Historicizing Theory

1. The Holocaust, French Poststructuralism, the American Literary Academy, and Jewish Identity Poetics

Thus the Jew remains the stranger, the intruder, the unassimilated at the very heart of our society. —Jean-Paul Sartre, Reflexions sur la Question Juive “Auschwitz,” and “After Auschwitz,” that is to say, Western thought and life today. —Jean-François Lyotard, The Differend Theory in the United States institution of the profession of English is often shorthand for the general critique of humanism undertaken in France in the wake of the Second World War and then, in a double take, further radicalized in the mid sixties in the work of the so-called poststructuralists. —Gayatri Chakravortyt Spivak, The Post-Colonial Critic At a 1980 colloquium honoring Jacques Derrida entitled “The Ends of Man,” Jean-François Lyotard delivered a lecture, “Discussions, or Phrasing ‘after Auschwitz,’” in which he spoke the epigraphic phrase that I just cited. During the discussion that followed, Derrida enjoined: “if there is somewhere a One must, it must link up with a one must make links with Auschwitz; . . . I mean to say that the unlinkable of Auschwitz prescribes that we make links.”1 Over 17 1 The Holocaust, French Poststructuralism, the American Literary Academy, and Jewish Identity Poetics EVAN CARTON the next decade, French intellectuals—especially leading poststructuralist philosophers, textual critics, and social theorists—voluminously obliged. Spurred by a series of unsettling political and cultural events that spanned the 1980s and continued to resonate in the 1990s (the national reexamination of the history of Vichy and indigenous fascism; the resurgence of anti-Semitic violence in Paris; the Holocaust negationism of Robert Faurisson and others; the screening of Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah; the Klaus Barbie trial; the political inroads of Jean-Marie Le Pen and the National Front; and the Martin Heidegger and Paul de Man affairs), these intellectuals explicitly linked their critical projects and situations to Auschwitz. Works such as Lyotard’s Differend (1984) and Heidegger and “the jews,” (1988), Derrida’s Cinders (1987), Maurice Blanchot’s Writing of the Disaster (1980), Jean Lacoue-Labarthe’s Heidegger, Politics, and Art (1987), and Julia Kristeva’s Powers of Horror (1980), belatedly confirmed the Holocaust’s constitutive presence—its long absent presence, or presence as absence—in French poststructuralist thought.2 The widely disseminated and applied social, philosophical, historical, and linguistic paradigms of postwar French theory, it now appeared, had emerged in large measure from the theorists’ ambivalent subtextual struggles to “make links with Auschwitz.” From its outset, I will argue, French poststructuralism at once confronted, commemorated, deflected, and veiled the Holocaust. Nor were these complicated relations fully revealed or resolved by the retrospective 1980s and 1990s assertions of the Holocaust’s link or presence to contemporary intellectual life— articulations that themselves tended to effect a kind of disarticulation, an unlinking or absenting, as well. Lyotard’s and Derrida’s quoted remarks begin to suggest why this is so. Taken together, they invoke Auschwitz as modernity’s principle of identity and its principle of alterity—linked and unlinkable at once by virtue of its irreducible otherness (Derrida) and its ubiquity (Lyotard) to thought and life today. The word “Auschwitz” itself—which indicates both a locus of horrible destruction and a boundless destructiveness and horror—helps enact this convergence of identity and alterity, presence and absence. Yet, whether as the most notorious site of the Nazi Final Solution or as the abyss in and of modern consciousness, “Auschwitz” here displaces another phrase—la question juive—by which the shapers and inheritors of twentieth-century French social, literary, and intellectual history are powerfully and particularly connected to it. To make this observation is to insist that the implicit “before Auschwitz” of Lyotard’s hypostatic “‘Auschwitz’”/“‘after Auschwitz’” be interrogated and that both the “One” and the “must” of Derrida’s “One must” be historically specified. However categorical and cataclysmal, the Holocaust is situated for contemporary French intellectuals within chains of cultural circumstance and meaning that long predate and postdate it. 18 Evan Carton As, for French cultural theorists, the Holocaust is situated within, and mediated by, historical chains of circumstance and meaning, so is it (differently ) situated and mediated for American literary critics. Indeed, the central link between the Holocaust and the contemporary discipline of literary study in America is French poststructuralism itself. Imported in the 1970s, with little initial exploration of its historical conditions or recognition of its inscription or encipherment of the Holocaust, this body of postwar French thought came to comprise the field of...