French Literature Reviews - 2026

The Literary and Cultural Rhetoric of Victimhood. Western Europe, 1970-2005
Philosophy, Anthropology and Ideas

Fatima NAQVI, The Literary and Cultural Rhetoric of Victimhood. Western Europe, 1970-2005, New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2007, 272 p.

ISBN 1-4039-7570-1

SUMMARY

This study analyzes the pervasive rhetoric of victimhood in European culture since 1968. In a radically fragmented public sphere, individuals perceive themselves as dissociated from all others, while at the same time they feel similar to everyone else. Where genuine solidarity and communality are attenuated, people present themselves as victims to garner media attention, create fragile social bonds, or escape supposed marginalization and oppression. Fatima Naqvi commences with interpretations of Sigmund Freud, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, arguing that contemporary discourse continues a trajectory mapped in the early 20th century—in the shadow of Nazism. In a series of paradigmatic readings of René Girard, Peter Sloterdijk, Michael Haneke, Anselm Kiefer, Christoph Ransmayr, Friederike Mayröcker, Michel Houellebecq, Giorgio Agamben, and Elfriede Jelinek, she traces the ongoing fascination with victimhood and the desire for victim status in the West. She looks at the way in which such cultural anxiety expresses itself; at how victim rhetoric calls itself into question; and, finally, at how it perpetuates itself in the moment that it becomes philosophically ungrounded.

CONTENTS

Sacrificial Victims: Sigmund Freud, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Walter Benjamin

Politics of Indifference: René Girard and Peter Sloterdijk

Mediated Invisibility: Michael Haneke

Apocalyptic Cosmologies: Christoph Ransmayr and Anselm Kiefer

Melancholia Is Moot: Return to Freud

Impoverishment and Feminization: Friederike Mayröcker

Television’s Foreign Voices: Elfriede Jelinek

A Domain of Sexual Struggle: Michel Houellebecq

The Quest for the Sacred: Giorgio Agamben

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Fatima Naqvi is Assistant Professor at Rutgers University, where she teaches courses on 20th-century German literature and film. She has written on film adaptation as melancholic translation, history and cosmology in recent German culture, the poetics of violence in the films of Michael Haneke, as well as aesthetic education in Thomas Bernhard’s novels. She has also published on Bernhard’s controversial drama Heldenplatz, El Greco’s influence on Rilke’s poetry, laughter as a means of social action in Roberto Benigni’s La vita è bella, and Catholicism’s continuing presence in contemporary Austrian writing.

The modern landscape of cultural criticism and philosophy has frequently engaged with the psychological and social conditions of the fragmented public sphere. Within the traditions of intellectual history and cultural studies, the intersection of media attention, marginalization and shifting social bonds forms a central area of inquiry. Scholars often examine how individual perceptions of isolation and similarity manifest in contemporary public discourse, tracing how theoretical frameworks from earlier decades continue to influence modern interpretations of society, culture and politics in Western Europe.

Fatima Naqvi analyzes the pervasive rhetoric of victimhood in European culture from 1970 to 2005, beginning with interpretations of Sigmund Freud, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer. Through readings of thinkers and creators such as René Girard, Peter Sloterdijk, Michael Haneke, Michel Houellebecq and Giorgio Agamben, the study traces an ongoing fascination with victim status and the ways cultural anxiety expresses itself. Readers interested in contemporary European literature, film and cultural theory may find this volume relevant to their inquiries.