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From: Ruth Chandler <R.Chandler@xxxxxxxxx>
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Date: Thu, 05 Apr 2001 15:25:05 +0100
>>> chris jones <ccjones@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> 04/01 7:37 am >>>
Hi Ruth and list
Yikes!
why yikes?
Ruth wrote:
> fictive or not, i think it a mistake to lose the singularities of
> either the event of Aids or the events of the Holocaust. there are clearly
> parallels to be drawn between the material practices of each BUT to lose
> the differences between them does a different kind of violence to the ways
> in which 'unspeakability' are machined geo-politically. this is not to
> trivialise your remarks but to demand that the poetic 'event' of
> historiography reconceptualise its predicates.
I have been doing some stuff on the singularity of HIV/AIDS and for some
reason the Nazi holocaust haunts me.
probably not as much and in significantly different ways to the trauma
impact in Jewish families.
I kept thinking this was a case of
parrallels, a simple confusion. But that word confusion alerted me that it
may be quite possible that I am dealing with a historical epoch which is
both
holocaust and HIV/AIDS. This is not to lose the singularities of the Nazi
events and the events of HIV/AIDS but to understand or conceptualise them as
quite possibly at both ends of an epoch? This of course leaves me with the
difficulty and problem of a compossible linear history between the two
singularities and (perhaps more precisely) can I make this claim?
you can claim what you like! it is not for me to say who can speak in the
philosophy of history. to convince me, however, you would need to produced a
nuanced 'genealogy' of the different kinds of violence at work in your
epoch; provide a major and minor account of how these
differentiate/differenciate; explain the justification for bookending your
epoch in this way; account for how bookending, aka known as periodisation
delimits the rthyms of oblivion you describe; account for why you think it
possible to pose variants of the same form of violence as your totalising
gesture;.
as a piece of narrative 'history' it would be interesting to explore
alteration between these singular events, resonance and dissonace and set up
your epochal markers as aesthetic frames which emphasies the expressive
force of the violences you are looking at. Judith Walkowitzs-in her City of
Dreadful Delight constructs a really good historical treatment of urban
social space by taking a resoance between Jack the Ripper and the more
recent Yorkshire Ripper, another serial murderer as her bookends but she is,
also very attentive to what is different about these cases.
ciao
Ruth.C
best wishes Chris Jones
