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Reviewed by:
  • The Holocaust and the Postmodern
  • Devin O. Pendas
The Holocaust and the Postmodern, Robert Eaglestone (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 369 pp., cloth $115.00, pbk. forthcoming (2008).

Jürgen Habermas once famously accused postmodernists (Michel Foucault specifically) of what he termed "cryptonormativity." By this, Habermas meant that postmodernists evinced clear normative preferences (e.g. in favor of the oppressed or marginalized) for which they could not adequately account on the basis of their own epistemological theories. This claim that postmodernism is ethically incapacitated by its epistemological relativism has been particularly potent among historians, some of whom (e.g., Richard Evans and Deborah Lipstadt) have alleged that questioning of the positive truth of history is a slippery slope to Holocaust denial. In light of the Paul de Man scandal or the use by some deniers of postmodern-seeming arguments, these are hardly unwarranted concerns (although most Holocaust deniers actually claim to be empiricists). Yet anyone tempted to dismiss postmodernism on these grounds, as either well-intentioned but misguided relativism or as obscurantist posturing, would do well to read Robert Eaglestone's thoughtful, provocative, and cogent defense.

Eaglestone begins by asserting that postmodernism is, in fact, a direct response to the Holocaust. As such, he insists, it is as a mode of thought both deeply ethical and committed to rationality, albeit retaining an awareness of the "limits and processes of rationality" (p. 3). As a form of ethics, postmodernism has two interconnected strands. First, it seeks to ground a new "humanism beyond humanism" that rests on "an awareness of 'the trace' of that otherness which escapes the limits of systems of thought and language but is made manifest in them" (p. 3). Second, postmodernism rejects what Eaglestone calls the metaphysics of comprehension, a tradition in Western thought that seeks to comprehend the "other" by reducing it to that which is the same. "Postmodernism focuses on both the act of comprehending, seizing, covering up, and on the resistance to that act—to the emergence, if only momentarily, of otherness" (p. 4). As for the rationality of postmodernism, Eaglestone argues that the concern evinced by thinkers such as Jacques Derrida and Emmanuel Levinas with the margins of discourses (the "edges" where different genres, e.g., literature and philosophy, or memory and history, blur into one another) does not mark a rejection of reason but rather a richer understanding of its operations.

Organizing his account into three parts—reading, metahistory, and the "trace of the Holocaust"—Eaglestone traces four themes through each: normalization (the way scholarly objectivity recapitulates the bureaucratic logic of mass murder); identity (the way readers tend to identify with characters in texts and thereby reduce their essential otherness); genre (the way readers' expectations shape the way they read, or misread, texts); and truth (claiming there are in fact not one, but two kinds of truth). [End Page 519]

In Part I of the book, Eaglestone offers insightful readings of both Holocaust testimony and fiction, fleshing out his assertion that testimony in particular must be read as a new genre, if it is to be read correctly. Testimony is marked, he asserts, by a fundamental paradox. "Despite the impossibility of understanding, and the admonition made against identifying with the victims, Holocaust testimonies are read and the readers do identify with narrators and other characters, precisely because that is what they expect to do in reading" (p. 37). For Eaglestone the solution to this paradox lies in understanding the proper generic conventions of testimony, which is to say, by shifting our "horizon of expectation" in reading testimony (p. 38). Here it is particularly important to be cognizant of, and open to, the various ways that testimony disrupts the process of identification, ranging from formal or stylistic experiments to temporal interruptions in the narrative and the lack of closure and resolution typical of many such texts.

In discussing what he terms the metahistory of the Holocaust, Eaglestone argues that it is crucial to understand that there are two distinct modes of truth. The first is correspondence truth, which is the form of truth historians and scholars generally deploy: "truth is the agreement or correspondence of a judgement, an assertion, or a proposition...

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