ABSTRACT
Although Adorno’s comments on the status of culture after Auschwitz, along with Benjamin’s theses on the philosophy of history, have become standard references when discussing representations of the Holocaust, new forms of recorded testimony and television melodrama have raised issues that were not anticipated by these earlier theorists. Contemporary poststructuralist trauma theory, emerging from DeManian deconstruction and the study of Holocaust testimony, has conceptualized traumatic memoryand often photographic, video or fi lm images-as a literal trace of a past event. However, this theory of the traumatic image becomes, in the context of Holocaust studies, not so much a means of evading ideology (as I have argued it was for Barthes) but a basis for recovering historical experience through verbal testimony or archival images. As a result, specifi c representations of the Holocaust have been granted special status and removed from their more general contexts in contemporary media culture. I argue that such claims for the transmission of traumatic experience through visual media reduce our ability to grasp the larger historical signifi cance of the image.
