The Ethics of Discomfort: Critical Perpetrator Studies and/as Education after Auschwitz

Abstract

This chapter begins with Adorno’s call for a critical engagement with perpetrators in his essay “Education after Auschwitz.” Adorno conceives of education as promoting autonomy and critical self-reflection. I relate this to Foucault’s conception of “desubjectivation” and an ethics of discomfort, which I develop as a core principle of teaching about perpetrators and a critical Perpetrator Studies more generally. I argue that literature and art have a crucial role to play as they can both model and elicit a productive sense of discomfort. I draw on two examples to illustrate this claim: a work of literary non-fiction, Helga Schubert’s Die Welt da drinnen (2003); and Milo Rau’s Breivik’s Statement (2012), a performance piece. I discuss these works in terms of the concepts of empathic unsettlement and affirmative critique, respectively, and show how they are each committed to a critical perpetrator pedagogy that is informed by an ethics of discomfort.