The Aesthetics of Trauma: Mini - Course
Margaret Iversen
1. Psychoanalysis and Surrealism
Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), The Standard Edition of the Complete
Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, edited and translated by James Strachey, London: The
Hogarth Press, 1974, Vol. 18, Parts I –V.
André Breton, Mad Love. Translated by Mary Ann Caws. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press,
1987. First published in France by Librairie Gallimard, 1937, Parts 1-3.
2. Psychoanalysis: Jacques Lacan
Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis. Edited by Jacques-Alain Miller.
Translated by Alan Sheridan. London: Penguin, 1977, chapters 5 and 6.
Hal Foster, “Death in America,” October 75 (Winter 1996), pp. 36-59.
3. Traumatic Photography
Benjamin, Walter. “Little History of Photography.” In Selected Writings, vol. 2. Edited by Michael
W. Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith, trans. Rodney Livingstone et al. Cambridge, Mass:
Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999.
Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. Translated by Richard Howard. New
York: Hill and Wang, 1981. Especially second half of Part I, ‘Studium and Punctum.’
4. Images in Spite of All
Didi-Huberman, Georges. Images in Spite of All: Four Photographs from Auschwitz. Translated by
Shane B. Lillis. Chicago, Ill., and London: University of Chicago Press, 2008, Part I.