In the familiar atmosphere of hue and cry, Violence and Understanding in Gaza encourages its read... more In the familiar atmosphere of hue and cry, Violence and Understanding in Gaza encourages its readers to think for themselves when it comes to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. As the first comprehensive investigation of the British broadsheets' coverage of the armed conflict between the State of Israel and Hamas, Kaposi critiques the newspapers' output, arguing that they without exception merely replicate the black and white logic of war. He contends that the newspapers defeat their own aims about a two-state solution based on compromise. For that to happen, the British media must in future cease to write about the conflict as if it were a mythical contest between Good and Evil. Instead of asking who is innocent and who should be blamed, it should start to treat the conflict as a story of mutually painful but very real human relations. Any meaningful political-moral criticism can only start from that position.
Part of a comprehensive study to analyse British broadsheets' coverage of the First Gaza War, thi... more Part of a comprehensive study to analyse British broadsheets' coverage of the First Gaza War, this paper examines the moral arguments presented in editorials. Doing so, it showcases a non-dualist, relational inquiry of the representation of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Instead of focusing on what is empirically 'true', morally 'right', and ethnically 'Israeli/Jewish' or 'Palestinian/Arab' as extradiscursive categories, it approaches them as discursive constructions and asks what relations, what forms of lives the editorials cultivate in representing them. The analysis demonstrates that whilst newspapers overwhelmingly imagine isolated and ahistorical essences to clash in Palestine-Israel, they do not exclusively do so. Traces of a discourse of relations, where 'I' (Palestinian or Israeli) is partly constituted by the 'Other' (Israeli or Palestinian) can also be found in the editorials. It is with the vicissitudes of such relational accounts that the article concludes.
Part of a comprehensive study to analyse British broadsheets' coverage of the First Gaza War, thi... more Part of a comprehensive study to analyse British broadsheets' coverage of the First Gaza War, this paper examines the moral arguments presented in editorials. Doing so, it showcases a non-dualist, relational inquiry of the representation of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Instead of focusing on what is empirically 'true', morally 'right', and ethnically 'Israeli/Jewish' or 'Palestinian/Arab' as extradiscursive categories, it approaches them as discursive constructions and asks what relations, what forms of lives the editorials cultivate in representing them. The analysis demonstrates that whilst newspapers overwhelmingly imagine isolated and ahistorical essences to clash in Palestine-Israel, they do not exclusively do so. Traces of a discourse of relations, where 'I' (Palestinian or Israeli) is partly constituted by the 'Other' (Israeli or Palestinian) can also be found in the editorials. It is with the vicissitudes of such relational accounts that the article concludes.
This paper re-analyzes Stanley Milgram’s own account of his widely known experiments on obedienc... more This paper re-analyzes Stanley Milgram’s own account of his widely known experiments on obedience to authority. It will focus on the conceptual apparatus that Milgram constructed to interpret his findings and the way his crucial concepts – morality, authority and obedience – were empirically operationalized. First, the re-analysis will argue that Milgram in none of these cases operationalized appropriately the concept he claimed to operationalize. Morality/suffering, the legitimate authority of science and obedience involving free choice were only sporadically present in the experiments, and never present where they should have been relevant. Second, however, the re-analysis will also suggest that Milgram may in fact have operationalized some other concepts with some validity. In the place of legitimate authority of science, we may have an arbitrarily destructive and, arguably, illegitimate authority. In the place of obedience stemming from free choice, we may have acts that are the outcome of coercion and some form of psychological torture. As a result, the ultimate argument of this paper will not be that Milgram’s findings (according to his own account) are null and void. Rather, it raises the possibility that what is of interest in the experiments is not the fact that a majority of people continued to push levers under conditions of coercion, but that a substantial minority somehow managed to extricate themselves. From an indictment of humanity, thus, the “Milgram experiments” will become the demonstration of the resources humans may draw upon to become everyday heroes in rebelling against meaningless, arbitrary and destructive oppression.
This paper seeks to contribute to the growing band of constructionist approaches within the field... more This paper seeks to contribute to the growing band of constructionist approaches within the field of identity studies (Wetherell & Moharty, 2010). First, it will review the developments that have taken place since the emergence of these approaches in the 1980s, identifying a state of fragmentation into local discursive, political-moral and psychosocial levels of analysis. Second, and in order to challenge this fragmentation, it will present a rhetorical psychological (Billig, 1987, 1999a) analysis of the classic exchange of public letters between Israeli historian of Judaism Gershom Scholem and American political theorist Hannah Arendt in the wake of the latter’s book Eichmann in Jerusalem (Arendt 1994a). The analysis will proceed from local discursive action, through political-moral frameworks, to the nature of the writers’ investment in these constructions. It will show that while the participants’ occasioning of extreme identity categories (such as the “Jewish anti-Semite” and the totalitarian-style religious Zionist ideologue) is a function of apparently incommensurable political-moral discourses, the nature of investment into such constructions may be understood in a mutual commitment to the absolute inalienability of Jewishness. Third, therefore, the paper will conclude that, rather than constituting separate “levels”, local discursive action, political-moral intelligibilities and psychosocial qualities are mutually constitutive of each other. It is only through recognizing their inter-dependent nature that the complexity of identity may properly be addressed.
"This paper attempts to unpack the far-reaching theoretical and practical issues that underlay th... more "This paper attempts to unpack the far-reaching theoretical and practical issues that underlay the classical debate between cognitive psychologist Ulric Neisser and discursive social psychologists Derek Edwards and Jonathan Potter on Watergate witness John Dean’s memory (Edwards and Potter, 1992b; Neisser, 1982b). Accounting for their disagreements, Neisser claimed the mantle of the cognitive-ecological approach to memory and emphasized the psychologist’s ultimate priority of truth over discourse, while Edwards and Potter claimed that of discursive/rhetorical psychology and focused exclusively on discourse over truth. As such, the debate at the time ended in mutual misunderstanding and the shadow of theoretical incommensurability. However, as will be argued, a reanalysis of the arguments strongly suggests that Neisser was right about truth when he intuitively sensed the importance of discourse, and Edwards and Potter were right about discourse when they did not lose sight of truth. Therefore, beyond the impasse there has remained a promise inherent in the debate: it demonstrated an imaginative attempt to undermine the absolute dichotomy of truth and rhetoric and demonstrate their mutual inter-dependence. The concluding section will attempt to draw some implications of this promise and sketch out the possibility of a discipline which is not fragmented between received divisions and methods but unified on the basis of things characteristically human: moral sense and political values.
Keywords: Rhetorical psychology, discursive psychology, ecological study of memory, truth, cognition, discourse"
The article revisits the fabled exchange of letter between Hannah Arendt and Gershom Scholem in t... more The article revisits the fabled exchange of letter between Hannah Arendt and Gershom Scholem in the wake of the Eichmann trial. The main focus is on the respective arguments with regard to Jewish responsibility and the question of the possibility of judgement. The paper attempts to recover and contrast the basic framework and sets of assumptions that underlie these arguments. Doing this, it eventually identifies the fundamentally differing political and moral consequences of both Arendt’s and Scholem’s perspectives with regard to both the Holocaust and Jewish identity.
This article examines the significance of the private-public exchange of letters between Gershom ... more This article examines the significance of the private-public exchange of letters between Gershom Scholem and Hannah Arendt in the wake of the Eichmann trial. Using rhetorical analysis, it considers the respective arguments concerning Jewish responsibility, the incompatible political-moral frameworks offered to underpin such judgments, and the extreme identities the correspondents construct for each other. In doing so, it identifies the ultimate significance of the exchange with the total breakdown of discourse it symbolically resulted in—in other words, with the consensus pertaining to the Holocaust leading to a complete incommensurability of the respective political-moral positions. Such a state of affairs is finally accounted for, paradoxically, in terms of the far-reaching agreement between Arendt and Scholem, reaching beyond politics and even identity: the total inescapability of Jewishness.
"Egy ismerõsöm nemrégiben megjegyezte, hogy mást mondok az esszéimben, mint regényeimben, s beval... more "Egy ismerõsöm nemrégiben megjegyezte, hogy mást mondok az esszéimben, mint regényeimben, s bevallom, ismerõsömnek ez az észrevétele annyira meghökkentett, hogy azóta sem tudom kiverni a fejembõl." 1 -Ezzel a mondattal indul Kertész Imre esszékötete, A számûzött nyelv. 2 A szerzõ reakciója kiválóan jellemzi saját életmûvét, mely telis tele van önidézetekkel, regényeiben gyakran esszéisztikus részekkel találkozhatunk, esszéiben pedig nem csak hogy használja szépirodalmi eszköztárát, de mûvei egyik legavatottabb értelmezõjének is tûnik. 3 Kertész életmûve keresztül-kasul kapcsolódik önmagába, érthetõ tehát, ha az "ismerõs" megjegyzése az író részérõl értetlenkedésre talál. Ez a dolgozat elsõsorban Kertész és az "ismerõs" nézetkülönbségének lehetséges miértjeit igyekszik boncolgatni, miközben más szerzõket is vizsgálva Auschwitz néhány értelmezésének következményeivel foglalkozik.
My aim in this paper is not to argue for the uniqueness of the Holocaust in any kind of philosoph... more My aim in this paper is not to argue for the uniqueness of the Holocaust in any kind of philosophical or historic-philosophical sense. What interests me here, is rather the unique consequence of the events that happened under the label of the „Holocaust”. It is, that from the perspective of the phenomenon of „Auschwitz” it seems quite artificial to separate fiction and non-fiction, film, documentary, history-writing, novels, memoirs or even the oral testimonies (cf. Young 1988). It seems quite productive to interpret them in relation to one another, indeed it is sometimes a requirement as well! Since all of these texts „read” each other and together form the (textual) universe, we call: Auschwitz. So the problem that holds importance to me here is how the Fateless by Imre Kertész orients itself towards all of these texts, especially to the oral testimonies. Therefore, after having outlined the general framework according to which I find it sensible to start this interpretative textual journey, I will turn briefly to the oral testimonies of the Holocaust. In the largest part of this paper I will attempt to show how the Fateless in its basic dynamic brings forth the same problem that is presented in the oral testimonies. It is my hope that the reader shall see, how in his novel Kertész handles the phenomenon of „resistance to narrative” (known from the oral testimonies) as one of the main problems. My central thesis is that the Fateless roughly deconstructs the narratives and cultural concepts we commonly use when thinking about the world; and by doing so, Kertész shows, how our cultural heritage as a tool became useless in the realm of the lagers.
In the familiar atmosphere of hue and cry, Violence and Understanding in Gaza encourages its read... more In the familiar atmosphere of hue and cry, Violence and Understanding in Gaza encourages its readers to think for themselves when it comes to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. As the first comprehensive investigation of the British broadsheets' coverage of the armed conflict between the State of Israel and Hamas, Kaposi critiques the newspapers' output, arguing that they without exception merely replicate the black and white logic of war. He contends that the newspapers defeat their own aims about a two-state solution based on compromise. For that to happen, the British media must in future cease to write about the conflict as if it were a mythical contest between Good and Evil. Instead of asking who is innocent and who should be blamed, it should start to treat the conflict as a story of mutually painful but very real human relations. Any meaningful political-moral criticism can only start from that position.
Part of a comprehensive study to analyse British broadsheets' coverage of the First Gaza War, thi... more Part of a comprehensive study to analyse British broadsheets' coverage of the First Gaza War, this paper examines the moral arguments presented in editorials. Doing so, it showcases a non-dualist, relational inquiry of the representation of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Instead of focusing on what is empirically 'true', morally 'right', and ethnically 'Israeli/Jewish' or 'Palestinian/Arab' as extradiscursive categories, it approaches them as discursive constructions and asks what relations, what forms of lives the editorials cultivate in representing them. The analysis demonstrates that whilst newspapers overwhelmingly imagine isolated and ahistorical essences to clash in Palestine-Israel, they do not exclusively do so. Traces of a discourse of relations, where 'I' (Palestinian or Israeli) is partly constituted by the 'Other' (Israeli or Palestinian) can also be found in the editorials. It is with the vicissitudes of such relational accounts that the article concludes.
Part of a comprehensive study to analyse British broadsheets' coverage of the First Gaza War, thi... more Part of a comprehensive study to analyse British broadsheets' coverage of the First Gaza War, this paper examines the moral arguments presented in editorials. Doing so, it showcases a non-dualist, relational inquiry of the representation of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Instead of focusing on what is empirically 'true', morally 'right', and ethnically 'Israeli/Jewish' or 'Palestinian/Arab' as extradiscursive categories, it approaches them as discursive constructions and asks what relations, what forms of lives the editorials cultivate in representing them. The analysis demonstrates that whilst newspapers overwhelmingly imagine isolated and ahistorical essences to clash in Palestine-Israel, they do not exclusively do so. Traces of a discourse of relations, where 'I' (Palestinian or Israeli) is partly constituted by the 'Other' (Israeli or Palestinian) can also be found in the editorials. It is with the vicissitudes of such relational accounts that the article concludes.
This paper re-analyzes Stanley Milgram’s own account of his widely known experiments on obedienc... more This paper re-analyzes Stanley Milgram’s own account of his widely known experiments on obedience to authority. It will focus on the conceptual apparatus that Milgram constructed to interpret his findings and the way his crucial concepts – morality, authority and obedience – were empirically operationalized. First, the re-analysis will argue that Milgram in none of these cases operationalized appropriately the concept he claimed to operationalize. Morality/suffering, the legitimate authority of science and obedience involving free choice were only sporadically present in the experiments, and never present where they should have been relevant. Second, however, the re-analysis will also suggest that Milgram may in fact have operationalized some other concepts with some validity. In the place of legitimate authority of science, we may have an arbitrarily destructive and, arguably, illegitimate authority. In the place of obedience stemming from free choice, we may have acts that are the outcome of coercion and some form of psychological torture. As a result, the ultimate argument of this paper will not be that Milgram’s findings (according to his own account) are null and void. Rather, it raises the possibility that what is of interest in the experiments is not the fact that a majority of people continued to push levers under conditions of coercion, but that a substantial minority somehow managed to extricate themselves. From an indictment of humanity, thus, the “Milgram experiments” will become the demonstration of the resources humans may draw upon to become everyday heroes in rebelling against meaningless, arbitrary and destructive oppression.
This paper seeks to contribute to the growing band of constructionist approaches within the field... more This paper seeks to contribute to the growing band of constructionist approaches within the field of identity studies (Wetherell & Moharty, 2010). First, it will review the developments that have taken place since the emergence of these approaches in the 1980s, identifying a state of fragmentation into local discursive, political-moral and psychosocial levels of analysis. Second, and in order to challenge this fragmentation, it will present a rhetorical psychological (Billig, 1987, 1999a) analysis of the classic exchange of public letters between Israeli historian of Judaism Gershom Scholem and American political theorist Hannah Arendt in the wake of the latter’s book Eichmann in Jerusalem (Arendt 1994a). The analysis will proceed from local discursive action, through political-moral frameworks, to the nature of the writers’ investment in these constructions. It will show that while the participants’ occasioning of extreme identity categories (such as the “Jewish anti-Semite” and the totalitarian-style religious Zionist ideologue) is a function of apparently incommensurable political-moral discourses, the nature of investment into such constructions may be understood in a mutual commitment to the absolute inalienability of Jewishness. Third, therefore, the paper will conclude that, rather than constituting separate “levels”, local discursive action, political-moral intelligibilities and psychosocial qualities are mutually constitutive of each other. It is only through recognizing their inter-dependent nature that the complexity of identity may properly be addressed.
"This paper attempts to unpack the far-reaching theoretical and practical issues that underlay th... more "This paper attempts to unpack the far-reaching theoretical and practical issues that underlay the classical debate between cognitive psychologist Ulric Neisser and discursive social psychologists Derek Edwards and Jonathan Potter on Watergate witness John Dean’s memory (Edwards and Potter, 1992b; Neisser, 1982b). Accounting for their disagreements, Neisser claimed the mantle of the cognitive-ecological approach to memory and emphasized the psychologist’s ultimate priority of truth over discourse, while Edwards and Potter claimed that of discursive/rhetorical psychology and focused exclusively on discourse over truth. As such, the debate at the time ended in mutual misunderstanding and the shadow of theoretical incommensurability. However, as will be argued, a reanalysis of the arguments strongly suggests that Neisser was right about truth when he intuitively sensed the importance of discourse, and Edwards and Potter were right about discourse when they did not lose sight of truth. Therefore, beyond the impasse there has remained a promise inherent in the debate: it demonstrated an imaginative attempt to undermine the absolute dichotomy of truth and rhetoric and demonstrate their mutual inter-dependence. The concluding section will attempt to draw some implications of this promise and sketch out the possibility of a discipline which is not fragmented between received divisions and methods but unified on the basis of things characteristically human: moral sense and political values.
Keywords: Rhetorical psychology, discursive psychology, ecological study of memory, truth, cognition, discourse"
The article revisits the fabled exchange of letter between Hannah Arendt and Gershom Scholem in t... more The article revisits the fabled exchange of letter between Hannah Arendt and Gershom Scholem in the wake of the Eichmann trial. The main focus is on the respective arguments with regard to Jewish responsibility and the question of the possibility of judgement. The paper attempts to recover and contrast the basic framework and sets of assumptions that underlie these arguments. Doing this, it eventually identifies the fundamentally differing political and moral consequences of both Arendt’s and Scholem’s perspectives with regard to both the Holocaust and Jewish identity.
This article examines the significance of the private-public exchange of letters between Gershom ... more This article examines the significance of the private-public exchange of letters between Gershom Scholem and Hannah Arendt in the wake of the Eichmann trial. Using rhetorical analysis, it considers the respective arguments concerning Jewish responsibility, the incompatible political-moral frameworks offered to underpin such judgments, and the extreme identities the correspondents construct for each other. In doing so, it identifies the ultimate significance of the exchange with the total breakdown of discourse it symbolically resulted in—in other words, with the consensus pertaining to the Holocaust leading to a complete incommensurability of the respective political-moral positions. Such a state of affairs is finally accounted for, paradoxically, in terms of the far-reaching agreement between Arendt and Scholem, reaching beyond politics and even identity: the total inescapability of Jewishness.
"Egy ismerõsöm nemrégiben megjegyezte, hogy mást mondok az esszéimben, mint regényeimben, s beval... more "Egy ismerõsöm nemrégiben megjegyezte, hogy mást mondok az esszéimben, mint regényeimben, s bevallom, ismerõsömnek ez az észrevétele annyira meghökkentett, hogy azóta sem tudom kiverni a fejembõl." 1 -Ezzel a mondattal indul Kertész Imre esszékötete, A számûzött nyelv. 2 A szerzõ reakciója kiválóan jellemzi saját életmûvét, mely telis tele van önidézetekkel, regényeiben gyakran esszéisztikus részekkel találkozhatunk, esszéiben pedig nem csak hogy használja szépirodalmi eszköztárát, de mûvei egyik legavatottabb értelmezõjének is tûnik. 3 Kertész életmûve keresztül-kasul kapcsolódik önmagába, érthetõ tehát, ha az "ismerõs" megjegyzése az író részérõl értetlenkedésre talál. Ez a dolgozat elsõsorban Kertész és az "ismerõs" nézetkülönbségének lehetséges miértjeit igyekszik boncolgatni, miközben más szerzõket is vizsgálva Auschwitz néhány értelmezésének következményeivel foglalkozik.
My aim in this paper is not to argue for the uniqueness of the Holocaust in any kind of philosoph... more My aim in this paper is not to argue for the uniqueness of the Holocaust in any kind of philosophical or historic-philosophical sense. What interests me here, is rather the unique consequence of the events that happened under the label of the „Holocaust”. It is, that from the perspective of the phenomenon of „Auschwitz” it seems quite artificial to separate fiction and non-fiction, film, documentary, history-writing, novels, memoirs or even the oral testimonies (cf. Young 1988). It seems quite productive to interpret them in relation to one another, indeed it is sometimes a requirement as well! Since all of these texts „read” each other and together form the (textual) universe, we call: Auschwitz. So the problem that holds importance to me here is how the Fateless by Imre Kertész orients itself towards all of these texts, especially to the oral testimonies. Therefore, after having outlined the general framework according to which I find it sensible to start this interpretative textual journey, I will turn briefly to the oral testimonies of the Holocaust. In the largest part of this paper I will attempt to show how the Fateless in its basic dynamic brings forth the same problem that is presented in the oral testimonies. It is my hope that the reader shall see, how in his novel Kertész handles the phenomenon of „resistance to narrative” (known from the oral testimonies) as one of the main problems. My central thesis is that the Fateless roughly deconstructs the narratives and cultural concepts we commonly use when thinking about the world; and by doing so, Kertész shows, how our cultural heritage as a tool became useless in the realm of the lagers.
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Keywords: Rhetorical psychology, discursive psychology, ecological study of memory, truth, cognition, discourse"
Keywords: Rhetorical psychology, discursive psychology, ecological study of memory, truth, cognition, discourse"