter Jones fonds. Cited in full the passage offers further reason to believe that the 1832 miniature might well reflect Jones’s

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own preferred self-presentation: the substitution in the copy of a white collar for the black neck treatment of the original. ‘I think that by this time you must be convinced that there is nothing like white divinity for the neck of your swarthy husband’, Jones wrote to his wife. ‘I was hard at work yesterday begging, but as I had on my black stock I only received £7.’ J. McE. Murray, ‘John Norton’, Ontario Historical Society Papers and Records 37 (1945), p. 16. Willig: Restoring the Chain, p. 165. See Carl Benn, ‘Missed Opportunities and the Problem of Mohawk Chief John Norton’s Cherokee Ancestry’, Ethnohistory 59/2 (2012), pp. 261– 91. Willig: Restoring the Chain, p. 251. Fulford: Romantic Indians, pp. 220–22. Augustus Jones to Peter Jones, 30 March 1838, Peter Jones fonds. Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1993) passim, especially pp. 44, 65–66. Pointon: ‘Surrounded with Brilliants’, p. 63. Pointon: ‘Surrounded with Brilliants’, p. 68. Douglas Robinson, Translation and Empire (Manchester, University of Manchester Press, 1997), p. 10. Vicente Rafael, Contracting Colonialism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988), p. 210, cited in Robinson: Translation and Empire, p. 5. Gayatri Spivak, ‘The Politics of Translation’, in Lawrence Venuti (ed.), Translation Studies Reader (London: Routledge, 2000), p. 400. Willig: Restoring the Chain of Friendship, p. 164. On the accuracy of Norton’s claim to Cherokee parentage and the validity of his Mohawk chieftanship, see Benn: ‘Missed Opportunities’, pp. 261–91. On the history of Kaswentha, see Paul Williams and Curtis Nelson, ‘Kaswentha’, For Seven Generations: An Information Legacy of the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples, CDROM (Ottawa: Libraxus, 1997). For an analysis of Kaswentha in regard to contemporary constitutional politics, see Alan Cairns, Citizens Plus: Aboriginal Peoples and the Canadian State (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2000). There is no ‘official’ version of Kaswentha, or the Great Law of Peace; this translation of the wampum is by Onondaga subchief and Six Nations elder Huron Miller, and appears in the publication of the Native American Centre for the Living Arts, Turtle 1/4 (Winter 1980), p. 5.

Chapter 3: The ‘Irish Holocaust’ 1 Catherine Marshall, quoted in the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Representations of the Famine at the Irish Museum of Modern Art (Dublin: Irish Museum of Modern Art, 1998), press release. 2 R. Dudley Edwards and T. Desmond Williams (eds), The Great Famine: Studies in Irish History, 1845–52 (Dublin: Irish Committee of Historical Sciences by Browne and Nolan, 1956). For an account of the gestation of this volume see Cormac Ó Gráda, ‘Making History in Ireland in the 1940s and 1950s: The Saga of The Great Famine’, Irish Review Spring/Summer, 12 (1992), pp. 87–107. 3 Writing on the perception of 1940s historians’ ‘silence’ on the Famine, UCC historian Joe Lee has pointed out what may be an obvious but often overlooked fact: the very small number of university historians actually working on Irish subjects at the time. J.J. Lee, ‘150 Years: The Famine’, Irish Independent, 19 August 1995.

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4 Interview with Avril Doyle (former Chair, Famine Commemoration Committee), Wexford, Co. Wexford, 7 August 2007. Doyle acted as chairperson of the government’s official 150th anniversary Famine Commemoration Committee. 5 See Dáil Éireann Debates, Committee on Finance, Vote 72 – Alleviation of Distress (4 July 1947). 6 Mary Daly and Margaret O’Callaghan (eds), 1916 in 1966: Commemorating the Easter Rising (Dublin: Royal Irish Academy, 2007). 7 Cormac Ó Gráda, ‘After the Famine Fever’, The Irish Times, 19 May 2001. 8 For details of the commemorative activities see National Famine Commemoration Committee, Ireland’s Famine: Commemoration and Aawareness (Dublin: Famine Commemoration Committee, 1995); National Famine Commemoration Committee, Directory of Commemorative Events (Department of the Taoiseach, 1995); Don Mullan (ed.), A Glimmer of Light: an Overview of Great Hunger Commemorative Events in Ireland and Throughout the World (Dublin: Concern Worldwide, 1995). See also Peter Gray, ‘Memory and Commemoration of the Great Irish Famine’, in Peter Gray and Kendrick Oliver (eds), The Memory of Catastrophe (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004), pp. 46– 64. 9 Kerby Miller and Patricia Mulholland Miller, Journey of Hope: The Story of Irish Immigration to America (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 2001). 10 Laura Wilson, How I Survived the Irish Famine (Dublin: Gill & Macmillan 2000). 11 The makers of the dolls, the Crolly Doll Factory of Donegal, currently offers ‘Kathleen, the Tattie Hoker’ Famine doll for a more reasonable €100. 12 Christopher Morash, Writing the Irish Famine (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), pp. 2–3. See also Christopher Morash, ‘Spectres of the Famine’, Irish Review Winter, 17–18 (1995/96) pp. 74–79; Christopher Morash, ‘Making Memories: the Literature of the Irish Famine’, in Patrick O’Sullivan (ed.), The Meaning of the Famine (London and Washington: Leicester University Press, 1997) pp. 40­ –56; Chris Morash, ‘Famine/Holocaust: Fragmented Bodies’, Eire-Ireland 32, Spring (1997), pp. 136–50. 13 Joep Leerssen, ‘Monument and Trauma: Varieties of Remembrance’, in Ian McBride (ed.), History and Memory in Modern Ireland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 215–20. 14 R.F. Foster, The Irish Story: Telling Tales and Making it up in Ireland (London: Allen Lane and the Penguin Press, 2001), p. xx. 15 Mary Robinson, ‘Cherishing the Irish Diaspora’: address to the Houses of Oireachtas on a Matter of Public Importance, 2 February 1995 (Dublin). 16 Foster: The Irish Story, pp. 32–33. 17 Peter Gray and Kendrick Oliver, ‘The Memory of Catastrophe’, History Today, 51/2, February (2001), p. 13. 18 Ruth Leys’ work in particular has yielded significant influence in her strident critique of the variations of trauma theory operative within psychology and other disciplines (especially literature and cultural studies). LaCapra has similarly sought to explore the origins and dominance of traumatic analysis, particularly within literature. Ruth Leys, Trauma: A Genealogy (Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press, 2000); Dominick LaCapra, Representing the Holocaust: History, Theory, Trauma (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994); Dominick LaCapra, Writing History, Writing Trauma (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001). 19 Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996); Marianne Hirsch, Family Frames: Photography, Narrative, and Postmemory (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997). The amenity of trauma

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theory to issues of representation has ensured its popularity in recent art historical writing as well: see Lisa Saltzman and Eric Rosenberg (eds), Trauma and Visuality in Modernity (Hanover: Dartmouth College Press, 2006). 20 Hirsch: Family Frames, p. 22. 21 The symbolism and inscription of the Buffalo monument was imitated by another New York Famine memorial project, located in Olean, Cattaraugus County (2000). 22 Scott Brewster and Virginia Crossman, ‘Re-writing the Famine: Witnessing in Crisis’, in Scott Brewster et al. (eds), Ireland in Proximity: History, Genre, Space (London and New York: Routledge, 1999), p. 53. Joep Leerssen similarly fuses trauma theory and Irish collective memory, seeking to find in monumental examples evidence of Freudian traumatic symptomology: Leerssen: ‘Monument and Trauma:’, pp. 215–20. See also Geraldine Moane, who analyses Famine memory through the lens of ‘survivor guilt’ and transgenerational trauma: Geraldine Moane, ‘Colonialism and the Celtic Tiger: Legacies of History and the Quest for Vision’, in Peadar Kirby, Luke Gibbons, and Michael Cronin (eds.), Reinventing Ireland: Culture, Society and the Global Economy (London: Pluto Press, 2002), pp. 109–23. 23 Niall Ó Ciosáin, ‘Was There “Silence” about the Famine?’, Irish Studies Review 13 (1995), p. 10. Ó Ciosáin has strenuously critiqued (through examinations of folklore) both the assumption that Famine memory lay dormant up until the ‘recovery exercises’ of the 1990s and the modern view that the Famine was an intensely culturally cataclysmic or ‘traumatic’ event: Niall Ó Ciosáin, ‘Famine Memory and the Popular Representation of Scarcity’, in Ian McBride (ed.), History and Memory in Modern Ireland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). 24 Ó Ciosáin: ‘Was There “Silence” about the Famine?’, p. 7. 25 Cormac Ó Gráda, An Drochshaol: Bealoideas agus Amhrain (Dublin: Coiscéim, 1994); Morash: Writing the Irish Famine; Ó Ciosáin: ‘Was There “Silence” about the Famine?’; Morash: ‘Spectres of the Famine’; Carmel Quinlan: ‘“A Punishment from God”: The Famine in the Centenary Folklore Questionnaire’. Irish Review 19 Spring/Summer (1996), pp. 68–86; Patricia Lysaght, ‘Perspectives on Women during the Great Irish Famine’, Bealoideas: Journal of the Folklore of Ireland Society 64–65 (1996/97), pp. 63–130. 26 Foster: The Irish Story; Edna Longley: ‘Northern Ireland: Commemoration, Elegy, Forgetting’, in Ian McBride (ed.), History and Memory in Modern Ireland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 223–53; Cormac Ó Gráda, ‘Satisfying a Great Hunger for Guilt and Self-pity’. Sunday Tribune, 15 May 1994; Fintan O’Toole, ‘The Great and Good Join Famine Roll-call’, The Irish Times (Dublin), 28 October 1998. 27 David Lloyd, Irish Time: Temporalities of Modernity (Dublin: Field Day, 2008), pp. 25–29. 28 Stuart McLean, The Event and its Terrors: Ireland, Famine, Modernity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), p. 156. 29 Katrina Goldstone, ‘Thanks for the Memory’, The Irish Times, 21 January 1998. 30 Dáil Éireann Debates, Questions, Oral Answers: Great Famine Commemoration (21 June 1995). 31 Dáil Éireann Debates, 150th Anniversary of the Famine: Statements (5 October 1995). 32 Tom Hayden (ed.), Irish Hunger: Personal Reflections on the Legacy of the Famine (Boulder/ Dublin: Roberts Rinehart Publishers/Wolfhound Press, 1997). The heavily sentimental and psychoanalytically-inflected contributions to this volume received stringent criticism from Longley: ‘The incidence of “trauma” and “repression” in Irish Hunger confirms the responsibility of Irish-American weltschmerz for introducing psycho-babble, as well as Riverdance, into the theatre of Irish memory. Many contributors – including some Irish writers – evince a kind of false memory syndrome by free-associating upon what they yet

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agree to be “silence”.’ Longley: ‘Northern Ireland: Commemoration, Elegy, Forgetting’, p. 232. 33 Carolyn Ramsay, ‘The Need to Feed’, in Tom Hayden (ed.), Irish Hunger: Personal Reflections on the Legacy of the Famine (Boulder/Dublin: Roberts Rinehart Publishers/Wolfhound Press, 1997), pp. 137–42. 34 Tom Hayden, ‘The Famine of Feeling’, in Hayden: Irish Hunger, p. 290. 35 Andreas Huyssen, Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), pp. 14–5. 36 Kenny: ‘A Nightmare Revisited’, pp. 189–90. 37 Terry Eagleton, Heathcliff and the Great Hunger: Studies in Irish Culture (London and New York: Verso, 1995). 38 Deborah Peck, Silent Hunger. The Psychological Impact of the Great Irish Hunger: An Gorta Mor (1845–1852) (Massachusetts School of Professional Psychology, 2000). 39 These monuments have been erected thus far on private land: [IR.09]. 40 Committee president Jim Coyne in interview: Art Carey, ‘In Sculpture, the Irish Saga’, Philadelphia Enquirer (Philadelphia), 17 October 2002. 41 Thomas J. Archdeacon, ‘The Irish Famine in American School Curricula’, Eire-Ireland 37, Spring/Summer (2002), pp. 130–52; Maureen Murphy and Alan Singer, ‘New York State’s “Great Irish Famine Curriculum”: A Report’. Eire-Ireland 37, Spring/Summer (2002), pp. 109–18; James V. Mullin, ‘The New Jersey Famine Curriculum: A Report’. Eire-Ireland 37, Spring/Summer (2002), pp. 119–29. Similar curricula have now been proposed in 15 states, although rates of adoption vary. 42 David Sapsted, ‘British “Genocide” is Theme of NY Parade’, Irish Independent, 12 December 1996. 43 Avril Doyle, Dáil Éireann Debates, Adjournment Debate: Great Famine Commemoration (19 December 1996). 44 Doyle, Dáil Éireann Debates 45 Interview with Doyle. 46 The contrast between Mary Robinson’s remarks at the unveiling of the Cambridge Famine memorial and those made by the attendant crowd illustrate a common clash: Tom McNiff, ‘President Unveils America’s Memorial to Famine Victims’, Irish Independent, 24 July 1997. Genocidal references from official Irish governmental representatives at commemorative unveilings across the diaspora are rare; more commonly such views have been voiced by local community leaders or commentators, as in the dedication of the Ennistymon Famine memorial in 1995 which saw Edward Wallace (President of the Ancient Order of Hibernians) referring to the famine as a ‘genocide’: ‘Hibernians Remember Million Victims of the Great Famine’, The Irish Times, 21 August 1995. 47 John Waters, ‘Troubled People,’ in Haydon: Irish Hunger, pp. 103–4. 48 Huyssen, Present Pasts, p. 100. 49 James Young, The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993); James Young (ed.), The Art of Memory: Holocaust Memorials in History (New York/London: Prestel/Thames and Hudson, 1994). 50 As an interesting comparative example, a similar gap has appeared between the ‘official’ finalists in the 11 September memorial competition (none of which have any figurative element and all of which rely on symbols of light, darkness, inversions, etc.), and the little-known but numerous small community-led memorials in outer New York and New Jersey which eschew any notion of the spare or the minimal, adopting instead heroic symbols of America (firefighters, eagles), recreating the spectacle of the event (burning

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towers), or reifying artefactual remains of the twin towers. See also Erika Doss, Memorial Mania: Public Feeling in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010). Text from interpretative brochure provided on site (2007). Margaret Kelleher, The Feminization of Famine: Expressions of the Inexpressible? (Cork: Cork University Press, 1997). Kelleher: The Feminization of Famine, p. 146. Thomas P. Salmon, quoted on the commemorative committee’s website (last accessed 9 September 2012). Thomas P. Salmon, quoted on the commemorative committee’s website . Goodacre, quoted on website: Galleria Silecchia, Glenna Goodacre: American Bronze Sculptor, http://www.galleriasilecchia.com/Goodacre/bio.html (last accessed 9 September 2012). Joanne Ditmer, ‘An Gorta Mor Massive Sculpture Takes Shape at Loveland Foundry’, The Denver Post (Denver), 14 March 2002. Glenna Goodacre (artist), telephone interview, 28 February 2007. Interview with John Donovan (President, Irish Memorial Inc.), Philadelphia, PA, 15 June 2005. Interview, Goodacre. Ó Gráda: ‘Satisfying a Great Hunger for Guilt and Self-pity’. Kenny: ‘A Nightmare Revisited,’ p. 190. J.J. Long, ‘Monika Maron’s Pawels Briefe: Photography, Narrative, and the Claims of Postmemory’, in Anne Fuchs, Mary Cosgrove, and George Grote (eds), German Memory Contests: The Quest for Identity in Literature, Film, and Discourse since 1990 (Rochester: Camden House, 2006), pp. 149–50. Long: ‘Monika Maron’s Pawels Briefe’, pp. 149–50. Brewster and Crossman: ‘Re-writing the Famine: Witnessing in Crisis’, p. 45. Nuala O Faolain, ‘Black Year When Death Brought the Country to its Knees’, The Irish Times, 20 January 1997. This chapter is an early version of a chapter that will appear in my book Commemorating the Irish Famine: Memory and the Monument (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2013).

Chapter 4: Courbet’s Trauerspiel

1 Gustave Courbet, ‘Letter from Courbet to Champfleury, Ornans, November–December, 1854’, in Hélène Toussaint, ‘The Dossier on “The Studio” by Courbet’, in H. Toussaint et al. Gustave Courbet (1819–1877) (London: Royal Academy, 1977), pp. 249–80; Petra ten-Doesschate Chu (ed. and trans.), ‘G. Courbet, To CHAMPFLEURY, Ornans Nov–Dec 1854’, Letters of Gustave Courbet (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), nos 54–58. Letter held in Musée d’Orsay inv. 89083. 2 Toussaint: Gustave Courbet (1819–1877), p. 258. 3 Charles Baudelaire, ‘The Exposition Universelle’, in Art in Paris, 1845–62. Salons and Other Exhibitions. Reviewed by Charles Baudelaire, trans. and ed. Jonathan Mayne (London: Phaidon, 1965), pp. 131–32. 4 Walter Benjamin, Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (London and New York: Verso, 1985). This edition first published in London by New Left Books, 1977. First published German text: Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1963), written c.1916–25. 5 Benjamin: Origin of German Tragic Drama, pp. 177–78 (my emphasis).

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6 Joel Fineman, ‘The Structure of Allegorical Desire’, October 12 (Spring 1980), pp. 47– 66. Fineman writes: ‘[B]asing itself on its own critical reflection, desire becomes in psychoanalysis, as in allegory, both a theme and a structuring principle, and its own psychology, its theory of the human, thus becomes … the allegory of love, while its metapsychology, its theory of itself, becomes the allegory of allegory.’ 7 Fineman: ‘The Structure of Allegorical Desire’, quotes Northrop Frye: ‘It is not often realized that all commentary is allegorical interpretation, an attaching of ideas to the structure of poetic imagery’ (p. 47). 8 Petra ten-Doesschate Chu (ed.), Courbet in Perspective (Upper Saddle River: Prentice-Hall, 1977), p. 3. 9 T.J. Clark, Image of the People: Gustave Courbet and the 1848 Revolution (London: Thames & Hudson, 1973), p. 24. 10 Gustave Courbet, ‘Letter from Courbet to Alfred Bruyas, Ornans, November-December 1854’, in Chu: Letters of Gustave Courbet (1992), nos 54–57. In this letter, written at the same time as the one to Champfleury, Courbet expresses his feelings to his friend and patron, Alfred Bruyas, also depicted in The Painter’s Studio. Here Courbet realizes that his pose as political buffoon hides his heartbreak; his ‘wife’ has left taking his child with plans to marry another. 11 Gerstle Mack, Gustave Courbet, trans. Alfred A. Knopf (Westport: Greenwood, 1970), p. 86. First published New York: Alfred Knopf Inc., 1951. Courbet, it is documented, visits Dieppe in September 1852, though no details are recorded. 12 Jack Lindsay, Gustave Courbet: His Life and Art (Bath: Adams & Dart, 1973), pp. 88–89. 13 Lindsay, Gustave Courbet, p. 344, n. 37 (Mack, Gustave Courbet; Georges Riat, Gustave Courbet, Peintre (Paris: H. Floury, 1906)). See also Robert Fernier, Gustave Courbet, intro. R Huyghe (London: Pall Mall Press, 1969), p. 70; Robert Fernier, Courbet. Tome I: 1819–1865, Tome II: 1866–1877 (Paris: La bibliothèque des Arts, 1977). 14 Alan Bowness, in Toussaint et al.: Gustave Courbet, p. 87. Ref: ‘Lovers in the Country’. Bowness wrote the commentary in the body of the catalogue in which Toussaint’s article was published. 15 Toussaint et al.: Gustave Courbet (1819–1877), p. 268. 16 Toussaint et al.: Gustave Courbet (1819–1877), p. 268. 17 Courbet quoted in Toussaint et al.: Gustave Courbet (1819–1877), Toussaint p. 269. 18 Courbet quoted in Toussaint et al.: Gustave Courbet (1819–1877), Toussaint p. 269. 19 Toussaint et al.: Gustave Courbet (1819–1877), pp. 254–55. 20 Toussaint et al.: Gustave Courbet (1819–1877), pp. 254–55. The donors were grandchildren of M. and Mme Defossés who owned The Painter’s Studio, 1897–1919, and hung it as a backdrop in the amateur theatre at their home. Toussaint also footnotes Robert Fernier, ‘Courbet avait un Fils’, Amis Gustave Courbet, Bulletin no. 10 (1951), pp. 1–7, for the information on Virginie and Désiré Binet. 21 René Huyghe, Germain Bazin and Hélène Jean Adhémar, Courbet. L’Atelier du peintre allégorie réelle, 1855, Monographies des peintres du Musée du Louvre (Paris: Éditions des Musées Nationaux, 1944), footnote: ‘Malgré cela il faut qu’il soit fait … Je vous embrasse de cœur, Gustave Courbet.’ 22 E. Gros-Kost, Gustave Courbet. Souvenirs intimes (Paris: Derveaux, 1880). Ref: Courbet’s son, quoted in Mack: Gustave Courbet, p. 25 23 Mack: Gustave Courbet, p. 82. Ref: see also Riat: Gustave Courbet, Peintre, and Robert Fernier, ‘Courbet avait un Fils’, Amis Gustave Courbet, Bulletin no. 10 (1951), pp. 1–7. 24 Toussaint et al.: Gustave Courbet (1819–1877), p. 268: ‘Virginie’s son was born in 1847; his father used to teach him to paint, and in an outburst of paternal pride he once declared:

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“there is nothing more I can show him”. We suggest that the son is to be identified with the small boy, not mentioned [*] in the letter, who sprawls on the ground at Mme. Sabatier’s feet and is drawing a picture of a man. The studio, let us not forget, is a resumé of seven years of Courbet’s “artistic and moral life”.’ Lindsay: Gustave Courbet, p. 57. Benjamin: Origin of German Tragic Drama, pp. 177–78. Alan Bowness, ‘Courbet’s Proudhon’, Burlington Magazine 120, March (1978), pp. 123–29; 5th Burlington Magazine Lecture delivered on 20 February, 1978. James H. Rubin, Courbet (London: Phaidon, 1997), p. 165. Griselda Pollock, ‘Jeanne’, in Differencing the Canon: Feminist Desire and the Writing of Art’s Histories (London: Routledge, 1999), pp. 261–77; on the term ‘mistress’, p. 262. Édouard Houssaye, L’Artiste, 15 April (1855). Source: Huyghe. et al., p. 23. Mack: Gustave Courbet, p. 130. Werner Hoffman, ‘The Painter’s Studio: Its Place in Nineteenth-Century Art’, in Petra ten-Doesschate Chu: Courbet in Perspective, p. 113. First published in W. Hoffman, The Earthly Paradise: Art in the Nineteenth-Century (New York: George Baziller, 1961). Benjamin: Origin of German Tragic Drama, pp. 177–78. Rubin: Courbet, p. 140. Rubin: Courbet, p. 179. Rubin: Courbet, p. 216. Kenneth Clark, The Nude (Penguin: Harmondsworth, 1956), p. 151. Clark: The Nude, p. 151. Mack: Gustave Courbet, p. 113. Huyghe et al.: Courbet. L’Atelier du peintre allégorie réelle, 1855, pp. 11–12. Jules-Antoine Castagnary, ‘A Biography of Courbet’ (c. 1868), in Chu: Courbet in Perspective, pp. 6–22. Extracts from J.A. Castagnary, ‘Fragments d’un livre sur Courbet’, Gazette des Beaux-Arts, 4 période, no. 5 (1911), pp. 5–20; no. 6 (1911), pp. 488–97; no. 7 (1912), pp. 19–29. Eugène Delacroix, The Journal of Delacroix (New York: Crown, 1948), entry for 3 August 1855. Clark: The Nude, p. 151. Clark: The Nude, p. 151. Hoffman: ‘The Painter’s Studio’, pp. 117–18. G. Courbet, Letter To Alfred BRUYAS, Ornans Jan 1854, in Chu: Letters of Gustave Courbet, nos 54–7. Aaron Scharf, Art and Photography (London and Middlesex: Penguin, 1968, 1974), p. 131. ‘This photograph is probably one of a series taken by Vallou de Villeneuve in 1853 and 1854. The pose, with the drapery held to the breast, is close to that of the painting and the features of the head, the hair style and the characteristic proportions of the body in both painting an photograph are with little doubt those of the same model.’ Rubin: Courbet, p. 138. Chu: Letters of Gustave Courbet, nos 54–7. Urlich Finks (ed.), French Nineteenth-Century Painting and Literature (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1972), p. 120. Elizabeth Ann McCauley, Industrial Madness: Commercial Photography in Paris 1848–1871 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1994), p. 149. McCauley: Industrial Madness, p. 176. Sylvie de Decker Heftler, ‘Le Nu photographique. Art impur, art réaliste’, Photographies 6 (1984), p. 63 (my translation). Some of these complex mises-en-scènes of the artist’s studio,

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charged with stage props and symbols, are regarded by de Decker Heftler more as curios than convincing representations, finding those ‘deposited at the Bibliothèque nationale, without doubt very hard to believe …’. But the pioneer of this ‘dubious enterprise’, was B. Braquehais. Monsieur Dagen (supervisor), ‘Peinture/Photo/Installation’, in Photographies et peinture, de Courbet à Picasso, University of Paris 1 Pantheon-Sorbonne (Tarek scénariste BD: 1999– 2000), pp. 11–14 (last accessed January 2011). Huyghe et al.: Courbet. L’Atelier du peintre allégorie réelle, 1855, pp. 17–18 (my translation). Benjamin: Origin of German Tragic Drama, p. 91. ‘Gustave Jean Désiré COURBET, 10/06/1819 Ornans, + 21/12/1877 La-Tour-De-Peiz (x) Thèrèse Adélaïde Virginie BINET (1808–1865) dont: Désiré Alfred Emile BINET ° 15/09/1847 + 05/07/1872 Dieppe’ (last accessed 3 February 2011). Fernier: Courbet. Tome I: 1819–1865; Fernier: Gustave Courbet.

Chapter 5: Astonishing Marine Living 1 See Kodwo Eshun, More Brilliant Than The Sun: Adventures in Sonic Fiction (London, Quartet Books, 1998), p. 84. 2 ‘Exhibition Ellen Gallagher Ichthyosaurus. Curated by James Putnam, 28 July–25 September 2005 at the Freud Museum (accessed 1 March 2007). 3 Amna Malik, ‘Patterning Memory. Ellen Gallagher’s Ichthyosaurus at the Freud Museum’, Wasafiri 21/3 (2006), pp. 29–39, p. 29. 4 Said in Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994) p. 73. 5 In The Question of Lay Analysis, Freud infamously describes the sexual life of the adult female as a ‘dark continent’ for psychology, extending the lack of knowledge of the sexual life of little girls into adult womanhood. See Sigmund Freud, The Question of Lay Analysis [1926] (London: Barnard and Westwood, 1947), p. 35. 6 See Lola Young, ‘“Race”, Identity and Cultural Criticism’, in Kum Kum Bhavnani (ed.), Oxford Readings in Feminism. Feminism and ‘Race’ (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 171–83, p. 172. 7 Mary Ann Doane, ‘Dark Continents; Epistemologies of Racial and Sexual Difference in Psychoanalysis and the Cinema’, in Stuart Hall and Jessica Evans (eds), Visual Culture. The Reader (London: Sage, 2003), pp. 448–56, p. 450. 8 Eurocentric raciology was, as Hannah Arendt details, initially an intra-European invention. See Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism [1951] (London: Harvest, 1976). 9 Colette Guillaumin, Racism, Sexism, Power and Ideology (London: Routledge, 1995), p. 35. 10 Both class and ‘race’ can be read to intensify sexual difference in Lacan’s writings. Consider the compromised beauty and tarnished probity in his ‘Negress adorned for the wedding and the poor woman ready for the auction block’, taken from the Shulamite’s ‘I am black, but comely’ and the adage ‘poor, but honest’. See Jacques Lacan, Écrits. A Selection (London: Tavistock, 1977) p. 153. The term ‘but’ exercises a delay so that black beauty and honesty are made into an insistence, or alternatively, it qualifies the compromised nature of black beauty and of the honesty of the poor, or it could mark exceptional instances. In any case, it acknowledges the determining operations of class and racialization on linguistic usage in class-variegated, racializing, postcolonial societies. 11 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality I (London: Penguin, 1978), pp. 119, 150.

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12 Judith Butler, The Psychic Life of Power. Theories in Subjection (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), p. 104. 13 Hortense J. Spillers, ‘“All The Things You Could Be by Now, If Sigmund Freud’s Wife Was Your Mother”. Psychoanalysis and Race’, in Elisabeth Abel, Barbara Christian and Helene Moglen (eds), Female Subjects in Black and White (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), pp. 135–58, p. 136. 14 Spillers: ‘All The Things’, p. 150. 15 Spillers: ‘All The Things’, p. 135. 16 Kalpana Seshadri-Crooks, Desiring Whiteness. A Lacanian Analysis of Race (London: Routledge, 2000), p. 44. 17 Seshadri-Crooks: Desiring Whiteness, p. 21. 18 Nowhere in ‘The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious or Reason since Freud’ does he indicate a category of master signifier. See Lacan: Écrits. 19 Elisabeth Grosz, Jacques Lacan. A Feminist Introduction (London: Routledge, 1990) p. 96. ‘Repression’ would seem to offer a potential model for thinking of a racial signifier, where certain visual signifiers are isolated and reduced to the position of signifieds, to restrict their associative freedom (for a discussion of Repression see Grosz: Jacques Lacan, p. 100. 20 Jean Walton, ‘Re-Placing Race in (White) Psychoanalytic Discourse. Founding Narratives of Feminism’, in Elisabeth Abel, Barbara Christian and Helene Moglen (eds), Female Subjects in Black and White (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), pp. 223–51, p. 227. 21 Freud’s view of so-called primitive culture is in line with the biases of Western imperialist thought. Australian Aboriginals are ‘poor, naked cannibals’ and are of interest for the study of the self by supposedly revealing an early stage of the development of Europeans, as though preserved in aspic. See Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo [1918] (London: Routledge, 2001), pp. 1–2. 22 Sander L. Gilman, Freud, Race and Gender (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), p. 38. Of his boyhood Freud remarked, ‘I began to understand what it meant to belong to an alien race, and anti-Semitic feelings among the other boys warned me that I must take up a definite position’, Freud in Gilman: Freud, Race and Gender, p. 16. While we might now interpret this operation as, following Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, a form of strategic essentialism, his view of race was more of a shifting and ambivalent questioning and acceptance, in tandem with an awareness of its historicity. 23 Gilman: Freud, Race and Gender, p. 36. 24 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’, in Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (eds), Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (London: Macmillan Education, 1988), pp. 271–313, p. 296. 25 Spillers: ‘All The Things’, p. 145. 26 In Fanon’s anti-colonial manifesto, The Wretched of the Earth, Kelly Oliver notes that colonization takes a physical manifestation whereby emotional sensitivity resides like an open sore on the racialized skin. As the psyche flinches from the caustic agent, the colonized is said to be a hysterical type. Boundaries between body and mind are blurred as the violence of the material world circulates into the psyche and the body. Indeed, Fanon speculates that racism can cause hormonal changes in its victims. See Kelly Oliver, ‘The Good Infection’, Parallax 11/3 (2005), pp. 87–98, p. 92. In both Black Skin, White Masks and The Wretched of the Earth, the point of white identification for blacks is the power that whiteness affords, thus Fanon closes the gap between base and superstructure. In The Wretched of the Earth he explains, ‘You are rich because you are white, you are white because

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you are rich … In the colonies, the economic substructure is also a superstructure’. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (London: Penguin, 2001), p. 31. 27 Lola Young, ‘Missing Persons. Fantasising Black Women in “Black Skin, White Masks”’, in Alan Read (ed.), The Fact of Blackness. Frantz Fanon and Visual Representation (London: ICA, 1996), pp. 86–101, p. 95. 28 Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (New York: Grove Press, 1967). 29 Capécia in Fanon: Black Skin, p. 42 30 Fanon: Black Skin, p. 57. 31 Fanon: Black Skin, p. 60. Fanon argues that when the black (Antillean) man is no longer limited to his own environment, he is exposed to the weight of his ‘blackness’. Most traumatically, this is when he sets foot in France and hears the white child’s infamous announcement, or sits amongst the white audience of a Tarzan film in a French cinema. Yet since Fanon positions the black man as the object of the black woman’s affective erethism both in the Antilles and in the diaspora, before he ever gets to Europe, he has only to turn to his treacherous feminine compatriot to learn of the burden of ‘blackness’. ‘The race must be whitened; every woman in Martinique knows this, says it, repeats it’, Fanon, Black Skin, p. 47. 32 Fanon: Black Skin, pp. 51, 62. 33 Young: ‘Missing Persons’, p. 97. 34 In the 1974 film Sun Ra. Space is the Place, directed by John Coney, Sun Ra and his Intergalactic Solar Arkestra return to Oakland, California. They have spent some years searching outer space for a suitable planet for black people in a music-powered space ship. Sun Ra created not so much a transnational as a transhistorical galactic autobiography by adopting the name and persona of Ra, the Egyptian Sun God, and claiming to be of an alien angelic race from Saturn. He had an extensive library of Egyptology, world theology and race theory, which suffused his musical avant-garde of the 1950s and 1960s with its politics and philosophy and also reflected a wider period in which African American historians were linking dynastic Egyptian culture with those of black Africa. 35 Gallagher in Ichthyosaurus: A Voyage in the Primeval Oceans and the Evolution of the Mind, flyer produced to accompany the exhibition (London: Freud Museum, 2005). 36 Paul Gilroy flags the appropriation of the diaspora concept by Pan-African politics and in black history from unacknowledged Jewish sources, while he pays homage to the role of Jewish thinkers in his conceptualization of a future of Black Atlantic cultural politics. See Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic. Modernity and Double Consciousness (London: Verso, 1993). 37 In Freud’s account, which recalls the murder of the primal father, the first Moses was an Egyptian prince who led the Hebrews out of Egypt but, tiring of his austere code, they eventually murdered him and repressed the memory of both the murder and monotheism. 38 Edward Said, Freud and the Non-European (London: Verso, 2003), pp. 43, 44, 51. 39 Said: Freud, p. 40. 40 James Joyce, Ulysses (London: Penguin, 1986), p. 411. 41 Griselda Pollock, ‘The Image in Psychoanalysis and the Archaeological Metaphor’, in Griselda Pollock (ed.), Psychoanalysis and the Image (MA: Oxford: Victoria: Blackwell, 2006), pp. 1–29, p. 6. 42 See Nicholas Mirzoeff, ‘Introduction. The Multiple Viewpoint: Diasporic Visual Cultures’, in Nicholas Mirzoeff (ed.), Diaspora and Visual Culture. Representing Africans and Jews (London; New York: Routledge, 2002), pp. 1–18, p. 2. 43 Doane: ‘Dark Continents’, p. 450. 44 Francette Pacteau, The Symptom of Beauty (London: Reaktion, 1994), p. 133.

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45 Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark. Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (London: Picador, 1992), p. 85. 46 Drexciya in Eshun: More Brilliant Than The Sun, p. 84. 47 Writing of a more generalized context, Stuart Hall contends that ‘race’ and ‘ethnicity’ need to be put under erasure. See Stuart Hall, ‘Conclusion. The Multi-cultural Question’, in Barnor Hesse (ed.), Un/settled Multiculturalisms. Diasporas, Entanglements, Transruptions (London: Zed Books, 2000), pp. 209–41, p. 209. 48 Freud: Totem, p. 180. 49 Freud: Totem, pp. 166, 180. 50 Seshadri-Crooks reminds us that in slave regimes in North America, enslaved women were ‘fair game’ for their owners. The master, like the father of Freud’s primal horde, could cohabit with slaves and breed upon the children produced by such unions. The racial symbolic intervened to override the incest taboo and present a selected view of the family, so that the progeny of the master bred upon slave women were precluded kinship within the family structure on the basis of racial dissimilarity. See Seshadri-Crooks: Desiring, p. 42. 51 Gallagher in Malik: ‘Patterning Memory’, p. 32. 52 Bracha L. Ettinger, ‘Wit(h)nessing Trauma and the Matrixial Gaze: From Phantasm to Trauma, from Phallic Structure to Matrixial Sphere’, Parallax 7/4 (2001), pp. 89–114, p. 90. 53 Ettinger: ‘Wit(h)nessing Trauma’, p. 103. 54 Caoimhín Mac Giolla Léith, Untitled Essay, Murmur: Ellen Gallagher (Edinburgh: Fruitmarket Gallery, 2004), n.p. 55 Beth Coleman, ‘Unmoored Beauty’, Ellen Gallagher. Blubber (New York: Gagosian Gallery 2001), n.p. 56 Judith Butler, Antigone’s Claim. Kinship Between Life and Death (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), pp. 22–23. 57 Butler: Antigone’s Claim, p. 24. 58 Jacques Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis. 1959–1960, Book VII (London: Routledge, 1992), p. 283. 59 Butler: Antigone’s Claim, p. 58. 60 Butler: Antigone’s Claim, p. 82.

Chapter 6: New York Transfixed 1 Aby M. Warburg, ‘Memories of a Journey through the Pueblo Region’ [unpublished notes] (1923) reproduced in Philippe-Alain Michaud, Aby Warburg and the Image in Motion, trans. Sophie Hawkes (New York: Zone Books, 2004), p. 313. 2 Michael Shulan, ‘Images of Democracy’ (last accessed 3 September 2006). 3 Shulan: ‘Images of Democracy’. 4 Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, trans. Eric Prenowitz (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), p. 4. 5 Freud’s key grappling with the problem of trauma appears in his 1920 essay ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’ (in Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings, ed. Adam Phillips, trans. John Reddick (London: Penguin, 2003), pp. 43–102). There is now an enormous field of ‘trauma studies’ which is comprised of psychiatrists and psychologists who study the impact of events which produce a series of symptoms known in the language of the DSM-V as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), as well as those who engage trauma

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primarily as a theoretical concept that affects representation, narration and memory. See, for instance: Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1996); and Jean Laplanche, Life and Death in Psychoanalysis, trans. Jeffery Mehlman (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1976) and Essays on Otherness (London: Routledge, 1999). Herman Rapaport, ‘Archive Trauma’, Diacritics 28/4 (Winter 1998), p. 76. Jean Baudrillard, The Spirit of Terrorism and Requiem for the Twin Towers, trans. Chris Turner (London: Verso, 2002), p. 4. In his book on the Rwandan genocide, Philip Gourevich describes a similar paradox involving traumatic disavowal and the deferred registration provided by the camera. He describes taking photographs, when visiting the memorial at Nyarubuye, of the skeletons that had been left where they fell because he was unsure whether he could really see what he was seeing while he saw it. Later he quotes Alexandre, a Greek journalist who witnessed a massacre at Kibeho, one of the refugee camps that housed both perpetrators and victims. Alexandre exclaims: ‘I experienced Kibeho as a movie. It was unreal. Only afterward, looking at my photographs – then it became real.’ We Wish to Inform you that Tomorrow We Will be Killed with our Families (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1998), pp. 19 and 196. Shoshana Felman, ‘Education and Crisis, or the Vicissitudes of Teaching’, in Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub (eds), Testimony: Crises of Witnessing Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History (New York: Routledge, 1992), pp. 1–56. One of the undeveloped questions here is about the affective difference between fear and terror – terms that I use somewhat interchangeably throughout the chapter. In ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’, Freud suggests that surprise is a key element of trauma – what he describes as ‘the fright’ experienced by the victim. To this end he distinguishes between the words ‘fright’, ‘dread’ and ‘fear’: ‘“Fear” represents a certain kind of inner state amounting to expectation of, and preparation for, danger of some kind, even though the nature of the danger may well be unknown. “Dread” requires a specific object of which we are afraid. “Fright,” however, emphasizes the element of surprise; it describes the state that possesses us when we find ourselves plunged into danger without being prepared for it. I do not believe that fear can engender traumatic neurosis; there is an element within fear that protects us against fright, and hence also against fright-induced neurosis’ (p. 51). Freud has railway accidents in mind (and perhaps the shell-shocked soldiers of the First World War). Certainly the events that fall under the metonym of 9/11 possess an element of surprise and therefore represent an instance of ‘fright’ rather than ‘fear’. Etymologically, ‘terror’ comes from the Latin terrorem, meaning great fear or dread. Keith Thomas offers an overview of the field in his introduction to A Cultural History of Gesture: From Antiquity to the Present Day, ed. Jan Bremmer and Herman Roodenburg (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991). I should note that ‘gesture’ is often reserved for those bodily expressions which are considered to be voluntary or wilful to some extent, while involuntary gesticulations such as laughing, crying, blushing and the like are usually referred to as ‘expressions’. Social historians, moreover, have shown that (voluntary) gesture is largely the product of social and cultural differences, scholars and scientists since Darwin have argued that those (involuntary) expressions pertaining to emotion are universal – shared not only among human communities around the globe but also with many non-human animals. In some respects, the present chapter is searching for a middle ground in this polarity by sketching a metapsychology of the specific (involuntary) gesture I call ‘transfixed’.

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12 Charles Darwin, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872), 3rd edn with commentaries by Paul Ekman (London: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 278. 13 See Ekman’s notes in Darwin: Expression, p. 302. 14 Darwin: Expression, p. 288 15 In fact, Darwin posits three principles to explain the nature of innate expressions: 1) ‘serviceable habit’, by which he meant that some expressions originated in movements useful to our progenitors and were adopted through natural selection; 2) ‘antithesis’, which means that some expressions are used because they visibly appear opposite from the opposite emotions; and 3) as a ‘direct action of the nervous system’, which is explained above. 16 Although he would rail at the thought, Darwin’s measured insistence upon our animal lineage is rather reminiscent of the popular social science of physiognomy – at least in his comparison of the facial forms (if not the character) of animals and man. 17 Peter Gay, Freud: A Life for Our Time (New York: W.W. Norton, 2006), p. 36. Freud mentions Darwin throughout his oeuvre and he raises the question of non-human psychology as late as ‘An Outline of Psychoanalysis’ (1940), in The Penguin Freud Reader, ed. Adam Phillips (London: Penguin, 2006), p. 4. 18 I owe my phrasing here to Susan Buck-Morss, ‘Aesthetics and Anasethetics: Walter Benjamin’s Artwork Essay Reconsidered’, October 62 (Autumn 1992), pp. 14–15. BuckMorss very briefly describes how ‘three aspects of the synaesthetic system – physical sensation, motor reaction, and psychical meaning – converge in signs and gestures comprising a mimetic language. What this language speaks is anything but the concept. Written on the body’s surface as a convergence between the impress of the external world and the express of subjective feeling, the language of this system threatens to betray the language of reason’. 19 There is some debate in the psychoanalytic literature about ‘unconscious affect’ as Freud describes it in his early metapsychology. Andre Green compactly describes the central problem as an issue of ‘how to make the unconscious beginnings of affective transmission conscious?’ (see ‘On Discriminating and Not-discriminating between Affect and Representation’, International Journal of Psychoanalysis 80 (1999), p. 285). And yet I think these nine photographs offer evidence of the way in which unconscious affect may be transmitted through pre-verbal, non-discursive forms such as gesture. 20 Sigmund Freud, ‘An Outline of Psychoanalysis’ (1940), in The Penguin Freud Reader: p. 13, emphasis added. 21 Joyce McDougall, Theaters of the Body: A Psychoanalytic Approach to Psychosomatic Illness (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1989). 22 Dora’s case can be found in ‘Fragment of an Analysis of Hysteria’ in The Psychology of Love, ed. Adam Phillips (London: Penguin, 2006), pp. 1–110. Elizabeth von R’s case is in James and Alix Strachey (eds and trans.), Studies on Hysteria (London: Penguin: 1991), pp. 202– 58. Bruno Walter writes of his own condition in Theme and Variations: An Autobiography, trans. James Galston (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1966). I should note that Darwin, too, recognized the body as a ‘conductor’ for emotion. Early in his book he include this remarkable, proto-psychoanalytic passage: ‘The most striking case, though a rare abnormal one, which can be adduced to the direct influence of the nervous system, when strongly affected, on the body, is the loss of colour in the hair, which has occasionally been observed after extreme terror or grief. One authentic instance has been recorded, in the case of a man brought out for execution in India, in which the change of colour was so rapid that it was perceptible to the eye’ (Darwin: Expressions, pp. 69–70).

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23 This classification of 9/11 as a ‘disaster’ (as opposed to terrorist assault) has been confirmed by verbal testimony. Mary Marshall Clark, who has conducted an oral history project with approximately four hundred individuals in New York City and the surrounding area, found that the Pearl Harbour analogy (offered by the media) was largely rejected: ‘The sinking of the Titanic was an analogy used far more frequently by many we interviewed, drawing people’s attention to the myth of invincibility, which was difficult to reject as a reality in both cases.’ See ‘The September 11, 2001, Oral History Narrative and Memory Project: A First Report’, The Journal of American History 89/2 (2002), pp. 569–79. 24 Baudrillard: The Spirit of Terrorism and Requiem for the Twin Towers, p. 4. 25 Walter Benjamin, ‘On the Mimetic Faculty’, in Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland and Gary Smith (eds), Selected Writings Volume 2, Part 2, 1931–1934, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge and London: The Belknap Press, 2005), p. 720. 26 Benjamin: ‘On the Mimetic Faculty’, p. 721. 27 The Concise Oxford English Dictionary, 8th edn, ed. R.E. Allen (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), p. 1296. 28 Felman: ‘Education and Crisis’, p. 2: emphasis in original. 29 Michihiko Hachiya, Hiroshima Diary: The Journal of a Japanese Physician August 6–September 30, 1945, Trans. Warner Wells (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1955), p. 1. 30 With the rise of the Nazis, the Warburg Institute moved to London where it was eventually incorporated in the University of London’s School of Advanced Study. See Fritz Saxl, ‘The History of Warburg’s Library’, in Ernst H. Gombrich, Aby Warburg: An Intellectual Biography (London: The Warburg Institute and University of London, 1970). 31 Some scholars argue that Warburg is the true inventor of the discipline of iconology, although Erwin Panofsky is usually cited as the founding father. These same scholars are quick to point out that iconology no longer means what it mean to Warburg in the German context of Kulturwissenschaft, and more pointedly, that Warburg’s project is fundamentally distinct from the positivist discipline of iconology that has developed in American art history departments through Panofsky’s influence. A short list of those scholars interested in recovering Warburg’s project include Giorgio Agamben, ‘Aby Warburg and the Nameless Science’, Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy, ed. and trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), pp. 89–103, George Didi-Huberman, L’image survivante: histoire de l’art et temps des fantômes selon Aby Warburg (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 2002), Philippe-Alain Michaud, Aby Warburg and the Image in Motion (New York: Zone, 2004) and Matthew Rampley, The Remembrance of Things Past: On Aby M. Warburg and Walter Benjamin (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2000). 32 This is Warburg’s phrase taken from 1912 lecture ‘Italian Art and International Astrology in Palazzo Schifanoia in Ferrara’, in The Renewal of Pagan Antiquity: Contributions to the Cultural History of the European Renaissance, trans. David Britt (Los Angeles: Getty Research Center, 1999), p. 585. He resuscitates the phrase a decade later in his ‘Notes for the Kreuzlingen Lecture on the Serpent Ritual’, p. 313. 33 Gertrude Bing, ‘A.M. Warburg’, Journal of Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 28 (1965), p. 310. 34 Warburg describes the ‘tragic scenes’ of funeral rites in ‘Francesco Sassetti’s Last Injunction to his Sons’ (1907), republished in The Renewal of Pagan Antiquity, p. 245. Gertrude Bing, Warburg’s assistant makes this connection more evident and reprints images not included with the original essay in ‘A.M. Warburg’, pp 306 and 310. Warburg’s unique practice of the comparative gaze would become more developed in his final project, the Mnemosyne Atlas (which remained unfinished at the time of his death in 1929). The Atlas – which has been described as a symphony, an assemblage of constellations, and a laboratory of the

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history of images – is the best example of unique Warburg’s style of Kulturwissenshaft. See Ernst Gombrich, Aby Warburg: An Intellectual Biography (London: The Warburg Institute, University of London, 1970) and Charlotte Schoell-Glass, ‘“Serious Issues”: The Last Plates of Warburg’s Picture Atlas Mnemosyne’, in Richard Woodfield (ed.), Art History as Cultural History: Warburg’s Projects (Amsterdam: G&B Arts International, 2001), pp. 183– 208. Aby Warburg, Images from the Region of the Pueblo Indians of North America, trans. Michael P. Steinberg (Ithaca: Cornel University Press, 1995), p. 38. Warburg: ‘Italian Art and International Astrology in Palazzo Schifanoia in Ferrara’, in The Renewal of Pagan Antiquity, p. 585. This phrasing follows from Barbara Hernstein Smith who defines narrative as ‘verbal acts consisting of someone telling someone else that something happened’. See ‘Narrative Versions, Narrative Theories’, in On Narrative, edited by W.J.T. Mitchell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), p. 228. Shulan: ‘Images of Democracy’.

Chapter 7: Dan Graham, Reality Television and the Vicissitudes of Surveillance 1 ‘Homes for America, Early 20th Century Possessable House to Quasi-Discrete Cell of “66”’, Arts Magazine 41/3 (December 1966–January 1967), pp. 21–22. 2 As cited in Dan Graham: Public/Private (Philadelphia: Moore College of Art and Design, 1993), p. 6. 3 See ‘Levittown, PA: Building the Suburban Dream’ (The State Museum of Pennsylvania, 2003). 4 In 1948, the DuMont Company advertised their new TVs with the slogan, ‘Your New Window on the World’. See Lynn Spigel, Make Room for Television: Television and the Family Ideal in Postwar America (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1992), p. 105. On Thomas Hutchinson’s book, Here is Television, Your Window on the World (1946), see Spigel, ‘The Suburban Home Companion: Television and the Neighborhood Ideal in Postwar America’, in Beatriz Colomina (ed.), Sexuality and Space (Princeton: Princeton Architectural Press, 1992), p. 188. 5 Dan Graham, ‘Mirrors and Signs’, Dan Graham Works, 1965–2000 (Dusseldorf: Richter Verlag, 2001), p. 179. 6 Anthony Vidler, The Architectural Uncanny: Essays in the Modern Unhomely (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), p. 221. 7 Dan Graham, ‘Public Space/Two Audiences (1976)’, Rock my Religion, Writings and Art Projects, 1965–1990, ed. Brian Wallis (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993), p. 190. Also see Graham: Dan Graham Works, pp. 172–74. 8 See Alexander Alberro, ‘Specters of Utopia’, in Dan Graham: Models to Projects, 1978–1995 (New York: Marian Goodman Gallery, 1996), p. 16. 9 For an excellent discussion of the dynamics at work in this piece, see Beatriz Colomina, ‘Double Exposure: Alteration to a Suburban House (1978)’, in Alex Kitnik (ed.), Dan Graham (London: Phaidon Press 2001), pp. 82–89. 10 For Graham’s views on An American Family see Graham: Dan Graham: Public/Private, pp. 6–7. On the history and production of the famous documentary see Jeffrey Ruoff, An American Family: A Televised Life (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2002). 11 Ruoff: An American Family, p. 27.

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12 Graham: Dan Graham: Public/Private, p. 7. 13 Graham: Dan Graham: Public/Private, p. 7. 14 Jonathan Bignell, Big Brother: Reality TV in the Twenty-first Century (London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), p. 5. 15 Michel Foucault, ‘The Eye of Power: A Conversation with Jean-Pierre Barou and Michelle Perrot’, in Thomas Y. Levin, Ursula Frohne, and Peter Weibel (eds), CTRL Space: Rhetorics of Surveillance from Bentham to Big Brother (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), p. 95. 16 Foucault: ‘The Eye of Power,’ p. 97. 17 John E. McGrath, Loving Big Brother: Performance, Privacy and Surveillance Space (London and New York: Routledge, 2004), p. 19. 18 Anita Biress and Heather Nunn, Reality TV: Realism and Revelation (London and New York: Wallflower Press, 2005), p. 11. 19 Colomina: ‘Double Exposure,’ p. 87. 20 See ‘Surveillance’ in Bignall: Big Brother. 21 Paul Flynn, Big Brother: Access All Areas (London: Random House, 2005), p. 44. 22 Sigmund Freud, ‘The Uncanny’, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works, Vol. 17, trans. and ed. James Stratchey (London: The Hogarth Press, 1955), pp. 219–56. 23 Freud: ‘The Uncanny’, p. 220. 24 Freud: ‘The Uncanny’, p. 226. 25 Vidler: The Architectural Uncanny, p. x. 26 Vidler: The Architectural Uncanny, p. 222. 27 Lynn Spigel, Welcome to the Dreamhouse: Popular Media and Postwar Suburbs (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001), p. 386. 28 Dan Graham, ‘Alteration to a Suburban House’ (1978), in Rock My Religion, p. 206. 29 See Graham: Dan Graham Works, p. 305 30 See Leon Battista Alberti, On Painting, trans. Cecil Grayson (London and New York: Phaidon, 1972), para. 19, p. 55. 31 Dan Graham, Half Square, Half Crazy (Sesto San Giovanni: Edizioni Charta, 2005), p. 45. 32 Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, trans. Hazel E. Barnes (New York: Washington Square Press, 1956), pp. 347–50. 33 Dan Graham Works, 2001, p. 13. 34 Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York and London: W.W. Norton & Company, 1977), pp. 75, 72. 35 Slavoj Žižek, Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture (Cambridge MA.: MIT Press, 1991), p. 109. 36 Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book I, Freud’s Papers on Technique, 1953–1954, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. John Forrester (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1988), p. 215. 37 Vidler: The Architectural Uncanny, p. 224. 38 Freud: ‘The Uncanny’, p. 248, fn 1.

Chapter 8: Towards an Iconomy of Violence 1 Etienne Balibar, Masses, Classes, Ideas: Studies on Politics and Philosophy Before and After Marx, trans. James Swenson (London: Routledge, 1994), pp. 50–9. 2 I have briefly touched on this issue in my essay on Kristeva’s semiotic chora. See Maria Margaroni, ‘“The Lost Foundation”: Kristeva’s Semiotic Chora and its Ambiguous Legacy’, Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy 20/1 (Winter 2005), pp. 78–98.

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3 Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1969). 4 Jacques Derrida, Glas, trans. John P. Leavey Jr and Richard Rand (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986), p. 28. 5 Hegel quoted by Robert R. Williams, Recognition: Fichte and Hegel on the Other (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992), p. 4. 6 In ‘The Other’s Decision in Me (What Are the Politics of Friendship?)’ Simon Critchley draws attention to ‘Levinas’s repeated insistence on the other speaking from “un autre rivage”’. See Simon Critchley, Ethics, Politics, Subjectivity. Essays on Derrida, Levinas and Contemporary French Thought (London: Verso, 1999), p. 268. 7 Critchley: Ethics, Politics, Subjectivity, p. 272. 8 Gillian Rose, The Broken Middle: Out of our Ancient Society (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), p. 278. 9 See Alexandre Kojéve, Introduction à la Lecture de Hegel: Leçons sur la Phénoménologie de l’esprit professées de 1933 à 1939, ed. Raymond Queneau (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1968) and Jean Wahl, Le Malheur de la Conscience dans la Philosophie de Hegel (Paris: PUF, 1951). In this light, it is no wonder that, in her 1999 study of Levinas, Bettina Bergo does turn to Jean Wahl. See Chapter XII ‘The Unhappy Consciousness and Levinas’ Ethics’, in Bettina Bergo, Levinas Between Ethics and Politics: For the Beauty that Adorns the Earth (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 2003), pp. 277–94. 10 Beatrice Hanssen, Critique of Violence: Between Poststructuralism and Critical Theory (London: Routledge, 2000), p. 206. 11 Derrida raises the question of the relation between Jew and Greek (singularity and universality) in his first engagement with Levinas. See Jacques Derrida, ‘Violence and Metaphysics’, in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (London: Routledge, 2001), p. 192. 12 In Postmodern Ethics Zygmunt Bauman draws a distinction between the political beingwith and the ethical being-for. See Zygmunt Bauman, Postmodern Ethics (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1993), pp. 13–4. 13 Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), pp. 20, 28–29. 14 Agamben: Homo Sacer, p. 8. 15 Agamben: Homo Sacer, p. 188. The problem, in my view, does not lie, as Agamben argues, in the fact that ‘humanitarian organizations … can only grasp human life in the figure of bare or sacred life, and therefore, despite themselves, maintain a secret solidarity with the very powers they ought to fight’. On the contrary, humanitarian organizations attempt to draw attention to the excess of humanity behind/beyond the bare life of victims caught in the limitations of their particular circumstances. ‘The “imploring eyes” of the Rwandan child’ to which Agamben refers are far from mute. See Agamben: Homo Sacer, p. 133. As Levinas has repeatedly reminded us, they are signifying, directly addressing us and making us response-able. The problem (which both humanitarian organizations and Levinasian ethics need to take seriously) is that this ethical Saying does not speak for itself and is more often than not muted if it is not addressing us from the ‘right’ subjective or cultural position. Contesting the assumption that a consensus can be taken for granted ‘when the subject is looking at other people’s pain’, Susan Sontag writes: ‘To those who are sure that right is on one side, oppression and injustice on the other, and that the fighting must go on, what matters is precisely who is killed and by whom. To an Israeli Jew, a photograph of a child torn apart in the attack on the Sbarro pizzeria in downtown Jerusalem is first of all a photograph of a Jewish child killed by a Palestinian suicidebomber. To a Palestinian, a photograph of a child torn apart by a tank round in Gaza is first of all a photograph of a Palestinian child killed by Israeli ordnance.’ See Susan

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Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2003), pp. 6, 9. It seems that Antonin Artaud was right when he wrote: ‘le visage humain/n’ a pas encore trouvé sa face’. Quoted by Julia Kristeva, Visions capitales (Paris: Réunion des musées nationaux, 1998), p. 141. All translations from the original French are my own. 16 Agamben: Homo Sacer, p. 28. 17 Agamben: Homo Sacer, p. 29. 18 For an alternative reading of recognition that attempts to do justice to the complexity of the concept in Hegel and that draws attention to the variety of its empirical modes see Williams: Recognition. 19 Hanssen: Critique of Violence, p. 183. For different attitudes to the contemporary politics of recognition see Judith Butler, The Psychic Life of Power (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997); Nancy Fraser, Justice Interruptus (New York: Routledge, 1997); Axel Honneth, The Struggle for Recognition, trans. Joel Anderson (Boston: MIT Press, 1996); Kelly Oliver, Witnessing: Beyond Recognition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001); Charles Taylor, ‘The Politics of Recognition’, in Amy Gutman (ed.), Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), pp. 25–73; Patricia Williams, The Alchemy of Race and Rights (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991); Robert R. Williams, Recognition; Iris Young, Intersecting Voices (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997); and Ewa Plonowska Ziarek, An Ethics of Dissensus: Postmodernity, Feminism and the Politics of Radical Democracy (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001). 20 See Balibar: Masses, Classes, Ideas and Jean-Luc Nancy, The Inoperative Community, trans. Peter Connor, Lisa Garbus, Michael Holland and Simona Sawhney (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991). 21 Agamben: Homo Sacer, p. 122. 22 Agamben: Homo Sacer, pp. 11, 188. 23 G.W.F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Mind [1807], trans. J.B. Baillie (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2003), p. 10. 24 It is clear from the passage quoted above that Hegel does not treat the terms ‘suffering’ and ‘patience’ as synonymous. ‘Patience’ denotes the calm endurance of suffering, perseverance despite hardship, forbearance. It also throws into relief the temporality of ‘suffering’, its duration, which opens it to time and what is to-come. See The Concise Oxford Dictionary, 8th edn, s.v. ‘patience’, p. 872. See also The Oxford Library of Words and Phrases, Vol. III. Word Origins, s.v. ‘patience’, p. 340. 25 Julia Kristeva, ‘The System and the Speaking Subject’, in The Kristeva Reader, ed. Toril Moi (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986), p. 31. 26 Julia Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, trans. Margaret Waller (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), p. 112. 27 Poggeler writes: ‘In the Preface to the Phenomenology, before he calls attention to Aristotelian teleology, Hegel warns us not to forget the seriousness, the pain, the patience and the labour of the negative, in considering the life of God as a play of love with itself. But doesn’t Hegel himself forget this seriousness when he later says “God is love, i.e., the making of distinctions and the nullifying of such distinctions, a play of distinctions which is not serious; distinctions which are annulled as soon as they are posited, the eternal simple Idea”?’ Quoted by Williams: Recognition, p. 235. 28 Kristeva: Revolution, p. 112. 29 Kristeva: Revolution, p. 118. 30 Kristeva: Revolution, p. 109. 31 Derrida: Glas, p. 1.

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32 Derrida: Glas, pp. 24, 28. 33 Rose: The Broken Middle, p. 236. 34 Julia Kristeva, The Old Man and the Wolves, trans. Barbara Bray (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), p. 141. 35 Kristeva: Visions capitales, p. 60. 36 Kristeva: Revolution, p. 26. 37 Julia Kristeva, Sense and Non-Sense of Revolt: The Powers and Limits of Psychoanalysis, trans. Jeanine Herman, Vol. 1 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), p. 53. 38 Kristeva: The Old Man and the Wolves, p. 141. 39 Kristeva: Visions capitales, p. 61. 40 Rose: The Broken Middle, p. 250. 41 René Girard, Violence and the Sacred, trans. Patrick Gregory (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977), p. 31. 42 Girard: Violence and the Sacred, p. 49. What Girard calls ‘sacrificial crisis’ is equivalent to Agamben’s ‘state of exception’. In both cases, it is the distinction between legitimate and illegitimate violence, execution and transgression of the law that disappears. See Girard: Violence and the Sacred, p. 49 and Agamben: Homo Sacer, pp. 19, 57. 43 According to Girard, ‘[t]he cultural order is nothing more than a regulated system of distinctions in which the differences among individuals are used to establish their “identity” and their mutual relationships.’ See Girard: Violence and the Sacred, p. 49. It is the loss of such differences that brings about violence. The sole function of the sacred is to restore the differences lost. 44 Although his account of mimetic violence is, as Rose argues, ‘[s]puriously distinguished from Hegel’s dialectic of master and slave’, Girard feels himself closer to the paradigm of the unhappy consciousness which he understands as ‘the master-slave struggle internalized’. See Rose: The Broken Middle, pp. 144–45. 45 The invocation of Thomas Hobbes is most appropriate here. Indeed, it is interesting that Michel Foucault reads Hobbes’ status naturalis as ‘a war of equality’, a state of violence, in other words, resulting from the ‘natural lack of differentiation’. Quoted by Hanssen: Critique of Violence, p. 125. In addition, for both Hobbes and Girard society originates in the desire of human beings to protect themselves from their own violence. See Hanssen: Critique of Violence, p. 126 and Girard: Violence and the Sacred, pp. 4, 8. 46 Girard: Violence and the Sacred, p. 148. 47 Girard: Violence and the Sacred, p. 271. 48 As Rose demonstrates in her discussion of Girard, his later affirmation of Christian agape (in Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World) does not lead him to revise his understanding of law as synonymous with prohibition. See Rose: The Broken Middle, pp. 133–52. 49 Girard: Violence and the Sacred, p. 267. 50 Kristeva: Visions capitales, p. 60. 51 Kristeva: Visions capitales, p. 60. 52 Kristeva: Visions capitales, p. 60. 53 Kristeva: Visions capitales, p. 152. 54 Kristeva: Visions capitales, p. 58. 55 Kristeva: Visions capitales, pp. 61–62. 56 Kristeva: Visions capitales, p. 63. 57 Kristeva: Visions capitales, p. 62. 58 Julia Kristeva, Possessions (Paris: Fayard, 1996), p. 256. All translations from the original French are my own.

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59 Kristeva: Possessions, p. 257. 6 0 It is precisely because of her function as an ‘example’ that Antigone, according to Derrida, is both part of and outside the Hegelian dialectical system. See Critchley: Ethics, Politics, Subjectivity, pp. 11–15. 61 Critchley: Ethics, Politics, Subjectivity, p. 14. 62 Critchley: Ethics, Politics, Subjectivity, p. 14. 63 Critchley: Ethics, Politics, Subjectivity, p. 11. 64 See especially Julia Kristeva, Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia, trans. Léon Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989). 65 Derrida: Glas, p. 20. 66 Kristeva: Possessions, pp. 11–3. 67 Describing his Acéphale (what is for him the ‘transmutation of the human looking for another version of freedom’), Georges Bataille writes: ‘He is not a man. He is not a god either. He is not me though he is more than me: […] in other words, monstrous.’ Quoted by Kristeva: Visions capitales, p. 151. 68 Kristeva: Visions capitales, p. 151. 69 Kristeva: Visions capitales, p. 152. After the ritualistic beheading of Nicholas Berg and the photographs from Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq these descriptions take on a chilling resonance. As Joanna Bourke points out in her article on the Abu Ghraib tortures, ‘the victims have been reduced to exhibitionist objects or anonymous “meat”. They either wear hoods or are beheaded by the camera’. See Joanna Bourke, ‘Torture as Pornography,’ Guardian, Friday 7 May 2004, (last accessed 30 July 2011). 70 As Rilsky does not fail to explain, the word ‘justice’ needs to be understood in the musical sense as precision, accuracy. Kristeva: Possessions, p. 102. 71 Kristeva: Possessions, p. 102. 72 Kristeva argues that, if our attention shifts from the sacrifice that Bataille’s Acéphale represents to ‘representation itself ’, Acéphale appears as ‘a fertile impasse’. See Kristeva: Visions capitales, p. 152. 73 Her approach to language and life is what she calls a ‘bottom-up’ approach, starting from the body and the senses. Kristeva: Possessions, p. 236. 74 Kristeva: Possessions, p. 169. 75 Kristeva: Possessions, pp. 21, 34. 76 Kristeva: Possessions, p. 102. 77 Kristeva: Possessions, pp. 78, 212. 78 Kristeva: Possessions, p. 212. 79 Kristeva: Possessions, p. 18. 80 Girard: Violence and the Sacred, p. 4. 81 Girard: Violence and the Sacred, p. 12. 82 Kristeva: Possessions, p. 80. 83 Kristeva: Possessions, p. 77. 84 Kristeva: Possessions, p. 81. 85 Kristeva: Possessions, p. 277. 86 Girard: Violence and the Sacred, p. 271. 87 Girard: Violence and the Sacred, p. 271. 88 Kristeva: Possessions, p. 77. 89 Kristeva: Possessions, p. 277. 90 In Violence and the Sacred Girard uses the generic ‘he’ to refer to the pharmakos and emphasizes that ‘he’ is ‘a relatively indifferent victim’. See Girard: Violence and the Sacred,

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p. 4. As Eva Frojmovic has suggested, however, Girard’s generic ‘he’ is far from genderneutral, given that the prototype of the pharmakos for him is Jesus Christ. Dr Frojmovic’s suggestion was made to me in the context of a discussion on an earlier version of this chapter, given as a lecture at the Centre for Cultural Analysis, Theory and History at the University of Leeds on 19 May 2004. 91 Martha Reineke, ‘The Mother in Mimesis: Kristeva and Girard on Violence and the Sacred’, in David Crownfield (ed.), Body/Text in Julia Kristeva: Religion, Women, and Psychoanalysis (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992), p. 69. 92 Reineke: ‘The Mother in Mimesis’, pp. 76, 80. 93 Girard: Violence and the Sacred, pp. 8, 258. 94 Girard: Violence and the Sacred, p. 27. 95 Girard: Violence and the Sacred, p. 258. 96 Girard: Violence and the Sacred, pp. 258, 267. 97 Agamben: Homo Sacer, p. 124. 98 Kristeva: Possessions, p. 276. 99 Kristeva: Possessions, p. 136. 100 See Honneth: The Struggle for Recognition. 101 Oliver: Witnessing, p. 48. 102 Oliver: Witnessing, p. 48. 103 Williams: Recognition, p. 149. 104 Williams: Recognition, p. 16. 105 Williams: Recognition, p. 2. 106 Kristeva: Visions capitales, pp. 19–34. 107 Kristeva: Visions capitales, pp. 19, 29. 108 According to Kristeva, ‘to sacrifice’ means literally ‘to return to the invisible’. See Kristeva: Visions capitales, p. 19. In Homo Sacer Agamben writes: ‘we are confronted with a residual and irreducible bare life, which must be excluded and exposed to a death that no rite and no sacrifice can redeem’ (p. 100). It is precisely because the Nazi extermination of the Jews took place in a context that foreclosed any redemption that he criticizes the ‘wish to lend a sacrificial aura’ to it ‘by means of the term “Holocaust”’. See Agamben: Homo Sacer, p. 114. 109 Kristeva: Visions capitales, p. 62. 110 Kristeva: Possessions, p. 136. 111 In her discussion of Picasso’s La Femme à la collerette in Visions capitales Kristeva writes: ‘… in Picasso, the violence of eroticism is preserved, but it slides from the face to the collarpiece, while the wound, which never ceases to operate, points to a loved intimacy, a loving cut’. Kristeva: Visions capitales, p. 146. 112 Kristeva: Possessions, p. 278. 113 Kristeva: Possessions, p. 278. 114 Kristeva: Possessions, pp. 170–4. 115 In The Feminine and the Sacred Kristeva writes: ‘There is a fertile moment of melancholia when I take on the loss of the old and begin a new birth. But I stand between the two. This moment between the two, this stage of transition, this space of oscillation... makes me think that narration is the same space where nostalgia is transformed into something that “will take place” […] And if this is the truth? Not the “meaning” but the tendency towards.’ See Julia Kristeva and Catherine Clement, The Feminine and the Sacred, trans. Jane Marie Todd (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001), pp. 230–231.

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116 See Julia Kristeva, ‘Sharing Singularity: An Interview with Julia Kristeva conducted by John Lechte’, in John Lechte and Maria Margaroni, Julia Kristeva: Live Theory (London: Continuum, 2004), p. 159. 117 Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History (New York: Routledge, 1992), p. 82. 118 Kristeva: Possessions, p. 78. 119 Kristeva and Clement: The Feminine and the Sacred, p. 231. 120 Kristeva: Visions capitales, p. 153. 121 Kristeva: Visions capitales, p. 153. 122 Kristeva and Clement: The Feminine and the Sacred, pp. 248–49. 123 Kristeva: Possessions, p. 278.

Chapter 9: From Horrorism to Compassion 1 Bracha Ettinger, ‘From Proto-Ethical Compassion to Responsibility; Besidedness and the Three Primal Mother Fantasies’, Athena (Lithuania) 2 (2006), p. 100. 2 Adriana Cavarero, Horrorism: Naming Contemporary Violence, trans. William McCuaig (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), p. 29. 3 Cavarero: Horrorism, p. 3 4 Cavarero, Horrorism, p. 8. 5 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition [1958] (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2nd revised edn, 1999), which follows on from her The Origins of Totalitarianism [1951] (New York: Schocken Books, 2004). 6 Cavarero: Horrorism, p. 16. 7 Cavarero: Horrorism, pp. 29–30. 8 Adriana Cavarero, Horrorismo: Overro Violenza sull’inerme (Milano: Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, 2007). 9 For an extended explanation of trauma in these terms see Griselda Pollock, ‘Trauma and Artworking’ in After-affect/After-Image; Trauma and Aesthetic Transformation in the Virtual Feminist Museum (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013). 10 Jean Laplanche, New Foundations for Psychoanalysis, trans. David Macey (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989). 11 Cavarero: Horrorism, p. 105. 12 Barbara Victor, Army of Roses: Inside the World of Palestinian Suicide Bombers (London: Constable and Robinson, 2003). 13 Victor: Army of Roses, 202–01. 14 Jacqueline Rose, ‘Deadly Embrace’, London Review of Books 26:21 (4 November 2004), 21–24, p. 24 15 Jacqueline Rose, States of Fantasy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996); The Last Resistance (London: Verso, 2007). 16 . 17 Catherine Clément and Julia Kristeva, The Feminine and the Sacred, trans. Jane Marie Todd (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996); for a reading of this anthropological, psychoanalytical debate on the relation of bodies and meaning, life and the sign: see Griselda Pollock, ‘Sacred Cows: Wandering in Feminism, Psychoanalysis and Anthropology’, in Griselda Pollock and Victorian Turvey Sauron (eds), The Sacred and the Feminine: Imagination and Sexual Difference (London: I.B.Tauris, 2007), pp. 9–48. 18 Ettinger: ‘From Proto-Ethical Compassion to Responsibility’, p. 124. 19 Ettinger: ‘From Proto-Ethical Compassion to Responsibility’, pp. 124–5.

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2 0 Ettinger: ‘From Proto-Ethical Compassion to Responsibility’, p. 124. 21 For a range of readings of Medusa see Marjorie Garber and Nancy J. Vickers (eds), The Medusa Reader (London: Routledge, 2003). 22 Jane Ellen Harrison (1903), ‘The Ker as Gorgon’, Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion [London: 1903] (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), p. 187. 23 Vanda Zajko and Miriam Leonard, Laughing with Medusa: Classical Myth and Feminist Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). 24 Mieke Bal, ‘Reading Art’ in Griselda Pollock (ed.), Generations and Geographies in the Visual Arts: Feminist Perspectives (London: Routledge, 1996), p. 26. 25 Cavarero: Horrorism, p. 14. 26 Cavarero: Horrorism, p. 16. 27 I have explored this image in ‘Death in the Image: The Responsibility of Aesthetics in Night and Fog (1955) and Kapo (1959)’ in Griselda Pollock and Max Silverman (eds), Concentrationary Cinema: Aesthetics as Resistance in Alain Resnais’s Night and Fog (London: Berghahn, 2011), pp. 258–302. 28 The point is made by Mary Felstiner, To Paint her Life: Charlotte Salomon in the Nazi Era (New York: HarperCollins,1994), pp. 207–8. 29 Bracha Ettinger, ‘Fascinance and the Girl to m/Other Matrixial Feminine Difference’. in Griselda Pollock (ed.), Psychoanalysis and the Image: Transdisciplinary Perspectives (Boston: Blackwell, 2006), p. 61. 30 Gayatri Spivak, ‘French Feminism in an International Frame’, Yale French Studies [Feminist Readings: French Texts/American Contexts] 62 (1981), pp. 154–84. 31 Ettinger: ‘From Proto-Ethical Compassion’, p. 100. 32 Ettinger: ‘From Proto-Ethical Compassion’, p. 100. 33 Ettinger: ‘From Proto-Ethical Compassion’, p. 100. 34 Ettinger: ‘From Proto-Ethical Compassion’, p. 101 35 Ettinger: ‘From Proto-Ethical Compassion’, p. 102. 36 Ettinger: ‘From Proto-Ethical Compassion’, p. 102. 37 Ettinger: ‘From Proto-Ethical Compassion’, p. 103. 38 Ettinger: ‘From Proto-Ethical Compassion’, p. 103. 39 Ettinger: ‘From Proto-Ethical Compassion’, p. 105. 40 Ettinger: ‘From Proto-Ethical Compassion’, p. 105. 41 Ettinger: ‘From Proto-Ethical Compassion’, p. 106. 42 Ettinger: ‘From Proto-Ethical Compassion’, p. 106. 43 Ettinger: ‘From Proto-Ethical Compassion’, p. 126 44 Ettinger: ‘From Proto-Ethical Compassion’, p, 110. 45 Ettinger: ‘From Proto-Ethical Compassion’, p. 129. 46 Ettinger: ‘From Proto-Ethical Compassion’, p. 131. 47 Ettinger: ‘From Proto-Ethical Compassion’, pp. 110–11. 48 Ettinger: ‘From Proto-Ethical Compassion’, p. 115. 49 Ettinger: ‘From Proto-Ethical Compassion’, p. 111.

Chapter 10: Encountering Blue Steel

1 Laura Mulvey, ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, in Visual and Other Pleasures (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1989), pp. 14–26, p. 15. 2 Lucy Bolton, Film and Female Consciousness: Irigaray, Cinema and Thinking Women (New York: Palgrave, 2011), p. 10. 3 Bolton: Film and Female Consciousness, p. 10.

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4 Considered approaches to the study of film inspired by Deleuze include, for example, Felicity Coleman’s Deleuze and Cinema (Oxford: Berg, 2011) and Alison Young’s The Scene of Violence: Cinema, Crime, Affect (Abingdon: Routledge, 2010). 5 See, for instance, Caroline Bainbridge’s A Feminine Cinematics: Luce Irigaray, Women and Film (New York: Palgrave, 2008), Bolton’s Film and Female Consciousness, Catherine Constable’s Thinking in Images: Film Theory, Feminist Philosophy and Marlene Dietrich (London: BFI, 2005) and Liz Watkins’s ‘Light, Colour and Sound in Cinema’, Paragraph 25:3 (2002), pp. 118–28. 6 Bolton: Film and Female Consciousness, p. 174. 7 Bainbridge: A Feminine Cinematics, p. 12. 8 Bainbridge: A Feminine Cinematics, p. 14. 9 The difference in outlook between Bainbridge and Watkins is made particularly obvious when their respective essays in the special issue of Paragraph on Irigaray’s work are read in tandem. See Bainbridge, ‘Feminine Enunciation in Women’s Cinema’, Paragraph 25/3 (2002), pp. 129–41 and Watkins’s ‘Light, Colour and Sound in Cinema’. The contrast between Bolton’s reading of In the Cut (Dir. Jane Campion, USA, 2003) in Film and Female Consciousness and Watkins’s in ‘The (Dis)Articulation of Colour: Cinematography, Femininity and Desire in Jane Campion’s In the Cut’, in Wendy Everett (ed.), Questions of Colour in Cinema: From Paintbrush to Pixel (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2007), pp. 197–216 is also revealing. 10 Watkins: ‘Light, Colour and Sound in Cinema’, p. 128. 11 Watkins: ‘Light, Colour and Sound in Cinema’, p. 119. 12 See, for instance, Kristeva’s essay ‘La reliance, ou de l’érotisme maternel’, Revue Français de Psychanalyse 75: Le maternel (Paris: PUF, 2011), pp. 1559–70. 13 The aspect of Irigaray’s project that is dependent upon mimicry can also be seen to be associated with, irrevocably tainted by, that paradigm. 14 Robynn J. Stilwell, ‘Breaking Sound Barriers: Bligelow’s Soundscapes from The Loveless to Blue Steel’, in Deborah Jermyn and Sean Redmond (eds), The Cinema of Kathryn Bigelow: Hollywood Transgressor (London: Wallflower Press, 2003), pp. 32–56; p. 52. 15 Yvonne Tasker, Spectacular Bodies: Gender, Genre and Action Cinema (London: Routledge, 1993), p. 159. 16 Herman L. von Ende, ‘Bluing Steel: Patent No. 2,283,109’ (1942), pp. 1–2; p. 1. 17 Ende: ‘Bluing Steel’, p. 2. 18 Anna Powell, ‘Blood on the Borders – Near Dark and Blue Steel’, Screen 35/2 (1994), pp. 136–56; p. 145. 19 This cure for erection dysfunction is given cinematic mention in Cocoon (Dir. Ron Howard, USA, 1985). Blue steel is also used a term to describe the penis by a stevedore in the first episode of Season 2 of The Wire. 20 Cora Kaplan, ‘Dirty Harriet/Blue Steel: Feminist Theory Goes to Hollywood’, Discourse 16/1 (1993), pp. 50–70; p. 60. 21 Christina Lane, ‘From The Loveless to Point Break: Kathryn Bigelow’s Trajectory in Action’, Cinema Journal 37/4 (1998), pp. 59–81; p. 70. 22 Linda Mizejewski, ‘Picturing the Female Dick: The Silence of the Lambs and Blue Steel’, Journal of Film and Video 45/2–3 (1993), pp. 6–23; p. 16. 23 Powell: ‘Blood on the Borders’, p. 145 24 Kaplan: ‘Dirty Harriet/Blue Steel’, pp. 58–9. 25 Steven Shaviro, The Cinematic Body (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), pp. 2–4. 26 Bracha L. Ettinger, ‘The Matrixial Gaze’, The Matrixial Borderspace, ed. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), pp. 41–92; p. 64.

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2 7 Ettinger: ‘The Matrixial Gaze,’ p. 64. 28 Ettinger: ‘The Matrixial Gaze,’ pp. 64–5. 29 Jacqueline Rose, ‘Sexuality in the Field of Vision’, in Sexuality in the Field of Vision (London: Verso, 1986), pp. 224–33. 30 Rose: ‘Sexuality in the Field of Vision’, p. 227. 31 Rose: ‘Sexuality in the Field of Vision’, p. 227. 32 Ettinger uses the neologism m/Other to distinguish this psychic category from that of the Mother associated with the Oedipal scenario or post-natal object relations. 33 Ettinger describes prenatal affective experiences as not tamed by the signifier. See Ettinger: ‘The Matrixial Gaze’, p. 108. 34 For a discussion of the sub-symbolic see Ettinger: ‘The Matrixial Gaze’, pp. 64–5. 35 See Martha McCaughey, Real Knockouts: The Physical Feminism of Women’s Self-Defense (New York: New York University Press, 1997), pp. 177–211. 36 Emphases present in the original. Bracha L. Ettinger, ‘Fascinance and the Girl-to-m/ Other Matrixial Feminine Difference’, in Griselda Pollock (ed.), Psychoanalysis and the Image (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), pp. 60–93; p. 80. 37 Ettinger: ‘Wit(h)nessing Trauma and the Matrixial Gaze’, p. 145. 38 Ettinger: ‘The Matrixial Gaze’, p. 84. 39 For a sustained analysis of Ettinger’s artistic practice see Griselda Pollock, ‘Abandoned at the Mouth of Hell or the Second Look that does not Kill: The Uncanny Coming to Matrixial Memory,’ in Penny Florence (ed.), Looking Back to the Future: Essays on Art, Life and Death (Amsterdam: G+B Arts International, 2001), pp. 113–74; pp. 143–50. 40 Ettinger: ‘Wit(h)nessing Trauma and the Matrixial Gaze’, p. 144. 41 Ettinger: ‘Wit(h)nessing Trauma and the Matrixial Gaze’, p. 145. 42 Linda Mizejewski, Hardboiled and High Heeled: The Woman Detective in Popular Culture (New York: Routledge, 2004), p. 135. 43 Rose: ‘Sexuality in the Field of Vision’, p. 228. 44 Ettinger: ‘Wit(h)nessing Trauma and the Matrixial Gaze’, p. 145. 45 Ettinger: ‘Wit(h)nessing Trauma and the Matrixial Gaze’, p. 145. 46 A. Kiarina Kordela, ‘Marx, Condensed and Displaced’, in Catherine Liu, John Mowitt, Thomas Pepper and Jakki Spicer (eds), The Dreams of Interpretation: A Century down the Royal Road (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), pp. 303–19; p. 308. 47 Ettinger: ‘The Matrixial Gaze’, p. 48. 48 Bracha L. Ettinger, ‘The Red Cow Effect: The Metramorphosis of Hallowing the Hollow and Hollowing the Hallow’ in Juliet Steyn (ed.), Act 2 Beautiful Translations (London: Pluto Press, 1996), pp. 82–119; p. 95. 49 Ettinger: ‘The Matrixial Gaze’, p. 65. 50 Ettinger: ‘Wit(h)nessing Trauma and the Matrixial Gaze’, p. 129. 51 Shaviro: The Cinematic Body, p. 2. 52 Ettinger: ‘Wit(h)nessing Trauma and the Matrixial Gaze’, pp. 153–4. 53 Sara Beardsworth, Julia Kristeva: Psychoanalysis and Modernity (Albany: SUNY, 2004), p. 72. See also p. 56. 54 Griselda Pollock, ‘Femininity: Aporia or Sexual Difference’, in Ettinger: The Matrixial Borderspace, pp. 1–40; p. 34. 55 Pollock: ‘Femininity: Aporia or Sexual Difference’, p. 17. 56 Kristeva: ‘La reliance’. 57 Kristeva: ‘La reliance’, p. 1561. 58 Kristeva: ‘La reliance’, p. 1563. Bion describes the mother as forming a ‘container’ in Attention and Interpretation (London: Karnac, 1984), pp. 72–82.

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Ettinger: ‘The Matrixial Gaze’, p. 83. Kristeva: ‘La reliance’, p. 1565. Ettinger: ‘The With-In-Visible Screen’, in Ettinger: The Matrixial Borderspace, p. 105. Zeev Winstok, ‘Toward an Interactional Perspective on Intimate Partner Violence’, Aggression and Violent Behavior 12/3 (2007), pp. 348–63; p. 356. 63 Winstok: ‘Toward an Interactional Perspective on Intimate Partner Violence’, p. 356. 64 Judith Butler, Frames of War: When is Life Grievable? (London: Verso, 2009), p. 10. 65 Winstok: ‘Toward an Interactional Perspective on Intimate Partner Violence’, pp. 355–56. 66 Karen E. Tatum, Explaining the Depiction of Violence Against Women in Victorian Literature (Lewiston: Edward Mellen Press, 2005), p. 163. 67 Mulvey: ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, pp. 14–26. 68 Shaviro: The Cinematic Body, p. 9. 69 Shaviro: The Cinematic Body, p. 9. 70 Georges Didi-Huberman, Confronting Images: Questioning the Ends of a Certain History of Art, trans. John Goodman (Pennsylvania: Penn State Press, 2005), pp. 229–71. 71 Didi-Huberman: Confronting Images, p. 269. 72 Bracha L. Ettinger, ‘Trans-Subjective Transferential Borderspace’, in Brian Massumi (ed.), A Shock to Thought: Expression after Deleuze and Guattari (London: Routledge, 2002), pp. 215–39; p. 216. 73 Didi-Huberman: Confronting Images, p. 261. 74 Ettinger: ‘The Red Cow Effect’, p. 99. 75 Ettinger: ‘The Red Cow Effect’, p. 106. 76 I provide the beginnings of a sketch of how Ettinger’s thinking provides a way beyond the impasse Kristeva’s concept of abjection causes in relation to efforts to theorize hospitality towards the Other in the final chapter of my book After Francis Bacon (London: Ashgate, 2012), pp. 131–76. 77 Judith Butler, ‘Disturbance and Dispersal in the Visual Field’, in Catherine de Zegher and Griselda Pollock (eds), Bracha L. Ettinger: Art as Compassion (Brussels: ASA, 2011), pp. 149–65; p. 164. 78 Susan L. Miller, Gender and Community Policing: Walking the Talk (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1999), p.103. 79 Miller: Gender and Community Policing, p. 83.

LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS

Paula Carabell was previously Assistant Professor of Art History at Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton, Florida, having worked at the University of California, San Diego, the Open University, London and Birkbeck College, University of London. She has published widely in Contemporary Art and Renaissance Studies; her most recent articles include a study of Thomas Struth’s early citiscapes and an investigation into the relationship between Michelangelo, antiquity and the development of the figura serpentinata. Suzanna Chan has a background in both art practice and art writing and lectures in History and Theory at the School of Art and Design, University of Ulster in Belfast. She is currently working on a book exploring aesthetic, ethical, historical and political relations between migration, diaspora and contemporary art by women (forthcoming, I.B.Tauris). Published articles and chapters on art, feminism and articulations of identity, history and place are included in the Journal of Gender Studies, Visual Culture in Britain, Cities of Belfast, edited by N. Allen and A. Kelly, and Facing the Other: Interdisciplinary Studies on Race, Gender and Social Justice in Ireland, edited by B. Farago and M. Sullivan. Nicholas Chare is Lecturer in Gender Studies in the School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne and Visiting Research Fellow in the Centre for Cultural Analysis, Theory and History at the University of Leeds. His most recent publications are Auschwitz and Afterimages (I.B.Tauris, 2011) and After Francis Bacon (Ashgate, 2012). Emily Mark FitzGerald is Assistant Lecturer in the School of Art History and Cultural Policy at University College Dublin. Her research interests include public art, memory and monumentality, with a special focus on the visual culture of commemoration. A Humanities Institute of Ireland Fellow, her work cataloguing worldwide Irish Famine monuments has been supported by the Mellon-Mays Social Science Research Council, Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, Royal

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Hibernian Academy, and US-Ireland Alliance. Originally from Los Angeles, she currently lives in Dublin. Henrik Holm has a PhD in Art History from Copenhagen University and is currently Curator of Art at the National Gallery of Art, Denmark. His research area is National Identity. Kristina Huneault is Associate Professor of Art History at Concordia University, Montreal, where she holds a university research chair and is a founder of the Canadian Women Artists History Initiative (). Her books include Rethinking Professionalism: Women and Art in Canada, 1850–1970, edited with Janice Anderson, and Difficult Subjects: Working Women and Visual Culture, Britain 1880–1914. Her current research addresses the conjunction of women, art and subjectivity in the context of colonialism. Maria Margaroni is Associate Professor in Post-War Continental Philosophy, Literary Theory and Feminist Thought at the University of Cyprus. She has held Visiting Fellowships at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities (University of Edinburgh) and the Centre for Cultural Analysis, Theory and History (University of Leeds). Her publications include: Julia Kristeva: Live Theory (with John Lechte, Continuum, 2004), Metaphoricity and the Politics of Mobility (with Effie Yiannopoulou, Rodopi, 2006), Intimate Transfers (with Effie Yiannopoulou, special issue of the European Journal of English Studies, 2005) and Violence and the Sacred: Bataille, Girard, Agamben, Kristeva, special issue of Philosophy Today, 2012. She is currently working on a monograph focusing on the thought of Julia Kristeva (forthcoming by SUNY Press). She is also engaged in editing a collection of essays entitled Textual Layering: Contact, Historicity, Critique (with Apostolos Lampropoulos and Christos Hadjichristos; forthcoming by Lexington Books, Rowman and Littlefield). Griselda Pollock is Professor of Social and Critical Histories of Art and Director of the Centre for Cultural Analysis, Theory and History at the University of Leeds. Known for her major feminist interventions in cultural theory and visual analysis and work on trauma, aesthetics and psychoanalysis, she has written extensively in cultural studies and art history. Major recent publications include Encounters in the Virtual Feminist Museum: Time, Space and the Archive (2007), Digital and Other Virtualities: Renegotiating the Image (2010, with Anthony Bryant), Bracha L. Ettinger: Art as Compassion (2011, edited with Catherine de Zegher), After-affect I After-image: Trauma and Aesthetic Transformation (2013), Concentrationary Cinema: Aesthetics as Resistance in Alain Resnais’s Night and Fog (2011, with Max Silverman). Forthcoming are From Trauma to Cultural Memory: Representation and the Holocaust and Theatre of Memory: Charlotte Salomon’s Orphic Journey in Life? or Theatre? 1941–42. Sharon Sliwinski is Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Information and Media Studies and the Centre for the Study of Theory and Criticism at Western University,

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London, Canada. She writes and teaches broadly in the areas of visual culture and psychoanalysis. Her book Human Rights in Camera was published by the University of Chicago Press in 2011 and she is currently working on a book called Dream Matters. Jenny Tennant Jackson recently retired as Senior Lecturer in Art History and Critical Studies at Leeds Metropolitan University. Initially trained as a researcher in medical science, she turned to Art History and completed doctoral research at the University of Leeds with a study of Walter Benjamin’s theory of allegory and the paintings of Gustave Courbet. She has been a member of an interdisciplinary research team on ‘The Emergence of Artificial Culture in Robot Societies’. Her publications include ‘Efficacity’ in Conceptual Odysseys: Passages to Cultural Analysis, edited by Griselda Pollock (London: I.B.Tauris, 2007).

INDEX

Page references in italics refer to captions. 5* network 136 9/11 (11 September 2001 terrorist attacks) xviii, 8, 14, 22, 23, 25, 26, 116–28 abandonment 162, 185, 186, 188 abjection 178, 184, 207, 240n76 Abraham 180, 184 Abraham, Nicholas 19 Abu Ghraib prison 15 abuse scandal 211n19, 234n69 photographs of atrocities 25, 26, 31 Abu Simbel 108 Action from Ireland 63 Adorno, Theodor W. 33 ‘Cultural Criticism and Society’ 32 ‘Engagement’ [Commitment] 33 ‘Kulturkritik und Gesellschaft’ [Cultural Criticism and Society] 33 aesthetic(s) 9, 13, 16, 22 of connectivity 15 of good taste 40 psychoanalytical 16 shift from ethics to 8 theosophical 82 tinged with affects 12 affective, the 16 affectivity 8, 21 affect(s) 22 aesthetic tinged with 12 of reality TV xviii psychoanalysis and art 7 psychoanalytic theories 9

states of affect shaped by history 124 unconscious 123 Afghanistan 15, 25, 34 Africa African diaspora 110 trauma of 2 troping of 4 African Americans intellectual history of 106 slavery 62 Afro-Futurist expression 103 Agamben, Giorgio 146, 147, 155, 157 Homo Sacer 146, 235n108 agonism 14, 17 Ahern, Taoiseach Bertie 68 al-Akhras, Ayat 159, 163, 164–66 Al-Aksah mosque, Jerusalem 180 allegory xviii, 21, 77, 79–83, 88, 100, 115 Amahoro, Rwanda 3 American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions 52 American Family, An (television series) 133–34 American Revolutionary War (1775–83) 45, 47 amnesia xvii, 34 Amnesty International 32 Amsterdam School of Cultural Analysis (ASCA) xvi Anderson, Benedict 35 André, Gill (Gosset de Guines André) Courbet by himself and by Gill 84

Index Andrews, David 68 animals: expressions and emotions 121 Annan, Kofi 31 anthropology 17 anti-Semitism 13, 107, 110, 223n22 Antigone 115, 152 anxiety xviii, 4, 22 aporia(s) 9, 14, 16, 17, 143, 144, 145, 151 apparatus theory 190 Arendt, Hannah 15, 17, 105, 144, 148, 162, 174, 179 The Human Condition 9, 161 Aristotelian teleology 232n27 Arnold, Matthew 110 Arts and Humanities Research Council xvi Arts Magazine 129 Athena 170, 171 attunement 179 Augustine, St 179 Auschwitz 32, 33, 160, 174, 179 Australian Aboriginals 223n21 Austria, Nazi annexation of 9, 103 babies defenceless before the mother’s unconscious 19 traumatized 19 Bainbridge, Caroline 190–91 Bal, Mieke xvii, 173, 174 The Point of Theory: Practices of Cultural Analysis xvi The Practice of Cultural Analysis: Exposing Interdisciplinary Interpretation xvi Travelling Concepts in the Humanities: A Rough Guide xvi Balibar, Étienne 147 Barclay, Robert 48, 49 Baroque apotheosis 82 Barthes, Roland 125 Camera Lucida 1 Basra, Iraq 25 Bataille, Georges 234n67 Acéphale 153 Baudelaire, Charles 79–80, 89, 91 Baudrillard, Jean 119, 124 Beardsworth, Sara: Julia Kristeva 202 beauty 27, 81, 82 Bell, Charles 122

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Benjamin, Walter xviii, 21, 77, 80–81, 89, 127 and mimesis 124–25 and the symbol 82 Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels 81, 99 Benn, Carl 53 Bentham, Jeremy 134, 135 Berg, Nicholas 234n69 besideness 179 Bethlehem 159, 165 Bhabha, Homi: ‘DissemiNation’ 35 Bible 30 Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris 94 Big Brother xviii, 22, 135–39 Big Brother House 6 136, 137–38 Big Brother House 7 137 Bigelow, Kathryn 18, 190, 197, 201, 202, 207 Binet, Désiré-Alfred-Émile 83, 86, 87, 89, 99 Binet, Thérèse-Adélaïde-Virginie 79, 83, 85, 86, 87, 88, 89, 99 Bion, Wilfrid 19, 203 Black Atlantic 102, 103, 224n36 Blanchot, Maurice 144 blood purity 105 Blue Steel (film) 14, 190–207 In Eugene’s Sight 192, 193 film noir aesthetic 198 Getting a Grip 192, 199, 200, 205 Letting Go 206, 206 opening credits 194–95 plot 192–94 repetition in 199, 200 Bollas, Christopher 12 Bolton, Lucy 190 Film and Female Consciousness 190 Bonvin, François 94 Borch-Jacobsen, Mikkel 105 Boston, Massachusetts 69 Boston Irish Famine Memorial 72, 73 Boucher, François 93 Bourdieu, Pierre: The Love of Art 39 Bourke, Joanna 234n69 Brant, Joseph 47, 56 Braquehais, Bruno 95, 98, 98 Academic Study – no.7 95–97, 96, 99 Étude Académique 95 Musée Daguerrian - Photographie Artistique 95 Nu à l’oiseau 97

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‘Bridget O’Donnel and Children’ 70 British and Foreign Bible Society 49, 56 Brouillet, André: Leçon du Mardi, Salpêtrière 112 Brown, Clancy 199 Bruyas, Alfred 79, 94, 97, 220n10 Bruyas’ Gallery 98 Buffalo, NY: Western New York Irish Famine Memorial 65–66, 65 Bullock, Sandra 163 Bush, George W. 15, 31, 211n19 Butare, Rwanda 3 Butler, Judith 8, 15–16, 105, 115, 204, 207 Antigone’s Claim 15 The Psychic Life of Power 15 Butler, Octavia 111 Cambridge Famine Memorial, Massachusetts 72, 218n46 Camden, Earl of 48 Campbell, Thomas 47 Canada history of two men of the First Nations 20, 21 Peter Jones as the first ordained Aboriginal minister 42 canonization in the arts 26 made to end all discussions 30 mothers against 27, 29 potentially divisive 36 a symptom of resistance to critical analysis 30 Capécia, Mayotte: Je suis Martiniquaise 107–8 Caravaggio, Michelangelo Merisi da The Head of Medusa 172–73, 172, 174 The Sacrifice/Binding of Isaac 180, 181 Carraroe, County Galway 65 Caruth, Cathy 37, 64 Castagnary, Jules-Antoine 83, 89, 92–93, 99 Castlereagh, Lord 48 castration 162, 168, 184, 186, 189, 191, 196, 197, 201–7 anxiety 195 Cavarero, Adriana 159 delineation of violence against the vulnerable 17 horrorism term 159, 160–61, 163, 189

Horrorismo: Overro Violenza sull’inerme [Horrorism: Naming Contemporary Violence] 162 Italian feminist philosopher 18 and Medusa 170, 173, 179 CCTV 135 Centre for Cultural Analysis, Theory and History (CentreCATH) xvi–xvii Champfleury (Jules Fleury-Husson) 79, 86, 88, 99 Channel 4 135, 136 Channel 5 135, 136 Charcot, Jean-Martin 7, 112 Charlie’s Angels 2: Full Throttle (film) 197 Chelmno extermination camp, Poland 174 Cherokee nation 44–45 Chicago School economists 25 chironomia 120 chora 148, 149 Christian agape 233n48 Christianity 180 Chu, Petra ten-Doesschate 94 cinema Blue Steel 190–207 mainstream 197 and psychoanalysis 7 circumcision 182, 184 civil rights 32 Clapham Sect 48 Clark, Kenneth 91–92, 93 Clark, Mary Marshall 228n23 Clark, T.J. 79, 83, 89, 99 classicism 82 Clément, Catherine 158 Clinton, George 110 co-affection 178, 179, 182 co-emergence 178, 182, 186, 201, 206 co-poiesis 200 Coalition Forces 25 ‘Coalition of the Willing’ 25, 34 Cold War 143 Collier’s magazine 60 colonialism imagery of 45 ravages of 45 colonization xviii, 13, 14, 21, 44 compassion Abraham and Isaac 180

Index adult 170 for an-other 22 and ethical and political conflicts 18 Ettinger on 169 and fascinance 178 and hospitality 16, 178, 187, 188, 189 and Levinas 183 Matrixial 182, 189 presubjective 188 primary 170, 189 primordial foundations in Matrixial severality 169–70 womb 183, 185 concentration camps 3, 15 concepts xiv, xvi Concern 63 Coney, John 224n34 consciousness desires to be blind to a violent reality 37 and Hegel 148 Constable, Catherine 190 Continental Philosophy 17 Cornet and Gilbert Associates 70 Courbet, Gustave 21 Les Amants dans la campagne, Les Amants Heureux, ou Walse [The Lovers in the Countryside, The Happy Lovers, or Waltz] 85–86, 86 L’Atelier du peintre: allégorie réelle déterminant une phase de sept années de ma vie artistique [The Painter’s Studio: A Real Allegory Determining a Period of Seven Years of my Artistic Life] 77, 78, 79, 82, 93 as allegory 77, 83, 88, 100 and Baudelaire 79 fragmentary and ephemeral women 91 frequently read politically 77 photographs 94–100, 95, 96, 98 as a Trauerspiel 77, 79, 83, 100 Bacchante 98 Baigneuse 98 The Bathers 92 Les Cribleuses de blé 89 Detail of the right hand side of L’Atelier du peintre: allégorie réele déterminant une phase de sept années de ma vie artistique 86, 87 Femme au perroquet 97

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Fileuse endormie 98 Indolence and Luxury 92 friends and supporters 79 letter to Champfleury 79, 88–89, 94, 99 mask/persona 83, 94, 97 Parisienne 92 photographers connected with his art 94–95 Portrait de l’artiste dit L’homme blessé [Portrait of the Artist, called The Wounded Man] 89, 90 Portrait of Charles Baudelaire 79, 80 proud of his son’s drawing abilities 89 La Sieste champêtre [Country Siesta] 89, 90 son by Virginie Binet 83, 86, 87, 89, 99 Woman seated and asleep, holding a book, right hand on a table 86, 86 women 77, 86, 88, 89, 91–93, 94–100 Courbet, Zoé 79 Covenant Chain 57, 58 Critchley, Simon 144, 152 critical analysis 20, 30, 31, 32, 40 critical intimacy xvii Cross, Bill 202 Cross, Dorothy 70 cultural analysis xvi, 21 Cultural Analysis, Theory and History (CATH) xiv–xv cultural heritage 20, 26, 47–48, 50, 51 cultural radicalism 26, 32 cultural war: in Denmark 23–24 Curtis, Jamie Lee 192 Cyahinda, Rwanda 3 Cyangugu, Rwanda 3 Dagen, M. 97 daguerreotypes 94, 95, 97, 100 ‘dark continent’ trope 104–5, 110 Darwin, Charles 22 Freud’s admiration for him 122–23 theory of the expression of emotion 123–24 The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals 121–22, 127 ‘Terror, from a photograph by Dr. Duchenne’ 121, 121 Davis, Thomas 64 De Andrea, John: Allegory: after Courbet 101

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De Decker Heftler, Sylviane 97, 221–22n52 De Valera, Éamon 61 Dean, T.A. (after Matilda Jones): Kahkewaquonaby Peter Jones Missionary to the Chippeway Indians 55 death allegory and symbol 82 death drive 9 mass 8 Medusa as the face of death 173 sacrificial cults of 182 second 169 degenerescence 105 Deheisheh refugee camp, Bethlehem 159 dehumanization 173, 174, 178 Delacroix, Eugène 93 Delessert, Édouard 97 Deleuze, Gilles 190 democracy 14 basic value of 29 ethical 146, 147 propaganda against 32 democratic ethos 145, 149 Denmark 20–21 2001 elections 23 Canon for the Arts (‘Kulturkanon’) 20, 23, 25, 26–27, 29–36, 38, 39, 40 cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad 20, 25, 26, 31 Civil List Pensions for artists 30 ‘Coalition of the Willing’ 25, 34 cultural crisis 20, 23–24 cultural radicalism 26, 32 decision to pull out of Iraq 25 economy 25 laws on terrorism 32, 212n23 Muslims in 20, 26 nationalism 23 occupied during World War II 34 post-traumatic stress disorder 20, 23, 25, 31–32, 34 right-wing government 20, 23 Derrida, Jacques 10, 11–12, 117, 118, 144 Glas 144, 148, 152, 153 ‘Memory: The Question of Archives’ (later published as Mal d’Archive/ Archive Fever) 11–12 desire 82, 146

devouring, devouringness 185, 186 Dezarrois, M. 98 dialectical mediation 144 dialectical method 148 dialogism 148 diaspora concept 224n36 diasporic peoples 110 Didi-Huberman, Georges 205 difference xv, 196 diremption 149 discourse theory xv dislocation 21, 64, 138 displacement 200 Dmytryk, Edward 198 Doane, Mary Ann 105, 106, 110 docusoaps 134 Dolliver: Études d’après Nature 97 Donovan, John 74 Dora (Freud’s patient) 123, 227n22 Dostoyevsky, Fyodor 152 doubling xviii Doyle, Avril 60, 67, 68–69 dreams, traumatic 118 Drexciyan myth 102–3, 111, 112, 114, 115 Duchenne de Bologne, G.B. 121, 122, 122 ‘Fright’ from Mechanics of Human Physionomy 121, 122 Dunlop, John 50 Duval, Jeanne 89, 91, 99 E4 cable network 136 Eagleton, Terry 68 Easter Rising (1916) 61 Eckersberg, C.W.: View through three of the Northwestern Arches of the Third Storey of the Colosseum. A Thunderstorm is Brewing over the City 24 ego, the 18, 19, 140, 187 ego psychology 18 egology 144 ekastsis 111 El-Sarraj 164 Elizabeth von R. (Freud’s patient) 123, 227n22 emotion Freud views in terms of its ‘quota’ 123 its psychical nature rarely discussed by Darwin 122

Index empathy 72, 74, 153, 166, 169, 182 Empire, Western 13 Endemol 135 Ennistymon Famien Memorial 218n46 Environmental Assessment Institute (Denmark) 24 Enzenberger, Nanna 33 Eros 114, 183 ethics 22, 152, 182 Levinasian 231n15 other-directed 144 and politics 144, 147, 151 postmodern 146 of responsibility 15 shift from ethics to aesthetics 8 a turn towards 8, 9 ethnic cleansing 174 ethnic conflict 13 ethnocentrism 17 Ettinger, Bracha L. 17, 159, 167–70, 191, 202, 203, 205 Abraham and Isaac 180 antidote to horrorism 180 and Eurydice 175 Eurydice no. 17 175, 176, 177 fascinance 178, 187, 188, 189 feminineM 169, 182, 188, 189 feminine Matrix 168 hyphenation and neulogisms 196 Matrixial theory 15, 16, 112, 167, 169, 179, 180, 183, 186–87, 189, 195 non-I-yet-co-affects-with-I 169 not-enoughness 185, 186, 188 not-I 169 ready-made mother monster 185 response-ability 16, 22 and the Symbolic 195–96 trans-subjectivity 19, 179 wit(h)ness 179, 187 wit(h)ness-Thing 200 wit(h)nessing 179, 187, 188 metramorphic 206 Etty, William 93 eugenicist theories 105 European Union (EU) 32 Eurydice 175 evil eye (fascinum) 171, 178 evolution 102

existanai 111 Exposition Universelle (1955) 79 expressions Darwin’s three principles 227n15 involuntary 226n11 transfixed 119, 121, 124, 125, 226n11 facial expressions, witnessing 9/11 119 Famine Echoes (radio series) 61 famine, Irish 60–77 passim Famine Survey 66 ‘Famine Walks’ 63 famine, as genocide 68 curriculum 68 ‘famine fever’ 61 in Ireland 1946–47 60 memories 61, 63 monuments and memorials 62, 69, 72 memory discourse of 62 trauma 62, 67,69,76. Third World 63 sublime 76 survivors 76 Fanon, Frantz 102 ‘The woman of colour and the white man’ 107–8 The Wretched of the Earth 223–24n26 fascinance 178, 187, 188, 189 fascinum 171, 178 fascism 5, 8, 29 fear xviii, 4, 22, 121, 122 of mutilation and non-being 162 state of fear shaped by history 124 and terror 122, 226n10 Felman, Shoshana 120, 126, 157 feminine difference 163 feminine, the and genocide 178 negation of humanity to 162 and Noack’s Standing Woman 27 and peace 163 as protectress 171 feminineM 169, 182, 188, 189 feminine Matrix 168 femininity 105, 106, 163 and the black woman 110 European 105

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phallic 195 ‘unknowable’ 103 feminism 16, 29, 40, 179 physical 197 feminist film studies 105, 190, 191 feminist theory xv, 105, 162–63 femme-fatale-Other/mother 198 Fernier, Robert 85, 89, 99 ffAm (femme-fatale-Autre/mère) 198 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb 146 Fineman, Joel 82 First Nations 20, 21 aggressive reduction of cultural and symbolic space 46 church’s mission 50 earliest treaty with European settlers 57 relentless encroachment on their lands 46 sovereignty 47, 53 systematic traumatization of children by the church 50 trauma in the wake of colonization 44, 45 War of 1812 53 Fluss, Gisela 103 Fogarty, Chris 68 Foster, Roy 62, 64, 67 Foucauldian notions 40 Foucault, Michel 22, 105, 222n10 Discipline and Punish 31 and the Panopticon 134–35 freedom of speech 29, 32 Freud, Sigmund xviii, 20, 29, 30–31, 205 admiration for Darwin 122–23 antiquarianism 103, 110 ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’ 9, 114, 225n5, 226n10 his boyhood 223n22 and the cinema 7 Civilisation and its Discontents 38 and classical myths 82 the devouring mother 186 experience with his ‘double’ 142 forced to flee for his life 9, 103 and Gisela Fluss 103 heimlich 138 importance of his psychoanalysis for the interpretation of art 37

Jewish identity 11 and marine biology 21, 102, 110 Moses and Monotheism 9–10, 11, 12–13 and mourning 152 mystic writing pad 12 Nachträglichkeit 179 ‘An Outline of Psychoanalysis’ 123 and the racialized model of the Jew 106–07 rivalry with Pierre Janet 7 sexual difference 21 story of the burning dead child 37–38 Structural Theory 123 ‘Thoughts for the Times on War and Death’ 9 trains as a zoologist 122 on trauma affecting the way events are experienced 118 and traumatized soldiers 7, 9 the uncanny 138–39 and the Vatican Gradiva 27 Freud Museum, London 22, 102, 103, 109, 112, 113 Friedman, Milton 25 fright 122, 226n10 Fulford, Timothy 47, 53 Gallagher, Ellen 21, 102 Abu Simbel 108, 109, 110 Ichthyosaurus 102, 103, 108, 112, 114 Odalisque 103–4, 104, 106, 107, 108 Watery Ecstatic series 102, 103, 111, 112, 113, 114, 115 Gallagher, Ellen and Clejine, Edgar Murmur series 114 Kabuki 114 gaze, the comparative 228n34 and the eye 141 Lacan on 7, 22 Matrixial 178, 188 of Medusa 172 mirroring 147 phallic 104, 187, 188 and reality television 135 of a Rwandan genocide survivor 2 subversive 107 Geist 144, 156

Index Gellner, Ernest 210n2 genocide attempted genocide of European Jewry 7 Jewish survivors 7 locates a future in the feminine 178 racist 15 Rwanda (1994) 2–7 state-sponsored 15 survivors in Rwanda 2, 5 genotext 148 George, Alice Rose 116 George III, King 50 gestation 168 gesture(s) analysis of 120–21 shared 119, 124 transfixed 124, 125, 128 voluntary 336n11 Gikongoro, Rwanda 3 Gilbert, Craig 133 Gilman, Sander 107 Girard, René 149, 150, 151, 155 Violence and the Sacred 154 globalization 8, 26, 34 Goodacre, Glenna 62, 73–74, 74, 75 Gorgon, the 170, 171 Gorgoneion 171, 174 Gourevich, Philip 226n8 Gradiva (bas-relief) 27, 29 Graham, Dan 22 Alteration to a Suburban House model 130–33, 131, 139 Cafe Bravo 139–42, 140 ‘Homes for America’ 129 Public Space/Two Audiences 131–32, 132 ‘Video in Relation to Architecture’ 134 Gramsci, Antonio 210n2 Great Famine (1845–50) 60–76 150th anniversary 60, 64, 66, 67–68, 70, 75 blame and recrimination 68 centenary 60, 61 clichés 70 genocidal interpretation of 68, 69, 218n46 ‘The Great Silence’ 66 imprecise nature of 61

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memory of 62, 63, 64, 66 New York Famine curriculum 68 public memorials 61–62, 63, 63, 65–66, 65, 69, 70, 71, 72–74, 73, 74 Greek myths 171 Greek tragedy 81 ‘Greenpeace Denmark’ 212n23 Gros-Kost, E. 89, 99 Grosse Île, Quebec 70 Guillamin, Colette 105 Gush, William 49 Hachiya, Michihiko 126 hallucinations xviii, 118 Hamilton, Doug 116, 117 Hanssen, Beatrice 146, 147 Haraway, Donna: ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’ 30 Hardt, Michael 40 Harrison, Jane 171 Harron, Maurice 72 Hayden, Tom: Irish Hunger 67, 69, 217– 18n32 HBO 164 healing 187 post-memorial 21 Hebraism 110 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 17, 144, 146, 150, 152, 156, 232n27 ‘auto-affective’ cycle 148 ‘labour of the negative’ 147 ‘suffering’ and ‘patience’ 232n24 Hegelian dialectics 144, 148, 149, 152 heimlich 138 Heinsen, Hein 211n15 Hellenism 110 Hemingway, Ernest: To Have and Have Not 110 Herbert, Kathy 70 here is new york: a democracy of photographs 116–28 Alya Scully (no. 1880) 116, 118, 124 Doug Hamilton (no. 3240) 116, 117 From Gulnara Samilova (no. 5119) 116, 117, 124 Jeff Jacobson (no. 2566) 116, 117 Rachel Shaw (no. 2944) 116, 118, 124 unknown photographer (no. 1540) 116, 118, 124

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unknown photographer (no. 2087) 125, 125 unknown photographer (no. 2365) 116, 119, 124 unknown photographer (no. 3029) 116, 116, 124 unknown photographer (no. 5032) 116, 116, 124 unknown photographer (no. 5112) 125 hermeneutics 37 heterogeneity 10 Hindenburg explosion 124 Hiroshima 126 Hirsch, Marianne 64 history epistemological 105 and Trauerspiel 81–82 as trauma 10, 13 Hobbes, Thomas 233n45 Hobbesian status naturalis 146 Hoffman, Werner 91, 93–94 Hoffmann, E.T.A.: ‘The Sand-man’ 138 Holm, Henrik Ole 20–21, 23–40 Holocaust 2, 5, 6, 13, 14, 62, 64, 67–68, 69, 103, 157, 175, 235n108 see also Shoah Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington DC 118 homophobia 17 Honig, Bonnie 14 Honneth, Axel 156 horror definition 160–61 and terror 160 horrorism 18 Cavarero on 159, 160–61, 163, 170, 189 Eurydice 175 a new form of violence 162 hospitality xviii, 183, 184 and compassion 16, 178, 187, 188, 189 non-sacrificial 189 Hotel Rwanda (film) 2 Houses of the Oireachtas 63 Houssaye, Édouard 91 How I Survived the Irish Famine (Laura Wilson) 61 Hutu people: massacre of Tutsi minority in Rwanda (1994) 6

Huyghe, René 92 Huyghe, René et al: Courbet, L’Atelier du peintre allégorie réelle 97–98 Ichthyosaurus 103 see also under Gallagher, Ellen iconology 228n31 iconomy 151, 157 icons 4 identification 124 identity building up 36 civic 174 cultural 10, 13, 57 diasporic feminine 102 ethnic 13 First Nations 47 individual 45 Jewish 110 masculine 21 national 10, 13, 20 and subjectivity 20 transcultural 53, 57 traumatic ambivalence of 13 undermining 36 Ifris, Wada 164 Illustrated London News 70, 73 image, the causing the eruption of real violence 9 dialectical 127 and the eyes of a witness to murder of her family 2 invisible images 5 psychoanalysis identified with the visual 7 psychological history of 20–28n4 recurring 119 role in soliciting an ethico-political response 15 of suffering 4 image, the xv, xviii Imaginary, the 7 imagination 16, 17, 80 incest taboo 112 Indian Department (Canada) 50, 53, 56 individualism 82 inerme 175, 180 Infinite/Finite 148 Ingres, Jean-Auguste-Dominique 79–80

Index intellectual revolution xiv–xv Interahamwe militia: leads massacre of Tutsi minority in Rwanda (1994) 6 Internet 117 cartoons of the Prophet 20, 26 intersubjectivity 19, 54, 58, 106, 144, 148 intertextuality 148 Intifada, second 163 Iraq War, first (1992) 8 Iraq War (2003–11) 15, 25, 34 Iraq–Kuwait war (1991) 6 Ireland diaspora 60–63, 65, 66, 70, 218n46 economy 60, 64 ethnic stereotypes 70 Famine memorials 61, 70, 71, 72 Ireland in Proximity (ed. Brewster et al.) 66 Irigaray, Luce 190, 191 Irish Famine 14, 21 Irish Folklore Commission Famine survey (1944-5) 60 Irish Independent 61 Irish National Famine Commemoration Committee 67 Irish Psychoanalytical Association 67 Irish Times 67 Iroquois nation 46, 47, 48, 57–58 Isaac 180, 184 Islam 164 Israel accused of violence against Palestinians 14, 164 at war with Palestine 13 memory-burdened 14 Israel/Palestine xviii, 15, 18, 167 Israeli Occupation 164, 166 Jaar, Alfredo The Eyes of Gutete Emerita cover 1 Let There Be Light 3–4, 3 Real Pictures 4-6, 4, 5 (detail) The Rwanda Project (The Lament of the Image) 1–7 Untitled (Newsweek) 6–7 Jacobson, Jeff 116, 117 Janet, Pierre 7 Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi 13 Jensen, Johannes V. 33

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Jensen, Wilhelm: Gradiva 27, 29 Jesus Christ 180 Jews attempted genocide of European Jewry 7 Freud’s need to reclaim Europeanness of Jewish people 13 and Greeks 145, 231n11 Jewish diaspora 110 Mizocz ghetto massacre 174–75 nomadism 110 racialized model of the Jew 106–7 Johnson, Philip: private estate (completed 1949) 130 Jones, Augustus 53 Jones, Eliza Field 43, 49, 50, 51, 54 Jones, Elizabeth 53 Jones, Matilda 42–43 Eliza Field Jones 50, 51, 54 Kahkewaquonaby, an Indian chief 43, 44, 51 Kahkewaquonaby, Reverend Peter Jones 41, 43, 43, 50–51, 52, 54 Jones, Peter (Kahkewaquonaby) 213n2, 214–15n38 compared with John Norton 53, 56, 57, 58 and divisive sectarian arguments within Canadian Methodism 53 dual cultural heritage 50 efforts on behalf of Ojibwe 42 fails to achieve his goal 57 fundraising tours 42, 46, 52 marriage 49 a Methodist missionary 41, 42 portraits see under miniature paintings private audience with William IV 43 Jorio, Andrea de: La Mimica degli antichi investigata nel gestire napoletano [Gestural Expression of the Ancients in the Light of Neapolitan Gesturing] 120 Jorn, Asger 33 Stalingrad, No-Man’s Land or the Mad Laughter of Courage 33, 33 ‘Joséphine’ 85, 92, 99 Joyce, James: Ulysses 110 Judaism 110 Kalkau, Sophia 211n15 Kaplan, Cora 195

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Kapur, Geeta 13–14 Kaswentha (wampum belt) 57, 58 Kelleher, Margaret 72 Kenny, Sean 68, 75 kenosis 149, 151 Kerr, John 68 Khalil Bey 92 Khomeyni, Ayatollah 211n6 Kibeho refugee camp massacre, Rwanda 226n8 Kibungo, Rwanda 3 Kigali, Rwanda 3 Kigali airport, Rwanda 6 kinaesthesia 196 kinship 103, 112, 114, 115 Klein, Naomi: The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism 25 Knight, Mary Ann: Captain Norton Teyoninhokar’awen, a chief of the Mohawks, one of the Five Nations in Upper Canada 41, 42, 47–48, 49 Kordela, A. Kiarina 200 Kristeva, Julia 8, 147, 191, 202, 204 and the aesthetic 16 and aporia 17 ‘Psychoanalysis and the Polis’ 1, 10 Possessions 17, 150, 152–57 Revolution in Poetic Language 148 ‘The System and the Speaking Subject’ 148 Visions capitales 149, 150, 153, 155, 156–57 Kristeva, Julia and Clément, Catherine: The Feminine and the Sacred 158, 235n115 Kulturwissenschaft xvi, 228n31, 229n34 Kunst-Werke, Berlin 139 LaCapra, Dominick 64, 216n18 Lacan, Jacques 7, 37, 39, 106, 183, 186, 195 Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis 141 links the unconscious with language 18 makes the unconscious structural 18 ‘second death’ 169 separation of being from language 115 the Thing as the lost object 200 Lacanianism 105, 106 Laclau, Ernesto 14

Lahey, Grand Marshal John 68 landscape painting 30 Lane, Christina 195 language: linked with the unconscious 18 Laplanche, Jean 19, 162, 170 Latvia 174 Laub, Dori 157805 Lévi-Strauss, Claude 16, 18, 46 Levinas, Emmanuel 15, 144, 146, 183, 184 Totality and Infinity 144 Levitt, Bill 129 Levittown (Long Island and Bucks County, Pennsylvania) 129 Levittowner house 130 Levy, Avigail 160, 164–65, 166 Levy, Rachel 160, 164–65 Leys, Ruth 64, 216n18 Library for the Science of Culture (later Warburg Institute), Hamburg 127 Lin, Maya 73 Lindsay, Jack 99 Lisbon earthquake 124 literature 17 Lithuania 174 Lloyd, David 67 Lomborg, Bjorn 24 Longley, Edna 67, 217–18n32 loss of the breast 168 of a child 164 of confidence, control, and influence 210n2 and love xviii, 21, 89 and mourning 21 of the political 8 trauma of 77, 89 unacknowledged 9 Loud family 133–34 Louvre, Paris 89, 150 love Christian 144 and loss xviii, 21, 89, 162 reciprocal 144 Lynch, Kathleen 67 Lysaght, Patricia 66 Macaulay, Zachary 49 Malik, Amna 103, 112

Index Mantz, Paul 98 Marx, Karl 17 Marxism 8, 20 Marxist theory xv masculine difference 163 masculinity 91 Master/Slave paradigm 144, 146, 156 materiality 148 maternal body, non-subjective 168 maternal eroticism 203 maternal-feminine 18, 167, 174, 179 maternal-feminineM 182, 183 maternal-feminineph 184 Matrix, the 15, 16, 168, 206 Matrixial, the 170, 195, 207 desire 187 difference 168 logic 18 politics 207 pre-oedipal psychic zone 114 principle 184 sphere 112, 186 theory 16, 169 thinking 169 Matrixiality 167, 169, 170, 179 Matta-Clark, Gordon: Splitting 133 McCaughey, Martha 197 McCauley, Elizabeth 96–97 McDougall, Joyce 123 Mack, Gerstle 85, 89, 92, 99 McKenna, Patricia 70 McLaughlin, Elizabeth 70, 71, 72 McLean, Stuart 67 meaning 82 Medalia, Hilla 164, 166 Medusa 18, 160, 161, 162, 170–79, 171, 172 memory xvii, xviii collective 119 cultural 10, 12 destruction of 118 Famine memories 61–64, 66, 69, 70, 75, 76 historical 118 individual 119 inherited 67 institutionalizing 20 loss of 32 matrixial 200

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personal 64 suppressed 62 transgenerational ‘race’ 112 traumatic 67–68, 103 visual memory of the Holocaust 6 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 141 metaphorein 148 Methodism, Methodists 42, 50, 53 metramorphosis 201 Mibirizi, Rwanda 3 Middle East 164, 167, 179 Middle Passage xviii, 102, 110, 111, 114 Mies van der Rohe, Ludwig 136 Barcelona Pavilion 130, 131, 139 Miller, Kerby: Journey of Hope 61 Miller, Susan L.: Gender and Community Policing 207 mimesis 124, 125, 128, 151 mind/body dynamic 123 miniature paintings dialectic between selfhood and otherness 56 Eliza Field Jones 50, 51, 54 format of 46–47 John Norton 41, 42, 47–48, 49, 54, 56, 58 miniatures’ ability to bridge cultural gaps 46 Peter Jones 41, 43, 43, 44, 46, 51–52, 54, 55, 56, 58 portraits of European colonizers and colonized subjects 45 proximity vs distance 54–55, 58 recognition of individual identity 45–46 sustained personal and political ties across the empire 45 minimalism 131, 137 Ministry for the Environment (Denmark) 24 mirror phase 7 Mirzoeff, Nicholas 110 Miss Congeniality (film) 163 Mississauga band 45, 56 Mitchell, W.J.T. 30 Mizejewski, Linda 195, 198 Mizocz ghetto massacre, Rovno district, Ukraine, formerly Poland (1942) 174–75 A German officer prepares to complete a mass execution by shooting two Jewish children,

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who were shot with the others in connection with the liquidation of the Mizocz ghetto 174, 176 A German police officer shoots Jewish women still alive after a mass execution of Jews from the Mizocz ghetto 174, 176 Jewish women and children are ordered to undress prior to their execution 174, 176 Jewish women, some of whom are holding infants, wait in a line before their execution by Ukrainian auxilliary police 174, 176, 177 Möbius strip 201 modernism, imperialist 103 Modernist architecture 130 Modernist movement 136 Modernity xviii, 32 democratic aspirations 8 grand political schemes 8 marked by the desire to forget on purpose 35 Mohawk nation 41, 45, 47, 48, 53, 57, 58 Mondzain, Marie-José 150 Image, Icone, Economie 151 Morash, Christopher 66 Morrison, Toni 110 Moses 10, 13, 110, 224n37 m/Other 114, 169, 170, 182, 184, 185, 188, 197, 203 mother, the her unconscious 19 primary bonding 19 traumas and secrets 19 mother-child relationship 156 Mouffe, Chantal 14 Moulin, Félix 97 mourning 152 Muhammad, Prophet 20, 25, 26 multiculturalism 147, 170 Mulvey, Laura 7, 190 Murder my Sweet (film) 198 Musée Daguerrien 97, 98 Musée d’Orsay, Paris 79 Muslims 180 myth(s) 81, 82, 102–3, 111 Nachträglichkeit 179 Nadar, Félix 95 Nakhbar, the 167

Nancy, Jean-Luc 147, 151 Naples, and gesture 120 Napoleon III, Emperor 79, 92 narcissism 27 natality 179 National Famine Commemoration Day 75 nationalism 17, 40, 210n2 in Denmark 23 the Fatherland 29 and the ‘meanwhile’ 35 and the notion of forgetting 34 part of modernity 35 resistance to analysis 30 rise of 35 Natural History 81 Nature 81 Nazi Germany and canonization 30 concentration and extermination camps of 3, 146, 157 Nazi regime 9, 27 Near Dark (film) 201–02 negativity, Hegelian 148 Negri, Antonio 40 neoclassicism 81 new world (dis)orders 8 ‘new’ world order 144 New York City Lower Manhattan Irish Hunger Memorial 62, 69, 70 New York Famine curriculum 68 see also 9/11 Newmarket, Co. Kilkenny: Gairdin an Ghorta [Famine Garden] 70, 71 Newsweek magazine 6, 160, 161 Noack, Astrid 27 Standing Woman 27, 28, 29 Nochlin, Linda 79 Norgaard, Bjorn 211n15 Norregaard-Nielsen, Hans Edward 211n15 Norton, John (Teyoninhokarawen) 213n2 commitment to indigenous concerns 53 compared with Peter Jones 53, 56, 57, 58 deserts British army and adopted by Mohawks 45, 47, 53 dual cultural heritage 47–48 embraces his First Nation identity abroad 52

Index fails to achieve his goal 57 father taken to Scotland after family killed 44–45 friends and supporters in England 48–49 and John Owen 49 and Mohawk lands 41 a Mohawk war chief 41, 47 portrait see under miniature paintings vision of pan-Indian federation 53 not-enoughness 185, 186, 188 Nyarubuye Genocide Memorial Site, Rwanda 226n8 objectification 46, 104 Occupied Territories 163 O Ciosáin, Niall 66, 67 O’Connell, Daniel 64 Oedipal drama 112 Oedipal kinship relation 103 Oedipus 114, 115, 186 Oedipus Complex 39 O Faolain, Nuala 76 Ó Gráda, Cormac 61, 66, 67, 75 oikos 150 Ojibwe nation 41, 42, 45, 53 O’Kelly, Alanna 70 Okri, Ben 1 Oliver, Kelly 156 oral phase 124 Orpheus 175 Other, the 19, 148 asymmetrical 151 hospitality towards 240n76 in the political sphere 16 prenatal 174 and self 146 the singular 151 transcendent 157 trauma of 2 the unknown Other 169 violence or indifference towards 22 Otherness 54, 56, 183 O’Toole, Fintan 67 Ovid 170, 172 Owen, John 49 Palazzo Ducale, Mantua 127 Palestine: at war with Israel 13

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Palestinians compromised humanity 179 culture 164 Israel accused of violence against them 14, 164 terminally displaced 14 Panofsky, Erwin 228n31 Panopticon 134–35 parallel montage 134 paranoia 16, 22 Paris, Treaty of (1783) 45 Pasdar, Adrian 202 Pataki, George 68 pathos formula (pathosformel) 208n4 patience 147, 150, 157, 232n24 patriarchy 7, 106, 107 PBS 133 peace and compassion 169 connection with the feminine 163 Pearl Harbor 124, 228n23 Pena, Elizabeth 203 penis envy 107, 184 Peress, Gilles 116 Peruche, E. 97, 98 perversion-heredity-degenerescence 105 Petrie, Donald 163 phallic difference 179 phallic logic 18, 168, 178 phallicism 204 phallocentric culture 173 Eurocentric proposition 103 order 171 thought 168, 182 phallocentrism 107, 191, 195, 206 phallus 167, 168, 189, 195, 196, 202, 203, 205 pharmakos 150, 154 Philadelphia Irish Memorial 62, 65, 73–75, 74 Philadelphia Irish Memorial Committee 68 Phillips, Ruth 46 photography camera caught up in enigma of trauma 120 Darwin’s collection of facial expression photographs 121 identity 125

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photographs as vehicles of transmission 128 photography studies 7 photocopying 176–77 physiognomy 227n16 physiology 123 Picasso, Pablo: La Femme à la Collerette 156, 235n111 picture window 130, 133, 134, 135 Plato: Symposium 183 platysma myoides muscle 122 Poggeler, Otto 148 Point Break (film) 201 Póirtéir, Cathal 61 political theory, current dead ends of 16 politics 22 critical questioning 9 cultural 21, 103, 224n36 and ethics 144, 147, 151 gender 163, 170 legacy of modern politics 8 matrixial 207 m/Other 197 Pan-African 224n36 racialized 102, 106 sexual 197 unacknowledged affliction and loss 9 a visual politics for psychoanalysis 7 Western 147 Pollock, Griselda 29, 89, 110, 159–89 Differencing the Canon 27 Polykleitos: Doryphoros 27, 29 Pompeii, destruction of 124 Poseidon 170 post-/anti-Hegelian Political Theory 17 post-traumatic stress disorder 40, 62, 225n5 and Denmark 20, 23, 25, 31–32, 34 Irish Famine 68 postcoloniality xv postmemory 64 postmodern culture 129 postmodernity 149 Powell, Anna 195 power xv, 105 male 195 Medusan 171 pregnancy 168, 180, 183, 184 prematernity 179, 180

prenatality 179, 180 Preziosi, Donald 34 ‘primitive culture’ 223n21 primitivity 105 privacy, the right to 32 Privy Council 48 Proudhon, Mme 89 Proudhon, Pierre-Joseph 79, 89 Providence, Rhode Island Famine memorial 72–73 psychoanalysis 149 and cinema 7 cornerstones of 190 and expression 123 Freudian 16, 18, 104, 107 Jewishness of 11 Lacanian 38–39, 82 the mother in 185 oriented towards transformation 10 political value of xvii and the psychic workings of race 105 racialized politics of 102, 106 and subjectivity 203 ‘the talking cure’ 7 theories of affect 9 a theory of subjectivity 18 visual politics of 26 psychoanalytical theory xv psychology of human expression 119, 122, 127 trauma in 7, 162 psychotherapy 67 public/private space 133, 136, 142 Quinlan, Carmel 66 Quintillian 120 ‘race’ ideology of 105 Lacanian analysis of 106 politics of 103 the problematic of 106 racial difference 105, 106 racialization 105, 107, 222n10 racism 17, 21, 102, 105, 107, 108 Rafael, Vicente 56 Rapaport, Herman 118 rape 178

Index Rasmussen, Anders Fogh 23–24, 30, 32, 34, 38 Real, the 105, 106, 188, 200, 206 Realism 77, 79, 80 reality television An American Family 133–34 Big Brother xviii, 22, 135–39 recognition concept 146, 156 Red, Eric 201 Reineke, Martha 154 Rejlander, Oscar 121 Renaissance 140, 208n4 Renan, Ernest: Qu’est-ce qu’une nation? [What is a Nation?] 35 repetition compulsion 9, 114 representation xv Resnais, Alain: Night and Fog 175 resonance 179 response-ability 16, 22 responsibility 14, 170, 187, 188 civic 48 for colonial violence 13 and ethics 16, 17, 189 historic 63 for others 9 political 169 postmemorial 76 of the press 31 social 15 Revolution of 1848 77 Riat, G. 85, 89, 99 Rivière, Joan: ‘Womanliness as a Masquerade’ 106 Robinson, Mary 63, 218n46 Romantics 82 Roscommon County Famine Memorial Garden 70, 71, 72 Rose, Gillian: The Broken Middle 144–45, 148–49 Rose, Jacqueline 12, 20, 164, 196, 200 Royal Academy 41, 43, 45, 48 Rubens, Peter Paul: The Head of Medusa 171 Rubin, James 79, 89, 91, 94 Rukara, Rwanda 3 Rumsfeld, Donald 31, 211n19 Rushdie, Salman fatwa on him 211n6 The Satanic Verses 211n6

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Rwandan Genocide (1994) 8 assassination triggers Hutu massacre of Tutsi minority 6 Jaar’s Rwanda series 2–7 plane shot down killing Presidents of Rwanda and Burundi (1994) 6 Sabatier, Mme 91 sacred, the 149, 150, 153, 155, 157, 158, 167 sacrifice 17, 115, 151, 153, 154–55 Said, Edward 10, 103 Freud and the Non-European (lecture) 12–13, 110 Salomon, Nanette: ‘The Art Historical Canon: Sins of Omission’ 27, 29 Salon of 1855, Paris 79 Samilova, Gulnara 116, 117 Samir, Abu 166–67 Samir, Um (born Khadra Kattous) 164, 165–66 Sartre, Jean-Paul: Being and Nothingness 140–41 Scalo 117 Scavenius, Bente 211n15 Scharf, Aaron 94, 95, 221n47 Schaviro, Steven 195 scopophilia 5 Scott, Sir Walter 41 Scully, Alya 116, 118 seduction 19 self, the constructed through media manipulation 136 a dialectical construct 142 egology 144 formation of 141 the notion of 138 and the other 139, 146–47, 150 sense of 129, 135 struggle for recognition 144 subject/object 141 transformation in Big Brother 142 self-other 150, 168 selfhood 46, 54, 56 Selzer, Mark 8 semanalysis 148 semiotic/symbolic 148, 149 semiotics 18

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separation 162 Seshadri-Crooks, Kalpana 106, 225n50 severality 168 Matrixial 169, 186 prenatal/prematernal 178 proto-subjective 179 sexism 17, 170 sexual abuse 8 sexual difference xv, xviii, 105, 106, 190 an-other 182 feminine 167, 184 Freud’s phallic theorization of 170 in Lacan’s writings 222n10 masculine 172 non-Oedipal 168 Oedipal 189 patriarchal modes of 7 and ‘racial discourse’ 21 and violence 162 sexuality xv, 105 enigma of 186 and fantasy 107 female 107 of Medusa 171 Shakespeare, William: Hamlet 80–81 Shangi, Rwanda 3 shared encounter-event 169 Shaviro, Steve 201, 204–5 Shaw, Rachel 116, 118 Shirley, Anne 198 Shoah 167 see also Holocaust Shulan, Michael 116, 128 Shure, Robert 72, 73 significance 148 signifiers 18, 197, 198 ‘enigmatic’ 19, 162 ‘glissement’ 106 master 106 operative 105 resignification of 115 Silver, Ron 192 singularity 2, 144, 145, 151, 153, 155, 161, 231n11 slavery, enslavement xviii, 21, 62, 67, 68, 103, 112, 225n50 soap opera 134 social responsibility 15

social sciences 105 sociality, phallic notions of 17 Socrates 183 Somerset House, London 41 Sontag, Susan 231–32n15 ‘Against Interpretation’ 36 ‘hermeneutics’ 37 Regarding the Pain of Others 15 Soviet Realism 72 Soviet Union: many driven from their homes by force 33 Space is the Place (film) 108, 224n34 spectatorship 7 Spillers, Hortense J. 105, 106, 107 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty xvii, 56–57, 107, 179 Stalingrad, Battle of (1942–43) 27 Stewart, Susan 46 Structural Theory (Freud) 123 subject/object 140, 141 subjecthood 19 subjectivity xv, xviii, 14, 16, 22, 162, 163, 179, 182, 196, 203 an aesthetic and proto-ethical dimension in 15 black feminine 107 defies the notion of the social contract 18 dominant theories of 167 as the effect of ‘seduction’ 19 feminine 114, 162 First Nations 46 and identity 20 indigenous 46, 54 as intersubjectivity 19 maternal 169 phallic 17, 19 phallic structuring of 186 postnatal 179 psychoanalysis as a theory of 18 specular aspects of 7 trans-subjective 183 within the domestic environment 134 suffering 22, 147, 150, 232n24 iconized and mediatized image of 4 individual 8 infantile 185 mass 8 private 10

Index survivors 7 sympathetic 63 of traumatized soldiers 7 suicide bombers 163 Ayat Al-Akhras 159–60, 161 Sun Ra 108, 110, 224n34 Sun Ra Arkestra 108 super-ego 18, 123 Supersol shop, Kiryat Hayovel, Jerusalem 159, 160 Swinford, Co. Mayo: Famine Memorial 63 Sydney 70 symbol 81, 82 Symbolic, the 196, 200, 206 synaesthetic system 227n18 Tanzania peace conference (1994) 6 Tasker, Yvonne 194 Tatum, Karen E. 204 Taylor, Charles 144 Teignmouth, Lord 49 television analogous to the picture window 134 cable 129 replaces the hearth as centre of family life 130 terror 121, 121, 122 definition 160 and the Gorgon 171 and horror 160 terrorism Danish laws 32, 212n23 escalating violence of 8 textuality xv thanatopolitics 147 theology defines a foundational cause and promises a single solution 8 offers one explanation that displaces all others 10 theoretical vs atheoretical xv Thirty Years’ War (1618–48) 80 Thomerson, Tim 202 Titanic, sinking of 118n23 Titian 127 To Die in Jerusalem (film) 164–65, 165 Tolle, Brian 62, 70 Torok, Maria 19

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Toronto: Ireland Park 62 torture at Abu Ghraib 25 survivors of 7 totalitarianism 8 Toussaint, Hélène 79, 94 Toussaint, Hélène et al..: Gustave Courbet 85–86, 87, 88, 99 tragedy 81 trans-subjectivity 19, 179 transcendence dialectical 170 transcendence/immanence 148, 151 transdisciplinary initiative xiv, xvi transfixion 22 transience 89 translation 56–57 Traub, Charles 116 Trauerspiel (mourning plays) 77, 79, 80–81, 83, 100 trauma affects the way events are experienced 118 of Africa 2 and agonism 13–14 cause of 34 defined 7, 124, 162 of dictatorships 8 of enslavement 21 familial 167 history as 10, 13 of loss 77 misuse of the concept 8 of the Other 2 political 83 psychic 77, 83, 162 of racism 108 The Rwanda Project 1 of separation 204 transmission across generations 7–8 transmitted from mother to child 19 trauma theory 75, 162 emergence of 8 and Freud’s discoveries 9 traumatic paradigm 62 traumatic witnessing xviii Trevor, Claire 198 Trier, Lars von 29

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Trinity College, Cambridge 47 Truman Show, The (film) 136 Tutsi people: massacred by Hutu majority in Rwanda (1994) 6 Twin Towers, New York, attacks on see 9/11 Ukraine 174 uncanniness, uncanny xviii, 16, 22, 35, 40, 114, 133, 138–39, 142 unconscious 35 evolutionary models of 102 Freudian phylogenetic model 103 linked with language 18 and Whiteness 106 unheimlich 138, 141 United Nations (UN) 32 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (1948) 2 small UN unit present at Rwandan Genocide 2 United States Famine memorials 61, 62, 65, 69, 70, 72–75, 73, 74 foreign policy under George W. Bush 15 universality 146, 231n11 Université de Paris, l’ 97 Valamaneshe, Hossein and Angela 70 Vallou de Villeneuve, Julien 94, 95, 97, 98 Nude Study 95 verbal testimony 120 Verplanck, Anne 49 victimhood 64, 75 Victor, Barbara 163–64, 170 Vidler, Anthony 138 Vietnam War 8 violence actual xviii central to the cultural imagination 17 colonial 13, 58, 67 containment of 146 domestic 8, 203, 204 endemic 17 impure/purifying 150 legitimate/illegitimate 233n42 in literature, art, the media and cinema xviii

and mediation 144 menace of 22 mimetic 233n44 paranoid 189 paternal 180 political 7 racialized 13 and the sacred 149–50 sexual 170 theory of 162 visual art studies 7 visual testimony 120 voyeurism 5, 134, 139 Wallace, Edward 218n46 Walter, Bruno 123 Walton, Jean 106 War of 1812 53 war on terror 15 Warburg, Aby xvi, xvii, 22, 116, 127–28, 208n4, 228n31 Warhol, Andy 134 Watkins, Elizabeth 190, 191 Watson, Patrick 136–37 Weir, Peter 136 Wesleyan-Methodist Magazine 50 Whelan, Kevin 67 Whiteness 106 Wilberforce, William 41, 48, 49 William IV, King 43 Williams, Robert 156 Willig, Timothy 52–53 Winstok, Zeev 203, 204 wit(h)ness 179, 187 wit(h)ness-Thing 200 wit(h)nessing 179, 187, 188 metramorphic 206 Witkin, Joel-Peter: Studio of the Painter (Courbet), Paris 101 Women’s Vietnam Veteran’s Memorial 73 World Trade Center, New York 23, 62, 125 World War I: traumatized soldiers 7, 9, 226n10 World War II 27, 34 ‘wound culture’ 8 xenophobia 20, 26

Index Yerushalmi, Josef Hayim 12 Freud’s Moses: Judaism Terminable and Interminable 10–11 Young, Lola 105, 107, 108

YouTube 15 Zeus 171 Žižek, Slavoj 141

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