Philosophical Witnessing: The Holocaust as Presence

Notes

« Notes » 1. philosophical witnessing (pages 3–16) 1 For an account of the Oneg Shabbos group and the archives (and of Ringelblum himself), see Samuel Kassow, Who Will Write Our History? (Bloomington : Indiana University Press, 2007). 2 On issues related to eyewitness testimony as such, see, e.g., Elizabeth F. Loftus , Eyewitness Testimony (1979, reprint Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996); and Laura Engelhardt, “The Problem with Eyewitness Testimony,” Stanford Journal of Legal Studies 1, no. 1 (1999): 25–29. For issues of eyewitness testimony specifically in relation to the Holocaust, see Machael Bernard-Donals and Richard Glejzer, eds., Witnessing the Disaster: Essays on Representation and the Holocaust (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2003); Gary Weissman, Fantasies of Witnessing (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2004); and Annette Wieviorka, The Era of the Witness, trans. Jared Stark (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2007). 3 See Primo Levi, Survival in Auschwitz, trans. Stuart Woolf (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1993); Thadeusz Borowski, This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen , trans. Barbara Vedder (New York: Penguin, 1967). 4 On the criteria for nation-building, see, e.g., Anthony D. Smith, The Ethnic Origins of Nations (London: Basil Blackwell, 1986), 16–18. 5 As described in James P. Duffy, Target America: Hitler’s Plan to Attack the United States (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 2004). See also Gerhard L. Weinberg, Visions of Victory: The Hopes of Eight World War II Leaders (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005). 6 Buber’s most widely circulated statement in relation to Nazism and the Jewish Question appeared in his response to Gandhi’s advocacy of non-violent resistance in that context. See Two Letters to Gandhi from Martin Buber and J. L. Magnes (Jerusalem: R. Mass, 1939). For other authors mentioned, see, e.g., Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies (London: Routledge, 1945) and Unended Quest: An Intellectual Autobiography (London: Fontana, 1976); and Emmanuel Levinas, Difficult Freedom: Essays in Judaism, trans. Sean Hand (London: Athlone Press, 1990) and Quelque reflexion sur la philosophie de l’hitlerism (Paris: Payot & Rivage, 1997). 7 A. J. Ayer, Language, Truth and Logic (London: Victor Gollancz, 1946). 212 notes 8 David Edmonds and John Eidinow, Wittgenstein’s Poker (London: Faber & Faber, 2001), 96. 9 See Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of the European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, trans. David Carr (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1954). Notwithstanding its title and the fact that it was first published in Germany in 1936, neither the “crisis” referred to nor anything else in the book gives any indication of the social or political conditions of the time. 10 David Hume warrants mention here as a philosopher who (uniquely, it seems) not only wrote history, but realized in his History of England (1754–1762) a work that was for its time and a century afterward a landmark achievement. This was an instance, however, of a philosopher writing history by applying what might be recognized as “philosophical method,” not of historical events, singly or collectively, being addressed philosophically or even by way of a philosophy of history. 2. truth at risk and the holocaust’s response (pages 17–32) 1 On the elements, form, and afterlife of Renaissance Humanism, see, for example , Paul Oskar Kristeller, Renaissance Concepts of Man (New York: Harper & Row, 1977) and Eight Philosophers of the Italian Renaissance (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1964); Anthony Grafton, Defenders of the Text: Traditions of Scholarship in an Age of Science, 1450–1800 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991); and Anthony Grafton and Lisa Jardine , From Humanism to the Humanities (London: Duckworth, 1986). 2 So far as I can determine, the phrase “philosophers of suspicion” in the sense used here and often cited elsewhere appears first in Erich Heller, The Disinherited Mind (London: Bower & Bower, 1957), but then becomes a common, although at times a shifting designation. 3 Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and Jovanovich, 1968), where the charge of the human as “superfluous” under totalitarianism is developed. 4 Specific accounts of this historical “filiation” have varied, although have in common been contentious. See, e.g., Zygmunt Baumann, Modernity and the Holocaust (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1989); Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (New York: Herder & Herder, 1972); Berel Lang, Act and Idea in the Nazi Genocide (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), chapter 7. 5 See, e.g., Carl Hempel, Aspects of Scientific Explanation (New York: Free Press, 1965). [18.118.126.241] Project MUSE (2024-04...