Upcoming TAPAS lecture

Another lecture by Professor Russell Kilbourn will be taking place at the University of Ghent, Belgium on October 27th for TAPAS (Think About the Past) entitled “The Representation of History in Four Holocaust films: Night and Fog, Schindler’s List, Son of Saul, and The Zone of Interest“. For more information see here.

Abstract

In this talk Dr. Russell Kilbourn invokes the Holocaust as a limit-case for investigating what a meaningful posthumanist aesthetic ideology might look like: an aesthetic in response to a world ready to do without the human, while the human propensity to treat other humans as less-than-human allows for the emergence of a properly posthumanist subject, however negatively defined. This begs the question at the core of a meaningful posthumanist critique of the Enlightenment tradition: What do we ever mean by ‘human’? By its very nature as a historical event, the Holocaust crystallizes all the issues and debates around the representation, mediation, transmission, distortion, or misrepresentation of anti-human atrocity on an unimaginable scale.

Eighty years on, the Holocaust moves from the embrace of living memory and firsthand recollection into the realm of collective cultural memory. In the 21st century, cultural producers with no direct or lived connection to the Holocaust continue to address the genocide of Europe’s Jews. Through close comparison of four key texts—Night and Fog (Alain Resnais 1956), Schindler’s List (Steven Spielberg 1993), Son of Saul (László Nemes 2015), and The Zone of Interest (Jonathan Glazer 2023)—I explore the possibility of ‘bearing witness’ through fiction film. Rather than seeing the Holocaust as unrepresentable because it is unimaginable or unspeakable (see e.g. Adorno 1949; Wiesel 1989), we must continue to tell stories about the Holocaust “because it is unspeakable” (Bruck 2007). The further away in time, the more an event is subject to the shared memory schemata of fictional narrative: memory as remediation or ‘rememoration’. This aligns with the concomitant shift in Holocaust studies, away from a privileging of individual and collective memory grounded in lived experience, toward an expanded recognition that even such seemingly authentic memorial-testimonial bearing-witness is itself always already determined by the medium in which it is captured, preserved and, hopefully, passed on.