Reconciling Community and Subjective Life Quotes

“The existential-hermeneutical implications of that double directionality are that the “consciousness constitutes its own past, constantly subjecting its meaning to revision in conformity with its ‘project’” (Laplanche & Pontalis 1973: 112).”
― Magdalena Zolkos, Reconciling Community and Subjective Life: Trauma Testimony as Political Theorizing in the Work of Jean Améry and Imre Kertész

“Irreversibility orients us towards the past, demanding engagement that is radically different from the approaches of mastery, containment or appropriation. It orients us towards the present, calling for the belief (and love) of the testimonial voice and for the capitulation vis-à-vis the proximate presence of “wounded” and “sutured” Other. And it orients us towards the future, in an insistent reminder that the catastrophic unfolding (in its current possibility and actuality) will not be reversed.”
― Magdalena Zolkos, Reconciling Community and Subjective Life: Trauma Testimony as Political Theorizing in the Work of Jean Améry and Imre Kertész

“as a line of defense […], [i]t invades you, takes you over, becomes a dominating feature of your interior landscape” (1995:”
― Magdalena Zolkos, Reconciling Community and Subjective Life: Trauma Testimony as Political Theorizing in the Work of Jean Améry and Imre Kertész

“without the pressure, in other words: whether I had been broken down or distorted by the dictatorships that I had lived through, whether I had lost my ability to breathe freely, or, to the contrary, if those gruesome systems have helped by forcing me to unfold my creative powers and style in my ambition to write.”
― Magdalena Zolkos, Reconciling Community and Subjective Life: Trauma Testimony as Political Theorizing in the Work of Jean Améry and Imre Kertész

“subject’s non-appropriation of the catastrophic memories. In this respect, such memories remain unincorporated by the subject. It is not within her/his powers to contain or even retain them. Instead, their status of being is “hauntological,” or “spectral.” The subject “cannot control [the] comings and goings” of these memories,”
― Magdalena Zolkos, Reconciling Community and Subjective Life: Trauma Testimony as Political Theorizing in the Work of Jean Améry and Imre Kertész

“The survivor’s secret is also her/his long forgotten “crime”—not as a specific wrong-doing, but as living made possible by the (veiled, or hidden) substitutive gesture of founding, or beginning (I begin—I live on—by the virtue of and in the stead of another).”
― Magdalena Zolkos, Reconciling Community and Subjective Life: Trauma Testimony as Political Theorizing in the Work of Jean Améry and Imre Kertész

“politically productive possibilities, in which the condition of “living after” frames the investigations and attempts of overcoming.”
― Magdalena Zolkos, Reconciling Community and Subjective Life: Trauma Testimony as Political Theorizing in the Work of Jean Améry and Imre Kertész

“This section, therefore, explores the content of Kertész’s idea of “surviving.” I argue that for Kertész surviving becomes a modality of post-apocalyptic ethical living and a relational condition of “being after the catastrophe,” vis-à-vis those who have not survived.”
― Magdalena Zolkos, Reconciling Community and Subjective Life: Trauma Testimony as Political Theorizing in the Work of Jean Améry and Imre Kertész

“The child’s terror at the unexpected and uncanny sight of a bald woman generates a number of transgressive associations of death and inanimateness (“corpse,” “mannequin”), as well as a figure of a threatening female promiscuity and sexual power (“a great harlot”).”
― Magdalena Zolkos, Reconciling Community and Subjective Life: Trauma Testimony as Political Theorizing in the Work of Jean Améry and Imre Kertész

“never resign itself to idealizing introjection. It must rail against what Freud says about it with such calm certainty, as though to confirm the norm of normality. The “norm” is nothing other than good conscience of amnesia. It allows us to forget that keeping the other inside oneself, as oneself, is already to forget the other. Forgetting begins right there. So melancholy is necessary. (Derrida quoted in Bennington 2008: 30; in original Derrida”
― Magdalena Zolkos, Reconciling Community and Subjective Life: Trauma Testimony as Political Theorizing in the Work of Jean Améry and Imre Kertész

“Furthermore, that traumatic repetitive emergence of the event throughout the text can be productively thought of through the figure of “echoing.” As Strudensky insists, echoing offers the possibilities of deciphering the poetics of traumatic repetition (2003: 100–2). From such a perspective, for B. the haunting (re-)appearance of the Professor is a mark of B.’s post-apocalyptic existence.”
― Magdalena Zolkos, Reconciling Community and Subjective Life: Trauma Testimony as Political Theorizing in the Work of Jean Améry and Imre Kertész

“(sometimes long after the event), or at any rate that the eventhood of the event cannot be given a simple date and time, and [that it] defies simple insertion into continuity.” It has been discussed previously that in Laplanche’s”
― Magdalena Zolkos, Reconciling Community and Subjective Life: Trauma Testimony as Political Theorizing in the Work of Jean Améry and Imre Kertész

“In this statement the protagonist (and Kertész?) expounds the view that “Good can be done in life in which Evil is the principle, but only at the cost of the doer’s sacrificing his life” (2007: 43). The disastrous event of the Holocaust is interrupted, and countered, by the “act of kindness” that emerges from within the catastrophic. The address of the Other—the gesture of bread sharing by a starved camp inmate—makes the subject’s survival possible by the virtue of its substitutive logic.”
― Magdalena Zolkos, Reconciling Community and Subjective Life: Trauma Testimony as Political Theorizing in the Work of Jean Améry and Imre Kertész

“cannot be explained is not evil but, contrarily, the good. […] This is what I find interesting and incomprehensible, this is what I cannot find a rational explanation for. (1997a: 31–2, emphasis in original)”
― Magdalena Zolkos, Reconciling Community and Subjective Life: Trauma Testimony as Political Theorizing in the Work of Jean Améry and Imre Kertész

“out of the ordinary” and “has no logic to it” (Evans 2006). B. recalls intervening”
― Magdalena Zolkos, Reconciling Community and Subjective Life: Trauma Testimony as Political Theorizing in the Work of Jean Améry and Imre Kertész

“use [that opportunity and appropriate B.’s bread ration], would be to destroy his only chance to live and to remain alive” (2003: 59). Kertész concludes that there must be “something [and please do not try to name it], uninfected by […] our body, our spirit, the animal instinct, […] an idea, which has to be uninfringed and protected, as the Professor’s one and only chance to survive”—a chance to live through and live on (2003: 59, emphasis in original).”
― Magdalena Zolkos, Reconciling Community and Subjective Life: Trauma Testimony as Political Theorizing in the Work of Jean Améry and Imre Kertész

“that estranged angrily demanding beast …. The problem was that without my food allotment the question of survival appeared to be purely academic. (1997a: 32) In an insightful interpretation of that scene, Summers-Bremmer emphasizes the inseparability of “the instinct that connects food with survival and the excessive, enigmatic elements to do with meaning”—namely “the way hunger can never be divorced from hope […]”
― Magdalena Zolkos, Reconciling Community and Subjective Life: Trauma Testimony as Political Theorizing in the Work of Jean Améry and Imre Kertész

“The protagonist is a post-catastrophic subject to the extent that he is engaged in difficult “negotiations” of oneself vis-à-vis the fact of having survived. It is in the context of these subjective negotiations that the Professor’s deed, as well as the implicit suggestion that the Professor’s has perished, become constitutive of a catastrophic community.”
― Magdalena Zolkos, Reconciling Community and Subjective Life: Trauma Testimony as Political Theorizing in the Work of Jean Améry and Imre Kertész

“Fateless, I conclude, asks precisely that question of the survivor: what it means to remain faithful to that encounter with another in remembrance, in writing, and in living-on.”
― Magdalena Zolkos, Reconciling Community and Subjective Life: Trauma Testimony as Political Theorizing in the Work of Jean Améry and Imre Kertész

“Kertész is an apocalyptic writer (and one that remains obsessed with the enigma of love in this apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic world). The intimate connection that he draws between trauma subjectivity and community comes to the surface only once the reader has recognized the significance of the ruptured, or displaced, untimely occurrence of love in the catastrophe. “What I discovered in Auschwitz,” says Kertész in his Nobel Prize Lecture (2002a), “is the human condition, the end point of a great adventure.” This”
― Magdalena Zolkos, Reconciling Community and Subjective Life: Trauma Testimony as Political Theorizing in the Work of Jean Améry and Imre Kertész

“The uninterrupted remnant presence of the catastrophe in the life of the subject (also in its synecdochic relation to the communal) defines that subjective existence as fragmentary,15 “subjectivity as wounded, blamed, and persecuted exposure” (Blanchot 1995b: 24).”
― Magdalena Zolkos, Reconciling Community and Subjective Life: Trauma Testimony as Political Theorizing in the Work of Jean Améry and Imre Kertész

“is facilitated by the use of the present perfect tense, which gives the past events in Fateless immediate and temporally proximate appearance as “a kind of dramatic present and colloquiality” (Vasvári 2005: 265). Timothy Bewes identifies a similar characteristic in the work of Sebald: time in Sebald’s novels cannot be thought of as synonymous with duration, but, rather, it is subordinate to movement, to plot, to narrative” (2005: 95, emphasis in original).”
― Magdalena Zolkos, Reconciling Community and Subjective Life: Trauma Testimony as Political Theorizing in the Work of Jean Améry and Imre Kertész

“effect of the uninterrupted narrative continuity”
― Magdalena Zolkos, Reconciling Community and Subjective Life: Trauma Testimony as Political Theorizing in the Work of Jean Améry and Imre Kertész

“tragic narrative, and facilitates the description of the camp as a “complex […] mixture of suffering, boredom, hunger, work, dehumanization, […] happiness” (Friedland 2002: 185). The “oppressiveness” of temporal narrative has thus to be understood as an indication of linearity’s existential aspects, and, more specifically, Gyuri’s powerlessness”
― Magdalena Zolkos, Reconciling Community and Subjective Life: Trauma Testimony as Political Theorizing in the Work of Jean Améry and Imre Kertész

“The Laplanchian metaphoric-metonymical genealogy of trauma provides here an image of an originary, catastrophic “wounding,” which, belatedly, comes to “possess” the subject, through the “hopeless desire” for the reversibility of the injury; the Freudian Ungeschehenmachen, the “undoing what has been done” (Laplanche & Pontalis 1973: 465–69 & 477–8).”
― Magdalena Zolkos, Reconciling Community and Subjective Life: Trauma Testimony as Political Theorizing in the Work of Jean Améry and Imre Kertész

“questions are not “whether to draw a line under it, as it were; whether to preserve its memory or slip it into the appropriate pigeonhole of history; whether to erect a monument to the murdered millions, and if so, what kind.” Rather, the “problem” of Auschwitz is its irreversibility: “it happened, and this cannot be altered” (2002a).”
― Magdalena Zolkos, Reconciling Community and Subjective Life: Trauma Testimony as Political Theorizing in the Work of Jean Améry and Imre Kertész

“Gyuri’s return home from the camp (which occurs to the extent that the home does not, and has never, exist/existed) is like a return from an after-death place. It is an unexpected, spectral and a haunting appearance. For”
― Magdalena Zolkos, Reconciling Community and Subjective Life: Trauma Testimony as Political Theorizing in the Work of Jean Améry and Imre Kertész

“What do I call a fate? Certainly the possibility of tragedy. The external determinacy, the stigma which constraints our life into a situation, an absurdity, in the given totalitarianism, thwarts this; thus, when we live out the determinacy that is doled out to us as a reality, instead of the necessity that stems from our (relative) freedom—that is what I would call fatelessness. (2005: 98)”
― Magdalena Zolkos, Reconciling Community and Subjective Life: Trauma Testimony as Political Theorizing in the Work of Jean Améry and Imre Kertész

“Agambenquotes from Hegel’s Aesthetics: “what is at issue […] is the right of the wide awake consciousness, the justification of what the man has self-consciously willed and knowingly done, as contrasted with what he was fated by the gods to do and actually did unconsciously,” and declares that “[n]othing is further from Auschwitz than this model” (2002: 96 & 97). Not only do innocence and guilt becomes unbridgeable, but their relation is based on a de facto inversion: the camp deportee “feels innocent precisely for that which the tragic hero feels guilty, and guilty exactly where the tragic hero feels innocent” (2002: 97). Agamben’s context is that of Primo Levi’s “grey zone,” and the rationale of Befehlnotstand, the principle of blind obedience, or the “‘state of compulsion to follow an order’” (2002: 97).”
― Magdalena Zolkos, Reconciling Community and Subjective Life: Trauma Testimony as Political Theorizing in the Work of Jean Améry and Imre Kertész

“The “Jew” is thus a sign: “a situation in totalitarianism,” but, also, “a symbol, a life situation, an ethical task [with its own] possibilities of knowing, a lesson in experiencing a situation of complete dependence, misery, [and] exclusion” (2006b:”
― Magdalena Zolkos, Reconciling Community and Subjective Life: Trauma Testimony as Political Theorizing in the Work of Jean Améry and Imre Kertész