Politics and Personhood

Reflections on the Portrait Photograph

Bibliographic Data

ID11885674
AuthorsJenny Edkins (0000-0003-1477-0607, Aberystwyth University, corresponding author)
Year2013
Volume38
Issue2
Pages139-154
Publication date2013-05-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueAlternatives Global Local Political (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0304-3754 • E-ISSN: 2163-3150
PublisherSAGE Publishing (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1177/0304375413488030
OpenAlexW2019398929
LanguageEN
Citations received11

The faces of the missing are held aloft on placards in demonstrations or posted on walls in the aftermath of disappearances. They appear massed on the pages of newspapers and in the displays of genocide museums. Often nothing more than family snapshots given a public place, such images can be compelling. Although photographs of atrocity and war have frequently been discussed, little attention has been paid to these other images: images that do not show suffering but still seem, at least potentially, to be politically effective. How do these photographs work? What form of personhood do they instantiate and what politics do they point to? How are they different from other photographs? This article examines what might be special about a photograph, especially a photograph of a face, and how its political impact might be understood. Drawing on Lacanian psychoanalytic concepts of trauma and subjectivity, the article suggests that a photograph embodies in its very temporal structure a personhood that is inimical to contemporary structures of sovereign power. The destabilizing political potential of a photograph, like that of certain forms of literary text, could be understood as arising from its potential as an encounter with the trauma that inhabits sovereign power and sovereign subjectivity but that is generally concealed. The account presented offers an alternative approach to the analysis of the politics of a photograph and gestures toward other manifestations of personhood and politics

Aesthetics · Art · Epistemology · Genocide · Nothing · Personhood · Political science · Political subjectivity · Politics · Power (physics · Psychoanalysis · Psychoanalytic theory · Sociology · Sovereignty · Subjectivity · Uncanny · Italian Fascism and Post-war Society · Law · Philosophy · Philosophy, Ethics, and Existentialism · Photography and Visual Culture · Psychology

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