OSA | Visions after the Fall: Program

Visions after the Fall: Museums, Archives and Cinema in Reshaping Popular Perceptions of the Socialist Past

István Rév: Stain. Exhibiting Victims

I will present three images. (I will use the term "image" in the sense Pliny the Elder understood it in his Natural History: meaning, extreme likeness, as opposed to resemblance, the picture.) All three images are clearly acheiropoietic, in the sense that they are the results of action from a distance, e. i., not made by human hand. The presentation will introduce traces as documents, stains perceived as extreme likenesses of victims exhibited. All three stains are parasitic on background gospel-type narratives, and connect this world with the other. István Rév is the Director of the Open Society Archives at Central European University and professor at the History Department, Political Sciences Department, CEU. Professor Rév is a founding editor of The Budapest Review of Books. He taught lectures and seminars at the University of Chicago Law School, Jesus College Oxford, Political Science Department Columbia, Anthropology Department Princeton, History Department Davis, Program in History and Literature Harvard. He is the author of Economic and Social History of Hungary in the Period of "Socialism" (in Hungarian, Budapest, 1990); Retroactive Justice, Prehistories of Postcommunism (Stanford, 2004), and editor of Monumental Histories (Special issue of Representations, Berkeley, 1991).

« Back Date: June 9, Friday Time: 9.30-10 am