FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 9, 2007
Translocalities/transmodernities: Panel Discussion, Geballe Room, Townsend
Center
12:30 p.m. – 3 p.m. Polycentric sessions and screenings, San Francisco
Art Institute, Lecture hall and classrooms
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This paper offers a reading of the The Silence, Gilles Peress' photographic
documentation of the Rwandan genocide. I argue that the book's use of
the figure of the "interval" as a way to represent the temporal
logic of the traumatic event shifts emphasis away from a discourse of
justice and rights towards the very process of representation. This
argument draws on the
critical theoretical work of Jean Laplanche and Jacques Derrida to demonstrate
how a psychoanalytic conception of traumatic time effectively ruptures
the liberal narrative of moral progress that has characterized the discourse
of human rights. I consider what Derrida has called a politico-logic
of trauma and his conception of a topology of mourning to address the
possibility of a different notion of justice outside the language of
law and progress, towards the promise of a different future, hence a
temporality that is not a modular extension of the present but one whose
future alterity is informed by its relation to the past.
Participant's Bio:
Targol Mesbah teaches critical theory, postcolonial critique and Iranian
cinema in the Interdisciplinary Humanities and Media Studies programs
at New College in San Francisco. She received her B.A. in film studies
from the University of California Irvine and her Ph.D. in history of
consciousness at University of California Santa Cruz. She is presently
engaged in turning her doctoral dissertation into a book manuscript
entitled Why Does the Other Suffer? War, Trauma, and the Everyday. Her
research interests include critiques of the normalizing effects of biopower;
poststructuralist philosophy; psychoanalytic time; and the politics
of difference.