The Holocaust Sublime
Singularity, Representation, and the Violence of Everyday Life
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 7579250 |
|---|---|
| Authors | John Sanbonmatsu (0009-0002-9053-3427, Worcester Polytechnic Institute, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2009 |
| Volume | 68 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 101-126 |
| Publication date | 2009-01-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | American Journal of Economics and Sociology (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0002-9246 • E-ISSN: 1536-7150 |
| Publisher | Wiley (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1111/j.1536-7150.2008.00617.x |
| OpenAlex | W1984455953 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 5 |
| References cited | 14 |
The world of the concentration camps . . . was not an exceptionally monstrous society. What we saw there was the image, and in a sense the quintessence, of the infernal society in which we are plunged every day. —Ionesco 1 A bstract It has become common to view mass historical traumas like the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki or the Holocaust as singularities —in other words, events of such transcendent, almost metaphysical significance that they exceed intelligibility. Siding with “realist” intellectuals who instead emphasize the rootedness of genocide in the structures of modernity and everyday life, I argue that the discourse of singularity aestheticizes historical trauma in problematic ways. Drawing on Kant's analytic of the sublime, in which the subject, in confronting an awesome or terrifying phenomenon from a position of safety, comes to realize his or her own powers of transcendence and moral superiority, I argue that the holocaust sublime encourages the viewing subject to “face” overwhelming horrors of the past, but without having to confront the subject's actual responsibility for the atrocities of the present. By pitting the extraordinary or “singular” against the banal and everyday, the holocaust sublime thus obscures, rather than reveals, the habits of thought and social structures that make genocidal practices inevitable
Aesthetics · Art · Epistemology · Everyday life · Genocide · Literature · Modernity · Phenomenon · Sociology · Subject (documents) · Sublime · The Holocaust · Italian Fascism and Post-war Society · Memory, Trauma, and Commemoration · Philosophy · Philosophy, Ethics, and Existentialism
The Contract of Mutual Indifference
Hiroshima TracesTime, Space, and the Dialectics of Memory
History and Memory after Auschwitz
Women's Liberation and the Sublime
Eternal Treblinka
Fascists
Civil Religion in Israel
The Holocaust Industry
Writing History, Writing Trauma
New Perspectives on the Holocaust
The Kantian Sublime
| Unique citing works | 5 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0,38 |
| Citation span | 2013 - 2025 (13) |
| Citation velocity | recent |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 5 |