Disappearing Traces: Holocaust Testimonials, Ethics, and Aesthetics

3. Lending an Ear to the Silence Phrase: Holocaust Writing of the Differend

102 c h a p t e r t h r e e Lending an Ear to the Silence Phrase Holocaust Writing of the Differend It takes a poet to describe it, I don’t have the words. —a b a b e e r , Holocaust survivor La réalité a souvent besoin d’invention, pour devenir vrai. C’est-t-à dire vraisemblable. —jo rg e s e m p rú n , L’écriture ou la vie The disaster, unexperienced. It is what escapes the very possibility of experience—it is the limit of writing. . . . Which does not mean that the disaster, as the force of writing, is beyond the pale of writing or extratextual. —m au r i c e bl a n c h o t, The Writing of the Disaster writing the DIFFEREND: the memory phrase “remember!”1 At least since the broadcast of the contentious TV miniseries Holocaust in 1978, a number of Holocaust testimonials were labeled “controversial ” because of the challenge they posed to the established boundaries between creditable responses to the atrocities and “mere” aesthetic productions. Contentious representations of the Holocaust included Art Spiegelman’s comic book Maus, Binjamin Wilkomirski alias Bruno Doesseker’s fake Holocaust memoir Fragments: Memories of a Wartime Childhood, Norman Finkelstein’s polemical study The Holocaust Industry, Roberto Benigni’s Oscar-winning film Life Is Beautiful, Peter Eisenmann’s Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin, and the art exhibit Mirroring Evil: Nazi Imagery/ Recent Art at the Jewish Museum in New York, among others.2 The Lending an Ear to the Silence Phrase 103 controversies surrounding these works gave rise to lengthy debates, in both academia and the popular media, signaling a crisis in the realm of Holocaust memorialization. What these debates also revealed, however, was a problematic relation between ethics and aesthetics in a diverse body of works subsumed under the category of Holocaust representations. As such, they laid bare a need for a new idiom in which to express these works’ intertwined yet contradictory claims: of commemorating the dead and working through the traumatic past, on the one hand, and providing aesthetic pleasure on the other. Despite the pronouncements about the “unspeakability” of the Holocaust experience, the testimonial imperative that has inspired Holocaust literature over the last few decades has been animated by a hope that the survivor’s tale can be shared, indeed, translated and retranslated into a common idiom that carries the message “Remember !” Yet the disputes over the different modes of remembering the Holocaust have been acrimonious. Indeed, one “has a feeling” that these conflicts cannot be resolved in the common language of the injunction to remember. French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard bids us to heed such feelings because they often signal that something cannot be phrased in the language that is currently available; an intractable remainder resists the efforts to share the Holocaust story. Lyotard , let us recall, insists that the task of “thought” today is to bear witness to the differend, whether it is expressed in the form of a philosophical inquiry, a literary work, or a work of art. Lyotard defines the differend as a conflict that cannot be equitably resolved because no rule exists to which both claimants could appeal when seeking a just solution. As a result, either one or both parties in the conflict suffer injustice, without hope for restitution; they feel victimized because they are deprived of a language in which they could express their grievance. Under the current rules of language, their case has become literally “unspeakable.” Lyotard was prompted to write The Differend in response to Robert Faurisson’s spurious claims about the nonexistence of gas chambers, which the Holocaust denier supported with scientific data and archival research. According to Lyotard, Holocaust survivors were victimized by the demand from Faurisson and his cohorts that they provide a scientific proof for the mass extermination of the Jews. Hence, in a lecture “Discussions or Phrasing ‘After Auschwitz,’” Lyotard (1992) proposed that the task for philosophy in the post-Holocaust era was to “link” to the name “Auschwitz” in novel ways, that is, to search Lending an Ear to the Silence Phrase 104 for idioms other than those that are governed by the rules of scientific knowledge (364). These innovative genres of discourse would allow the injustice to be articulated and the memory of “Auschwitz” as “the most real of events” to be...