Abstract
In 1949, French intellectual David Rousset publicly called on Nazi camp survivors to bear witness to the existence of a “concentration camp universe” in the Soviet Union. Rousset, a former Buchenwald internee and an influential author, demanded that his fellow survivors identify in unqualified terms with the suffering of Soviet prisoners. Even as he colluded with Cold War governmental agencies, Rousset claimed that the imperative to oppose concentration camps existed “beyond” political or ideological commitments. This essay analyzes the arguments about suffering, politics, and memory made by Rousset and his contemporary critics, notably Jean-Paul Sartre. It responds to Rousset's admirers who have overlooked distinctive aspects of his project: his rhetoric of apoliticism, his demand for complete identification with victims, his exclusive interest in limit-case abjection as opposed to injustice in general, his interpretation of the Nazi camps that centered on forced labor rather than on genocide, and his avoidance of the language of human rights.
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