Emptiness and Deadly Environments (Theorizing the Contemporary)

Czytanie Literatury. Łódzkie Studia Literaturoznawcze

The article presents an analysis of the essayistic knowledge about genocide. For this purpose, the author used works by Martin Pollack. Further, the article indicates the intertwining of two threads in Pollack’s prose. The first one is the history of his family, recollections about Nazi relatives, and the dissonance which formed inside him regarding his family’s past. The other one is the study of space understood as uncovering its “contamination”, the sinister past which has marked the specific portion of the landscape. The aim of the article is to check whether it is possible to decontaminate, i.e. expunge that contamination from these landscapes in order to make them once again locations which foster life rather than are mere empty cemeteries.

diacritics, 2009

Here we present, in broad terms, not a history of the Void, which Sergio Givone has covered with great authority, nor a history of nihilism, whose most important coordinates have already been mapped,1 but instead an essay on the irruptions of the void within the intellectual experience of the West. Our basic hypothesis is, first of all, that these irruptions presuppose that the void exerts a ceaseless labor-which is not, however, a "productivity"-that is capable of dis mantling the forms and norms that are established from time to time to curb it or at least to hide it. And secondly, that whenever we frantically try to neutralize the void, the void seizes us from its abyss with even greater violence, twisting our forms and violating our boundaries (which are so much more fragile than they claim to be in the face of its im pervious power). As such, he who fears and exorcises the void and its devastation is most exposed to them, and he who believes he gets the farthest away from them, is actually the nearest. Irruption is not, therefore, simply an "experience," a deliberate attempt to trans gress the limits of the human, toward Good and toward Evil.2 It is rather an unforeseen and unwanted experience, a catastrophe we suffer. The sphere with which we are concerned is not theoretical but practical. Therefore the void is experienced as death, the absolute disorder, the annihilation of life-the very thing from which we wish to protect ourselves by creating the norm, law, and order to be gin with. In this practical sphere, the categorical imperative absolutely must be security, which is to say, the deferral, or humanization, of death. There are many strategies that, in various guises, have the objective of securing life by means of a "productive" relation with death, of creating orders that incorporate disorder, strategies that make coexistence with death the origin of social cohesion, of coexistence among men. So many human laws find their own innermost force by incorporating the law of death. And if, as Emanuele Severino asserts, all Western thought that believes in the reality of death is nihilistic, and if this thought strives to defend itself from death with metaphysics and ontology, then there exist sophisticated forms of nihilism that define themselves by their proximity to death, to the annihilation of living beings.

2020

This essay takes the book Contaminated Landscapes, published in 2014 by the Austrian journalist and writer Martin Pollack, as an opportunity to explore relationships between landscapes, (marked) places and memory. In considering the relationship between the metaphorical (literary) image of contaminated landscapes and the actual crime scenes, I focus on the mass shootings of Jews by the German Nazis and their local supporters in the former Soviet Union. These specific crime scenes are used to explore the limits and problems of Pollack's metaphor. With the help of seven photographs, central cases in the argument are also presented using concrete examples.

Porous becomings: anthropological engagements with Michel Serres, 2024

This chapter introduces Michel Serres as an important theorist of modern warfare and violence. It brings together Serres’ topological perspectives on time, history, and general ecology of pollution together. The chapter thus opens new avenues for thinking and writing about the long-lasting socio-environmental effects of wars and their aftermaths. It draws on examples from Henig’s ongoing research on explosive war remains in postwar Bosnia and Herzegovina, toxic legacies of the Cold War era military projects, and Serres’ reflections on Hiroshima and Nagasaki nuclear bomb explosions. In so doing, the chapter retraces Henig’s encounters and resonances with Michel Serres, and his thinking with Serres about wastes of war, their unruly temporalities and insidious planetary effects.

Security Dialogue, 2024

This article develops the idea that late modern war's relationship with the geos (the ground and the life it sustains) is doubly destructive. While part of this is recognized in a recent focus on slow violence and ecological aftermaths, there is little consideration of the 'beforemath', or the sites of extraction that make advanced military technologies possible. Drawing attention to mining in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), the article connects military technologies to arms manufacturers and their use of extracted minerals (e.g. cobalt, tantalum, copper, uranium). Shared patterns of environmental and public health effects across parts of Iraq, Gaza and the DRC indicate the doubly destructive nature of late modern war's relationship with the geos: toxic materials threaten life after war as the deposits of bombardment and before war as mineral commodities at the beginning of arms supply chains. The article explicates how a perspective from the beforemath radically refigures the ways we think about war and spatiality, temporality, and the range of bodies affected in ways that promise a fuller understanding of the violence distributed by practices of late modern war.

Progress in Human Geography, 2021

Attending to connections between serious health conditions (cancers and congenital disorders) and weapons residues in Iraq, Afghanistan and Gaza, this article develops a geographical agenda for examining power in late modern war from the perspective of the ground and the life it sustains. A case is made for understanding the time-spaces of war as not compressed, vertical or remote but enduring, pedospheric and proximate in which violence emerges through processes (carcinogenic and teratogenic) that transcend boundaries between 'life' (bios) and 'nonlife' (geos). Such are the geontological time-spaces of late modern war that geographersin both 'physical' and 'human' sub-fieldsare uniquely equipped to examine.

Disposal and concealment in genocide and mass violence, 2014

The twentieth century was the century of mass violence and genocide. The size, diversity, and systematic character of the massacres, but also the inscription of killings in murderous ideologies and the use of new techniques for the systematic eradication of human groups, mark a new way of conceiving, justifying, and perpetrating crime. The role of states, as the totalitarian regimes formally defined by Hannah Arendt as well as 'traditional' dictatorships, was also a prominent feature of this century. 2 Forms of mass violence certainly differed, and continue to differ, widely from one country to another, from one system to another, from one continent to another; nevertheless, this 'age of extremes', in the words of historian Eric Hobsbawm, 3 has seen an outburst of violence that has produced, as its logical consequence, mass death, ideological mass death, and therefore millions of corpses. It may seem a truism, since this aspect of human destiny is shared universally, that every human body ends marked by rigor mortis before the decomposition of the flesh, and then of the bones, as a result of a combination of biological and chemical processes influenced by a wide variety of factors, such as climatic conditions, the nature of the ambient environment, or human intervention. 4 Of course, the countless cultures and religions, small or great, have always treated bodies according to special rituals, the product of socio-cultural contexts but also of continual historical developments. One might even say that social anthropology, as a

Security Dialogue, 2024

This article develops the idea that late modern war’s relationship with the geos (the ground and the life it sustains) is doubly destructive. While part of this is recognized in a recent focus on slow violence and ecological aftermaths, there is little consideration of the ‘beforemath’, or the sites of extraction that make advanced military technologies possible. Drawing attention to mining in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), the article connects military technologies to arms manufacturers and their use of extracted minerals (e.g. cobalt, tantalum, copper, uranium). Shared patterns of environmental and public health effects across parts of Iraq, Gaza and the DRC indicate the doubly destructive nature of late modern war’s relationship with the geos: toxic materials threaten life after war as the deposits of bombardment and before war as mineral commodities at the beginning of arms supply chains. The article explicates how a perspective from the beforemath radically refigures the ways we think about war and spatiality, temporality, and the range of bodies affected in ways that promise a fuller understanding of the violence distributed by practices of late modern war.

Madhya Bharti, Humanities and Social Sciences, 2023

The term 'The Waste Land' is a pivotal and grievous abstract idea of the modern era which holds much structural complexity, obscurity and despairing tone to reflect the embody many of the cultural and intellectual issues of the present age. A well known literary personality of 20 th century , T.S Eliot published "The Waste Land " in 1922 after The Great War. The postwar disillusionment of 1920s led many literary figures to voice out the predicament and moral dilemma that modern life faces. T.S Eliot was one of the eminent figures who was able to depict the crisis time and connect then existing panorama with the modern age. To quote Harold Bloom, The waste land can be read as "a testament to the disillusionment of a generation, an exposition of the manifest despair and spiritual bankruptcy of the years after world war I". Eliot is a stern realist acutely conscious of manifold problems as well as a visionary who looks at life beyond the limits of time and space. A vivid of the uncertain world and the insincere manner of the mind is portrayed carefully in The Waste Land , which refers to the spiritual and intellectual death of the modern world which is in the verge of decay. The poem displays the disillusionment, hopelessness and cynicism of modern life and the world where tension, anxiety, depression, unrest above all an extreme decay of morality. The purpose of this paper is to highlight the social, cultural and moral decay of modern civilization due to the commercialization of life where everything is for sale. Exposing a picture of mundane waste land that symbolically suggest the spiritual death of modern men ,and is expedition of "human failure and of perennial quest for salvation ".

2017

To live in today’s disfigured landscape – where nature is but a fragment of an ancient beauty and richness – means entering the era of allegory tout court, within which human existence is forced to dwell in a lunar landscape remindful of those described by P. K. Dick, the locus of rotting refuse, where everything is swiftly reduced to “kipple” and “gubble.” Yet, despite being a mere fragment, an allegory of its former self, nature still retains a historical dimension: that dimension of time which the social universe – turned into an obtuse self-perpetuating myth – has given up in the name of the “always identical and always new” and of the irrevocability of a particular historical-contingent outcome. Yet, even a disfigured nature can be the source of a concrete utopia of reintegration, by virtue of its histori­cal dimension. In other words, neither the wasteland of nature nor our dreams of salvation are exempt from an otherwise unsuspected mutual solidarity: being interconnected, th...