Disciplining the Holocaust

Karyn Ball is Associate Professor of English and Film Studies at the University of Alberta and the editor of Traumatizing Theory: The Cultural Politics of Affect In and Beyond Psychoanalysis.

• List of IllustrationsAcknowledgments Introduction 1. Disciplining Traumatic History: Goldhagen’s "ImproprietyGoldhagen’s Impropriety • Trauma and the Disciplinary Imaginary 2. The Aesthetics of Restraint: Peter Eisenman’s "Jewish" Solution to Germany’s Memorial QuestionMemorial Culture before and after Reunification: Between Revisionism and Jürgen Habermas’s "Western Consensus" • "What have we done to ourselves by doing away with the Jews?": The Memorial and Its Interlocutors • Deconstructivist Architecture between Libeskind and Eisenman: Toward a "Jewish" Antimemorial Genre? 3. "Auschwitz" after LyotardThe Wound of Nihilism • Improper Ends • Expropriating the We • Affective Evidence • Survivor Memory and the Limits of Empathy 4. "Working through" the Holocaust? Toward a Psychoanalysis of Critical ReflectionLibidinal Reflections • Against Catharsis • Sadomasochism and the Disciplinary Imaginary 5. Unspeakable Differences, Obscene Pleasures: The Holocaust as an Object of DesireThe Discipline of Compassion between Testimony and Confession • The Holocaust as a Feminist Object of Desire Notes Index

"Disciplining the Holocaust is an ambitious and thought-provoking study that touches on many uncomfortable questions for scholars in this area. It will undoubtedly prompt discussion and debate." — H-Net Reviews"A complex book about a difficult topic." — CHOE"Disciplining the Holocaust is a brave, multileveled, and important intervention that presages a new type of historical meditation, one in which new ways of framing the unrepresentable are on display. The book is informed by an impressive combination of critical vocabularies, all of which seem needed to address one of the bewitched sites of modernity." — Tom Cohen, author of Ideology and Inscription: "Cultural Studies" after Benjamin, De Man, and Bakhtin