Unrecognizable Subjects, Grief, and Repair in Esther Dischereit’s Blumen Für Otello (2014)

Abstract

This article examines the aesthetics, ethics, and politics of artistic grief work in the 2014 text assemblage Blumen für Otello by contemporary German Jewish artist and activist Esther Dischereit. Dischereit’s work offers a complex engagement with racialized violence in post-unification Germany, tackling the murders perpetrated by the Nationalsozialistischer Untergrund (National Socialist Underground, NSU) between 2000 and 2007. In their response to the crimes, the German authorities wilfully obstructed investigative efforts and ultimately failed to deliver justice. This situation was exacerbated by a public and media discourse that consistently trivialized the crimes and dehumanized their victims. Against this backdrop, Dischereit’s text offers an artistic intervention into the hierarchies of ‘grievability’ (Butler) and care that enabled such failures in the first place. Drawing on theorists Judith Butler, Çiğdem Inan and Encarnación Gutiérrez Rodríguez, I propose that Blumen für Otello develops and champions an aesthetics, ethics and politics of dispossession. Employing strategies of transveral affectation and mourning, multi-layered translation and post-catastrophic improvisation, Dischereit’s approach has the potential to undo the division between grievable and ungrievable lives. As such, it may foster reparative modes of agency and relationality that enable the (re-)construction of alternative fields of care.