Contemporary Portrayals of Auschwitz: Philosophical Challenges (review)

Contemporary Portrayals of Auschwitz: Philosophical Challenges. Eds. Alan Rosenberg, James R. Watson, and Detlef Linke. Amherst, New York: Humanity Books, 2000. Pp. 355. $69.95 h.c. 1-57392-733-3.

Slowly, philosophy is learning what aesthetic theory realized quickly during the Nazi era and what theoretical physics knew instantaneously in August 1945: To naively posit a disjunction between theory and practice is a perilous and irresponsible delusion. Like art and physics before it, philosophy too must recognize that it is unavoidably embedded in the world and that its thinking has concrete ethical-political effects. The ancient attempts to transcend this world by seeking refuge in the contemplation of the permanent, and the modern attempts to infuse the world with some overarching meaning--to seek an ultimate reconciliation of difference in identity or to find comfort in an obsessive compulsion for clarity--crumble immediately into ruin when refracted through the shattered lens of Auschwitz. The ineffable horrors of the Holocaust, precisely because they exceed the expressive power of language, inevitably escape philosophy's capacity to render them conceptual, to give them ultimate meaning, to uncover their absolute truth. In the face of such an excess, philosophy falls into crisis, for it can no longer be what it had hoped to be. Rather, it must rethink itself, comb the ruins of it own destruction for that which might be salvageable, and take up once again the Socratic injunction to critically engage the concrete world of human being.

The collection of essays gathered from a 1997 conference held by the Society for the Philosophic Study of Genocide and the Holocaust (SPSGH) in Bonn, Germany, and published under the title Contemporary Portrayals of Auschwitz contributes greatly to the attempt to think through the challenge the Holocaust imposes on philosophy. Although the volume is broken up into five parts--"Witnesses and Testimonies," "Morality and Ethics," "Art and Poetry," "History and Memory" and "The Crisis of Representation"--its power lies in the extent to which the essays in each part obstreperously refuse to settle cleanly into the categories into which they have been placed. In overflowing their categories, the essays engage one another on multiple levels, one implicitly responding to another in such a way that an intricate web of conversations emerges out of the whole. Here I will follow the thread of one such conversation.

If there is any justification in speaking about an era of "postmodernity," it is surely due to the fact that Auschwitz disrupts the very continuity of history. To speak of the "postmodern," then, is to recognize the decisive importance of this disruption. All of the essays in this volume are "postmodern" in this limited sense. However, a very powerful implicit debate emerges between the essays when the question of the efficacy of modernism is considered. Some authors argue that the Holocaust is a decisive indictment of modernity that renders any attempt to salvage something positive from it as at best naive, at worst, malicious. Others, however, attempt to pick through the ruins of modernity, seeking in them something to counteract the dangers endemic to an absolute denunciation of modernity.

Versions of the first position, varying in intensity, can be found in contributions by Debra Bergoffen, Detlef Linke, Klaus Dörner, and James Watson. In her powerful essay "Improper Sites," Bergoffen forcefully insists upon the monstrosity of the "Final Solution," on the fact that it cannot be named and that every attempt to name it, to give it meaning, fails to recognize that it "cannot be accommodated by the teleologies of reason" (34). She argues that the proliferation of sites of memory--memorials, museums, and monuments--that attempt to infuse the Holocaust with some level of redemptive meaning inevitably violates the inexpressible suffering of the victims. Her suggestion is to allow the monstrous sites to remain what they are, "eyesores," blemishes, "insults to good sense" (36). This position, which rigorously insists upon the radical discontinuity of history and emphasizes...