holocaust memory and hegel

Holocaust Memory and Hegel

Eisenstein, Paul.

History & Memory, Volume 11, Number 2, Winter/Fall 1999, pp. 5-36(Article)

Published by Indiana University PressDOI: 10.1353/ham.2005.0002

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PAUL EISENSTEIN

The finite has always to be maintained and made into an absolute.Hegel

To invoke the name Hegel in the context of the Holocaust—and whatit means to remember it—will surely seem to some to strike a discordanttone. As cardinal spokesman for German Idealism and its version ofabsolute subjectivity, Hegel is usually more frequently aligned withclearing a conceptual space amenable to the commission of Holocaustsrather than with ensuring against any future recurrence of them. Fewmay be as explicit as Karl Popper—for whom Hegel is the decisive linkin the emergence of modern totalitarianism1—but the lion’s share ofcontemporary critical-theoretical positions (especially those informed bypoststructuralism) still depend fundamentally on a rejection of Hegel onethical grounds. This rejection has primarily to do with the sense that thehistorical fate of particular groups and identities do not fare so wellwithin and as a consequence of the Hegelian system and the position ofAbsolute Knowledge reached by Spirit. Indeed, today, for many Hegel’sgrand dialectic of History—in which every immediacy, every experience,every particular is already and automatically swallowed up by thewhole—points up the violence of master-narratives at their worst. As itentraps and subsumes so many different material markers of identity(bodily, ethnic, gender, class, etc.)—markers which for Hegel gain theirapparently singular bearing solely by means of what is universal (i.e.consciousness and the activity of thinking)—Hegel’s master-narrative, it

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is said, lets nothing go free. One need only recall Hegel’s paean to the“cunning of reason” in his introduction to the Philosophy of History, inwhich he claims quite explicitly that “the particular is for the most partof too trifling value as compared with the general,” and thus its sacrificeis nothing to lament.2 Moreover, Hegel is said to erase the very principleof difference itself, since every advance within Hegel’s dialectic appearsto represent an achievement of meaningful knowledge which disavowsthe very condition of meaningful knowledge—that condition being the“play” of nonmeaning which even allows meaningful knowledge to beconstituted in the first place. As Derrida says of Hegel’s phenomenology,“It does not see the nonbasis of play upon which (the) history (of mean-ing) is launched.”3

This is, of course, part of the now-standard deconstructive critiqueof Western metaphysics and the “transcendental subject” on which itrelies, the subject who erases within his own mind the divide betweenspirit and matter and thereby realizes a fictive unity between the two. Itis Hegel who theorized this subject more thoroughly than anyone,insisting that every material reality experienced by this subject is alwaysand only the product of his or her mediation; as Hegel put in the prefaceto the Phenomenology, “everything turns on grasping and expressing theTrue, not only as Substance, but equally as Subject.”4 The radicality ofGerman Idealism indeed concerns precisely its theses pertaining to thestatus of objectivity as such—that is to say, its claims that objectivity itselfis the product of subjective mediation, that what counts as an object canonly be determined by a subject. In this respect, objectivity is in a sensean illusion: it does not exist “out there” but is rather the result of adistinction between subject and object made by the very subject inquestion.5

For Hegel, this very distinction is a structural feature of conscious-ness or selfhood itself. According to Hegel, there is a fundamental“disparity which exists in consciousness between the ‘I’ and the substancewhich is its object” (21). Moreover, this disparity—what Hegel refers toas the “negative in general”—is absolutely critical for the survival ofsubject and object. This is why Hegel says that the distinction, conven-tionally thought to be a “defect of both,” is in fact “their soul, or thatwhich moves through them” (21). The key point of Hegel’s phenome-nology is to recognize that the disparity between the “I” and its objects

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is at the same time the disparity of all substance with itself, and it is thislatter disparity which even clears the way for the subject to emerge andfor substance to be known or to exist for us at all. This is but anotherway of saying that our knowledge of the world and ourselves can neverbe an immediate one because something substantial must be given up ifthere is even to be anything at all to be gotten back: the consistency ofreality itself, then, depends upon the sacrifice of substance and theprocess that sacrifice commences whereby reality itself depends on thesubject’s ability “to appropriate and subdue it to himself.” As Hegel putsit in the lesser Logic,

The “I” is as it were the crucible and the fire which consumes theloose plurality of sense and reduces it to unity.... This view has atleast the merit of giving a correct expression to the nature of allconsciousness. The tendency of all man’s endeavors is to understandthe world, to appropriate it and subdue it to himself: and to thisend the positive reality of the world must be as it were crushed andpounded, in other words, idealized.6

As the imagery here makes clear (so much so that one is tempted tocringe), Hegel does not simply recognize the process whereby the objectworld (i.e. positive reality) is created. On the contrary, he urges thisprocess on, insisting that the subject exercise his mediation of materialreality without reserve. What Hegel is after, of course, is the identity ofidentity and nonidentity, the seemingly oxymoronic “concrete univer-sal”—that is to say, the universal thought that is nonetheless universaldespite its existence within a particular consciousness. To this end, Hegelinsists that the subject “crush and pound” his way toward a totalizingvantage point vis-à-vis material reality, a position Hegel baptizedAbsolute Knowledge or Spirit. Nowhere more than here, however, doesHegel’s philosophy appear to be guilty of that trespass for whichcontemporary philosophy—with its emphasis on pluralism and localism,its privileging of the particular over the absolute—is ever on the alert.Here Hegel would seem to run afoul of today’s antifascist ethicalcategorical imperative: never represent your particular interests asuniversal ones; always maintain a tension between the two.7 Ignoring thisimperative, Hegel would seem indeed to be implicitly on the side of the

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fundamental fantasy of fascism, urging on the achievement of a finalIdentity between subjects and the object world that stands over againstthem, imagining a state in which the subject has rid himself of alldifference by so many acts of conceptual appropriations.

The violence that marks these appropriations—even though theytake place at the level of the conceptual—is precisely what evokes thesense that there is something dangerous about Hegel’s philosophy.Hegel’s insistence on totalizing, in view of the appropriations he placesat the core of his Idealism and the subject’s being-in-the-world, appearsto clear a path for a kind of totalitarian or imperialist mind-set and thescapegoating visited upon those on the margins who resist or cannot fitwithin the whole. The instant that Universal Spirit is in fact givenmaterial attributes—i.e. is said to manifest itself in an embodiedform—an exclusionary, antidemocratic imaginary would seem to ensue.Within Holocaust Studies and Jewish Cultural Studies, these concernshave been especially trenchant and have raised important questions alongthe following lines: Does not Hegel’s Idealism take to its very extremea longing for the univocal and the universal initiated by the Greeks andmade the foundation of anti-Judaism (via the discourse of Paul) in Chris-tian Europe?8 Does not Judaism, for Hegel, represent merely an“adolescent” stage in the progressive life of Spirit coming-to-itself—astage soon eclipsed by and incorporated into Christianity?9 Is there notsome affiliation, even if unwitting, between the racist/nationalist fantasyof an organic, transparent society which fueled the Holocaust and thesort of universalist thinking whose clearest philosophical underpinningrests with Hegel? And must we not, in our attempt to bear witness tothe Holocaust itself, avoid reproducing a certain Hegelian gesturewhereby the horror is overcome—that is to say, made to serve theadvance of a meaningful System?10

In his ruminations apropos the Holocaust on conscience andmemory, Harold Kaplan notes the almost inevitable ethical trespassconstituted by the systematic attempt to achieve some Identity betweensubjective and material reality. According to Kaplan, “Those lumberingabstractions of the German philosophic tradition—Fichtean, Hegelian,Marxist, then Fascist—sought immanence and became deadly, perhapsbecause immanence could be found only in violent form. Historymounted a stage and demanded sacrifice.”11 Emil Fackenheim, pointing

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out the superiority Hegel lends to his own standpoint (the “elevation ofselfhood to infinity”), can only ask this question: “[W]hat of the ‘Lord’of Judaism and His otherness?”12 According to Fackenheim, Hegel’s rolein the context of Holocaust memory is to “instruct only by way ofcontrast,” since the “transcending comprehension” that is the distin-guishing feature of Hegel’s Absolute Spirit cannot but meet its match inthe horror of the Holocaust (27).

Perhaps no thinker articulates the above-named concerns moreconsistently than Emmanuel Levinas, who in his essays on Judaismcontinually hints at the specter of the Holocaust as he indicts Hegel’snotion of Spirit for presiding over a philosophic operation by which (andthis phrase cannot help but give us pause) Jews are made to vanish. InLevinas’s reading of Hegel,

The particularity of a people is identical to its finitude. It isHegelian logic that presides over this announcement of disappear-ance. The particularity of a thing has significance in fact only inrelation to a whole; and from that point on, in the name ofHegelian logic, the necessary disappearance of a people is an-nounced, for everything that is finished must finish.13

From the standpoint of Hegelian logic, Levinas notes, any claim by Jewsto some independence from history, some existence apart from theuniversal History Hegel advocates, is simply illusory. The Jewish claim tobe an “eternal people,” for example, cannot survive what Levinas sees asa less than just (Hegelian) litmus-test for legitimation:

the exaltation of the judgement of history, as the ultimate jurisdic-tion of every being, and the affirmation that history is the measureof all things. The judgement passed by a conscience on events thatsucceed, that have an efficacity, an objective visibility, would, youknow, according to the exaltation of history, be merely a subjectiveillusion that vanishes like smoke in the face of the judgement ofhistory. For this conception, there is no eternal people liable to livefree in the face of history. Every people is part of history, bearswithin it its determined essence, and contributes in its way to theuniversal work that incorporates and surpasses it—into which,

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consequently, it is finally absorbed and disappears. What would beeternal is the universal history itself which inherits the heritage ofdead peoples. (199)

That such “dead peoples” whose own judgements are made to vanishlike smoke (again, phrases that give us pause) might insist on a kind ofvitality is, according to Levinas, from the standpoint of Hegelian logicchalked up to a mere “subjective belief [whose] purely subjectivesignificance is denounced at the very moment at which the real curve ofevents is drawn” (200). For Levinas then, the “progress” of history,under the pressure of Hegel’s “synoptic gaze,” is in this way given aprestige that depends fundamentally on the fact that no one locate himor herself in opposition to the meaning and direction of history. For thisprestige to be thus maintained, Judaism (or any other particular ethnicor cultural tradition for that matter) faces two choices—integration intoChristianity or a judgement of insignificance:

Philosophy, as it is summed up and crowned by Hegel, wouldprecisely end up by integrating the individual and collective wills tothe extent that they are real—that is to say, effective—into areasonably structured totality, in which these living totalities arerepresented by their works, but in which these works derive theirtrue—that is to say visible—significance not from the subjectiveintentions of their authors but from the totality, the only one tohave a real meaning [sens] and to be able to confer it. The inten-tions of the authors and, consequently, everything that—to returnto Judaism—the Jews think themselves, the whole of our Aggadahand Halakhah, would be just an old wives’ tale, a theme for asociology or psychoanalysis of Judaism. Judaism would not be truein what it wished, but in the place where the universal historywould have left it. (200)

As Levinas suggests here, the very desires of Judaism—the will andwishes of Jews themselves—are seriously threatened by universalizing ortotalizing narratives of whatever stripe (e.g. Hegelian, sociological,psychoanalytic) that claim to possess the real meaning of these desires.These narratives, functioning as reasonably structured totalities, might

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claim to operate in an ostensibly neutral fashion, but in their claim tocomprehensiveness, Levinas argues that their interests are far from merelyobjective or neutral. This is the case because their versions of history donot allow for alternate narratives, laws and desires to have a kind ofautonomous significance in the face of Hegel’s self-realizing absolute.According to Levinas then, the Jew today is not one who merely believesin Moses and the prophets; on the contrary, to be a Jew is to insist onand be granted a kind of prior philosophical ground which permits andenables that belief. To quote Levinas again,

To wish to be a Jew today is therefore, before believing in Mosesand the prophets, to have the right to think that the significance ofa work is truer in terms of the will that wished it into being thanthe totality in which it is inserted; and, even more brutally, that willin one’s personal and subjective life is not a dream whose death willallow us to draw an inventory of the work and the truth, but thatthe living willing of will is indispensable to the truth and under-standing of the work. (200)

In Levinas’s key qualifier (“even more brutally”), it is clear that theterrain of philosophy is one with ramifications of violence for real, liveJews—the prevention of which would seem to be predicated on a clearrejection of Hegel.

As the arbiter of genuine significance, Hegel’s suprahistoricalSubject might be said to oversee a “final solution” of the tensionbetween our idea of reality and reality itself and, as such, is something ofwhich, in today’s climate, we can only be wary. After Auschwitz, ourinterests, to paraphrase Foucault, must lie not with solutions but withproblematics.14 That is to say, we must everywhere avoid the exercise ofmastery in the name of some abstract Master-Principle; instead, we mustwork to keep the problem of knowing alive, because problems, notsolutions, reverse the usual domination of the particular by the universal.This has been nowhere more evident than in the way we regard theattempt to learn about and memorialize the Holocaust. Given themagnitude of the horror of the event itself, it now goes without sayingthat it is not possible for our thinking to be adequate to the “way itwas.” After the Holocaust, our thinking about history has, in a way,

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become condemned to particularity. Every historical narrative appearsnow, to use Hayden White’s familiar term, an emplotment, and everyartistic representation must be regarded not as the product of anessential, transhistorical vision but rather as the product of a limited,discursive, subject position. History, so the saying goes, has becomememory. Michael Marrus, who notes this very shift in historiographicencounters with the Holocaust, has registered this very point. Accordingto Marrus—invoking Isaiah Berlin’s famous distinction—we have movedaway from the attempt to know history in terms of master-narratives (i.e.the province of the hedgehog) and toward the encounter with history viathe production and proliferation of a plurality of narratives (i.e. theprovince of the fox). Marrus writes,

We have passed from a historical literature conditioned by a fewgrand visions to a body of writing shaped by discrete, not necessari-ly interconnecting perspectives. By and large, it seems to me, in thefirst two decades after the Holocaust writers were preoccupied withthe search for a single key—something that would unlock themystery of the massacre of European Jewry. Since then, historianshave moved more cautiously, guided by a variety of researchagendas. With significant exceptions, historical writers today areuncomfortable with the frameworks they have inherited. Theyspend much of their time pointing to variety, paradoxes, complexi-ties, and contradiction. Their writing is less informed by single,unitary perspectives than it was with their predecessors, and theyhave advanced our knowledge on many smaller fronts, in contrastto the massive, coordinated campaigns of those who went before.15

In noting the unease historical writers have with their ownframeworks, Marrus is in fact noting the ascendancy of a postmodern/poststructuralist sensibility when it comes to the encounter with history,and the primary feature of this sensibility is precisely the avoidance oftotalizing—i.e. the refusal of any position of supreme mastery. This iswhy so many historiographic accounts now seek to foreground their owninadequacy and why a sense of minimalism or understatement pervadesso many memoirs and literary representations of the Holocaust. Ratherthan setting up theories, most of us spend our time deconstructing them,

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and this latter gesture is taken by poststructuralists, new historians andpluralist humanists alike as the ethical position. In short, the totalizinggestures that are part and parcel of the Hegelian subject appear toreplicate a certain fascist gesture and to evade the fundamental trauma ofthe Holocaust by recouping some meaning from it. As DominickLaCapra suggests, every good historian today, far from being a universalsubject, occupies only a “subject position” into which he/she mustcontinually inquire and reflect upon critically and self-critically.16 Theresult is a practice of memory that is decidedly against totalizing and theclosure presumed to come with it. Instead, memorialization is forLaCapra a perpetual effort at “working-through” the Holocaust in an“attempt to counteract the projective reprocessing of the past throughwhich we deny certain of its features and act out our own desires for self-confirming or identity-forming meaning.”17

In this climate, Hegel appears to have little to offer. Even devoteesof Hegel, even those who clearly see themselves as working in thetradition of Hegel, have been hard-pressed not to associate him with theHolocaust. The case of Adorno is perhaps paradigmatic in this respect,for despite Adorno’s praise of Hegel,18 there is for him nonethelesssomething in the philosophy of the latter that, in the last instance, iscomplicit with the mentality of fascism and anti-Semitism. This “some-thing” is, of course, Hegel’s commitment to the whole or the universal,and this is why if Hegel survives at all in discussions of how best tocomport ourselves in our thinking about (i.e. bearing witness to) history,he survives by dint of a key separation between method and system. Inhis notion of a “negative dialectics,” Adorno thus keeps Hegel’sdialectical method—which works according to the thesis “that objects donot go into their concepts without leaving a remainder”19—but rules outany arrival at some absolute position, some position of unity betweenuniversal and particular. Dialectics is, for Adorno, “the consistent senseof nonidentity” (5). Thus unity is for Adorno always and only complicitwith domination and cruelty. “No universal history,” he writes, “leadsfrom savagery to humanitarianism, but there is one leading from theslingshot to the megaton bomb.... It is the horror that verifies Hegel andstands him on his head” (320). This is precisely why Adorno advancesa “negative” dialectics—the idea that any advancement of knowledge isalways plagued by negativity, by some “extremity” that eludes our

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conceptual frameworks and ways of knowing. Negative dialectics is alwaysfaithful to this “remainder” that eludes our ways of knowing. Hegel, forAdorno, “cut short” dialectics in his positing of some final position ofreconciliation, and this, for Adorno, is likened specifically to the attitudeof the Nazis: “If thought is not measured by the extremity that eludesthe concept, it is from the outset in the nature of the musical accompani-ment with which the SS liked to drown out the screams of its victims”(365).

Adorno’s line here returns us yet again to the prescription for self-referentiality that stands today as an ethical maxim overseeing allhistorical inquiry. The question, however, is this: must self-referentialitystand as the bedrock of what it means to bear witness to history? Doesself-referentiality ensure that we are not exercising a kind of mastery soas to recoup something meaningful from the Holocaust? Does self-referentiality guarantee the place of trauma in the act of bearing witnessto the Holocaust? That is to say, is self-referentiality the only way toremain faithful to that aspect of history which eludes all of our ways ofknowing? Might not self-referentiality sometimes function as a way tomaintain the self in its encounter with the object/other of history? Andin this way, doesn’t it always lead to a deferral of an encounter with thereal of history, that unsymbolizable dimension that cannot (yet) even becalled other? It is here, in my view, that Hegel and the category of theabsolute, is crucially relevant to, and deserving of recovery for, an ethicsof historical memory. Because all of our memorial efforts are rooted inthinking—in that which is universal about any intelligible phenome-non—it is perhaps time to recognize that we cannot avoid universalizinginsofar as we think and speak about the past at all. When we followHegel on this point, however, we don’t arrive at the position of comfortwe might imagine. Far from being a position of self-satisfaction orsupreme mastery, Hegel’s totalizing position leads us toward theexperience of difference not between something and something butrather between something and nothing. Hegel’s absolute is thus not beregarded as a means by which we would “know all” about the Holocaustand thus mitigate a traumatic encounter with it, but rather entails theexperience of realizing the way in which all of our knowledge—andindeed our very way of knowing itself—only takes us to the point wherewe traumatically encounter the real of history.

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The whole of Hegel’s place at the cornerstone of historical memory rests,of course, on the fundamental thesis of Hegelian phenomenology—thatthe particular is already universal. At first glance, the radicality of thisproposition appears to lie entirely in a conservative direction. That is tosay, Hegel’s proposition appears on the face of it to grant an equallylegitimate position to any individual formulator of the proposition itself,thus opening up a universe of radical relativity and/or aggression inwhich every particular interest is given license to believe its interest to bein fact universal. In the case of Holocaust memory, this would appear tobe a recipe for disaster; one can imagine all sorts of apologists invokingthis thesis of Hegel’s to justify the truthfulness of their particularinterpretation or memorialization of history.20 What if, however, at adeeper level, this is not Hegel’s aim at all? What if, on the contrary,Hegel’s insistence on the universality of every particular interest isdesigned not to secure the legitimacy of all particular interests (and thusof a radically conservative philosophy of relativity) but instead to pointup the insufficiency/inadequacy of any and every particular interest?What if Hegel’s aim is finally to grasp the source of this insufficiency atits most genuine level—as pertaining not to the realm of particularity butto the order of the universal itself? If this is the case, then Hegel is farfrom granting license—without regard to truth—to any and everyparticular approach toward history; he is far from writing a blank checkto fascism which would enable the latter in fact to regard its particularinterest as universal and thus carry out whatever barbarity might benecessary to realize a palpable universality. On the contrary, when Hegelinstructs us that our particular is already universal, he forces us towardan encounter with a more primordial form of difference—not that be-tween two particular interests but rather between the order of somethingand the order of nothing, between that which can be thought and thatwhich cannot. In other words, Hegel’s claim shifts radically the directionof our inquiry: the difficulty lies not in finding a way from the particular(i.e. a starting point) to the universal but rather from the universal to theparticular.

Hegel’s insistence on a universal ground for everything, then, mightbe seen to undo the fundamental fantasy of fascism by reversing the way

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we conceptualize our memorial efforts. For Hegel, it is not the universalor total account (i.e. master-narrative) that is just outside of our reachand must remain so; rather, it is the particular. It is not, in other words,the universal that lies in some nonhistorical domain but rather theparticular.21 Indeed, for Hegel, it is the universal that is all the time withus and must be taken up resolutely if we are to confront the traumaticreal of history—the particular that eludes the whole of the symbolicorder. Hegel makes this point by insisting on a fundamental truthconcerning our being as speaking beings: that every time we open ourmouths to designate this or that particular entity, every time we think theparticular, every time we reduce it to sense, we are all the time speakingand thinking from the position of the whole.22 This is, in Hegel’s lesserLogic, the basic insight of phenomenology: “thought is the universal inall acts of conception and recollection” (37). It is, as Hegel says, “theagency of thought [that] gives universality to particular contents” (32).This is clearly the most crucial of Hegel’s claims concerning universality:thought, or the universal, is thus not that which harms or threatens toengulf the particular—as it is for Adorno and others—but is, rather, theabsolutely real ground for everything meaningful in our world. The verydesignation of something particular is merely an instance of universality.The universal is thus not to be repudiated as that which acts violentlytoward particulars; the particular emerges only in so far as it has alwaysalready been touched by what is universal, in so far as it has reached thelevel of thought.

Hegel makes this clear at the close of the “Sense-Certainty” sectionof the Phenomenology. There, he says that the sensuous particular cannotbe reached by language, because language—which is for Hegel alwaysinseparable from thinking—enjoys no unmediated relation with the rawmaterial encountered by our senses. Even the Kantian recourse tounmediated intuition does not manage to escape dependence on thatwhich is universal. As Robert Pippin explains, “We must admit that thereis no way in which the intuited particular, or formally characterizeddomain of intuited particulars, can play a cognitively significant roleexcept as already minimally conceptualized particulars. Always involvedin such judgements is my having taken this to be this-such, even in aquite minimal or highly abstract way.”23 When we speak or think aboutsome particular sense-experience, then, we do so only because paradoxi-

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cally we are not/no longer experiencing it an unmediated way. There isalways—even if only minimally—a dimension of universality to ourmeaningful utterances. This is why Hegel can say in the “Sense-Certainty” section of the Phenomenology that language has “the divinenature of directly reversing the meaning of what is said, of making it intosomething else, and thus not letting what is meant get into words at all”(66). This is the case because language belongs to consciousness, whichis inherently universal: whenever something is thought or spoken about,then, we are already in the domain of universality. The attempt toactually “say” or “think” a particular entity would result in either thatentity’s crumbling away or in the speaker’s inability to complete hisdescription. Again, Hegel’s point is this: that any reference to aparticular—even the particular that eludes our finite mind—is still theproduct of the whole. This is the thrust of Hegel’s critique of empiricismwhich holds that sensory objects (i.e. concrete particulars) “ha[ve]absolute truth for consciousness” (65).

In their own way, empiricists would seem to be good pluralists: theycounter the egoistic tendencies of Idealism by recognizing the uniqueinviolability of every particular. As Hegel points out, they “speak of theexistence of external objects, which can be more precisely defined asactual, absolutely singular, wholly personal, individual things, each ofthem unlike anything else; this existence, they say, has absolute certaintyand truth” (66). But to say that these external objects have “absolutetruth for consciousness,” for Hegel is to make an assertion in which onedoes not “know what one is saying, to be unaware that one is saying theopposite of what one wants to say” (65). Any meaningful designation ofa particular only indicates what is universal about it: “When I say: ‘asingle thing,’ I am really saying what it is from a wholly universal pointof view, for everything is a single thing” (66). Thus, the sense of theunsaid that pervades so many memorializations of the Holocaust mightin fact be regarded in a different light—not as the inability of theparticular to pass itself off as the universal but rather as the inability ofthe universal (i.e. the order of thought, the order of language) to renderintelligible the particular. And when one urges a notion of respecting theparticularity of the particular, of foregrounding the inadequacy oflanguage by claiming to avoid universalizing or taking one’s rendering

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of a given phenomenon as absolute, it is the case that one is unawarethat one is saying the opposite of what he/she wants to say.24

The entirety of Hegelian phenomenology rests exactly on this point:for the particular to be grasped, thought must have already gone beyondit. As Hegel puts it, “The Here that is meant would be the point; butit is not: on the contrary, when it is pointed out as something that is, thepointing-out shows itself to be not an immediate knowing [of the point],but a movement from the Here that is meant through many Heres intothe universal Here” (64). Were this not the case, any utterance designat-ing a particular could never complete its task; its very capacity todesignate is thus linked precisely to its universality, because were anutterance really to correspond to an “immediate knowing”—i.e. really tobe truly singular—it would simply be another particular which ex-ists—like those entities it is to designate—only at the level of sense andnot at the level of meaning. The exercise by which sound emerges fromour mouths would thus not be a “pointing-out,” but rather a purelymechanical gesture, and without meaning because the meaning of ourwords is inseparable from the whole, or universality, of the discourse inwhich they are put.25

The totalizing practice that might follow this recognition, then,would do nothing to confirm the superior position of the AbsoluteSpirit. It would, on the contrary, make explicit what has been implicit allalong: the precariousness of the universal and the ridiculous desperate-ness that underwrites its securing of particulars. In other words, whenthe universal subsumes individual particulars, the universal is telling us bythis very process something about its ontological status as well—thatsense always eludes it, that it is in the first/last instance without anintelligible ground. Exaggerated acts of totalizing make this messageunmistakable: the universal itself is not all, is external to itself. Even theuniversal is lacking and looking for that which might make it complete.Try as it might to symbolize an external cause responsible for its lack, itsproject is doomed to fail because that cause is in fact internal to theorder of signification itself and cannot be symbolized. This is why,though we speak all the time from the position of the absolute, it issignificant whether or not we take it up absolutely: to take up totalizingin this way is to counter the use made of totalizing within the fundamen-tal fantasy of fascism.26

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We are here at the point of making the crucial claim that everyposition taken up absolutely is a radical one, and that paradoxically, thefascist position is not absolute enough, for it fails to take its very ownconceptualization of history and the present far enough so as to confrontthe lack or split that is the condition of possibility for its very capacity toconceptualize at all. Indeed, to take up an absolute position is to exposethe manner in which even the universal Law that structures the order oflanguage depends on its own primordial self-rupture and thus constitu-tionally lacks stability and substance; to occupy the position of theabsolute without taking it up, however, is either to believe in the natural,essential universality of that Law or to postpone the recognition that theLaw has no ground. In both cases, the Law is spared a traumaticencounter with the real. Gilian Rose is thus right to note the disservicedone to Hegel by those who would separate his method from his“system.” Absolute Knowledge, Rose argues, means only this recogni-tion: that what are “apparently ‘universal’ laws turn out to be the fixingof particularity.”27 What eludes the Law, then, what stands in the way ofa harmonious, whole, transparent socius is recognized finally for what itis: not an actual object to be acquired, incorporated or eliminated but acondition of the whole of the symbolic order itself. Though he has beenroutinely misread on just this point, Hegel is the one who makes thisclear. “The self-knowing Spirit,” Hegel says on the final page of thePhenomenology, “knows not only itself but also the negative of itself, orits limit” (492).

This is the Absolute Spirit’s point of “reconciliation”: not anexperience of harmony but rather the realization that the lack ofcompletion that is our condition humaine is due not to external factorsbut to the constitution of the subject itself. This sort of reconciliationmight go a long way toward undoing the paranoid construction of theJew at the heart of fascism’s fundamental fantasy as that “external” figurewho is fingered as the embodied cause of an individual’s or society’sinability to constitute itself as a closed totality. Anti-Semitism, then,would have nothing to do with Jews, per se.28 When in the lesser LogicHegel claims that “the consummation of the infinite End, therefore,consists merely in removing the illusion which makes it seem yetunaccomplished” (274), he articulates a truth which drives a stakethrough the heart of fascist anti-Semitism: all of your projections onto

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the figure of the Jew as that which must be eliminated for your identity/society to become an organic, harmonious whole in fact only mask anegativity internal to identity itself. What Hegel calls the consummationof the end—the position of Absolute Spirit—is thus not a static,transcendental position of substantial knowledge. It entails not a purecomprehension of the object. Nor does it portend the resolution of allcontradiction in some final synthesis. On the contrary, it represents thatposition wherein one finally comes clean about the impossibility of totalknowledge, wherein one experiences the abyss between all that we areable to conceptualize and the real itself. Only by showing the manner inwhich a universal system arbitrarily organizes the meaning of particularsymbols, is it possible to dramatize the defects of that system and toplace it at risk against that which bars its consistency: the real of history.

Absolute Knowledge is the subject’s knowledge of the impossibilityof its self-coincidence: the subject only gains consistency in its oppositionto itself. Absolute Knowledge does not thus subsume all particularity; itrecognizes particularity as its very lifeblood—not some element alien toits consciousness and to be overcome. The result is a ceased quest forsome unchangeable Being—i.e. the real—as an actual existence, as some-thing capable of cementing the social contract against contingency. Inshort, one gives up the notion that the recovery of the vanished “real”can become a socializing entity. In the Phenomenology, Hegel againmakes this clear:

Consciousness, therefore, can only find as a present reality the graveof its life. But because this grave is itself an actual existence and itis contrary to the nature of what actually exists to afford a lastingpossession, the presence of that grave, too, is merely the struggleof an enterprise doomed to failure. But having learned fromexperience that the grave of its actual unchangeable Being has noactuality, that the vanished individuality, because it has vanished isnot the true individuality, consciousness will abandon its quest forthe unchangeable individuality as an actual existence, or will stoptrying to hold on to what has vanished. Only then is it capable offinding individuality in its genuine or universal form. (132)

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Hegel’s point is that the real has no actuality within symbolization andthat attempts to symbolize it cannot hope to produce the Signifiercapable of comprehending the whole of a particular historical event.Here, Hegel is quite far from the way he is usually construed—as havingconstructed a system that has reached some harmonious moment ofperfection at precisely the moment in which nothing exists which isexternal to it. But he is likewise far from an alternate conclusion—ashaving summed up a present moment in order to leave open thepossibility of a future development of Spirit. On the contrary, Hegelsums up a present moment in order to bring about an experience inwhich one traumatically encounters the abyss that is the ground of Spirititself, that Spirit only exists by way of its failure. Spirit may take newforms, but all attempts to master the ground of these forms will alwaysencounter an idiotic, nonsensical tautology, since Spirit is its ownground. The “Absolute Knowledge” that all efforts to master the groundof Spirit are doomed to fail might in fact lead us to a new form throughwhich to represent/memorialize the Holocaust: that form which nolonger conceals the whimsy and the weakness of its ordering principle.This ordering principle is taken up absolutely by the human subject sothat he might enter that place of the real where one finds one’sindividuality in its genuine form.

This discovery, Hegel would appear to say, cannot be achieved—asa more postmodern or deconstructionist sensibility would assure us—byholding back within symbolization, by acknowledging the limitation ofan individual perspective, for this position leaves the Law guaranteeingsymbolic relations untouched. Memory remains within the realm of thesymbol—in the conversation involving different, discursively producedviewpoints—without exposing the universality of that realm as a necessaryand groundless fiction. An alternate, even more “totalizing” form, on theother hand, might lay bare the necessity of the fiction by revealing thepurely performative nature of any universal Law. It deploys, in plainsight, an ordering principle in all of its arbitrariness in order to make thefollowing point: that the very social reality in which we live is no less theproduct of such an arbitrary deployment, that our very identities as socialcreatures are no less dependent on a force whose ways and means makeno sense. Its use of such a principle in this way radically differs from theabsoluteness of the fascists: no Nazi would tell you that the vision of a

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Third Reich is merely a non-sensical, purely performative Master-Signifierthat does nothing to confer essence upon his symbolic identity and theidentity of his countrymen. Overidentifying with this Signifier is thusperhaps the attitude that most undermines the point where fascism takeshold: it exposes the ridiculousness or stupidity of the principle whichenables us to make any sense of the world. It reveals the Law assomething that we institute, but whose ultimate ground cannot be foundwithin the domain of reason. Brought out in this way, we see the“universal” Law for what it is: a contingent institution that marks thedefect of the whole. If our memorial efforts are truly to combat theparanoid fantasies of fascism, this is precisely the (Hegelian) realizationthey must seek to bring about.

*

We might exemplify these Hegelian insights by looking at DavidGrossman’s Holocaust novel, See Under: Love. The first three sections ofGrossman’s novel are decidedly postmodern in their refusal to exercisemastery apropos the Holocaust. Indeed, Grossman’s aim in these threesections appears precisely to dramatize the impossibility of ever arrivingat or narrating from a totalizing position when it comes to bearingwitness to the Holocaust—an impossibility that necessitates so manybreakdowns at the level of narrative. Indeed, if one were to take the firstthree parts of Grossman’s novel as exemplary, self-referentiality wouldappear to be the only ethical option open to novelization. In section one,we meet Momik Neuman—a nine-year-old boy living in Jerusalem whoseparents are Holocaust survivors. Privy only to bits and pieces concerningthe fate of European Jewry, Momik is desperate to concretize the wholeof the Holocaust—he wants all of its parts to be meaningful—and we seehis extraordinary imagination at work as he continually attempts tointerpret the behavior of the survivors in terms of the heroic forms ofpopular adventure stories with which he is so familiar. Momik doesn’thave much to go on: his parents will not speak of their experiences,referring to Europe only as “Over There”; his grandfather AnshelWasserman, who comes to live with the Neumans on the novel’s openingpage, was once a great storyteller, but the story that now comes out of

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his mouth is a story Momik cannot make sense of; and the behavior ofthe other survivors in his neighborhood lies equally outside the domainof Momik’s understanding. Despite all the tales Momik is able to fashion,he is nonetheless dissatisfied, feeling that “so much was missing. Themain thing was missing.”29 All of Momik’s narratives, in other words,break down, and this leads him to go as far as to reconstruct a “NaziBeast” (this being a phrase he has picked up) in his basement. Thisproject, too, fails, and we are left with the clear sense—even if Momik isnot—that any attempt to know the whole of history is doomed to fail.

This same dynamic is dramatized in the second and third sectionsof the novel. In his attempt (in section two) to recover the lostmanuscript of Bruno Schulz, a Polish writer and artist murdered by theNazis in the Drohobycz ghetto in 1942, we see Momik attempting toachieve as an adult what he was unable to achieve as a child: someunmediated access to the whole of history. The value of Schulz’smanuscript (entitled The Messiah) for Momik is clearly tied to what itmight do for his ability to come to terms with the problematic ofHolocaust memory: in what form is mass death to be conceptualized soas to bear witness both to the individual victims and the enormity of theloss? By way of an answer, Schulz’s lost manuscript offers Momik areturn to some original language capable of resolving this tension, butit is a language which Momik ends up rejecting because it grasps thewhole at the expense of the particular. The “Age of Genius” ushered inby the Messiah in Schulz’s imagination is quite simply a world in whichall otherness has been eliminated, a world marked by some primordialunity, and Momik sees it as the world of the dictator. The result is a kindof renewed fidelity to the particular in section three as Momik tries againto grasp the story told by his grandfather Anshel Wasserman. Onceagain, however, the narrative breaks down as Momik and his characterfight over the direction that the retelling should take. Wasserman wantshis grandson to tell the story so as to point out the inviolability ofsomething universal: the nugget of humanity he believes to lie at thecore of the human heart. Like the Nazi Beast and Schulz’s Messiah,Wasserman’s story is designed apparently to mediate the tension betweenparticular and universal, and this is the tension that Grossman fore-grounds in his own character’s struggle with the crux of his grandfather’sstory. What Grossman would seem to deny is the symbolization of

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anything that might bring out more complete relations with history andrid Momik of the sense of his incompletion in the face of what hap-pened.

But if this is Grossman’s aim, then what are we to make of thefourth section—the story of baby Kazik’s life told in the form of anEncyclopedia? If in each of the three quests that make up Grossman’snovel we have seen Momik’s failure to produce and identify with thosefigures who would seem to contain in their very being the real of history,who would seem to promise a scenario whereby language and thoughtwould be adequate to history, these failures have also had the effect ofrevealing to us the fundamental finitude that dooms his efforts. As longas Momik is trying to symbolize these “real” (particular qua particular)figures, his project must fail because of this finitude: the real cannot beknown within the symbolic, within the finite. A story, then—anystory—is thus inseparable from the whole of the finite world (i.e. thesymbolic structure) that sustains its meaning. And if Momik wants trulyto open himself to the otherness he encounters in the fact of a littleboy’s death—of an individual victim of the Holocaust—it is at the levelof this whole that this little boy’s death will have to be faced. The finiteis not, as Bruno Schulz might have maintained, what must be eliminatedin order to encounter the real but is rather, as Hegel suggests, to bemaintained and made into an absolute. In opting for a form thatoveridentifies with its object—the life and death of a little boy in theWarsaw ghetto—Momik would appear to have reached the point ofAbsolute Self-Knowledge, which is, in the ultimate line of the Phenome-nology, far from the experience of self-transparency or self-possession.Hegel writes, instead, that “the self-knowing Spirit knows not only itselfbut also the negative of itself, or its limit: to know one’s limit is to knowhow to sacrifice oneself” (472).

This is, in fact, Momik’s recognition and the crowning achievementof his formal decision in the last quarter of Grossman’s novel. Prior tothis point, Momik’s attempts at memory have all taken place inside therealm of symbolization and for a nameable, symbolizable force. Anddespite the fact that they have been driven by a sincere desire to bearwitness to the Holocaust, they have had the covert consequence ofconferring a substantial integrity upon the Law or Master whichguarantees the consistency of our symbolic identities. If every sacrifice is

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for a something that is meaningful (e.g., the Beast, Schulz, Wasserman)then the order of signification—the order of the symbolic—truly iscomprehensive. But if one sacrifices oneself for nothing, if that sacrificecannot be accounted for, cannot be made sense of, then the symbolic isshown to be lacking. Holes in it become visible, and the order of the realemerges. When Hegel says that the self-knowing Spirit has learned “howto sacrifice oneself,” he points in just this direction: knowing “how tosacrifice oneself” means sacrificing oneself not for any mere symbolicentity but for the real itself. Momik’s sacrifices, in the various declara-tions of war that occupy him for much of the novel—against the Beast(the presumed possessor of knowledge pertaining to Over There), againstthe Sea (the presumed possessor of Bruno Schulz), against GrandfatherAnshel (the presumed possessor of the last of the Children of the Heartstories)—appear, then, to mistake the “real” import of sacrifice in theethics of memorialization. Sacrifice is an ethical position when it isnothing—i.e. something non-sensical, the particular qua particular—thatone is sacrificing oneself for.

By the end of the novel, Momik appears to have reached this ethicalposition: he seems to have grasped the manner in which his repeated“wars” have in fact met a decisive covert need. In the “AbsoluteKnowing” section of the Phenomenology, Hegel exposes this need: self-consciousness does not wish to know the nothingness of the object,which is in fact knowledge of itself. Hegel calls this the “uncultivatedconsciousness” of religion and claims that “not until consciousness hasgiven up hope of overcoming that alienation in an external, i.e. alien,manner does it turn to itself, because the overcoming of that alienationis the return into self-consciousness; not until then does it turn to itsown present world and discover it as its property” (488). The functionof Momik’s “wars,” in other words, is to keep consciousness fromreaching the position of Absolute Knowledge that Hegel envisions forthe subject—i.e. from recognizing the way that all of our thoughts andfeelings and stories about the past, in a radical sense, have themselves (quaacts of conceptualizing) as their object. For Hegel, Absolute Knowledgeis simply the point wherein one recognizes the groundless pure posit-ing—the thought that is its own ground—that is prior to whateversupport we find for our conceptualizing in the object world. AbsoluteKnowledge is thus nothing but the movement—the restless process of

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the self superseding the self—in which consciousness takes itself as object.This is why the Subject, the “I,” is for Hegel not a substance but rathera relation or an identity, which always indicates a lack of wholeness: “The‘I’ is not merely the Self, but the identity of the Self with itself” (489). IfMomik has before always named his “enemy,” and in so doing kepthimself from recognizing that the source of his conflicts rests in thedeadlock of his self-alienating, self-identity, he now rightly sees that act,and the sacrificial economy that undergirds it, as a sign of the “littlenazi” in every one of us: “the disease at the very root of our naturewhich we proliferate with every move. The Nazis merely outlined it andgave it a name, an army, workers, temples, and sacrificial victims” (296).For Momik, the Nazis only tapped into an already-extant willingness toparticipate in such sacrificial economies—economies that solve, for thehuman subject, the radical deadlock of Absolute Knowing and therecognition that it is only by way of our own acts of groundless self-positing that we produce those meanings we find in the object world. Itis, then, a willingness to sacrifice ourselves for nothing (i.e. to show thatfrom the beginning, we are without support in the Other) that must beengaged in the project of historical memory, and Momik engages it ina novel way—not by advancing a simple dismissal of sacrifice but byexaggerating it to such an extent that its entire economy is unmaskedand exposed to nothingness itself.

If the Nazi sacrifice may seem itself already sufficiently exaggerated,it is, for Momik, never more than the slave’s sacrifice for the name of theMaster. It is not “absolute” (in the Hegelian sense) because it is asacrifice for something; it freezes the subject at the point where theessentiality of the Master’s name is maintained. The Nazi sacrifice, inother words, is one colossal attempt to preserve the illusion that thesymbolic is all. All of its activity—its work, its battles, its building oftemples, its genocidal acts—points to this end. “The Complete Encyclo-pedia of Kazik’s Life,” however, represents a different sort of activity.Here, self-knowledge involves the subject’s encounter with the historicityof the symbolic order at every instant. The real war, Momik realizes, isagainst nothing that can be made sense of, and the others have been butattempts to occlude this fact. Wasserman’s prayer on the final page of thenovel, in this context, articulates the larger, formal message ofGrossman’s novel:

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Wasserman raised his eyes to Niegel and said, “All of us prayed forone thing: that he might end his life knowing nothing of war. Doyou understand, Herr Niegel? We asked for so little: for a man tolive in this world from birth to death and know nothing of war.”(452)

The war to which Wasserman refers resonates beyond the world war hesurvived and to the paranoia that structured it. His prayer, then, appearsas a prayer for the sort of artistic form in which he has ultimatelylanded—a form that has given up its belief in the essence of the alterityof the Other or of that kernel of non-sense to which we are subjected.“The Complete Encyclopedia of Kazik’s Life,” we might say, as a formthat knows nothing of war, is an attempt to arrest the use made oftotalizing within the fundamental fantasy of fascism—i.e. the exercise oftotalizing in order to secure the integrity of nation or individual againstunsymbolizable forces—and by the survivors and their children. Againstthis use of totalizing, a totalizing which reasserts some way of stitchingup the fissure that marks our individual and collective identities,Grossman offers a different (Hegelian) inheritance, one that understandssomething new about the nature of our wars. This new understandingis wrapped up at its deepest level with ideas concerning life, love,contingency and the necessity of (symbolic) death: “He was finished inthis war. This war was finished in him. There was nobody to fight for.For him it was over. He was dead now. He was ready for life” (297).

How is it that a kind of death readies one for life, and what doesthis have to do with remembering the Holocaust? This paradox is criticalfor an understanding of Momik’s progression in See Under: Love and theHegelian undertones to the ethical progression of memory thatGrossman’s novel attempts to chart. For Grossman, historical memory isan undertaking in which we come to experience our own death, thegroundlessness of our being. What Momik comes to realize is that ourvery access to language entails a kind of death we cannot seek to escape.The Beast, The Messiah, the “eternal” story of Anshel Wasserman—theseform the basis, as I have said, of such an escape, but this is not life, onlythe paranoid form of coping with it. To be “ready for life” is, on thecontrary, to fully assume the symbolic order’s incompletion (and in theprocess, assume one’s death) and to take on a project of memory whose

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object is not symbolizable. One’s act of memory, in this context, wouldthus be a sacrifice for nothing, a sacrifice that would appear to make nosense. Is it not for this reason that the Reader’s Preface to the “Encyclo-pedia” speaks of removing any and all tensions likely to create the“extraneous illusion of a purpose, as it were, at the root of all things,toward which all ‘life’ is supposed to flow” (304). Does not a similar“purposelessness” pertain to our act of reading an encyclopedia in itsentirety—a work that is explicitly not a narrative? Purpose appears to bewhat the experience of reading an encyclopedically arranged story appearsto lack: the very headings have been selected in the most arbitrary ofways, and our “reading on” is robbed of the enjoyment of believing thatwe are progressing toward some end (e.g., the “Reader’s Preface” reportsthe fact of Kazik’s death before we even encounter it in the narrativeproper). In the opening section of the novel, an Encyclopedia promisedcomprehensive knowledge to a nine-year-old boy:

Momik loves to hold the big books in his hands, and it makes himfeel good all over to run his fingers down the smooth pages thatseem to have a protective covering that keeps your fingers away, soyou won’t get too close, because who are you, what are youcompared to the Encyclopedia, will all the little letters crowded inlong, straight columns and mysterious abbreviations like secretsignals for a big, strong, silent army boldly marching out toconquer the world, all-knowing, all-righteous ... he likes to touchthe pages and feel deep in his stomach and his heart all the powerand the silence, and the seriousness and the scientificness thatmakes everything so clear and simple. (43–44)

Then, it required shrewd and methodical detection strategies—i.e.purposeful activity. Now, it is that form which in true Hegelian fashionarbitrarily organizes the imagined life of a victim of the Holocaust so asto suggest the stupidity of all our ordering efforts, the impossibility ofachieving complete relations within language with history or with thosewe love. The Encyclopedia reveals its order while at the same timerevealing the complete contingency of all order, its dependence on atautological, idiotic, performative act of pure positing.

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The activity that results in the “Encyclopedia” is the product of anethical realization that the acts in which one must engage are the onesthat appear to be without purpose. The most radical act of bearingwitness is for Grossman the act that makes no sense. Those who expectour memorial efforts to do just the opposite—to wrench somethingmeaningful from the catastrophe, something capable of reasserting thedeepest ground for our individual and collective identities—are certainlybound to object to this gesture of Momik’s, and Grossman has stagedprecisely this objection in the character of Ayala. Ayala’s rejection isaimed fundamentally at the exaggeratedly total form, but it testifies tothe truth of Momik’s enterprise in her very condemnation of it:

This whole encyclopedia business is utterly worthless. It doesn’texplain anything. Look at it: you know what it reminds me of? Amass grave. That’s what it reminds me of. A grave with limbssticking out in every direction. All disjointed. But not only that,Shlomik. It’s also a documentation of your crimes against humanity.And now that you’ve gotten this far, I hope you see that you’vefailed, that your whole encyclopedia is not enough to fully encom-pass a single day or even a single moment of human life. (450)

Momik’s crime is the crime of his form—an Encyclopedia that explainsnothing. Ayala tells him that she doesn’t expect a “happy ending” fromhim—“I know your limitations,” she says—but what she does expect arestories which affirm the symbolic order that sustains their meaning.Momik can thus reverse his disaster and earn her forgiveness if he writesher a “new story. A good story. A beautiful story”—a story “withMERCY [q.v.], with LOVE [q.v.]! Not See under: Love!” (450). InAyala’s view, crimes can be committed in novels, but novels ought notto commit crimes. The artist, for her, must write with mercy and love inorder to suspend the gap between symbolic and real. On the level ofform, at least, art is not to disclose its disability: it is not to take on theshape of a mass grave.

Ayala’s analogy is apt, for Grossman seems to have found the onlyway to treat a “local” facet of the Holocaust without being accused oftrying to mitigate its enormity. The attempt to know absolutely anindividual’s life and death under the Nazis gives shape to a form which

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corresponds to that enormity. Taking his positing abilities to theirextreme, Grossman’s goal is finally to open the subject up to that feelingwhich is outside all positing. Aaron Marcus is here perhaps our guide,the apothecary who declares “open war on the limitations of humanfeeling” (441). Wasserman tells us that Marcus “longed to clear a wayfor himself into unknown territories, the abracadabra realms we feelinside, which nobody dares to touch” (440). And Marcus is not one whoshies away from the most ultimate of sacrifices. To know certain feelings,Marcus often undergoes the very dissolution of his identity. It is not somuch Marcus’s desire to develop a new language of feeling—his“Sentimo” is an attempt to give a name to various shades of feelings,because people are trained to feel only what they can name—as much asit is the risk that exemplifies the truth of his enterprise. Marcus is onewho has “saddened himself to death”—and the important consequenceof this effort is not his new language, but his recognition that withinlanguage the most important dimensions of feeling are missing. Perhapsthis is why in the very moment of Kazik’s death, everyone—exceptMarcus—experiences a kind of mystical moment of justice, of divinejustice:

Approaching death had roused the same feeling in most of them:it was the right thing. And all of life is a free ticket, but in the endwe are returned against our will to the domain of some invisibleforce, grave and inevitable, which collects its rightful debt, withoutMERCY [q.v.] or solace. To all of them, suddenly life, their ownlives, seemed wrong and dreary and senseless [see under: LIFE,THE MEANING OF], and even those who weren’t religious felta sudden awe of God, while unfamiliar thoughts of sins committedand punishments deserved ran through their minds. (429)

Only Marcus derives a different lesson from the death of the “old boy”(Kazik)—a lesson for the perpetrators and those who refuse to take theirtotalizing far enough: “Only Aaron Marcus thought sadly that perhapsdeath was as arbitrary and inexplicable as life itself” (429). This is ourlesson as well: the trauma of the Holocaust is not confined to it butpertains to the implicit trauma—the inexplicability of our lives and of ourdeaths—that it makes, and made, explicit. As the Event that attempted

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to eliminate this inexplicability, the nature and permanence of thistrauma is perhaps its greatest, and most difficult, legacy.

NOTES

1. Karl R. Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies, vol. 2, The High Tide ofProphecy: Hegel, Marx, and the Aftermath, 5th ed. (Princeton, 1971). Popperremains the most vituperative critic of Hegel and the most explicit proponent ofa direct causal link between Hegel and totalitarianism. Hegel is, for Popper, the“dictator of philosophy” (35), an apologist for State domination, the purveyorof a “despicable perversion of everything that is decent; a perversion not only ofreason, freedom, equality, and the other ideas of the open society, but also of asincere belief in God, and even of a sincere patriotism” (49). According toPopper, all of the modern totalitarians “have been brought up in the closeatmosphere of Hegelianism” (31).

2. G. W. F. Hegel, The Philosophy of History, trans. J. Sibree (New York,1956), 33.

3. Jacques Derrida, “From Restricted to General Economy: A Hegelianismwithout Reserve,” trans. Alan Bass, in Derrida, Writing and Difference (Chicago,1978), 276. Thus Derrida’s critique of Aufhebung: it represents, for Derrida,nothing but the “busying of discourse losing its breath as it reappropriates allnegativity for itself ... thereby simultaneously blinding itself to the baselessnessof the nonmeaning from which the basis of meaning is drawn, and in which thisbasis of meaning is exhausted.” Hegel’s economy is thus a “restricted” one andnot a “general” one. The whole master–slave dialectic is for Derrida a way foreven death to be given meaning, to be brought under the sign of Logos.

4. G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford, 1977),10. Subsequent references to this edition will be made parenthetically within thetext.

5. According to Hegel, even the frameworks by and through which we gainaccess to reality are the result of an act performed by the subject. This is perhapsthe point at which to note Hegel’s critique of Kant. Kant, too, believed in the“subjective” nature of all “objective” reality. And yet for Kant, the conceptualconditions for any experience of reality—i.e. Kant’s famous categories—areintuitions and not concepts. They are extraconceptual. Hegel goes even furtherthan Kant, which is to say he “idealizes” even these categories. Even they areposited/mediated by the subject.

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6. G. W. F. Hegel, Logic, trans. William Wallace (Oxford, 1975), 69.Subsequent references to this edition will be made parenthetically within the text.

7. For the notion that perpetual tension between particular and universal mightbe a basis for progressive politics, see Daniel Boyarin and Jonathan Boyarin,“Diaspora: Generation and the Ground of Jewish Identity,” Critical Inquiry 19(Summer 1993): 693–725. Aligning Judaism with particularity and Christianitywith universality, the Boyarins imagine a kind of (dialectical) checks-and-balancesrelationship involving the two which might work fundamentally toward antiracistends: excessive exercise of one’s particular political interests (e.g. fascism) wouldbe checked by a concern for all peoples, and an excessive concern for all peoples(e.g. imperialism) would be checked by the recognition that at some level,different cultures must be allowed to flourish. In other words, both the universaland the particular have something to offer, as long as each one submits toremaining in tension with the other. As the Boyarins put it, “The genius ofChristianity is its concern for all the peoples of the world; the genius of Judaismis its ability to leave other people alone” (707). What they are after, in short, isa “synthesis” that would “allow for stubborn hanging-on to ethnic, culturalspecificity but in a context of deeply felt and enacted human solidarity” (720).

8. This question appears perhaps most consistently in the work of Daniel andJonathan Boyarin. Citing Paul’s famous lines—“There is neither Jew nor Greek;there is neither slave nor freeman; there is no male and female. For you are allone in Christ Jesus”—Daniel Boyarin notes the way in which a universal spiritand its drive for sameness erases various differences: “In the process of baptismin the spirit the marks of ethnos, gender, and class are all erased in the ascensionto a univocity and universality of human essence which is beyond and outside thebody.” Daniel Boyarin, A Radical Jew: Paul and the Politics of Identity (Berkeley,1994), 24. Calling consistent attention to the dangers of idealization, spirituali-zation and totalization—three gestures initiated by Paul and consummated byHegel—the Boyarins point out the “fateful consequences” such gestures havehad for Jews in the Christian West. See Boyarin and Boyarin, “Diaspora.”

9. For a discussion of the fate of Judaism within Hegel’s dialectical sys-tem—“the dialectic itself expresses a fundamental injustice toward Judaism,because it sublates it into Christianity while dismissing its post-Jesus history asmeaningless. In this respect, Hegel’s dialectic does to Judaism what the medievalchurch (ecclesia) has done to the synagogue (synagoga)”—see Yirmiyahu Yovel,Dark Riddle: Hegel, Nietzsche, and the Jews (University Park, PA, 1998), 99. Seealso Jonathan Boyarin’s discussion of the failure of “the ethical narrative ofuniversal history,” and his observation apropos of Hegel that “contemporary Jewsnever fit into his scheme of providential world history.” Jonathan Boyarin, Stormfrom Paradise: The Politics of Jewish Memory (Minneapolis, 1992), 94.

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10. See, for instance, Emil Fackenheim’s lament concerning the way in whichthe Holocaust falls prey to Hegelian ideas concerning Overcoming, specificallyhis pointed claim that “there can be no thought of a return to Hegelianism, apossibility which, if it ever was real, is gone beyond recovery.” To Mend theWorld: Foundations of Post-Holocaust Jewish Thought (New York, 1982), 127.

11. Harold Kaplan, Conscience and Memory: Meditations on a Museum of theHolocaust (Chicago, 1994), 12.

12. Fackenheim, To Mend the World, 111. Subsequent references to thisedition will be made parenthetically within the text.

13. Emmanuel Levinas, A Difficult Freedom: Essays on Judaism, trans. SeánHand (Baltimore, 1990), 199. Subsequent references to this edition will be madeparenthetically within the text.

14. See Michel Foucault, “On the Genealogy of Ethics: An Overview of Workin Progress,” The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York, 1984),340–72.

15. Michael Marrus, “Reflections on the Historiography of the Holocaust,”Journal of Modern History 66 (Mar. 1994): 93.

16. Insisting that transferential relations are involved in each and everyhistorian’s inquiry into history, LaCapra consistently emphasizes “that the roleof the historian is not a full identity but at most a subject-position that shouldbe complemented, supplemented, and even contested by other subject-positions(such as critical reader and intellectual).” Dominick LaCapra, Representing theHolocaust: History, Theory, Trauma (Ithaca, 1994), 10. In his more recent book,LaCapra again emphasizes the importance of subject-positions—not only tocontest the notion of a neutral, objective approach to history but also tochallenge those who risk aestheticizing or sacralizing the repetition or “acting-out” of a traumatic past: “Subject-position is a crucial notion that, despite itsjargonistic sound, conjoins social and psychoanalytic concerns and criticallymediates between an essentializing idea of identity and an ill-defined, ideological-ly individualistic, and often aestheticized notion of subjectivity.” DominickLaCapra, History and Memory after Auschwitz (Ithaca, 1998), 206.

17. LaCapra, Representing the Holocaust, 64.18. For clear expressions of praise, see Theodor Adorno, Hegel: Three Studies,

trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen (Cambridge, MA, 1993). There, we findstatements like the following: “The wealth of experience on which thought feedsin Hegel is incomparable; it is put into the ideas themselves, never appearing asmere ‘material,’ to say nothing of example or evidence external to the ideas.Through what is experienced, the abstract idea is transformed back intosomething living, just as mere material is transformed through the path thought

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travels: one could show this in every sentence of the Phenomenology of Spirit”(50).

19. Theodor Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (New York,1966), 5. Subsequent references to this edition will be made parentheticallywithin the text.

20. This is currently one of the more vexing problems pertaining to the studyof the Holocaust: how can an emphasis on the particular at the same time workto contest particular accounts—some would call them historicizations, othersmythologizations—that clearly work toward apologetic or conservative ends? IfHegel is to insist on the universality of every particular approach, might he notbe giving, even if unwittingly, a philosophic justification for blatant acts whichmiswrite/rewrite history. This is precisely the question raised by Omer Bartov,who notes the manner in which proponents of particularity are “paradoxicallyforced together and—mostly very much against their will and better judge-ment—found sharing their scholarly abodes with very strange bedfellows indeed.”Omer Bartov, Murder in Our Midst: The Holocaust, Industrial Killing, andRepresentation (New York, 1996), 118.

21. For this very inversion of the usual relationship between universal andparticular, see Slavoj Zizek, The Indivisible Remainder: An Essay on Schelling andRelated Matters (New York, 1996), 214–18. Taking his cue from Hegel, Zizekargues that the universal and particular must “change places”: what we think ofas a number of particular interpretive frameworks are in fact a plurality ofuniversal interpretive frameworks. The latter appear, then, as “answers to the‘absolute particularity’ of the traumatic Real” (217). For a view highly critical ofthis notion of a nonhistorical particular, see LaCapra, Representing the Holocaust,205–24.

22. Adorno’s critique of the universal would thus appear to be misplaced, forthe very meaning of his critique rests upon a universal ground. In other words,his very insistence that thought measure itself by what eludes it—because thatinsistence is fundamentally a thought—is no less the product of an absoluteposition.

23. Robert Pippin, Hegel’s Idealism: The Satisfactions of Self-Consciousness (NewYork, 1989), 85–86.

24. To illustrate this point, we might consider here Binjamin Wilkomirski’snow disputed Holocaust “memoir” Fragments, trans. Carol Brown Janeway (NewYork, 1996). Comprised of a “rubble field of isolated images and events,” Wilko-mirski suggests that a universal vantage point from which to view his ownexperiences is impossible: to write about these experiences at all is to “give up onthe ordering logic of grown-ups” and to forgo the “benefit of perspective orvanishing point” (4–5). Our Hegelian point here is simply that Wilkomirski’s

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book might properly be titled Universals, since insofar as the images and eventshave made their way into language, they have been touched by what is universal.And indeed, their universality is what allows us to encounter their traumaticdimension.

25. When Lacan says that “the symbolic order from the first takes on itsuniversal character”—“It isn’t constituted bit by bit. As soon as the symbolarrives, there is a universe of symbols”—he is only rearticulating this Hegelianpoint. Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book II: The Ego in Freud’sTheory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis, 1954–1955, trans. Sylvia Tomaselli(New York, 1991), 29. It is here that we might see the extent to whichpsychoanalysis and psychoanalytic practice are informed by certain Hegeliantheses. Is it not the case that everything in analysis is designed to separate sensefrom meaning, the unconscious from consciousness?

26. There are, in other words, two totalizing operations—one that seeks tosecure a ground for the Law and the sociosymbolic order, and one that seeks atraumatic encounter with that particular “kernel of the real” which lies on theother side of the Law. The confusion/conflation of these two operations isperhaps most apparent in Adorno’s and Horkheimer’s insistence that totality andanti-Semitism are always linked. On this point, see Theodor Adorno and MaxHorkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (New York,1947). My claim here is that the totality to which they are referring is notHegel’s and that the totalizing Adorno and Horkheimer see in the Enlighten-ment project is an operation designed to realize society objectively as atransparent whole. As conceived by the purveyors of Enlightenment, this totalityis still symbolic, and this is precisely what points up the un-Hegelian dimensionof the society or subject they hope thereby to produce. For Hegel, the symbolicorder (i.e. the order of thought/language) depends on some minimal difference,some negativity, and incorporating this negativity would do nothing to cementsocial relations; on the contrary, it would bring about their complete collapse.Negativity (i.e. some minimal disparity between subject and substance), in otherwords, is not just that which eludes the order of thought, it is that order’s lastsupport.

27. Gilian Rose, Hegel Contra Sociology (New Jersey, 1981), 183. For Rose,the distinction between Hegel’s radical “method” and his conservative “system”is itself a conservative one: “Hegel’s thought has no social import if the absoluteis banished or suppressed, if the absolute cannot be thought” (42).

28. Slavoj Zizek insists that this is precisely what we must recognize if we areto undo the paranoid construction of the Jew. As Zizek puts it, “The (anti-Semitic figure of the) ‘Jew’ is not the positive cause of social imbalance andantagonisms: social antagonism comes first, and the ‘Jew’ merely gives body to

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this obstacle.... One falls into the ideological trap precisely by succumbing to theillusion that anti-Semitism really is about Jews.” Slavoj Zizek, The Plague ofFantasies (New York, 1997), 76–77. This illusion has produced both negativeand positive rationales for hatred of Jews. See, for instance, George Steiner, “TheLong Life of Metaphor: An Approach to the ‘Shoah,’” in Berel Lang, ed.,Writing and the Holocaust (New York, 1988), 154–71. Steiner notes the negativerationale (i.e. the idea that the Jews killed Christ) while offering up his ownpositive rationale: “It is not, I believe, as deicide, as ‘God killer,’ that the Jew hasbeen loathed and feared in the Christian civilization of the West (although thathideous attribution does play its part). It is as inventor of God; it is as spokesmanfor and remembrancer of an almighty, all-seeing, all-demanding Deity. It isbecause Judaism has kept man awake” (164).

29. David Grossman, See Under: Love, trans. Betsy Rosenberg (New York,1990), 29. Subsequent references to this edition will be made parentheticallywithin the text.

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holocaust memory and hegel

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