As the last Holocaust survivors age and pass away, the awareness that all living memory of the events themselves will soon be extinguished has fostered in regard to survivor testimony what one could call an anxiety of historical transmission. This anxiety accounts in large part for the accelerated production of testimony in the past two or three de cades, most notably through the establishment of extensive video archives but also through the publication of written memoirs. It doubtless helps to explain as well the republication or translation of many important texts. Yet transmission has as much to do with reception...

One of the more noteworthy contributions to our understanding of the reception of Holocaust survivor testimony has been made by Dori Laub, a psychiatrist and cofounder of the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies at Yale University. In two influential essays, “Bearing Witness, or the Vicissitudes of Listening” and “An Event Without a Witness: Truth, Testimony and Survival,”¹ Laub, who is also a survivor and has served as an interviewer for the Archive, draws attention to the relational nature of testimony by insisting that the listener, as witness to the witness, plays a crucial role in the elaboration of testimonial...

The current interest in Holocaust survivor testimony has been stimulated to no small degree by a resurgence of interest in trauma. This resurgence, extending virtually unabated, it seems, over the past thirty years or so, has carried well beyond psychology to a number of other fields, including not only history, politics, and sociology but literary criticism, philosophy, and visual studies. In these last areas of inquiry, moreover, where concern with issues of a formal nature is particularly pronounced, the relation between trauma and survivor testimony has generally been envisioned as a problem pertaining to the ways in which traumatic experience...

Anyone proposing to revisit Theodor W. Adorno’s statement that “to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric” can rightly be expected to explain why it is necessary, or at least worth the trouble, to do so. Of course, in the ever expanding field of critical work on representations of the Holocaust, Adorno remains very much a figure to be reckoned with. Yet his considerable influence seldom if ever manifests itself independently of the famous phrase, which, whether accurately or not, has been cited often enough to produce the numbing effect of a seriously overworked platitude. In thinking about the Holocaust and...

It seems safe to say that no philosophical or theoretical approach to Holocaust survivor testimony can afford to disregard the status of theoretical inquiry itself after Auschwitz. On what grounds, indeed, could theory have earned an exemption from the general indictment expressed in Theodor Adorno’s claim that “Auschwitz has irrefutably demonstrated the failure of culture”?¹ To be sure, as he broaches the survival of philosophy in the introduction toNegative Dialectics, it is not exactly this issue that Adorno has in mind. When he remarks that “philosophy, which once seemed obsolete, lives on because the moment to realize it was...

As the ethically charged encounter with an other who is not like me, the reception of Holocaust survivor testimony almost inevitably leads us to discuss the work of Emmanuel Levinas, arguably the twentieth century’s foremost philosopher of ethics in the Continental context. Of course, there are additional, equally compelling reasons to pursue this discussion, such as Levinas’s thematization of the ethical relation as a situation of address or even as testimony and the role that the Holocaust played in his thought no less than in his life. Here, expanding on a notion put forward in chapter 3, namely, that testimonial...

The perspective of this book as a whole is informed by the notion that at stake in the interaction we call “witnessing” is a fundamental and indispensable tension between its participants. Even though in most cases there is no face-to-face encounter with survivors but rather one that is mediated by a recording of some kind, so that we can at best, and largely unbeknownst to survivors themselves, act as the trustees of their testimony by ensuring its continued reception, we are presumably always concerned, whether as listeners, readers, or viewers, with their reconstruction of a sense of self and community....