Theoretical Interpretations of the Holocaust: (108 Holocaust and Genocide Studies)

This book aims to show the many resources at our disposal for grappling with the Holocaust as the darkest occurrence of the twentieth century. These wide-ranging studies on philosophy, history, and literature address the way the Holocaust had led to the reconceptualization of the humanities. The scholarly approaches of Pierre Klossowski, Georges Bataille, and Maurice Blanchot are examined critically, and the volume explores such poignant topics as violence, evil, and monuments.

Table of Contents:
EDITORIAL FOREWORD ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION ONE ANDREW BENJAMIN: Interrupting Confession, Resisting Absolution: Monuments after the Holocaust TWO RAVIT REICHMAN: The Myth of Old Forms: On the Unknowable and Representation THREE IAN JAMES: Pierre Klossowski: The Suspended Self FOUR DAN STONE: Georges Bataille and the Interpretation of the Holocaust FIVE SARA GUYER: Being-Destroyed: Anthropomorphizing L’espèce humaine SIX RICHARD STAMP: “Do Not Forget the Very Thing that Will Make You Lose Your Memory”: Blanchot’s “Désastre” and the Holocaust SEVEN HEIDRUN FRIESE: Silence — Voice — Representation EIGHT MICHAL BEN-NAFTALI: Lyotard’s and Derrida’s “Catastrophist Phenomenology” NINE SIMON SPARKS: The Experience of Evil: Kant and Nancy ABOUT THE AUTHORS INDEX

About the Author :
Andrew Benjamin is Professor of Philosophy at Warwick University and Visiting Professor in Architecture at Columbia University. Among his many publications are Art, Mimesis, and the Avant-Garde (1991), The Plural Event (1993), and Present Hope: Philosophy, Architecture, Judaism (1997).
Michal Ben-Naftali teaches in the department of comparative literature, Hebrew University, Jerusalem.
Heidrun Friese is an independent researcher living in Berlin. Her publications include Lampedusa: Anthropologie einer Insel (1996), (with Aleida Assmann) Identitäten (1998), and (with photographs by Naomi Salmon) the forthcoming Wort-Bild. Eine Choreographie.
Sara Guyer is a doctoral student in the Department of Rhetoric at the University of California, Berkeley.
Ian James is Director of Medieval and Modern Languages and Fellow of Downing College, Cambridge University. He is the author of Pierre Klossowski (forthcoming).
Ravit Reichman recently completed a Fulbright Fellowship at Tel Aviv University. She is a doctoral student in the Department of Comparative Literature at Yale University.
Simon Sparks is a Leverhulme Trust Research Fellow in the Faculté de la philosophie, Université des Sciences Humaines de Strasbourg. In addition to publishing articles on various areas of post-Kantian thought, he has edited two recent volumes, On Jean-Luc Nancy and Philosophy and Tragedy, and is editor and translator of Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy’s Retreating the Political (all Routledge).
Richard Stamp recently finished his doctoral thesis on the concept of friendship in the works of Maurice Blanchot and Georges Bataille in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Warwick. He has published translations of essays by Jean-Luc Nancy and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe.
Dan Stone is Lecturer in Twentieth Century European History at Royal Holloway, University of London. He has published a number of articles on the interpretation of the Holocaust, and is the author of Constructing the Holocaust: Genocide and History (forthcoming) and Breeding Superman: Nietzsche, Race, and Eugenics in Edwardian and Interwar Britain (Liverpool University Press, forthcoming 2002).

Review :
"[an] excellent edited collection … Stone’s volume is hugely welcome as an admirable comprehensive guide for an Anglophone readership to an alternative tradition of thinking about the Holocaust." - in: The Jewish Quarterly (Autumn 2002)