Sebastian de Vivo: Home - *** THIS FORUM IS ARCHIVED ***

Key Pages

I'm interested in exploring the intersections of trauma, memory, and materiality. Two facets are especially fascinating to me: one dealing with the narration and representation of the traumatic event, both at the individual and collective level, and the other with the processes by which the traumatic event is crystallized into (and through) material culture. Here I'm interested in pursuing multiple strands of signification, from an historical focus on one particular monument (the Lion at Chaeronea), to the traces of the event upon the urban landscape (the siege of Sarajevo, Mostar, Dubrovnik). And, perhaps, the tiny mementos that become inscribed with traumatic (or not) memories.

My other primary interest is in warfare, monuments, and practices of commemoration. Here I'm fascinated by the notion of war as a dispersed social totality, and consequently, by the notion of the capillaries of trauma. How does the memory of the traumatic event become absorbed into the quotidian structures of an individual's existence? How does it reorder them? Conversely, how do these quotidian structures carry into the real time experience of the traumatic event? And of course, how do these processes inform practices of commemoration, particularly the construction and engagement of monuments and memorials?

These questions inform my latest interest: siege warfare. Here it would seem that these issues are absolutely exploded, because the separation between the location of the traumatic event (the battlefield) and of quotidian structures (everyday life) disappears. The city (my home, my house, my room) then becomes the location of both the traumatic and the quotidian event: the same place could be the site of my daily breakfast and my cousin's dismemberment (a notion related to the criminalization of space and the scene of the crime). I'm not quite sure yet what to do with this.

Dissertation Notes

Anthropology:

Tales from a Broken Land

Philosophy:

The Aesthetics of the Moral Self

Notes on Moral Systems in ''Apocalypse Now''