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Stranded Objects: Mourning, Memory, and Film in Postwar Germany
Book by Santner, Eric L.
- GenresFilm
216 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1990
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January 17, 2018
"For as I have argued, when one broaches issues of mourning and melancholy one enters into a realm of psychic mechanisms beyond the pleasure principle which have to do not so much with the economy of drives as with the constitution of the self.. . . Paul de Man illustrates, there are dangers embedded in this postmodern revision of a thesis that was addressed to a very concrete historical situation.
In order to mourn for the victims of National Socialism, the Mitscherlichs claimed, the population of the new Federal Republic (and again, it is for pragmatic reasons only that I limit myself to this case) would first have to work through the more primitive narcissistic injury represented by the traumatic shattering of the specular, imaginary relations that had provided the sociopsychological foundations of German fascism. According to the Mitscherlichs, Nazism had promised a so-called utopian world in which alterity in its multiple forms and dimensions could be experienced as a dangerous Semitic supplement that one was free to push to the margins and finally to destroy. [The bullying aspect of narcissism and the formation of the super inflated ego] This was a utopia in which a mature self could never really develop. For the complex entity called the humans self constitutes itself precisely by relinquishing its narcissistic position and mournfully, and perhaps even playfully, assuming its place in an expanded field of relations and rationality in which “I” and “you”, “here” and “there,” “now” and “then,” signifies and signified, have boundaries, that is, are discontinuous. It is this passage from a realm of continuity into one of contiguities that signals the advent of the uncanny - the unheimlich - in human experience. There could be, the Mitscherlichs argued, no real mourning for victims of Nazism, no genuine perception of the full magnitude of human suffering caused in the name of the Volksgemeinschaft, until this more primitive labor of mourning - the mastery of the capacity to say “we” not narcissistically, the integration of the unheimlich into the first person plural - has been achieved." ~Eric L. Santner, Stranded Objects: Mourning, Memory, and Film in Postwar Germany
In order to mourn for the victims of National Socialism, the Mitscherlichs claimed, the population of the new Federal Republic (and again, it is for pragmatic reasons only that I limit myself to this case) would first have to work through the more primitive narcissistic injury represented by the traumatic shattering of the specular, imaginary relations that had provided the sociopsychological foundations of German fascism. According to the Mitscherlichs, Nazism had promised a so-called utopian world in which alterity in its multiple forms and dimensions could be experienced as a dangerous Semitic supplement that one was free to push to the margins and finally to destroy. [The bullying aspect of narcissism and the formation of the super inflated ego] This was a utopia in which a mature self could never really develop. For the complex entity called the humans self constitutes itself precisely by relinquishing its narcissistic position and mournfully, and perhaps even playfully, assuming its place in an expanded field of relations and rationality in which “I” and “you”, “here” and “there,” “now” and “then,” signifies and signified, have boundaries, that is, are discontinuous. It is this passage from a realm of continuity into one of contiguities that signals the advent of the uncanny - the unheimlich - in human experience. There could be, the Mitscherlichs argued, no real mourning for victims of Nazism, no genuine perception of the full magnitude of human suffering caused in the name of the Volksgemeinschaft, until this more primitive labor of mourning - the mastery of the capacity to say “we” not narcissistically, the integration of the unheimlich into the first person plural - has been achieved." ~Eric L. Santner, Stranded Objects: Mourning, Memory, and Film in Postwar Germany
Displaying 1 of 1 review