The Holocaust: An ''Engorged'' Symbol of Evil?

Remembering the Holocaust offers a space for debate about how the Holocaust has taken center stage in most discussions about evil in America since the 1960s. The text features a reprint of sociologist Jeffrey Alexander’s widely read essay “The Social Construction of Moral Universals” (2002), followed by several contributions from luminaries in the field of Holocaust studies who agree, disagree, and otherwise engage Alexander’s account. In his essay, Alexander sets out to explain why the Holocaust has come to occupy the “limelight” in much cultural discourse around evil; his project adopts Kant’s “radical evil,” threads it through Émile Durkheim, and comes up with “sacred-evil,” which describes the process of making a tragedy out of the Holocaust. This “trauma-drama,” Alexander argues, has become a universal symbol of evil. The instrumentalization of how the Holocaust figures among the many other catastrophic events in global history is ultimately at stake in understanding the event. As Geoffrey Hartman notes in the foreword, “the wound is in danger of becoming the identity” (xiii). As virtually everyone in Remembering the Holocaust reiterates, the wound of the Holocaust was used, according to Peter Novick, to bolster Israel. And Alexander, after all the commentators on his essay have offered their views, concludes with a return to how the Holocaust functions in the Israel–Palestine conflict.

“Social Construction” begins with the question, “How did a specific and situated historical event . . . become transformed into a generalized symbol of human suffering and moral evil, a universalized symbol” (3). It is an apt question now and was also in the late 1990s when he began researching the issue. Alexander answers his question by moving through several examples of how this came to be and concludes that “the trauma-drama gave the story of the Holocaust a mythical status” (34) and that its message can be understood as “evil is inside all of us and in every society” (35). David Grossman’s child-of-survivors narrator, Momik, in See Under: Love (2002) terms this the LNIY—the little Nazi in you. In other words, Alexander articulates how the Holocaust became separated from the war and how it took on this mythical status that enabled everyone to recognize the potentiality of evil within. Paired with Novick’s account, the two offer an excellent summary of how the Holocaust took prominence in our cultural imaginary of evil.

While he offers a detailed history of the cultural construction of the Holocaust as a “sacred-evil,” both his tone and his vocabulary can be hard to justify, if not understand. For example, in discussing the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s permanent exhibit, he notes that there are “powerfully negative images of concentration camps” (47), which begs the question of how there might be powerfully positive images of the camps. Even more worrying, while Martin Jay uses the word “odd” to describe Alexander’s repeated use of “engorged” (I counted five iterations within a two-page sample) to describe the discourse around the Holocaust, none of the smart and interesting commentaries delve at length into Alexander’s rhetoric:

An engorged evil overflows with badness. Evil becomes labile and liquid; it drips and seeps, ruining everything it touches. Under the sign of the tragic narrative, the Holocaust did become engorged, and its seepage polluted everything with which it came into contact

(50).

I agree with Jay that the word “engorged” is odd, but I would go further and argue that its diverse connotations render it inappropriate in this context. What I found immensely unclear in Alexander’s narrative, and what this example demonstrates, is exactly where he stands in his historicization. Through the tone of these sentences one gets the impression that Alexander almost viscerally reacts to this seeping pollution of the Holocaust—as though this genocide were itself dirty in both senses of the word...