Introducing the "Global Animal": An Insomniac's Recourse in the Anthropocene (original) (raw)
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The introduction conceptualizes the environmental history of the Holocaust as a subdiscipline of Holocaust studies. The authors approach this emerging field of research through the context of environmental humanities with its current interest in the Anthropocene, soil science, forensics, multispecies collectives, and explorations of relations between ecocides and genocides. Proposed approach considers post-Holocaust spaces and landscapes as specific ecosystems and examines relations between its actors (human and non-human) in order to show the Holocaust's spatial markers and long-terms effects. The article outlines existing literature on the subject, identifies the central research problems and questions, and discusses sources and methods. The authors demonstrate that the environmental history of the Holocaust applies a hybrid methodology that uses methods from various disciplines with the aim of creating new theories and interpretive categories and thus should be considered complementary to existing approaches in Holocaust studies. The authors follow the methodological principles of grounded theory in generating new concepts and seeking multidisciplinary methods for explaining nature's role in the Holocaust and how Holocaust has changed nature. The authors claim that the environmental history of the Holocaust broadens Holocaust studies as a field of research and opens up new questions concerning relations between nature and extermination in order to provide a more holistic perspective for exploring the relationship between culture and nature, genocide and ecocide. The approach proposed here shows Holocaust and post-Holocaust landscapes in terms of ecological/natural heritage, which might influence the way these spaces are commemorated, conserved and preserved, as well as used for tourist purposes.
Holocaust Studies in the Era of Climate Change
Humanities of the Future: Perspectives from the Past and Present, Ben Fletcher-Watson and Jana Phillips, eds., Edinburgh: IASH Occasional Papers, vol. 21, pp.147-164. , 2020
At first glance, the pairing of the Holocaust and climate change may strike one as odd. On the one hand, Holocaust studies, as an academic field, deal with the historical event itself and its cultural and societal aftermath, including but not limited to a philosophical reassessment of Western civilisation, literary and artistic representations of mass murder, the psychoanalytical treatment of mass trauma, and the sociology of violence. On the other hand, the reality of climate change has yet to dawn upon us, as its trajectory is at present an unfolding dark prophecy. While the full force of climate change is still to reveal itself in the future, there is no denying that Holocaust commemoration is a future-oriented cultural endeavour, since remembering the victims and identifying the causes of state-sponsored violence were meant, from the outset, to prevent a repetition of this historical trauma.
2018
Between literature (fiction) and testimony, the narratives that attempt to voice and bear witness to the catastrophe dwell, in Jacques Derrida's terms, on an impossible limit. Bearing witness is thus haunted by two apparently opposed, yet interrelated, unstable functions: on the one hand it is continuously undone by the impossibility to tell its story, to find a language that can comprise and render the catastrophe, on the other hand, bearing witness means to embark on the quest of this possibility of a language that could confess to that which is impossible to grasp entirely. Considering posthumanism in its impossibility to tell its own story and in its quest for a language that would make it possible , our paper investigates the possibility of bearing witness to the unrepresentable. We will revisit the polemic around the images of the Shoah as we will delve into how one can deal with the language that bears witness to the events of a past that is out of reach. We will reconsider the dispute between Georges Didi-Huberman and Claude Lanzmann around the four photographs rescued from Auschwitz as we analyze László Nemes' film Son of Saul-which Didi-Huberman calls a necessary monster-and other documentary films exploring the possibility of speaking about the catastrophe (Harun Farocki, Rithy Panh, Patricio Guzmán). We will thus observe why and when we can speak of an ethical way to use the images of the Holocaust and why art can and should employ the impossibility of language to imagine the unimaginable in spite of all.
2011
'[...] I no longer know where I am. I seem to move around perfectly easily among people, to have perfectly normal relations with them. Is it possible, I ask myself, that all of them are participants in a crime of stupefying proportions? Am I fantasizing it all? I must be mad! Yet every day I see the evidences. The very people I suspect produce the evidence, exhibit it, offer it to me. Corpses. Fragments of corpses that they have bought for money. 'It is as if I were to visit friends, and to make some polite remark about the lamp in their living room, and they were to say, “Yes, it’s nice, isn’t it? Polish-Jewish skin it’s made of, we find that’s best, the skins of young Polish-Jewish virgins.” And then I go to the bathroom and the soap wrapper says, “Treblinka – 100% human stearate.” Am I dreaming, I say to myself? What kind of house is this? ‘Yet I’m not dreaming. I look into your eyes, into Norma’s, into the children’s, and I see only kindness, human kindness. Calm down, I tell myself, you are making a mountain out of a molehill. This is life. Everyone else comes to terms with it, why can’t you? Why can’t you?’ Elisabeth Costello (Coetzee 2001: 69)
The industrialized mistreatment of nonhuman animals has acquired unprecedented dimensions globally, taking the lives of trillions of singular beings every year. Regardless of nonhuman animals having a significant place in human culture, literature, art and religion, the most intimate contact most humans have with other animals is consuming their flesh. In a philosophico-psychological discussion, I will argue that the current world order is facilitated by two ideologies: metaphysical anthropocentrism and carnism. Metaphysical anthropocentrism is grounded in the presumption that ‘the human’ can be categorically separated from ‘the animal’ (Heidegger, 1962). The ideology of carnism acts as a complementary approach, explaining the human-projected distinction between different species of nonhuman animals. Carnism thereby allows humans to perceive some animals as singular entities, while disregarding the existence of others. I will demonstrate that both of these ideologies are fundamentally flawed. Using Jacques Derrida’s(1993, 2002) philosophy, I will reconceptualize the notion of language, thereby including animals in an originary zoo-genetic process. This will allow nonhuman animals to be encountered as singular, nonsubstitutable beings. Recognising their existence simultaneously means recognising their finitude - their having of a death. The giving of a death and finitude to animals, however, has major implications on the contemporary ideological paradigms. The recognition of animal singularity and death necessarily demands a radical change in the way we treat other animals.