Auschwitz and Afterimages: Abjection, Witnessing and Representation

This deeply persuasive book presents a new and profound approach to the testimony of the Holocaust. Nicholas Chare offers a critical reassessment of the writings on the abject by Julia Kristeva, including her best known, highly influential work ‘Powers of Horror’, first translated into English in 1982. He re-appraises the value the concept of abjection holds for the study of the witnessing and representation of the Holocaust. Chare also provides fresh interpretations of, for example, the poetic prose of Charlotte Delbo and the paintings of Francis Bacon, and he explores the ‘Scrolls of Auschwitz’, discovered buried in the grounds of the crematoria at Birkenau. These material remains of an event that have become historical documents composed in the most abject circumstance are analysed through their physical state as excavated objects and testimonial texts extending the complex reading of writing, imaging and the bodily that is the core of Kristevan theses on abjection.