Many of those who know little of Theodor Adorno’s philosophy know his remark that to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.² It is a puzzling remark in many respects, not least because of its (largely unstated) assumptions about the effects produced by poetic renderings of unspeakable events. Even if there are events legitimately describable as unspeakable, it is hard to see why poetry deserves more opprobrium than any other way of framing them. Social theory and sociology, for instance, appear prime candidates for the same charge. Indeed, perhaps the only reason that Adorno would not have mentioned them in the...

Half a century has passed since the victory of the Allied troops put an abrupt end to Hitler’s ‘final solution of the Jewish question’ – but the memory of the Holocaust goes on polluting the world of the living, and the inventory of its insidious poisons seems anything but complete. We are all to some degree possessed by that memory, though the Jews among us, the prime targets of the Holocaust, are perhaps more than most.¹

Among the Jews in the first place, living in a world contaminated with the possibility of a holocaust rebounds repeatedly in fear and horror. To...

Hannah Arendt described the Holocaust as a ‘rupture with civilisation’ that shattered all existing ideas of progress, all feelings of optimism, all previously engraved images of Europe as a civilised community, all notions of the innocence of modern political thought. In ‘Mankind and Terror’, for example, she writes: ‘Not only are all our political concepts and definitions insufficient for an understanding of totalitarian phenomena but also all our categories of thought and standards of judgement seem to explode in our hands the instant we try to apply them.’¹ Arendt was one of the first to argue that the attempted extermination...

Emil Fackenheim cites with approval Elie Wiesel’s statement that the ‘Holocaust destroyed not only human beings but also the idea of humanity’.¹ The evaluation of this claim, which raises the question of the very possibility of ethics after Auschwitz, rests upon a prior assessment of the relation of the Holocaust to modernity. In a nutshell, does the Holocaust represent an appalling ‘hiatus’ in the ongoing progress of modernity, or the disclosure of its essential nihilism? Do we still dwell in the shadow of Auschwitz or is it now possible to ‘actively forget’ and move on? My aim in this paper...

There are several worthwhile reasons for considering H.G. Adler in terms of the current debate about the Nazi genocide.¹ Not only did he begin to reflect on the problem of representing these events at an early date when, in 1942, he was deported, but his views, even when not cited, have been deeply implicated in the current discussion, whether because of their role in confrontation with Adorno’s philosophy, or because they are, albeit unwittingly, echoed almost word for word by Zygmunt Bauman inModernity and the Holocaust.² There is, so to speak, a public side to H.G. Adler’s role in...

The name ‘Auschwitz’ stands for what was without question one of the most traumatic events of the century. Equally, it names an event which emphatically dissolves moral scepticism; we feel morally certain that there evil of an unspeakable kind occurred. Perhaps, then, it is the utter proximity of these two thoughts, thetraumatic insistenceof the event of the Holocaust and our moralcertaintyabout its evil character, that lies behind and is the genealogical origin of recent attempts to identify trauma with ethicality as such. For example, in Emmanuel Levinas’Otherwise than Beingwe read:

A passivity of which...

In this essay I investigate Jean-François Lyotard’s thinking on the related questions of anti-semitism and the Holocaust. However, as a way in it is useful to locate his thought within the context of social theory’s reflections on these issues as a whole.

Beginning with Marx’sOn the Jewish Question² and continuing to the present day, social theory has reflected upon the causes of modern anti-Jewish hostility. However, despite the many varied ways in which social theory has approached the issue of anti-semitism, one theme constantly re-appears. Drawing on the fact that the term ‘anti-semitism’ first gained popular acceptance in 1879,³...

Within the modern West we have learnt to think of the Enlightenment as a secular project which claims to think of individuals as rational selves. Where faith was positioned within pre-modern societies which were organised around tradition, we learnt within an Enlightenment vision of modernity to find reason. People were no longer expected to accept beliefs as a matter of faith but could confidently expect to have to prove their beliefs according to reason. This helped radically to redefine the relationship between public and private spheres and religious belief became a matter of individual choice alone. So it was that...

‘Only one thing remained close and reachable amid all losses: Language. Yes, language. In spite of everything it remained unlost. But it had to go through its own lack of answers, through terrifying silence [Verstummen], through the thousand darknesses of murderous speech. It went through and gave no words for what happened; but it went through this event. It went through and was allowed to resurface [zutage treten], enriched [angereichert] by it all.’ So Paul Celan remarked upon receiving the literary prize of the city of Bremen in 1958.¹

Celan’s meditation on language, memory and history, his reflections of this...

After the Shoah politics and political solidarity take on a different quality. The attribution of an identity and the affirmation of that identity have to be viewed as importantly different. It is no longer possible to define Jewish identity simply in terms of the object of persecution and oppression.¹ Such descriptions deny the possibility of that conception of identity that Jews would attribute to themselves. The politics of identity has to take the divide between attribution and affirmation as central to any understanding and evaluation of claims concerning identity. Within the investigations of solidarity friendship has emerged as a model...

Although less well known to social theorists than that of other Frankfurt School members, the work of Franz Neumann has recently become the focus of renewed interest.¹ Within contemporary legal scholarship, that interest has centred largely upon how this ‘junior’ member of the Frankfurt School combined classic liberal constitutional values, particularly a belief in the rule of law, with a distinctive sociological analysis of law.² Several historians have studied the wartime record of Neumann, Kirchheimer and Marcuse,³ but Neumann’s wartime service with US military intelligence has received little attention from legal theorists, in spite of its clear relationship with his...

In her testimony written in the immediate aftermath of the war, Suzanne Birnbaum, stunned by the pace at which the Jews of Hungary had been decimated at Auschwitz, wrote that 600,000 were murdered in July and August of 1944. The reality was somewhat less – we know now that the number of Hungarian Jews killed in this period was around 435,000. Nevertheless, Annette Wieviorka, in her study of testimonies of the immediate post-war period – of which there are a surprisingly large number – notes in response to this error that it ‘makes no difference to the insane scale of the massacre’.²

But...

... every culture that has lost myth has lost, by the same token, its natural, healthy creativity. Only a horizon ringed about by myths can unify a culture. The forces of imagination and of Appollonian dream are saved only by myth from indiscriminate rambling. Nor does the commonwealth know any more potent unwritten law than the mythic foundation which guarantees its union with religion and its basis in mythic conceptions. Over against this, let us consider abstract man stripped of myth, abstract education, abstract mores, abstract law, abstract government; the random vagaries of the artistic imagination unchanneled by myth; a...