Revisiting Modernity and the Holocaust: Heritage, Dilemmas, Extensions

265 Pages·2022·6.567 MB·English

by  Jack Palmer (editor), Dariusz Brzeziński (editor)

Revisiting Modernity and
the Holocaust
Zygmunt Bauman’s Modernity and the Holocaust is a decisive text of intellectual
reflection after Auschwitz, in which Bauman rejected the idea that the Holocaust
represented the polar opposite of modernity and saw it instead as its dark
potentiality. Bringing together leading scholars from across disciplines, this
volume offers the first set of focused and critical commentaries on this classic
work of social theory, evaluating its ongoing contribution to scholarship in the
social sciences and humanities. Addressing the core messages of Modernity and
the Holocaust that continue to sound amidst the convulsions of the present, the
chapters situate Bauman’s volume in the social, cultural and academic context
of its genesis, and considers its role in the complex processes of Holocaust
memorialisation. Offering extensions of Bauman’s thesis to lesser-known and
undertheorised events of mass violence, and also considering the significance of
Janina Bauman’s writings in their own right, this volume will appeal to scholars of
sociology, intellectual history, Holocaust and genocide studies, moral philosophy,
memory studies and cultural theory.
Jack Palmer is Research Fellow in the School of Sociology and Social Policy
and Deputy Director of the Bauman Institute at the University of Leeds, UK. He
is the author of Entanglements of Modernity, Colonialism and Genocide.
Dariusz Brzeziński is Assistant Professor in the Department of Theoretical
Sociology at the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of the Polish Academy of
Sciences. He is the author of Zygmunt Bauman and the Theory of Culture.
Classical and Contemporary Social Theory
Series Editor: Stjepan G. Mestrovic
Texas A&M University, USA
Classical and Contemporary Social Theory publishes rigorous scholarly work that
re-discovers the relevance of social theory for contemporary times, demonstrating
the enduring importance of theory for modern social issues. The series covers
social theory in a broad sense, inviting contributions on both ‘classical’ and
modern theory, thus encompassing sociology, without being confined to a single
discipline. As such, work from across the social sciences is welcome, provided
that volumes address the social context of particular issues, subjects, or figures
and offer new understandings of social reality and the contribution of a theorist or
school to our understanding of it.
The series considers significant new appraisals of established thinkers or
schools, comparative works or contributions that discuss a particular social issue or
phenomenon in relation to the work of specific theorists or theoretical approaches.
Contributions are welcome that assess broad strands of thought within certain
schools or across the work of a number of thinkers, but always with an eye toward
contributing to contemporary understandings of social issues and contexts.
Titles in this series
The End of the Modernist Era in Arts and Academia
Bruce Fleming
The Civilizing Process and the Past We Now Abhor
Slavery, Cat-Burning and the Colonialism of Time
Bruce Fleming
Temporal Politics and Banal Culture
Before the Future
Peter Conlin
Revisiting Modernity and the Holocaust
Heritage, Dilemmas, Extensions
Edited by Jack Palmer and Dariusz Brzeziński
For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/sociology/
series/ASHSER1383
Revisiting Modernity and
the Holocaust
Heritage, Dilemmas, Extensions
Edited by Jack Palmer and
Dariusz Brzeziński
First published 2022
by Routledge
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© 2022 selection and editorial matter, Jack Palmer and Dariusz Brzeziński;
individual chapters, the contributors
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of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has
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British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
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ISBN: 978-0-367-63754-5 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-0-367-63755-2 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-003-12055-1 (ebk)
DOI: 10.4324/9781003120551
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Contents
Notes on contributors vii
Acknowledgements xii
Editors’ introduction: through the window again: revisiting
Modernity and the Holocaust 1
JACK PALMER AND DARIUSZ BRZEZIŃSKI
PART 1
Sociology after Modernity and the Holocaust 23
1 Modernity or decivilisation? Reflections on Modernity and
the Holocaust Today 25
LARRY RAY
2 The sociology of modernity, the ethnography of the
Holocaust: what Zygmunt Bauman knew 39
JOANNA TOKARSKA-BAKIR
PART 2
Rationality, obedience, agency 57
3 From understanding victims to victims’ understanding:
rationality, shame and other emotions in Modernity and
the Holocaust 59
DOMINIC WILLIAMS
4 Warsaw Jews in the face of the Holocaust: ‘trajectory’ as
the key concept in understanding victims’ behaviour 75
MARIA FERENC
vi Contents
5 Visual representations of modernity in documents from
the Łódź Ghetto 88
PAWEŁ MICHNA
PART 3
Extensions and reevaluations 109
6 Reassessing Modernity and the Holocaust in the light of
genocide in Bosnia 111
ARNE JOHAN VETLESEN
7 The Rwandan genocide and the multiplicity of modernity 125
JACK PALMER
PART 4
‘That world that was not his’ – on Janina Bauman 143
8 Janina Bauman: to remain human in inhuman conditions 145
LYDIA BAUMAN
9 Janina and Zygmunt Bauman: a case study of inspiring
collaboration 156
IZABELA WAGNER
10 Reading Modernity and the Holocaust with and against
Winter in the Morning 177
GRISELDA POLLOCK
PART 5
The legacies of Modernity and the Holocaust 197
11 Bauman, the Frankfurt School, and the tradition of
enlightened catastrophism 199
JONATHON CATLIN
12 Modernity and the Holocaust and the concentrationary universe 218
MAX SILVERMAN
Off-the-scene: an afterword 232
BRYAN CHEYETTE
Index 246
Notes on contributors
Lydia Bauman is an artist and art historian. Lydia has a BA in Fine Art from Uni-
versity of Newcastle upon Tyne and an MA in History of Art from the Cour-
tauld Institute of Art (Distinction). She has exhibited widely in solo and group
shows within the United Kingdom, the United States and Poland. Her exhibi-
tion in March 2019 at the Mall Galleries in London, “Looking for Georgia”,
attracted international attention. Her most recent exhibition, “Earthworks”,
was held at the Mall Galleries in 2021. She has lectured at numerous adult
education institutions in London and art galleries such as the Tate Gallery,
National Portrait Gallery, Boston Museum of Fine Arts and the National Gal-
lery where she works to date. Over the course of the pandemic, she devised
and delivered a programme of 180 online lectures – “Art for the Uninitiated”.
These lectures, along with biographical information and her artworks, can be
accessed on her website: www.lydiabauman.com.
Dariusz Brzeziński is Assistant Professor at the Institute of Philosophy and Soci-
ology, Polish Academy of Sciences (Department of Theoretical Sociology)
and Visiting Research Fellow at the School of Sociology and Social Policy at
the University of Leeds. He teaches sociology and anthropology at the Jagiel-
lonian University in Cracow as well. His research focuses on contemporary
social thought, sociology of culture and theory of culture. He is an author of
Zygmunt Bauman and the Theory of Culture (McGill-Queens University Press
2022), and a co-editor of a three-volume series of selected writings of Zygmunt
Bauman (Polity Press, 2021–2023). Dariusz Brzeziński wrote on many aspects
of social theory and sociology of culture in such journals as: European Journal
of Social Theory, Thesis Eleven, Polish Sociological Review and many others.
Jonathon Catlin is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of History and the Inter-
disciplinary Doctoral Program in the Humanities at Princeton University. His
dissertation is a history of the concept of catastrophe in twentieth-century
German and Jewish thought, with a focus on the Frankfurt School of critical
theory. His writings have been published or are forthcoming in Radical Phi-
losophy, Post45 Contemporaries, History and Theory, Memory Studies, Anti-
semitism Studies, The European Journal of Cultural and Political Sociology,
The Point, The Spectator and The Journal of the History of Ideas Blog, where
he is a contributing editor.
viii Notes on contributors
Bryan Cheyette is Chair in Modern Literature and Culture at the University of
Reading and a Fellow of the English Association. He has published 11 books
as well as articles on both Zygmunt and Janina Bauman. His most recent pub-
lications include Diasporas of the Mind: Jewish/Postcolonial Writing and
the Nightmare of History (Yale University Press, 2014) and The Ghetto: A
Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2020). A Series Editor for
Bloomsbury (New Horizons in Contemporary Writing), he has been a visiting
professor at Dartmouth College, the University of Michigan, and the Univer-
sity of Pennsylvania. He also holds fellowships at the universities of Leeds,
Southampton and Birkbeck College, London. He is currently researching Anti-
semitism and Empire: From Arendt to Zangwill, which will engage with Zyg-
munt Bauman’s theories of allosemitism and proteophobia.
Maria Ferenc is Assistant Professor at the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw.
In 2020, she completed her Ph.D. dissertation entitled “Sources and Mean-
ings of Information in the Warsaw Ghetto”. In 2021 she has published “Każdy
pyta, co z nami będzie”. Mieszkańcy getta warszawskiego wobec wiadomości
o wojnie i Zagładzie [‘Everyone asks what will become of us’. Inhabitants of
the Warsaw ghetto in the face of the news about war and the Holocaust]. She is
currently coordinating the research project Encyclopedia of the Warsaw Ghetto
and the English edition of the Ringelblum Archive.
Paweł Michna is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Anthropology of Litera-
ture and Cultural Studies at Jagiellonian University in Kraków, Poland, where
he is working on a project on the functioning of the Graphic Office in Łódź
Ghetto. His research interests focus on politically and socially engaged art
from interwar avant-garde to contemporary art and Holocaust Studies, particu-
larly art and visual documents created during Shoah. In 2020, he received the
Joseph Kremen Memorial Fellowship in YIVO Institute and Gerald D. Feld-
man Travel Grant awarded by the Max Weber Foundation.
Jack Palmer is a Research Fellow based in the School of Sociology and Social
Policy at the University of Leeds and is Deputy Director of the Bauman Institute.
His Leverhulme Trust-funded project “Bauman and the West” (2018–2021) is an
extended study of the late sociologist Zygmunt Bauman, and situates the West
as a substantive theme in Bauman’s scholarship and biography. A sole-authored
monograph of this project is under contract with McGill-Queens University Press.
His previous publications include Entanglements of Modernity, Colonialism and
Genocide: Burundi and Rwanda in Historical-Sociological Perspective (Rout-
ledge, 2018) and his work has appeared in journals such as European Journal of
Social Theory, Theory, Culture & Society and Thesis Eleven. He is a co-editor of
a three-volume series of selected writings of Zygmunt Bauman (Polity Press).
Griselda Pollock is Professor Emerita of Social and Critical Histories of Art
and Director of the Centre for Cultural Analysis, Theory and History (CEN-
TRECATH) at the University of Leeds. She is a world-renowned figure in cul-
tural theory and art history and is the 2020 Laureate of the Holberg Prize.
Notes on contributors ix
Committed to creating and extending an international, postcolonial, queer
feminist analysis of the visual arts, visual culture and cultural theory, she also
researches issues of trauma and the aesthetic in contemporary art expanding her
concept of the virtual feminist museum (After-affects I After-images: Trauma
and Aesthetic Transformation in the Virtual Museum, Manchester, 2013; Art
in the Time-Space of Memory and Migration, Freud Museum & Wild Pansy
Press, 2013); and her monograph Charlotte Salomon in the Theatre of Memory
(Yale, 2018). Since 1995, she has been teaching and publishing on issues of
the Holocaust and Cultural Memory and since 2007, she has elaborated the
concept of concentrationary memory in relation to the Arendtian critique of
totalitarianism, in four publications co-edited with Max Silverman: Concen-
trationary Cinema (Berghahn, 2011); Concentrationary Memories: Totalitar-
ian Terror and Cultural Resistance (Bloomsbury, 2013); Concentrationary
Imaginaries: Tracing Totalitarian Violence in Popular Culture (Bloomsbury,
2015) and Concentrationary Art (2018). Her recent publications include Bra-
cha L. Ettinger, Matrixial Subjectivity Aesthetics Ethics, Volume 1990–2000
(Palgrave MacMillan, 2020) and forthcoming is Killing Men & Dying Women:
Imagining Difference in 1950s New York Painting (Manchester University
Press, 2022).
Larry Ray is Professor Emeritus of Sociology at the University of Kent, UK.
His research and publications extend across social theory, globalisation, post-
communism, ethnonational conflict, sociology of memory, Jewish Studies and
the sociology of violence. He is the author of 12 authored and edited books,
including Theorizing Classical Sociology (Open University Press, 1999), Key
Contemporary Social Theorists (co-edited with Anthony Elliott, Blackwell,
2002), Social Theory and Postcommunism (with William Outhwaite, Black-
well, 2005), Globalization and Everyday Life (Routledge, 2007), Violence and
Society – Towards a New Sociology (with Jane Kilby, Sociological Review
Monograph Series) and Boundaries, Identity and Belonging in Modern Juda-
ism (with Maria Diemling Routledge, 2016). He is currently working on social
theory, modernity and photography.
Max Silverman is Professor of Modern French Studies at the University of
Leeds. He works on post-Holocaust culture, postcolonial theory and cultures
and questions of trauma, memory, race and violence. His book Palimpsestic
Memory: The Holocaust and Colonialism in French and Francophone Fiction
and Film (Berghahn, 2013) considers the connections between the Holocaust
and colonialism in the French and Francophone cultural imaginary. He has
recently published four co-edited books with Griselda Pollock on the theme
of “concentrationary”: Concentrationary Cinema (2011), Concentrationary
Memories (2014), Concentrationary Imaginaries (2015) and Concentra-
tionary Art (2019).
Joanna Tokarska-Bakir is a Polish cultural anthropologist, literary scholar and
religious studies scholar. Her book Pod klątwą. Społeczny portet pogromu