Abstract
In the winter of 2011, I took a graduate seminar on Holocaust Life Writing. In this particular course, “Life Writing” was defined (and problematized) as autobiography, memoir, and letters. Primo Levi’s The Drowned and the Saved was our last text. During our first week of discussions of Levi, a student rejected the text. I remember feeling uneasy—everyone stopped talking and sat in silence—not a productive, contemplative silence, rather a deeply terrified silence. The student expressed hatred, overtly saying: “I hate him!” Our classroom discussion halted abruptly. Then, suddenly, students tried to intervene; without listening, they policed the space, now turned unsafe. They attacked the student, attacked the professor for not diffusing the “hate” comment. In the midst of this emotional outburst, I kept wondering whether the student hated the text, hated Levi, or both. What exactly was at stake in this expression of hatred? More importantly, what did it mean to hate a Holocaust survivor, someone who had survived extreme and overt forms of hatred: deportation, dehumanization, torture, and genocide? We never really asked the student to explain the expression of hatred toward Levi. The topic was left and never brought up again, never worked-through. We continued attending class with an incredible silence between us, a divisive energy that seemed irreconcilable. Our class discussions skirted around the articulation of hatred but never addressed what it meant directly.
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Notes
Deborah Britzman, Lost Subjects, Contested Objects: Toward a Psychoanalytic Inquiry of Learning (Albany: State University of New York, 1998), 2: “Difficult Knowledge” bridges pedagogical and psychoanalytic theories of learning, which compels a desire to learn and a desire to ignore: “In order for there to be learning there must be conflict within learning.”
Julia Kristeva, Hatred and Forgiveness (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 193: Kristeva brings forgiveness out of its religious roots into the secular world: “the Freudian revolution consists of replacing forgiveness through the interpretation of variants of hatred that feed a symptom … interpretation is a pardon: a rebirth of the psychical apparatus with and beyond the hatred that bears desire.”
Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, trans. Raymond Rosenthal (New York: Vintage Books, 1988), 168.
Levi’s notion of judgment is similar to Hannah Arendt’s view in The Life of the Mind, I: Thinking (1978) that judgment can be a way to reclaim human dignity (216). Judgment is both a reflexive mental and political faculty of thought that cannot be guided by existing concepts or sets of rules.
Michalinos Zembylas, “The Affective Politics of Hatred: Implications for Education,” Intercultural Education 18.3 (2007): 179: “previous research and analysis on hatred has largely focused on the role of hate feelings through a range of psychological discourses.” He also mentions “theories of the sociology of emotions” that “see hatred as a social product that is constituted in a political space.”
Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004), 44.
Judith Butler, Excitable Speech: A Politics of Performance (New York: Routledge, 1997), 38: Butler discusses how language and trauma are intertwined and how there is no safe way of using language. Language is inherently violent: “That such language carries trauma is not a reason to forbid its use. There is no purifying language of its traumatic residue, and no way to work-through trauma except through the arduous effort it takes to direct the course of its repetition.”
Audre Lorde, “The Uses of Anger: Women Responding to Racism,” in Sister Outsider: Essays & Speeches by Audre Lorde (Berkeley: Crossing Press, 2007), 129. Lorde’s essay outlines productive outcomes of honestly expressing anger toward social-justice ends, specifically within “white” dominated spaces. She directly critiques the feminist movement and “critical theory” academic circles that silence her experience of racism because no one can tolerate her “anger.” She defines anger as a “grief of distortions between peers and its object is change.” She distances herself from hatred, defining it as “the fury of those who do not share our goals and its object is death.”
Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994).
Dianna Taylor, “Hannah Arendt on Judgement: Thinking for Politics,” International Journal of Philosophical Studies 10.2 (2002): 153.
Emmanuel Levinas, Ethics and Infinity: Conversations with Philippe Nemo, trans. Richard A. Cohen (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1985), 87: Levinas wrote extensively on the “face” as an essential component for ethics because it reveals a vulnerability and uniqueness in the Other that necessitates selfless generosity and service.
Sharon Todd, Learning from The Other: Levinas, Psychoanalysis, and Ethical Possibilities in Education (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003), 135.
Carolyn J. Dean, The Fragility of Empathy after the Holocaust (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004), 2. Dean discusses how overexposure to violent images can foster apathy, or “numbness.” The Holocaust became the focal point of atrocity and genocide in the West due to “the intensification of visual images and narratives since the 1960s, but also the central role of American and European Jewry in shattering the once secure meaning of ‘humanity’ in the West”
Simone Schweber, Making Sense of the Holocaust: Lessons from Classroom Practice (New York: Teachers College Press, Columbia University: 2004), 6–7. She recounts a famous US controversy in Holocaust Education where students laughed during a screening of Schindler’s List. The “Castlemont incident proves that the moral content of the Holocaust is not self-evident to students who don’t have a context to receive it.” She later discusses the importance of balancing formal and representational curricular content.
Rachel Baum, “‘What I Have Learned to Feel’: The Pedagogical Emotions of Holocaust Education,” College Literature 23.3 (1996): 44.
Deborah Britzman, The Very Thought of Education: Psychoanalysis and the Impossible Professions (New York: State University of New York, 2009), 83.
Deborah Britzman, “The Other Scene of Pedagogy: A Psychoanalytic Narrative,” Changing English: Studies in Culture and Education 21.2 (2014): 123.
Sigmund Freud, “Remembering, Repeating and Working-Through (Further Recommendations in the Technique of Psychoanalysis,” in The Penguin Freud Reader, trans. Joan Riviere, ed. Adam Phillips (New York: Penguin Classic, 2006), 320: “Working-through” the resistances of the unconscious is qualified as “an arduous task for the subject of the analysis and a trial of patience for the analyst. Nevertheless it is a part of the work which effects the greatest changes in the patient and which distinguishes analytic treatment from any kind of treatment by suggestion.”
Jacques Derrida, “To Forgive: The Unforgivable and the Imprescriptible,” in Questioning God, ed. John D. Caputo, Mark Dooley and Micheal J. Scanlon (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001), 1–21.
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© 2016 Christina Foisy
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Foisy, C. (2016). Hatred in the Holocaust Classroom: Reading Primo Levi Affectively toward Forgiveness. In: Vuohelainen, M., Chapman, A. (eds) Interpreting Primo Levi. Italian and Italian American Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137435576_5
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