ABSTRACT
How should we understand the historical relation between theories of trauma and of visual media? I begin this inquiry by returning to Freud, whose psychoanalytic theory of traumatic memory had a direct infl uence on Benjamin, Adorno and other theorists who followed them in developing critical approaches to modern media. This chapter explains how the concept of unconscious optics proposed by Benjamin can be used to understand historical trauma in the writings of Freud. Although Freud tended to theorize trauma with respect to the individual subject, he also developed theories of collective identity and historical trauma. The cultural signifi cance of modern visual media however remained outside the scope of Freud’s inquiries. I argue that photography, as a new optical technology, offered perspectives Freud could not fully assimilate into psychoanalytic theory. Photography bears witness to a set of historical transformations that shaped, both directly and indirectly, the theorization of trauma.
