The Implicated Subject Quotes

“Recognizing ourselves in the position of the implicated subject […] will not automatically make us better people; such self-reflexivity can indeed become a form of narcissism or solipsism that keeps the privileged subjects at the center of analysis. [...]

Self-reflexivity alone will not lead directly to a political movement that can dismantle the conditions of implication. The burden of history will not simply evaporate once we see our place in its long- and short-term legacies. Precisely because it involves negotiating with the past, the confrontation with historical violence is ongoing, it's expiration date uncertain.”
― Michael Rothberg, The Implicated Subject: Beyond Victims and Perpetrators

“In 1949, the African American scholar and activist W.E.B. Du Bois visited Warsaw, where he saw the ruins of the ghetto the Nazis had established there and then completely destroyed after suppressing the uprising. Three years later, Du Bois wrote a short article a recounting his trip called “The Negro and the Warsaw Ghetto”: “In the first place, the problem of slavery, emancipation, and caste in the United States was no longer in my mind as a separate and unique thing, as I had so long conceived it. It was not even solely a matter of color and physical and racial characteristics, which was particularly hard thing for me to learn, since for a lifetime the color line had been a real and efficient cause of misery…. The race problem in which I was interested cut across lines of color and physique and belief and status, and was a matter of cultural patterns, teaching and human hate and prejudice, which reached all sorts of people and caused endless evil to all men.»

[...] Moving beyond a conception of his own experience as “a separate and unique thing”, Du Bois comes to an understanding of race that is instead multidirectional. […] Du Bois’s post-Warsaw vision brings black and Jewish histories into relation without erasing their differences or fetishizing their uniqueness. Proximate pasts are neither “separate and unique” nor “equal”; rather, a form of modified “double consciousness” arises capable of conjoining them in an open-ended assemblage.”
― Michael Rothberg, The Implicated Subject: Beyond Victims and Perpetrators

“The Nazi genocide is conventionally thought to exceed all “normal” conceptions of justice and to estrange familiar categories such as “guilt”, “punishment”, and even “the human.” Yet, invocations of the genocide in the context of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict tend to reference the Holocaust as the bearer of shared norms of human rights and clear-cut moral distinctions. In scenarios of equation, not only is the past anachronistically rewritten from the vantage point of a very different present (a rewriting that characterizes many acts of memory), but as a result, the present loses its potential as a locus of novelty [.…]

Regardless of the complexities of the Nazi genocide as a historical phenomenon, the images of the genocide that circulate in the present reduce it – as well as the contemporary cases to which it is analogized – to a stereotypical scenario of good and evil, innocence and absolute power. A discourse based on clear-cut visions of victims and perpetrators or of innocence and guilt, evacuates the political sphere of complexity and reduces it to a morality tale. Even in the case of Genocide, a seemingly exceptional situation of polarized innocence and guilt, the most thoughtful responses have been forced to reflect on uncomfortable questions of complicity and ambivalence in “the gray zone” first described by Primo Levy. P139 [….]

Ultimately, the goal of a radical democratic politics of multidirectional memory today is not only to move beyond discourses of equation or hierarchy, but also to displace the reductive, absolutist understanding of the Holocaust as a code for “good and evil” from the center of global memory politics. This task is time- and place specific and demands a vision of reflective justice.”
― Michael Rothberg, The Implicated Subject: Beyond Victims and Perpetrators