|
|  |
Invention of Hysteria
Charcot and the Photographic Iconography of the Salpetriere
Georges Didi-Huberman
Translated by Alisa Hartz
 Table of Contents and Sample Chapters
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.
About the Author
Georges Didi-Huberman teaches at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales in Paris. He is a winner of the Distinguished Lifetime Achievement Award for Writing on Art given by the College Art Association.
| "...a significant examination of an often blurred landscape between pain and performance."
—Allan Graubard, Leonardo Reviews "This poetic account of the relationship between photography and madness will interest any student of art or mental health."
—Publishers Weekly Forecasts |
|
| "Didi-Huberman composes an absolutely fascinating story about the emergence of modern subjectivity from the netherworld and darkrooms of nineteenth-century medicine. This gorgeously written and provocative landmark study is indispensable for anyone interested in questions of gender, the history of science, photography, and medicine: in short, in how we see ourselves as who we are."
—Ulrich Baer, Department of German, New York University, author of Spectral Evidence: The Photography of Trauma
"Georges Didi-Huberman's Invention of Hysteria is an almost legendary text, so influential has it been on cultural criticism, and this even before its very welcome translation into English. Writing in a style that is at once literary and philosophical, Didi-Huberman brilliantly demonstrates how a study of hysteria in the nineteenth century continues to have profound relevance for anyone interested in questions of culture and its embodiment—that is, questions concerning the workings of power. The author's erudite combination of visual and textual research and provocative analysis has produced a book that will be equally crucial to scholars of medicine, feminism, psychoanalysis, literature, photography, art history, the body, or postmodern theory, to name only a few of the fields it touches on. But it's also simply a great read, an artful rendition of history that reminds us of the extent to which the 'weird science' of the nineteenth century still haunts our thinking to this day."
—Geoffrey Batchen, Professor of Art History, City University of New York Graduate Center
"The invention and dissemination of photography, it has often been noted, contributed to what has been called the modern 'frenzy of the visible.' In this remarkable study of Charcot's clinic Salpêtrière and its iconography of madness, Georges Didi-Huberman demonstrates that it led as well to the heightened visibility of frenzy. The camera, he brilliantly shows, documented—or, better put, solicited—the theatricalized spectacle of hysterical symptoms suffered by women at the dawn of the psychoanalytic age."
—Martin Jay, Sidney Hellman Ehrman Professor of History, University of California, Berkeley
View All Endorsements |
|
See Other Titles In:
|
|
|
