Abstract
ABSTRACT This paper sets out to explore a question opened up by the growing number of life‐writings and oral testimony currently being produced by members of‘the second generation’. That is, how can the descendants of Jewish Holocaust survivors free themselves from ‘the repetition of suffering’, which, in the language of Lacanian psychoanalysis, could be described as the attachment to an unbearable form of enjoyment (jouissance) of the Shoah? The paper pursues a Lacanian reading of the writing of one such descendant, the expatriate Australian writer, Lily Brett. It considers whether the themes of anxiety, death, eating, bodies and the fantasy of love between mothers and daughters that structure her stories constitute a form of testimony with, as the Lacanian Israeli psychoanalyst Rivka Warshawsky puts it, ‘the power of resolving the repetition compulsion’.
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