Dismemberment, Repetition, and Working-Through: Keeping Up in Treme

Abstract: Borrowing heuristically from Freud's paper on psychoanalysis, and rhetoric's “locus of the irreparable,” this essay develops an analysis of the HBO series Treme that treats the show as a project oriented toward the reconstruction of the symbolic order in the aftermath of disaster. If the show, on the one hand, invites us to take part in the collective working-through of suffering, on the other hand, like television generally, it remains lodged in the register of repetition.