From cave paintings of hunting and the crucifixion of Christ to phantasmagoric portraits by Goya and Hogarth, from Matthew Brady’s photographs of the U.S. Civil War and long-form moving image compositions by Griffiths and Eisenstein which led to more stylized portrayals by Fincher, Kubrick and Tarantino up to and through manga and video games, depictions of violence in and through images and words have held an ambiguous place—both of fascination and rapture, and of contempt and disgust, sometimes simultaneously—throughout history and across cultures. In the late modern era, both visual art and performative work by artists such as Bacon, Beuys, Burden, Ono, Richter and others, have attempted to question, represent and embody violence. Drawing on a range of creative media and genres including fiction, photography, music, and film, as well as theoretical texts by philosophers, literary critics and anthropologists such as Deleuze, Fanon, Foucault, Genet, Kafka, Nietzsche, Taussig, and Žižek, this course charts an itinerary through various theaters of violent encounter to move beyond the sensational and disturbing in order to explore the symbolic and affective registers of violence. What kinds of theoretical and artistic assumptions underline representational practices about violence, and what are the ethical and political risks that attend such choices? Can representations of violence be innocent of violence themselves, or are they necessarily implicated in the scenes of violence they invoke, speak to, and mediate?

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