Framing Death – How to Shoot One’s Crime

In a series of three lectures cultural theorist Sylvère Lotringer will examine representations and changing attitudes to death.

Once an event ritually shared with the family and the community, death has become invisible. It is now being collectively acknowledged only when it results from a crime, and even then the brute facts of mortality are presented to the jury in ways that borrow heavily from fiction. Drawing from police crime archives of the 1980s from the five boroughs of New York, gathered by the police videographer known as Johnny Esposito, Sylvère Lotringer looks at the different ways death is resurfacing in Western culture.