Georges Didi-Huberman: Invention of Hysteria: Charcot and the Photographic Iconography of the Salpetriere (1982/2003)

In this classic of French cultural studies, Georges Didi-Huberman traces the intimate and reciprocal relationship between the disciplines of psychiatry and photography in the late nineteenth century. Focusing on the immense photographic output of the Salpetriere hospital, the notorious Parisian asylum for insane and incurable women, Didi-Huberman shows the crucial role played by photography in the invention of the category of hysteria. Under the direction of the medical teacher and clinician Jean-Martin Charcot, the inmates of Salpetriere identified as hysterics were methodically photographed, providing skeptical colleagues with visual proof of hysteria’s specific form. These images, many of which appear in this book, provided the materials for the multivolume album Iconographie photographique de la Salpetriere.

As Didi-Huberman shows, these photographs were far from simply objective documentation. The subjects were required to portray their hysterical “type”—they performed their own hysteria. Bribed by the special status they enjoyed in the purgatory of experimentation and threatened with transfer back to the inferno of the incurables, the women patiently posed for the photographs and submitted to presentations of hysterical attacks before the crowds that gathered for Charcot’s “Tuesday Lectures.”

Charcot did not stop at voyeuristic observation. Through techniques such as hypnosis, electroshock therapy, and genital manipulation, he instigated the hysterical symptoms in his patients, eventually giving rise to hatred and resistance on their part. Didi-Huberman follows this path from complicity to antipathy in one of Charcot’s favorite “cases,” that of Augustine, whose image crops up again and again in the Iconographie. Augustine’s virtuosic performance of hysteria ultimately became one of self-sacrifice, seen in pictures of ecstasy, crucifixion, and silent cries.

Originally published by Editions Macula, Paris, 1982
Translated by Alisa Hartz
Publisher MIT Press, 2003
ISBN 0262042150, 9780262042154
373 pages

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Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen, Jakob Jakobsen (eds.): Expect Anything Fear Nothing: The Situationist Movement in Scandinavia and Elsewhere (2011)

“This volume is the first English-language presentation of the Scandinavian Situationists and their role in the Situationist movement. The Situationist movement was an international movement of artists, writers and thinkers that in the 1950s and 1960s tried to revolutionize the world through rejecting bourgeois art and critiquing the post-World War Two capitalist consumer society.

The book contains articles, conversations and statements by former members of the Situationists’ organisations as well as contemporary artists, activists, scholars and writers. While previous publications about the Situationist movement almost exclusively have focused on the contribution of the French section and in particular on the role of the Guy Debord this book aims to shed light on the activities of the Situationists active in places like Denmark, Sweden and Holland. The themes and stories chronicled include: The anarchist undertakings of the Drakabygget movement led by the rebel artists Jørgen Nash, Hardy Strid and Jens Jørgen Thorsen, the exhibition by the Situationist International “Destruction of RSG-6” in 1963 in Odense organised by the painter J.V. Martin in collaboration with Guy Debord, the journal The Situationist Times edited by Jacqueline de Jong, Asger Jorn’s political critique of natural science and the films of the Drakabygget movement.”

Contributors: Peter Laugesen, Carl Nørrested, Fabian Tompsett, Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen, Jacqueline de Jong, Gordon Fazakerley, Hardy Strid, Karen Kurczynski, Stewart Home, Jakob Jakobsen.

Publisher Nebula, Copenhagen; in association with Autonomedia, New York, 2011
Open access
ISBN 879936512X, 9788799365128
288 pages

Reviews: Kim West (Kunstkritikk, 2011), Lugo (2011).

Publisher

PDF, PDF (9 MB)

See also Bolt, Jakobsen (eds.), Cosmonauts of the Future: Texts from the Situationist Movement in Scandinavia and Elsewhere, 2015.
More on Situationists

McKenzie Wark: A Hacker Manifesto (2004–) [EN, DE, FR, CR, ES]

A double is haunting the world–the double of abstraction, the virtual reality of information, programming or poetry, math or music, curves or colorings upon which the fortunes of states and armies, companies and communities now depend. The bold aim of this book is to make manifest the origins, purpose, and interests of the emerging class responsible for making this new world–for producing the new concepts, new perceptions, and new sensations out of the stuff of raw data.

A Hacker Manifesto deftly defines the fraught territory between the ever more strident demands by drug and media companies for protection of their patents and copyrights and the pervasive popular culture of file sharing and pirating. This vexed ground, the realm of so-called “intellectual property,” gives rise to a whole new kind of class conflict, one that pits the creators of information–the hacker class of researchers and authors, artists and biologists, chemists and musicians, philosophers and programmers–against a possessing class who would monopolize what the hacker produces.

Drawing in equal measure on Guy Debord and Gilles Deleuze, A Hacker Manifesto offers a systematic restatement of Marxist thought for the age of cyberspace and globalization. In the widespread revolt against commodified information, McKenzie Wark sees a utopian promise, beyond the property form, and a new progressive class, the hacker class, who voice a shared interest in a new information commons.

Publisher Harvard University Press, 2004
ISBN 0674015436, 9780674015432
208 pages

Review: Hua Hsu (Village Voice, 2004).

Wikipedia

Publisher

A Hacker Manifesto (English, 2004, updated on 2014-9-12)
Hacker-Manifest (German, trans. Dietmar Zimmer, 2005, added on 2018-7-13)
Un manifeste hacker (French, trans. Club Post-1984 Mary Shelley & Cie Hacker band, 2006, added on 2018-7-13)
Hakerski manifest (Croatian, trans. Tomislav Medak, 2006)
Un manifiesto hacker (Spanish, trans. Laura Manero, 2006, added on 2018-7-13)
Manifiesto hacker (Spanish, trans. of a shorter essay, undated, v4, added on 2014-3-6)