0000000001107644
AUTHOR
Magdalena Zolkos
Skulls, Tree Bark, Fossils
AbstractStudies of material objects in the field of memory studies have followed diverse epistemological and disciplinary trajectories, but their shared characteristic has been the questioning of philosophical assumptions concerning human relations with inanimate things and lower-level organic objects, such as plants, within the Aristotelian hierarchy of beings. Rather than accept at face value their categorizations as passive or deficient in comparison to the human subject, critical scholarship has reformulated the place and role of nonhuman entities in culture. This essay examines the nexus of materiality and memory in the work of the French philosopher and art historian Georges Didi-Hube…
The Phantasmatic Core of Fascism: Psychoanalytic Theories of Antisemitism and Group Aggression Amongst the ‘Political Freudians’
The period predating and overlapping with World War II saw psychoanalytic authors respond to the authoritarian and fascist developments in Europe through scholarly and analytical writings. These authors, sometimes referenced as ‘political Freudians’, were interested in bringing psychoanalysis in a dialogue with progressive social and pedagogical movements of their times, focusing their critique on the persecutory, eliminatory and purificatory fantasies, which they saw as animating the fascistic movements in Europe. This article analyses selected texts by Otto Fenichel, Ernst Simmel and Rudolf Loewenstein and argues that these authors asked about the political and ethical stakes of the fasci…
The Pandemic and Its Shadow. Feminist Theoretical and Art Discourses on Trauma and Community in COVID-19
This article explores the philosophical and psychoanalytic trajectories of conceptualizing the Covid-19 pandemic as ‘collective trauma’, and considers what would be the risks, but also productive possibilities, of such a theoretical move. the context of this inquiry is the so-called ‘shadow pandemic’ – the drastic increase in domestic violence globally, which accompanied introduction of lockdowns as a measure of containing the impact of Covid-19 on public health infrastructures. For the women who were victims of violence during the lockdowns, the discourse of ‘sheltering’, ‘isolation’ and ‘staying home’ has carried antithetical meanings to the o6cially sanctioned ones – those were meanings …
Reimagining cultural memory of the arctic in the graphic narratives of Oqaluttuaq
The Greenlandic oral story-telling tradition, Oqaluttuaq, meaning “history,” “legend,” and “narrative,” is recognized as an important entry point into Arctic collective memory. The graphic artist Nuka K. Godtfredsen and his literary and scientific collaborators have used the term as the title of graphic narratives published from 2009 to 2018, and focused on four moments or ‘snippets’ from Greenland’s history (from the periods of Saqqaq, late Dorset, Norse settlement, and European colonization). Adopting a fragmentary and episodic approach to historical narrativization, the texts frame the modern European presence in Greenland as one of multiple migrations to and settlements in the Artic, ra…