Presented by the Research Focus Group in Modernist Studies Friday, May 9 / 3:30 p.m. / Free South Hall 2635 ABSTRACT: "Ruination: Partition and the Expectation of Violence (on Allan deSouza's Irish Photography)" This essay takes as its occasion a series of photographs on the Irish border region by Allan deSouza, a Los Angeles based photographer, born in East Africa of Goan ancestry, who grew up in London and travels frequently to the north west of Ireland. The photographs are the motive for a set of interconnecting reflections on the conditions of violence and on its relation to state formation; on violence and the forms of history; and on the place of melancholy as a relation not only to the past, which inevitably it is, but as no less a kind of opening to a future. The paper links these concerns through three works by Walter Benjamin that seem superficially quite disparate but are, nonetheless, interconnected by many cryptic corridors. Those works are “Critique of Violence” (1920-21); The Origin of German Tragic Drama, written in 1924-5 and published in 1928; and the “Theses on the Philosophy of History” (1940). The link that I will pursue runs between the insistence of violence—and its relentless disavowal—in the historical foundations of the state; the function of historicism in enabling that disavowal through a rarely acknowledged mythic/symbolic aesthetic that is encrypted in it; and the counter-discourse of historical materialism that Benjamin links with melancholy. ABOUT DAVID LLOYD: David Lloyd is the Hartley Burr Alexander Chair in the Humanities at Scripps College. He is the author and/or co-editor of several books and dozens of articles, including "Colonial Trauma/Postcolonial Recovery?" (2000), Ireland after History (1999), "Counterparts: Dubliners, Masculinity and Temperance Nationalism" (1998), The Politics of Culture in the Shadow of Capital (1997), Culture and the State (1997), Anomalous States: Irish Writing and the Postcolonial Moment (1993). He is currently at work on a collection of essays on culture and ideology entitled Aesthetic Education: On the Cultural Formation of the Subject and another book, A History of the Irish Orifice: Modernity and the Body in Ireland. Top of Page <<Back