scholarly journals A thanatopolitical visualisation of accounting history: Giorgio Agamben and Nazi Germany

2021 ◽  
pp. 103237322110086
Author(s):  
Erin Twyford
Keyword(s):  
Natural Disasters ◽  
Nazi Germany ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Complex Matrix ◽  
Giorgio Agamben ◽  
Accounting History ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
Integral Role ◽  
Human Cost

The extensive measures taken to destroy a people are facilitated by a complex matrix of interrelated actors and practices, yet there remains an underdeveloped implication of accounting in the wider moral and political imperatives. The purpose of this article is to introduce a thanatopolitical visualisation of accounting history adapted from the work of Giorgio Agamben and Michel Foucault. The theoretical triptych implicates business and accounting in the State-sanctioned financial, political and actual deaths of people. Through reference to Nazi Germany (1933–1945) and the companies Deutsche Bank and Ford Werke, the utility of the theoretical device is illustrated, and silences in accounting are given exposure through alternative accounts. Adopting a close-reading method, the peripheral yet integral role of accounting helped conceal the human cost of thanatopolitical ideology. Beyond the Holocaust example, this triptych is relevant for the exploration of other instances of thanatopolitics, such as war, natural disasters and pandemics.

Haunting Hands

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kathleen M. Cumiskey ◽  
Larissa Hjorth
Keyword(s):  
Natural Disasters ◽  
Digital Media ◽  
Mobile Device ◽  
Social Practice ◽  
Digital Content ◽  
Mobile Media ◽  
Significant Events ◽  
Integral Role ◽  
Depth Study

From natural disasters to private funerals, digital media are playing a central role in the documentation and commemoration of shared significant events and individual loss experiences. Yet few studies have fully engaged with the increasing role mobile media play in making meanings related to traumatic events across different individual and collective contexts. Haunting Hands provides the first in-depth study into understanding the role of mobile media in memorialization and bereavement as a cultural and social practice. Throughout the chapters in this book, we explore how mobile devices are both expanding upon older forms of memory-making and creating new channels for affective cultures whereby the visual, textual, oral, and haptic manifest in new ways. Encompassing everything from phones to tablets, mobile media are not only playing a key role in how we represent and remember life, but also in how we negotiate the increasingly integral role of the digital within rituals in and around death. Haunting Hands posits how, during times of distress, mobile media can assist, accompany, and at times augment the disruptive terrain of loss. The book expands upon debates in the area of online memorialization in that the mobile device itself takes prominence, not only for its communicative or social function, but also for the ways in which it can contain as well as generate an intimate space within it. In this way, the device becomes an important companion for mobile-emotive grief as the bereaved engage with emotionally charged digital content in solitary, sometimes secretive, and sometimes shared ways.

The Role of Education in Preventing Nuclear War

1984 ◽  
Vol 54 (3) ◽  
pp. 282-304 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eric Markusen ◽  
John Harris
Keyword(s):  
Citizen Participation ◽  
Nuclear Weapons ◽  
Crucial Role ◽  
Arms Race ◽  
Nazi Germany ◽  
Nuclear War ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
Nuclear Arms Race ◽  
Nuclear Arms

Arguing that education should play a crucial role in reducing the threat of nuclear war, Eric Markusen and John B. Harris turn first to history. They examine the role of education in the Holocaust of Nazi Germany and draw a thought-provoking parallel to the role of education in the nuclear arms race. They then discuss aspects of U.S. nuclear weapons policymaking and factors of psychological resistance that have limited citizen participation in decisionmaking. Finally, they explore the potential of education to help prevent nuclear war and describe ways that educators are rising to that challenge.

Serbs and Jews

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexander Prusin
Keyword(s):  
Civil Servants ◽  
Nazi Germany ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
Auxiliary Role

Assesses the role of native collaboration and poplar attitudes to the genocide of Jews in Serbia. Similarly to other German-occupied countries, participation in the Holocaust in Serbia was a part of general collaboration, whereby the native civil servants and policemen strove to demonstrate loyalty or ideological affinity to Nazi Germany. To this end, while playing an auxiliary role in the genocide, the Serbian collaborationists displayed considerable initiative and energy in implementing the Nazi racial policies. At the same time, many Serbs risked their lives providing their Jewish co-nationals with “Aryan” documents, hiding them from the police, or leading them to safety.

The Time of Indifference: Mandelstam's Age, Badiou's Event, and Agamben's Contemporary

CounterText ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 85-99
Author(s):  
William Watkin
Keyword(s):  
Modern Time ◽  
Giorgio Agamben ◽  
Alain Badiou

There has been little direct discussion between perhaps the two leading philosophers of our age: Alain Badiou and Giorgio Agamben. Yet both men have written about the same poem by Osip Mandelstam, ‘The Age’, around the topic of time. Significantly, Agamben's response, written after Badiou's, is a subtle and damning critique of Badiou's conceptualisation of time, in particular extended across the categories of the modern, the contemporary, and the now or the event – although it never actually mentions Badiou by name. In this paper the lens of the central role of indifference in the work of both is used to present alternating and competing views as to the nature of modern, contemporary, and ‘now’ time. Specifically, a contrast is drawn between Badiou's use of indifference as both quality-neutral and absolutely non-relational, and Agamben's application of the indifferent suspension of the temporal signature as such. The paper concludes that while Badiou uses temporal indifference to question and problematise the idea of modern time as ‘now’, through a theory of the event, Agamben appears to go further. Rather than analyse the nature of modern time, the contemporary and the now through his reading of Mandelstam, Agamben uses Mandelstam's poem to suspend the Western conception of time as a line composed of points in its entirety.

Patrick Kavanagh and the Authentic ‘Dispensation’: Rereading the Role of Narrator in The Great Hunger

2012 ◽  
Vol 42 (1) ◽  
pp. 86-104 ◽  
Author(s):  
Catherine Kilcoyne
Keyword(s):  
National Literature ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Peasant Farmer ◽  
Nineteen Forties ◽  
Death Knell

This essay posits a challenge to the continued reading of The Great Hunger (1942) as a realist depiction of the Irish small-farming class in the nineteen forties. The widespread critical acceptance of the poem as a socio-historical ‘documentary’ both relies upon and propagates an outmoded notion of authenticity based upon the implicit fallacy that Kavanagh's body of work designates a quintessence of Irishness in contradistinction to his Revivalist predecessors. In 1959 Kavanagh referred to this delusion as constituting his ‘dispensation’, for indeed it did provide a poetic niche for the young poet. Kavanagh's acknowledgement of this dispensation came with his rejection of all prescriptive literary symbols. While this iconoclasm is widely recognised in his later career, the relevance of The Great Hunger to this question continues to be overlooked. In fact, this poem contains his strongest dialectic upon the use of symbols – such as the peasant farmer – in designating an authentic national literature. The close reading of The Great Hunger offered here explores the poem's central deconstruction of ruralism and authenticity. The final ‘apocalypse of clay’ is the poem's collapse under the stress of its own deconstructed symbolism; the final scream sounds the death knell to Kavanagh's adherence to his authentic dispensation.

Bad Dreams and Secret Artists: Translating Freud into Literature

2002 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 127-139 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ian Patterson
Keyword(s):  
Sigmund Freud ◽  
Ordinary Language ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Careful Attention ◽  
Popular Approach ◽  
English Reader ◽  
Creative Writer ◽  
The Many ◽  
The Way

This article addresses the increasingly popular approach to Freud and his work which sees him primarily as a literary writer rather than a psychologist, and takes this as the context for an examination of Joyce Crick's recent translation of The Interpretation of Dreams. It claims that translation lies at the heart of psychoanalysis, and that the many interlocking and overlapping implications of the word need to be granted a greater degree of complexity. Those who argue that Freud is really a creative writer are themselves doing a work of translation, and one which fails to pay sufficiently careful attention to the role of translation in writing itself (including the notion of repression itself as a failure to translate). Lesley Chamberlain's The Secret Artist: A Close Reading of Sigmund Freud is taken as an example of the way Freud gets translated into a novelist or an artist, and her claims for his ‘bizarre poems' are criticized. The rest of the article looks closely at Crick's new translation and its claim to be restoring Freud the stylist, an ordinary language Freud, to the English reader. The experience of reading Crick's translation is compared with that of reading Strachey's, rather to the latter's advantage.

Painted Memories

2007 ◽  
Vol 7 (4) ◽  
pp. 26-29
Author(s):  
mayer kirshenblatt ◽  
barbara kirshenblatt-gimblett
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
World War ◽  
Daily Diet ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
Yom Kippur ◽  
Root Vegetables

Mayer Kirshenblatt remembers in words and paintings the daily diet of Jews in Poland before the Holocaust. Born in 1916 in Opatóów (Apt in Yiddish), a small Polish city, this self-taught artist describes and paints how women bought chickens from the peasants and brought them to the shoykhet (ritual slaughterer), where they plucked the feathers; the custom of shlogn kapores (transferring one's sins to a chicken) before Yom Kippur; and the role of herring and root vegetables in the diet, especially during the winter. Mayer describes how his family planted and harvested potatoes on leased land, stored them in a root cellar, and the variety of dishes prepared from this important staple, as well as how to make a kratsborsht or scratch borsht from the milt (semen sack) of a herring. In the course of a forty-year conversation with his daughter, Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, who also interviewed Mayer's mother, a picture emerges of the daily, weekly, seasonal, and holiday cuisine of Jews who lived in southeastern Poland before World War II.

Gedanken zu Genesis 46,8–27

2019 ◽  
Vol 63 (1) ◽  
pp. 93-104
Author(s):  
Wilfried Warning
Keyword(s):  
Close Reading ◽  
Per Se ◽  
Distinct Distribution

Abstract In general, commentators consider Gen 46:8–27 as a secondary addition. Close reading brings to light the structuring role of verses 18 and 25 („these were the sons of Zilpah / Bilhah … and these she bore to Jacob, sixteen souls / seven souls”). In a ten-part outline based on the personal name (PN) „Jacob” v. 18 takes the fourth and v.25 the fourth from last positions. In Genesis 37–50 the noun נפש „soul” occurs thirteen times – now v. 18 takes the sixth and v. 25 the sixth-from-last positions. The thirteen-part table based on the PN „Ruben” stands out for two reasons: Firstly, in Genesis the term „Ruben the first born of Jacob” shows up only twice, namely in the first (34,23) and last (46,8) texts. Secondly, as regards content 37,22 and 42,22 are correlated. In the 13-part outline they take the sixth and sixth-from-last positions respectively. The distinct distribution of these terms indicates that the passage per se is well structured and, what is more, at the same time it has been skillfully integrated in Gen 37–50 and in the Jacob-Joseph cycle.

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