Disciplining the Holocaust

Karyn Ball

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9780791477779
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Holocaust History
• Index: History

Disciplining the Holocaust examines critics' efforts to defend a rigorous and morally appropriate image of the Holocaust. Rather than limiting herself to polemics about the "proper" approach to traumatic history, Karyn Ball explores recent trends in intellectual history that govern a contemporary ethics of scholarship about the Holocaust. She examines the scholarly reception of Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing Executioners, the debates culminating in Eisenman's Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin, Lyotard's response to negations of testimony about the gas chambers, psychoanalytically informed frameworks for the critical study of traumatic history, and a conference on feminist approaches to the Holocaust and genocide. Ball's book bridges the gap between psychoanalysis and Foucault's understanding of disciplinary power in order to highlight the social implications of traumatic history.

Table of contents

• DISCIPLINING THE HOLOCAUST
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Disciplining Traumatic History: Goldhagen’s “Impropriety”
• 2. The Aesthetics of Restraint: Peter Eisenman’s “Jewish” Solution to Germany’s Memorial Question
• 3. “Auschwitz” after Lyotard
• 4. “Working through” the Holocaust?Toward a Psychoanalysis of Critical Refl ection
• 5. Unspeakable Differences,Obscene Pleasures: The Holocaust as an Object of Desire
• Notes
• Index