Notes
EXORDIUM 1. Celan, Poems, 140ff. For a detailed commentary upon “Engführung,” see Szondi. 2. See Hatley. For Levinas’s affirmation of Celan, reading his poetry as exemplary for a “saying without a said,” see Emmanuel Levinas, “Paul Celan: From Being to the Other.” 3. Jacques Derrida, “Shibboleth. For Paul Celan” 50, 38, and passim. 4. Dennis Schmidt has pointed out that Celan had to invent his own calendar. See his “Black Milk and Blue.” 5. See Benjamin, Thesis XIV. Celan almost certainly knew this text, as he refers to Benjamin on a number of occasions. His “In One” presents precisely the constellation that Benjamin had called for in the “Theses.” 6. Celan, Poems, 210ff. A few words on the historical references in the poem are in order. “February 13,” written in Austrian dialect (“Feber”), recalls the general strike of the Viennese workers against the Austro-fascist regime on that date in 1934. “Peuple de Paris” was the headline of the calls of the Paris communards to the people of Paris in 1871. “No pasaràn,” literally “They will not pass,” the battle cry of the largely anarchist Republicans in the Spanish Civil War of 1936 against Franco’s fascist troops, fighting a crucial battle near Huesco. “Abadias” names an old Spanish revolutionary who lived in French exile and whom Celan knew personally. In 1917, shots from the cruiser Aurora on the Tsarist palace in St. Petersburg opened the October Revolution. 7. Celan, “Der Meridian,” 135. INTRODUCTION 1. In their detailed study of U.S. media in particular, Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky note that the distinction between “worthy” and “unworthy” victims 197 Notes contributes to the formation of propaganda in favor of class inequalities and the political and economic elites in Western countries. See their Manufacturing Consent, xixff.; 37ff. 2. See, for example, the classic study of postwar Germany from the late 1960s, Mitscherlich, Die Unfähigkeit zu Trauern; for more recent claims along similar lines, see Nassehi, Weber, Tod, Modernität und Gesellschaft. 3. For an overview, see Kevin Avruch and Beatriz Vejarano, “Truth and Reconciliation Commissions: A Review Essay and Annotated Bibliography.” 4. See, for example, Louis Pojman, “The Moral Status of Affirmative Action,” 183, and Thomas Hill, “The Message of Affirmative Action.” Hill argues that both deontological backward-looking arguments and utilitarian forward-looking arguments send the wrong message, so that a different conception of the relation between normative value and time is required. He finds these different values in cross-time wholes, such as Alasdair MacIntyre’s value of the narrative unity of a life instead of valuing different moments in isolation. While I agree that the opposition between the past and the future needs to be overcome, I will put into question the temporal unity and unified national identity on the basis of which Hill makes his case. Both of these contribute to the notion of moral progress and the exclusion of voices of suffering from a national past that precisely stands in need of challenge. 5. See, for example, Hans Blumenberg’s investigation into the logic of epochality arising with modernity. Blumenberg argues that modernity is the first epoch to understand itself as an epoch, thereby depriving itself of the possibility to legitimize itself by recourse to tradition. “Modernity [Neuzeit] was the first and only age that understood itself as an epoch and, in so doing, simultaneously created the other epochs.” He continues to note that the problem of legitimacy lies in modernity’s “claim to carry out a radical break with tradition, and in the incongruity between this claim and the reality of history, which can never begin entirely anew.” Hans Blumenberg , The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, 116. 6. Courtois (ed.), Livre Noir du Communisme. With its central claim that communism ravaged Europe more than fascism because it produced more victims, this book created quite a stir in European countries faced with the aftermath of a century of totalitarian violence. The subsequent popularity of ‘black books’—whose most important claims come in numbers—confirms the trend to quantify and compare. One might here also think of the debate between historians about the number of the victims of the British slave trade, figured variously between eight and twenty million. 7. See Przeworski, “Material Bases of Consent” in his Capitalism and Social Democracy. See also Przeworski and Wallerstein, “Structural Dependence of the State on Capital”; Dryzek, Democracy in Capitalist Times, 24ff. 8. Of course, one might always worry that images of past...
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