Hegel Without Reserve

Abstract

The post-Hegelian turn in critical philosophy “after Auschwitz” left residues in contemporary cultural criticism that have also influenced the development o f Holocaust and trauma studies in recent years. In Traumatic Encounters: Holocaust Representation and the Hegelian Subject, Paul Eisenstein explores how the Hegelian subject might be redeemed for Holocaust and trauma studies from a milieu that has sometimes led to its preemptive burial. The ultimate aim o f this redemption is to make a case for recovering the dialectic between the Particular and the Universal in Hegel’s conceptualization o f the subject o f history for the project o f bearing witness to the traumatic past. Eisenstein’s vehicles for this agenda include Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List, D. M. Thomas’s The White Hotel, Thomas M ann’s Doctor Faustus, and David Grossman’s See Under: Love. His analyses o f these works deliver insight after insight, all o f which challenge prevailing assumptions about the limits o f witnessing when all perspectives are partial yet nevertheless should— or indeed must—retain universal implications. Eisenstein remarks the myriad reasons for a political if not funda­ mentally anti-intellectual suspicion o f Hegel in “Holocaust Memory and Hegel,” the first chapter of Traumatic Encounters. In his discussion of Hegel and his critics, Eisenstein righdy observes that Hegel’s dialectic and Absolute Spirit have come to be associated with the aggrandizing and difference-obliterating tendencies o f National Socialism. This asso­ ciation follows from reductive interpretations o f Theodor W. Adorno’s excoriating evaluation of the fate o f metaphysics and lyric poetry after Auschwitz and Jacques Derrida’s subsequent deconstruction o f the on-