Unspeakable Differences, Obscene Pleasures: The Holocaust as an Object of Desire

This essay explores the prospect of a will to power/knowledge in feminist approaches to the Holocaust. My thesis is that a cultural fascination with Nazism over-determines feminist responses to women's testimony as a source of new knowledge about the gendered and sexual differentiation of traumatic historical experience. I therefore analyze the overlap among postmemory, fantasy, and sympathetic introjection as venues of symbolization that are affected by disciplinary structures of identification, professionalization, and self-surveillance. At stake is the ethics of a feminist commitment to progressive politics that forecloses the role of sadomasochistic fantasy in the disciplinary configuration of compassion. (KB)