Aversion and Erasure: The Fate of the Victim after the Holocaust (review)

This study is a thought-provoking engagement with mostly French and American debates around the iconic status of the Holocaust as the ‘origin of the postmodern traumatic’ (p. 4), the inextricable relationship between victimization, suffering, and identity, and the ideological construct of the ‘competition of victims’ in contemporary culture’s ‘mass narcissism’ (Roger Luckhurst, quoted on p. 6). Chapter 1 explores the concept of the ‘surfeit of Jewish memory’ (the idea that Jewish victims of the Holocaust are obsessively and pathologically remembered), and how new rhetorical constructions of victimhood have led to ‘identity theft’ (Ruth Franklin, on p. 38). This overidentification with victims, decried by critics such as Esther Benbassa and Alain Finkielkraut, is seen at best as an ‘unpredictable symptom of the otherwise commendable diffusion of human rights’ (Tzvetan Todorov, on p. 43), and at worst as a ‘masochistic attraction to injury’ (Ian Buruma, on p. 43), whereby real victims have become indistinct from would-be claimants who narcissistically appropriate the suffering of others. Chapter 2 examines French discourses on ‘exorbitant’ memory, relating them not to recent defences of republican universality, abstract citizenship, and national identity (‘Frenchness’) against ethnic and group identifications (liberal pluralism, multiculturalism), but to discourses by Stéphane Courtois and François Furet that oppose Communism’s ‘opacity’ to Nazism’s ‘clarity’ (p. 73). The rhetorical effects of such discourses, Dean argues, fashion a conceptual difference, echoed in writings by Alain Besançon, Todorov, and Jean-Michel Chaumont, between a narrow assertion of particular Jewish suffering and the universal tragedy of human suffering; while, in the anti-identitarian thinking of Alain Brossat and Alain Badiou, claims that the Holocaust obfuscates other genocides elide all historical context in such a way that the rhetorical construction of Jewish suffering can be read as a contemporary allegory of the long history of so-called offense that Jewish particularism has given to humanism in France. Chapter 3 broaches the question of the minimalist style in victim testimony, the privileging of rhetorical constraint so as to impede empathic identification, in order to explore the ethical implications of a cultural practice in which credible testimony is that in which victims have mastered (or perform mastery of) their own wounds. The power of the minimalist style to convey and to displace the affect of testimony itself is illustrated by the historiographical narratives of Saul Friedländer on Nazi Germany and the Jews, Jan T. Gross’s work on Polish pogroms against Jews after the War, and recent writings on Holocaust representation by Lawrence Langer and Berel Lang. In the final chapter Dean focuses on how the negative claims about victims end up inadvertently erasing their experiences and identities. Victims, she concludes, invariably become objects of other people’s identification, projection, and displaced anxieties. Dean’s insightful study of the ongoing historical refashioning of Western cultural attitudes to victims is not about questions of Holocaust representation and memory, but about ideological hypocrisy, moral blind spots, and the limitations of historical and theoretical methods in confronting the affective dimension of institutionalized violence, and its impact on victims’ experience and on how victims choose to testify to their suffering.