Freud was in a bellicose state of mind for just two weeks at the start of the Great War of 1914-1918. Very quickly thereafter, he began to devote himself to an attempt at understanding, doing so in an all the more singular way as he found himself faced with a radically unprecedented situation. The ...
# 61 | Rwanda | Nathan Réra
The staging of photographs is a practice that has always existed. As early as the American Civil War, Alexander Gardner and Timothy O’Sullivan, it is known, certainly moved corpses around in order to render their compositions more “striking,” just as they also reported their models to be “Yankee” or “Confederate” so as to suit ...
# 60 | Pillages and Restitutions | Bénédicte Savoy
Through her fundamental work on the despoliation of artworks, Bénédicte Savoy reminds us that this has been an issue of importance for people’s memories since the time of Antiquity. In fact, it already was such an issue in Aeschylus’ Agamemnon. In the present text, Savoy brings out for us the recurring motifs in debates ...
# 59 | The War of the Models | Michael Lucken
What kind of war do countries plunge themselves into when they claim to be the source of some sort of novelty? While exact reproduction may be more profitable, this does not suffice to ensure the reputation of a country or an industry that has to innovate in order to dominate. Michael Lucken studies Japan, ...
# 58 | Conjuring away War | Frédérique Goerig-Hergott
“I didn’t paint war scenes in order to prevent war; never would I have had that pretension,” Otto Dix told Otto Wundshammer in 1946. “I painted them in order to conjure war away. All art is conjuration.” In evaluating his own work more than twenty years after the Great War of 1914-1918, Dix subscribed to ...
# 57 | Guardroom | Léonard Pouy
There was a time when war was so loved and considered so normal that history itself was thought to be made up especially of military battles, conquests, and heroism. That was the way it was in the seventeenth-century Netherlands, when the Dutch were victorious over the Spanish occupiers in 1648. Within a Reformation atmosphere, ...
# 56 | Chinese Art | Estelle Bories
Estelle Bories, who wrote her dissertation at the Paris Institute of Political Studies (Sciences Po) on contemporary Chinese art, reexamines for us the historical context within which this issue emerged. She is interested in the origins of the Chinese avant-garde, in the Woodcut Movement, and in the internationalist standpoint adopted by the writer Lu ...
# 55 | Madness, Equality, Democracy | Laure Murat
Laure Murat is a historian and a professor in the Department of French and Francophone Studies at UCLA. She has published several outstanding books, the most recent of which, L’Homme qui se prenait pour Napoléon. Pour une histoire politique de la folie (Gallimard, 2011), is of fundamental importance. She reexamines for us the relationships between ...
# 54 | On French Colonialism | Nicolas Schaub
Between 1830 and 1870, at the time of the French colonial conquest of Algeria, more and more representations appeared. Yet, with few exceptions, these representations camouflaged the sufferings on both sides, and hardly anyone but Tony Johannot directly evoked the brutality of colonization. Johannot fixed in place the image of the “smoke out” from ...
# 53 | Social Question | Fabienne Chevallier
Fabienne Chevallier studies the connections between architecture, urban planning, hygienics, and politics. Here, she looks at the cholera epidemic of 1932 in Paris, where the inequality before life was confirmed to be a determining factor for inequality before death. The official decrees recommending expensive and inaccessible forms of nourishment—grilled meats and fish—were no more ...
