Concentrationary Imaginaries: Tracing Totalitarian Violence in Popular Culture

Description

In 1945, French political prisoners returning from the concentration camps of Germany coined the phrase 'the concentrationary universe' to describe the camps as a terrible political experiment in the destruction of the human. This book shows how the unacknowledged legacy of a totalitarian mentality has seeped into the deepest recesses of everyday popular culture. It asks if the concentrationary now infests our cultural imaginary, normalizing what was once considered horrific and exceptional by transforming into entertainment violations of human life. Drawing on the political philosophy of Hannah Arendt and the analyses of violence by Agamben, Virilio, Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, it also offers close readings of films by Cavani and Haneke that identify and critically expose such an imaginary and, hence, contest its lingering force.

Griselda Pollock is Professor of Social and Critical Histories of Art and Director of the Centre for Cultural Analysis, Theory and History at the University of Leeds. Her publications include Visual Politics of Psychoanalysis: Art and the Image in Post-Traumatic Cultures (2013). Pollock is Series Editor of Bloomsbury's New Encounters Series. Max Silverman is Professor of Modern French Studies at the University of Leeds. His publications include Palimpsestic Memory: the Holocaust and Colonialism in French and Francophone Fiction and Film (2013). Griselda Pollock and Max Silverman are joint authors of Concentrationary Cinema: Aesthetics as Political Resistance in Alain Resnais's 'Night and Fog', which won the Kraszna-Krausz Award for Best Book on the Moving Image, 2011. They are also joint editors of Concentrationary Memories: Totalitarian Terror and Cultural Resistance, the first of three volumes on the Concentrationary in New Encounters Series, of which Concentrationary Imaginaries is the second to be published.