Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Introduction
- 1 The Holocaust's Life as a Ghost
- 2 Hannah Arendt: Politics and Understanding after the Holocaust
- 3 Whither the Broken Middle? Rose and Fackenheim on Mourning, Modernity and the Holocaust
- 4 Good against Evil? H.G. Adler, T.W. Adorno and the Representation of the Holocaust
- 5 ‘After Auschwitz’: Trauma and the Grammar of Ethics
- 6 Lyotard: Emancipation, Anti-Semitism and ‘the Jews’
- 7 Eradicating Evil: Levinas, Judaism and the Holocaust
- 8 Silence – Voice – Representation
- 9 Friends and Others: Lessing's Die Juden and Nathan der Weise
- 10 The Visibility of the Holocaust: Franz Neumann and the Nuremberg Trials
- 11 Holocaust Testimony and the Challenge to the Philosophy of History
- 12 Open Behind: Myth and Politics
- Notes on Contributors
- Name Index
- Subject Index
8 - Silence – Voice – Representation
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Introduction
- 1 The Holocaust's Life as a Ghost
- 2 Hannah Arendt: Politics and Understanding after the Holocaust
- 3 Whither the Broken Middle? Rose and Fackenheim on Mourning, Modernity and the Holocaust
- 4 Good against Evil? H.G. Adler, T.W. Adorno and the Representation of the Holocaust
- 5 ‘After Auschwitz’: Trauma and the Grammar of Ethics
- 6 Lyotard: Emancipation, Anti-Semitism and ‘the Jews’
- 7 Eradicating Evil: Levinas, Judaism and the Holocaust
- 8 Silence – Voice – Representation
- 9 Friends and Others: Lessing's Die Juden and Nathan der Weise
- 10 The Visibility of the Holocaust: Franz Neumann and the Nuremberg Trials
- 11 Holocaust Testimony and the Challenge to the Philosophy of History
- 12 Open Behind: Myth and Politics
- Notes on Contributors
- Name Index
- Subject Index
Summary
Impossible donc de l'oublier, impossible de s'en souvenir. Impossible aussi, quand on en parle, d'en parler – et finalement comme il n'y rien à dire que cet événement incompréhensible, c'est la parole seule qui doit le porter sans le dire.
Maurice Blanchot, L'entretien infini, p.200Et comme si cette parole ne pouvait s'ériger que sur les ruines de l'autre, avec et sans elle.
Poussière. Poussière.
Le silence, nul écrivain ne l'ignore, permet l'écoute du mot. A un moment donné, le silence est si fort que les mots n'expriment plus que lui.
Ce silence, capable de faire basculer la langue a-t-il sa propre langue à laquelle on ne peut attribuer ni origine ni nom?
Passage ininterrompu du silence au silence et du mot au silence.
Edmond Jabès, La mémoire des mots, pp.13–14‘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.
Celan's meditation on language, memory and history, his reflections of this time, a time of radical losses, opens with the commemoration of topographical dislocations, a motion through the distant sites of a literary landscape which once seemed unreachable for him, the young poet: ‘…Bremen, brought closer to me by books and the names of those who wrote books and published books, retained the sound of the unreachable. The reachable, though far enough, which was to be reached was named Vienna. You know, what even this reachableness meant over those years.’ This construction of readings, books, names of authors and their imaginary places, this topographical history which defines what is close and reachable, is completely destroyed by what happened. This history Celan is commemorating has radically cancelled ‘any thought of destination or of homecoming’, but what has remained reachable and close, ‘in spite of everything and amid the losses’ is language: ‘Only one thing remained close and reachable amid all losses: language.’
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- Information
- Social Theory after the Holocaust , pp. 159 - 178Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 2000