disruptive of the urban fabric in negative ways (as
I distinguish analytically between diachronic
your reference to rent and public transport implies), (historical) and synchronic (contemporary)
I think it can also be disruptive in positive ways: implication, but I also suggest that these two forms
I would not underestimate the impact of coming almost always appear together. To give an example
across Stolpersteine [stumbling stones] dedicated to of what I mean: white people in former slave
victims of the Nazis in the streets of European cities; owning and slave trading societies are diachronically
I would be surprised if the historical consciousness implicated in slavery but the afterlives of slavery
of many tourists had not been deepened by such have also perpetuated inequalities in the present that
encounters. render those same people synchronically implicated.
It’s difficult to untangle those two axes, but I think
3. You’ve recently published The implicated
subject, in which you present a new figure that
seeks to overcome the categories of victim,
perpetrator and bystander in order to analyse
political responsibilities. Would you care to
elaborate on the concept of the implicated
subject?
it’s still worth making the analytical distinction for
the purposes of conceptual clarity and in order to
facilitate comparisons between different scenarios.
Among the other issues I tackle in the book
are what I call “complex implication,” which
describes situations in which one may have strong
ties to histories of victimization (what Marianne
Hirsch calls “postmemory”) and still be implicated
My new book arose from a sense that we have had in contemporary injustices. I explore complex
an impoverished and non-systematic conceptual implication by discussing the work of Jewish artists
vocabulary for addressing some key issues regarding who evoke memory of the Holocaust while exploring
responsibility for violence and inequality. I believe implication in the Israeli occupation of Palestine and
we have been too fixated on the binary opposition South African apartheid, respectively. Finally, I’m
between victims and perpetrators in both scholarship interested in how artists, intellectuals, and activists
and public discourse. I became interested in transform consciousness of their own implication
figures who enable, inherit, benefit from, and help into acts of what I call “long-distance solidarity,”
perpetuate violence and inequality without being forms of internationalist solidarity that cross lines of
perpetrators in any moral or legal sense. In my identity, nation, and status. Long-distance solidarity
opinion, the concept of the bystander is also too is a vexed and difficult form of affiliation, but I see
weak to describe these kinds of issues because it the kinds of alliances it makes possible as necessary
implies not only passivity but a certain innocence. to political transformation.
My book is about people (most of us!) who are not
guilty of crimes or “perpetrators” of exploitation,
but remain historically and politically responsible in
different ways for atrocities and inequalities both in
the past and present. There has been important work
in recent years on related issues such as complicity
by scholars such as Mark Sanders, Christopher
4. Together with Yasemin Yildiz you are writing
a book about how the population that has
recently migrated to Germany perceives and
relates to the Nazi history of the country and the
Holocaust. Could you share with us some of the
working conclusions of your study?
Kutz, Naomi Mandel, and Debarati Sanyal, and on
the figure of the beneficiary by scholars such as We started working on this project about a decade
Mahmood Mamdani, Robert Meister, and Bruce ago when we noticed the emergence of a troubling
Robbins, but I saw the need for an umbrella term discourse on immigrants—especially those from
that would bring together different forms of what so-called Muslim countries like Turkey—and
I call implication: our indirect entanglement in Holocaust memory. In a 2011 article called “Memory
injustices. Citizenship,” we came to identify a “migrant double
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