ABSTRACT
Trauma imagery holds immense political power. By bringing hardship, pain and suffering into focus, trauma images shock and horrify. They present what witnesses perceive as an impossible spectacle: tragedy so difficult to comprehend that, in the words of Maurice Blanchot (1995: 7), it “escapes the very possibility of experience.” Trauma turns our understanding of reality upside-down. Seeing human hardship, pain and death, it is as if our eyes are deceiving us. Yet, as we look, we know our eyes are not. And it is here, in this sheer impossibility of witnessing trauma, that trauma can also captivate. Trauma can hypnotise, fascinate, enthral, aggravate, anger and dismay. Trauma can motivate us.
