Disciplining the Holocaust

by Ball, Karyn

• ISBN13: 9780791475416
• ISBN10: 0791475417
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2008-10-09
• Publisher: State Univ of New York Pr

Summary

"Disciplining the Holocaust examines critics' efforts to defend a rigorous and morally appropriate image of the Holocaust. Rather than limiting herself to polemics about the "proper" approach to traumatic history, Karyn Ball explores recent trends in intellectual history that govern a contemporary ethics of scholarship about the Holocaust. She examines the scholarly reception of Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing Executioners, the debates culminating in Eisenman's Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin, Lyotard's response to negations of testimony about the gas chambers, psychoanalytically informed frameworks for the critical study of traumatic history, and a conference on feminist approaches to the Holocaust and genocide. Ball's book bridges the gap between psychoanalysis and Foucault's understanding of disciplinary power in order to highlight the social implications of traumatic history."--BOOK JACKET.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations	p. ix
Acknowledgments	p. xi
Introduction	p. 1
Disciplining Traumatic History: Goldhagen's "Impropriety"	p. 19
Goldhagen's Impropriety
Trauma and the Disciplinary Imaginary
The Aesthetics of Restraint: Peter Eisenman's "Jewish" Solution to Germany's Memorial Question	p. 45
Memorial Culture before and after Reunification: Between Revisionism and Jurgen Habermas's "Western Consensus"
"What have we done to ourselves by doing away with the Jews?": The Memorial and Its Interlocutors
Deconstructivist Architecture between Libeskind and Eisenman: Toward a "Jewish" Antimemorial Genre?
"Auschwitz" after Lyotard	p. 95
The Wound of Nihilism
Improper Ends
Expropriating the We
Affective Evidence
Survivor Memory and the Limits of Empathy
"Working through" the Holocaust? Toward a Psychoanalysis of Critical Reflection	p. 149
Libidinal Reflections
Against Catharsis
Sadomasochism and the Disciplinary Imaginary
Unspeakable Differences, Obscene Pleasures: The Holocaust as an Object of Desire	p. 193
The Discipline of Compassion between Testimony and Confession
The Holocaust as a Feminist Object of Desire
Notes	p. 219
Index	p. 287
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