Professor Elissa Marder (Emory University) – Dream and the Guillotine: Femininity, Photography and Other Scenes of Fixation What is the relation between the singular unreality of the world of a dream and the guillotine, that exemplary enlightenment machine that transformed the legal administration of capital punishment into a public spectacle of the moment of death? I read these two seemingly opposed and unconnected figures through each other in order to explore how Freud’s descriptions of the formal qualities of the dream-work enter into—and complicate—our understanding of how events and actions become visible and readable in the so-called real world. The dream and the guillotine communicate with one another because they both stage scenes of a very particular kind. The question of female ...Read More