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Thesis

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on November 30, 2005 at 2:58:18 pm
 


Quick links: Adorno Future reading Working bibliography Working thesis Old notes Other students' work

General notes

 

  • From __The German Quarterly__:
Anne Fuchs - "Towards an Ethics of Remembering: The Walser-Bubis Debate and the Other of Discourse" - Summer 2002The idea that narrative (storytelling) is the proper way to remember our pasts (and even develop our identities) is overwhelming in "currently dominant theories of cultural memories" (235). But, this point is not so clear-cut. For example, the Walser-Bubis debate is the debate between two Shoah survivors, Ignatz Bubis - who is impelled by an unhealable wound left by the Shoah to remember the dead (which reestablishes the ethical contract between self an other ruptured by the Shoah) - and Martin Walser - who, in the autobiographical novel __Ein springender Brunnen__, removes all mention of the Shoah (and the deaths of his brother and father) in an attempt to avoid the perpetrator-victim binary. Memory as storytelling/narrative is problematic partly insofar as it attempts to manage the Shoah, to fit it into an emotionally compelling, but neatly packaged experience (a trip to the Holocaust Museum, an "enjoyable trip" to Auschwitz (237), etc.). Much writing about the Shoah is - according to James E. Young - "factually insistent" (237) in the sense that it attempts to make a strong link between the narrative and the writer's experience. But, because the writing is therefore linked directly to the writer's experience, when the writer is not present, the work loses its only evidence. Young concedes, though, that this idea becomes complicated when we consider examples of fictional accounts of the Shoah that are also factually insistent. He makes the distinction between a sense of authority that is "retrieved" and one that is "constructed" (238), ie: one that comes directly from experience and one that comes indirectly from fiction. Anne Fuchs (the author), then argues that this distinction is important from an ethical standpoint. A retrieved authority, even insofar as the author's name is present, appeals to an existence that is not entirely capturable by words and thus the ethical obligation to take account of the testimony (how does this work? - see 238). Here, the author reminds of Levinas, who attempts to develop an ethics of others that does not attempt to remove the otherness of the other (by conceiving of it as another self), but "affects a calling into question of the same, a shock which offsets and disturbs consciousness. ...This experience of otherness is a manifestation that defies representation..." (239). In other words, surprisingly like Adorno's explanation of the importance of art and philosophy, the experience of the other as an-other forces us to reconceive what we think fits under our present understanding of the world (that which we regard as "the same"). But, the key difference, between this conception and Adorno's is that this experience with the other defies representation. It cannot be touched by art.
  • __Postmodernism and the Ethical Subject__:
"Towards a Postmodern Ethics of Memory"This essay looks at the postmodern way of thinking about history (namely, as something fragmented to which we are "foreign" (in other words, as something distant from us)) and claims that the roots of this way of thinking lie (at least partly) in technology since the beginning of the 19th Century and the way that it has changed, and continues to change, the way we think about time and space.

"The contemporary preoccupation with history and memory can be seen as operating in direct reaction to the amnesiac tendency of our era, the inscription of newly imagined communities and locations a response to the loss of shared ritual and national identities in a West increasingly characterized by shifting zones of cultural hybridization. However, it would be misleading to frame these gestures against forgetting as merely nostalgic and compensatory. New modes of theorizing questions of knowledge and the subject within the postmodern also mark important re-framings of the past - and in ways that work to expand rather than to diminish our ethical horizons" (8).
The study of history has not only become broader, but more self-conscious, such that people now talk about history less as an epistemological study (after truth) and more of "an ethical and political practice" (10, quoting Lynn Hunt (pg 103?), "History as a Gesture; or The Scandal of History"), In other words, as we realize that history is intersubjective and not objective, we also realize that it must be social (governed by who is allowed into the intersubjective discourse), so social questions (questions of value and politics) enter into discussions about the study of history. Looking at history as intersubjective also opens up questions of revisionism in which we think of history as memory at the level of a nation-state, like the example of the French denial of Vichy as Paris was liberated (see, pg. 11), and of the existence of the Other as an essential component of language.

Once we associate history with memory, we see that the growing historical awareness in literature, literary theory, philosophy, etc. is partly a push to remember (Holocaust Remembrance, AIDS quilts, the return of historical considerations in theory, etc.) and partly - because human consciousness is not infinite - a push to forget. Remembering - according to Derrida (where?!) - is an ethical act.

  • And then...

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