Magdalena Zolkos
Biographic Data
| ID | 238242 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Magdalena Zolkos |
| GIVEN NAMES | Magdalena |
| FAMILY NAME | Zolkos |
| SIGNATURE | ZOLKOS M |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Jyväskylä |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-3728-5268 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 42 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 63 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 41 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2003 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
Returning dignity to the victims by ‘rendering history legible’: Georges Didi-Huberman, dialectical montage and the question of the archive
This text examines Georges Didi-Huberman's philosophy of visuality, focusing on the use of archival images of mass atrocity, partly in response to the ethical and political problem of engaging with photographs taken by perpetrators of violence. Challenging commentators on Claude Lanzmann's Shoah who argued for the unrepresentability of historical trauma, Didi-Huberman famously argued that images constitute vital historical events in their own rig…
Reframing restitution with Roberto Esposito and Achille Mbembe: Restitutive Justice Struggles and the Colonial ‘Dispositif of a Thing
Struggles for postcolonial restitution of heritage objects held in museums and other knowledge institutions in the west have challenged the legal and regulatory frameworks securing the collections’ integrity and unseizability and they have oppugned the epistemological power dynamics that manifest through the re-semanticization of the acquisitioned and confiscated objects as ‘mere things’. Drawing attention to the contrast between the internationa…
Anachronism, Olfaction and “Scarce Memorability” of Travelling Whale Exhibits
This article examines the cultural and psycho-social dynamics of remembrance of travelling whale exhibits in Europe as a case of “scarce memorability”. Drawing on Ann Rigney’s concept of differential memory and Georges Didi-Huberman’s theory of anachronistic survivals of defunct cultural formations, it postulates the importance of olfactory sensorium in environmental memory studies. The analysis focuses on what was likely Europe’s last case of it…
The Ethics of Refusal in Terrence Malick’s A Hidden Life
Terrence Malick’s 2019 film A Hidden Life explores the ethical and political problem of refusal as an act and utterance of “not doing” violence and injustice that is expected. The film offers a nuanced and poetic depiction of Austrian peasant Franz Jägerstätter (1907–1943), who refused to give an oath of loyalty to Hitler ( Führereid), and was subsequently imprisoned and executed under the Nazi laws criminalizing conscientious objection as an “of…
Oneiric Witnessing: Dreamscapes of War
Are wartime dream diaries a testimony to violence and its impact on society and culture? Do dreams shape and respond to history and the collective remembrance of war? This article argues that wartime dream collections constitute a testimonial practice that brings visibility to experiences hidden from the public domain and missing from dominant discourses on war. Connecting post-2022 Ukrainian dream diaries and theoretical contributions to cultura…
Post-colonial heritage restitution as recognition struggles
This article examines struggles for postcolonial heritage restitution in international politics from the perspective of the problem of recognition. It views restitution not only as physical object movement and as transfer of legal ownership of cultural items, but also as political struggles involving reclamatory speech acts by Indigenous groups. Taking as a starting point three passages depicting contemporary restitutive claims made by an Indigen…
Contrapuntal Imagining and Reparative Remembrance in Pia Arke's Art Research Stories from Scoresbysund
Stories from Scoresbysund (2003) was a creative research project by the Danish Greenlandic artist Pia Arke (1958–2007) that documented her painstaking excavation and collection of material from primarily unofficial and private archives concerning the history of Scoresbysund/Ittoqqortoomiit, a colonial outpost in eastern Greenland. After the Danish authorities established the outpost in 1925, they also resettled of a group of Greenlanders into the…
The Obstinate Solids That Cannot Be Dissolved by Argument or Love: Resentment in Rebecca West's Black Lamb and Grey Falcon
Rebecca West's Black Lamb and Grey Falcon documents her travels in Yugoslavia in the 1930s. It is at the same time a travelogue, critical historiography of the region, political critique of imperialism, and a seismograph of the war that would engulf Europe a few years later. This article starts with the observation that West narrates history as deeply woven into the present, and as repository of collective affects and experiences that exert multi…
Reclaiming Hinemihi through rematriation: Victoria Hunt's cinematic and performance art as memory activism
Transposition, generationality, and trauma: From psychoanalytic Holocaust studies to post-mnemonic cultures
The concept of transposition, initially linked to the study of affective transmission of trauma across generations, has not progressed far beyond psychoanalytic Holocaust studies, and its broader cultural implications remain underexplored. Through its presentation and appraisal, I make an argument for the critical and epistemic potential of transposition, both recognizing and moving beyond the specific framework of its original articulation, name…
Colonial imagery of ‘Arctic hysteria’ and its resignification in Pia Arke’s work of counter-memory
The figure of the ‘Arctic hysteric’ emerged in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in the discourses of polar explorations and Arctic colonisation as part of photographic and narrative archive of Westerners’ encounter with Greenlandic populations. This racialised and gendered trope made a mark on the European collective memory of Arctic explorations, solidifying an image of native Greenlanders as infantile, frail and in need of prot…
Witnessing the Anthropocene
The Didi-Huberman Dictionary
A comprehensive introduction to the philosophy of Georges Didi-Huberman in dictionary form Offers a cross-disciplinary, comprehensive overview of Didi-Huberman’s thought Provides both an introductory research tool for those encountering Didi-Huberman’s philosophy for the first time as well as a resource for scholars who want to deepen and extend their knowledge of Didi-Huberman’s work Presents entries on the key concepts, figures, and motifs in h…
The Phantasmatic Core of Fascism: Psychoanalytic Theories of Antisemitism and Group Aggression Amongst the ‘Political Freudians’
The period predating and overlapping with World War II saw psychoanalytic authors respond to the authoritarian and fascist developments in Europe through scholarly and analytical writings. These authors, sometimes referenced as ‘political Freudians’, were interested in bringing psychoanalysis in a dialogue with progressive social and pedagogical movements of their times, focusing their critique on the persecutory, eliminatory and purificatory fan…
Witnessing After the Human
Skulls, Tree Bark, Fossils
Studies of material objects in the field of memory studies have followed diverse epistemological and disciplinary trajectories, but their shared characteristic has been the questioning of philosophical assumptions concerning human relations with inanimate things and lower-level organic objects, such as plants, within the Aristotelian hierarchy of beings. Rather than accept at face value their categorizations as passive or deficient in comparison …
Reimagining cultural memory of the arctic in the graphic narratives of Oqaluttuaq
The Greenlandic oral story-telling tradition, Oqaluttuaq, meaning “history,” “legend,” and “narrative,” is recognized as an important entry point into Arctic collective memory. The graphic artist Nuka K. Godtfredsen and his literary and scientific collaborators have used the term as the title of graphic narratives published from 2009 to 2018, and focused on four moments or ‘snippets’ from Greenland’s history (from the periods of Saqqaq, late Dors…
Restitution and the Politics of Repair: Tropes, Imaginaries, Theory
This book develops a political philosophic approach to restitution and repatriation of objects, by arguing that the development of restitutive norms in the West has been auxiliary to the emergence of modern state sovereignty. It draws on critiques of international law of cultural heritage return, and of its Western humanistic underpinnings, including the ontological binary distinction between things and persons. Rather than accept the restitutive…
Hanya Yanagihara's The People in the Trees and post-colonial trauma criticism
The figure of a wounded body has been part of the cultural iconography of psychoanalysis since Freud defined trauma as the infringement of psyche's protective membrane that incites a neurotic response and represses memory of the injurious event. Recent feminist and postcolonial critiques of cultural trauma theory have problematised this ‘wound-centrism’ insofar as it has privileged an individuated, event-like and time-framed conceptions of violen…
Bereft of Interiority: Motifs of Vegetal Transformation, Escape and Fecundity in Luce Irigaray's Plant Philosophy and Han Kang's The Vegetarian
Recent consideration of plants as philosophic subjects has challenged the Aristotelian claim that plants constitute the simplest form of life and that they are soulless creatures, 'bereft of interiority.' Instead, philosophers such as Luce Irigaray and Michael Marder have proposed a post-metaphysical conception of the human subject, recognized as continuous with, and contiguous to, the vegetal life. In this article, I focus on Irigaray's ethics o…
Life as a Political Problem: The Post-Human Turn in Political Theory
The post-human turn in political theory has challenged the anthropocentric assumption that individuated human agency is the exclusive domain of political action, subjectivity, and community. Recently, there has emerged an important intersection between, on one hand, the “post-human turn” in political theory and, on the other hand, the critical studies of neoliberal governance and ideology, which define the contemporary historical moment in terms …
The return of things as they were: New humanitarianism, restitutive desire and the politics of unrectifiable loss
Porous Skins and Tactile Bodies: Juxtaposition of the Affective and Sentimental Ideas of the Subject
This article brings together two ideas that authors in theoretical humanities tend to consider in isolation—of affect and of sentiment—and investigates what conceptions or imaginaries of the subject these ideas have historically relied on and reproduced. When viewed from the lens of the theory of subjectivation, the contemporary notions of affect and the modern sentiment tradition not only reveal significant conceptual, epistemic and ideational o…
The Origins of European Fascism: Memory of Violence in Michael Haneke’s The White Ribbon
Michael Haneke’s film The White Ribbon (2009) narrates violent attacks that disrupt the cyclical life of a German village in 1913–14. The narrator frames the violence as a study of the origins of fascism: the alleged perpetrators are children, who rebel against the disciplinary powers of patriarchal authority. Coming to maturity during World War I, they will have become the generation of Nazism’s followers. In contrast to psycho-historical readin…
Posthumanist Perspectives on Affect: Framing the Field
This special issue on posthumanist perspectives on affect seeks to create a platform for thinking about the intersection of, on the one hand, the posthumanist project of radically reconfiguring the meaning of the “human” in light of the critiques of a unified and bounded subjectivity and, on the other, the insights coming from recent scholarship on affect and feeling about the subject, sociality, and connectivity. Posthumanism stands for diverse …
Climate Change as Experience of Affect
Dubbed a "wicked problem," climate change is exceeding our ability to agree upon any of the modern repertoire of responses available to us, perhaps most notably a market for carbon trading. Scientists are calling on social scientists and humanities scholars for radical approaches to social transformation. Responding to this call, in this paper we stage a conversation between two scholars across the humanities and social sciences on how new possib…
Affective ontologies: Post-humanist perspectives on the self, feeling and intersubjectivity
Witnessing After the Human
Posthumanist Perspectives on Affect: Framing the Field
This special issue on posthumanist perspectives on affect seeks to create a platform for thinking about the intersection of, on the one hand, the posthumanist project of radically reconfiguring the meaning of the “human” in light of the critiques of a unified and bounded subjectivity and, on the other, the insights coming from recent scholarship on affect and feeling about the subject, sociality, and connectivity. Posthumanism stands for diverse …
Life as a Political Problem: The Post-Human Turn in Political Theory
The post-human turn in political theory has challenged the anthropocentric assumption that individuated human agency is the exclusive domain of political action, subjectivity, and community. Recently, there has emerged an important intersection between, on one hand, the “post-human turn” in political theory and, on the other hand, the critical studies of neoliberal governance and ideology, which define the contemporary historical moment in terms …
Reclaiming Hinemihi through rematriation: Victoria Hunt's cinematic and performance art as memory activism
Bereft of Interiority: Motifs of Vegetal Transformation, Escape and Fecundity in Luce Irigaray's Plant Philosophy and Han Kang's The Vegetarian
Recent consideration of plants as philosophic subjects has challenged the Aristotelian claim that plants constitute the simplest form of life and that they are soulless creatures, 'bereft of interiority.' Instead, philosophers such as Luce Irigaray and Michael Marder have proposed a post-metaphysical conception of the human subject, recognized as continuous with, and contiguous to, the vegetal life. In this article, I focus on Irigaray's ethics o…
The conceptual nexus of human rights and democracy in the Polish lustration Debates 1989–97
The practice of transitional justice in Poland has been closely linked to the process of democratization, but the nature and dynamics of that relationship have remained hotly contested. While both the opponents and the proponents of so-called ‘lustration’ justified their positions in the vocabulary of liberal democracy, they tended to approach the concepts of rights and democracy from two theoretically distinct positions. The debates surrounding …
Colonial imagery of ‘Arctic hysteria’ and its resignification in Pia Arke’s work of counter-memory
The figure of the ‘Arctic hysteric’ emerged in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in the discourses of polar explorations and Arctic colonisation as part of photographic and narrative archive of Westerners’ encounter with Greenlandic populations. This racialised and gendered trope made a mark on the European collective memory of Arctic explorations, solidifying an image of native Greenlanders as infantile, frail and in need of prot…
Reimagining cultural memory of the arctic in the graphic narratives of Oqaluttuaq
The Greenlandic oral story-telling tradition, Oqaluttuaq, meaning “history,” “legend,” and “narrative,” is recognized as an important entry point into Arctic collective memory. The graphic artist Nuka K. Godtfredsen and his literary and scientific collaborators have used the term as the title of graphic narratives published from 2009 to 2018, and focused on four moments or ‘snippets’ from Greenland’s history (from the periods of Saqqaq, late Dors…
The return of things as they were: New humanitarianism, restitutive desire and the politics of unrectifiable loss
Apocalyptic Writing, Trauma and Community in Imre Kertész'sFateless
This article explores philosophical themes in Imre Kertész's novel Fateless. More specifically, it offers a reading of Fateless from a perspective of trauma theory and of the idioms of an apocalyptic coming in order to demonstrate that at the heart of this literary text there is a question of the subject's (im)possibility of community with another in the wake of a catastrophic occurrence. There are many figurations of community in the text, which…
The Hoax of War: The Foreign Policy Discourses of Poland and Bulgaria on Iraq, 2003–2005
An analysis of Poland's and Bulgaria's foreign policy articulations on Iraq provides a discursive platform not only for the manifestation of national self-positioning in the international arena, but also for the expression of national fears and the re-contextualization of historical narratives. The claim is that the Iraq war became a ‘hoax’ for public expressions of the ‘essence of the nation’. Despite the different conditions and historical expe…
Jean Améry's Concept of Resentment at the Crossroads of Ethics and Politics
The questions of forgiveness and political justice have recently become intertwined with the “transitional justice” project, the aim of which is the coming to terms with past human rights violations. This article demonstrates that “transitional justice” is less concerned with providing justice than with achieving historical closure, moral redemption, and a “new beginning.” It proposes that justice requires a profound reflection of a political nat…
What the Pre-modern Can Tell Us. Jacques Maritain on the Rights of Men
On Human Rights, Wittgenstein and Disciplinary Hegemonies: Methodological Reflections
The Democratic Impact of International Organizations
Perovskite-type BaCeO3 has been investigated to study the effects of preparation method and cation doping on the particle size and sintering in the fabrication of dense perovskite membranes. A variety of preparation methods including solid-state reactions, coprecipitation, microemulsion, and molten salt reactions have been studied. In coprecipitation and microemulsion preparations, perovskites were formed at significantly lower temperatures than …
Seyla Benhabib’s Post-Metaphysics of Human Rights and the (Un)Bearable Heaviness of Politics
The conceptual nexus of human rights and democracy in the Polish lustration Debates 1989–97
The practice of transitional justice in Poland has been closely linked to the process of democratization, but the nature and dynamics of that relationship have remained hotly contested. While both the opponents and the proponents of so-called ‘lustration’ justified their positions in the vocabulary of liberal democracy, they tended to approach the concepts of rights and democracy from two theoretically distinct positions. The debates surrounding …
Retroactive Justice: Prehistory of Post-Communism , by István Rév
The Hoax of War: The Foreign Policy Discourses of Poland and Bulgaria on Iraq, 2003–2005
An analysis of Poland's and Bulgaria's foreign policy articulations on Iraq provides a discursive platform not only for the manifestation of national self-positioning in the international arena, but also for the expression of national fears and the re-contextualization of historical narratives. The claim is that the Iraq war became a ‘hoax’ for public expressions of the ‘essence of the nation’. Despite the different conditions and historical expe…
Jean Améry's Concept of Resentment at the Crossroads of Ethics and Politics
The questions of forgiveness and political justice have recently become intertwined with the “transitional justice” project, the aim of which is the coming to terms with past human rights violations. This article demonstrates that “transitional justice” is less concerned with providing justice than with achieving historical closure, moral redemption, and a “new beginning.” It proposes that justice requires a profound reflection of a political nat…
Reconciliation-No Pasarán: Trauma, Testimony and Language for Paul Celan
This article intervenes in the project of theorizing the politics of reconciliation and transitional justice with the suggestion that (a) more attention be paid to subjective experiences and discursive sensitivities affected/shaped by the trauma of historical violence and injustice, and that (b) the constitutive as well as potentially subversive working of these experiences and sensitivities be recognized. It focuses specifically on Paul Celan (1…
The Shame of Survival: Working Through a Nazi Childhood , by Ursula Mahlendorf
Apocalyptic Writing, Trauma and Community in Imre Kertész'sFateless
This article explores philosophical themes in Imre Kertész's novel Fateless. More specifically, it offers a reading of Fateless from a perspective of trauma theory and of the idioms of an apocalyptic coming in order to demonstrate that at the heart of this literary text there is a question of the subject's (im)possibility of community with another in the wake of a catastrophic occurrence. There are many figurations of community in the text, which…
The Fragility of it All
This article examines the development of Leszek Kolakowski's thought, in the context of changing Polish political landscape; from the early Marxist text, critical of the Catholic Church and its doctrine -- to the late books on Augustine and Pascal and sympathetic analysis of the role of religion in contemporary society. The author attempts to discover a continuity in this development; it may by found, the author argues, in Kolakowski's rationalis…
"Can there be Costless War? Violent Exposures and (In)Vulnerable Selves in Benjamin Percy's "Refresh, Refresh
The technological transformation of the conduct of war, exemplified by the American employment of drones in Afghanistan and in Iraq, calls for a critical reflection about the fantasies that underpin, and are in turn animated by, the robotic revolution of the military. At play here is a fantasy of a "costless war" or a "sterile war", that is such act of military state violence against the other that is inconsequential for the self. In other words,…
Climate Change as Experience of Affect
Dubbed a "wicked problem," climate change is exceeding our ability to agree upon any of the modern repertoire of responses available to us, perhaps most notably a market for carbon trading. Scientists are calling on social scientists and humanities scholars for radical approaches to social transformation. Responding to this call, in this paper we stage a conversation between two scholars across the humanities and social sciences on how new possib…
Affective ontologies: Post-humanist perspectives on the self, feeling and intersubjectivity
Magic Realism in Holocaust Literature: Troping the Traumatic Real
In Magic Realism in Holocaust Literature Jenni Adams challenges the dominant position of historical realism as the genre of Holocaust representation. While drawing extensively on literary trauma th...
Memory, Trauma, and History: Essays on Living with the Past
"Memory, Trauma, and History: Essays on Living with the Past." The European Legacy, 19(1), pp. 137–138
The Origins of European Fascism: Memory of Violence in Michael Haneke’s The White Ribbon
Michael Haneke’s film The White Ribbon (2009) narrates violent attacks that disrupt the cyclical life of a German village in 1913–14. The narrator frames the violence as a study of the origins of fascism: the alleged perpetrators are children, who rebel against the disciplinary powers of patriarchal authority. Coming to maturity during World War I, they will have become the generation of Nazism’s followers. In contrast to psycho-historical readin…
Posthumanist Perspectives on Affect: Framing the Field
This special issue on posthumanist perspectives on affect seeks to create a platform for thinking about the intersection of, on the one hand, the posthumanist project of radically reconfiguring the meaning of the “human” in light of the critiques of a unified and bounded subjectivity and, on the other, the insights coming from recent scholarship on affect and feeling about the subject, sociality, and connectivity. Posthumanism stands for diverse …
Porous Skins and Tactile Bodies: Juxtaposition of the Affective and Sentimental Ideas of the Subject
This article brings together two ideas that authors in theoretical humanities tend to consider in isolation—of affect and of sentiment—and investigates what conceptions or imaginaries of the subject these ideas have historically relied on and reproduced. When viewed from the lens of the theory of subjectivation, the contemporary notions of affect and the modern sentiment tradition not only reveal significant conceptual, epistemic and ideational o…
The return of things as they were: New humanitarianism, restitutive desire and the politics of unrectifiable loss
Life as a Political Problem: The Post-Human Turn in Political Theory
The post-human turn in political theory has challenged the anthropocentric assumption that individuated human agency is the exclusive domain of political action, subjectivity, and community. Recently, there has emerged an important intersection between, on one hand, the “post-human turn” in political theory and, on the other hand, the critical studies of neoliberal governance and ideology, which define the contemporary historical moment in terms …
Bereft of Interiority: Motifs of Vegetal Transformation, Escape and Fecundity in Luce Irigaray's Plant Philosophy and Han Kang's The Vegetarian
Recent consideration of plants as philosophic subjects has challenged the Aristotelian claim that plants constitute the simplest form of life and that they are soulless creatures, 'bereft of interiority.' Instead, philosophers such as Luce Irigaray and Michael Marder have proposed a post-metaphysical conception of the human subject, recognized as continuous with, and contiguous to, the vegetal life. In this article, I focus on Irigaray's ethics o…
Restitution and the Politics of Repair: Tropes, Imaginaries, Theory
This book develops a political philosophic approach to restitution and repatriation of objects, by arguing that the development of restitutive norms in the West has been auxiliary to the emergence of modern state sovereignty. It draws on critiques of international law of cultural heritage return, and of its Western humanistic underpinnings, including the ontological binary distinction between things and persons. Rather than accept the restitutive…
Hanya Yanagihara's The People in the Trees and post-colonial trauma criticism
The figure of a wounded body has been part of the cultural iconography of psychoanalysis since Freud defined trauma as the infringement of psyche's protective membrane that incites a neurotic response and represses memory of the injurious event. Recent feminist and postcolonial critiques of cultural trauma theory have problematised this ‘wound-centrism’ insofar as it has privileged an individuated, event-like and time-framed conceptions of violen…
Sociology (27 works) · Political science (23 works) · Philosophy (19 works) · Politics (19 works) · Law (16 works) · Epistemology (15 works) · Psychology (15 works) · Philosophy (14 works) · Art (13 works) · History (12 works)