Yasco Horsman – författare

What role do legal trials have in collective processes of coming to terms with a history of mass violence? How does the theatrical structure of a criminal trial facilitate and limit national processes of healing and learning from the past? This study begins with the widely publicized, historic trials of three Nazi war criminals, Eichmann, Barbie, and Priebke, whose explicit goal was not only to punish, but also to establish an officially sanctioned version of the past. The Truth and Reconciliation commissions in South America and South Africa added a therapeutic goal, acting on the belief that a trial can help bring about a moment of closure. Horsman challenges this belief by reading works that reflect on the relations among pedagogy, therapy, and legal trials. Philosopher Hannah Arendt, poet Charlotte Delbo, and dramaturg Bertolt Brecht all produced responses to historic trials that reopened the cases those trials sought to close, bringing to center stage aspects that had escaped the confines of their legal frameworks.

What role do legal trials have in collective processes of coming to terms with a history of mass violence? How does the theatrical structure of a criminal trial facilitate and limit national processes of healing and learning from the past? This study begins with the widely publicized, historic trials of three Nazi war criminals, Eichmann, Barbie, and Priebke, whose explicit goal was not only to punish, but also to establish an officially sanctioned version of the past. The Truth and Reconciliation commissions in South America and South Africa added a therapeutic goal, acting on the belief that a trial can help bring about a moment of closure. Horsman challenges this belief by reading works that reflect on the relations among pedagogy, therapy, and legal trials. Philosopher Hannah Arendt, poet Charlotte Delbo, and dramaturg Bertolt Brecht all produced responses to historic trials that reopened the cases those trials sought to close, bringing to center stage aspects that had escaped the confines of their legal frameworks.

What role do legal trials have in collective processes of coming to terms with a history of mass violence? How does the theatrical structure of a criminal trial facilitate and limit national processes of healing and learning from the past? This study begins with the widely publicized, historic trials of three Nazi war criminals, Eichmann, Barbie, and Priebke, whose explicit goal was not only to punish, but also to establish an officially sanctioned version of the past. The Truth and Reconciliation commissions in South America and South Africa added a therapeutic goal, acting on the belief that a trial can help bring about a moment of closure. Horsman challenges this belief by reading works that reflect on the relations among pedagogy, therapy, and legal trials. Philosopher Hannah Arendt, poet Charlotte Delbo, and dramaturg Bertolt Brecht all produced responses to historic trials that reopened the cases those trials sought to close, bringing to center stage aspects that had escaped the confines of their legal frameworks.

This book offers philosophical and psychoanalytical reflections on the selfhood shaped in autobiographical graphic narratives, or autographics. These reflections revolve around the ‘autographic gesture’. This gesture refers to, firstly, the leaving of graphic traces of an embodied self, which, secondly, transform into a drawn figure that represents this self and acquires a certain autonomy as a character, and which, thirdly, are embedded in a narrative that tells all or part of this self’s life story. By combining the semiotic logics of trace, image, and narrative, the book argues, autographics perform this gesture and shape a specific form of selfhood. The book studies this process by turning to theories about selfhood constructed primarily within the following three intellectual traditions: existential hermeneutics, as developed by Paul Ricoeur; existential phenomenology, as embodied by Jean-Paul Sartre; and psychoanalysis, through the lenses of Jacques Lacan, Marion Milner, and Donald Winnicott. The ideas of these authors, as well as Paul de Man’s and Johann Gottlieb Fichte’s analyses of subject-constitution, are brought into dialogue with autobiographical graphic narratives by Zoe Thorogood, Katie Green, Peter Pontiac, Alison Bechdel, Yoshihiro Tatsumi, Marjane Satrapi, Riad Sattouf, Keiji Nakazawa, Lynda Barry, and others.