Against Holocaust-Sublime: Naive Reference and the Generation of Memory

To the generation that directly suffered the Holocaust or witnessed it at one remove, ethical imperatives to remember Auschwitz must have seemed and seem clear and simple; but not today when the burden of memory increasingly falls upon a public whose members were born after the events they recall. No longer the sole purview of survivors, memory more and more depends upon the varied work of artists, scholars and community functionaries (painters, writers, architects, sculptors, actors, filmmakers, historians, philosophers, literary critics, art historians, politicians, clergy, educators, philanthropists, ideologues). In the following pages, I build on the work of recent critics to make a philosophical point about how one remembers: with what sympathies, suspicions, critical methods, narratives, images, tone, language and affect. I start with the Jewish philosopher Emil Fackenheim for whom the Holocaust undermined "philosophy" by provoking wonder and astonishment. Identified by Fackenheim with revelation, these constitute affective sources against which Reason has allegedly sought to protect itself. ¹ Arthur Cohen advanced the same argument when he wrote, "There is something in the nature of thought--its patient deliberateness and care for logical order--that is alien to the enormity of the death camps." ²

Like so much reflection upon the Holocaust during the 1970s and 1980s, these sentiments unwittingly teetered on the edge of art. In fact, the attention to wonder and enormity that Fackenheim and Cohen find alien to philosophy has its origin in philosophical aesthetics. Writing in the eighteenth century, Alexander Baumgarten coined the term aesthetics to mean "the science of perception." He explained, "The Greek philosophers and the Church Fathers have already carefully distinguished between things perceived and things known." ³ Baumgarten took as his main focus the organization of representations forming sensual, poetic perception. The wonder demanded by Fackenheim has a place in that order. Baumgarten proposed, "By wonder we mean an intuition of many things in a representation, such things as are not found together in many series of our perceptions." He continued to state, "in the extraordinary we sense, rather than implicitly assert a relation to the inconceivable." ⁴ This same sentiment fits Fackenheim's response to resistance during the Holocaust. Ghetto fighters, pious Hasidim, pregnant women and "righteous gentiles." Natural explanations (social, biological, psychological) only heightened the sense of wonder with which their example struck him. At one point, extending through some fifteen pages of text, Fackenheim repeatedly exclaimed, "Once again the categories 'willpower' and 'natural desire' seem inadequate. Once again we touched an Ultimate." ⁵

Indeed, the Holocaust almost becomes sublime in contemporary thought, be it post-Holocaust or postmodern. Presented in the philosophical tradition, "sublime" refers first to the feeling involved when the human imagination and understanding have reached their limit. Such epistemological crisis shaped the work of Fackenheim and Cohen and riddled the work of Jean-François Lyotard and Julia Kristeva. The Holocaust itself may very well have outstripped the human power to understand. On the other hand, the rhetoric that shapes this insight--an often automatic recourse to words like incomprehensible, uncanny, unspeakable, tremendum--carries consequences that complicate that simple sense. Holocaust-memory turns "aesthetic" with each passing generation: a point that critics like Dominick LaCapra and Michael André Bernstein writing in the mid- to late 1990s have begun to suspect and work through. The course assumed in this essay provides a relatively obscure detour back to Mendelssohn, Kant and Schiller. Classical Enlightenment aesthetic theory shows why contemporary critics have begun contesting Holocaust-memory that assumes the argot of sublimity and why they adopt a style that Mendelssohn and Schiller called "naive."

Sublime

In "On the sublime and naive in the fine sciences," Moses Mendelssohn saw how the physically immense, noted by Cohen, takes one by the "surprise" signaled by Fackenheim. Mendelssohn recognized the moment in which "the soul is momentarily stopped in its tracks and gazes astounded, at this immensity." ⁶ In contrast to this attention to immense objects, Kant's...