Word: auschwitzes
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
When Theodor Adorno read Celan's poem, he proclaimed that "After Auschwitz, poetry is barbaric." The problem, he felt, was that it was impossible to talk about the Holocaust without depriving it of its meaning, its force, its incomprehensibility. But he also knew it was impossible not to talk about the Holocaust and that doing so was to side with those who did nothing to stop it, with the people who claimed to have no idea of the camps just over the hill...
Derrida's Cinders is an answer to Adorno's problem, and, to may mind, a better one. Adorno himself never came to a firm conclusion about what to do, about how to speak properly for these dead, but, in effect, he did. By summarizing the Holocaust as "Auschwitz," Adorno was able to reduce the ethics of surviving to an aphorism--neat and tidy and quotable...
Derrida's answer is twofold. The first part is contained largely in the left-hand page of Cinders, and amounts to saying "Before Auschwitz, philosophy was barbaric...
...Crimson recently spoke with Art Spiegelman, author of Maus and the recently released Maus II, cartoon books which chronicle his father's experiences in the Auschwitz concentration camp. The following are excerpts from that conversation...
...tried to explain it to people who didn't know the book. What it's like is if Philip Marlowe wasn't such a stupid lush and a romantic but got stuck in Auschwitz, maybe [Raymond] Chandler [author of the Marlowe detective novels] would have been able to write This Way For the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen. In that it's kind of like writing as camera, you know--without affectation, without telling us what one feels but only what one sees and hears. And that helped me to understand something very important...