ABSTRACT
This chapter describes histories of war, trauma and memory by focusing on documents from the Dr Fadl Fakhouri file in the archive of the Atlas Group. The artist Walid Raad founded the group in 1989 and remained its sole member until he dissolved it in 2004. The chapter focuses on documents that are said to have been part of a donation made to the archive of the Atlas Group. The Lebanese historian Fakhouri made the donation in 1993, and it consists of notebooks, films and photographs. Photography became the indexical secretary of the neurologist Jean Laplanche-Martin Charcot who was studying hysteria at La Salpetriere in Paris. Charcot used photography extensively and built an archive hosting an iconography of hysterical/traumatic symptoms. The documents in the Fakhouri file never promise the possibility of translation but nonetheless they carry something across. The documents from the Fakhouri file raise questions regarding history writing and especially address the task of the historian.
