Ruination: partition and the expectation of violence (on Allan deSouza's Irish photography).
This essay takes as its occasion a series of photographs on the Irish border region by Allan deSouza. The photographs are the motive for a set of interconnecting reflections on the conditions of violence and on its relation to state formation; on violence and the forms of history; and on the place o...
| Publicado en: | Social Identities Vol. 9; no. 4; pp. 475 - 510 |
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| Formato: | Artículo |
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Taylor & Francis Ltd
Dec2003
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| Acceso en línea: | Ver este registro en EBSCOhost |
| fields | @attributes: recordID: 1 pdfLink: plink: https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=ssf&AN=12252656&site=ehost-live header: @attributes: shortDbName: ssf uiTerm: 12252656 longDbName: Social Sciences Full Text (H.W. Wilson) uiTag: AN controlInfo: bkinfo: jinfo: jid: 13504630 SEN jtl: Social Identities issn: 13504630 maglogo: Y pubinfo: dt: Dec2003 vid: 9 iid: 4 pid: 377 pub: Taylor & Francis Ltd artinfo: ui: 12252656 10.1080/1350463032000174641 ppf: 475 ppct: 35 formats: fmt: @attributes: type: P size: 10.1MB tig: atl: Ruination: partition and the expectation of violence (on Allan deSouza's Irish photography). aug: au: Lloyd, David affil: University of Southern California su: Ireland DeSouza, Allan Historical materialism Dialectical materialism Violence Photography sug: subj: Historical materialism Dialectical materialism Violence Ireland Photography DeSouza, Allan ab: This essay takes as its occasion a series of photographs on the Irish border region by Allan deSouza. The photographs are the motive for a set of interconnecting reflections on the conditions of violence and on its relation to state formation; on violence and the forms of history; and on the place of melancholy as a relation not only to the past, which inevitably it is, but as no less a kind of opening to a future. These concerns link three works by Walter Benjamin: 'Critique of Violence' (1920-21); The Origin of German Tragic Drama (1924-25); and the 'Theses on the Philosophy of History' (1940). The link runs between the insistence of violence in the historical foundations of the state; the function of historicism in enabling that disavowal through a rarely acknowledged mythic/symbolic aesthetic that is encrypted in it; and the counter-discourse of historical materialism that Benjamin holds in tension with melancholy. Ireland is a state marked by the virtual and the actual violence of partition. Subject to all the injunctions and institutions of modernity, to its emerging forms of state and policing as well as to its techniques and technologies of military reduction, Ireland remains a location in which the failure of projects of modernity is only too easily exemplified. Ireland's is a history in ruins, a history of ruins. Ruins are the signs of a history of incompletion and 'ruination' that is normally read by conventional historians as the fatality of a culture resistant to modernity and driven to return time and again to its own atavisms. Benjamin's insight is to read in ruins and in violence not merely the consequences of a past malevolently active in the present, but openings onto an alternative configuration to that suggested by historicism and modernity. pubtype: Academic Journal doctype: Article src: R language: English refInfo: copyright: @attributes: flag: N holdings: @attributes: islocal: N |
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