scholarly journals From Lanzmann’s Circle of Flames to Bodies in Pain: Anglo-American Holocaust Fiction and Representations of the Gas Chamber

Genealogy ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 4 (3) ◽  
pp. 88
Author(s):  
David Dickson
Keyword(s):  
The Body ◽  
Grey Zone ◽  
Emotional Distance ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
Anglo American ◽  
Schindler's List ◽  
Gas Chamber

This article discusses the apparent desire in Anglo-American Holocaust fiction to form a deeper connection to the horror of the Holocaust by recreating scenes of suffering in the gas chamber. Using Elaine Scarry’s The Body in Pain, Alison Landsberg’s theory of ‘prosthetic memory’ and the concept of ‘feeling-with’ as outlined by Sonia Kruks, it discusses the motives underlying these representations and what an audience stands to learn from these bodily encounters with the Holocaust past. The article begins by discussing texts that explore the notions of temporal and emotional distance and the unreachability of the Holocaust dead, while also reflecting the corresponding impulse to reconnect with the murdered by physicalising them as bodies in pain. It then moves on to works that aim to make the experience of death in the gas chamber literally inhabitable for present-day nonwitnesses. In pursuing this argument, the article focuses on six representative texts: Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List (1993), Bryan Singer’s Apt Pupil (1998), Tim Blake Nelson’s The Grey Zone (2001), The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas (2006 and 2008, for the book and film respectively), In Paradise (2014) by Peter Matthiessen and Mick Jackson’s Denial (2016).

How Dead Can You Be?

1975 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 133-146 ◽  
Author(s):  
Adrienne Van Till-D'Aulnis de Bourouill
Keyword(s):  
Brain Function ◽  
Blood Circulation ◽  
Artificial Respiration ◽  
The Body ◽  
Life And Death ◽  
The Public ◽  
Current Usage ◽  
Anglo American ◽  
Legal Security ◽  
Carotid And Vertebral Arteries

Life and death are defined in terms of function. Four groups of abnormal cases of death are specified and differentiated from normal cases. Murder, active euthanasia and cessation of artificial respiration are differentiated on the basis of the interested party, the cause of death and the purpose of the act. Juridical acceptance of this differentiation and terminology makes cessation of artificial respiration lawful, provided the patient had validly refused this treatment or is irreversibly comatose and also respirator-dependent. This would make it unnecessary to redefine death in terms of coma in order to solve legal and practical problems. Such a redefinition is against current usage (coma presumes life) and is the first step on an extremely slippery road; it is only admissible if done by the legislator after extensive public discussion. Disagreement among doctors about the definition and diagnosis of death causes distrust among the public, aggravates the shortage of donor organs and makes legal security an illusion. Three diagnostic ‘schools’ are compared: the Anglo-American (using Harvard's criteria), the French (using Mollaret's coma dépassé) and the Austro-German (using absence of intracranial blood circulation). On grounds of logic only the Austro-German diagnosis is reliable; it is not based on a statistically irreversible absence of outwardly perceptible manifestations of brain function, but proves and documents with certainty the total and irreversible impossibility of brain function. At present this has to be done by bilateral angiography of both carotid and vertebral arteries; if negative concerning the intracranial part, this proves death. In normal cases the traditional criteria may be used; in abnormal cases where no infringement of the body is foreseeable death need not be a certainty in order to stop therapy, provided the patient is irreversibly comatose and also respirator-dependent; in abnormal cases where an infringement is foreseeable death should be proved and documented to make the infringement lawful, apart from other conditions such as consent. Proof can be obtained by the Austro-German method or by discontinuing resuscitation during at least 15 consecutive minutes where this is legally permissible. Most German and Dutch lawyers concerned share this view.

Komiks w służbie historii. Zagłada ucieleśniona na kartach komiksu Epizody z Auschwitz: Nosiciele tajemnicy

2020 ◽  
Vol 60 (2) ◽  
pp. 6-14
Author(s):  
Gaweł Janik
Keyword(s):  
Comic Book ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Holocaust

The article is an attempt to critically read the Polish comic book "Episodes from Auschwitz: The Carriers of a Mystery" by Michał Gałek and Michał Pyteraf. The author draws attention to the risks associated with the choice of the comic as a medium talking about the trauma of the Holocaust. Placing a comic book within publications that fit the current of historical politics, the author of the article pointed to the elements that testify to his polonocentrism. The image of the body was analyzed, with particular emphasis on differences in the presentation of prisoners of the camp, men selected to work in the Sonderkommando branches and its members. Attention was paid to the fetishization and eroticization of the Jewish body, which is dangerously close to the Nazi body.

Punishment and the body in the ‘old’ and ‘new’ South Africa: A story of punitivist humanism

2011 ◽  
Vol 15 (4) ◽  
pp. 427-443 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gail Super
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Capital Punishment ◽  
New South ◽  
The Body ◽  
Party Government ◽  
Complex Entity ◽  
Nationalist Party ◽  
Official Discourse ◽  
Anglo American

This paper analyses official discourse about punishment in South Africa, from 1976 to 2004. It frames punishment as a form of governance which is both connected to, and separate from, the Anglo/American/European examples that are generally referred to in the literature. The shift from corporal and capital punishment to the use of long-term imprisonment is discussed within a framework that emphasizes how both the apartheid and post-apartheid state explained and attempted to justify punishment policies during times of great upheaval and change. Penality under apartheid was a complex entity, and the punishment regime under the Nationalist Party government was starting to reform during the period analyzed. This liberalization was accompanied by a lengthening of terms of imprisonment, a trend that has continued in the ‘new’ South Africa. The prison in post-apartheid South Africa speaks to both humanism and punitivism. This duality has contributed to its enduring nature and endless capacity to reform.

scholarly journals The Saint and the Cynic: Resentment and Jewishness in Améry, Sloterdijk, and Wyschogrod

2017 ◽  
Vol 24 (3) ◽  
pp. 95-116
Author(s):  
Menachem Feuer
Keyword(s):  
Human Body ◽  
The Body ◽  
Harold Bloom ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
Peter Sloterdijk ◽  
New Thinking ◽  
Modern Condition ◽  
Enlightenment Philosophy

The constellation of pain, resentment, the body, and time – as they exist in the wake of the Enlightenment and in the dawn of a new barbarism - is found throughout the work of Jean Améry and Peter Sloterdijk. Both thinkers were especially influenced by Nietzsche’s readings of resentment, his challenge to the Enlightenment, and his turn to the body as the basis of a new kind of thinking which starts with pain, dwells in irreversible time, and ends with the possibility of action and joy. While this new thinking is novel and appeals to all humankind, the most unexpected points of convergence between Améry and Sloterdijk can be found in their particular neo-Nietzschean articulations of Jewishness: using what Harold Bloom would call revision, they both propose a revision of Nietzsche’s reading of Judaism as resentment. Améry associates Jewishness with “revolt” while Sloterdijk associates what he calls “kynicism” (as opposed to cynicism) with Jewishness.1 Intensely aware of the mortal blows that have been dealt to the Enlightenment, philosophy, and modernity as well as to the human body during the Holocaust, Améry and Sloterdijk both address – either directly or indirectly – the meaning of cynicism in relation to Jewishness, in particular, and the modern condition, in general. 

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