Political Violence and the Imagination: An Introduction (Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy) (original) (raw)
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Critical Review of International, Social, and Political Philosophy, 2019
This paper investigates Hannah Arendt’s writings on tragic unreconciliation and pariah humour as offering creative strategies for confronting the deadening of emotion that enables people to become reconciled to what they should refuse or resist. She offers a distinctive contribution to debates on reconciliation and justice, I suggest, by articulating a tragic approach to unreconciliation. Yet Arendt recognised that tragic accounts of violence can reinforce denial and resignation. In writings on the ‘hidden tradition’ of the ‘Jew as pariah,’ Arendt suggests that humour can be an important response to tragic accounts of political violence and a strategy for awakening an emotional response in those who cannot perceive tragedies to which they have become reconciled. As arts of refusal, tragic unreconciliation and pariah humour invoke and subvert the tragic imagination to reveal possibilities for solidarity, responsibility, and transformation that challenge problematic forms of reconciliation – reconciliation to one’s role as a participant in, or bystander to abuse, reconciliation as self-abnegating assimilation, and reconciliation as compromise, scapegoating, or denial.
'TELL ME LIES …': HOLOCAUST, HISTORY, IDENTITY IN THE WORKS OF
The paper is a response to what has been recognized by the film maker Clay Claiborne, the author of the 2008 documentary Vietnam: The American Holocaust, as an urgent need to face the suppressed truth about the Vietnam War as the best vantage point from which to examine the mechanism of historical repetition. The continuity of war and violence, despite declarative promises of peace and stability, is the paradox that since the WWII has increasingly engaged the attention of historians, cultural critics and commentators, and artists. In the introductory section of the paper the views are represented of those among them who come from different fields yet, like Claiborne, use the benefit of the same, post-colonial, hindsight to reach the common conclusion about the holocaust, not as a unique aberration, but as historically recurrent and culturally conditioned phenomenon. The strategies used to justify and perpetuate it -the second major focus in this part of the paper -are not limited to deliberate falsification of historical facts though, for beyond what Harold Pinter called "the thick tapestry of lies" concealing the crimes of the past, there is the willingness, generated by western myths of racial supremacy, to believe the lies and/or condone the crimes. Within this (imperialist, patriarchal) mythic tradition, a particular kind of split identity is produced by, and reproduces in its turn, the kind of violent history we tend to take for granted: I argue, along with J. Habermas, L. Friedberg, C. Nord and H. Giroux, that the factual truth will stop short of the transformative effect, political or moral, we traditionally expect from it as long as the deep-seated affective alienation from whatever has been construed as the other that constitutes this identity remains unrecognized and unattended. Confronting such forms of radical inner dissociation, considered normal or desirable in patriarchal culture, has been, at least since Shakespeare, art's ultimate raison d'étre. In the rest of the paper I provide three examples of such literary deconstructions of western identity-forming traditions: Coetzee's 197 novel Dusklands about the continuity of consciousness bringing together geographically and historically distant events: the colonial massacres of the African Hottentots and the genocidal assault on Vietnam; US, the 1966 collaborative dramatic experiment directed by Peter Brook, and its 1968 cinematic version Tell Me Lies , re-mastered and released in 2012, and Death and the Maiden, Ariel Dorfman's 1990 play about the failure of democracy in the post-Pinochet Chile. While Coetzee reveals the incurable 'sickness of the master's soul,' making Hegel's master/slave paradigm a constant ironic reference, the governing purpose of Brook's and Dorfman's plays, I will argue, is to examine the possibilities open to drama of conquering denial and releasing the kind of sympathetic imagination crucial to the non-hierarchical 'I/Thou' relationship that used to regulate social life in archaic communities, when, according to an increasing number of scientists, biologically scripted empathy and solidarity were the only conceivable strategy of survival.
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Israeli television series have received remarkable international acclaim in recent years. In this article I examine the political implications of this success in terms of the West’s suspicious and hostile imagining of Islam, and the way in which the Jew – and the Israeli as the embodiment of a new Jew – performs the role of a liminal figure of mediation. I seek to unravel these tensions while arguing that during the last decade – a period defined by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s rule – Israeli cultural representation experienced a significant paradigmatic shift exemplified in its unflinching confrontation with the violent reality of Jewish sovereign existence in the Middle East. In relinquishing the conventions of psychological-drama in its representations of the crises of conscience and moral dilemmas plaguing the warrior, Israeli culture rejected one of the symbols of its self-perception, that of “shooting and crying,” in favor of a blunter confrontation with its own violence. In this article I suggest an approach to reading classic literary texts (by S. Yizhar and Yehuda Amichai) and current televisual representations of political conflict and warfare that focuses particularly on the way these texts justify violence: either by portraying the warrior as a victim, or as an outcast possessing special sensitivities, or lastly, as the one who finally acts out the traumatic violence between Arabs and Jews by shooting, and this time, by shooting and killing.
3. The Holocaust Sublime: Singularity, Representation, and the Violence of Everyday Life
American Journal of Economics and Sociology, 2009
AbstractIt has become common to view mass historical traumas like the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki or the Holocaust as singularities—in other words, events of such transcendent, almost metaphysical significance that they exceed intelligibility. Siding with “realist” intellectuals who instead emphasize the rootedness of genocide in the structures of modernity and everyday life, I argue that the discourse of singularity aestheticizes historical trauma in problematic ways. Drawing on Kant's analytic of the sublime, in which the subject, in confronting an awesome or terrifying phenomenon from a position of safety, comes to realize his or her own powers of transcendence and moral superiority, I argue that the holocaust sublime encourages the viewing subject to “face” overwhelming horrors of the past, but without having to confront the subject's actual responsibility for the atrocities of the present. By pitting the extraordinary or “singular” against the banal and everyday, the holocaust sublime thus obscures, rather than reveals, the habits of thought and social structures that make genocidal practices inevitable.It has become common to view mass historical traumas like the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki or the Holocaust as singularities—in other words, events of such transcendent, almost metaphysical significance that they exceed intelligibility. Siding with “realist” intellectuals who instead emphasize the rootedness of genocide in the structures of modernity and everyday life, I argue that the discourse of singularity aestheticizes historical trauma in problematic ways. Drawing on Kant's analytic of the sublime, in which the subject, in confronting an awesome or terrifying phenomenon from a position of safety, comes to realize his or her own powers of transcendence and moral superiority, I argue that the holocaust sublime encourages the viewing subject to “face” overwhelming horrors of the past, but without having to confront the subject's actual responsibility for the atrocities of the present. By pitting the extraordinary or “singular” against the banal and everyday, the holocaust sublime thus obscures, rather than reveals, the habits of thought and social structures that make genocidal practices inevitable.
Misrecognising the victim of state violence: denial, ‘deep’ imperialism and defending ‘our boys’
Crime, Law and Social Change
This article critically examines public responses to attempts at holding former British soldiers accountable for historic human rights violations committed during conflicts fought overseas. Using the case of British Army veterans who served in the North of Ireland and Iraq as an empirical basis, it posits that such responses are defined by a moral myopia that distinguishes between state violence 'here ' and 'there' and 'now' and 'then'. This moral myopia, it is submitted, is a form of identity politics forged through a marriage between deep imperialism and the strategies of denial used by the state. This essentially misrecognises the victim of state violence and ultimately leads to public sympathy favouring those who stand accused of human rights abuse over and above those actually subjected to it. Ultimately, the article concludes, this means that public opinion is channelled in a way that calls for such violations not to be punished rather than for them to be punished. treatment of those who had served in Iraq. Far from needing convinced by the letter, May had herself espoused a similar sentiment at the 2016 Conservative Party conference when she proclaimed that 'we will never againin any future conflictlet those activist, left-wing human rights lawyers harangue and harass the bravest of the bravethe men and women of Britain's Armed Forces' .
Funny as hell: The functions of humour during and after genocide
European Journal of Humour Research, 2015
The history of genocide is replete with various humorous treatments by different actors with distinctive objectives. This type of dark humour treats the topic, which is usually enveloped with solemnity, in a satirical manner. This essay aims to study the functions of humour by comparatively examining victimized individuals' and groups' use of humour during and after violent episodes such as genocide. Why do victims use humour under conditions of extreme peril, threats to life, and fear? It draws on published and unpublished memoirs, pamphlets, video clips, and most importantly victims' artistic and literary responses to the Nazi repression and the mass violence in Bosnia (1992-1995) and Syria (2011-2013). The essay argues that dark humour seems to be widespread among victims and survivors, as it functions as a complex mechanism for coping with anxiety and fear, group cohesion and critique of perpetrators. Our conclusions suggest that victimological approaches in genocide studies can benefit considerably from focusing on oppressed groups' humoristic responses to mass violence.
The Victim’s Voice and Melodramatic Aesthetics in History
Abstract: Saul Friedländer's recent Nazi Germany and the Jews: The Years of Extermination offers a brilliant new literary mode for historical representation of extreme events such as the Holocaust. He has produced an authoritative historical narrative of the Holocaust, within which he integrates the victims' authentic voices, as recorded (mostly) in their contemporary writings. This article offers a comparative assessment of Friedländer's achievement with regard to the integration of Jewish sources into the historical account. It begins with a contextualization of Friedländer's book within a framework that compares the ways in which Jewish sources are addressed by different historiographical approaches. In the second part it seeks to contextualize analytically and critically Friedländer's concept of “disbelief”—a concept by which he defines the role of the “victims’ voices” in his narrative. I claim that in our current “era of the witness,” set within a culture addicted to the “excessive,” the voices of the victims and the witnesses appear to have lost their radical political and ethical force. They seem no longer to bear the excess of history, and can thus hardly claim to be the guardians of disbelief. Excess and disbelief have thus become the most commonplace cultural topos. In our current culture, I contend, the excessive voices of the victims have, to some extent, exchanged their epistemological, ontological, and ethical revolutionary function for an aesthetic one. They operate according to the pleasure principle in order to bring us, the consumers of Holocaust images, the most expected image of the “unimaginable,” which therefore generates a melancholic pleasure and involves the narrative in melodramatic aesthetics. The article concludes by briefly suggesting some guidelines for an alternative approach to the study of contemporary Jewish Holocaust sources. Publication Date: 2009 Publication Name: History and Theory
Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 2018
Drawing upon experiences associated with racialized tensions and interactions related to living in neocolonial, post-apartheid South Africa, I engage with Gillian Straker's complex paper on "States of Exile and Marginalization" (this issue) as elaborated in response to Moffatt's film Night Cries. In particular, I question what it means to receive the hatred of the other in contexts in which previous relations of power become challenged and inverted and grapple with how it may be possible to sustain a relational ethics in such instances. Straker's reading of the tension between the real and the symbolic in Night Cries and what this signals for modes of expression, multiplicity of meaning, and potentialities in relating is also highlighted.