Visualizing Atrocity: Arendt, Evil, and the Optics of Thoughtlessness
Valerie Hartouni
Visualizing Atrocity takes Hannah Arendt’s provocative and polarizing account of the 1961 trial of Nazi official Adolf Eichmann as its point of departure for reassessing some of the serviceable myths that have come to shape and limit our understanding both of the Nazi genocide and totalitarianism’s broader, constitutive, and recurrent features. These myths are inextricably tied to and reinforced viscerally by the atrocity imagery that emerged with the liberation of the concentration camps at the war’s end and played an especially important, evidentiary role in the postwar trials of perpetrators.
At the 1945 Nuremberg Tribunal, particular practices of looking and seeing were first established with respect to these images that were later reinforced and institutionalized through Eichmann’s trial in Jerusalem as simply part of the fabric of historical fact. They have come to constitute a certain visual rhetoric that now circumscribes the moral and political fields and powerfully assists in contemporary mythmaking about how we know genocide and what is permitted to count as such. In contrast, Arendt’s claims about the “banality of evil” work to disrupt this visual rhetoric. More significantly still, they direct our attention well beyond the figure of Eichmann to a world organized now as then by practices and processes that while designed to sustain and even enhance life work as well to efface it.
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About Valerie Hartouni
Reviews for Visualizing Atrocity: Arendt, Evil, and the Optics of Thoughtlessness
Holocaust and Genocide Studies
"By relating the visual to the criminal and political issues of the Nazi genocide, Eichmann, and Arendt, Hartouni poses critical questions on justice and morality that resonant in other genocides and in our time."
Lia Deromedi
Dialogues on Historical Justice and Memory
"Hartouni provides simply the finest analysis of the issues involved in Arendts reading of Eichmann and the failure of the trial to recognize a new crime, the crime of the bureaucracy and & the optics of thoughtlessness.Visualizing Atrocityis a masterful accomplishment and should take its place as the leading work at the intersection of political and normative judgement with visual projection."
Wayne Morrison
Theoretical Criminality
"A compelling and broad-reaching manuscript that will be of great interest not only to scholars of Arendt and Eichmann, but to those who want to think more generally about the interrelationship of political judgment and visual culture."
Judith Butler,University of California, Berkeley "Visualizing Atrocity is a masterful accomplishment and should take its place as the leading work at the intersection of political and normative judgement with visual projection."
Theoretical Crimonology