Tales of affect, 'thick' and 'thin': on distantiation in Holocaust historiography

In this essay the author uses Freud's schema of 'thick' and 'thin' to explain the visceral affect of memories of the Holocaust on survivors and perpetrators and bystanders. For the survivors the 'thick' visceral affect of memories of past violence is intense as though the threat of violence were still actively present. For perpetrators the affect is 'thin' and the disavowel of actions and the crimes he or she ordered or committed transpires as a defensive tendency to blame the victim. This can be seen in the book 'Neighbours by Jan Gross. The essay concludes with a reflection on the biopolitical impications of a dialectics between 'thick' and 'thin' affect, which suggests a contemporary-historiographic construction of 'normalcy' as an appearance of continuity privileges the standpoint of a subject who disavows his or her implication in the violence and crises that sentence others to destruction.