The Holocaust in the Twenty-First Century

Contesting/Contested Memories

David M. Seymour, Mercedes Camino

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317299585
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia dell'Olocausto

This volume locates and explores historical and contemporary sites of contested meanings of Holocaust memory across a range of geographical, geo-political, and disciplinary contexts, identifying and critically engaging with the nature and expression of these meanings within their relevant contexts, elucidating the political, social, and cultural underpinnings and consequences of these meanings, and offering interventions in the contemporary debates of Holocaust memory that suggest ways forward for the future.

Part I

Holocaust Memory, Globalisation and Antisemitism

1 Holocaust Memory

Between Universal and Particular

David M. Seymour

Introduction

This essay is part of an ongoing project that looks at the way the Holocaust and ‘Holocaust memory’ comes to be subsumed within contemporary forms of antisemitism. The most recent and paradoxical illustration of this phenomenon concerns recent ‘debates’ around its now annual commemoration, Holocaust Memorial Day. At the core of these debates is the idea that Holocaust Memorial Day’s seemingly singular focus on Nazi crimes against Jews serves not only to ‘privilege’ its Jewish victims at the expense of others but also serves particularist Jewish interests, most notably, Jewish nationalism or ‘Zionism’.

One of the articulations of these ‘debates’ is through the language of ‘universalism’ and ‘particularism’. From this perspective, Nazi crimes against Jews are presented as ‘universal crimes against humanity’. As a consequence, any emphasis or, indeed, recognition of their specifically Jewish dimensions is read as the illegitimate usurpation of universalism by narrow and parochial particularism. It is as a violation of the seemingly progressive standards of an abstract ‘humanity’ and of ‘universal human rights’ that the alleged specificity of Holocaust Memorial Day stands accused.

This chapter examines the genealogy of these ‘debates’. The first section offers a critique of critical thought’s treatment of the Holocaust from the late 1980s onward. In these works, we see what I have termed the dissolution of the specifically or ‘particular’ Jewish aspects of Nazism into a more generic and abstract ‘universalism’.¹ In the second section, I discuss the consequences of this dissolution when re-articulated in the index of ‘morality’—that is, in the development of the Holocaust as moral symbol or ‘icon’. In the section that follows, I examine the ways in which the allegation of Jewish ‘particularism’ around the question of Holocaust memory and memorialisation is said to stimulate the unravelling of the post-national and post-modern project of the ‘New Europe’. The final section looks at similar negative presentations of the Holocaust in the recent critical rejection of ‘ethics’ and a return to what is termed ‘the political’. I conclude by arguing that together, these attempts to understand antisemitism run the risk of reproducing the very phenomenon it seeks to challenge. I begin, however, with some preliminary methodological comments.

Methodological Preliminaries

The most concise way to explain the methodology underpinning this chapter is with reference to Adorno and Horkheimer’s critique of commodity fetishism or commodification.² For Adorno and Horkheimer, commodification is the process whereby that which is unique and distinct is caught within the near universal realm of exchange. As a condition of entry into this realm, uniqueness and distinctiveness have to be made amenable for their exchange with everything else. As a consequence, the specific or particular quality, in this case, its inherent uniqueness, which obstructs that exchange, has to be expunged. It is only when emptied of its particular substance and reformulated in strictly abstract, formalist and universal terms that the object becomes a commodity and can take its place within the ubiquitous realm of exchange.

Further, that which cannot be contained within the commodity, its expunged elements, reappear as an unpredictable threat to the structure or system of commodification as a whole. Thus, while on the one hand, the commodity’s formal attributes permit its inclusion within the realm of exchange, on the other hand, its now expunged, yet threatening, particularities (its content and substance) are recast as nothing more than superstitious myth having no place in an increasingly rationalized (i.e. commodified) world. They must be rejected from the world and, because they cannot be recognized in their universal aspects, become excluded and taboo.

Dissolving the Holocaust: The Universal over the Particular

The notion of ‘Holocaust dissolution’—that is, of dissolving the specifically Jewish dimensions of Nazism into a broader, more universal concept or phenomenon—reappears³ in many recent, critical accounts of the Holocaust. Here one need only mention the writings of Zygmunt Bauman,⁴ Michel Foucault⁵ and Giorgio Agamben.⁶ Despite the significant and important distinctions that exist between their works, their unifying theme is the connection between the Holocaust, the nation-state and the overarching concept of modernity.

For these thinkers, genocidal antisemitism is integral to the ‘modernist project’ that they see as the defining characteristic of the modern nation-state. In terms of content, this project is characterised as an obsession with the needs of rational national order and/or the health of the national population. It is in these contexts that the Jews are cast as the ‘Other’—as the embodiment of the threat to such order and health. This project of order and health is both inaugurated and managed by the state, either directly or indirectly. It is the state which succeeds in classifying the populations under its domain according to the criteria of those who contribute to the health of the body politic and those who pose a threat—that is, ‘those who shall live’ and ‘those who shall die’, respectively. Inscribed within the very essence of modernity itself, genocidal antisemitism becomes the expression of this policing of boundaries and the expression of the very nature of modern national sovereignty. Indeed, for Giorgio Agamben, this classifying function and the genocidal impulse it implies are present within the praxis of national law and juridical rights inherent within it.

It is in this context that the contours of Holocaust dissolution begins to appear. First, and most obviously, the placement of genocidal antisemitism within the generic concept of modernity serves to de-terrioralise and dehistoricise the geographical and historical actualities of the Holocaust. It overlooks any meaningful consideration of why the Holocaust occurred at a specific place and at a specific time (Germany in the mid-twentieth century). Correspondingly, it fails to acknowledge and account for the significance of the diverse range of political regimes and their impact on the mass murders.

Implicit in this initial tendency to dissolve the particularism of genocidal antisemitism into abstract universals is the positivist nature of its conceptual schema. As no more than expressions of a ‘modern project’ whose aims and outcomes are read into modernity from its inception, related concepts such as the nation-state, sovereignty, law, nationalism, bureaucracy, the Jews and antisemitism appear on the scene in an equally ahistorical form. These concepts’ forms and content, seemingly complete in meaning from their origin, are simply posited. To adopt the words of Adorno and Horkheimer, they take on the appearance of ‘brute facts’. This presentation of modernity’s conceptual schema adopts the positivist mantra that what is, simply is. They take on, in other words, the power of a fate or of a nature that cannot, nor could not be, otherwise. In this positivism, any notion of conceptual development (a development in keeping with changes in social-political relations) is correspondingly abjured.

The positivism of these concepts is, in turn, reinforced through the idea that their origins can be traced back to an expression of a seemingly autonomous political sovereignty. Such a view is in keeping with the notion that genocidal antisemitism is a direct result of the state’s (Bauman) or ‘the sovereign’s’ (Agamben) power to construct the body politic under its domain in an image of its own making; in this instance, it is of a ‘racially healthy’ or ‘ordered’ society. The positing of such an origin accounts for the conflation of content that characterises the apparent diversity of operative concepts. All concepts are presented as if they contain from their inception the inherent propensity of extermination, both jointly and severally. Not only, therefore, do such concepts contain the impulse to genocide but also, because none serves as a challenge or limit to that impulse, all are implicated in equal measure.

In this context, therefore, the social, political and historical actualities of the Holocaust come to be dissolved within the nature of modernity as expressed through the modern nature state. Yet this does not lead to the position that the post-Holocaust or post-modern and post-national world has transcended (modern) antisemitism, or that, having transcended modernity’s nation-state, we have, almost as a by-product, overcome its seemingly natural propensity to genocidal antisemitism. What it means is that by dissolving the Holocaust into the universalist concept of ‘modernity’, it is not so much antisemitism that is overcome (since it is robbed of any autonomous existence), but, rather, the old (i.e. modern) nation-state itself.

From this perspective, genocidal antisemitism, rooted in the nation-state ab initio, has become modernity’s central defining characteristic, but this says little about antisemitism that is neither nationalist, genocidal nor political in origin. As the aforementioned critique indicates, the possibility of the presence of politically autonomous, non-nationalist and non-genocidal antisemitism remains both invisible and untheorised. Indeed, by conflating antisemitism and genocidal antisemitism with modernity, we have the situation whereby no ‘space’ for antisemitism can be said to exist in the post-national and post-modern world.

The danger implicit in this way of thinking about antisemitism (now defined solely as genocidal antisemitism or the Holocaust) is that not only has it been relegated to the past, but it has also been overcome by the legitimising force of a new world. As a consequence, any claim of non-genocidal antisemitism that draws on its memory even in the most general of terms runs the risk of being deemed illegitimate from the outset. Because genocidal antisemitism is recognized as the only antisemitism, it calls into question the anti-anti, or, rather, the non-antisemitic image of the post-modern world. It is, I believe, the potentially destabilizing effect of claims to antisemitism in post-national’s gilded self-image that partly explains not only the denial of claims of contemporary antisemitism but also the intensity of that denial.

In the wake of these modes of thinking, the propensity of these negative consequences takes on a specifically ‘moral’ character. The reason for this shift of register arose through the idea, present both in Bauman and Agamben, that the political nature of the ‘modernist project’ of nation-building, the boundaries it demanded which characterised genocidal antisemitism, brought with it the repression of morality understood in this context as a pre- or asocial concern with the ‘Other’. In other words, if all other modes of being together were seen as tainted by the praxis of the modernist project, only morality appeared as the appropriate glue in the era of the post-modern and post-national.

The Holocaust as Universal Moral Commodity

In this section, I argue that the notion of commodification marks discussions of the post-national and post-modern adoption and the adaption of genocidal antisemitism as a moral symbol. In so doing, it echoes the dissolution of the specificities of the Holocaust into formal universal terms outlined in the earlier section. As will be discussed, these notions of Holocaust dissolution and commodification are contained within Levy and Sznaider’s recent work on ‘Holocaust memory’ and its place within the new global ‘moral economy’.

It is in Levy and Sznaider’s work on genocidal antisemitism and huma...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Jews, Bolsheviks and the Shoah between Amnesia and Anamnesis
• Part I  Holocaust Memory, Globalisation and Antisemitism
• Part II  Monuments and Sites of Memory
• Part III Media and Education
• Part IV Personal, Familial and Collective Remembrance
• Epilogue
• Contributors
• Index