3. The Holocaust Sublime: Singularity, Representation, and the Violence of Everyday Life

John Sanbonmatsu

American Journal of Economics and Sociology, 2009, vol. 68, issue 1, 101-126

Abstract: The world of the concentration camps . . . was not an exceptionally monstrous society. What we saw there was the image, and in a sense the quintessence, of the infernal society in which we are plunged every day. —Ionesco1 Abstract It has become common to view mass historical traumas like the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki or the Holocaust as singularities—in other words, events of such transcendent, almost metaphysical significance that they exceed intelligibility. Siding with “realist” intellectuals who instead emphasize the rootedness of genocide in the structures of modernity and everyday life, I argue that the discourse of singularity aestheticizes historical trauma in problematic ways. Drawing on Kant's analytic of the sublime, in which the subject, in confronting an awesome or terrifying phenomenon from a position of safety, comes to realize his or her own powers of transcendence and moral superiority, I argue that the holocaust sublime encourages the viewing subject to “face” overwhelming horrors of the past, but without having to confront the subject's actual responsibility for the atrocities of the present. By pitting the extraordinary or “singular” against the banal and everyday, the holocaust sublime thus obscures, rather than reveals, the habits of thought and social structures that make genocidal practices inevitable.

Date: 2009
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1536-7150.2008.00617.x

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bla:ajecsc:v:68:y:2009:i:1:p:101-126

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.blackwell ... bs.asp?ref=0002-9246

Access Statistics for this article

American Journal of Economics and Sociology is currently edited by Laurence S. Moss

More articles in American Journal of Economics and Sociology from Wiley Blackwell
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Wiley Content Delivery ().