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What Goldhagen promised his readers was first and foremost an explanation of the Holocaust. He addressed himself heedlessly to the disturbing question of “why” and, avoiding any caveats, chose one and only one answer. He repeated it in chapters and footnotes to the point of exhaustion. Boldly exclaiming that he was the only one who had found the solution, he told everyone that the matter was now settled.

Of course, for specialists who had preoccupied themselves with the problem, his “explanation” settled nothing at all. It did, however, appeal to a large number of book buyers, who cannot do research but have wanted an explanatory statement for a long time, one that appears to be sufficient, and for that reason satisfying as well. It was not factual evidence that convinced them, for he had done none, but a simple chain, the links of which they had already heard before: Germans—anti-Semitism—hatred—brutality. It was not even any originality in this formation that carried them along, but its familiar ring. To make it even more familiar, Goldhagen mentioned these words often in his six hundred pages, and added others like “unspeakable,” “murderous,” “demonological,” “vitriolic,” and “gruesome.” The adjectives are accusatory; they are taken from the domain of politics and not political science, but with them Goldhagen broke a dam of reticence in a public that had wanted to say them but had not said them aloud about the German people of the Nazi era.

See also:  Strother Purdy, “Stalingrad" and My Lai: A Literary-Political Speculation

Raul Hilberg is professor emeritus at the University of Vermont, where he held the John G. McCullough chair of political science. He is the author of The Destruction of the European Jews (1961; rev. ed. 1985), Sonderzüge nach Auschwitz (1981), and Perpetrators, Victims, and Bystanders: The Jewish Catastrophe, 1933-1945 (1992).

And it is just now, perhaps, that a reaction is beginning: pure and intense light, purity and brightness of colors are beginning to burn here and there with intense patches among many others, immersed as usual in a dull haze of paintings. I am not presuming to confirm with assurance that time will disintegrate these weakened colors sooner or later. But another tendency is already clearly emerging. In places, the bright sun shines, which is of a specific character; the mood of dusk that not too long ago took first place among motifs is now beginning to be interpreted differently the purity and intensity of colors stare out shyly even in overcast weather. Munich's exhibit of innovators in art, this year’s “Secession,” will give a rough picture of these two trends in contemporary painting.

See also:  Margaret Olin, Validation by Touch in Kandinsky's Early Abstract Art

Wassily Kandinsly was born in Moscow in 1866 and studied law and economics at the University of Moscow. In 1896, he rejected a teaching position at the University of Dorpat in Estonia and moved to Munich to pursue painting. Following the outbreak of World War I, Kandinsky left Munich and returned to Russia, where he taught at the Moscow Art Academy and founded the Museum of Artistic Culture. In 1921, he returned to Germany, subsequently accepting a teaching position at the Bauhaus in 1922. When the Nazis closed the school in 1933, he moved to Neuilly-sur-Seine. He died in 1944.

This paper will reflect on a famous case of law that has impacted on our times—the O. J. Simpson (criminal) trial—together with a famous literary text that bears, surprisingly, many resemblances to this contemporary case: Tolstoy's The Kreutzer Sonata. In both the legal drama of the case and in the literary drama of the text, what is at issue is a marriage that ends up in murder. In both, a jealous husband is arrested and is put on trial for the murder of his wife—and is acquitted. And yet the husband in Tolstoy's work acknowledges his guilt, and is precisely telling us the story to explain not only why, but how he killed his wife.

See also:  Shoshana Felman, Theaters of Justice: Arendt in Jerusalem, the Eichmann Trial, and the Redefinition of Legal Meaning in the Wake of the Holocaust  ·  Shoshana Felman, Paul de Man's Silence

Shoshana Felman is the Thomas E. Donnelley Professor of French and Comparative Literature at Yale University. She is the author of The Literary Speech Act: Don Juan with Austin, or Seduction in Two Languages (1984), Writing and Madness (1985), Jacques Lacan and the Adventure of Insight (1987), and What Does a Woman Want? Reading and Sexual Difference (1993). She is also the editor of Literature and Psychoanalysis: The Question of Reading—Otherwise (1982) and coauthor, with Dori Laub, of Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History (1992). The present essay is part of a book in progress entitled Dilemmas of Justice.

That the EU has sanctioned use of the musical theme of Beethoven's choral finale while refusing to confirm Schiller's text is indeed a curious situation. Music, language, politics, and identity are here entangled in a disquieting embrace so disfigured by history, interpretation, and usage that misrepresentation threatens to eradicate philosophical positioning and political debate. This entanglement is implicit in the council's original noncommittal time frame—"for the time being. . . allow some time to pass."In keeping with the actions and methods of the EU's own founders, "perhaps some words" could and would evolve over time. But underneath this veiled phraseology lies not the question, What words? but rather, When will the words be adopted? The hope appears to be that over time almost by stealth, as Monnet said Europe's wounds will be sufficiently healed. For this actually to happen, the horrors of the recent past would have to be transcended, which, as Taruskin reminds us, may not be possible in our time.⁴⁴

· 44. See Taruskin,"Resisting the Ninth," Nineteenth-Century Music 12 (Spring 1989): 241-56, esp. p. 256.

See also:  Maynard Solomon, Beethoven's Ninth Symphony: The Sense of an Ending

Caryl Clark is assistant professor of musicology at the University of Toronto at Scarborough and the Faculty of Music. She has published several articles on the operas of Haydn and Mozart.

In what is probably the most wide-reaching transformation of the humanities since literary criticism's rise to power over half a century ago, popular culture has become an important object of academic attention. It is a shift that has helped throw up cultural studies as a new discipline or, at any rate, as a new interdisciplinary mix. And although the preconditions of popular culture's academicization remain largely unexamined, one thing seems clear: the current vigorous academic interest in popular cultures belongs to a larger process in which popular-cultural technologies, genres, and works are increasingly moving and interacting across national and cultural borders. It is tempting to call this larger process globalization, but, except in quite specific instances, it constitutes something less—transnationalization. But it is one of these exceptional instances which interests me in this essay. Since the 1980s some cultural products are indeed globally popular and intentionally so; they are distributed and apparently enjoyed everywhere, at any rate wherever electricity is on line or generators and batteries can be transported and where they are not successfully banned. They belong to what I will call (without any intended Gramscian resonances) the global popular.

See also: Simon During, After Death: Raymond Williams in the Modern Era

Simon During is Robert Wallace Professor of English at the University of Melbourne. His most recent book is Patrick White. He is currently working on a historical investigation into magic as a form of secular entertainment and culture.

India has emerged in recent theoretical writing as the site of one of modernity’s gravest implosions. A sinister Hindu chauvinism threatens to eclipse a Nehruvian and post-Nehruvian moment. Despite Hindutva’s origin at the heart of the modern, there is an understandable fascination with this nostalgic politics’ alliance with new visual technologies, ranging from the mobile video rath (chariot) to the superabundance of colour posters. This fascination is propelled on the one hand by journalistic clichés which claim a paradox through the juxtaposition of the ’medieval ’ and the modern’, but also by simplistic secularist accounts gripped by a historicism which is only capable of constructing popular media as antagonistic to his own project. In these accounts these new visuals harbor the threat of the unpicturing the nation, of unthreading a community which has been carefully stitched together. Here I will advance the argument that for more than a century very similar images have pictured this very nation which is now threatened. The signs which cover contemporary Indian politics currently suffer from an underinformed epidemiology which naively links formal content with ideological effect through physiognomic readings.

· 1. 'The mishaps that can result from such a "physiognomic" reading of artistic documents are clear enough. The historian reads into them what he has already learned by other means, or what he believes he knows, and wants to "demonstrate"' (Carlo Ginzburg, 'From Aby Warburg to E. H. Gombrich: A Problem of Method', Clues, Myths, and the Historzcal Method, trans. John and Anne Tedeschi [Baltimore, 1989], p. 35).

See also:  Dipesh Chakrabarty, Romantic Archives: Literature and the Politics of Identity in Bengal

Christopher Pinney is a lecturer in South Asian anthropology at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. He is currently completing a book-length study of popular Hinduism and the printed image. He co-curated the exhibition The Impossible Science of Being: Dialogues between Anthropology and Photography at the Photographers' Gallery, London, 1995-96.

The recent spate of exhibitions of Latin American art in the United States and Europe has prompted widespread discussion about the manner in which that art is represented and explained. For Latin American art has always been received with ambiguity and unease in international contexts. The crucial site of contention centers invariably on the status of a Latin American identity, or of where and how a specifically Latin American difference can be found.⁴

· 4. Among the many critical accounts of these exhibitions and the debate they generated, see Mari Carmen Ramirez," Beyond' the Fantastic': Framing Identity in U.S. Exhibitions of Latin American Art," Art Journal 51 (Winter1 992): 60-68.

See also:  Kwame Anthony Appiah, Cosmopolitan Patriots

Natalia Majluf  is head curator of the Museo de Arte de Lima. She is working on a book on the paintings of Francisco Laso and the emergence of a Creole identity in nineteenth-century Peru.

A translation of the poetry of Alokdhanwa, a contemporary Hindi poet.

Amitava Kumar teaches cultural studies in the English department at the University of Florida. He is a columnist for Liberation (India) and a photographer for the New York-based co-op Impact Visuals. He is preparing two book-length manuscripts for publication: Passport Photos and Poems for the I.N.S.

Spinosa and Dreyfus bring to the debate about essentialism a refreshing impatience with the facile moralism that typically accompanies interventions in this debate; not the least reward of their analytical rigor is its laying bare the extent to which the term essentialism tends to be used rhetorically rather than cognitively. In providing an antiessentialist alternative to the standard critique of essentialism, Spinosa and Dreyfus succeed in diminishing, both cognitively and rhetorically, the moralistic frission that attends the standard critique—a frission that too often substitutes for sound argument. And while I subscribe to the general academic consensus that views essentialism as a problem (especially from the perspective of queer theory), I am nonetheless grateful to Spinosa and Dreyfus for making it harder for lazy arguments to score easy points by the self-righteous charge of essentialism. That is, by carefully distinguishing between two kinds of antiessentialism, Spinosa and Dreyfus implicitly offer a welcome secondary distinction between morality and ethics.

Tim Dean, assistant professor of English at the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana, is a fellow at the Stanford Humanities Center for 1997-1998 and the editor of Beyond the Couch: Sexuality, Psychoanalysis, and Cultural Politics (forthcoming). He is currently working on a book to be titled Modernism and the Ethics of "Impersonality."

We shall begin by putting Tim Dean's argument in its strongest terms. To do this we shall summarize part of our argument in "Two Kinds of Antiessentialism and Their Consequences," using the technical terms we introduced there. We argue that both our best intuitions about cognition and many of our practices in the West allow us to claim that there may be two or more weakly incommensurable worlds, each with its own mode of making people and things intelligible. Thus, one is justified in denying that there must be a single consistent and coherent set of types that accounts for all types of entities in all possible worlds. Hence, the essentialist's central claim that intelligibility requires such a set of types fails.

Charles Spinosa is Acting Director of Research at Business Design Associates, on leave from Miami University in Ohio. He writes on Shakespeare, Heidegger and post-Heideggerian philosophy, and Early Modern common law. He is the author, with Fernando Flores and Hubert L. Dreyfus, of Disclosing New Worlds: Entrepreneurship, Democratic Action, and the Cultivation of Solidarity (1997). Hubert L. Dreyfus is a professor in the graduate school at the University of California, Berkeley. His books include What Computers Still Can't Do: A Critique of Artificial Reason (1992), Being-in-the-World: A Commentary on Heidegger's "Being and Time," Division I (1991), and, with Paul Rabinow, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics (1982).

We are all familiar with both the risks and the pleasures of identifying with the writer about whom we write. Particularly when we focus on an individual author, our investment in the text is always entangled with a more problematic investment in the consciousness that produced it. If, on the one hand, we feel an obligation to attempt to occupy the subjectivity behind the texts we analyze, we also know that this can always only be a projection, a fantasy that can potentially disable or distort our critical agenda. Few discussions more strikingly and revealingly exhibit the stakes of this identification than Paul Bovè's recent study of Henry Adams, "Giving Thought to America" (Critical Inquiry 23 [Autumn1 996]: 80-108).

Loren Glass is a graduate student in American literature and cultural studies at Duke University. His dissertation is entitled "Impersonating the Public Sphere."

I want to thank Loren Glass for the chance to add some remarks to my paper on Henry Adams and to record some more of my thinking about contemporary critical practices. Glass's objections do not convince me, but they exemplify certain habits in critical thinking that are worth indicating. Some are, I hope, just idiosyncrasies caused by the difficult task of reading Adams's The Education; others may be more interesting.

Paul Bovè edits boundary 2 and is professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh. The author of Destructive Poetics, Intellectuals in Power, In the Wake of Theory, and Mastering Discourse, Bovè is completing a book on Henry Adams.