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.
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List of Illustrations
Acknowledgements

Series Preface: Concentrationary Memories: The Politics of Representation, Griselda Pollock and Max Silverman

Introduction
A Concentrationary Imaginary?, Griselda Pollock

Part I. Thinking
1. Framing Horror, Adriana Cavarero

2. Between Realism and Fiction: Arendt and Levi on Concentrationary Imaginaries, Olivia Guaraldo

3. Totality, Convergence, Synchronization, Ian James

Part II. Desire
4. Wrap me up in Sadist Knots: Representations of Sadism—From Naziploitation to Torture Porn, Aaron Kerner

5. Redemption or Transformation: Blasphemy and the Concentrationary Imaginary in Liliana Cavani’s The Night Porter (1974), Griselda Pollock

Part III. Camp
6. Seep and Creep: the Concentrationary Imaginary in Martin Scorsese’s Shutter Island (2010), Benjamin Hannavy Cousen

7. Haneke and the Camps, Max Silverman

8. Spec(tac)ularizing ‘Campness’: Nikita and La Femme Nikita the Series, Brenda Hollweg

Notes
Bibliography
Notes on Contributors
Index

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This book considers how the unacknowledged legacy of a totalitarian mentality has seeped into the deepest recesses of everyday popular culture, and ask whether the 'concentrationary' now infests our cultural imaginary.
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Shows how the unacknowledged legacy of a totalitarian mentality has seeped into everyday popular culture
We stand at several crossroads at the moment in relation to the visual arts and cultures, historical and contemporary, and to theories and methods of analysis. The series New Encounters: Arts, Cultures, Concepts, edited by Griselda Pollock, confronts de rigueur cultural research with critical and crucial questions regarding its relevance in the contemporary world, such as how we think about visual art, the status of art history in the institution, and whether visual culture is taking its place. Working with transdisciplinary research, the series opens up new fields of collaboration in the visual cultures through encounters between ways of thinking, doing and making in the arts and humanities, connecting praxis and theory in new and innovative ways. Exploring art, history, culture, film and photography, the series seeks new knowledge by facilitating encounters between and across these different ways of doing, making and thinking about visual culture, and its place in contemporary life.
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Produktdetaljer

ISBN
9781350229556
Publisert
2021-09-09
Utgiver
Bloomsbury Publishing PLC; Bloomsbury Visual Arts
Vekt
740 gr
Høyde
232 mm
Bredde
156 mm
Dybde
26 mm
Aldersnivå
U, 05
Språk
Product language
Engelsk
Format
Product format
Heftet
Antall sider
330

Om bidragsyterne

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.