Against Holocaust-Sublime: Naive Reference and the Generation of Memory

Abstract

To the generation that directly suffered the Holocaust or witnessed it at one remove, ethical imperatives to remember Auschwitz must have seemed and seem clear and simple; but not today when the burden of memory increasingly falls upon a public whose members were born after the events they recall. No longer the sole purview of survivors, memory more and more depends upon the varied work of artists, scholars and community functionaries (painters, writers, architects, sculptors, actors, filmmakers, historians, philosophers, literary critics, art historians, politicians, clergy, educators, philanthropists, ideologues). In the following pages, I build on the work of recent critics to make a philosophical point about how one remembers: with what sympathies, suspicions, critical methods, narratives, images, tone, language and affect. I start with the Jewish philosopher Emil Fackenheim for whom the Holocaust undermined “philosophy” by provoking wonder and astonishment. Identified by Fackenheim with revelation, these constitute affective sources against which Reason has allegedly sought to protect itself. Arthur Cohen advanced the same argument when he wrote, “There is something in the nature of thought—its patient deliberateness and care for logical order—that is alien to the enormity of the death camps.” Like so much reflection upon the Holocaust during the 1970s and 1980s, these sentiments unwittingly teetered on the edge of art. In fact, the attention to wonder and enormity that Fackenheim and Cohen find