Karyn Ball

Disciplining the Holocaust focuses on questions of moral and scientific propriety in recent critical discussions about the Holocaust's representation. The dissertation revolves around my employment of the term proper to describe the nexus of moral, hermeneutical, and aesthetic ideals that delineate a rigorous approach to the Holocaust and thereby delimit its content as an object of inquiry. This formulation derives from Jacques Derrida's deconstruction of idealist conceptions of meaning and identity, but also from Michel Foucault's emphasis on the double sense of the term discipline as a field of inquiry and a system of codes that regulates discourse and knowledge in the human sciences. My analysis problematizes the ways that historians, philosophers, and critics invoke the disciplinary proper for the purpose of excluding allegedly "improper" representations of the Jewish genocide. My aims are to trace shifts in scholars' definitions of propriety across different discursive domains while illuminating the relevance of Holocaust scholarship for an understanding of traumatic discourse in general. In the first chapter, the controversy surrounding Daniel Jonah Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust provides the departure point for my theorization of the genocide's constitution as a traumatic historical object. The second chapter concretizes this analysis through a reading of the 1986 West German Historians' Debate about the Holocaust's centrality in German history. The third chapter examines Jean-Francois Lyotard's philosophically over-determined figuration of Auschwitz as a sublime event that transcends empirically based judgments. This critique also affirms his rhetorical emphasis on the competition among opposing descriptions of historical experience. The fourth chapter identifies the theoretical conditions and moral limits of adopting Freudian psychoanalysis to evaluate representations of the Holocaust. In addition, this chapter employs psychoanalytic theory to explain how collective memories assume a disciplinary power to regulate interpretations of the traumatic past. This is a controversial fine of inquiry because it suggests that scholars consider their affective investment in the Holocaust as a traumatic object of inquiry. My conclusion therefore addresses the ethical implications of this analysis that potentially offends the sensibilities of Holocaust survivors and the bereaved

This essay focuses on Judith Butler’s configuration in Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism of sacred life from the mystical motifs that traverse Walter Benjamin’s writings as the pivot of an anti-identitarian ethics committed to non-violent resistance. To gain critical leverage on Butler’s post-secular stance, my analysis turns to Talal Asad’s ‘Redeeming the “Human” Through Human Rights’ chapter from Formations of the Secular, where he enunciates a disparity between a ‘pre-civil state of nature’ and the notion of ‘inalienable rights’ that informs the subject’s rights under secular law. In underscoring the secular state’s inability or refusal to ascribe sacredness to ‘real living persons’ over and against ‘“the human” conceptualized abstractly, or imagined in a state of nature’ as presumed by natural law, Asad indirectly articulates what is at stake in Butler’s explication in Parting Ways of Benjamin’s ‘Critique of Violence’. In this context, Butler unpacks Benjamin’s remarks about the sixth commandment’s non-coercive disposition and the inner struggle its provisional applicability prompts. A conception of ‘sacred life’ crystallizes through Butler’s emphasis on the open-endedness of this struggle, which encourages us to abandon a solipsistic investment in our own suffering in the process of acknowledging its eternally transient rhythm. I argue that Butler supplements this motif by drawing upon Hannah Arendt’s grounding of the political in cohabitation. My contention is that while ‘sacred life’ forms the backbone of Butler’s affirmation of civil disobedience, Arendt empowers Butler’s ethics to transcend Benjamin’s Jewish-messianic melancholy by radicalizing the passivity that refracts it.

This essay undertakes a critique of recent trends in affect theory from the standpoint of the “human motor”: a trope that presupposes a thermodynamic psychophysiology distended between energy conservation and entropy. In the course of reanimating thermodynamic motifs in Marx's labor power metabolics and Freud's trauma energetics, the essay broaches entropics as a poetics of depletion that offsets affect theories promoting open-system metaphors. Open-system affect theory sometimes amalgamates emancipatory post-humanist gestures inherited from Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari with neuroscientific terms. In the course of “liberating” affect from subject-oriented topoi, this “liberation-scientistic” admixture expropriates organic matter's degeneration over time. An “entropical” perspective also challenges Antonio Negri's Spinozaist affect conceived as a capacitating power that encounters obstacles but never limits. Both “liberation scientism” and “capacitation rhetoric” mimic capital's abstraction in infinitely expanding its potential to extract surplus value from finitely embodied labor. With enervation and deterioration at its crux, entropics illuminates how people might feel individuated by their respective struggles to safeguard scarce energy and forestall “heat death” while navigating simultaneous demands. The question is whether or not open-system motifs in affect theory can effectively register the political force of this struggle with depletion and present or imminent debilitation as its common ground.