A significant portion of philosophical questions concerning the Holocaust revolve around the problem of representation, that is, how the event can be represented in a concept or in an image, if at all. This article argues that Nuit et brouillard (Night and Fog, 1956) by Alain Resnais and Inglourious Basterds by Quentin Tarantino (2009) respond to the problem of representation in an original way by challenging the conventions of their respective genre. The juxtaposition of past and present images in Nuit (...) et brouillard proposes a new form of remembering that liberates memory from the confines of the past in order not to lose sight of what is happening now. Inglourious Basterds, similarly, circumvents the problem of realistic representation by means of a counter-historical story in which Hitler is brutally killed in Paris. Pushing to the extreme the Americanisation that is typical of the Hollywood treatments of World War II, Tarantino offers a multi-layered spectacle of violence that culminates in the burning down of a film theatre as a symbol of Tarantino’s having done with representation. (shrink)

A significant portion of philosophical questions concerning the Holocaust revolve around the problem of representation, that is, how the event can be represented in a concept or in an image, if at all. This article argues that Nuit et brouillard (Night and Fog, 1956) by Alain Resnais and Inglourious Basterds by Quentin Tarantino (2009) respond to the problem of representation in an original way by challenging the conventions of their respective genre. The juxtaposition of past and present images in Nuit (...) et brouillard proposes a new form of remembering that liberates memory from the confines of the past in order not to lose sight of what is happening now. Inglourious Basterds, similarly, circumvents the problem of realistic representation by means of a counter-historical story in which Hitler is brutally killed in Paris. Pushing to the extreme the Americanisation that is typical of the Hollywood treatments of World War II, Tarantino offers a multi-layered spectacle of violence that culminates in the burning down of a film theatre as a symbol of Tarantino’s having done with representation. (shrink)

The decision of the United Kingdom to leave the European Union, to ‘Brexit’, appears as a traumatic shock. Here this shock is examined in the context of the national imaginary of ‘Englishness’ and its relationship to theory. I focus on the theoretical tendency known as accelerationism, which suggests we embrace abstraction and modernity to transcend the limits of contemporary capitalism into a new post-capitalist society. Accelerationism embraces the future and modernity, in contrast with the seemingly backward-looking imaginaries of Brexit. The (...) desire of accelerationism to transcend national limits, including these backward-looking imaginaries of Englishness, is actually shaped by these imaginaries. In this way, accelerationism and the debates around it offers ways to unlock the social, psychic and theoretical formations that condition Brexit as well. What they reveal is the way in which Brexit is shaped by a particularly ‘English’ form of modernisation. (shrink)