Do artists travel away from or towards trauma? Is trauma encrypted or inscribed in art? Or can aesthetic practices (after-images) bring about transformation of trauma, personal trauma or historical traumas? Can they do this in a way that does not imply cure or resolution of the traces (after-affects) of trauma? How do artists themselves process these traces as participants in and sensors for our life-worlds and histories, and how does the viewer, coming belatedly or from elsewhere, encounter works bearing such traces or seeking forms through which to touch and transform them?
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In this innovative collection, a distinguished group of international authors dare to think psychoanalytically about the legacies of political violence and suffering in relation to post-traumatic cultures worldwide. They build on maverick art historian Aby Warburg's project of combining social, cultural, anthropological and psychological analyses of the image in order to track the undercurrents of cultural violence in the representational repertoire of Western modernity. Drawing on post-colonial and feminist theory, they analyze the image and the aesthetic in conditions of historical trauma,...

In 1945, French political prisoners returning from the concentration camps of Germany coined the phrase the concentrationary universe to describe the camps as a terrible political experiment in the destruction of the human. This book shows how the unacknowledged legacy of a totalitarian mentality has seeped into the deepest recesses of everyday popular culture. It asks if the concentrationary now infests our cultural imaginary, normalizing what was once considered horrific and exceptional by transforming into entertainment violations of human life. Drawing on the political philosophy of...