1. Just What Part of “Auschwitz” Don’t We Understand?
When Theodor Adorno situated contemporary culture “after
Auschwitz,” he coined a phrase that has been accumulating
significance and intensity as this culture moves on into the future
and Auschwitz recedes, reluctantly, into the past. In the course
of this movement, Auschwitz has come to represent the Holocaust for
contemporary imagination. When we say “Auschwitz,” we do
not mean the concentration camp in occupied Poland, or we do not mean
merely that; we also refer to the vast network of bureaucracy, regional
and personal politics, personal and impersonal betrayals and hatreds,
German nationalist and racist presumptions that found expression
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in National Socialism and a leader in Hitler, the scapegoat mentality and
delusional ideology produced by a centuries-old anti-Semitism—in
short, the immense, cumulative, complex, profound, prosaic, stunning, and
disturbingly banal process that produced what is known as the Holocaust.
So when we refer to “Auschwitz,” we mean something else;
when we say we exist “after Auschwitz,” we are making
a statement about our own relation to history and to an especially
uncomfortable past. Just what that relation is, and what that past
contains, rises bleakly to mind: a train station, cattle cars, bewildered
naked people, some go to the right, some go to the left, gas, ovens,
chimney, smoke. A process stunning in its simplicity—the reduction
of living people to smoke and ashes—while overwhelming in its
implications: the reduction of living people to smoke and ashes. The
word “Auschwitz” emblematizes this simplicity—giving
the process a specific location and a name—while enacting its
complexity: specifying, locating, and naming. Like any word, or any
name, “Auschwitz” both signifies and effaces, refers and
defers. When we posit ourselves “after Auschwitz,” we situate
ourselves in the presence of people who died there, as well as in the
accusing presence of those who survived it. Such an enunciation of
“we” forces us to confront our own complex subject position
of “after Auschwitz,” according to which we stand in some
relation to both.
This relation is most often articulated in terms of an inability
to perceive it, couched in an emphasis on the limits of thought,
language, and representation, and as such is characterized by what I
call a rhetoric of the unspeakable. Auschwitz, in particular,
and the Holocaust, in general, are commonly referred to as unspeakable,
unthinkable, inconceivable, incomprehensible, and challenging (or forcing
us to reestablish, or to rethink, or to acknowledge, or to probe)
the “limits of representation.” The more we speak about
Auschwitz, it seems, the more prevalent and compelling our gestures
toward the limits of our speech, our knowledge, and our world.
These gestures are familiar. “To write poetry after Auschwitz
is barbaric,” says Adorno. “The world of Auschwitz
lies outside speech as it lies outside reason” says George
Steiner. “Auschwitz negates all systems, destroys all
doctrines” says Elie Wiesel.1 More recently, and most
significantly, Jean-François Lyotard posits Auschwitz as a
differend—the space that cannot
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(yet) be filled by any single discourse of history, politics, or
philosophy. “Auschwitz,” then, stands for the unspeakable: A
complex challenge to communication, comprehension, and thought, the word
refers to the limit of words, pointing toward a realm inaccessible to
knowledge. Speaking the unspeakable would extend or efface these
limits, diminishing the distance between us and that realm, highlighting
the complex relation between what language includes and excludes, and
forcing us to confront the implications of such effacement for thinking,
writing, and speaking about what has been assumed to be unspeakable.
In addressing a rhetoric of the unspeakable in relation to the
Holocaust, I assume that it is not merely an ironic paradox that the
most thoroughly documented atrocity in human history is figured as the
emblem of this history’s incomprehensibility. While we would like
to think that the sheer magnitude of the destruction (in Poland alone:
500,000 by mobile operations, 550,000 in the ghettos, 1,950,000 in
the camps, three million all together)2 would require a physical challenge to
articulation, these figures slip easily off the tongue, forcing us to
address the distinction between what is physically unspeakable, what is
socially unspeakable, how these realms are determined, and the extent to
which they interact. Further, the prevalence of such gestures toward the
unspeakable in Holocaust writing demands that we question their purpose
and function in such writing, and, further, in the broader parameters of
contemporary culture, so often defined as “After Auschwitz”
or “post-Holocaust.” In this context, it is worth considering
the extent to which the presumed “unspeakable” quality of
the Holocaust—a quality usually associated with the sacred, with
the ineffable, and with the challenge to ethics and aesthetics posed
by scenes of mass suffering and death—is a cultural construct,
replete with the interests and assumptions that govern any cultural
construct, less a quality of the event itself than an expression of our
own motivations and desires.
This essay will address the presence and operation of a rhetoric of the
unspeakable in writing after the Holocaust, as well as the implications
of this rhetoric for those who use it. The “we” in my essay
refers specifically to those who, like the philosophers and historians
I discuss, situate themselves in a history and culture defined as
“after Auschwitz,” a historical moment and cultural stance
that is problematized by the limits to knowledge posed by this term. It
is the underlying argument of this essay that a rhetoric of
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the unspeakable, by distancing the Holocaust from contemporary culture,
eradicates our responsibility toward, and even our complicity with,
what has been deemed beyond the range of human thought.
2. Avoiding “Holocaust”
In 1952, Bruno Bettelheim criticized the term
“Holocaust,” calling it a heuristic that permits
us to “manage . . . intellectually” what would
“overwhelm us emotionally,” hinting that this
“linguistic circumlocution”3 is somehow similar to the Nazi’s
term, final solution, and the technical term, genocide,
coined at the Nuremberg trials: “Calling the Holocaust a burnt
offering is a sacrilege, a profanation of God and man. . . . To call these
most wretched victims of a murderous delusion, of destructive drives run
rampant, martyrs or a burnt offering is a distortion invented for our
comfort, small as it may be . . . it robs them of the last recognition
which could be theirs, denies them the last dignity we could accord them:
to face and accept what their death was all about, not embellishing it
for the small psychological relief this may give us.”4
By focusing on the motivations of naming, Bettelheim alerts us to
the cultural, social, and psychological assumptions that determine
the assignation of language to an event. Our choice of such terms as
“martyrs” or “burnt offering” reflects our own
interests: it reveals a “distortion invented for our comfort,”
offering “psychological relief,” however small, not to the
victims or the survivors but to those of us who are doing the naming. At
the same time, though, Bettelheim employs terminology of the sacred to
critique these terms: “Holocaust” itself is, for Bettelheim,
“a sacrilege, a profanation.” While ostensibly critiquing
the implicit sacralization in “Holocaust,” then, Bettelheim
simultaneously affirms the Holocaust’s heterogeneity to the secular,
contingent, “profaning” operations of language. While
critiquing one term by which the Holocaust is spoken, he retains the
notion of the Holocaust as unspeakable. It is this circumlocution
that characterizes the eschewal of the term “Holocaust”
in contemporary discussions of the Nazi persecution of Jews in Europe.
When we sacralize the Holocaust—referring to it as a “burnt
offering,” to its victims and survivors as “martyrs,”
or situating it in a tradition of ineffability that stems from a
centuries-old discussion of the limitations posed
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to language by the presence or the idea of the divine—we create a
series of associations with religious (specifically Judaic and Christian)
narratives. These associations “functionalize” the Holocaust,
as Peter Haidu points out in his own brief critique of the term:
“Holocaust represents not only disaster and catastrophe,
but functionalizes them as a burnt offering, a sacrifice willingly
offered divinity, a divinity apparently hungry and thirsty for the
blood of innocents, a sacrifice which, properly enacted, might allow the
victims the possibility of an eventual redemption.”5
The reluctance of Holocaust writers to use the term
“Holocaust” reflects an attempt to avoid such
functionalization. Not only does “Holocaust” evoke
“a divinity apparently hungry and thirsty for the blood of
innocents,” it constructs humanity as complicit participants in
the sacrifice demanded by such a divinity and offers the possibility
of “an eventual redemption” for the victims, indicating
that their deaths could, somehow, make sense in this narrative. For
such writers as Bettelheim and Haidu, “Holocaust” weds an
image of humanity’s complicity in the “sacrifice”
(it is “willingly offered”) with the victims’ possible
“eventual redemption,” and as such should be avoided. By
shunning the functionalization posed by the term “Holocaust,”
then, these writers shun the potential of complicity—both
of God and of man—with this horrific act that, when renamed
“sacrifice,” might lend meaning to the victims’
suffering. By avoiding “Holocaust,” we avoid stating our own
complicity with an evil God and maintain the incommensurability of the
victims’ suffering with the sense-making mechanisms of redemption.
This “functionalization” should be further examined with
attention to its object: For whom is the Holocaust functionalized? And
can this functionalization, or its impossibility, be limited, directed,
or controlled? In a religious narrative, “Holocaust,”
as a paradigm of absolute evil, poses a challenge to mankind’s
relation to God. As such, what is assumed to be the specifically Jewish
character of the Holocaust becomes secondary to what are perceived as the
broader implications of the event. Robert McAfee Brown, speaking from
an explicitly theological perspective, addresses the Holocaust in this
manner. Opening with an apparently rhetorical question—“How
can one speak about the unspeakable?”—he concludes that
the Holocaust must remain as a warning, an illumination of our moral
landscape, to forestall other, similar evils: “There is hope that
the Holocaust, unredeemably evil in itself, could be a grotesque beacon,
in the light of which we could gird
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ourselves against its repetition toward any people in any time, in any
place. And I believe that unless we can use it as such a beacon,
the Nazis have finally won.”6
Brown, then, functionalizes the Holocaust as a narrative of potential
redemption, if not for the victims themselves, perhaps for future victims
of future atrocities, and for human culture in general—the Nazis
might yet “win” (win what?) if we fail to use the Holocaust
as a “beacon.” His discussion is a central example of
how speaking about what has been initially posited as unspeakable
facilitates a certain mistranslation as a historically, temporally,
geographically specific atrocity is turned into a test of faith. For
Brown, the faith that is being tested here is, specifically, his own
Christian faith—an extremely discomfiting concept for those who
think of the Holocaust as something Christians did to Jews.7
Once the unspeakable is constructed as a theological narrative
of destruction, sacrifice, and potential redemption in the term
“Holocaust,” it becomes appropriable—not merely by Brown
as a test of his Christian faith but as a generic, almost comfortable
appellation for a broad spectrum of disasters: hence the use of
“Holocaust” to refer to African American and American Indian
histories, the AIDS crisis, and abortion, to limit this appropriation to
public discourse in the United States alone. Holocaust writers commonly
respond to this appropriation by replacing “Holocaust”
with the Hebrew terms Shoah or, more rarely, Churban,
terms that, writes Berel Lang, “are more accurately descriptive
than ‘Holocaust,’ because they imply a breach or turning
point in history (and because they reject the connotations of
‘sacrifice’).” Lang adds, however, that “these
references, too, have theological or at least mediating overtones”
and chooses to refer to “the Nazi genocide against the Jews”
precisely in order to avoid such overtones.8
Further, replacing “Holocaust” with Hebrew terms generates
an illusion of controlling the referent: A Hebrew word can, one assumes,
refer only to a Jewish catastrophe, safeguarding such a catastrophe from
possible appropriation, retaining its specificity (the implementation
of the Final Solution
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to Nazi Germany’s “Jewish Problem” in Europe during
the 1930s and 1940s) as well as positing it as a cumulative moment in
a Jewish history of persecution, perhaps signifying the end of that
history and the beginning of a new one with the establishment of the
State of Israel. While Shoah, too, has theological connotations,
the term is usually used as a paradigm of disaster, specific to the
Jewish people, that is located in history rather than in divine will.
Referring to the Holocaust in Hebrew raises issues of translatability
between languages and, hence, between cultures, and the use of the
Hebrew term Shoah to safeguard the specific Jewish identity of
the Holocaust poses such translatability as impossible: a disturbing
cul-de-sac for those who emphasize “never again!”—for
the Jews, perhaps, but not necessarily for the Tutsi. Attempts to ensure
the specificity of the Holocaust, then, construct the Holocaust as
incommensurable and, therefore, as potentially irrelevant to contemporary
history.9
Finally, emphasizing such untranslatability posits the Holocaust
as speakable only by those who have a claim on Hebrew—although
the idea that Hebrew-speaking Israeli Arabs might refer to their own
histories as containing a Shoah demonstrates that a claim on
Hebrew does not ensure the specifically Jewish character of the Holocaust.
I employ the term “Holocaust” in light of these issues, not
despite them. Expressions of discomfort with “Holocaust”
reveal an unwillingness to face the salvationist implications of
the narrative evoked by “sacrifice,” a discomfort with
potential complicity with the evil God who demanded this sacrifice or
with the human beings who performed it, and—most crucially—a
reluctance to enable or facilitate the appropriation of this narrative
by other histories or other cultures. I maintain that complicity and
appropriation must be confronted, not avoided: It is our unwillingness,
discomfort, and reluctance that need to be examined.
3. Memory, History, and the Extermination of the Jews in
Europe: Establishing the Limits of Representation
That the unspeakable is an inevitable product, or aspect, of language
is axiomatic. As language is a human enterprise, the inhuman—in
the form of radical evil, infinite good, absolute beauty, or the utter
alterity of the divine
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—poses
a specific challenge to the potential of human conceptualization
and hence to language. When we say that what the Nazis did to the
Jews is unspeakable, we are implicitly identifying this action as
“inhuman” and hence as inaccessible to human understanding,
external to the speech communities that form human cultures. Once
the Holocaust is perceived as unspeakable, its expression in the
contingent structure of language forces it into a representation that
is, necessarily, a radical misrepresentation—an act that
Holocaust writers are, almost uniformly, reluctant to perform.
Thus, despite the discomfort engendered by functionalization and
appropriation, “Holocaust” and Shoah persist as
prominent names for the Nazi genocide of Jews. The main reason for
this is the powerful connotation, in both “Holocaust” and
Shoah, of immensity, of totality: Both terms evoke a total
destruction, a complete annihilation, an absolute
devastation. This sense of total destruction would seem to indicate
that (1) all Jews were destroyed, or (2) the destruction itself was
total. Both assumptions are inaccurate: Jews out of the Nazis’
reach—in North and South America, South Africa, the Middle and
Far East, as well as in countries where Nazi policies were actively
resisted, such as Denmark and, to a lesser extent, Bulgaria—were
not destroyed; further, the presence of Jewish thought and life in Europe
after the Holocaust qualifies any assertion that the Holocaust completely
destroyed the European Jews. (Jonathan Boyarin defines genocide
as “the destruction of an imagined national collective, the
loss of a ‘people,’” and emphasizes that since such
a collective, such a ‘people,’ is itself a construction,
its loss is equally a construction.)10
Despite its inaccuracy, though, a rhetoric of total destruction
persists, enacted by the connotations of total destruction implicit
in “Holocaust” and Shoah, and reflected in a
corresponding rhetoric of the challenge that such totality poses
to representation. While it is not surprising that the Holocaust is
perceived in terms of totality, or that the sheer magnitude of the
destruction is considered to pose a specific problem to representation
(the Holocaust is, indeed, a vast and violent event), what is surprising
is that in the case of the Holocaust, this vastness and violence are
assumed to be unique, unprecedented, offering a specific and, apparently,
irresolvable problem to experience, imagination, conceptualization, and,
finally, representation.
Saul Friedlander, for example, chooses the term apocalypse
to describe the Holocaust and hence to articulate the difficulty,
or impossibility,
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of adequate representation. “The total dissonance between
the apocalypse that was and the normality that is makes adequate
representation elusive, because the human imagination stumbles
when faced with the fundamental contradiction of apocalypse within
normality,” writes Friedlander.11 But when he concludes that
“the representation of the Shoah does not seem to have played
any significant role” in Western ideology and culture,
and that “the catastrophe of European Jewry has not been
incorporated into any compelling framework of meaning in public
consciousness, either within the Jewish world or in the Western
cultural scene in general,”12 one wonders: Just what
“framework” or “role” would be deemed
sufficiently “compelling” or “significant”
a repository for such a catastrophe? The implied answer in
Friedlander’s essay is, of course, “none.” Once the
Holocaust is posited as an apocalypse, statements such as “the
representation of the Shoah does not seem to have played any significant
role” are always already qualified by the impossibility of any such
role. By posing the Holocaust as total destruction that, necessarily,
evades conceptualization, Friedlander constructs it as unspeakable.
This construction of the Holocaust as unspeakable produces, for
Friedlander, a strong sense of the limits of representation—limits
that, while they are “undefined,” are nonetheless
“clearly felt.” He refers to a “perception of limits
. . . the sense of which is compelling,”13 elsewhere noting
that while “one cannot define exactly what is wrong with
a certain representation of the events . . . one senses when
some interpretation or representation is wrong.”14 Such an emphasis on
“sense” and “feeling” in response to Holocaust
representations establishes the presence of limits without necessitating
their definition, since to define the limits of representation would be
to establish what is and is not representable, positing the Holocaust
within a specific interpretive framework.
As a result of this positioning, the Holocaust becomes a paradigm of
representation’s limits, in comparison to which representations
of other atrocities must necessarily fall short. So Friedlander asks,
“Why do we feel that Picasso’s ‘Guernica’
forcefully expresses the horror of the death and destruction brought
about by the German attack on this peaceful Spanish town, whereas we do
not know of any visual expression, nor can we clearly
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think of any, that would adequately express the utter horror
of the extermination of the Jews in Europe?”15 The Holocaust, then,
must be unspeakable, while “Guernica,” presumably,
speaks. Significantly, Friedlander’s emphasis on the limits of
representation rests not on any interpretive analysis of what makes the
Holocaust unrepresentable but rather on an appeal to his readers’
(unutterable) sensibilities: “we feel, . . . we do not know,
. . . nor can we clearly think.”
Such assumptions of the limits of representation effect a specific
relegation of the Holocaust to the realm of the unspeakable: the
realm outside of language, outside of conceptual or interpretive
frameworks—structures that may themselves facilitate a certain
disturbing reduction, translation, or appropriation. Emphasizing
the externality of the Holocaust to these structures establishes
the Holocaust’s heterogeneity to sense-making mechanisms,
while asserting the centrality of our unspoken (and unspeakable)
“sense” and “feeling” in establishing this
heterogeneity. The question remains, however: What purpose
does the presumption of the Holocaust’s unspeakability serve for
Holocaust writers?
4. Trauma and the Unspeakable
In the course of this discussion, I have been assuming that this rhetoric
of unspeakability is explicit and deliberate, a conscious decision of
Holocaust writers as an expression of their assumptions and agendas. But
the unspeakable is also what cannot be physically spoken or pronounced,
like an infinite word or an infinite scream. Its dimensions are located
in the challenge posed to the psyche by a traumatic experience and
the subsequent repetition and deferral that constitute the work of
mourning. These psychic dimensions of the unspeakable are echoed in the
taboos or injunctions against certain speech acts by the community: our
reluctance to shout “Auschwitz” on a crowded street corner,
or to force Holocaust survivors to address what they prefer not to speak
about. In such cases, the unspeakable takes the form of trauma, not
merely for the individual survivors but for a collective post-Holocaust
culture, which is perceived to be traumatized by the presence of the
Holocaust in its past. In this manner, what is psychically impossible
(for the individual survivor) becomes a rhetorical expression of psychic
impossibility (contemporary culture’s trauma in the wake of the
Holocaust).
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This rhetorical expression, like a rhetoric of the unspeakable, should be
examined with an eye toward its implicit political or cultural agenda. In
their seminal book on testimony, Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub introduce
a rhetoric of trauma through which to address the presence of the
Holocaust in history, its implications for narrative and culture, and
our own response to this presence and its implications (which they call
“testimony”). They situate their discussion after “the
historic trauma of the Second World War,”
a trauma we consider as the watershed of our times and which the
book will come to view not as an event encapsulated in the past, but
as a history which is essentially not over, a history whose
repercussions are not simply omnipresent (whether consciously or not)
in all our cultural activities, but whose traumatic consequences are
still actively evolving (Eastern Europe and the Gulf War are two
obvious examples) in today’s political, historical, cultural and
artistic scene, the scene in which we read and psychoanalyze, and from
within whose tumult and whose fluctuations we strive both to educate and
write.16
Perceiving the Holocaust as trauma does two things: It presumes
that group identities and individual identities can be approached
in similar fashion (hence Felman and Laub’s “we”
can equally refer to the authors or to the imagined community of
contemporary culture), and it posits the Holocaust as unspeakable,
as the traumatic event that precipitates the psychic mechanisms of
repression and the work of mourning in these identities—the
“repercussions” and “traumatic consequences”
that Felman and Laub mention.17 In this context, Felman and
Laub’s unquestioned assumption of “we” facilitates an
unquestionable (because “obvious”) collapse of contemporary
political scenarios (“Eastern Europe and the Gulf War”)
into a history (pre)determined by the Holocaust, while never addressing
the question that such collapsing raises (What do the Gulf War and the
Holocaust have
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in common?) or the ideological implications of any of this
question’s many answers.
Texts marked by trauma ask, as Cathy Caruth asks in Unclaimed
Experience, “what it means to transmit and to theorize around
a crisis that is marked, not by a simple knowledge, but by the ways it
simultaneously defies and demands our witness.”18 In this manner,
a rhetoric of trauma perpetuates the assumption of the traumatic
event’s inherent unspeakability; hence, positing the Holocaust
as a “traumatic” event reiterates its presupposed
heterogeneity to conceptual structures, subtly emphasizing the
assumption that it is unspeakable: Knowledge is, necessarily,
too “simple,” a misguided expression of hubris or
naïveté, as Caruth concludes, “for history to be
a history of trauma means . . . that a history can be grasped only
in the very inaccessibility of its occurrence.”19
Approaching the Holocaust as a traumatic event, then, fuses
an assumption of the Holocaust’s unspeakability to the
construction of a collective identity that is presumably traumatized
by the presence of the Holocaust in its history. This assumption
masks the ideological underpinnings of identifying the Holocaust
(which happened in Europe, to people who are, today, perceived as
technically “white”) as a trauma that reverberates through
“contemporary culture” (which, one would hope, includes
non-European, nonwhite people).20 In addition, the notion that
contemporary culture is “traumatized” by the Holocaust
constructs contemporary culture as the (essentially passive) victim
of the Holocaust’s impact on its (constructed) collective
psyche—effacing the issue of volition and subsequent responsibility
raised by the Holocaust’s presence in contemporary history.
Dominick LaCapra, whose writings on the Holocaust are informed by
a rhetoric of trauma, defines the relation of the contemporary to
history as “muted trauma” that must be “worked
through”: “What is necessary,” he writes,
“is a discourse of trauma that itself undergoes—and
indicates that one undergoes—a process of at least
muted trauma insofar as one has tried to understand events and
empathize with victims.”21 Trauma is, for LaCapra, the product
of our own empathy and is hence testimony to our attempt
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to understand the victims’ experience; thus, a discourse of trauma
serves to identify the scholar who produces it as appropriately receptive
and sympathetic to the suffering of others. Such a scholar’s
ability to be traumatized by the Holocaust is an index of his or her
own responsible, empathetic approach to history, while it constructs
this history as traumatic, hence unspeakable. For Caruth, Felman and
Laub, and LaCapra, a rhetoric of trauma works like a rhetoric of the
unspeakable, as the protective psychic mechanisms of trauma operate as
rhetorical mechanisms to protect us from the implications of a history
that we simultaneously acknowledge and disavow.
5. Auschwitz 1270 to the Present: Gesturing toward the
Unspeakable
A responsible enunciation of “after Auschwitz,” then, requires
us to speak the unspeakable. If a rhetoric of the unspeakable marks the
limits of our knowledge with silence, absence, and impossibility, speaking
the unspeakable, breaking this silence, extends or effaces these limits,
confronting us with what had henceforth been excluded, foregrounding our
own investments and assumptions that have perpetuated a rhetoric of the
unspeakable in Holocaust discourse for nearly half a century. In other
words, we need to ask, as I asked at the opening of this essay, Just
what part of “Auschwitz” don’t we understand?
In a recent study, Auschwitz 1270 to the Present, Robert Jan
Van Pelt and Debórah Dwork address what they describe as the
“almost comfortable demonization” that “[distances]
us from an all too concrete historical reality, suppressing the local,
regional, and national context of the greatest catastrophe western
civilization both permitted and endured, and obscuring the responsibility
of the thousands of individuals who enacted this atrocity step by
step.” They posit their own study as an attempt to close this
distance: Their aim is to posit Auschwitz as “just another place
which became what it did by ordinary people using standard procedures:
requisition forms, transportation vouchers, planning permissions,
bills of sale, bills of receipt.”22 By displaying the concrete, prosaic
networks that enabled Auschwitz to become a killing center, Van Pelt and
Dwork intend to demythologize the killing, replacing incomprehensibility
with knowledge and enabling
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a more responsible commemoration of the function the camp served and
the suffering it inflicted.
Van Pelt and Dwork’s project is, then, admirable: They claim
to dispel the mythologization surrounding what is commonly (and
disturbingly) referred to as “planet Auschwitz” and to
reestablish Auschwitz’s uncanny closeness and similarity to the
culture that produced it, as well as to the culture that remembers
it. As a concrete place produced by concrete, prosaic processes,
Auschwitz promises to gain significance and relevance—as a result
of this study, we should no longer be able to dismiss it as an abstract
paradigm of evil, separated from us, as Van Pelt and Dwork put it, by
“night” and “fog.”23
But in the chapter devoted to the process of killing, titled “The
Holocaust,” Van Pelt and Dwork move to foreground the limitations
of their study. A bleak recital of the existing facts (who designed
the building, who constructed the furnaces, how the flames were fanned,
how the gas chambers were constructed, how and when the system of mass
extermination became operational, and the extent of its productivity)
leads the authors to this statement: “We know all of
that. But we understand very little about many issues central
to this machinery of death. Research into the history of the region,
the intended future of the town, the development of the camp, and the
changing design of the crematoria has been useful, but it is not the
whole story about the Holocaust at Auschwitz. It is the questions
of the victims and the survivors which loom large” (A, 352;
my emphasis).
When the historically specific Auschwitz meets the broader phenomenon
of the Holocaust, then, the limits of knowledge must be firmly set. The
limits of what we know are established and sharply contrasted
with the limits of what we can understand, as a space of
incomprehensibility is created through a gesture toward silence, absence,
and impossibility: the unheard, unhearable questions of the victims and
the unanswered, unanswerable questions of the survivors. These questions,
according to Van Pelt and Dwork, redirect the issue away from how
the atrocity could happen to why. Quoting a survivor’s
experience of the selection process, they focus on
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this statement: “They went to the left, and we went to the
right. And I said, ‘Why?’” (A,
352).
It is “that process of selection,” declare Van Pelt
and Dwork, “that is the core and moral nadir of the horror
of the Holocaust—the selection, and not the gas chambers and
crematoria. The Germans and their allies had arrogated to themselves
the power to decide who would live and who would die” (A,
353). They go on to quote Hannah Arendt’s report on the Eichmann
trials: “As though you and your superiors had any right to determine
who should and who should not inhabit the world” (A,
353).24
In this section of Eichmann in Jerusalem, however, Arendt is
not discussing the specific selection of the unfit for the crematoria
and the fit for labor that occurred at Auschwitz; rather, Arendt is
responding to the principle of “selection” that the Nazis
enacted on to certain peoples as opposed to others. Thus Sara’s
question “Why?”—when repeated at the end of the
chapter (“And Sara’s question remains: ‘And I said,
“Why?”’” [A, 353])—becomes
not “Why selection?” but “Why the Jews?” or even
“Why genocide?” These are questions that Auschwitz 1270
to the Present never attempts to answer.
Why?—Sara’s unanswered, unanswerable
question—appears at and marks the limits of our understanding. It
confronts our knowledge with the experience of the victims and the
survivors, underscoring the inability of the former to access the
latter. This evocation of and retreat into the unspeakable reestablishes
an “almost comfortable” distance between Auschwitz and
ourselves; further, by locating the experience of the survivors beyond
our comprehension, Van Pelt and Dwork collapse the experience of the
camps—both that of the victims who died there and of the survivors
who lived there—into an amorphous space that cannot be accessed by
knowledge or expressed by language. In the face of the unspeakable, then,
our responsibility toward the memory of Auschwitz becomes deceptively
simple: We can only, we need only, foreground the limits of our knowledge
and gesture toward what we don’t understand.
6. Auschwitz and After: Complicity and the Unspeakable
A responsible enunciation of “after Auschwitz,” then, demands
that we speak the unspeakable, undo this gesture. But when the unspeakable
is spoken, what is revealed? I argue here that speaking the unspeakable
forces the painful confrontation with a deep-rooted complicity
that is an almost
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inevitable aspect of the Holocaust’s presence in contemporary
history and in the ethics of memory and responsibility
that such a history entails.
In his introduction to Auschwitz and After, “In the
Shadows of Auschwitz: Culture, Memories, and Self-Reflection,”
Lawrence Kritzman states, “The memory of Auschwitz and the
question of Jewish identity have been key critical topoi in
French political, cultural and intellectual life since the end of
World War II,” adding that “since Auschwitz, every word
evoking its dark past either dissimulates guilt or simply denies the
reality of the extermination.”25 One might assume that Vichy,
rather than Auschwitz, would be a more appropriate sign for
contemporary French life, and indeed Kritzman’s main concern
in this essay is Vichy’s complicity with the Nazis and the
implications of this complicity for representations of the Holocaust
in France. But Kritzman’s gesture toward Auschwitz, rather
than Vichy, facilitates a turn away from the complexities of French
complicity and toward an expansion of “Auschwitz”
into a general comment on the responsibilities and ethics of
memory: “The problem of remembering Auschwitz,”
concludes Kritzman, “is how to remember it in order not to forget
what happened at Auschwitz, or how to talk about Auschwitz without
betraying or trivializing it.”26
By naming Auschwitz, rather than Vichy, as a referent for his enunciation
of a “we,” Kritzman illustrates the manner in which Auschwitz,
wrenched from its specific historical and political context, comes to
signify the challenges to communication, comprehension, and thought
associated with the Holocaust, while our own situation “after
Auschwitz” implies, as Kritzman puts it, a compelling ethical
imperative: We must not forget, we must not trivialize, we must
not betray. But a rhetoric of the unspeakable (the obscurity and
inaccessibility that characterize “Auschwitz,” the emphasis
on our inability to understand it) qualifies such an ethical stance:
If we cannot “know” Auschwitz, how can we know what not to
betray, how not to trivialize, when to remember, why not to forget?
Choosing a concentration camp (particularly one as demonically efficient
as the gas chambers and crematoria proved Auschwitz to be) to stand for
the Holocaust seems to imply that it is the killing, and the killing
alone, that eludes comprehension. One imagines a well-oiled operation by
which Jews are unloaded from trains, subjected to a selection process,
herded into gas chambers, and cremated—a strangely sterile,
abstract proceeding,
[End Page 218]
perhaps what Martin Heidegger was thinking about when he referred to
“the manufacture of corpses.”27 Shocking as this image may be,
it is still a disturbingly reductive account that effaces the more
complex and far more disturbing issue of how Jews got to Auschwitz in the
first place, while the passivity of the victims, as they are unloaded,
selected, herded, gassed, and cremated, elides the complexities of
life within, and after, Auschwitz. Further, by giving the horror a
specific location and a name, the horror is localized, abstracted,
and isolated, as if the Holocaust is (merely) what occurred at the
camps. But the fact remains that family members, friends, neighbors,
coworkers, students, teachers, employers, employees, religious leaders,
municipal and government officials, real and imagined allies were all
potential betrayers or murderers, and it is this dissolution of an entire
network of human relations, not just the killing, that constitutes
the Holocaust. Calling it “Auschwitz,” especially in the
context of a discussion of French complicity and collaboration, effaces
this fact, makes it too easy to face.
7. Rethinking Adorno: “This Is the Drastic Guilt of Him Who Was
Spared”
But we do call the Holocaust “Auschwitz,” and we do
posit ourselves “after Auschwitz,” whether or not
we agree with Adorno that “to write poetry after Auschwitz
is barbaric.” Adorno’s dictum, almost inevitable in
discussions of Holocaust literature and aesthetics, is broadly utilized
by Holocaust philosophers and historians as evoking and establishing
the challenge posed by “Auschwitz” to post-Holocaust
culture. Occasionally, this statement is accompanied by a footnote
or a parenthetical comment mentioning Adorno’s retraction of
this statement in the final chapter of Negative Dialectics:
“It may have been wrong to say that after Auschwitz you
could no longer write poems.”28 Whether writings about the Holocaust
evoke Adorno’s statement or its refutation, however, “to
write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric” stands firm, in Holocaust
writing, as a marker of unspeakability: Holocaust
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writers quote Adorno’s statement to emblematize the challenge
the Holocaust poses to meaning, to writing, to civilization.
But these writers fail to recognize that in the context of Adorno’s
broader concerns about the position of cultural criticism in the wake of
the Holocaust, this challenge is described as the result of a radical
complicity. In “Cultural Criticism and Society,”
Adorno addresses the role of the critic in society, specifically the
extent to which the critic is implicated in, and hence complicit with,
the culture he or she examines. “The cultural critic is not happy
with civilization, to which alone he owes his discontent,” writes
Adorno, “he speaks as if he represented either unadulterated
nature or a higher historical stage. Yet he is necessarily of the same
essence as that to which he fancies himself superior.” The guilt of
cultural criticism, says Adorno, is that by the act of putting culture to
scrutiny, the cultural critic helps to efface culture’s disturbing
operations. “Even in the accusing gesture, the critic clings to the
notion of culture . . . where there is despair and measureless misery,
he sees only spiritual phenomena, the state of man’s consciousness,
the decline of norms” (P, 19). Thus the critic’s
work “detracts from the true horrors” as cultural critics
“help to weave the veil” (P, 28, 20).
Adorno’s proposition in the face of this seemingly inevitable
complicity is to posit an “immanent criticism.” He defines
immanent criticism as an “unideological thought” that
“does not permit itself to be reduced to ‘operational
terms’ and instead strives solely to help the things themselves
to that articulation from which they are otherwise cut off by the
prevailing language” (P, 29). Immanent criticism, then,
tries to speak the unspeakable, helping that which has been silenced
toward articulation. It should avoid transcendence and harmony, focusing
on and highlighting, rather than resolving, the contradictions between
reality and ideology. But Adorno recognizes that this “immanent
method,” too, is likely to be “dragged into the abyss by
its object,” to be incorporated into the “causal dependence
of culture” (P, 34). In other words, by speaking the
unspeakable, immanent criticism runs the risk of being implicated in,
or complicit with, its object.
In offering the idea of immanent criticism, Adorno is not so much
posing a solution as describing a crisis. And the crisis is that of
culture in the wake of the Holocaust and in light of totalitarian regimes
(specifically in Russia). He ends his essay by expressing the paradoxical
nature of the mind’s attempt to escape the reification imposed on
it by dialectical thought: “The more total society becomes, the
greater the reification of the mind and the more paradoxical its effort
to escape reification on its own. Even the most extreme consciousness
of doom threatens to degenerate into idle chatter.”
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It is within the context of this collapse of consciousness of doom
into doom, of the mind’s reification into its attempt to escape
this reification, that Adorno concludes, “Cultural criticism
finds itself faced with the final stage of the dialectic of culture
and barbarism. To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric. And this
corrodes even the knowledge of why it has become impossible to write
poetry today” (P, 34).
My recontextualization of this statement in Adorno’s essay shows
how, for Adorno, poetry after Auschwitz is directly complicit with the
culture that produced Auschwitz. And this complicity in culture and in the
barbarism that culture has proved itself to be cannot be articulated or
even known: the essential barbarism inherent in poetry after Auschwitz
“corrodes”—or contaminates—“even the
knowledge of why it has become impossible to write poetry
today.” Adorno ends his discussion of cultural criticism and
society, then, with a delineation of the widespread complicity of culture
with the barbarism it produced, a complicity that subsumes even the
knowledge of its manifestations.
While Adorno did retract the statement, “to write poetry after
Auschwitz is barbaric,” it is important to note that Adorno’s
“retraction” reinforces this complicity rather than effaces
it. “Perennial suffering has as much right to expression as a
tortured man has to scream; hence it may have been wrong to say that after
Auschwitz you could no longer write poems,” he writes in Negative
Dialectics. But an existence after Auschwitz is nonetheless defined
by complicity and guilt: “It is not wrong,” Adorno continues,
“to raise the less cultural question whether after Auschwitz you can
go on living—especially whether one who escaped by accident, one who
by rights should have been killed, may go on living. His mere survival
calls for the coldness, the basic principle of bourgeois subjectivity,
without which there could have been no Auschwitz; this is the drastic
guilt of him who was spared.”29
Holocaust writers, as a rule, do not take this “drastic guilt”
seriously, and those who do (for example, Arendt in Eichmann
in Jerusalem) are accused of blaming the victims, potentially
perpetuating the victimization. In this context, a vehement eschewal
of moral judgment reflects an urgent dissociation of Holocaust writers
from the implication that they are applying simplistic and, presumably,
outdated morality to an event or an experience they consistently maintain
is beyond their abilities to comprehend. In The Drowned and the
Saved, Primo Levi writes compellingly about the “gray
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zone” of the concentration camp, in which the distinction
between guilty and innocent is deliberately obscured. Addressing the
crucial and painful issue of the victims’ forced complicity
with their aggressors, a complicity that, Levi argues, only enhances
their victimization, he rigorously distances this issue from
comprehension, which he identifies as simplification, associating it
with a childlike Manichaean tendency to clearly demarcate good from
evil. For Levi, then, comprehension, which is inevitably simplistic,
equally inevitably judges and accuses. While he notes that “the
condition of the offended does not exclude culpability,” he
is careful to add, “I know of no human tribunal to which one
could delegate the judgement.”30
Emphasizing the unspeakability of the Holocaust is a common way in which
Holocaust writers make it possible to talk about the Holocaust without
confronting the morally questionable implication of seeming to comprehend,
to simplify, to judge. But it is this crucial complicity of
contemporary culture after Auschwitz that lies behind Adorno’s
declaration of the Holocaust as unspeakable, and writers who situate
themselves in the context of Adorno’s writings ignore this
fact. While perpetuating the rhetoric of the unspeakable inherent in
“to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric,” they fail
to address why Adorno thinks this is barbaric: the inevitable
guilt and complicity that emerge from the presence of the Holocaust in
contemporary history that defines itself as “after Auschwitz.”
In the case of the Holocaust, what makes the unspeakable especially
compelling is our sense that applying language to the event involves a
certain violation of its victims: To speak their experience would run the
risk of understanding that experience, with its concurrent possibilities
of trivializing or betraying it. Thus, the unspeakable is imbued with an
ethical imperative: It frees language from potential complicity
in the evil to which it has been fettered, and it serves as a space
in which our relation to, and responsibilities toward, the dead are
enacted. Peter Hayes describes this investment in the unspeakable as
“an intellectual and moral reflex, all the more powerful for
being propelled by hope and decency. The strength of these impulses
helps explain why references to the unfathomability of Nazi evil have
become virtually expected of any civilized commentator on the subject.
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”31
Adorno recognizes this ethical imperative: “After Auschwitz,”
he writes, “our feelings resist any claim of the positivity
of existence as sanctimonious, as wronging the victims; they
balk at squeezing any kind of sense, however bleached, out of
the victims’ fate.”32 According to the ethical
imperative of the unspeakable, the heterogeneity of the Holocaust
to “sense” is an expression of our own reluctance to
further wrong the victims—ultimately, a valorization of our
own morality. But this rhetoric of unspeakability explicitly effaces
the “drastic guilt” of post-Holocaust culture, a culture
that must confront its identity as the product of the presence of
the Holocaust in its history. When this effacement is compounded with
an emphasis on the “blindness,” “delusion,”
and “elation” of the perpetrators, the construction of the
Holocaust as an ultimately guiltless act is completed: The Holocaust
becomes (merely) the product of unexplained, incomprehensible, random
evil, like an asteroid hitting the earth; as Terrence Des Pres puts
it, “Survivors do not bear witness to guilt, neither theirs nor
ours, but to objective conditions of evil.”33
When I say that a rhetoric of the unspeakable effaces the issue of
complicity, I am not referring to the specific concern of complicity
or guilt that contemporary Germans may feel toward the presence of
the Holocaust in their history. Nor am I referring to the
problematic issue of the victim’s forced complicity in his or
her victimization that Levi eloquently discusses in The Drowned and
the Saved. Rather, I am referring to the most disturbing, because
widespread and unspoken, complicity of contemporary culture with its
own past and present atrocities. When I say that contemporary culture
must “speak the unspeakable,” I am taking Adorno’s
“drastic guilt” seriously: effacing the possibility of
guiltlessness and addressing the issue of contemporary culture’s
complicity with its history. As my discussion of Lyotard’s Le
Differend will demonstrate, it is precisely this rhetoric of the
unspeakable that facilitates the effacement of this complicity while
maintaining contemporary culture in the presumably ethical position of
refusing to further wrong the victims by misrepresenting their suffering
through necessarily reductive conceptual and interpretive frameworks. This
“ethical position” reflects a
[End Page 223]
certain self-congratulatory morality by which, under the guise
of not wronging the victims, contemporary culture maintains its
position as safely distant, conceptually and ethically, from this
“unspeakable” event.
8. Le Differend: The Ethical Imperative of the Unspeakable
In “Rephrasing the Political with Kant and Lyotard,”
David Carroll clarifies that the “critical-political”
goal of Le Differend “is not to reverse the injustice
and replace the acceptable idiom with the silenced one, thus paving
the way for future injustice, but rather to formulate a political
strategy and to practice a justice in terms of the nonresolution
of differends.”34 In the critical-political atmosphere
posed by Carroll, then, Lyotard’s concept of the differend
is motivated by the ethical imperative of the unspeakable: a reluctance to
translate horror into meaning, as such translation inevitably effaces the
victim’s traumatic experience, and this effacement runs the risk
of perpetuating the wrong done to the victim. Carroll’s reading
of Lyotard aligns a critical-political agenda with unspeakability:
For Carroll, politics and justice are enacted by maintaining a space
for the unspeakable, the “nonresolution of differends.”
A differend is, ultimately, a manifestation of the
unspeakable. Lyotard defines a differend as “the case where
the plaintiff is divested of the means to argue and becomes for that
reason a victim. . . . A case of differend between two parties
takes place when the ‘regulation’ of the conflict that opposes
them is done in the idiom of one of the parties while the wrong suffered
by the other is not signified in that idiom.”35 For Lyotard,
Auschwitz is a crucial manifestation of the differend, the
product of the conflict of incommensurate discourses. Auschwitz,
says Lyotard, addressing Adorno’s use of the term in Negative
Dialectics, is “the name of something (of a paraexperience, of
a paraempiricity) wherein dialectics encounters a nonnegatable negative
(un négatif non niable), and abides in the impossibility of
redoubling that negative into a ‘result.’”36 Lyotard calls
Auschwitz an “anonym” and says that “‘within
Auschwitz’ . . . would be found a name ‘within’ which
we cannot think, or not completely . . . it would be a name for the
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nameless . . . it would be a name which designates what has no
name in speculation, a name for the anonymous.”37 In his choice
of Auschwitz as a crucial manifestation of the differend,
Lyotard is enacting the substitution of “Auschwitz” for
“Holocaust” and posing Auschwitz as unspeakable (“a
name for the nameless”), with the consequent effacement of
Adorno’s specific concern with complicity.
Lyotard structures his book as a response to key philosophers—
Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Levinas—but it is his reading of Adorno
that is of greatest concern for the issue of unspeakability and
complicity after the Holocaust. By choosing Auschwitz to exemplify the
differend, Lyotard is explicitly responding to Adorno’s
concerns with the state of culture “after Auschwitz.” However,
the complicity that Adorno identified as the situation of culture
“after Auschwitz” is silenced when Auschwitz is read as a
differend: rather than a “corroded”—and hence
complicit—knowledge, Auschwitz becomes the paradigm of “what
is not presentable under the rules of knowledge.”38 Lyotard, then,
translates Auschwitz into the unspeakable, and this translation effaces
the complicity that was Adorno’s concern. If we agree with Adorno
that the rules of knowledge are corrupt and corroded—an assumption
that governs manifestations of the unspeakable and that directs its
ethical imperative—the notion of Auschwitz as a differend,
“that which is not presentable under the rules of knowledge,”
enables us to avoid, rather than forces us to confront, the inevitable
complicity that this knowledge forces upon us.
9. Confronting Complicity
It is this complicity, not absence, nor silence, nor the limits
of knowledge, nor any other manifestation of the unspeakable, that
needs to be the object and purpose of Holocaust writing and of reading
such writing. But what does confronting complicity mean? What are the
implications of speaking, or not speaking, the unspeakable?
On 21 December 1997, James C. McKinley Jr. published, in the
New York Times, an essay titled “Searching in Vain for
Rwanda’s Moral High Ground.”39 The essay addresses the disturbing
passivity of the Western world in light of the Rwandan genocide:
“Outsiders seeking to find clear villains
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and victims in this conflict quickly run into a moral quagmire. The
historical roots of the conflict are tangled and fed with blood. No
one’s hands are clean. And this yields incredible difficulty
in trying to think through what might be done to help this tortured
region stop the killing.” The impetus, or reflex, to act only
from a “moral high ground,” is not only posited without
question by McKinley; he offers the Holocaust as an example of such
moral ground from which Rwanda falls short: “For Westerners,
whose concept of genocide has been shaped by the moral clarity of the
Nazi Holocaust in Europe, the situation in Central Africa is baffling
and frustrating.” This “moral clarity of the Nazi Holocaust
in Europe,” it should be obvious, is a construct perpetuated by
a rhetoric of unspeakability that explicitly effaces the potential of
complicity—of the victims with their persecutors, of the Allies
with the operation of genocide, of bystanders who claimed ignorance. I
am not saying that what happened to the Jews in Europe is analogous
to Tutsi and Hutu killing each other in Rwanda. I am saying, however,
that holding one moment up as an example of “moral clarity”
to explain the passivity in the face of the other is, perhaps, the most
clearly immoral act of all.
The illusion of a “high moral ground” perpetuates the
assumption that avoiding complicity in atrocity is, ultimately, to remain
morally free from implication in this atrocity. This assumption is itself
prominent in McKinley’s discussion of why the West does not act
in Rwanda: “Those who would diffuse this bomb find themselves in
a dilemma: How can one criticize the current Government’s abuses
without appearing to condone the genocide of 1994? And how can outsiders
encourage a negotiated political solution between the Government and
exiled Hutu leaders without being accused of forcing victims of genocide
to come to terms with the people who tried to exterminate them?” The
“dilemma” that McKinley outlines assumes that it is possible
to “criticize . . . without appearing to condone,” and to
“encourage . . . without being accused”; global intervention,
thinks McKinley, can or should be enacted only from a position in
which one cannot be deemed complicit in global politics. According to
McKinley’s argument, the West does not interfere in Rwanda in
order to avoid potential complicity in the genocide there.
My emphasis on complicity, in light of McKinley’s assumptions in his
essay on Rwanda, should indicate the broader parameters of my critique
of a rhetoric of the unspeakable, not merely in Holocaust writing but
in the far broader context of international political rhetoric and
action. Evoked not only as an emblem of the limits of language and of
culture, or as a critical presence that necessitates a rethinking of
language and culture per se, the Holocaust—and Auschwitz, its
synecdochic representation—also functions as a
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metaphor of what is by now so tritely known as “man’s
inhumanity to man,” and invocations of this metaphor in the context
of discussions of global community, inter- and transnational politics,
as well as domestic policy “after Auschwitz” have become,
sadly, equally trite. What disturbs me is less the possibility that
the Holocaust, by virtue of its prominence in such discussions, may
have been rendered so emblematic that the details of its specificity no
longer command as much of our attention as, perhaps, they ought; what
disturbs me, rather, is this: the extent to which the limits of language
invoked by “the unspeakable” are wielded as a foundation of
contemporary cultural identity—an identity, problematically enough,
defined as “after Auschwitz”—and the corresponding
assumption that such a wielding performs some sort of ethics, as
if delineating the unspeakability of the Holocaust is an effective,
and responsible, rejoinder to the all-pervasive mantra “Never
again!”
This wielding occurs in language, or, more precisely, in rhetoric:
the performance of language in a specific cultural and political
context. Such context presupposes the presence and operation of a cultural
and political agenda, be it explicit or not. In the case of the Holocaust,
a rhetoric of the unspeakable is endowed with a significant ethical clout:
As the writers discussed in this essay maintain, to speak the unspeakable
is to somehow violate it, whether it desecrates the “sanctity”
of the victims’ suffering or (perhaps concurrently) whether
it enables an illusion of conceptual mastery, the self-congratulatory
assertion of which appears, in the context of such mass suffering, to be
painfully inappropriate at best, downright pernicious at worst. But when
this rhetoric is employed in a global arena, this ethical clout lends it
a significant amount of political power: Phrasing a historical fact in
terms generated by the Holocaust (concentration camps, genocide, ethnic
cleansing) works to justify political intervention (most recently in
Kosovo) while effectively masking the less noble purposes that inform such
intervention (evident in the Gulf War). At the same time, this rhetoric
is employed to justify an equally self-interested abstention from
political intervention (as per McKinley’s analysis of the case of
Rwanda). For good or ill, both, or neither, the political power inherent
in a rhetoric of the unspeakable is justified, ethically, by its strong
anchoring in the disquieting presence of the Holocaust in history.
The sad fact remains, however, that the ethical injunction under the
aegis of which this rhetoric is evoked is rarely, if ever, borne out
in practice. (Need I enumerate the bloody ethnic wars that have marked
the second half of the twentieth century? The criminal silencing of
AIDS? The still-pervasive
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racism and sexism that characterize our cultures?) This is not to say,
merely, that those who employ what I call a rhetoric of the unspeakable
are, themselves, complicit in the perpetuation of the world’s
woes. At fault here is the assumption that rhetorical performance
(specifically, rhetorical performance that modestly and self-consciously
gestures toward its own limits) is ethical practice: an obvious enough
fallacy, it is true, but a fallacy that is nonetheless obscured precisely
by a rhetoric of the unspeakable, a rhetoric that has, by the end of
this century, become so effectively and affectively scripted so as to
practically foreclose the possibility of its interrogation.
To conclude, focusing on what has been constructed as
“unspeakable” merely reiterates the ethical imperative
by which we, as members of post-Holocaust culture, refrain from
further wronging the victims of the Holocaust, and, further, avoid the
uncomfortable implications of addressing the presence of the Holocaust
in a culture that defines itself as the product of the Holocaust in its
past. By emphasizing the unspeakability of the victims’ experience,
its incommensurability to conceptual structures, we absolve the victims of
guilt—as if we, nonsurvivors, had the ability or even the right to
do so—and distance ourselves from their experience, as if we could
determine which aspects of our own history are constitutive and which are
unassimilable. Finally, a rhetoric of the unspeakable facilitates the
masquerade of rhetorical performance as ethical practice, as eloquent
gestures toward the limits of language replace far less comfortable
engagement with a painful and morally ambiguous reality in which there
never is, and never has been, a “moral high ground.”
The unspeakable, I urge, must be spoken. Complicity needs to be
confronted, not avoided. Unlike language, complicity has no limits; unlike
rhetorical performance, ethical practice cannot reasonably gesture toward
its own inefficacy. Only by speaking the unspeakable, confronting the
fact of complicity and assuming our own, can we effectively delineate
the complexity of the victims’ experience, confront the presence
of the Holocaust in our past, and, perhaps, reach a more responsible
understanding of what “after Auschwitz” really means.
In the course of this essay, “Auschwitz,” “after
Auschwitz,” and “Holocaust” will move in and out
of quotation marks. I use quotation marks in order to reflect a
crucial point of the essay: In the case of “Auschwitz,”
the relation between the name of the concentration camp itself and
the discourse it is evoked to signify is (I argue, deliberately)
blurred. “After Auschwitz” and “Holocaust”
refer to similar instances, and one of the purposes of “Rethinking
‘After Auschwitz’” is to address the blurring of these
distinctions and to investigate what these significant slippages enable.
Naomi Mandel is assistant professor of contemporary U.S. literature and
culture at the University of Rhode Island and an editor of American
Transcendental Quarterly and the Journal of Mundane Behavior. She is currently
writing a book that explores the interrelation of atrocity and identity
in literature, critical theory, popular culture, and film.
Notes
Statements that begin each section of this essay are “riffs”
that reflect a moment in the life of Miles Davis. For the essay’s
opening quotation, see Ian Carr, Miles Davis: The Definitive
Biography, cited below.
1. Theodor Adorno, Prisms,
trans. Samuel and Sherry Weber (London: Neville Spearman, 1955), 34;
George Steiner, Language and Silence (New York: Atheneum, 1967),
123; and Elie Wiesel, “The Holocaust as Literary Inspiration,”
in Dimensions of the Holocaust (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern
University Press, 1977), 7. Hereafter, subsequent references to
Prisms will be cited parenthetically as P.
2. Raul Hilberg, The Destruction
of the European Jews (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1985), 767. These
figures refer only to Jews. They exclude Poles, Gypsies, homosexuals,
the mentally ill, and other victims of National Socialism in the years
1933–1945.
3. Bruno Bettelheim, “The
Holocaust—One Generation After,” in Thinking the
Unthinkable, ed. Roger S. Gottlieb (New York: Paulist, 1990),
380–81.
5. Peter Haidu, “The
Dialectics of Unspeakability: Language, Silence, and the Narratives of
Desubjectification,” in Probing the Limits of Representation,
ed. Saul Friedlander (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992), 279.
6. Robert McAfee Brown, “The
Holocaust as a Problem in Moral Choice,” in Dimensions of the
Holocaust, 47, 62.
7. Daniel Goldhagen’s
Hitler’s Willing Executioners (New York: Random House, 1996)
has been widely, and justly, criticized (see, for example, Raul Hilberg in
Critical Inquiry 23, no. 4 [1995]: 721–28); I am, however,
sympathetic to Goldhagen’s contention that the Holocaust is, at
least in part, a manifestation of an explicitly Christian anti-Semitism.
8. Berel Lang, Act and Idea in
the Nazi Genocide (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), xxi.
9. Peter Haidu, for example, writes,
“Exclusive stress on the uniqueness of the Event, combined with
its sacralization, results in its disconnectedness from history”
(in Probing the Limits of Representation, 291).
10. Jonathan Boyarin, Storm
from Paradise (Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press, 1992), 7.
11. Saul Friedlander, Memory,
History, and the Extermination of the Jews in Europe (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1993), 51.
12. Friedlander, Memory,
History, and the Extermination of the Jews, 51, 43.
13. Friedlander, Memory,
History, and the Extermination of the Jews, 56.
14. Saul Friedlander, introduction
to Probing the Limits of Representation, 3–4.
15. Friedlander, Memory,
History, and the Extermination of the Jews, 58.
16. Shoshana Felman and Dori
Laub, Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis,
and History (New York: Routledge, 1992), xiv. While Felman and Laub
do not refer explicitly to the Holocaust in this passage, their study
is structured around the notion that the Holocaust reverberates as a
traumatic event in contemporary history.
17. I would extend Yael
Feldman’s observations about Israeli literature to this rhetoric
of trauma. Feldman, writing about contemporary Israeli fiction,
notes that in such literature psychoanalysis is appropriated for the
purposes of ideology critique and contends that “Freudianism is
used only as a metaphor; in the final analysis, it is ideology rather
than individual psychology that is the primary force behind these
literary representations” (Yael Feldman, “Whose Story Is It,
Anyway?” in Probing the Limits of Representation, 226).
18. Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed
Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (Baltimore, Md.: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1996), 5.
20. Under the Nazis, of course,
Jews were considered nonwhite. See Sander Gilman, The Jew’s
Body (New York: Routledge, 1991), for a more extensive discussion
of this issue.
21. Dominick LaCapra,
Representing the Holocaust (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press,
1994), 220–21; my emphasis.
22. Robert Jan Van Pelt and
Debórah Dwork, Auschwitz 1270 to the Present (New Haven,
Conn.: Yale University Press, 1996), 11. Hereafter, this work is cited
parenthetically as A.
23. Van Pelt and Dwork’s
reference to Alain Renais’s film Night and Fog (1955)
is telling: Critics have noted that the stylistic mastery of Night
and Fog aestheticizes the Holocaust to such an extent that, despite
its use of documentary material, the film maintains the Holocaust as
unrepresentable. See Geoffrey Hartman, “The Cinema Animal,”
and Omer Bartov, “Spielberg’s Oskar: Hollywood Tries
Evil,” in Spielberg’s Holocaust: Critical Perspectives
on “Schindler’s List,” ed. Yosefa Loshitzky
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), 61–76 and
41–60.
24. Hannah Arendt, Eichmann
in Jerusalem, rev. ed. (New York: Penguin, 1994), 279.
25. Lawrence D. Kritzman,
ed., Auschwitz and After: Race, Culture, and “the Jewish
Question” in France (New York: Routledge, 1995), 1.
27. Berel Lang, in
Heidegger’s Silence (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press,
1996), analyzes this phrase and notes that “what is problematic
here is . . . the abstraction and generalization by which Heidegger
hedges the concepts of death and technology, in effect excluding for
either of these the likelihood, perhaps even the possibility, of an
interior view—the view of the subject” (18).
28. Theodor Adorno, Negative
Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (New York: Seabury, 1973), 362.
29. Adorno, Negative
Dialectics, 362–63; my emphasis.
30. Primo Levi, The Drowned
and the Saved, trans. Raymond Rosenthal (1986; reprint, New York:
Random House, 1989), 44.
31. Peter Hayes, introduction
to Lessons and Legacies (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University
Press, 1991), 3. He adds: “Although such statements about another
subject might be taken as disappointing confessions of (sometimes lengthy)
explanatory failure, we crave them in this context as part of a reassuring
pact between asserter and audience. The former, in effect, avows that
‘I cannot understand, since I could not have done
or permitted such things,’ and the latter, eager to say the same,
nods in agreement.”
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