1998
First Published
3.96
Average Rating
176
Number of Pages
In Understanding the Nazi Genocide Enzo Traverso sustains a dialogue with writings on the Shoah from Hannah Arendt to Daniel Goldhagen by drawing on the critical and heretical Marxism of Walter Benjamin and the Frankfurt School, which grasped late capitalism’s pent-up capacity for destructive upheavals exacerbated by bureaucratic organisation and advanced technology. After Auschwitz, Hiroshima and the gulag, the old warning slogan - socialism or barbarism - formulated by European Marxists at the beginning of twentieth century needs to be seriously ‘revised’. The choice we face today is no longer between the progress of civilisation and a fall into ancient savagery, but between socialism conceived as a new civilisation and the destruction of humankind. For Traverso the Warsaw Ghetto uprising is an image of what should impel us to not a sense of inevitable victory, but an ethical imperative.
Avg Rating
3.96
Number of Ratings
28
5 STARS
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4 STARS
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3 STARS
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2 STARS
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1 STARS
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Author
Enzo Traverso
Author · 13 books
Enzo Traverso est né en Italie en 1957, il a enseigné les sciences politiques à l’Université de Picardie Jules Verne. Il est professeur de sciences humaines à Cornell University (New York)., iI est l’auteur de plusieurs ouvrages, traduits en une douzaine de langues. Parmi ses derniers travaux, Le Totalitarisme (Seuil, 2001), La violence nazie (La Fabrique, 2002), À feu et à sang. La guerre civile européenne 1914-1945 (Stock, 2007 ; Hachette-Pluriel, 2009). À La Découverte, il a publiéLes Juifs et l’Allemagne (1992) et Siegfried Kracauer. Itinéraire d'un intellectuel nomade (1994, rééd. 2006).
