Visualizing atrocity : Arendt, evil, and the optics of thoughtlessness / Valerie Hartouni.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Hartouni, Valerie.

Series:

Critical Cultural Communication

Critical cultural communication

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Arendt, Hannah, 1906-1975--Criticism and interpretation.

Arendt, Hannah.

War crime trials--Jerusalem--History--20th century.

War crime trials.

Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945).

Physical Description:

1 online resource (208 p.)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

New York : New York University Press, c2012.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

Visualizing Atrocity takes Hannah Arendt’s provocative and polarizing account of the 1961 trial of Nazi official Adolf Eichmann as its point of departure for reassessing some of the serviceable myths that have come to shape and limit our understanding both of the Nazi genocide and totalitarianism’s broader, constitutive, and recurrent features. These myths are inextricably tied to and reinforced viscerally by the atrocity imagery that emerged with the liberation of the concentration camps at the war’s end and played an especially important, evidentiary role in the postwar trials of perpetrators. At the 1945 Nuremberg Tribunal, particular practices of looking and seeing were first established with respect to these images that were later reinforced and institutionalized through Eichmann’s trial in Jerusalem as simply part of the fabric of historical fact. They have come to constitute a certain visual rhetoric that now circumscribes the moral and political fields and powerfully assists in contemporary mythmaking about how we know genocide and what is permitted to count as such. In contrast, Arendt’s claims about the “banality of evil” work to disrupt this visual rhetoric. More significantly still, they direct our attention well beyond the figure of Eichmann to a world organized now as then by practices and processes that while designed to sustain and even enhance life work as well to efface it.

Contents:

Front matter

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1. Arendt and the Trial of Adolf Eichmann

2. Ideology and Atrocity

3. Thoughtlessness and Evil

4. “Crimes against the Human Status” Nuremberg and the Image of Evil

5. The Banality of Evil

Notes

Bibliography

Index

About the Author

Notes:

Description based upon print version of record.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 08. Jun 2020)

ISBN:

9780814769768

0814769764

9780814738993

0814738990

OCLC:

809846968