Georges Didi-Huberman: Invention of Hysteria: Charcot and the Photographic Iconography of the Salpetriere (1982/2003)
Filed under book | Tags: · cultural studies, france, hypnosis, hysteria, jouissance, photography, psychology
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
PDF (updated on 2012-9-24)
Comments (2)Jon May, Nigel Thrift (eds.): Timespace. Geographies of Temporality (2001)
Filed under book | Tags: · actor-network theory, anthropology, buddhism, cultural geography, cultural studies, feminism, media studies, postmodern, psychology, sociology, time
Timespace undermines the old certainties of time and space by arguing that these dimensions do not exist singly, but only as a hybrid process term. The issue of space has perhaps been over-emphasised and it is essential that processes of everyday existence, such as globalisation and environmental issues and also notions such as gender, race and ethnicity, are looked at with a balanced time-space analysis.
The social and cultural consequences of this move are traced through a series of studies which deploy different perspectives – structural, phenomenological and even Buddhist – in order to make things meet up. The contributors provide an overview of the history of time and introduce the concepts of time and space together, across a range of disciplines. The themes discussed are of importance for cultural geography, sociology, anthropology, cultural and media studies, and psychology.
Publisher Routledge, 2001
Volume 13 of Critical geographies
ISBN 0415180848, 9780415180849
323 pages
PDF (updated on 2012-8-14)
Comments (2)Nigel Thrift: Non-Representational Theory: Space, Politics, Affect (2007)
Filed under book | Tags: · affect, anthropology, cultural studies, everyday, geography, life, non-representational theory, politics, social theory, sociology, space
“This book presents a distinctive approach to the politics of everyday life. Ranging across a variety of spaces in which politics and the political unfold, it questions what is meant by perception, representation and practice, with the aim of valuing the fugitive practices that exist on the margins of the known. It revolves around three key functions.
It introduces the rather dispersed discussion of non-representational theory to a wider audience; provides the basis for an experimental rather than a representational approach to the social sciences and humanities; and begins the task of constructing a different kind of political genre.”
Publisher Routledge, 2007
International library of sociology
ISBN 0415393213, 9780415393218
325 pages