In search of the Human: The trauma of modernity and the “instrumental reason” of the persecutors

Abstract

This article takes the clinical notion of trauma as a historiographic criterion for understanding modernity and its mythologies. If the rewriting of the term trauma – at the intersection of psychoanalysis and neurobiology, cultural anthropology and philosophy of the mind – is the hallmark of contemporaneity, it is quite acceptable to see the Shoah as a radical historical and epistemological watershed. Never before had such a highly productive bureaucratic-industrial system been designed and implemented for the devastation of the very idea of humanity. Auschwitz was, in the most radical ways, the liminal space between Human and Inhuman. It lay right at the cutting edge of the abyss that the executioner shares with his victim – the annihilation of humanity. This essay crosses a question that has always characterized the social construction of subjectivity: the perimeter of the Human, and the interrelationships between identity, alterity, and recognition.

Key words:

• Human/Inhuman
• enlightenment
• massive trauma
• dehumanization
• Holocaust
• victim/persecutor

ORCID

Francesco Migliorino http://orcid.org/0000-0001-7772-4232

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This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

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Notes on contributors

Francesco Migliorino

Francesco Migliorino is full professor of legal history at the law department of the University of Catania (Italy). His interests include the textuality of medieval canon law, codes of conduct in public social action, the construction of modern subjectivity, the dichotomy of Human/Inhuman in the meshes of the law, and the areas of contagion between psychoanalysis and law. He has written several monographic essays, including Fama e infamia (1985), In terris ecclesiae (1992), Mysteria concursus (1999), Il corpo come testo (2008), and Edoardo Weiss e “La giustizia penale” (2016). He is also the author of a short film (Aria) on criminal asylums in Italy in the 1930s.