Temporalities of Trauma in Hatufim and Homeland
Michaela Wünsch, Institute for Arts and Media, University of Potsdam
Michaela Wünsch’s article "Temporalities of Trauma in Hatufim and Homeland" focuses on two television series, the Israeli Hatufim and its American spin-off Homeland, to trace televisual representation of trauma and its aftermath. Departing from the position that trauma cannot be represented as such, she is interested in the nexus of temporality and television and argues that trauma in her two case studies is expressed in three different modes of temporality: suddenness, belatedness, and repetition. These three modes pick up where we left the public imaginary of trauma. Indeed Wünsch asks at the end of her article whether using these worn tropes of trauma is really an attempt at authenticity on the part of the directors, and not, more importantly, "simply a subjects relation under the dispositive of television in regard to a memory which is necessarily traumatic."
Keywords: trauma, television, psychoanalysis, Homeland, Hatufim