Concentrationary Imaginaries ─ Tracing Totalitarian Violence in Popular Culture

In 1945, French political prisoners returning from the concentration camps of Germany coined the phrase ‘the concentrationary universe’ to describe the camps as a terrible political experiment in the destruction of the human. This book shows how the unacknowledged legacy of a totalitarian mentality has seeped into the deepest recesses of everyday popular culture. It asks if the concentrationary now infests our cultural imaginary, normalizing what was once considered horrific and exceptional by transforming into entertainment violations of human life. Drawing on the political philosophy of Hannah Arendt and the analyses of violence by Agamben, Virilio, Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, it also offers close readings of films by Cavani and Haneke that identify and critically expose such an imaginary and, hence, contest its lingering force.

Griselda Pollock is Professor of Social and Critical Histories of Art and Director of the Centre for Cultural Analysis, Theory and History at the University of Leeds. Her recent publications include Visual Politics of Psychoanalysis: Art and the Image in Post-Traumatic Cultures (I.B. Tauris, 2013). Griselda Pollock is Series Editor of Tauris’ New Encounters Series.