On the Artistic Propensity of Pathology: Georges Didi-Huberman and the Invention of Hysteria
On the Artistic Propensity of Pathology: Georges Didi-Huberman and the Invention of Hysteria

Summary/Abstract: The aim of the present study is to discuss the criterion by which clinical photography (such as Salpêtrière Hospital’s Iconographie photographique, consisting in stances of the asylum’s patients in various stages of delirium, agitation, spasms and fits) can be contemplated from an aestethic point of view. The theoretical support for this proposal is the Invention of Hysteria by Georges Didi-Huberman, who, approaching categories of literary and cultural theory, doubled by a keen observation of the unfolding of the clinical practices in the second half of the 19th century and of the emergence of photography, detects a certain fetishization of the hysterical body through the assimilation of the mental image of hysteria with a collection of valid, consecrate picturesque manifestations.

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