Table Of ContentAffective Connections
Critical Perspectives on Theory, Culture and Politics
Series editors:
Glenn Jordan, Visiting Research Fellow, Cardiff School of
Journalism, Media and Cultural Studies, Cardiff University.
Former Director of Butetown History & Arts Centre.
Laurent Milesi, Reader in English, Communication and
Philosophy and Chair of the Centre for Critical and
Cultural Theory, Cardiff University.
Radhika Mohanram, Professor of English and Critical
and Cultural Theory, Cardiff University.
Chris Norris, Distinguished Research Professor, Cardiff University.
Chris Weedon, Professor Emerita and Honorary Chair, Centre
for Critical and Cultural Theory, Cardiff University.
Critical Perspectives on Theory, Culture and Politics is an interdisciplinary
series, developed in partnership with the Centre for Critical and Cultural
Theory, which is based in the School of English, Communication and Phi-
losophy at Cardiff University, UK. The series focuses on innovative research
produced at the interface between critical theory and cultural studies. In
recent years much work in cultural studies has increasingly moved away from
directly critical-theoretical concerns. One of the aims of this series is to foster
a renewed dialogue between cultural studies and critical and cultural theory
in its rich, multiple dimensions.
Titles in the series:
Culture Control Critique: Allegories of Reading the Present,
Frida Beckman
Prometheanism: Technology, Digital Culture and Human Obsolescence,
Günther Anders and Christopher John Müller, translated
by Christopher John Müller
Creole in the Archive: Imagery, Presence and the Location
of the Caribbean Figure,
Roshini Kempadoo
The Attention Economy: Labour, Time, and Power in Cognitive Capitalism,
Claudio Celis
Performative Contradiction and the Romanian Revolution,
Jolan Bogdan
Chinese Subjectivities and the Beijing Olympics,
Gladys Pak Lei Chong
The Extreme in Contemporary Culture: States of Vulnerability,
Pramod K. Nayar
Superpositions: Laruelle and the Humanities,
edited by Rocco Gangle and Julius Greve
Credo Credit Crisis: Speculations on Faith and Money,
edited by Laurent Milesi, Christopher John Müller and Aidan Tynan
Materialities of Sex in a Time of HIV: The Promise of Vaginal Microbicides,
Annette-Carina van der Zaag
From Shared Life to Co-Resistance in Historic Palestine,
Marcelo Svirsky and Ronnen Ben-Arie
Affective Connections: Towards a New Materialist Politics of Sympathy,
Dorota Golańska
Homemaking: Radical Nostalgia and the Construction of a South Asian
Diaspora,
Anindya Raychaudhuri (forthcoming)
Partitions and Their Afterlives: Violence, Memories, Living,
edited by Radhika Mohanram and Anindya Raychaudhuri (forthcoming)
Contested Borders: Queer Politics and Cultural Translation in
Contemporary Francophone Writing from the Maghreb,
William J. Spurlin (forthcoming)
Archaeologies of the Instant: Essays on Hypermodernity and Seeing,
edited by Peter R. Sedgwick and Damian Walford Davies (forthcoming)
Affective Connections
Towards a New Materialist
Politics of Sympathy
By Dorota Golan´ska
Published by Rowman & Littlefield International Ltd
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Copyright © 2017 by Dorota Golańska
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any
electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems,
without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote
passages in a review.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Available
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN: HB 978-1-78348-969-5
PB 978-1-78348-970-1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Available
ISBN: 978-1-78348-969-5 (cloth : alk. paper)
ISBN: 978-1-78348-970-1 (pbk. : alk. paper)
ISBN: 978-1-78348-971-8 (electronic)
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of
American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper
for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.
Printed in the United States of America
Contents
Acknowledgments ix
Preface xiii
Introduction: Seeing Differently—Introducing a New
Materialist Perspective 1
From Negation to Affirmation 1
New Materialism and the “Material Turn” 2
The Twilight of Ocularcentrism 6
Problems with Representation 12
Seeing Differently: New Materialism’s Methodological
Orientation 18
About the Book 21
1 Affect/Discourse: Towards a Synaesthetic Synthesis 29
Illogical Perception: An Introduction 29
Emotions and Affects 31
Embodied Affectivity 37
Memorial Art 41
Beyond Representation—New Materialism and the Arts 47
Synaesthetic Perception 53
The Work of (Memorial) Art: Concluding Remarks 59
2 Memory Sites: Remembering through Materiality 63
Material Memories of Material Places: An Introduction 63
Remembering Today: Materialization of Memory 65
Approaching “Dark Attractions”: Motivations, Perceptions,
Experiences 71
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viii Contents
New Museums and Questions of “Authenticity” 79
Importing Trauma: The Holocaust Memory in the United
States 82
Past in the Present Tense: The Israeli Memory of the
Holocaust 90
Shameful Memories: Remembering the Shoah in the German
Context 98
The Mattering of Matter: Concluding Remarks 105
3 Memory and Trauma: The Unspeakable 113
Entangled Memories: An Introduction 113
Approaches to Trauma: An Overview 115
Traumatic Memory, or a Haunting Past 119
Transmission of Trauma 125
Trauma and the Arts 129
2146 Stones against Racism (Jochen Gerz, 1993) 132
The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe (Peter
Eisenman, 2005) 136
Gravity (Richard Serra, 1993) 140
Bodily-Discursive Encounters: Concluding Remarks 143
4 Rhythms and Movements: Sensations, Becomings, Flows 147
Constant Movement: The Body as a Verb 147
Thinking (through the) Sensuous Bodies 149
The Rhythm of Un/Learning—A Permanent Vibration 154
Synaesthetic Encounters with Memorial Installation Art 160
Yad Layeled (Moshe Safdie, 1987) 161
The Garden of Exile (Daniel Libeskind, 2001) 164
Shalekhet (Menashe Kadishman, 2001) 167
The Drowned and the Saved (Richard Serra, 1992/1997) 170
The Logic of Relationality: Concluding Remarks 172
5 Affective Connections: Feminist Politics of Sympathy 177
From Encounters with Art to Feminist Knowledge Production 177
Approaching “Sympathy” through a Feminist Lens 180
Losing Oneself: Affecting and Being Affected 186
The Logic of Connectivity—The New Materialist Politics
of Sympathy 192
Passivity and Response-Ability: The Risks of Exposure 199
Material-Semiotic Connections: Concluding Remarks 204
Coda 209
Bibliography 223
Index 245
Acknowledgments
This book results from a web of intense connections and inter-/intra-actions
with many different people and bodies. It stems from an over four-year effort
of doing research on memorial art, studying theories of new materialism, and
investigating feminist knowledge production practices as well as from the
various occasions for meeting people and exchanging ideas with them.
This work would have not been possible without the generous help from
the National Science Center in Poland and an individual research grant that
I received from this institution for running a project entitled The Aesthetics of
Trauma. Affective Perception vs. Representation of the Holocaust in Memory
Sites (grant number UMO-2012/05/B/HS2/04032, OPUS 3), hosted by the
University of Łódź (Poland), the Faculty of International and Political Stud-
ies. This funding made my traveling to many sites and museums described
in this volume possible. It also allowed me to meet scholars from different
academic institutions worldwide (e.g., the US Holocaust Memorial Museum
in Washington, DC, Yad Vashem—The World Holocaust Remembrance
Center in Jerusalem, the University of Western Sydney in New South Wales,
the Victorian College of the Arts in Melbourne, Columbia University in
New York City) and discuss my thoughts and reflections with them. In all
those places I met wonderful people willing to offer their help in the form of
prolific discussions and critical insights that enabled making this book more
comprehensible to readers. They also challenged my ideas forcing me to
thoroughly think them through as well as suggested readings and concepts to
be used in my argumentation. My special thanks go to Tvia Fried for teach-
ing me how to navigate in the vast archives of Yad Vashem as well as for
making my research stay in Jerusalem an absolutely rewarding experience.
Similarly, I would like to thank Moti Fried for being my guide in the Israeli
context. I am also extremely grateful to Marianne Hirsch for discussing with
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