Traumatic Encounters
Subtitle: Holocaust Representation and the Hegelian Subject
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Published: August 2003
Language: eng
Format: Paperback
Number of pages: 236
ISBN-13: 9780791458006
Subjects: The Holocaust; Philosophy; Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945), in literature; Holocaust; Literature - Classics / Criticism; Literary Criticism; Europe; Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945), in motion pictures; General; Historiography; Semiotics & Theory; Jewish; Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich; Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945); Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945),
Description: "Traumatic Encounters argues for an alternative memorial path in Holocaust and cultural studies - one that shows the vital necessity of thinking in a universal way about an event like the Holocaust. Relying on Hegel's notion that the particular is already universal, Eisenstein shows how the encounter with trauma transpires not in the refusal of a universalizing gesture but rather in its wholesale embrace. This embrace results is a recognition involving the trauma that conditions the possibility of history in the first place - a structural trauma immune to historicization that Hegel and psychoanalysis place at the heart of subjectivity and community.

This encounter with a structural trauma is at the center of four titles that Eisenstein examines: Spielberg's Schindler's List, D.M. Thomas's The White Hotel, Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus, and David Grossman's See Under: Love."--Jacket.