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must accept. Of traditional monuments such as this, Young says that “rather than preserving public memory, the monument displaces it altogether, supplanting a community’s memory-work with its own material form.”9 Where a traditional monument forces the viewer to see a historical event in a certain way, a countermonument provides the freedom for interpretation. This is the point from which discourse arises. In memorials such as Monument Against Fascism, what is being represented is the immense loss and suffering that characterized the Holocaust and its aftermath. The countermonument works to represent an absence by creating an absence and encouraging an interaction with the monument which is indeterminate and promotes discomfort. To remember an absence, Young believes that an artist must in turn create an absence. By slowly burying itself in the ground, Monument Against Fascism is doing exactly this. The unconventional aesthetic of the monument encourages a dialogue between itself and the viewer who encounters it. While an idol exists as a self-enclosed totality, an image does not aim for this completion. Images are marked by the withdrawal of truth, where the withdrawal is present in its absence and is constituted by what is absent.10 Monument Against Fascism is marked by its physical absence once it is buried, an appropriate metaphor for the absence of the victims of fascism. Stubblefield claims that the significance of the monument disintegrates in the banality brought on by its location, making it invisible in a negative and unintentional way. He argues that because the discourse switched focus—from the topic of the monument to the logistics surrounding it—the monument is a failure. However, Nancy would disagree on the basis that an image, unlike an idol, is not in the position to dictate the discourse that it inspires. Whereas a traditional monument’s “essential stiffness and grandiose pretensions to permanence thus doom it to an archaic, premodern status,” the countermonument does not promote the same rigid perspective.11 Being open and incomplete in its meaning, a countermonument does not instruct a viewer to think anything in particular. The countermonument’s absence