Abstract
For the last two years or so I have been fascinated by one of Kathy Acker’s later novels, Empire of the Senseless. Usually celebrated for its allusive use of pastiche, its preoccupation with post-Oedipal desire and its unsettling of realist continuity, all features that entitle it to the label “postmodern” and place it within a tradition led by such figures as William Burroughs, I have been reading the text otherwise. For me, in what many might regard as an aberrant, if not obsessive, reading, the book is in part, but crucially, a Jewish text. Underlying, and informing, its postmodern qualities is the problem of the ambiguously positioned outsider, the outsider who is at once a part of and not a part of the culture within which they live, and of the event which determines and, in crucial part, defines them but which remains unnamed and, most importantly, unrepresented. I want to effect a partial, Jewish reading of Empire of the Senseless, a reading that uses the book as a pretext for a meditation on the problem of representability in particular relation to the Holocaust.1
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Notes
As will become apparent, my title relates to the problem of the relation between representation and the extraordinary. However, it also deliberately echoes Hannah Arendt’s title for her book on Adolf Eichmann’s trial, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, rev. ed. (New York: Penguin, 1994).
Kathy Acker, Empire of the Senseless (New York: Grove Press, 1988), 3.
“First Racial Definition (April 11, 1933),” in The Jew in the Modern World, ed. Paul MendesFlohr and Jehuda Reinharz, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 642.
I have not referred to Abhor’s name which, as Jodey Castricano notes in “If a Building Is a Sentence, So Is a Body: Kathy Acker and the Postcolonial Gothic,” in American Gothic: New Interventions in a National Narrative, ed. Robert Martin and Eric Savoy (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1998), has an etymology deriving from the Latin abhorrere meaning “to shrink back in dread; to be far from; to be inconsistent with; to regard with horror, extreme repugnance and disgust,” 105. Castricano emphasizes Abhor’s connection with horror and, following Georges Bataille, desire. I want to emphasize the abhorrent’s connection to abjection. In short, what is abject is experienced as abhorrent. Julia Kristeva, Powers ofHorror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982) argues that the abject is “[w]hat disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules. The inbetween, the ambiguous, the composite” (4). Culturally, in modern thought, this has been the situation of the Jew. The Jew has, for example, often been referred to as the stranger who stayed. Abhor’s Jewishness can be read in her abject circumstance.
James E. Young, Writing and Rewriting the Holocaust: Narrative and the Consequences of Interpretation (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), 87.
For a more developed discussion of this history see Jon Stratton, “Thinking Through the Holocaust: A Discussion Inspired by Hilene Flanzbaum, ed., The Americanization of the Holocaust,” Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies 14.2 (2000): 231–245.
Jeffrey Shandler, While America Watches: Televising the Holocaust (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 159.
Michael Rothberg, Traumatic Realism: The Demands of Holocaust Representation (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 5.
Ibid., 6.
Elie Wiesel, “Trivializing Memory,” republished in From the Kingdom of Memory: Reminiscences (New York: Schocken Books, 1995), 165.
Ibid., 169.
Ibid., 172.
Yosefa Loshitzky, “Introduction,” in Spielberg’s Holocaust: Critical Perspectives on Schindler’s List (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), 3.
Saul Friedlander, “Introduction,” in Probing the Limits of Representation Nazism and the “Final Solution” (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 2.
Ibid., 3.
Yehuda Bauer, Rethinking the Holocaust (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 9–10.
Michael Taussig, Shamanism, Colonialism and the Wild Man: A Study in Terror and Healing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 35.
Quoted in ibid.
Dominick LaCapra, History and Memory afterAuschwitz (Ithaca, NY; London: Cornell University Press, 1998), 180–181.
Saul Friedlander, Reflections of Nazism: An Essay on Kitsch and Death, trans. Robert Weyr (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), 91.
Perhaps the most detailed discussion of this term is still Jonathan Culler’s, in Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics and the Study of Literature (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1975), 137–152.
Henri Lefebvre, Everyday Life in the Modern World, trans. Sacha Rabinovitch (London: Allen Lane, 1971), 148.
Ibid., 147.
Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Vintage, 1979).
Alice Jardine, Gynesis: Configurations of Woman and Modernity (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985), 122–123.
Ibid., 124–125.
Ibid., 5. The Artaud quotation comes from Antonin Artaud, The Theater and Its Double, trans. Mary Caroline Richards. (Grove Press Inc., 1958 [1938]).
Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1995), 99.
Homi Bhabha, in the “Introduction” to his edited collection, Nation and Narration (London: Routledge, 1990) writes of “the unheimlich terror of the space or race of the Other.”
Sigmund Freud, “The ‘Uncanny,’” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. under the general editorship of James Strachey, vol. xvii (London: The Hogarth Press, 1962 [1919]), 245.
Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1989).
Irving Howe, World of Our Fathers (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976).
Frederic Jameson, The Prison-House of Language: A Critical Account of Structuralism and Russian Formalism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1972).
Operation MK-ULTRA and George Hunter White’s use of a brothel to find unsuspecting subjects on whom to test drugs is described in detail in Martin Lee and Bruce Shlain, Acid Dreams: The Complete Social History of LSD; the CIA, the Sixties and Beyond (London: Pan, 2001), 27–55. Acker renames White, George Black and moves the brothel from San Francisco to Paris.
This quote, from Daladier’s Prison Journal, is from Omer Bartov, Mirrors of Destruction: War, Genocide, and Modern Identity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 58.
Jean-Paul Sartre, “Preface,” in Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin ed., 1967), 24.
Ibid., 25.
Jonathan Boyarin, Storm from Paradise: The Politics ofJewish Memory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992), 113.
For an informed discussion on the role of French intellectuals in the French-Algerian War, see James Le Sueur, Uncivil War: Intellectuals and Identity Politics during the Decolonization of Algeria (Philadelphia: University ofPennsylvania Press, 2001).
Aime Cesaire, Discourse on Colonialism, trans. Joan Pinkham (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000).
Samira Kawash, “Terrorists and Vampires: Fanon’s Spectral Violence of Decolonization,” in Frantz Fanon: Critical Perspectives, ed. Anthony Alessandrini (London: Routledge, 1999), 237.
Here I would like to acknowledge the influence of Amanda Third’s thinking about apocalypse in “Limits of Feminist Agency: Valerie Solanas, Feminist Terrorist, Sexocide, and the Shooting of Andy Warhol,” paper given at the conference Gendering Ethics/The Ethics of Gender, June 23–25, 2000 at the University of Leeds.
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© 2008 Jon Stratton
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Stratton, J. (2008). The Banality of Representation: Generation, Holocaust, Signification, and Empire of the Senseless. In: Jewish Identity in Western Pop Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230612747_6
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