Special Section on Michael Rothberg’s The Implicated Subject: Introduction (original) (raw)
Related papers
Navigating Implication: An Interview with Michael Rothberg
Journal of Perpetrator Research, 2020
Angeles. His work on multidirectional memory and traumatic realism has influenced scholars working in the fields of memory studies, genocide and Holocaust studies, postcolonial studies, and beyond. More recently, with The Implicated Subject: Beyond Victims and Perpetrators (2019), Rothberg sets out to expand the way we think and talk about political violence and injustice by offering a new critical term: the implicated subject. This interview was conducted via email between February and early April 2020.
Political Memory and the Aesthetics of Care: The Art of Complicity and Resistance
Contemporary Political Theory
Mihaela Mihai has written a daring book that transcends disciplinary, linguistic, and national boundaries. Its central question is: What is the role of art and artists in helping us think through our political responses to systemic violence? According to Mihai. the arts have a major role to play in transforming 'official stories', which stabilize unjust orders; they can help interrupt the vicious cycle of systemic exclusions and violent habits. Mihai illustrates her thesis by analyzing 18 novels and films in three different repressive contexts: France under Nazi occupation, Communist Romania and apartheid South Africa. The first part of the book presents the conceptual underpinning of Mihai's argument in a remarkably well-written introduction and two short theoretical chapters. The second and much longer part of the book consists of the three case studies that make the proposals 'more sophisticated, more plausible, and more productive' (p. 65). In the introduction, Mihai critiques debates about systemic violence as astoundingly unnuanced. Discussions tend to focus on perpetrators, victims and resisters, thus 'limiting the accounts we get of past violence…and the agents involved' (p. 13). Perpetrators receive unmitigated condemnation, and resisters or 'heroes' unconditional praise. By contrast, Mihai wants us to see these groups of people on a moral and ethical continuum (p. 14). Some perpetrators become resisters or victims. Heroes are ambiguous and no stranger to fear; they may even betray. The most original features are in Mihai's articulation of the aesthetics of care and the three case studies. Mihai argues that works of art can 'seductively sabotage' our attachment to dominant-comfortable and reductive-narratives about the past' (p. 9). She discusses the role of novels and films, some well-known and others less so, as agents of 'hesitation' and interruption theoretically in Chapters 1 and 2. In Chapters 4-6 she turns to three cases studies of systemic violence. Chapter 1 introduces us to the concept of 'double erasure' (p. 25). There is no clean slate in spite of attempts at 'curating political memory'. Indeed 'the need not
"Implicated Subjects" by Jennifer Noji and Michael Rothberg
Routledge Handbook of Memory Activism, 2023
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.
2016
The future of Germany’s murderous past is now being reconsidered by a new generation of artists who have to navigate an increasing distance to the Third Reich and its remaining witnesses. Thus it is not surprising that recent postmemory work registers shifts, both with respect to mnemonic perspective and representational strategy. This article considers “Lore,” a story published in the trilogy The Dark Room (2001) by the British-German author Rachel Seiffert, and its cinematic adaptation by the Australian filmmaker Cate Shortland (2012) as two examples of such shifts. The mnemonic perspective of both works offers a productive tension. On the one hand they present the emotionally charged perspective of children of Nazi perpetrators, yet on the other hand they employ representational modes that are bare, impassive and minimalist. What are we to make of material that invites identification with protagonists born into a perpetrator legacy, particularly when these historical witnesses ar...
Studia Phaenomenologica 2019 – Volume 19 — On Conflict and Violence, https://www.zetabooks.com/studia-phaenomenologica-2019-volume-19-on-conflict-and-violence.html?fbclid=IwAR3AYkc7v3FaOPvwLPC5V5puYn-Rw1tuGt4QWo\_ZtzT9gJayNzo1fuGhuEw#.XeeMoppcSTE.facebook, 2019
Acts of violence develop in relation to place and involve the violation of its very limits. Every significant place is a scene of history, its limits embrace presence and sense. As such, it is the life-worldly home of memory. In this article, I will retrieve the bodily affective dimension of the phenomenon of place memory in instances of public commemoration. Drawing on different philosophical horizons like those of mainly Heidegger, Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, Derrida, Adorno, Ricoeur and Bataille, I'll contrast their different perspectives on the question of the intertwining of violence, place and memory and refer them to the narrative work of memorials (e.g. Libeskind's and Eisenman's for Berlin). Insofar violence has been traditionally represented and thereby obliterated by architecture, we may ask how should genocide, as the unspeakable and ungraspable be expressed? I'll suggest that it can only be attained by the suspension of meaning and presence: A narrative of bodily affections, of pathos, suffering and excess that accounts for what in itself remains beyond expression.
German Historical Institute London Bulletin, 2022
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).
in Journal of Perpetrator Research, 2(1), pp.13–19., 2018
Post-World War II Holocaust studies, followed by genocide, trauma, and postcolonial studies, set the triangulation of perpetrator, victim, and bystander at the heart of their discussion of both the ethical legacy of the Holocaust and the aftermath of other twentieth-century catastrophes. Aiming at the constitution of an appropriate instrument to deal with transitional justice issues, during the 1990s the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) interwove these subject positions, thereby attesting to a major transformation in post-genocide reconciliation processes, though not altering their basic foundation. Other theorizations, especially of the perpetrator, for example, expanded the scale of sociological characterization of the triangulation or confronted its call for interpellation and identification (most prominently in the fields of criminology and literature, respectively), but further reflected the same triadic foundation. The exploratory opposition between subject position and action provoked by Gudehus in his ‘Some Remarks on the Label, Field, and Heuristics of Perpetrator Research’ (in this issue) follows the twentieth century’s legacy as well. Undoubtedly, opposing epistemology (subject position) and ontology (the action-able), as his essay suggests, contributes to our renewed efforts to comprehend perpetratorhood, recently kindled by the initiation of the Journal of Perpetrator Research and its pioneering editorial. However, I suggest that while adhering to the twentieth-century legacies – from Hilberg’s triad to Primo Levi’s ‘Gray Zone’ – it is necessary to comprehend perpetratorhood in light of the shift from the victim era, defined as such by the seminal works of Felman and Laub and particularly Wieviorka, to the perpetrator era.
Open Research Europe, 2022
Background: In the twenty-first century, literatures from Central and Eastern Europe are marked by a boom of documentary fiction portraying complicity Nazi perpetration, Soviet terror, or other instances of 20th century mass violence and totalitarianism. Since understanding the past serves requirements of the present, the boom prompts the question: Why the interest in past complicities now? My hypothesis is that the texts address convergences between involvements in past acts of mass violence and current forms of participation in wrongdoings in neoliberalism. While these issues differ profoundly, they are related: structurally, both present the challenge of forming a nuanced notion of participation. Historically, they are related since justifications of past involvements have established the terminology, narratives, and heuristics in which terror, repression, and mass violence are subsequently discussed, thus forming the frame for negotiating current problematic involvements. Method: Critical discourse analysis is used to scrutinize the legal concept of complicity and combined it with close readings of passages from four literary texts to outline how attention to reciprocity in language can enhance our understanding of problematic involvement. Results: Literary portrayals of historical complicity are ambivalent; they can help to find models for comprehending issues of the present in cultural memory, but they can also serve to establish distance between present and past to appease the sense that all is not quite well, even after the demise of Nazi and Soviet terror. The article outlines two modes of distancing: a) spacio-temporal distancing of the commemorating point of view in 'the West' from the portrayed violence in 'the East', and b) moral distancing that casts the audience as superior to complicit characters. Conclusion: By pressing for analytic or consoling distance, both strategies of distancing amount to a complicity with the transmission of discourses that justify, excuse, or deny mass violence and totalitarian terror.
Open research Europe, 2022
Background: In the twenty-first century, literatures from Central and Eastern Europe are marked by a boom of documentary fiction portraying complicity Nazi perpetration, Soviet terror, or other instances of 20th century mass violence and totalitarianism. Since understanding the past serves requirements of the present, the boom prompts the question: Why the interest in past complicities now? My hypothesis is that the texts address convergences between involvements in past acts of mass violence and current forms of participation in wrongdoings in neoliberalism. While these issues differ profoundly, they are related: structurally, both present the challenge of forming a nuanced notion of participation. Historically, they are related since justifications of past involvements have established the terminology, narratives, and heuristics in which terror, repression, and mass violence are subsequently discussed, thus forming the frame for negotiating current problematic involvements. Method: Critical discourse analysis is used to scrutinize the legal concept of complicity and combined it with close readings of passages from four literary texts to outline how attention to reciprocity in language can enhance our understanding of problematic involvement. Results: Literary portrayals of historical complicity are ambivalent; they can help to find models for comprehending issues of the present in cultural memory, but they can also serve to establish distance between present and past to appease the sense that all is not quite well, even after the demise of Nazi and Soviet terror. The article outlines two modes of distancing: a) spacio-temporal distancing of the commemorating point of view in ‘the West’ from the portrayed violence in ‘the East’, and b) moral distancing that casts the audience as superior to complicit characters. Conclusion: By pressing for analytic or consoling distance, both strategies of distancing amount to a complicity with the transmission of discourses that justify, excuse, or deny mass violence and totalitarian terror.