Amit Pinchevski

• Professor
• Professor (Full) at Hebrew University of Jerusalem

Das Verhältnis des Philosophen Emmanuel Levinas zu den Künsten ist bisher im Schatten seiner Ethik geblieben. Gleichwohl durchziehen Fragen des Ästhetischen, des Performativen, der Medien und Technik sein gesamtes Werk. Mit diesem Band liegt erstmals eine Auswahl an ästhetischen und medialen Zugängen zum Werk von Levinas in deutscher Sprache vor. D...

Recommendations for Digitally Recording, Recirculating and Remixing Holocaust Testimony

This article explores the relationship between psychotherapy and sound reproduction technologies from the early 20th century to the present. Subscribing to a media genealogy approach, it traces the changing status of the recorded voice in therapy as set against broader transformations in the field of mental health. Delving into the recorded voice’s...

The task of topical segmentation is well studied, but previous work has mostly addressed it in the context of structured, well-defined segments, such as segmentation into paragraphs, chapters, or segmenting text that originated from multiple sources. We tackle the task of segmenting running (spoken) narratives, which poses hitherto unaddressed chal...

This paper takes recent PTSD claims by content moderators working for Microsoft and Google as a starting point to discuss the changing nature of trauma in the context of social media and algorithmic culture. Placing these claims in the longer history of how media came to be regarded by clinicians as potentially traumatic, it considers content moder...

Associations between trauma and media theory are longstanding, going back at least to Walter Benjamin’s observations on technology and modernity, which were themselves informed by Freud’s 1920 speculations on war trauma following WWI. A century later, and in the wake of numerous conflicts, catastrophes, and far-reaching technological transformation...

Setting dialogue in opposition to dissemination is one of the main themes of Speaking into the Air. This however does not entail regarding them as dichotomous or mutually exclusive. This article proposes that dialogue and dissemination are in fact interconnected, forming what I call “mutually assured heteronomy”: each finds its justification and li...

Recent years saw the rise of communication experts, operating in various contexts and enjoying high levels of popularity. The paper examines this expertise asking: What kind of expertise do communication experts hold? What is the communication they are expert in? And what can scholars of communication learn from experts who practice it professional...

carries out this thought experiment to great effect. By bringing media theory to bear on trauma theory, this book reveals the technical operations that inform the understanding of traumatic impact on bodies and minds. Under consideration is not the way trauma and traumatic memory figure in the media (film, television, photography and other popular...

In Transmitted Wounds, Amit Pinchevski explores the ways media technology and logic shape the social life of trauma both clinically and culturally. Bringing media theory to bear on trauma theory, Pinchevski reveals the technical operations that inform the conception and experience of traumatic impact and memory. He offers a bold thesis about the de...

“Transmission” is a term used, curiously enough, in both technology and psychology. In the former, it denotes the transfer of messages from one point to another, a view that was principally theorized by Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver. Technologically speaking, transmission names the conveyance of information from sender to receiver through a desi...

At the base of all Holocaust testimony projects lies a common commitment: to record and preserve the stories of those who survived the catastrophe as told in their own voices. When it comes to survivors’ testimonies, the messenger is as important as the message. The first to subscribe to this reasoning was the American psychologist David Boder, who...

In Transmitted Wounds, Amit Pinchevski explores the ways media technology and logic shape the social life of trauma both clinically and culturally. Bringing media theory to bear on trauma theory, Pinchevski reveals the technical operations that inform the conception and experience of traumatic impact and memory. He offers a bold thesis about the de...

Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) presents a puzzling pathology of memory. An event, usually experienced with great fear and distress, is remembered not through typical recollections of past occurrences, upsetting as they may be, but instead as repeated and intrusive re-experiencing of the event as if happening once again. This is more or less...

Shortly after the 1989 Hillsborough Stadium disaster in Sheffield, England, sixteen people brought actions claiming to suffer a “nervous shock” as a result of learning from the media about the fatal human crush that occurred during a soccer match. The plaintiffs, most of whom were relatives of the victims, demanded compensations as secondary victim...

In 1995 Binjamin Wilkomirski published a book that was to become a source of fierce controversy. Fragments: Memories of a Wartime Childhood recounts Wilkomirski’s experiences of surviving alone two concentration camps as a small Jewish child from Poland. Having lived most of his life as Bruno Dössekker, the adopted son of a Swiss couple, Wilkomirsk...

Modern technological media and psychoanalysis are historically coextensive, so argues Friedrich Kittler. During the last decades of the nineteenth century, a profound transformation had taken place in the material conditions of communication—what Kittler terms Aufschreibesystem (literally “writing-down system,” translated as “discourse network”). P...

Two weeks into the Adolf Eichmann trial, toward the end of April 1961, the poet Haim Gouri, who chronicled the proceedings for a local Israeli newspaper, wrote in his column: “The country carries on as usual, day and night, and this trial accompanies it. The one goes on, the other alongside. Away from the courtroom, there is no outward sign of it....

In Transmitted Wounds, Amit Pinchevski explores the ways media technology and logic shape the social life of trauma both clinically and culturally. Bringing media theory to bear on trauma theory, Pinchevski reveals the technical operations that inform the conception and experience of traumatic impact and memory. He offers a bold thesis about the de...

This article applies a media geneaology perspective to examine the operative logic of Google Translate. Tracing machine translation from post–World War II (WWII) rule-based methods to contemporary algorithmic statistical methods, we analyze the underlying power structure of algorithmic and human collaboration that Translate encompasses. Focusing on...

Media Events is a key text in explicating the relation between media and event insofar as it provides an account of time experienced through the structures and practices of broadcasting. We suggest that Dayan and Katz’s book investigates the heyday of a particular version of historicity, which is now giving way to a networked configuration of media...

This article takes sound as its analytical point of departure in asking the following question: What does sound do in television news? Exploring the conventions of sound used by producers of Israeli television news, from the signature tune to the various news items, this study reveals the role of sound as part of journalistic framing practices but...

Although entering only recently into communication scholarship, the problem of alterity is intrinsic to communication theory and philosophy. Alterity presents the challenge of resistance to communication and of the limit of communication. As such, it invites rethinking communication not simply as a question of knowledge and understanding but as a q...

Recent studies in psychiatry reveal an acceptance of trauma through the media. Traditionally restricted to immediate experience, Post-traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) is now expanding to include mediated experience. How did this development come about? How does mediated trauma manifest itself? What are its consequences? This essay addresses these q...

This article explores the elective affinities between autism and new media. Autistic spectrum disorder (ASD) provides a uniquely apt case for considering the conceptual link between mental disability and media technology. Tracing the history of the disorder through its various media connections and connotations, we propose a narrative of the transi...

‘Media witnessing’ designates a new configuration of mediation, representation and experience that is involved in the transformation of our sense of historical significance. It refers to the witnessing performed in, by and through the media: the appearance of witnesses in media reports, the possibility of media themselves bearing witness and the po...

This article explores the way Levinas communicates his ethical message through the media at work in his work speech, writing, and rare references to modern media. Levinas’s ethical message concerns the import of the relation with the other, a relation that interrupts any attempt at its thematization, including Levinas’s own philosophy. Levinas’s te...

In September 2012 a series of violent protests erupted in the Middle East, North Africa and Asia in response to a YouTube film that caricatured Islam’s Prophet Muhammad. The protests, which were directed primarily towards the US where the short film was made, echoed the similar violent reactions to the publications of the Prophet Muhammad cartoons...

Modern technological media and psychoanalysis are historically coextensive, so argues Friedrich Kittler. During the last decades of the nineteenth century, a profound transformation had taken place in the material conditions of communication—what Kittler terms Aufschreibesystem (literally “writing-down system,” translated as “discourse network”). 1...

This line whose writing is to be sought is a wandering line. It leads us in the search of this “something else,” the elementary object of this manifest begging that emanates from the slightest gesture of any child, and is exacerbated when coming from a maladapted child. Browsing through Web sites dedicated to information about autism, one might com...

Discussions on memory nowadays seem to proceed in two general directions. On the one hand, there is a growing interest in mediated memory: the various forms by which memory is formed and shared by means of media technologies, especially new media and multimedia. On the other hand, there is a consistent preoccupation with traumatic memory, that is,...

This paper aims to demonstrate the relevance of media witnessing – the witnessing performed in, by, and through the media – in situations of asymmetric conflict. The expansion of media technologies has brought new opportunities for both individuals and organizations to bear witness to events and broadcast their reports to increasingly wider audienc...

This essay considers the role of the radio in the mediation of trauma during the 1961 Eichmann trial. It is argued that radio broadcasts from the courtroom occasioned a transformation in the status of Holocaust survivors in Israel, who had been previously seen as deeply traumatized, unable or unwilling to speak about their experiences. Taking to th...

Contemporary media saturation requires us to rethink the notion of crisis. This paper characterizes crisis not in terms of isolable moments and significant events, but as a generalized and routine background condition—a persistent crisis-readiness. It is sustained and performed by a new media configuration: an assemblage of mediation, representatio...

From the Holocaust to 9/11, modern communications systems have incessantly exposed us to reports of distant and horrifying events, experienced by strangers, and brought to us through media technologies. In this book leading scholars explore key questions concerning the truth status and broader implications of 'media witnessing'.

Witnessing has recently become a contested issue in media scholarship, constituting a complex practice midway between experience and agency. Occupying a distinctive place in contemporary media studies, witnessing combines the evolution of media technologies — production, transmission, and representation — with weighty questions of morality and audi...

The Stalags, an Israeli pulp fiction series whose advent coincided with the 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem, portrayed sadomasochistic scenarios between SS female guards and Allied soldiers in POW camps. Written in Hebrew by native Israelis, these cheap pocketbooks were enormously popular with Israeli teenagers, many of whom were children...

This essay attempts to mobilize some key concepts developed in the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas into communication thought framework. The main argument is that Levinas's speculation on ethics as first philosophy provides an alternative perspective from which to view the relation between communication and ethics. At its core is the concept of inte...

This paper examines perhaps the ultimate manifestation of a communicational boundary: autism. It explores how autism has become an object of knowledge in disciplines concerned with mental and social life and identifies modes of communicability and incommunicability that have been deployed in clinical, scientific and social research. Such polarized...

By Way of Interruption presents a radically different way of thinking about communication ethics. While modern communication thought has traditionally viewed successful communication as ethically favorable, Pinchevski proposes the contrary: that ethical communication does not ultimately lie in the successful completion of communication but rather i...

This article explores the ethical dimensions of computer‐mediated communication held in chatrooms. The philosophical underpinnings refer to the work of Martin Buber and Emmanuel Levinas, specifically to concepts relating to the ethics of Other‐oriented communication. The main argument is that this medium presents serious difficulty for Other‐orient...

Street names are mundane media through which the past is commemorated and introduced into the public sphere. Viewed from a semiotic perspective, street names constitute a spatial-text produced over time, capturing the political, social and cultural climates in which it is formed. In this article we propose an analysis of street names in four Israel...

Diacritics 31.2 (2001) 71-84 —Paul Celan, "Speak, You Also" —Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster Whereas ethical questions have challenged concepts of self, identity, and society, the concept of freedom of speech—and its place in recent discussions on pluralism and multiculturalism—has remained largely unproblematized. The challenge I wis...

In this paper, we present a critical viewpoint of human dialogue in the modern age. In our view, the Internet, as the paramount cultural guidepost at the end of the millennium, is a stark reflection of the barrier in human communication in our time. By means of an analysis of conversation transcripts at virtual conversation sites, we shall endeavor...