Postcard From NYC October 2004

Abstract

This “theoretical postcard” emerged out of the author’s curious uneasiness both before and after a trip to New York City for a conference on psychoanalysis and democracy in the weeks just before the 2004 American presidential election. In the wake of this uneasiness and occasioned by the work of afterthought, the author asks questions about the desires and fantasies of both democracy and psychoanalysis in the aftermath of traumatic perception. Drawing a parallel between the spaces of New York City and Abu Ghraib prison, this theoretical postcard interrogates the idea of democracy in trauma, insisting on its central place in critically assessing the limits and liabilities of liberal democracies. It draws on the overdeterminations of New York City in televisual discourse as well as on the photographic “visibility” of the carceral in Abu Ghraib prison to ask, What does democracy want?