Exhibiting Atrocity Syllabus
Readings for Psychosocial Foundation short course
Exhibiting Atrocity: A Short Course for Psychosocial Foundation
Register for the class here
Content Warning: This material deals with the worst violence people inflict on each other. Moreover, it’s very difficult to talk about whether moral law has a grantor or not. I will be arguing that it doesn’t, and that building a world capable of supporting a social ethic we maintain ourselves is our only alternative to the barbarism that surrounds us. Our project will encounter various kinds of psychological resistance. My plan is to be as gentle as possible.
I’ll be speaking for the following texts for about an hour at our sessions. I can be a bit pedantic, so you will be able to participate in discussion even if you can’t do all the reading. Please feel free to read as much or as little as you are comfortable with.
Underlines indicate links.
Session 1: June 7
Exhibiting Atrocity, The Lack of Law, and Live Streamed Genocide
J. G.Ballard. The Atrocity Exhibition. “1 The Atrocity Exhibition” (1-18) “2 The University of Death”(19-40,) and “10: Plan For the Assassination of Jacquline Kennedy” (141-146). Flamingo. 2001.
Mahmoud Darwish. Trans Ramsis Amun. State Of Siege. 2002.
H. Bruce Franklin . “What Are We to Make of J.G. Ballard’s Apocalypse?“ Voices for the Future: Essays on Major Science Fiction Writers, vol. 2, ed. Thomas D. Clareson, Bowling Green: Bowling Green University Popular Press 1979. pp. 82-105.
Hamas Media Office Our Narrative: Operation Al-Aqsa Flood
Eyal Weizman. Ungrounding: The Architecture of Genocide, “Introduction” and “Part III: Ungrounding.”
Vintage. 2026
Haidar Eid. Banging On The Walls Of The Tank. “Gaza 2021 Wedha Street Massacre” and “Gaza 2023 Genocide.” Between The Lines 2025.
Tatiana Cozzarelli and Luigi Morris A Livestreamed Genocide and a Movement for Palestine that Shook the World - Left Voice
Nancy Fraser. Gaza As World Event. New Left Review. March-April 2026.
Pankaj Mishra. The Shoah After Gaza. London Review Od Books. V24 No. 6. March 2024
United Nations. Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide
United Nations. Universal Declaration Of Human Rights
One Democratic State Campaign. Manifesto
War crimes in Gaza: Al Jazeera Investigations | Israel-Palestine conflict | Al Jazeera (Video)
Dominic Angerame. Anaconda Targets. 2004 (Video)
Session 2: June 14
The Primal Father, The Big Other And The Law
Sigmund Freud. Trans. James Strachey. Totem And Taboo. Part IV: “The Return of Totemism in Childhood” (118-161.) Norton. 1950.
Jacques Lacan. “Introduction to The Names Of The Father Seminar”
Jacques Lacan. Television (Video)
Lama Khouri. “Indifferenz: ‘Neutrality’ at the European Psychoanalytic Federation Conference.” Parapraxis Magazine.
Jake Romm. “Idée Fixe: Holocaust trauma and Zionist Exterminationism.” In Parapraxis Magazine.
Darryl Li Speking on “The Most Moral Genocide in the World” at The Collège de France Symposium Politics and Poetics on the Ruins of Gaza
Session 3: June 21
Labor, Bosses, and Market Subjects
Karl Marx. Trans. Ben Fowkes. Capital: A Critique Of Political Economy. “Chapter 10: The Working Day” (especially “Section 4: Day And Night Work. The Relay System”). Penguin.
Wendy Brown. Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution. “Undoing the Demos
Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution” (17-46,) “Political Rationality and Governance”(115-150.) and “Law and Legal Reason” (150-175). Zone Books. 2015.
Philip Gourevitch and Errol Morris. Exposure The New Yorker March 17, 2008
How Markets Crowd Out Morals Michael J. Sandel. Boston Review. June 20, 2012.
David Wilson and William Dixon Homo Economicus Meets G.H. Mead: A Contribution to theCritique of Economic Theory
, London Metropolitan University
Laleh Khalili. “History Lesson.” Jewish Currents. Summer 2026
Jason Reed. The Production of Subjectivity Marx and Philosophy. Introduction 1-9 and Returns of Philosophical Anthropology: New Subjections/NewTransformations 311- 413
Kathi Weeks. The Problem With Work. “Introduction” (1-36,) and “Mapping The Work Ethic” (37-78.) Duke University Press. 2011.
Wages For Facebook (Crawler web pageP
Session 4: June 28
Lynching, The Law, and The Market
Rizvana Bradley. Picturing Catastrophe: The Visual Politics of Racial Reckoning. Yale Review. May 25 2021
Hannah Black. Open Letter To to the curators and staff of the Whitney Biennial
Judith Butler. “Endangered/Endangering: Schematic Racism and White Paranoia”
Louis-Georges Schwartz. In Plain View: Video Evidence. Art Forum. Summer 2016
Jared Sexton. ’This is what our dying looks like’: Elegeía for Emmett Till.” From Callaloo. Volume 41, Number 2, Spring 2018, pp. 60-74.
Session 5: July 8
Lawless: Saving Ourselves Without Subjection
Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen . “The Freudian Subject, from Politics to Ethics”
Joshua Clover. Riot Strike Riot: The New Era of Uprisings. Verso Books. 2016
Yasmin El-Rifae. Radius: A Story of Feminist Revolution. Verso Books. 2022
Idris Robinson. The Revolt Eclipses Whatever the World Has to Offer. Semiotext(e). 2026
Yahya Al-Sinwar. The Thorn and the Carnation Part I. 2024 TASQ Company
Addi Calli. The Gaza Ghetto Uprising (Video)