theology after shoah

8/8/2019 Theology After Shoah

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Journal of Literature & Theology, vol. 6, No. 1, March 1992

THE SHIBBOLETH OFMODERNITY: REFLECTIONS ON

THEOLOGICAL THINKINGAFTER THE SHOAH

David MossAfter Auschwitz there is no word tinged from on high, not even a theologicalone, that has any right unless it underwent a transformation.1

Is then the inexplicable explained by saying that it has occurred only once inthe world? Or is not this inexplicable, that it did occur? And has not this,the fact that it did occur, the power to make everything inexplicable, even themost explicable events?2

PAUL CELAN'S gruesome odyssey into the 'nomansland between speech andsilence', and then, tragically, death by his own hand, can hardly but avoidemblematic construal; or so it would seem. Thus: 'the legend of the Celanof the ultimate expressivo stammer, the musician of the Holocaust struckdumb by terror and anxiety, who ends by making a burnt offering oflanguage itself.'3 From the displaced, but still calculable references of thecycle Sprachgitter to the semantically intractable surds of Zeitgehoft

4, Celan'spoems, fuelled by enormous compression, appear to approach ever closerto complete hermetic closure: a world in which light neither enters norescapes I'univers concentrationnaire. Nevertheless, in a note to his Englishtranslator, Michael Hamburger, Celan angrily protested that he was 'ganzund gar nicht hermetisch'; and this, at least, should dissuade us from overhastymyth-making. Thus, we may suggest, Hans-Georg Gadamer's claim that amillenium may have to pass before we are granted entry into the mostinaccessible parts of Celan's work, would seem, unwittingly, to participatein a far grander and more bizarre myth. The thousand year Reich yieldedup its terrible and dark secret within only a fraction of that time. Thelabour of revelation, it would seem, cannot be postponed: it is a vitalendeavour.

Although this essay is not about Paul Celan, to begin with him is, IOxford University Press 1992


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58 T H E S H I B B O L E T H O F M O D E R N I T Ybelieve, emblematicalthough for reasons other than those already sug-gested. George Steiner has commented of Celan's poetry that it 'has takenus to the unspeakable centre of the Shoah-experience', and, 'has located[there] the sense of that experience within the definition of man, of history,and of human speech.'5 This 'sense of that experience' (my italics), howeverimpoverished or residual in such extremity, will be the concern of thisessay. And although this will involve a change of register from the poeticto the philosophical, I would suggest that this is what must be involved inany confrontation with an eventthe Shoahwhich threatens the aboli-tion of our own most immediate and felt confidence in the explicativepower of reason. To move from the realm of poiesis to that of technetheordering of the most profound metaphoris, I would suggest, the unavoid-able hermeneutic labour involved in securing any authentic theologicalresponse to this monstrous event.6 It may also intimate something of thefate of all our ways of religious saying and doing in this age post holocaustumnatus.

After Auschw itz, no more po etry, w rote T . W . A dorno ; the sense ofwhich Steiner locates in the demand that eloquence after Auschwitz 'wouldbe a kind of obscenity'. Thus, in our efforts to exorcise this rational fluency,this unstinting appeal to the norms and ideals of humane arbitration, wemust dig deep; deep into the obscure constituents of our psyche and world.Traditionally, this has been construed as the task and vocation of themetaphysician; and, in somewhat surprising fashion, it is evidenced in thecareer of Paul Celan. Towards the end of his life, Celan addressed a poemto Martin Heidegger containing these words: 'a hope, today, of a thinkingman's coming word'.7 A word of recognition, remorse, repentance?itnever came. The reasons for 'Heidegger's silence' remain obscure 8; however,the significance of Celan's request, I believe, does not. Both poet andphilosopher (and not necessarily Heidegger and Celan) participate in thelife-giving mystery of meaning; and as patient fashioning of symbol(Dichten), or probative 'exercise of the concept' (Denken), this activity, inthe Judaeo -Chris tian universe, can have but one goal: so many repeated'soundings' for Him Who Is, the God who bestows and secures the sover-eignty of all meaning. So it is then that after the 'travesty of all meaning-fulness, enacted in the Shoah', and witnessed to in the dark epiphaniesof Celan's poetry, we must embark upon a 'systematic labour of thought':the exposure of all our ways of doing and thinking to the most radicalcounter-testimony of the Shoah.

The following essay is offered as only the barest of outlines of what thismay mean, and it proceeds by way of a pattern of argument suggested bythe Jewish theologian Emil Fackenheim.9 It is in this way that I willendeavour to indicate the sense of any construal of the Shoah as 'unique',


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DAVID MO SS 59'ultima te' or 'final' beyond , that is, a rhetoric of visceral ho rror and m oralou trage. N evertheless, this task, by its very nature, is an invitation to severecriticism, even opprobrium; this cannot be avoided. To treat this onegenocide as unique, it is objected, is to continue to sanction that claim ofhistorical particularity that has fuelled anti-semitism to its worst excesses;moreover, to indulge in such sweeping indictments of Reason as the sus-taining mythos of Western Man is to abandon any verificatory calculus infavour of a 'catastrophic-mystical' vision of history; and finally, to holdonto all this, and yet go on, arguingperhaps even living?is simplyabsurd. These charges cannot be ignored. However, it is still the case thatthey avoid the one reality that seems to me to be unavoidable: the e xtermina-tion of the Jews is a phenom enon that bears no other logic, in essence, thana spiritual oneit is an event in which both man and God are implicated.And if this is so, then, I believe, we have no other choice than to exhumethe most stubbornly resistant constituents of our confidence and hopemetaphor as origin, as sacred history and as eschatology. This, in fragment-ary and halting form, is what Celan has to teach us; and why his poems,'north of the future', are emblematic of our age of destruction. They takeus to the edge, and, in some minimal senseas I shall arguebeyond thevery edge of this abyss. Thus, after a substantial detour, constituting thebody of this essay, it is to Celan that we will return in our conclusion.

IIWe begin with an empassioned question and understated response. In theessay from which we have already quoted, Steiner enquires: 'What categor-ies of intelligibility, what grammar of reason . . . can give interpretationto the abyss of 1938-45?' Against this, I think we may profitably juxtaposean autobiographical comment made by Leo Strauss in which he makes aclear, although veiled, allusion to Nazism. Strauss wrote:

It is safer to understand the low in the light of the high than the high in thelight of the low. In doing the latter one necessarily distorts the high, whereasin doing the former one does not deprive the low of the freedom to revealitself fully for what it is.10In the following two sections of this essay I wish to examine more deeplytw o fundamental modes of understanding wh ich, for theology and ontologyalike, have traditionally secured this possibility of reading 'the low in thelight of the high'. These two logics will in turn be exposed to dimensionsof the Shoah which, following Fackenheim, I will claim to be indisputablefacts of the event. Finally, and in response to their manifest incapacity to'give interpretation to the abyss of 193845', I wish to turn to a reflection


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60 T H E S H I B B O L E T H O F M O D E R N I T Yupon the relationship between the Shoah and the tragic as a mode oftheological understanding. However, in order to appreciate the significanceof this argument, we must first make a brief philosophical excursus; anexcursus intended, in very general terms, to outline the lineaments of whatJacques Derrida has called the logic of presence.11

The issue is this: intelligibility and the diabolical; or, more specifically,the chthonic character of evil as it interrupts the civilizing mythos of modern-ity. In any mode of thought governed by the logic of presence, the notionof historical continuity guarantees the minimal condition for inferred mean-ingboth epistemological and ontological alike. Or, in other words, thenotion of continuity provides the ineluctable bond between the two poleswhich demarcate the field of referral we call the western philosophicaltradition: History and Being. To illustrate this we may begin with thePlatonist, for whom Being exists beyond the flux of historical changeindeed, maybe even beyond the realm of the safe and secure order of theForms. The relation between Being and change then is secured by thecontinuous illumination afforded by the former shining, as it were, in theheavens. This static relation is bro ug ht into restless vibration in the Hegelianhermeneutic by way of the constituting, and constituted conception ofAbsolute Spirit. The movement of history is proleptic, and Being is envis-aged as that final stage in which all history is incorporated into a finaltransparent discourse. For Hegel, continuity is secured by the fact that therecan be no intractable surd resisting incorporation into the dialectic offreedom. Finally, for the radical historicist, historyas for the Hegelianconstitutes the universe of meaning; however, it is a meaning given, not inexpectation of eschatological completion, but rather in immanent culturalformation. Human creativity always acts in the context of a given past; butit is a creativity committed to continuous effort. Now it is the case that inconfrontation with the Shoah, otherwise diverse disciplinary accounts ofthis event have often coalesced around one central order of questioning: theontological formulation of reason. And, in particular, one aspect of thisformulation, with regard to the logic of presence, is crucial to our task: for,both Hegelianism and historicism remain rooted in Platonism to the extentthat they assume, as axiomatic, that no intelligible account of Being can begiven that does not solve the problem of evil. Evil may be construed asprivation, alienation or even reification, but never as interruptive event inthe continuum of 'presence': the kingdom of meaning. To suggest this,would be to suggest the co-existence of two incommensurate orders of timeand place in one monstrous absurdum. Thus the logic of Presence can no moretolerate the notion of different orders of reality, coeval and yet possessingno effective analogy or communication, than can orthodox Christianity


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DAVID MOSS 61endorse gnostic speculation. We may suggest then that the pulse of onto-theology dissipates dark thoughts of the tragic by theodictic 'solutions'.

inDuring the trial of Adolf Eichmann, Gideon Hausner began his evidenceto the Jerusalem court with the following statement:

What I record is the chronicle of the planet Auschwitz. I was there for abouttwo years. But time, there, is not as it is here on planet earth. There everyfraction of a second moves on different temporal wheels. And the denizens ofthis planet had no names, no parents, no children . . . They breathed accordingto different laws. They did not live according to the rules of this world, nordid they die.12

Hauser's experiencecorroborated a thousand times overwas of aworld both complete and self-consistent, suffering no deprivation of effici-ency or purpose by way of a cancelled mythos of human flourishing, butrather sustaining and expanding its province in collusion with the achieve-ments of modernity itself. What we have to reckon with here is an eventthat can no longer be accounted for by reference to 'the high' for it isparasitic upon nothing other than its own law of annihilation. It is aninstance of transcendent evil. Emil Fackenheim has listed five 'basic facts' that'are so plain as to be altogether beyond legitimate dispute', and which, hebelieves, constitute a claim to 'the uniqueness of the Holocaust ' .13 Bysubstantiating these factslargely by reference to Zygmunt Baumann'srecent and important study, Modernity and the Holocaustand then byintimating their philosophical and spiritual significance, I wish to indicatethe character of an event that brings us to the boundary of thought with amalign reality.

Facts four and five, as listed by Fackenheim in his latest publication ToMend the World, concern first, what Eichmann termed the 'idealism' of the'Final Solution', and second, the character of its perpetrators:4. The 'Final Solution' was not a pragmatic project serving such ends aspolitical power or economic greed. Nor was it the negative side of a positivereligious or political fanaticism. It was an end in itself. And, at least in the finalstage of the dominion of the Third Reich (when Eichmann diverted trains toAuschwitz from the Russian front), it was the only such end that remained.5. Only a minority of the perpetrators were sadists or perverts. For the mostpart they were ordinary jobholders doing an extraordinary job. And the tone-setters were ordinary idealists, except that the ideals were torture and murder.

Karl Schleuner has spoken of the long and twisted road to the destructionof European Jewry; a conception that should warn us against any aetiology


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62 T H E S H I B B O L E T H O F M O D E R N I T Yof the Shoah that is grounded, singularly and without supplement, inindividual pathology. From the aborted Madagascar project to the WannseeConference and beyond, an expanding empire calculated the terms forestablishing a Judenfreies Reich; a calculation that concluded in physicalextermination.14 An examination of the dimensionsindeed, very possibil-ity of this 'calculation ' is central to Baum an's study: it marks the exactpoint at which a chiliastically charged ideology of the kingdom of theliberated German Spirit fuses with modernity's instrumental capacity forradical societal reorganisation. Thus, to consider the 'Final Solution' an 'endin itself involves attending as much to the telos of the bureaucraticallyordered state machinery of destruction as it does to the racist ideology ofStocker, Strasser and Goebbels et al. Bauman is clear: 'The "Final Solution"did not clash at any stage with the rational pursuit of efficient, optimal goalimplementa t ion . On the con t ra ry , it arose out of a genuinely rational concern,and it was generated by bureaucracy true to its form and purpose.>1 5 In this respectwe may regard the Shoah as a 'legitimate resident in the house of mo dernity '.Nevertheless, questions of intentionality and of final purpose do impingeand indeed must impinge, once the efficacy of an all-embracing instrumentalcalculus has been granted. Sure enough in the case of the Shoah the designwas of a projected thousand-year Reich; however, as Arthur A. Cohen hasargued : 'Th e project of killing all Jews-the Ho locaust was an absurdumprecisely because even if all Jew s had been slain, the idea of the Jew . . .would never have been slain.'16 The situation that confronts us is a mis-nomer; worse still, an alogos: a 'Final Solution' that could never be finalthis side of complete and utter annihilation. An Ideal beyondmaybebefore?all sense. The Reich was sustained only by the fuelling of destruc-tion at its very h ear t; and as th e Russian armies closed in on Berlin, the soleand absolute article of Nazi faithexpressed in the burn ing of Jewishchildren bega n to spill over from the camps themselves. From the do omedBerlin bun ker Hitler ordered the flooding of the Berlin u nderg round system,the hiding place of men, women and children. This would not stop theRussian armies; it would, however, drown German children. From its verybeginning, the arteries of the thousand-year Reich led not to the envisionedKuppelberg, but to the gates of hellAuschwitz itself.17

Bauman devotes a considerable section of his enquiry to that feature ofthe 'uniqueness of the Holocaust' that Fackenheim lists as his fifth point.Bauman asks, how is it that 'these ordinary Germans [were] transformedinto the German perpetrators of mass crime?' His explanation, or rathersuggestionsbased in part upon a reading of Stanley Milgram's famouspsychological tests at Yale University in the early 1970 'sprovide a sociolo-gical explication of Simone Weil's oft-quoted comment that the seed ofevery crime lies within each and every one of us. Once again he directs his


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DAVID MO SS 63attention to the culture of bureaucracythis most modern inventionandexamines its internal dynamics and, critically, its mediating function withregard to the effect that its actions may have upon its own functionaries.Bauman concludes: 'The most poignant point, it seems, is the easiness withwhich most people slip into the role requiring cruelty or at least moralblindnessif only the role has been fortified and legitimized by superiorauthority. '18 In other words, by means of the authorization and routinizationof violence, the Nazi state immured its labour force (lawyers, civil servants,doctors, accountants) from any suspicion, indeed, even mild incredulity,concern ing its real End. Th is ability, intimating an extrem e ethical malleabil-ity, is perhaps handeablealthough no doubt disturbingin conditions of'disruptive' psychological testing. However, in recounting the history of193845 what we have to deal with is not only the behaviour of an entirenationand one cannot avoid stating the fact that those who resisted werepitifully few in number; but also a 'moral blindness' commensurate withcomplicity in genocide. One is forced to conclude that in postulating thisexplanation of an entire history of actions taken and deeds done (theevidence is clear in a mountain of bureaucratic memoranda whose notationis seemingly that of industrial productivity 19) we have reached a point ofdivesting the individual of any discriminating ethical stature. Can one dootherwise? And if we cannot, then no more can we shrink from this oneharrowing, and ultimately theological, question: are we any less the peoplewe could or should be after Auschwitz? Joh n R. Roth rejoins: 'Had Nazipower prevailed, authority to determine what ought to be would havefound that no natural laws were broken and no crimes against God andhumanity were committed in the Holocaust.'20 One hesitates to pronouncethe suggestion: a post-human world?

As we have seen, for the Platonist meaning is secured by approximationto the Forms, themselves illumined by the Good. The trajectory of certitudefrom eikasia to episteme correlates to the progress of a soul freed from thetransience of temporality. It is in this way that Plato seeks to ward off theprevenient threat of nihilism: by neither looking forward nor backwardsin history, but only upwards to the unchanging Ideal, the Good. Thus,Stanley Rosen concludes: 'The least, and perhaps the most, one can say ofthe Socratic good is that it preserves the sense of the world as the permanentintelligibility of the being of the world.' 2 1 But to say this, we must nowassert, is to say that which can no longer be said of the Shoah world. TheNazis employed neither a perverted conception of the Good, nor a misplacedassessment of the means by which to effect this Ideal. Rather, at the epicentreof the Nazi empire the camps displayed and continue to display the cancella-tion of any reference to the explicative power of the Good. The Shoahwas a self-subsistent maelstrom of evil in whose aura people'ordinary


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64 THE SHIBBOLETH OF MODER NITYGermans'enacted its annihilating principle. The analysis however has tobe taken still further in careful attendance to the accounts of concentrationcamp existence. Claude Lanzman records the testimony of Motke Zaidlwho, in 1944 as an inmate of the Sobibor camp, was ordered to dig up,with his bare hands, mass graves in order to incinerate the evidenceof genocide. He recalls: 'The Germans even forbade us to use the word'corpse' or 'victim'. The dead were blocks of wood, shit with absolutelyno impo rtance.'22 Primo Levi indicates the consequences of this:

We say 'hunger', we say 'tiredness,' 'fear,' 'pain,' we say 'winter' and they aredifferent things. They are free words, created and used by free men who livein comfort and suffering in their homes. If the Lagers had lasted longer a new,harsh language would have been born.23

This language was not borncan we even envisage such a language?but its possibility was experienced as the contraction of reference, a gap inlinguistic possibility, the very cancellation of the 'surplus of meaning'. Theold language, learnt from childhood, persisted; but it was made to standfor the primordial addition to all experience in the camps: death. It is abasic insight of the phenomenology of language that in the world ofordinary experience, the signified always transcends the signifier.24 But inthe Shoah world, a new and complex relationship governed languagebehaviour. On the one hand inherited patterns of speech and usage ten-aciously, almost miraculously, persist. But at the same time the signifiedwas also and always death: death by exhaustion, psychological collapse,exposure, murder or whatever. Even the manifold meanings of'food' (e.g.,sustenance, satiety, warmth, taste, conviviality) collapsed into the newsignified: death. For dried crusts and gruel were the remuneration for labourin an industry whose product was the ash of incinerated bodies.This condition, recorded although barely comprehended, is ruinous forPlatonic pragmatics whose first premise is the nobility of the just man: theman who can give an account of his deeds by divine measure. Man achievesthis measurement'the music of the polis'only in and through the iconicnature of speech; in other words, the self-transcending dimension of words.Jean Amery, provoked'for-God-knows what reason'into recalling astanza by Holderlin, as 'we were dragging ourselves . . . from the IG-Farben site back into camp', records:

Then I repeated the stanza somewhat louder, listened to the words' sound,tried to track the rhythm, and expected that the emotional and mental responsethat for years this Holderlin poem had awakened in me would emerge. Butnothing happened. The poem no longer transcended reality. There it was and


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D A V I D M O S S 65all that remained was objective statement: such and such, and the Kapo roars'left ', and the soup was w a t e r y . 2 5

T h a t s p e e c h s h o u l d be p u r i f i ed of its i c o n i c or h u m a n c o n t e n t is o b v i o u s l yn eces s a ry in the r e a l m of the phys ica l sc iences ; the r e s u l t of w h i c h ism a t h e m a t i c s . B u t w h e n m a t h e m a t i c s b e c o m e s a p a r a d i g m for all s p eech ,the resu l t is d e s t r u c t i v e a s i l e n t a n n i h i l a t i o n . T h e p u r e s p e e c h of non-i c o n i c eikasia'a harsh n e w l a n g u a g e ' ? i s s i l e n t b e c a u s e it has a l t o g e t h e rf o r g o t t e n a b o u t its o r i g i n in the h u m a n ( r e ad : h u m a n e ) p s y c h e . In theS h o a h w o r l d , l a n g u a g e s t a l l e d and the m o t h e r and the s is ters that Zai 'd l d ugu p he was fo rced to cal l 'Figuren, t h a t is . . . p u p p e t s , or d o l l s ' . T h e r e s o u r c e so f l a n g u a g e for m e a s u r i n g the d e e d s of men, g o o d f r o m bad, its p o w e r inr e - c o l l e c t i n g the s t o r y t h a t w e ca l l se l f - iden t i ty , its f e c u n d i t y in i m a g i n g aw o r l d o t h e r t h a n our own: all th i s was e r o d e d t o w a r d s s i l e n c e t h e s il en c en o t of e c s t a t i c i l l u m i n a t i o n , but of a n n i h l i a t i o n . It is a h a u n t -ing re f lec t ion tha t the o n l y i d i o m by w h i c h s o m e h a v e f o u n d it at allposs ib le to m a k e a l l u s i o n to t h i s m o s t m o n s t r o u s e v e n t , is m a t h e m a t i c a l .It is the d e p t h of the i r re f lec t ions tha t has led t h e m to a c o n v i c t i o n of thea p p r o p r i a t e n e s s of the i d i o m of s u rd and s i n g u l a r i t y .

IV'There is need for a new encounter with Hegel in what is rightly describedas the age post Hegel mortuum.'26 This comment, coming as it does in theintroduction to To Mend the World, provides the leitmotiv for Fackenheim'smost searching examination of the psyche of modernity. It is an examinationthat we must now attend to in the company of Bauman. The issue is this:an examination of modernity's consciousness of time construed as the properprovenance for any contemporary understanding of transcendence; which isto say, first and foremostly, an enquiry into the nature of historical tran-scendence itself. Thus, in the lingua franca of the 'modern age' (e.g.,'progress', 'revolution', 'emancipation', 'crisis', Zeitgeistto list but a few)we may recognise the boldest and most troubling claim of modernity: theclaim to create its own normativity out of itself. As Hans Blumenberg hasargued, foundational legitimation for the 'modern age' is not to be disco-vered in any exemplary past, but in the social and reflective revolution thatturned nostrum aevum, our own age, into nova aetas, the new age.27 This iswhat Hegel recognised, and in so doing was the first to grasp the Janus-like configuration at modernity's core. However, what we must remindourselves of are bonds of kinship too often forgotten. For the metaphorslisted above are just as much our conceptual-historical keys as they wereHegel's; and this is crucial to our task in exposing the Hegelian hermeneuticto the Shoah. The point requires a further elaboration.


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66 T HE S H I B B O L E T H O F M O D E R N I T YFor Hegel, Kant's three critiqueswhich he believed to be the suprememeditation upon modernity's meaninghad established, irrevocably, and

in reflective expression, the epochal detachment of modernity from theprevious age. Nevertheless, Hegel argued, if Kant had established thisseverance once and for all, he had done so at an intolerable cost: theconstruction of an architectonic of reason riven by formal differentiations.And for Hegel, such differentiations, bearing their correlative divisions inculture, were, in truth, nothing other than expressions of diremptions inlife itself. Thus emerged for Hegel the true character of modernity: thepursuit of self-assurance [Selbstvergewisserung]; wh ic h is to say, the a t t e mp tof modernity to stabilise itselfin the absence of any exemplary historicalmodelupon the very diremptions that had brought it into being. Thisattempt, according to Hegel, is the task and destiny of philosophy in our'modern age'. That we cannot doubt Hegel on this will inform our firstanalysis of his thought (our thought?) in confrontation with the Shoah.That we can no longer stay with his conclusions, his own asseveration ofconfidence in the 'modern age'and this is surely the double-bindwillconcern our second analysis. And so, if we have thus far sketched outHegel's characterization of modernity as the pursuit of self-assurance, wemust now briefly indicate his own supremely self-confident response to thissituation.

Hegel's response to the anxiety of the 'modern age' is the 'Idea ofOvercoming'; labelled by Fackenheim, 'the most courageous and character-istic claim of modernity'. Thus, for Hegel, while our perspective maychange, as indeed may the object of our enquirytheodicy or revelation;technology or aestheticsit nevertheless remains the case that, through amultiplicity of mediations, the spheres of science, morality and art are alltransformed into jus t so many embodiments of the principle of subjectiv-ity.28 In Hegel's philosophy it is the 'Idea of Overcoming' , a figureoriginally taken from the philosophy of the subject (establishing the unityof the subjective and the objective in knowledge), that provides the tran-scendental logic for mediating the finite and infinite, freedom and necessity,and state and civil society. And if we are to enquire of Hegel how such anIdea can, in any way, be related to the fabric of existence, then we mayhear in his response the most 'supremely humble' and yet at the same timethe most 'supremely presumptuous' claim of modern critical philosophy:philosophical thought can transcend all experience only because there isalready a transcending dimension within experience itself.29 Transcendence issecured within the movement of history, and we would have to be verydeaf indeed not to hear this conviction re-echo in the profoundly politicaldiscourse of modernity. This, Fackenheim asserts, should not surprise us forHegelianism stripped down to its core comprises this decisive theo-political


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DAVID MO SS 67bonding: the fusing of 'a religious aspect, the world-already-overcome(John 16:33), with a secular aspect, the-world-ever-yet-to-be-overcomethrough human self activity'. This is the Hegelian charter of self-confidencefor modern man, and to the extent that we remain convicted by the anxietyof our modern condition, so also do we remain summoned to a self-confidence in the power of universal human reason, the reason known andavailable to everyone. We do not have to look far for the evidence of thisfact; nor, I shall now argue, do we have to look far for its utter abrogation.To this condition of anxiety and this philosophy of self-confidence, wemust address Fackenheim's second and third basic facts listed as substantiatingthe 'uniqueness of the Holocaust':

2.This murder was quite literally 'extermination'; not a single Jewish man,woman or child was to survive, orexcept for a few that were well hiddenor overlookedwould have survived had Hitler won the war.3 .This was because Jewish birth was sufficient cause to merit torture and death;whereas the 'crime' of Poles and Russians was that there were too many ofthem, with the possible exception of the Gypsies, only the Jews had committedthe crime of existing at all.

In the following, I wish to outline a provisional 'ontology' of the Shoahwhich intimates a 'whole of horror' existing both spatially and temporallywithin the heart of modernity, although, horrifyingly, beyond its own mostfecund ontological dialectic.30 This, I suggest, is what must be involved inany 'new encounter with Hegel'. Two aspects, I will argue (as suggestedabove) are involved.First: Popular resentment against the Jews is not, nor could it be, asatisfactory explanation for the Nazi decision to judg e guilty and open toextermination millions of human beings defined by the sole fact of theirfeeing Jewish. Thus, George L. Mosse is led to comment: 'Christian theologyhas never advocated exterm ination of the Jews, but rather their exclusionfrom society as living witnesses to deicide. The pogroms were secondaryto isolating Jews in ghettoes.'31 No apologia for the Church's centuries-old'teaching of contempt' can be intended by this consideration: most surely,Luther's pamphlets of the early 1540's, advocating the Ausrottung of the Jewfrom Europe, were planks in the construction of European arteries whoserail heads bore the names of Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen. However,popular antisemitism, feeding from the wells of flagrant caricature anddiabolical myth, cannot account for death camps: Kristallnacht was the onlyepisode of mass anti-Jewish violence in Germany and this was pogrom notgenocide.32 Moreover, weighing against such old-style barbarity was, whatArendt has termed, 'the animal pity by which all normal men are affectedin the presence of physical suffering.' A thesis given harrowin g confirmation


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68 T H E S H I B B O L E T H O F M O D E R N I T Yin the address Heinr ich Himmler gave to h is ' ideal is t ic ' subordinates inO c t o b e r , 1 9 4 3 :

'T he Jew ish people is going to be annihilated,' says every part y m em be r. 'Sure ,it 's in the prog ram me , elimination of the Jews, annihilation w e'll take careof it. ' And then they all come trudging, eighty million worthy Germans, andeach has one decent Jew. Sure, the others are swine, but this one is an A-iJ e w . 3 3

S o m e t h i n g m o r e , s o m e t h i n g o t h e r t h a n ' m e r e ' a n t i s e m i t i s m , a n d t h ebear ing of the charge of deic ide , was involved in the Shoah; i t was somethingthat dul led , even defused , ' an imal p i ty ' . I t s d imens ions cons t i tu te whatBauman ca l l s the 'modern i ty o f r ac i sm ' .

'An im po r ta n t th in g happ ened to the J ews on the road to m od ern i ty ' ,r emarks Bauman: they were emanc ipa ted . The e f f ec t , a l though d i s t ingu ishedby local i ty and context , was that what had previous ly been accepted andeffec ted by cas te s ep ara t io n the ' o the rnes s ' o f the J ewish p e o p le n o wbec am e a t ru th tha t had to b e demo ns t r a ted a nd ' l abor ious ly constructed'.Thus , fo l lowing em anc i pa t io n , the J e w o f the ghe t to becam e the J e w - in -o u r - m i d s t w h a t B a u m a n t e r m s t h e ' c o n ce p t u al J e w ' a n d i n t hi s m a n i -fes ta t ion bo re an arch etypa l 'v iscos i ty ' , a p lu nd er i ng of ide nt i ty , tha t' in fec ted ' the ve ry hear t o f m od er n i t y ' s pu r su i t o f o rder an d c la r i ty . 3 4 Inthe in te rmesh ing s t ruc tu res o f admin i s t r a t ive bu reaucracy and indus t r i a lt ech no lo gy , the m od er n na t ion s tate d i s covered a m ea ns in the me d ica l -t h e r a p e u t i c i d i o m o f s oc ia l e n g i n e e r i n g 3 5 o f e x p u n g i n g i d e n t i t i e s d e e m e dto be ' cancerous ' . Cen tu r ies -o ld an t i s emi t i sm was an e lemen t in the murder -ous co m po un d o f genoc ide n o do ub t , bu t its fue l was the typ ica l ly m od er nam bit ion of socia l des ign an d engin eer ing , s t r iv ing to effect a h o m e for'au thent ic ' habi ta t ion in th is t ime and p lace . In o ther words , in the ideologyo f m o d e r n i t y :

Jews were to die not because they were resented (or at least not primarily forthat reason); they were seen as deserving death (and resented for that reason)because they stood between this one imperfect and tension ridden reality andthe hoped-for world of tranquil happiness.3 6

D o w e ca tch an echo o f tha t pa r t i cu la r theo -po l i t i ca l bo nd ing , the H e g e l -ian Idea, in this conclu sion? I reite rate, I can be no m o re t ha n sugg estiv eand , no doub t , inexcusab ly general in my comments ; never theless , th is i s suemus t bea r a deeper and mor e s ea rch ing exam ina t io n : h o w deep does Wes te rnman 's convict ion run that the fu l f i lment of his own t ru th , the r econc i l i a t ionof hea ven and ea r th , is pos t pon ed on ly by a s app ing f rom wi th in : the - Jew -in- ou r-m ids t? An d i f Heg el is ou r guid e in locat in g th is dark presen ce a t


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DAVID MO SS 69the heart of the anxiety of our modern age, then how much more are weconstrained to recognise those dimensions of Hegel's version of a reconcili-ation of modernity (in a 'state-sponsored' Sittlichkeit) that reside, ultimately,in his early readings of the Abraham story? 37 These urgent questions remainbeyond the scope, although not the direction, of this essay. However, thismuch is clear. The creation of the 'Jewish question' in modern Europe isirrevocably bound to the fulfilment of the Western ideological project: thestabilisation of modernity on the foundation of technology. This Hegelrecognised; and early Marx, in debate with Bruno Bauer, provides us withincomparable evidence.38 We must admit, on this score, Hegel is unim-peachable. And, moreover, it is in this sense that we might suggest thatmodernity, as theorised by Hegel, concluded at least one argument ofhistory wh ether the Jews w ere a chosen race: they are, irrevocably, utterlyand finally. But chosen for what?Joseph Goebbels, in a moment of private reflection, registered, withbrutal precision, this modern logic: 'There is no hope of leading the Jewsback into the fold of civilized humanity by exceptional punishments. Theywill forever remain Jews, jus t as we are forever m embers of the Aryanrace. '39 And what must now become clear is that on modernity's own termsthe consequence of thismass exterminationwas not a species of aberrantor chthonic logic; it was rather a moment of self-assertion true to its ownnature. And Hegel, as I have argued, is our primary witness. This comprisesthe first aspect of our encounter with Hegel: the 'cr ime' of Jewish existence.We now come to Fackenheim's second 'basic fact': a murder that 'was quiteliterally "extermination."'In the Shoah the Jew , each and every Jew , was chosen no t merely forphysical destruction, butand here, surely, words give out, exhausted oftheir last vestiges of meaningmetaphysical annihilation. Primo Levi'sharrowing account of the Muselmdnner constitutes 'an ultimate' for humanthought: the irreducible objectivum of an abominable reality:

On their entry into the camp, through basic incapacity, or by some misfortune,or through some banal incident, they are overcome before they can adaptthemselves; they are beaten by time, they do not begin to learn German, todisentangle the infernal knot of laws and prohibitions until their body is alreadyin decay, and nothing can save them from selection or death by exhaustion.Their life is short but their number is endless: they, the Muselmdnner, thedrowned, form the backbone of the camp, an anonymous mass, continuouslyrenewed and always identical, of non-men who march and labour in silence,the divine spark dead within them, already too empty really to suffer. Onehesitates to call them living; one hesitates to call their death death.40

Fackenheim asserts that the Muselmann is the Nazi state's most character-


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70 T H E S H I B B O L E T H O F M O D E R N I T Yistic and original product. Conflagrations of heaped corpses are, tragically,not a unique Nazi practice. The systematic operation of bestial practices,which governed camp life and had as their sole object the imm olation-of-self, were.4 1 The camps were not merely killing factories but the instanti-ation of a 'logic of destruction'; a universe whose configurational design,its laws both legal and statistical, its causalities and potentialities, weredirected towards one end: the demonic elimination of humanity. We recoilwith a hardened incredulity at such a presence; but where does the sourceof this incredulity really lie? That man can torture man (and woman andchild)? I do not believe so, for we have long kn ow n that W estern m an isa killer. The source of our dis-ease must be sought elsewhere. It is intimatedin a note by Jean Amery, and charted in Bauman's painful chapter: 'Solicit-ing the Cooperation of the Victims'.

Amery wrote: 'The power structure of the SS state towered up beforethe prisoner monstrously and indomitably, a reality that could not beescaped and that therefore finally seemed reasonable.'42 Bauman enquires:how it was that, excepting individual cases of disobedience, the Nazis couldcount on Jewish co-operation in their own annihilation? How was it thatthey could co-operate in their own transformation into Muselm'dnnerl Hisinvestigation is concerned primarily with the evidence of life in the ghettos,prior to transportation, and centres upon the status or inferential 'rationality'that may be accorded to any act of life-preservation in a world where thetelos of Reason is physical and spiritual ann ihilation. T he evidence he gathersdefies any adequate paraphrase; the logic of this destruction, manifest in thecreation of each and every new circle of hell, can only be displayed.Nevertheless, Bauman's conclusion is unavoidable: the calculus which in aprevious existence had ordered and patterned life in ways both ethical andrational, collapsed; but more than this, and here the register is ineluctablyontological, the minimal condition for even the possibility of such anorderingthe will to life itselfbecame both a necessary and sufficientcondition in the enactment of genocide. 'The train called 'self-preservation'stopped only at Treblinka railway station.' In this terrible fact, manifest inthe creation of the Muselmdnner, what we catch a sight of, is not merelymen and women encased in an autism of brutality, but an ontological zero,'the death of man as a rational, "forward-dreaming" speech organism (thezoon phonanta of Greek philosophy).' This is no putative metaphor, orrhetoric of horrified astonishment, Fackenheim argues, but the telos, finaland ultimate, of I'univers concentrationnaire. This insight, Fackenheimdemands, must not be compromised. Therefore, all thought seeking toexplain or to clarify, log or to rationalise the Shoah must be defied. Thus,in conclusion to this section, we must return to the ideology of modernity.

Hegelianism stands or falls by its ability to reconcile all the elements of


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DAVID MO SS 71human history. With the appearance of a thesis whose very essence isextermination, even Hegel's dialectic, with its promise of a final reconcili-ation between heaven and earth, is surely stalled:

For Hegel . . . to grasp a whole in a circular thought is to comprehend it, totranscend it, and, from a higher standpoint, perceive the meaning of the wholeby placing it into a perspective. On our part, in contrast, we confront in theHolocaust world a whole of horror. We cannot comprehend it but only compre-hend its incomprehensibility. We cannot transcend it but only be struck bythe brutal truth that it cannot be transcended.43

Hegelian dialectics, in however a disguised form, echoes in the manifoldlogics of modernity ; ho we ver, as I have argued, it is as a charter for modernsecular self-confidence, immanent in the infinite aspirations of modernity,that it exercises its most profound influence. Is this then what it means tolive in an age post Hegel mortuum: to maintain one's self-confidence even inthe age of Auschwitz? But as we recall, Fackenheim demands a newencounter with Hegel; what does this mean? It means, I believe, an encounterwith our own self-confidence; for either modernity is 'self-confidence,qualified as confidence in God, confidence in God given concrete form asself confidence,' or it is nothing. Thus, with dire brevity we could suggestthis final form for the Hegelian endeavour: dependence on God, on thepart of man, must be overcome. With Kant, Hegel could affirm that the'mightiest revolution coming from inside of man is his departure from hisself-incurred tutelage'. Man must prove himself as nondependent, and hemust work this nondependency out to the extreme of no longer needingGod; indeed, recognising the death of God. But in attaining this extreme, hewill, in effect, show himself to be more in need of God when he is notdependent upon Him than when he was dependent on Him. Could Hegelhave foreseen the extreme man of a rebelhous age who has travelled to thelimits of his nature and has shown the world how first creation could bemaimed in the murder of the Jewish People, and in times to come in theannihilation of the entire human species? Is this the prescribed enactmentof self-confidence, the demanded proof of autonomy? In the sober termsof empirical verification Bauman comments, 'I propose to treat the Holo-caust as a rare, yet significant and reliable, test of the hidden possibilities ofmodern society.'; but if this is so, then it is a test that cannot be venturedupon by the most courageous claim of modernity itself. For Hegel, it isthought that gives man immortality; man is the being who thinks, whocan thus becom e a being for-itself. O ur analysis of the Shoah-w orld how everhas revealed, within modernity's very midst, an enclave in which men andwomen and children were systematically divested of the symbolic and


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72 THE SHIB BOLE TH OF MO DER NIT Yspiritual structures of their lives in an attempt to reduce them to animalstatus, before destruction. Disturbingly, Jean Amery entitled his reflectionson his experience in Auschwitz: 'Attempts at Overcoming by One Who IsOvercome. ' It is thought that is overcome by the Shoah in testimony toall those whose will to life was overcome in the furnaces of Auschwitz.What rattles in the husk of the thought that has tried to think itself is thereal; or, as the philosopher Hans Jonas has commented 'much more is realthan is possible.' We need add only one more consideration. The 'FinalSolution' was engineered by the Nazi State; in other words, that form ofpolity which for Hegel was destined to become the expression of freedomand rationality by way of its self-grounding actualization. However, thegrounding that modernity discovered in the Nazi State was not the kingdomof freedom, but rather an artificially contrived state of nature 'producingno ethical works'.4 4 And this is critical, for Western Man in extremis, in thismodern consummating orgy of destruction, discovered not his dependencyupon God, but a means of purging (an utter catharsis), the presence of theinfinite, invisible, and ethically imperative God as witnessed to in theexistence of the Jewish people.

There is an ancient Midrash which goes:'You are My witnesses, says the Lord'that is, if you are my witnesses, I amGod, and if you are not My witnesses, I am, as it were, not God.'45

We began this section by outlining 'the most courageous and characteristicclaim of modernity'; we conclude by pointing towards its cancellation. Myclaim is this: to the extent that we remain committed to the project ofmodernity, to its attempt to create its own historical normativity out ofitselfconstrued as the transcending actwe are indicted by its own mostcharacteristic product: the Shoah, the shibboleth of modernity. But morethan this, we must be clear about the nature of this indictment, and it is atthis point that the register of our argument becomes ineluctably theological.Phillipe Lacoue-Labarthe argues the point with precision. He writes:

[W]hen one thinks History in terms of the deployment of metaphysics, andone calls on the West, under the same heading, to face its responsibility . . .one cannot maintain silence on the massacre of the Jews, in so far as it isprecisely the massacre of the Jews.46Thus, it is to this irreducible reality that we must attend in all ourrepeated attempts to emplot 'the divine gestalt, which lures, empowers, andshapes human activity in the direction of a transfigurative praxis.'47 For ifit is the case that the Shoah is a phenomenon that can bear no other logicin essencethan a spiritual one, then to chart the above path from Platonic


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DAV ID MO SS 73pragmatics to Hegelian Idealism is to do no more than describe a way thatis now irrevocably closed and boarded off. The fecund relationship oftheological thinking with history as the arena for the activity of self-transcendence, stalls in confrontation with the Shoah. But to speak in thisway is to speak of a caesura within history which, as it interrupts, closesoff; and closes off for good. We are, in other words, speaking of caesura asconcept; perhaps the concept for future theological thinking.

Our discussion in this essay has been wide-ranging and, at times, no doubtimprecise. This, I believe, reflects George Steiner's important insight thatin order to avoid a normalisation of the Shoah (under a specific logic ofhistorical explanation), we will, of necessity, become involved in the 'inter-mingling of different, perhaps irreconcilable levels of analysis and ofmethod.' This has proved to be the case in the above; nevertheless, it iswith the specifically theological implications of our discussion that I nowwish to take issue. To be precise: with the Shoah as a caesura for thought.This is a disturbing and, by any Kantian estimation, clearly a perplexingsuggestion. Nonetheless, the logic of this contention is, I believe, stilltraceable; and it is this logic that I wish to offer as a conclusion to this essay.Donald MacKinnon has argued in Kantian vein that talk o f'concep ts'involves not 'a recognitional capacity of an exceptional degree of refinementand resulting width of application', but, 'the way in which in exercise ofour understanding, we entertain the relevance of determining what is thecase in respect of one state of affairs to determining what is the case inrespect of another.' If this is so then we are bound to ask: what is thepurpose of invoking the concept of caesura in our accounting of the Shoah?The exercise would appear to be nonsensical, for either the death-campsare amenable to conceptual clarification by way of historical analoguesin which case the idiom of caesura would be straight misapplication; or elsethe very suggestion of caesura as concept would appear to cancel the func-tional ability that concepts possess in the first place. Despite this, I want toargue that this characterization bears a more significant interpretation thanso far suggested. However, in order to track the logic of this suggestionwe must be prepared to entertain, in some form, a sort of negative ontologycritically informed by the mode of tragic witness and inquiry. And this, inshort, will stand in utter contradistinction to the hermeneutic of idealismthat we have thus far been concerned with in this essay.

For Kant the manipulation of the conceptual order was but a responseto , or initiated fashioning of, the donation of reality an sich. As such, itfollows that the synthesis envisaged by Kantof reason with understand-inginvolves us in standing at the very boundary of the world as we


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74 THE SHIBBOL ETH OF MO DE RN IT Yperceive it, with the world as it is. But more than thisand this is the realcruxin order to grasp the bar that this places upon the legitimate exerciseof reason we must in some way stand outside this boundary. For Kant, thisstanding outside can be only minimal; nevertheless, it is critical standingoutside, and, as John Milbank has argued recently, it is for precisely thisreason that we may regard 'Kant's entire philosophy [as] in a sense anaesthetic of the classical sublime.'48 The point at which we arrived at theend of section IV is in complete contradiction to this ideology; nevertheless,in this aspect it shares a common logic: to speak of the Shoah as caesura inhistory is to register a boundary point of reason with the datum forinterpretation, although in this instance the encountered phenomenon ofcognitive resistance arises from a world in which ultimate reality becomesincommensurate w ith human w ell-being. Arthur A. Cohen has commented:'There is something in the nature of thoughtits patient deliberateness andcare for logical orderthat is alien to the enormity of the death camps . .. Thinking and the death camps are incommensurable. '49 Nevertheless, ifwe are to invoke this epithetthe Shoah as caesuraas a warrant fordisclosing, or rather negating the potentialities of philosophical and theolo-gical thought after Auschwitz, then we must be prepared to consider furtherthe ontological implication of what it could mean to stand, if only in aminimal way, outside of this boundary or incommensurability. For, toreiterate, it has been the argument of this essay that thought in confrontationwith the death camps is not involved in some sort of asymptotic relationtowards a limit, but rather with the utter experience of boundary.

In tragedy we can discover a source of inquiry into negativity; indeed,a mode of thought in which the pressures of severe negativity are refusedany dissipation. In what follows, the complex and often convoluted questionconcerning what tragedy is will not be our concern; our question is notone of category comm ensurabilityi.e., is the Shoah an event that we maycorrectly construe as tragic. This would be an exercise in facile domestica-tion. Rather, our question concerns what the tragic method does and inparticular: what is the ontological standing of the tragic as a mode ofthought if we are to employ it as a hermeneutic for approaching the Shoah?So far as theology (and indeed any 'logic of presence') is concerned, theimpulse behind this question is clear: tragedy manifests the theodicies of lifeand history that theology has traditionally sought to comprehend. However,in turnin g to tragedy in this instance our concern is rather w ith the ontologicalstatus of any theological vision that has listened well to the lessons of tragedyas a disruptive negative dialectic upon culturein our case modernity.

Arthur A. Cohen indicates one possible way of construing this in hisdescription of the Holocaust as tremendum. The description recalls RudolfOtto's phenomenological description of the terror-mystery of God's pres-


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DAV ID MO SS 75ence; Cohen however employs the phrase to invoke not the divine, butrather the malign possibility of a radical freedom released from all transcend-ental controls. However, it is the ontological status of this description thatmust attract our attention. As Cohen writes:

The tremendum is ultimate; its symbolic resonance permanent; its repetition isthe continuous assurance of its potency; its very ultimacy is prefiguration. Butit is not, for all its being ultimate, final. It is ultimate because it comprehendsand articulates all negativity, but it is not final. Finality and ultimacy differcrucially. Ultimacy entails the formal and configurational character of the realevent, whereas finality describes its intention and its goal. It is one thing tospeak of the tremendum as ultimate, quite another to affirm its finality. If final,everything is intended to evil and we must conclude that our affairs are run, ifnot by blind caprice, then most surely by a malign divinity.50

Thus, Cohen seeks to avoid the intrusion of the most fundam ental featureof the tragic vision: the 'unspeakable' theology of malevolent transcend-encea 'wicked God.' That he has attended, with an unmistakeableanguish, to the horror of this particular event is clear enough; but what isjust as clear is that his final word on the matter rests with the constructionof a tragic anthropology at whose centre lies the human sin of hubris. Cohen,we may suggest, has delineated with painstaking exactness the character ofthe Shoah as the exercise of an unlimited freedom: a prefiguration that isindeed ultimate. Nevertheless, in the terms of our discussion of Hegel, andin terms of the sharper Kantian focus that we have brought to our findingsby way of the concept of the Shoah as caesura, we must conclude thatCohen's appropriation of the tragic, as a mode of thought, refuses to warrantany reflection upon the ontological boundary between ultimacy and finalityas boundary and as not limit. But, we must surely wonder, can anythingmore conceivably be said?It is at this precise juncture that I wish to return to the point at whichour argument began: with the poetry of Paul Celan, and in particular withhis famous poem 'Psalm'. George Steiner has described this poem as being'unsurpassed [in its] immensity of implication and nakedness of expression.';and I can do no better in plotting its 'field of referral' than to directreaders to Steiner's own profound reflections upon it. 5 1 I reproduce Steiner's'paraphrase':

No-one kneads us again out of earth and loam,No-one bespeaks our dust.No one.Praise unto thee, No-one.For love of you will


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76 T H E S H I B B O L E T H O F M O D E R N I T Ywe bloom.Towards I againstYou.A nothingwere we, are we, willwe remain, blooming:No-one's-rose.Withthe stylus soul-brightthe dust-thread sky-waste,the crown reddenedby the purple word, which we sangabove, o abovethe thorn.

In what follows, the exegesis is Steiner's; my own suggestion is only thatin this poem we may recognise (as in so much of Celan's poetry) a symbolicintimation offinality. In other words, in so far as the ontological status ofthe tragic is inseparable from its interpretative constitution, then it is pre-cisely in and through the fragmentary and dark epiphanies of Celan's poemsthat we may broach the difference between ultimacy and finality that rearsbefore us in the systematic destruction of six million Jews. 'Psalm' by wayof its unerring theological tenorin style and referenceplots the bound-ary between thought and death camps, ultimacy and finality, while at thesame moment and in order to do thisintimates a minimal passage overthat boundary. Steiner writes:The 'nothingness' of the Jew at Auschwitz is, in a sense, the nothingness ofman before God created him; it is the nothingness which constitutes everyindividual extinction; it is the nothingness, the zero-point of history for theJewish people in the hand of its killers. Yet it is a nothingness 'in bloom', aterrible flow ering towards and against the 'No-oneness' of God's absence.'52

What is this boundary that Celan has crossed? Or again, in what sensehas his art transgressed the prohibition of Arthur A. Cohen that we shouldnot 'ask of [God] more than we can bear him to be.' It is this: No-onebespeaks our dust. For, 'The absence of God from the Shoah is also his silencein the face of the unremembered dead, an unremembrance which makes oftheir death a double annihilation.' We cannot conceive of this silence, forthis would most assuredly be self-mutilation; however, if we are to standby the body of the argument of this essay nor can we withdraw, with acertain composure, into past veritieshowever these are to be revivified.53


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T H E S H I B B O L E T H O F M O D E R N I T Yhis argument to consist in three 'explora-tions'; or, in other words, a series of con-frontations with the Holocaust of threetypes of philosophical logic: the first 'inwhich thought rises above history'; thesecond 'in which thought moves throughhistory in an attempt to overcome it'; andthe third in which 'thought is and remainssituated in history'. In this essay I will becon cern ed w i th the f irst two : nam ely thePlatonic and Hegel ian logics.

1 0 To Mend the World, p. 262.1 1 Ac co rdin g to D erri da the logic signifies a

'universal form of t ranscendental l i fe 'establ ished by the st ructure of con-sciousness and preserved by the capacityof langua ge to f ix concepts. In the mo stgeneral terms, i t denotes the central con-vict ion of Western metaphysics that'before my bi rth and after my death . . .the present is ' . Cf. Speech and Phenomenon(Nor thwestern Univers i ty Press : Evan-ston, III, 1973) pp. I34ff. In this section Ihave drawn on Kenneth C . Blanchard ' svery he lpfu l commentary , 'Ph i losophy inthe Age of Auschwi tz : Emi l Fackenheimand Leo Strauss' in Remembering For theFuture, Volume II: The Impact of the H olo-caust on the Contemporary World (P e rgam onPress: Oxford , 1989) pp . 1815-29 .

1 2 S ee M oshe P ea r l m an , The Capture andTrial of Adolf Eichmann (Lowet BrydoneLtd. : Lon do n, 1963) p. 396.

1 3 To Mend the World, p. 12.1 4 For an account of the crucial Wannsee

Co nfe ren ce o n 20 Ja nu ary 1942, see Ma r-t in Gi lbert ' s The Holocaust: The JewishTragedy (Fontana: Glasgow, 1987)p p . 2 8 0 - 9 3 .

1 5 Z y g m u n t B a u m a n , Modernity and theHolocaust (Pol i ty Press: Ca mb ridg e, 1989)p . 17.

1 6 ' O n E m i l F ackenhe i m ' s To Mend theWorld: A Review Essay' . In Modern Juda-ism Vol . 3 No. 2, p. 228.

1 7 See El ias Canet t i ' s remarkable essay 'TheA rch o f T r i um ph ' i n The Conscience ofWords (Andre Deutsch: London, 1986).

1 8 Modernity and the Holocaust, p. 168.1 9 S ee R au l H i l be rg ' s com m en t s perhap s

the hi s tor i an of the Holocaus tin Shoah:An Oral History of the Holocaust (P an t heon

Boo ks: N ew York , 1985) pp . 7 0- 3 . Al sohis massive: The Destruction of the EuropeanJews, 3 Vols . (Holmes and M eier : Lo ndo n,1985).

2 0 Q uot ed i n Modernity and the Holocaust,p . 7.

21 Nihilism (Yale Universi ty Press: NewHaven, 1969) p. 184.

2 2 Shoah: An Oral History of the Holocaust,p . 13.

2 3 Survival in Auschwitz (Col l i e r Books : NewYork, 1961) p. 112.

2 4 For example, see Paul Ricoeur ' s Interpreta-tion Theory: Discourse and the Surplus ofMeaning (Texas Christ ian Universi tyPress: Fort Worth, 1976) pp. 54ff.

2 5 At the Mind's Limits: Contemp lations b y aSurvivor on Auschwitz and its Realities(Schocken Boo ks: Ne w York, 1986) p. 7.

2 6 To Mend the World, p. 8.2 7 See Blumenberg ' s magi s t e r i a l , The Legit-

imacy of the Modern Age (MIT Press : Cam-br idg e , MA , 1983), i n which , t h ro ug h aweal th of historical evidence, he endeav-ours to demonstrate the dist inct ive charac-ter of modern thought and i t s qual i tat ivebreak wi th Chr i s t i an theology .

2 8 For a clear and concise explanation of this,see Charles Taylor ' s Hegel and Modern Soci-ety (C U P : C am br i dge , 1979 ) pp . 23ff.

29 To Mend the World, p. 158.3 0 See G. Steiner ' s 'On Lewis Feuer ' s "Sto-

icism" ' in Encounter LXXI, 2 (1988) 78.3 1 Modernity and the Holocaust, p. 72.3 2 Ibid. , p. 75.3 3 In A Holocaust Reader, Ed. Lucy S . Daw-

i dow i cz (B eh rm an H ouse : N ew Y ork ,1976) p. 133.

3 4 Modernity and the Holocaust, p. 53.3 5 See Robert Jay Lifton 's important s tudy

The Nazi Doctors: A Study in the Psychologyof Evil (Macmil lan: London, 1986) p. I4f .

3 6 Modernity and the Holocaust, p. 76.3 7 For an account of Hegel ' s preoccupat ion

with the f igure of Ab rah am and the ra mi -fications for his later ph ilo so ph y, see H . S.Harr i s , Hegel's Development Toward theSunlight, 1770-1801 (Clarendon Press :Oxford , 1972) .

3 8 ' O n the Jew ish Que st ion ' (1843) in Th eMarx-Engels Reader, Ed. Rober t C . Tucker


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D A V I D M O S S 79(W. W. Norto n & Com p: Ne w York,1978).39 Modernity and the Holocaust, p. 72.

4 0 Survival in Auschwitz, p. 82.4 1 See Terence des Pres' important study,

The Survivor: An Anatomy of Life in theDeath Camps (OU P : New York, 1976) .

4 2 At the Mind's Limits, p . 12.4 3 To Mend the World, p. 238.4 4 See H eg e l ' s Lectures on the Philosophy of

World History: Introduction (C UP : C am -b r i d g e , 1980) p. 145. Th e co l l abora t ion ofthe s tate in the crea t ion of the ' ru le ofC h r o n o s ' , an age of 'no en d u r i n g ach i ev e -m en t ' ex cep t i n g r u i n and des t ruc t ion ,w o u l d h av e b een for H eg e l u n t h i n k ab l e .

4 5 Q u o t e d in To Mend the World, p. 331.4 6 P h i l i p p e L aco u e - L ab a r t h e , Heidegger, Art

and Potties (Bas i l B lackwel l : Oxford , 1990)p . 48.

4 7 P e t e r C. H o d g s o n , God in History: Shapesof Freedom (Abingdon Pres s : Nashvi l l e ,1989) p. 49.

4 8 ' " B e t w e e n p u r g a t i o n and i l l u m i n a t i o n " : acr i t ique of the t h e o l o g y of r i g h t ' in Ken-neth Sur in, ed . Christ, Ethics and Tragedy( C U P : C a m b r i d g e , 1989) p. 164.

4 9 The Tremendum (Cros s roads : N e w Y o r k ,1981) p. 1.

5 0 Ibid. , 49 .5 1 'The Long Life of M e t a p h o r ' , p. 60.5 2 Ibid.5 3 In his ' M em o r i a l A d d r e s s ' r ep r i n t ed inDiscourse on Thinking ( H a r p e r and Row:

N e w Yo rk , 1966), He ideg ger describes hiss t an ce t o w ar d s our age of t e c h n o l o g y an d t h e r eb y , as we h av e a r g u ed , our ageo f A u s c h w i t z a s a Gelassenheit: a com-posure which ' l e t s th ings be.' One isb o u n d to ask: is this really an opt ion lef to p e n to us any m o r e ?

theology after shoah

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