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Papers by Michael Rothberg
Dynamics, Mediation, Mobilization, 2025
A contribution to a book honoring memory-studies scholar Ann Rigney, my essay in this volume refl... more A contribution to a book honoring memory-studies scholar Ann Rigney, my essay in this volume reflects on Rigney's work on memory and aesthetics as a way of adding nuance to my own work on multidirectionality. I then offer a short reading of Pınar Öğrenci’s 2022 film Aşît [The Avalanche] as an example of the multidirectional agency of the aesthetic.
parallax, 2023
This essay introduces the second part of a two-part special issue called "Feeling Implicated: Aff... more This essay introduces the second part of a two-part special issue called "Feeling Implicated: Affect, Responsibility, Solidarity." The issue joins a wave of work over the last two decades addressing indirect forms of participation in injustice and links that work to ongoing discussions in what became known during the same period as affect theory. The collection thus focuses on grey zones of responsibility and complicated structures of emotion and feeling – and especially on what we can learn by tracking their interplay.
Monsoon: Journal of the Indian Ocean Rim, 2024
On February 1, 2022, the online seminar "Conceptualising Archipelagic Memory" was organized as th... more On February 1, 2022, the online seminar "Conceptualising Archipelagic Memory" was organized as the curtain-raiser event for the Archipelagic Memory project and the international conference that took place in August of the same year. The seminar brought together Professors Michael Rothberg and Vijaya Teelock, in conversation with Ananya Kabir, to initiate a discussion on practices of memory-making in archipelagic spaces and through archipelagic structures, and on the meanings and possibilities embedded in the notion of "archipelagic memory." In this annotated transcript of the conversation, Rothberg and Teelock reflect with Kabir on their research trajectories and expertise, provoking new models of analysis constitutive of an archipelagic approach to Indian Ocean cultural history.
Los Angeles Times, 2024
An op-ed piece inspired by the Jewish-American writer Grace Paley on intra-Jewish conflict, antis... more An op-ed piece inspired by the Jewish-American writer Grace Paley on intra-Jewish conflict, antisemitism definitions, and difficult solidarity during the Gaza war.
parallax, 2023
This essay introduces a two-part special issue called "Feeling Implicated: Affect, Responsibility... more This essay introduces a two-part special issue called "Feeling Implicated: Affect, Responsibility, Solidarity." The issue joins a wave of work over the last two decades addressing indirect forms of participation in injustice and links that work to ongoing discussions in what became known during the same period as affect theory. The collection thus focuses on grey zones of responsibility and complicated structures of emotion and feeling – and especially on what we can learn by tracking their interplay.
Medico International, 2024
An interview about Holocaust memory, comparison, and the Israel/Gaza war.
Massachusetts Review, 2024
This International Holocaust Remembrance Day will not be like any other. As we mark the seventy-n... more This International Holocaust Remembrance Day will not be like any other. As we mark the seventy-ninth anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz on January 27 and commemorate the six million Jewish victims of the Holocaust alongside the Nazis’ many non-Jewish victims, the commemoration will take place against the backdrop of extraordinary events: in the midst of more than three months of catastrophic violence in Israel and Palestine and just one day after the International Court of Justice (ICJ) provisionally ruled on charges of genocide brought against Israel by South Africa. The events of these dark months have necessarily awakened memories of the Holocaust and raised difficult questions about the ethics of historical comparison. When is it legitimate to compare civilian deaths to the Holocaust, or a modern-day government to the Nazis? This essay addresses such questions by offering an "ethics of comparison" oriented toward "differentiated solidarity."
Routledge Handbook of Memory Activism, 2023
In this contribution to the Routledge Handbook of Memory Activism, we explore memory activism fro... more In this contribution to the Routledge Handbook of Memory Activism, we explore memory activism from the perspective of “implicated subjects.” Implicated subjects are those who enable, perpetuate, benefit from, or inherit histories of violence and structures of inequality (Rothberg 2019). Although the vocabulary of implication has not been central to the study of memory activism, prominent examples of scholarship in the field treat projects in which implicated subjects play crucial roles. We open with two foundaonal books on memory activism that involve examples of implication. We then offer examples from our own research: first, the social media activist project called “We are not Trayvon Martin” and, second, the mobilization of memory of the Japanese American Incarceration against the detention of migrants and refugees at the United States southern border. These examples demonstrate how significant activist projects involving social remembrance emerge from “implicated subjects.” Puting a focus explicitly on implicated subjects reveals that a sense of historical and political responsibility is a prominent driver of memory activism and that when memories of injustice combine with a sense of present-day implication a particularly powerful impetus to action can emerge. Finally, we note that a sense of implication not only motivates many memory activists but is also linked to activist goals.
Memory Studies, 2022
This essay assesses the acrimonious debates about Holocaust memory that took place in Germany in ... more This essay assesses the acrimonious debates about Holocaust memory that took place in Germany in 2020-2021 and that have come to be known as Historikerstreit 2.0. These debates call up older controversies, especially the 1986 Historikerstreit (Historians' Debate) in which Jürgen Habermas took on conservative historians who sought to relativize the Nazi genocide. The Historikerstreit concerned the relation between Nazi and Stalinist crimes and the question of German responsibility for the Holocaust; today's controversies involve instead the relation between colonialism and the Holocaust and racism and antisemitism as well as the ongoing crisis in Israel/Palestine. As the current debates reveal, the dominant Holocaust memory regime in Germany is based on an absolutist understanding of the Holocaust's uniqueness and a rejection of multidirectional approaches to the genocide. While that memory regime represented a major societal accomplishment of the 1980s and 1990s, it has reached its limits in Germany's "postmigrant" present. Yet, as an example of migrant engagement with the Holocaust illustrates, German society already includes alternative practices of memory that could transform the German model of coming to terms with the past in productive ways.
German Historical Institute London Bulletin, 2022
Michael Rothberg has challenged the underlying logic of competitive victimhood (Opferkonkurrenz),... more Michael Rothberg has challenged the underlying logic of competitive victimhood (Opferkonkurrenz), the theme of this special issue, in conflicts of memory. His book Multidirectional Memory shows that memory conflict can be productive, generating more memory through various forms of dialogism. In this model, different memory traditions draw on each other and emerge together in ‘non-zero-sum’ ways. The multidirectional dynamic he proposes also has implications for thinking about victimhood. Moving beyond the victim–perpetrator binary, he argues that we need a new category for people who enable and benefit from violence without being perpetrators themselves. Instead, such people can understand themselves as ‘implicated subjects’ who occupy ‘positions of power and privilege without being them- selves direct agents of harm’. In this interview, we will discuss how a more complex map of memory and historical responsibility can also produce new alliances and solidarities, a topic he will explore in his forthcoming book Memory Citizenship (co-authored with Yasemin Yildiz).
The Oxford Handbook of Twentieth-Century American Literature, 2022
This chapter seeks to understand the work of memory performed by Toni Morrison’s 1987 novel Belov... more This chapter seeks to understand the work of memory performed by Toni Morrison’s 1987 novel Beloved, arguably the most canonical work of American literature in the twentieth century. Against the backdrop of Beloved’s outsized influence, the chapter approaches the novel as a lens through which to reflect on the relationship of literature to cultural memory. The emergent interdisciplinary field of memory studies offers a conceptual framework that helps explain the cultural work Morrison’s novel does as well as the reasons it has resonated so powerfully across the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Such an approach helps connect the specificity of Beloved’s intervention with broader cultural currents inside and outside the academy. The chapter argues that we should understand Morrison’s novel as a “knot of memory” that serves as both outcome and conduit for multiple historical narratives.
Berliner Zeitung, 2022
An essay in German reflecting on the debates about the translation of Multidirectional Memory and... more An essay in German reflecting on the debates about the translation of Multidirectional Memory and about the relation between the Holocaust and colonialism and between antisemitism and racism.
JHI Blog, 2022
about recent debates in Germany concerning the history and memory of the Holocaust and colonialis... more about recent debates in Germany concerning the history and memory of the Holocaust and colonialism. Part one explores the central issues at stake in the latest debates and their relation to the German Historians' Debate of the 1980s. Part two engages the relationship of minorities to official Holocaust memory in a diversifying Germany, the role of scholarly positionality, and the relationship between scholarship and activism. In recent years, several U.S.-based scholars have found themselves at the center of fierce public debates in Germany about the history and memory of the Holocaust and its relation to colonialism and other forms of historical violence. Contributing editor Jonathon Catlin put three scholars in conversation to explore these debates from a variety of disciplinary perspectives. Sultan Doughan, an anthropologist, is the Dr. !omas Zand Visiting Assistant Professor in Holocaust Pedagogy and Antisemitism Studies at Clark University. Her research on civic education programs for people from migrant backgrounds in contemporary Germany investigates these practices as strategies for incorporation into the secular nation.
AICGS Blog, 2022
Berlin posed the worst kind of alliance problem. Lying 100 miles inside East German territory, su... more Berlin posed the worst kind of alliance problem. Lying 100 miles inside East German territory, surrounded by 124 Soviet and East German divisions, Berlin was indefensible by the West.
New German Critique, 1997
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms * I am grateful to Andreas Huyssen and Anson Rab... more All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms * I am grateful to Andreas Huyssen and Anson Rabinbach for their comments. Thanks also to Stuart Liebman, for all of his help, to Nancy K. Miller, as ever, to Russ Castronovo, Beth Drenning, Jeffrey Escoffier, Gerhard Joseph, and Neil Levi for reading earlier versions of this essay, and to Yasemin Yildiz, for showing me the power of Adorno's thinking. 1. This controversy was reported in the New York Times 27 Jan. 1995: A3.
The Romanic Review, Nov 1, 1993
I Moliere's Dom Juan (1665) was originally conceived as a substitution; most immediately, it ... more I Moliere's Dom Juan (1665) was originally conceived as a substitution; most immediately, it took the place of Le Tartuffe (1664), which had been banned somewhat reluctantly by Louis XIV, under pressure from devout Christians. This latter play aroused anger because of its depiction of "la fausse devotion," or religious hypocrisy (251).(2) Ironically, the power to substitute freely--which Moliere exercised in presenting Dom Juan immediately following the Tartuffe scandal--constituted the very problem with hypocrisy which caused such virulent opposition in the first place. Moliere's substitution of Dom Juan for the earlier play is not as different as it might initially seem from the actions of hypocrites who unscrupulously substitute the trappings of other people's identities for their own. According to Georges Mongredien, hypocrisy throws the category of "le propre" [property, cleanliness, the literal] into doubt: "le propre de l'hypocrite etant de singer en tout les manieres du vrai devot et donc de lui ressembler pour mieux abuser ses victimes, la confusion restait toujours possible" (251). In such a situation, "faux devots" become indistinguishable from "vrai devots," and every critique of the former leads implicitly to the latter, and even to an indictment of "toute l'Eglise." In a society where substitution follows so easily upon substitution, and "confusion" inevitably lurks, no wonder Le Tartuffe caused such anxiety. The tendency in much contemporary, poststructuralist literary theory has been to privilege this kind of sliding of the signifier over the signified as a subversion of hierarchical order and dominant power mechanisms. Indeed, if the Church in the seventeenth century can be seen as a hegemonic force, the miniature crisis surrounding Le Tartuffe might serve as evidence for such theories. However, another story exists alongside religious opposition: Louis XIV's "reluctant" prohibition of the play and his subsequent funding of other plays by Moliere. Why, if Le Tartuffe demystifies ideologies of domination associated with powerful claims to truth, should the king evidence delight at Moliere's play? This essay will argue that such a question can only be answered by a more precise evaluation of the function of rhetoric in the specific historical conditions of Louis XIV's France. Dom Juan, as the substitute for the earlier, more problematic play, represents a discursive field appropriate to such an investigation. This play foregrounds questions of rhetoric which serve as linguistic spaces of contestation; but, as a substitution meant to evade censorship, the text simultaneously attempts to cover over these power plays. An historical consideration of Dom Juan must articulate the various mediations between economics, ethics, representation, and gender which make up the largest portion of the play's concerns. Finally, the intersections between these various elements of the mode of production must be thought in relation to the rise of the absolutist state, the dominant political structure of seventeenth-century France. To call the questions at issue here "discursive," or matters of substitution, representation, and social linkage, should not distract from their basis in material conditions. Dom Juan arises precisely out of questions of economy, indicating the ineluctable imbrication of the aesthetic and the material. According to Mongredien, in losing the right to perform Le Tartuffe, Moliere also lost the opportunity for "un succes public qu'il esperait tres grand" (349). This failure left him "disempare" and forced him to close the Palais-Royal theater frequently (349), which indicates that he was probably crippled financially as well. He quickly substituted Dom Juan in order to avoid increasing impoverishment. Moliere's financial state of 1665 inscribes itself fairly directly in the form of Dom Juan: "Presse, Moliere ecrivit sa piece en prose, se souciant peu des regles sur l'unite de temps, d'action et de lieu" (350). …
Memory and Theory in Eastern Europe, 2013
Wasafiri, 2009
Full terms and conditions of use: http://www.informaworld.com/terms-and-conditions-of-access.pdf ... more Full terms and conditions of use: http://www.informaworld.com/terms-and-conditions-of-access.pdf This article may be used for research, teaching and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution , reselling , loan or sub-licensing, systematic supply or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. The publisher does not give any warranty express or implied or make any representation that the contents will be complete or accurate or up to date. The accuracy of any instructions, formulae and drug doses should be independently verified with primary sources. The publisher shall not be liable for any loss, actions, claims, proceedings, demand or costs or damages whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with or arising out of the use of this material.
American Literary History, 2006
Dynamics, Mediation, Mobilization, 2025
A contribution to a book honoring memory-studies scholar Ann Rigney, my essay in this volume refl... more A contribution to a book honoring memory-studies scholar Ann Rigney, my essay in this volume reflects on Rigney's work on memory and aesthetics as a way of adding nuance to my own work on multidirectionality. I then offer a short reading of Pınar Öğrenci’s 2022 film Aşît [The Avalanche] as an example of the multidirectional agency of the aesthetic.
parallax, 2023
This essay introduces the second part of a two-part special issue called "Feeling Implicated: Aff... more This essay introduces the second part of a two-part special issue called "Feeling Implicated: Affect, Responsibility, Solidarity." The issue joins a wave of work over the last two decades addressing indirect forms of participation in injustice and links that work to ongoing discussions in what became known during the same period as affect theory. The collection thus focuses on grey zones of responsibility and complicated structures of emotion and feeling – and especially on what we can learn by tracking their interplay.
Monsoon: Journal of the Indian Ocean Rim, 2024
On February 1, 2022, the online seminar "Conceptualising Archipelagic Memory" was organized as th... more On February 1, 2022, the online seminar "Conceptualising Archipelagic Memory" was organized as the curtain-raiser event for the Archipelagic Memory project and the international conference that took place in August of the same year. The seminar brought together Professors Michael Rothberg and Vijaya Teelock, in conversation with Ananya Kabir, to initiate a discussion on practices of memory-making in archipelagic spaces and through archipelagic structures, and on the meanings and possibilities embedded in the notion of "archipelagic memory." In this annotated transcript of the conversation, Rothberg and Teelock reflect with Kabir on their research trajectories and expertise, provoking new models of analysis constitutive of an archipelagic approach to Indian Ocean cultural history.
Los Angeles Times, 2024
An op-ed piece inspired by the Jewish-American writer Grace Paley on intra-Jewish conflict, antis... more An op-ed piece inspired by the Jewish-American writer Grace Paley on intra-Jewish conflict, antisemitism definitions, and difficult solidarity during the Gaza war.
parallax, 2023
This essay introduces a two-part special issue called "Feeling Implicated: Affect, Responsibility... more This essay introduces a two-part special issue called "Feeling Implicated: Affect, Responsibility, Solidarity." The issue joins a wave of work over the last two decades addressing indirect forms of participation in injustice and links that work to ongoing discussions in what became known during the same period as affect theory. The collection thus focuses on grey zones of responsibility and complicated structures of emotion and feeling – and especially on what we can learn by tracking their interplay.
Medico International, 2024
An interview about Holocaust memory, comparison, and the Israel/Gaza war.
Massachusetts Review, 2024
This International Holocaust Remembrance Day will not be like any other. As we mark the seventy-n... more This International Holocaust Remembrance Day will not be like any other. As we mark the seventy-ninth anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz on January 27 and commemorate the six million Jewish victims of the Holocaust alongside the Nazis’ many non-Jewish victims, the commemoration will take place against the backdrop of extraordinary events: in the midst of more than three months of catastrophic violence in Israel and Palestine and just one day after the International Court of Justice (ICJ) provisionally ruled on charges of genocide brought against Israel by South Africa. The events of these dark months have necessarily awakened memories of the Holocaust and raised difficult questions about the ethics of historical comparison. When is it legitimate to compare civilian deaths to the Holocaust, or a modern-day government to the Nazis? This essay addresses such questions by offering an "ethics of comparison" oriented toward "differentiated solidarity."
Routledge Handbook of Memory Activism, 2023
In this contribution to the Routledge Handbook of Memory Activism, we explore memory activism fro... more In this contribution to the Routledge Handbook of Memory Activism, we explore memory activism from the perspective of “implicated subjects.” Implicated subjects are those who enable, perpetuate, benefit from, or inherit histories of violence and structures of inequality (Rothberg 2019). Although the vocabulary of implication has not been central to the study of memory activism, prominent examples of scholarship in the field treat projects in which implicated subjects play crucial roles. We open with two foundaonal books on memory activism that involve examples of implication. We then offer examples from our own research: first, the social media activist project called “We are not Trayvon Martin” and, second, the mobilization of memory of the Japanese American Incarceration against the detention of migrants and refugees at the United States southern border. These examples demonstrate how significant activist projects involving social remembrance emerge from “implicated subjects.” Puting a focus explicitly on implicated subjects reveals that a sense of historical and political responsibility is a prominent driver of memory activism and that when memories of injustice combine with a sense of present-day implication a particularly powerful impetus to action can emerge. Finally, we note that a sense of implication not only motivates many memory activists but is also linked to activist goals.
Memory Studies, 2022
This essay assesses the acrimonious debates about Holocaust memory that took place in Germany in ... more This essay assesses the acrimonious debates about Holocaust memory that took place in Germany in 2020-2021 and that have come to be known as Historikerstreit 2.0. These debates call up older controversies, especially the 1986 Historikerstreit (Historians' Debate) in which Jürgen Habermas took on conservative historians who sought to relativize the Nazi genocide. The Historikerstreit concerned the relation between Nazi and Stalinist crimes and the question of German responsibility for the Holocaust; today's controversies involve instead the relation between colonialism and the Holocaust and racism and antisemitism as well as the ongoing crisis in Israel/Palestine. As the current debates reveal, the dominant Holocaust memory regime in Germany is based on an absolutist understanding of the Holocaust's uniqueness and a rejection of multidirectional approaches to the genocide. While that memory regime represented a major societal accomplishment of the 1980s and 1990s, it has reached its limits in Germany's "postmigrant" present. Yet, as an example of migrant engagement with the Holocaust illustrates, German society already includes alternative practices of memory that could transform the German model of coming to terms with the past in productive ways.
German Historical Institute London Bulletin, 2022
Michael Rothberg has challenged the underlying logic of competitive victimhood (Opferkonkurrenz),... more Michael Rothberg has challenged the underlying logic of competitive victimhood (Opferkonkurrenz), the theme of this special issue, in conflicts of memory. His book Multidirectional Memory shows that memory conflict can be productive, generating more memory through various forms of dialogism. In this model, different memory traditions draw on each other and emerge together in ‘non-zero-sum’ ways. The multidirectional dynamic he proposes also has implications for thinking about victimhood. Moving beyond the victim–perpetrator binary, he argues that we need a new category for people who enable and benefit from violence without being perpetrators themselves. Instead, such people can understand themselves as ‘implicated subjects’ who occupy ‘positions of power and privilege without being them- selves direct agents of harm’. In this interview, we will discuss how a more complex map of memory and historical responsibility can also produce new alliances and solidarities, a topic he will explore in his forthcoming book Memory Citizenship (co-authored with Yasemin Yildiz).
The Oxford Handbook of Twentieth-Century American Literature, 2022
This chapter seeks to understand the work of memory performed by Toni Morrison’s 1987 novel Belov... more This chapter seeks to understand the work of memory performed by Toni Morrison’s 1987 novel Beloved, arguably the most canonical work of American literature in the twentieth century. Against the backdrop of Beloved’s outsized influence, the chapter approaches the novel as a lens through which to reflect on the relationship of literature to cultural memory. The emergent interdisciplinary field of memory studies offers a conceptual framework that helps explain the cultural work Morrison’s novel does as well as the reasons it has resonated so powerfully across the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Such an approach helps connect the specificity of Beloved’s intervention with broader cultural currents inside and outside the academy. The chapter argues that we should understand Morrison’s novel as a “knot of memory” that serves as both outcome and conduit for multiple historical narratives.
Berliner Zeitung, 2022
An essay in German reflecting on the debates about the translation of Multidirectional Memory and... more An essay in German reflecting on the debates about the translation of Multidirectional Memory and about the relation between the Holocaust and colonialism and between antisemitism and racism.
JHI Blog, 2022
about recent debates in Germany concerning the history and memory of the Holocaust and colonialis... more about recent debates in Germany concerning the history and memory of the Holocaust and colonialism. Part one explores the central issues at stake in the latest debates and their relation to the German Historians' Debate of the 1980s. Part two engages the relationship of minorities to official Holocaust memory in a diversifying Germany, the role of scholarly positionality, and the relationship between scholarship and activism. In recent years, several U.S.-based scholars have found themselves at the center of fierce public debates in Germany about the history and memory of the Holocaust and its relation to colonialism and other forms of historical violence. Contributing editor Jonathon Catlin put three scholars in conversation to explore these debates from a variety of disciplinary perspectives. Sultan Doughan, an anthropologist, is the Dr. !omas Zand Visiting Assistant Professor in Holocaust Pedagogy and Antisemitism Studies at Clark University. Her research on civic education programs for people from migrant backgrounds in contemporary Germany investigates these practices as strategies for incorporation into the secular nation.
AICGS Blog, 2022
Berlin posed the worst kind of alliance problem. Lying 100 miles inside East German territory, su... more Berlin posed the worst kind of alliance problem. Lying 100 miles inside East German territory, surrounded by 124 Soviet and East German divisions, Berlin was indefensible by the West.
New German Critique, 1997
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms * I am grateful to Andreas Huyssen and Anson Rab... more All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms * I am grateful to Andreas Huyssen and Anson Rabinbach for their comments. Thanks also to Stuart Liebman, for all of his help, to Nancy K. Miller, as ever, to Russ Castronovo, Beth Drenning, Jeffrey Escoffier, Gerhard Joseph, and Neil Levi for reading earlier versions of this essay, and to Yasemin Yildiz, for showing me the power of Adorno's thinking. 1. This controversy was reported in the New York Times 27 Jan. 1995: A3.
The Romanic Review, Nov 1, 1993
I Moliere's Dom Juan (1665) was originally conceived as a substitution; most immediately, it ... more I Moliere's Dom Juan (1665) was originally conceived as a substitution; most immediately, it took the place of Le Tartuffe (1664), which had been banned somewhat reluctantly by Louis XIV, under pressure from devout Christians. This latter play aroused anger because of its depiction of "la fausse devotion," or religious hypocrisy (251).(2) Ironically, the power to substitute freely--which Moliere exercised in presenting Dom Juan immediately following the Tartuffe scandal--constituted the very problem with hypocrisy which caused such virulent opposition in the first place. Moliere's substitution of Dom Juan for the earlier play is not as different as it might initially seem from the actions of hypocrites who unscrupulously substitute the trappings of other people's identities for their own. According to Georges Mongredien, hypocrisy throws the category of "le propre" [property, cleanliness, the literal] into doubt: "le propre de l'hypocrite etant de singer en tout les manieres du vrai devot et donc de lui ressembler pour mieux abuser ses victimes, la confusion restait toujours possible" (251). In such a situation, "faux devots" become indistinguishable from "vrai devots," and every critique of the former leads implicitly to the latter, and even to an indictment of "toute l'Eglise." In a society where substitution follows so easily upon substitution, and "confusion" inevitably lurks, no wonder Le Tartuffe caused such anxiety. The tendency in much contemporary, poststructuralist literary theory has been to privilege this kind of sliding of the signifier over the signified as a subversion of hierarchical order and dominant power mechanisms. Indeed, if the Church in the seventeenth century can be seen as a hegemonic force, the miniature crisis surrounding Le Tartuffe might serve as evidence for such theories. However, another story exists alongside religious opposition: Louis XIV's "reluctant" prohibition of the play and his subsequent funding of other plays by Moliere. Why, if Le Tartuffe demystifies ideologies of domination associated with powerful claims to truth, should the king evidence delight at Moliere's play? This essay will argue that such a question can only be answered by a more precise evaluation of the function of rhetoric in the specific historical conditions of Louis XIV's France. Dom Juan, as the substitute for the earlier, more problematic play, represents a discursive field appropriate to such an investigation. This play foregrounds questions of rhetoric which serve as linguistic spaces of contestation; but, as a substitution meant to evade censorship, the text simultaneously attempts to cover over these power plays. An historical consideration of Dom Juan must articulate the various mediations between economics, ethics, representation, and gender which make up the largest portion of the play's concerns. Finally, the intersections between these various elements of the mode of production must be thought in relation to the rise of the absolutist state, the dominant political structure of seventeenth-century France. To call the questions at issue here "discursive," or matters of substitution, representation, and social linkage, should not distract from their basis in material conditions. Dom Juan arises precisely out of questions of economy, indicating the ineluctable imbrication of the aesthetic and the material. According to Mongredien, in losing the right to perform Le Tartuffe, Moliere also lost the opportunity for "un succes public qu'il esperait tres grand" (349). This failure left him "disempare" and forced him to close the Palais-Royal theater frequently (349), which indicates that he was probably crippled financially as well. He quickly substituted Dom Juan in order to avoid increasing impoverishment. Moliere's financial state of 1665 inscribes itself fairly directly in the form of Dom Juan: "Presse, Moliere ecrivit sa piece en prose, se souciant peu des regles sur l'unite de temps, d'action et de lieu" (350). …
Memory and Theory in Eastern Europe, 2013
Wasafiri, 2009
Full terms and conditions of use: http://www.informaworld.com/terms-and-conditions-of-access.pdf ... more Full terms and conditions of use: http://www.informaworld.com/terms-and-conditions-of-access.pdf This article may be used for research, teaching and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution , reselling , loan or sub-licensing, systematic supply or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. The publisher does not give any warranty express or implied or make any representation that the contents will be complete or accurate or up to date. The accuracy of any instructions, formulae and drug doses should be independently verified with primary sources. The publisher shall not be liable for any loss, actions, claims, proceedings, demand or costs or damages whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with or arising out of the use of this material.
American Literary History, 2006
![Research paper thumbnail of THE IMPLICATED SUBJECT [Published Front Matter]](https://attachments.academia-assets.com/61271832/thumbnails/1.jpg)
](When it comes to historical violence and contemporary inequality, none of us are completely innoc... more When it comes to historical violence and contemporary inequality, none of us are completely innocent. We may not be direct agents of harm, but we may still contribute to, inhabit, or benefit from regimes of domination that we neither set up nor control. Arguing that the familiar categories of victim, perpetrator, and bystander do not adequately account for our connection to injustices past and present, Michael Rothberg offers a new theory of political responsibility through the figure of the implicated subject. The Implicated Subject builds on the comparative, transnational framework of Rothberg's influential work on memory to engage in reflection and analysis of cultural texts, archives, and activist movements from such contested zones as transitional South Africa, contemporary Israel/Palestine, post-Holocaust Europe, and a transatlantic realm marked by the afterlives of slavery. As these diverse sites of inquiry indicate, the processes and histories illuminated by implicated subjectivity are legion in our interconnected world. An array of globally prominent artists, writers, and thinkers—from William Kentridge, Hito Steyerl, and Jamaica Kincaid, to Hannah Arendt, Primo Levi, Judith Butler, and the Combahee River Collective—speak to this interconnection and show how confronting our own implication in difficult histories can lead to new forms of internationalism and long-distance solidarity.
This book argues that understanding the legacies of historical violence and the ongoing perpetuat... more This book argues that understanding the legacies of historical violence and the ongoing perpetuation of inequality requires a new approach that moves beyond the stable and clear-cut categories of victims and perpetrators. In order to make sense of trauma, violence, and power in the contemporary world, the book introduces a new figure of historical responsibility: the implicated subject. The concept of the implicated subject helps make visible how modern subjects participate in contexts of violence and exploitation that at first seem far removed from them. Neither criminally responsible perpetrators, nor passive victims, nor mere innocent bystanders to violence, implicated subjects are participants in—and beneficiaries of—systems that generate dispersed and uneven experiences of trauma and wellbeing simultaneously. Combining theoretical reflection and close analysis of cultural texts from such contexts as transitional South Africa, contemporary Israel/Palestine, post-Holocaust/postcolonial Europe, and a transatlantic realm marked by the aftermath of slavery, The Implicated Subject helps shift our focus to the conditions of possibility of violence and suggests different routes for opposing it.
This draft attempts to think through two major debates on the left and in the broader public abou... more This draft attempts to think through two major debates on the left and in the broader public about the implications of Trump's election. The first has concerned the relationship between the Trump movement and various potential historically analogous movements, especially fascism. The second has involved trying to understand the reasons for Trump's victory (or Clinton's defeat); this conversation has involved numerous factors, from Russian intervention to voter intimidation, but from the perspective of political strategy the most important dimension of this debate has been the question of which social categories (i.e. race, class, gender, region, etc.) were the most salient in shaping voter preferences. The following notes start from the question of what it means to make historical comparisons, and go on to address questions about historical precedent and political mobilization on the left in the new national and global context. Historical comparisons and analogies are worth taking seriously because—for better or worse—they are frequently the foundation for powerful cultural memories that help produce individual and collective identities and because they inevitably play a role in historical understanding and political mobilization. My title's allusion to the Turkish situation is meant to suggest the need for all of us to look beyond our national context and think about what we can learn by taking a broader perspective, even if it means leaving our comfort zone. Comments are most welcome.
The recent German translation of Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of... more The recent German translation of
Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization (2009) reopened the discussion on the comparability of the Holocaust, remembering different histories of violence, and the role of memory in practices of exclusion and inclusion in today’s society.
The same week is also the anniversary of the Hanau attack (20 February 2020). The workshop wants to translate into a symbolic remembrance not only Hanau but also other attacks related to racism and anti-Semitism (e.g. Halle, 9 October 2019). This will give us the opportunity to discuss questions including, but not limited to:
Can different acts of violence be studied and understood as interconnected?
How can Multidirectional Memory form a frame of mutual recognition in a ‘Post-Migrant/Multicultural’ society?
Why are these forms of Othering and Alienation re-surfacing?
The discussion will be framed by commentaries from doctoral and post-doc researchers from different fields such as Philosophy, Sociology, Postcolonial Studies, Museology, History and Jewish studies.
These are my remarks from the opening roundtable of the inaugural Memory Studies Association conf... more These are my remarks from the opening roundtable of the inaugural Memory Studies Association conference in Amsterdam in December 2016.
Critical Inquiry, 2020
Michael Rothberg’s book asks us to consider how every resident has become a beneficiary of and a ... more Michael Rothberg’s book asks us to consider how every resident has become a beneficiary of and a party to acts of injustice. When our
governments oppress minorities—for example, African Americans in the contemporary United States—or support others who do so, we are
responsible. Citing historical cases such as the Holocaust, apartheid, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and the Turkish campaigns against the Kurds, anddrawing illuminating examples from the art and literature that helps us unpack the complexity of living in such times, Rothberg claims that
each oppressive regime produced a version of “violent innocence” or “implicated subjects.”
Journal of the History of Ideas Blog, 2022
In this conversation I speak to Sultan Doughan, A. Dirk Moses, and Michael Rothberg about recent ... more In this conversation I speak to Sultan Doughan, A. Dirk Moses, and Michael Rothberg about recent debates in Germany concerning the history and memory of the Holocaust and colonialism. Part one explores the central issues at stake in the latest debates and their relation to the German Historians' Debate of the 1980s. Part two engages the relationship of minorities to official Holocaust memory in a diversifying Germany, the role of scholarly positionality, and the relationship between scholarship and activism.