Reply to the Eckardts on "Uniqueness"

78 SHOFAR Summer 1995 Vol. 13, No.4 metaphysical analysis!-when will Professor Katz ever learn this? The fact stands that Katz has no right to deny, in effect, the dignity of those human beings for whom the singularity of the Holocaust lies in their existential/ fateful consanguinity with a historically victimizing community, and who are now living out responding lives of penitence in consequence of such horrible praxis. Perhaps if Professor Katz ever begins to comprehend this state of affairs, he will himself repent and stop transmogrifying Alice and Roy Eckardt into devotees of a mysticism and mystification they in truth steadfastly reject. Reply to the Eckardts on "Uniqueness" by Steven T. Katz Cornell University I am sorry that Alice and Roy Eckardt took such intense offense at my discussion of their work on the uniqueness of the Holocaust. I have always admired their principled stand on antisemitism in the Church and other issues and wish that this intellectual confrontation could have been avoided. However, the fact is that their notion of "transcending uniqueness " that I criticize in Volume I of The Holocaust in Historical Context is hopelessly confused, and their defense of their earlier position in the present correspondence only makes matters worse. Put simply, their conception of transcending uniqueness is largely incoherent. First let me repeat what is essentially my entire substantive discussion of the Eckardts' argument in Volume I of The Holocaust in Historical Context so that readers will understand what they are replying to: In particular, my guarded rendering of the character of the Holocaust's incomparability is not to be equated with Alice L. Eckardt and A. Roy Eckardt's intriguing contention that among the various meanings of the word uniqueness there is one term beyond others, transcetlding uniqueness , that peculiarly applies to, and individuates, the Sho'ah. This exceptional category they define as follows: The concept of transcending uniqueness refers to events that are held to be essentially different from not only ordinary uniqueness but even unique uniqueness. With transcending uniqueness the quality of difference raises itself to the level of absoluteness. Readers' Forum This supports their earlier statement: One way to situate the qualitative shift to transcending uniqueness is'ib speak of a radical leap from objectness to subjectness, a total existential crisis and involvement for the party who makes one or another aff1rmation of transcending uniqueness. This extraordinary about face is accompanied by a marked transformation in modes of language. One recognizes that in this odd language, the Eckardts are wrestling with the limits of the sayable, are striving to identify a distinctive ontic circum· stance whose conceptualization may point to something philosophically fertile; given the ambiguities of their formulation, however, the notion of transcending uniqueness is unendorsable. To the degree that I understand their meaning, the shifts and modillcations they introduce apply to many collective tragedies and do not provide compelling grounds for historical and metaphysical individuation. The Eckardts are correct to note that Antisemitism, as it has manifested itself within the entire history of the West, is itself a markedly unique phenomenon. This phenomenon is radically discontinuous with ordinary forms of "prejudice," such as is race and religion, forms that have their occasions and their locales and then atrophy or are superseded. Antisemitism is the one perennial malady of its kind within the history of the Western World, and it is spread universally within the entire geography of the West. Distinctively, it is pervasive in time as in space. This is the peculiar generality of antisemitism weddeo indissolubly to the peculiar peculiarity of the Holocaust. But this penetrating judgment, even though unimpeachable, does not serve to make their larger historiosophical and interpretive claim convincing. The authentic anomalousness of antisemitism as well as its disquieting endurance over place and time does not necessarily involve any transcendental correlates. It is true that the antisemitism of the West is rooted primordially in Christian theology, that on Christian grounds, )udeophobia is generated and warranted by primary ontological oppositions, but this intra-Christian dogma is not to be misunderstood and extrapolated per se into a genuine transcendental reality, into a legitimate transcendental analysis. We remain, therefore, satisf1ed with a more modest phenomenological, contra transcendental...