Michael Rothberg: Traumatic Realism: The Demands of Holocaust Representation University of Minnesota Prss 2000 H=Holocaust A=Auschwitz THE

NAZI GENOCIDE AIMED AT A THOROGHGOING DESTRUCTION OF BOTH THE PHYSICAL AND CULTURAL PRESENCE OF JEWS IN EUROPEIT WAS, IN OTHER WORDS, AN INTERDISCIPLINARY PROJECT. TWO APPROACHES TO THE QUESTION OF GENOCIDE HAVE DOMINATED: A) THE REALIST: H IS KNOWABLE (EPISTEMOLOGICAL CLAIM) AND REPRESENTATIONAL CLAIM THAT THIS KNOWLEDGE CAN BE TRANSLATED INTO A FAMILIAR MIMETIC UNIVERSE B) ANTIREALIST: NOT KNOWABLE OR ONLY KNOWABLE UNDER RADICALLY NEW REGIMES OF KNOWLEDGE AND THAT IT CANNOT BE CAPTURED IN TRADITIONAL REPRESENTATIONAL SCHEMATA THE ANTIREALIST: UNIQUENESS OF SHOAH-UNAPPROACHABLE OBJECT, UNBRIDGABLE RUPTURE BETWEEN THE ORDINARY AND THE EXTRAORDINARY (4) LANZMANN ASSERTS THAT HIS FILM SHOAH FORGOES ANY ATTEMPT TO REPRESENT THE H AND DECLARES ATTEMPT TO UNDERSTAND IS OBSENCE ELIE WIESEL SAYS A CANNOT BE EXPLAINED NOR CAN IT BE VISUALIZED. H TRANSCENDS HISTORY THEY ARE THUS ANTIREALIST JEAN FRANCOIS LYOTARD ALSO: REPLACES NOTIONS OF REALISM W THOSE OF SUBLIMITY AND THE INCOMMENSURABILITY OF THE DIFFEREND THS DISCOURSE OF TRANSCENDENCE, OBSCENITY AND TREMENDUM DETACHES THE EXTREME FROM THE EVERYDAY AND SEEKS TO DISABLE ESTABLISHED MOVED OF REPRESENTATION AND UNDERSTANDING ROTHBERGs main idea is that: The split bet ordinary and and extraordinary found in scholarship is actually reflective of nature of the events themselves. He uses the term traumatic realism to describe the peculiar combination of ordinary and extreme elements that characterize the Nazi genocide.

Rothberg identifies three fundamental demands that confronting the Holocaust makes on attempts at comprehension and representation: 1) demand for documentation 2) demand for a reflection on the formal limits of representation 3) a demand for the risky public circulation of discourses on the events Rothberg begins with Modernism after Auschwitz Theodor Adorno inaugurated the modernist interrogation of genocide when he proposed in an essay composed in late 1940s that to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric. Adorno formulated and reformulated this idea. Sees post H history as having a traumatic structure: it is repetitive, discontinuous, and characterized by obsessive returns to the past and troubling of simple chronology (19) Rothberg reads Adorno on A through Bakhtins category of the chronotope: captures the simultaneity of spatial and temporal articulations in cultural practices. Adorno wrote: to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric Rothberg looks at each element of this phrase. A is a place but more events it refers to: the slaughter by Nazi Germany of more than one million people(90% Jews) in four years (1940-44). Extermination mostly carried out at Birkenau (A II). Auschwitz is a time-place. Through constant reference to the site of murder, Adorno forces a reevaluation of the time of the modern world-now no longer conceived as a progressive passage from before to after but as threaten from within by potentially deadly repetition.