Marcus J. Carney
Univ Vienna; Northeastern Univ; Masaryk Univ Brno; Univ Witten-Herdecke;
Letting Go. The Form of Mourning.
Threnos in antiquity was understood as the activity of mourning. S. Freud dichotomised mourning with melancholia, entangling both in libido. A. and M. Mitscherlich took this up in the 1960s for the German people post Holocaust as their “inability to mourn”. J. Ruesen tried “Trauer” in this context again in the 1990s as “mourning humaneness”, bloating its abstraction. While M. Rothberg introduced the notion of “implicated subject” to the field/s of historical violence and injustices to modify R. Hilberg’s perpetrator-victim-bystander triad in 2019, the German “Historikerstreit 2.0” was raging, but not about Rothberg’s “implication”, yet about his 2009 concept of “multidirectional memory”, wherewith he demonstrated how the Holocaust had enabled the articulation of other histories of victimisation at the same time that it had been declared "unique" among human-perpetrated horrors, while uncovering the more surprising fact that public memory of the Holocaust emerged in part thanks to postwar events that seemingly had little to do with it. A particular [German] insistence on the uniqueness of the Holocaust seems to function as local, differentiation-hostile veneer and global delayer of fruitful, actually teachable distinctions, instead presenting an inability of letting go all over again, by not re-entering the form of mourning, therefore continually confusing memory with threnody. This contribution aims to decline “Trauer” (mourning) within the Form.
U.S.-Austrian lecturer, researcher, facilitator, filmmaker; with particular interest in epistemological implications and practical consequences of what has been called “representational perception”.