Bare life, bearing witness: Auschwitz and the pornography of horror

Parallax

Volumn 10, Issue 1, 2004, Pages 2-16

  Bernstein, J M ^a  

^a NEW SCHOOL FOR SOCIAL RESEARCH   (United States)

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[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 33845251006     PISSN: 13534645     EISSN: 1460700X     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/1353464032000171046     Document Type: Review

References (22)

1. Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, trans. Raymond Rosenthal (London: Abacus, 1989), pp. 63-4.
2. Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (New York: Zone Books, 1999).
3. Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (London: Routledge, 1973). For my commentary on the closing sections
4. see Adorno: Disenchantment and Ethics (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), Chapters 8-9. I note the convergence between Agamben and Adorno in a long footnote on pp. 387-9. This essay is intended as a fuller elaboration of the claims of that note together with my now severe reservations about Agamben's argument.
5. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998).
6. H. S. Harris, Hegel's Ladder II: The Odyssey of Spirit (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1997).
7. Agamben, Homo Sacer, p. 7.
8. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume I, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978), p. 143.
9. Andrew Norris, 'The Exemplary Exception: Philosophical and Political Decisions in Giorgio Agamben's Homo Sacer', in Radical Philosophy 119 (May/June 2003), p. 11.
10. Axel Honneth, The Critique of Power: Reflective Stages in a Critical Theory, trans. Kenneth Baynes (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991) forcefully argues for the convergence of Foucault's theory of society, especially as displayed in Discipline and Punish, with the core theses of Dialectic of Enlightenment. Honneth does not, however, acknowledge the convergence between Adorno and Horkheimer's text and Foucault's development of the notion of biopower in his later writings - a convergence that significiantly deepens the affinity between the two theories.
11. Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz, pp. 18-19.
12. Wolgang Sofsky, The Order of Terror: The Concentration Camp, trans. William Templer (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), p. 294.
13. Quoted in Remnants, p. 48.
14. This run of argument concerning the claim of pornography is lifted from my 'The Horror of Nonidentity: Cindy Sherman's Tragic Modernism', which will appear as Chapter 10 of my Against Voluptuous Bodies: Adorno's Late Modernism and the Idea of Painting (Stanford: Stanford University Press, forthcoming).
15. James Nachtwey, Inferno, (London: Phaidon Press, 1999).
16. For useful beginnings to the needed work of reflection see Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (New York: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 2003)
17. David Levi Strauss, Between the Eyes: Essays on Photography and Politics (New York: Aperture, 2003). For an insightful review of these works
18. Jeremy Harding, 'Humanitarian Art', London Review of Books 25/16 (August 2003), pp. 22-3.
19. Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989).
20. Susie Linfield, 'Beyond the Sorrow and the Pity', Dissent (Winter 2001), p. 104.
21. Linfield, 'Beyond the Sorrow and the Pity', p. 103. My understanding and evaluation of Nachtwey's project is indebted to Linfield's probing review.
22. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, p. 365.