Table Of ContentTerror and the Sublime in Art and
Critical Theory
Studies in European Culture and History
edited by
Eric D. Weitz and Jack Zipes
University of Minnesota
Since the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of communism, the very meaning of Europe has
been opened up and is in the process of being redefined. European states and societies are
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The reconfiguring of contemporary Europe is entwined with the cataclysmic events of the
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Series titles
Fascism and Neofascism: Critical Writings on the Radical Right in Europe
Edited by Angelica Fenner and Eric D. Weitz
Fictive Theories: Towards a Deconstructive and Utopian Political Imagination
Susan McManus
German-Jewish Literature in the Wake of the Holocaust: Grete Weil, Ruth Klüger,
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Pascale Bos
Exile, Science, and Bildung: The Contested Legacies of German Intellectual Figures
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Transformations of the New Germany
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The Turkish Turn in Contemporary German Literature: Towards a New
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Leslie A. Adelson
Terror and the Sublime in Art and Critical Theory: From Auschwitz to
Hiroshima to September 11
Gene Ray
Terror and the Sublime in Art
and Critical Theory
From Auschwitz to
Hiroshima to September 11
Gene Ray
TERRORANDTHESUBLIMEINARTANDCRITICALTHEORY
© Gene Ray,2005.Earlier versions of chapters were first published as
follows:Chapter One in The Yale Journal of Criticism,vol.17,no.1
(2004);Chapter Two in Gene Ray,ed.,Joseph Beuys:Mapping the Legacy
(New York:DAP;Sarasota:Ringling Museum of Art,2001);Chapter Three
in Alternative Press Review,vol.8,no.1 (Spring 2003);Chapter Four in
Third Text63,vol.17,no.2;Chapter Five in Third Text67,vol.18,no.2;
Chapter Seven in Anselm Franke,Rafi Segal,and Eyal Weizman,eds.,
Territories:Islands,Camps,and Other States of Utopia(Berlin:
Kunst-Werke Institute for Contemporary Art,2003);Chapter Eight
in Afterimage,vol.31,no.2 (September/October 2003);Chapter Nine
in Dissent(Fall 2003);Chapter Ten in Third Text69,vol.18,no.4.
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2005 978-1-4039-6940-8
All rights reserved.No part of this book may be used or reproduced
in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the
case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.
First published in 2005 by
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ISBN 978-1-349-53124-0 ISBN 978-1-4039-7944-5 (eBook)
DOI 10.1057/9781403979445
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Ray,Gene,1963–
Terror and the sublime in art and critical theory :from Auschwitz to
Hiroshima to September 11 / by Gene Ray.
p.cm.—(Studies in European culture and history)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1.Sublime,The,in art.2.Horror in art.3.Psychic trauma.
4.Arts,European—20th century.5.Aesthetics,Modern—20th
century.I.Title.II.Series.
NX650.S92R39 2005
700(cid:1).4164—dc22 2004043199
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd.,Chennai,India.
First edition:September 2005
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For John Knoblock, whose teaching was a question
of love no less than a love of the question
Contents
Preface ix
Acknowledgments xi
Abbreviations xiii
Introduction: The Hit 1
Chapter One Reading the Lisbon Earthquake: Adorno,
Lyotard, and the Contemporary Sublime 19
Chapter Two Joseph Beuys and the “After-Auschwitz” Sublime 33
Chapter Three Ground Zero: Hiroshima Haunts “9/11” 51
Chapter Four Mirroring Evil: Auschwitz,
Art and the “War on Terror” 61
Chapter Five Little Glass House of Horrors: Taking
Damien Hirst Seriously 73
Chapter Six Blasted Moments: Remarking
a Hiroshima Image 89
Chapter Seven Installing a “New Cosmopolitics”: Derrida
and the Writers 105
Chapter Eight Working Out and Playing Through:
Boaz Arad’s Hitler Videos 121
Chapter Nine Listening with the Third
Ear: Echoes from Ground Zero 135
Chapter Ten Conditioning Adorno: “After Auschwitz” Now 143
Notes 153
Index 181
Preface
This book offers neither the handrail of systematic exposition nor the readerly
reassurances of unified voice, tone, and address. If trauma, terror, and the
sublime are its recurrent figures, the treatments offered are fragmentary and
situated, as befits the humbled production of knowledge. If the essays
constellated here betray a story that goes beyond thematics to touch the
problem of form, then that story is a reflection of urgent times. As the hit
of a traumatic “event” reverberates through global public space, exposing a
world system in crisis and its over-revved war machine, academic writing is
dragged kicking from the ruins of its ivory towers. If these essays begin in
the patient and sanctioned modus of close reading, they end by rejecting
altogether the conventionalized and policed distinctions between academic
and political textual genres. The constative gives way to the performative,
the exegesis of work and image yields to urgent critique, the labor of insight
leaps over into intervention and refuses to be anything else. These essays
register not merely the very different venues and occasions for which they
were written but, more tellingly, the pressured conditions under which texts
can be written and published at all today: sentences that fail to register the
state of emergency simply fail.
Globalization has begotten cosmopoliticization, and history is on the
move again, the furies just behind it. We don’t know where this is going, but
it has begun. We are, as the Germans say, mittendrin: “in the middle of it,”
entangled and placed in the new global immanence. If art and politics have
always been locked together in the dialectic of culture and barbarism, that
dialectic cannot be closed off from the hit of rupturing occurrence.
Whether catastrophic or messianic, “events” are necessarily traumatic. If
“events” could be merely reduced or assimilated to the given order of things,
then they would not be “events.” But the structural belatedness of trauma is
such that we will not be able to know, before choosing and acting, which
kind of “event” has arrived (or is in the process of arriving). Between the
openness or the closure of fear with which we can meet it lies the space of
what Derrida calls “impossible” decision.
The period beginning now will test our practices and commitments.
Today, in all the zones of relative autonomy, the promise of happiness plays
x/ preface
aikido with the recuperative weight of the culture industry. We will see if
this suffices or can even be sustained. Between the possible and the impos-
sible, to keep pressure on the given world without conceding the good
universal or accepting the violation of any singularity or nonidentical: the
outlines and first moves of such a cultural ethics or politics have been
thought for us—by Adorno, Derrida, and others—in the desolated
aftermath of Auschwitz and Hiroshima. We will have our chance to reach
for an “other” politics, across the old borders, in new acts of thinking and
new forms and models of radical collaboration. The moments marked in
these essays are neither a completion nor the last word. They are a bracing,
as much as a reaching, for what is coming.
Acknowledgments
No one writes alone: it is unnecessary to say it. My proper name on the title
page is the conventional fiction, no more or less. Protocol calls here for a dec-
laration of debt that falls short of the radical dispersal of authorship that
thinking and writing nevertheless enact. The critique of originality would in
truth spare nothing: to question, too insistently, the conditions of possibility
of even the slightest leap of thought would be so humbling as to be tactless.
To think and write is to do so with others, and back at the beginnings,
wherever those may be if they are at all, things were never any different.
What one owes to a partner is more existential than any mere reckoning
can express. My wife Gaby lived with this book and, in the strongest way,
made its writing possible: it belongs to her as much as it does to me.
Thomas Pepper is immanent in every one of these essays: ten years ago
he generously and carefully led me to and into the category of the sublime,
thereby giving me the hard gift of a name for my obsession. For what I’ve
done with it after that, he can’t be blamed. I only hope, with due fear and
trembling, that I haven’t failed him.
Friends and fellow latecomers have read these essays in draft form. Their
sharp insights, critical comments, and helpful suggestions have been invalu-
able. I am especially grateful to Rasheed Araeen, Guy Brett, Christine
Mehring, Stephen Miles, Ziauddin Sardar, and Ursula Tax for reading all or
major portions of the manuscript. I also thank Lewis Andrews, Barbara
Bernstein, Dominic Boyer, Gaye Chan, Josh Cohen, Steven Corcoran,
David Garret, Nick Manolukas, Ryuta Nakajima, Joni Spigler, Alfredo
Triff, Deborah Waite, Johannes Werner, and Armin Zweite for sharing their
time and knowledge. They have all tried to save me; if I’ve gone wrong just
the same, that’s not their fault.
This book would not have been possible without the sustaining generosity
of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation: its support of my research in
1996 and 1997 was crucial to the genesis of this project, and its continued
support enabled me to return to Berlin in 2002 and 2003 and complete the
text. Thanks also to Anselm Franke and Kunst-Werke Institute for
Contemporary Art for hosting my last period of writing in Berlin.
