This article takes the clinical notion of Trauma as a historiographic criterion for the understanding of Modernity and its mythologies. If the rewriting of the term Trauma — in the intersection of psychoanalysis and neurobiology, cultural anthropology and philosophy of the mind — is the hallmark of contemporaneity, it is quite acceptable to see the Shoah as a radical historical and epistemological watershed. Never before had such a highly productive bureaucratic-industrial system been designed and implemented for the devastation of the very idea of humanity. Auschwitz was, in the most radical ways, the liminal space between Human and Inhuman. It is right on the cutting edge of the abyss that the executioner shares with his victim the annihilation of humanity. This essay crosses a question that has always characterized the social construction of subjectivity: the perimeter of the Human and the interrelationships between Identity, Alterity and Recognition.

In search of the Human: The trauma of modernity and the "instrumental reason" of persecutors

Francesco Migliorino
2018-01-01

Abstract

This article takes the clinical notion of Trauma as a historiographic criterion for the understanding of Modernity and its mythologies. If the rewriting of the term Trauma — in the intersection of psychoanalysis and neurobiology, cultural anthropology and philosophy of the mind — is the hallmark of contemporaneity, it is quite acceptable to see the Shoah as a radical historical and epistemological watershed. Never before had such a highly productive bureaucratic-industrial system been designed and implemented for the devastation of the very idea of humanity. Auschwitz was, in the most radical ways, the liminal space between Human and Inhuman. It is right on the cutting edge of the abyss that the executioner shares with his victim the annihilation of humanity. This essay crosses a question that has always characterized the social construction of subjectivity: the perimeter of the Human and the interrelationships between Identity, Alterity and Recognition.
2018
Human/Inhuman, enlightenment, massive trauma, dehumanization, Holocaust, victim/persecutor
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Utilizza questo identificativo per citare o creare un link a questo documento: https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11769/332272
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