..., and the racial underpinnings of Pierre Bourdieu's distinction between “archaic” and “modern” habitus. habits of whiteness archaic habitus impulse embodied habits the unconscious ...

... The last thirty years have seen a great deal of scholarship on Benjamin’s optical unconscious, yet much of this work expands well beyond photography, the actual subject of Benjamin’s formulation. This chapter places the medium and its historically specific conditions at the center of renewed...

... This chapter examines one exemplary instance of the optical unconscious that lies latent in Freud’s interpretation of the “R is my uncle dream” as recounted in his Interpretation of Dreams . Drawing on the work of Freud, Benjamin, Gilman, Schmitt, and others, Fardy discusses how the dream...

... This chapter investigates Walter Benjamin’s notion of the optical unconscious, concentrating on photography but taking up a variety of representations and visual practices. Key examples range from the frontispiece of Hobbes’s  Leviathan  through daguerreotypes of enslaved persons to digital...

... citizen—this chapter analyzes the photographic archive as the optical unconscious of colonial projects. Drawing on Ann Laura Stoler’s suggestion that the archival researcher’s work is a strategy of “developing historical negatives,” and reading it through Walter Benjamin’s descriptions of the optical...