Abjection Sustained: Goya, the Chapman brothers and the Disasters of War

Abstract

Today the title the Disasters of War refers to at least three works. The first a set of engravings etched by Francisco Goya, c. 1810–20, published posthumously in 1863 as Los Desastres de la guerra, the second and third are a set of miniature dioramas and a suite of engravings produced by Dinos and Jake Chapman in the 1990s. All three works take as their subject the horrors of war. Goya's is based on his first‐hand experience of the sufferings of the Spanish people during and immediately after the Napoleonic occupation. The Chapmans' are born out of a desire ‘to virally infect or be contagious to’ the artist's ‘association with humanism’. These latter Disasters attempt, in other words, to reanimate the founding trauma of Goya's work, to reveal the indivisible remainder, the abject object, that art criticism, wedded as it is to the ideology of humanism, seeks to repress. Drawing on Lacanian psychoanalysis, this essay takes a critical look at the nature and significance of this desire, asking whether or not the Chapmans' fascination with the founding trauma of Goya's Disasters of War marks a reinvention of, rather than a retreat from, the ethics of humanism.