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This is an examination of the difficult interplay between the collective pursuit of justice and reconciliation on one hand and the individual subjective experience of trauma on the other, proposing that it be thought as a potentially productive tension. To do so, Zolkos looks at how texts from Jean Améry and Imre Kertész speak to the question of the politics of the past and, ultimately, to the post-foundational notions of community and justice. The text works with issues of reconciliation at a theoretical level that bring together insights from political theory, trauma studies, holoc

AbstractStudies 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 to the human subject, critical scholarship has reformulated the place and role of nonhuman entities in culture. This essay examines the nexus of materiality and memory in the work of the French philosopher and art historian Georges Didi-Huberman, with the focus on the questions of mnemonic affordance of things and plants. The essay proposes that Didi-Huberman's project can be approached from the perspective of "undoing" the key binaries of Western historiography of art and material culture: surface/depth, exteriority/interiority, visibility/invisibility, and malleability/rigidity. Focusing on imaginal representations of memory objects in Didi-Huberman's two essays Bark and Being a Skull, the essay situates these texts within the context of his philosophical reading of Aby Warburg's iconology, and argues that Didi-Huberman's undoing of the binaries that have traditionally structured thinking about materiality and memory could be productively approached as a philosophical project of transvaluating surface.

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 of the late capitalist monitoring, regulation, and exploitation of biological life of populations. In this context, the post-human turn in political theory has meant the extension of focus from human agency to include animals, plants, inanimate objects, and machines. Focusing on the work of Catherine Malabou, Maurizio Lazzarato, Brian Massumi, Brad Evans, and Julian Reid, I discuss some of the problems that arise from the attempt at non-anthropocentric theorizing of politics, including what it means—theoretically, politically, and epistemologically—to consider biological and machinic units in terms of political agency. I suggest that the problems encountered by these post-humanist contributions to the field of political theory are epistemological, analytical, and political. I focus in particular on whether the non-anthropocentric refiguring of politics offers new critical insights into, and resistances against, neoliberal governance.Bhandar B and Goldberg-Hiller J (eds) (2015) Plastic Materialities: Politics, Legality, and Metamorphosis in the work of Catherine Malabou. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.Evans B and Reid J (2014) Resilient Life: The Art of Living Dangerously. Cambridge: Polity Press.Lazzarato M (2014) Signs and Machines: Capitalism and the Production of Subjectivity (trans J D Jordan). Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e).Massumi B (2014) What Animals Teach us about Politics. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

The figure of the Jewish pariah has permeated Western cultural imagination, as demonstrated, for example, by the re-emergence of the medieval myth of Ahasverus, the Wandering Jew, in modern anti-Semitism. In Western European states the figure (and fantasy) of the Jewish pariah helped to consolidate national identity in the modern period at the cost of exclusion and violence against Europe's others. This article focuses, first, on the cultural and political genealogy of the tradition of the 'conscious pariah', which emerged in Jewish thought in the nineteenth century, as a formation of the subject who asserts, rather than rejects or evades, her/his status as an outcast. Second, the article situates the Jewish tradition of conscious pariahdom vis-à-vis the work of Holocaust philosopher Jean Améry in order to critically analyse his alleged advocacy of the victim-oriented politics of memory and historical redress. The argument is that in contrast to the dominant interpretations of Améry's thought as invested in the subject's own suffering, his negative constructions of Jewishness engender a philosophical gesture beyond the lachrymose readings of Jewish history and pariahdom. Améry's conception of the conscious pariah is an attempt to inscribe 'hyperbolic' ethical content into the experience of deracination and estrangement.