Dominick lacapra biography

The book's concluding essay, "Writing About Trauma," examines the various ways that the voice of trauma emerges in written and oral accounts of historical events. Theoretically ambitious and historically informed, Writing History, Writing Trauma is an important contribution from one of today's foremost experts on trauma. In ten essays, he reformulates the problem of the relation between the "great" texts of the Western tradition and their contexts.

Seeking to refine "context" into a concept useful to historical research, LaCapra urges intellectual historians to learn from lessons and developments in contemporary literary criticism and philosophy, fields that have undertaken a radical reassessment of the reading of texts. In this study Dominick LaCapra addresses the ongoing concern with the application of theory - namely that of literary studies and linguistics - to contemporary historical research and analysis.

History and Reading is an attempt to address the concerns of those scholars who either resist theoretical discussions or disavow the use of interdisciplinary study. LaCapra begins with an extensive discussion of the problem of reading and interpretation as it relates to the understanding of history.

Dominick lacapra biography

In the final chapter, LaCapra deals with the problem of rethinking and reconfiguring French studies, suggesting how this discipline could itself profit from the theoretical innovations for which it has been so important a conduit in the last few decades. LaCapra offers sensitive readings of Tocqueville and Foucault, authors who present vastly different narrative strategies and modes of analysis.

Looking at these and other theorists whose work addresses the writing and understanding of history, he considers how their distinctive textual practices have transformed standard modes of interpretation and analysis. A distinguished and widely respected European historian, LaCapra offers a sophisticated consideration of how to combine textual analysis with traditional historical practices, and shows how this practice can be brought to bear on French studies and help to shape its future directions.

Dominick LaCapra's History and Its Limits articulates the relations among intellectual history, cultural history, and critical theory, examining the recent rise of "Practice Theory" and probing the limitations of prevalent forms of humanism. LaCapra focuses on the problem of understanding extreme cases, specifically events and experiences involving violence and victimization.

He asks how historians treat and are simultaneously implicated in the traumatic processes they attempt to represent. In addressing these questions, he also investigates violence's impact on various types of writing and establishes a distinctive role for critical theory in the face of an insufficiently discriminating aesthetic of the sublime often unreflectively amalgamated with the uncanny.

In History and Its Limits, LaCapra inquires into the related phenomenon of a turn to the "postsecular," even the messianic or the miraculous, in recent theoretical discussions of extreme events by such prominent figures as Giorgio Agamben, Eric L. External links [ edit ]. Wikiquote has quotations related to Dominick LaCapra. References [ edit ].

Cornell University Department of History. Retrieved 24 February Routledge ; Kaplan, E. Writing and revising the disciplines. Cornell UP. ISBN Retrieved 8 February It's not difficult to understand how a person has a plan of extermination and tries to carry it out. It's not difficult to understand how bureaucracies function and have certain consequences, and how people try to do their job, and how you have little functionally rational technocrats who are trying to arrange demographic schemes.

What's difficult to understand is that combined with other things that really seem out of place. Most people who've discussed Daniel Goldhagen's book have not seen that as something he touches upon himself, but doesn't know how to explain. Goldhagen, in his book, gives many examples of almost carnivalesque glee in doing things that were not required by the situation, that were not functional.

But what's significant in Goldhagen's enterprise is that there is a small, good book struggling to get out of the very big, dubious book. And that very small, good book provides documentation for an involvement in outlandish transgression and even taking a carnivalesque glee in the suffering of others that doesn't seem to be intelligible from any rational point of view.

One has to try to approximate, at least, an understanding of why this was happening, because I don't think this was unique to the Germans, but was something that had happened elsewhere. But that's a possibility for virtually anyone, and one has to recognize that as a possibility for oneself. It's only with that that one has some chance of resisting even reduced analogues of certain kinds of behavior, including victimization in one's own experience.

You mentioned that scapegoating is ubiquitous and not unique to the Holocaust. One still has to question, though, how a total mass murder such as the Shoah could take place. That's right. What's different about the Nazis is the extent to which they went in their attempt to eliminate difference — that extent is paradoxically what made them different.

And how can you possibly explain it? One can agree that that is distinctive, that with respect to the Jews in contradistinction to the other groups of victimsthe goal was the elimination, down to the last child, of this people anywhere in the world. That you would persecute them anywhere in the world, you would follow them anywhere in the world.

How do you understand, or try to understand, that? I try to do so in terms of this problem of enemy brothers — there were so many ways in which German Jewry, and Germans, were extremely close culturally, in a lot of different ways. German Jews did not believe that their German culture, their German quality, could be denied them. The unpreparedness of German Jews was very much linked up with the extent to which they felt German, culturally.

They could not believe what was happening to them. One recent, and almost fantastic, example of this is the diaries of Victor Klemperer, who managed to survive the war, and who always believed that he was a good German. He even believed that the Germans were a chosen people, and that the Nazis were un-German; that he, himself, as a German Jew was German, and even part of the chosen people, whereas the Nazis were the un-Germans.

And that's sort of the extreme limit of the sense of German Jewry, especially more assimilated German Jewry: that German Bildung was their Bildung. The apprehension on the part of the Nazis, including Hitler, was that indeed this was true. That's why it was so hard to bring about not only a distinction, but this utter and total difference between the German and the Jew, because that difference was so unbelievably implausible, given the cultural formation of the dominick lacapra biographies, that they did indeed owe so much to each other, and were utterly hybridized as a people.

The need to extirpate from oneself what is indeed a very intimate part of oneself leads to incredibly rash behavior. This is one aspect of it. This is, in a sense, the problem of enemy brothers, where the animosity came from the Germans not initially from the Jews, obviouslybut was flowing overwhelmingly in one direction, and the hostility — that kind of crazy desire to get rid of something that is very much part of yourself is like ripping organs from yourself.

Most of the Holocaust took place in Eastern Europe, where Jews were very removed from German culture. What is your explanation? We'll come to this in a second. The big problem, from the Nazi point of view, was that of the Jew who could pass, and who in that sense was a kind of invisible presence that was presumably totally different, but whose difference could not be perceived.

In the case of Eastern European Jewry, the differences could be perceived, and there you could have the stereotype acting as a kind of sledgehammer. How do you explain this? So the Jews were to be eliminated, both because they could pass, and because they were so utterly different that they could be immediately identified, just as they should be eliminated because they were both the bearers of capitalism and communism simultaneously; both the bearers of modernity just like the Germansand the bearers of anti-modernity and reaction, which the Germans wanted to overcome in themselves as well.

There were elements of German society that were not altogether modern as well, that somehow had to be reconstructed in the German image. Don't you think that the over-emphasis on the Holocaust in the popular culture, the politics and the economics of America is some kind of denial of the traumas with which America is directly involved?

These traumas such as that of the African-Americans and the Native-Americansare still relevant there, and America may be blinded to its present by emphasizing the traumas of others in the past. I think that that's altogether possible. We can come back to America, but it's not altogether unique to Americans. I think that generally what happens both in personal life and in collective lifeis that one comes to focus on a given trauma when there may be other traumas that are more pressing.

This often happens: that you look at an earlier trauma as a way of not looking too closely on contemporary traumas, or it could be other past traumas that are just coming to a full articulate voice at the present. This happens in France. The French concern with Vichy is a way of displacing anxiety about Algeria and its aftermath. And in the United States, the way in which the heritage of slavery and of American Indians can also be obscured by a focus on the Holocaust.

Someone has raised the question, somewhat rhetorically, of why, on the Mall in Washington, we have a Holocaust museum, but no museum dedicated to slavery or to the American Indians. After all, they were our victims and we were part of the forces that tried to combat the victimization of the Jews in Europe. So why are we commemorating that, rather than something that points more directly at our own involvement in dubious processes?

This is a very good question. The answer is that people do indeed attempt to obscure or displace certain problems by focusing on other problems. This can happen; the point is to recognize it and try to resist it. But it doesn't mean that the Holocaust is not a significant problem, even in the United States. It is interesting that throughout the world, with various timing, the direct interest in the Holocaust has been somewhat belated.

Again, there was that initial rush of memoirs and diaries right after the war, and then, for varying periods of time, a great deal of repression, avoidance, and denial. And even today, what is also surprising to me in the United States is the number of historians of Germany even of modern Germany, 20th-century Germany who don't focus on the Holocaust, who don't work on the Holocaust as, at least, one of their research areas or teaching areas.

I think there's pressure on people to do that now. One can say that what has happened to the Holocaust as a problem is that it has emerged from being ghettoized within Jewish history, and perhaps a subsection of German history, to become not only an important component of German history, but of European and world history. At the present time, I think that people certainly historians and other commentators have recognized that, if you are trying to understand the 20th century and Western history in general, the Holocaust is a problem with which you, to some extent, have to be concerned in an informed way.

This is why things like the Paul de Man and the Heidegger incidents were significant, in that they functioned almost as classical cases of psychoanalytic displacement. In terms of the history of the Holocaust, the de Man incident is worth a footnote — if that. The Heidegger case, if you're interested in philosophy, is important, but in the general history of the Holocaust, Heidegger is one figure — a somewhat significant figure that you might mention in a sentence, but that's about it.

What is important is that many commentators including very important figures, such as Derrida started to address the Holocaust more directly in the aftermath of these incidents, so that it was these relatively small incidents that brought the larger problems into clearer focus. When you re-read the early Derrida, you can argue as has been donethat it often reads like an allusive, indirect survivor discourse, where the source of the problem is never mentioned.

But somehow you have the inscription of the post-traumatic effects in the writing. You can read him in many other ways, but this is one interesting way. Even in the case of other people, earlier in their work there were allusions, analogies, but not sustained interest, and perhaps other smaller things triggered their interest. In my own case, it was not so much the de Man and Heidegger affairs — although they were significant — but the fact that Friedlander invited me to this conference that brought to my attention not really as a cause, but an occasionthe necessity for greater reflection on something I had mentioned, that had been part of my awareness, but never a focus of attention.

I believe my case is rather typical, but what is important at the present time is that the problem itself has become an important one. And if you are studying the 20th century, or even Western history and its broader implications, it would be difficult to justify not discussing the Holocaust. The necessity is to discuss it in ways that don't allow it to serve diversionary functions, so that you can actually study the Holocaust.

What I'll be doing a good deal of in the future is studying the origins of anthropology in the United States through a focus on the southwest, and the relationship between anthropologists and the American Indians in the southwest. This is a problem that brings up question transference. Observer-participation is a question of transference, whether the anthropologist remains a scientist or goes native, or tries to work out some approach that is neither remaining a purely objective scientist, nor going native.

That's a question of how you work through something like an implication in the object of study, or a transferential relation, and I dominick lacapra biography that the question of the anthropologist, the non-native anthropologist, in relation to the native population problem, also brings up all of these issues. I tend to believe that, at the present time, the level of theoretical reflection is highest in Holocaust studies, because of both the intensity of the thought devoted to it and the array of figures who've taken it as an object of concern.

There's a great deal there that is significant for research into other areas, including other genocides, or even policies that are in some sense like slavery. If slavery constitutes a genocide, it's a genocide over an extremely long period of time, with relations between masters and slaves not altogether the same as those between Nazis and victims.

Slavery nonetheless presents, for a people, problems of oppression, a heritage, the question of a founding trauma, how they're forging identities in the present, and so forth. The other thing is that one has to be able to study certain problems, even if one is a member of the population either oppressed, or oppressing that isn't totally within identity politics, but that tries to achieve some perspective on identity politics.

One way that I've come to see recently in which you can define identity politics, is a form of thinking wherein research simply validates your beginning subject position. Through identity politics, your initial subject position remains firm, and if anything, through research is further strengthened. Yet the challenge of research is somehow to try to transform one's subject position, so that one doesn't end up where one began.

If anything, I think that one of the great problems in research is that there is a grid of subject positions, and through processes of identification or distancing, one remains within that grid. The grid of the Holocaust is one that you also see elsewhere. It involves the victim, the perpetrator, the bystander, the collaborator, the resister, and one born later — a bit of an elaboration on Hilberg's grid.

This grid is an immensely strong one. It's very hard to try to elaborate a position whereby you don't simply find yourself identifying dominick lacapra biography one of those positions or simply combining certain positions. The challenge of research that is also an ethical and a philosophical challenge is trying to elaborate subject positions that don't simply fall within that grid, but that allow relations between people that are not beholden to victimization and the consequences of victimization.

The question is whether there are possibilities that don't fall within a broadly conceived sacrificial mechanism that involves victimization of the other to achieve one's own identity. I want to ask you about rationality after Auschwitz. Why is it that the Holocaust has gained such prominence, such a centrality, in Western consciousness?

What does it seem to be saying to us, and what lessons can we possibly learn from it? The centrality of the Holocaust in Western consciousness is related to the kind of challenge it poses to certain forms of Western self-understanding. If we really believe that the West is the high point of civilization, and that there has been some development over time in the direction of increased sensitivity to suffering and injustice, and if we really do see the story of the West as that of enlightenment, then it's very difficult to come to terms with the Holocaust within that frame of reference.

Charles Taylor's book Sources of the Self has received a great deal of praise from people including historiansand he does try to integrate the Holocaust into a kind of new Hegelian developmental account of the West, wherein the West is exceptional in its degree of enactment of justice, and in the prevalence of a concern about suffering.

In certain ways, you can see that; but in other ways, it's a story that doesn't have full credibility. I think that the shock of the Holocaust is its shock to an enlightened selfconsciousness. I tend to believe that there are two forms of rationality, as scholars from the Frankfurt School tried to argue. One is a form of instrumental rationality in the adaptation of means to ends.

This is a kind of narrow, technical rationality. Biota William Tinzaara. Lachenalia Riana Kleynhans. Larrondo Petrie. Molecular identification of Pleurotus ostreatus strains from Patagonia and their ability to retain laccase activity at low temperature Francisco Kuhar. Bioquimicaharper Gatitos Negros. He received his B. He began teaching in the Cornell University Department of History in He has also explored the use in historical studies of techniques developed in literary studies and aesthetics, such as close reading and the role of a critical approach to the interaction between texts or artifacts and their contexts of production and reception.

In addition to its role in the field of history, LaCapra's work has been widely discussed in other humanities and social science disciplines.