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The Universal Uniqueness of the Holocaust Among all the dilemmas, paradoxes, and mysteries facing those who study the Holocaust, its unique or singular character is perhaps the most confusing and controversial issue that is most likely to bring about long debates (Rosenberg & Silverman 13-58), and to provoke emotional heat in discussion. Apart from the intensity with which the question about the uniqueness of the Shoah is often suggested or rejected, those involved in the debate, with few notable exceptions, are in agreement on at least one fundamental point: the issue of the singularity of the Holocaust is entwined with a series of binary oppositions. Hence, the uniqueness of the Shoah is counterposed to its universality; in other words, the one excludes the other. The reliance on binary opposition becomes even more evident when the question of the singularity of the Holocaust encounters the assertions of its universality. Thus Elie Wiesel has passionately argued that the uniqueness of the Holocaust is such that it cannot even be regarded as an event in history: “the universe of concentration camps, by its design, lies outside if not beyond history. Its vocabulary belongs to it alone.” (Wiesel 165) Such a view sees the Shoah as a transcendent event, unconnected to the trajectory of our techno-scientific civilisation which has sprung from the sociocultural environment of the West; its singularity is such that it exceeds the power of language to express it: the Holocaust is indescribable. Even where the Holocaust is not considered to be transcendent or ineffable but conceived as having an anti-Jewish character in essence, discussions about the possible universality of the Holocaust is effectively prevented. That is the focus of the questions rhetorically raised by David Vital, with respect to the Holocaust: Was it then in some crucial and decisive sense not only an event in but also peculiar to Jewish history, and comprehensible ultimately only in its terms? ... Is it amenable to being rendered intelligible only in terms that are specific to the Jews? (Vital 132) Indeed, it seems that a claim for the universality of the Holocaust is doomed to the rejection of its uniqueness. That, at least, is how Yehuda Bauer has formulated his argument: If what happens to the Jews is unique, then by definition it doesn’t concern us, beyond our pity and commiseration for the victims. If the Holocaust is not a universal problem, then why should a public school system in Philadelphia, New York or Timbuktu teach it? Well, the answer is that there is no uniqueness, not even of a unique event. Anything that happens once can happen again: not quite in the same way, perhaps, but in an equivalent form. (Bauer 5) This paper is aimed at arguing for the uniqueness of the Shoah. However, its own conception of that uniqueness seeks to disprove the binary oppositions in which the issue has been involved. That is to say, the very singularity of the Holocaust must be integrally linked to its historicisation and contextualisation, which will necessarily involve comparisons that may help to exemplify similarities as well as distinctions between different manifestations of human-made mass-death. Contextualisation and the comparative method, instead of removing the unique elements of the Holocaust, can actually highlight its singularity, even as they draw people’s attention to the Shoah’s similarities to other exterminatory events. In much the same fashion, this paper insists that the singularity of the Extermination is inevitably connected with its universality. The Holocaust world that emerged in all its singularity, though in the early stage at Auschwitz and the other Nazi death camps, has now become an objective-real possibility on the front of history. In elaborating a conception of the uniqueness of the Holocaust that “overthrow” the binary oppositions that have made such a claim conflict with the historicisation or universality of the Shoah, this paper is to explain its own conception of the singularity of the Holocaust, which is based on the Holocaust’s rigorous contextualisation and its awesome universality. First, the idea that “meaning already inheres in events” should be rejected. People ought not to think that it is the task of the historians, the social theorists, or the philosophers to discover the meaning and to express it in words that correspond to the events they designate. The ascription by the historians or philosophers cannot arbitrarily “create” the meaning of events. Rather, such meaning is socially or culturally constructed by the actors in the historical process, and then incorporated into the theorisation of those selfsame events, which is the essential activity of the historians or philosophers. On that view, truth is a function of people’s way of being-in-the-world; events and their meaning are “carved out” of the flow of man’s being-in-the-world and then socially constructed. That means any historical event can always be re-described and reconstructed from a different cultural or social perspective and thus giving rise to what Jean-Francois Lyotard has termed “differends” (Lyotard 47). Nonetheless, the description of a certain historical event as unique or singular is culturally meaningful as long as it enables people to construct and act in the world——it is on this basis that the designation of the Holocaust as unique and singular makes sense. Then, we should to turn to the complex of factors that lead people to insist on the uniqueness of the Holocaust, even though the paper is arguing for both its historicisation and universality. The claim of “uniqueness” is intended to set the Holocaust apart from other historical events and to distinguish it in the flow of history——just that singular event has the potential of transforming a culture or changing the course of history in a profound or decisive way. Undoubtedly, the Holocaust was just such a transformational event: following Phillipe Lacoue-Labarthe, people can best describe the Holocaust——or to use Lacoue-Labarthe’s terminology, “the Extermination”——as a caesura in global history. For Lacoue-Labarthe, a “caesura would be that which, within history, interrupts history and opens up another possibility of history, or else closes off all possibility of history.” (Lacoue-Labarthe 45) Also, the German-Jewish historian and social theorist, Dan Diner, has expressed the transformational character of Auschwitz by his designation of it as a “Zivilisationsbruch”, a break or crack in the course of civilisation (Diner 143). Similes such as a caesura, or Zivilisationsbruch, are intended to make clear the complete transformation caused by the Extermination and to emphasise the uniqueness of the event. The Holocaust, of which Auschwitz is symbolic, has opened a door into a world in which human-made mass-death can become intrinsic to the sociocultural environment. While serving as the tool that helped to open a door into a possible Holocaust world, Auschwitz also closed a door of another world, the world which was shaped by the dream of the coming dawn of permanent peace and the idea of the steady and continuous progress that had been a significant part of the Enlightenment project. That project of modernity had to face the serious challenge of those forces incarnating the dark side of modernity and of the will-to-power that Heidegger saw as inseparable from the reign of planetary technics. It is that confusing problem that has led Lyotard to “argue that the project of modernity has not been forsaken or forgotten but destroyed, ‘liquidated’. There are several modes of destruction, several names that are symbols for them. ‘Auschwitz’ can be taken as a paradigmatic name for the tragic ‘incompletion’ of modernity.” (Lyotard 18) Yet the “caesura” did not appear out of nowhere. As Claude Lanzmann has insisted, “to say that the Holocaust is unique and incommensurable does not imply that it is an aberration that eludes all intellectual and conceptual comprehension, which falls outside history and is denied the dignity of being a historical event. On the contrary, we consider the Holocaust to be a completely historical vent, the legitimate and universal, albeit monstrous, product of the entire history of the Western world.” (Lanzmann 137-138) Linking the Holocaust and its uniqueness to the history of the West, however, raises several crucial problems. First, it is important to avoid reading the history of the West teleologically, in which the Holocaust becomes destined to take place——the predetermined outcome of the flow of history. While Lanzmann’s statement may remain open to such a reading, Lacoue-Labarthe seems to have already fallen into just the trap of teleological reading when he asserts that “in the Auschwitz apocalypse, it was nothing less than the West, in its essence, that revealed itself.” (Lacoue-Labarthe 35) History is not the revelation of essences; indeed, the whole vocabulary of essence and its revelation must be respect. Apart from the “teleology” problem, Lacoue-Labarthe’s claim is questionable because it generalises and demonises the history of the West. Although it can be said that the Holocaust is the outcome of profound tendencies integral to the project of the West, that project and that history cannot be reduced to the “blasting fuse” of Auschwitz. In contextualising the Holocaust firmly within the history of the West, people should make clear as to which part of its project could have produced the Shoah and prove its designation unique. The Israeli historian, Otto Dov Kulka, who tries to elaborate the ground-breaking work of Shnuel Ettinger, has agued that the singularity of the Holocaust stems from the adoption and advocacy of anti-Semitism to the Nazi project. However, Kulka hastily links that anti-Semitism to the whole development process of the West, where it constitutes core value of its cultural history. For Kulka, anti-Semitism is not only an expression of conservative or reactionary trends which have opposed the project of modernity, which is where most historians locate the phenomenon, but also it is an expression of the very “progressive” tendencies arising during the Enlightenment and providing the cultural dynamic for the project of modernity. (Kulka 141-144) However, far from making the anti-Semitism that he finds central to the Shoah the justification for interpreting it as a transcendent and unique event, Kulka’s argument for the singularity of the Holocaust essentially rests on its historicisation and universality: for Kulka, “the ‘Jewish Question’ was placed at the heart of an historical event [the Holocaust] that can be regarded as the gravest and most menacing crisis of Western civilisation: an attempt to revolt against the roots of its very existence.” While Kulka sees in the Holocaust a “revolt” against the cultural roots of the West, French postmodern thinkers such as Phillipe Lacoue-Labarthe, Jean-Francois Lyotard, Jacques Derrida and Maurice Blanchot insist that in its choosing the Jew as the “Other” to be exterminated, the West demonstrated its essence, or at least the profound tendencies central to its project. Hence Lacoue-Labarthe has argued that “it was not at all by chance that the victims of that annihilation attempt [the Extermination] were the witnesses in the West of another origin of the God who was venerated and thought there——if not indeed, perhaps, of another God——one who had evaded capture by the Hellenistic and Roman traditions and who thereby stood in the way of the programme of accomplishment.” (Lacoue-Labarthe 37) Although the understanding of the role anti-Semitism plays in the singularity of the Holocaust cannot be isolated from its contextualisation in the history of the West, one cannot reduce the uniqueness of the Extermination to its choice of victim. In this regard, Hannah Arendt’s criticisms cannot be ignored: “Anti-Semitism by itself had such a long and bloody history that the very fact that the death factories were chiefly fed with Jewish ‘material’ has somewhat obliterated the uniqueness of this operation.” (Arendt 367) It is the fact that the exterminatory project and its actualisation in the concentration camps was in constant use that has led Arendt to look beyond the Jewish question for the basis of the uniqueness of the Holocaust. It was the “non-utilitarian character” of those camps and their senselessness in terms of instrumental reason that seemed to her one of the bases for distinguishing the death camps from earlier bloodletting and the nature of their victims. However, this paper wants to put forward another factor firmly concealed in the project of modernity which is seemingly integral to designating the Holocaust as unique, namely the reign of planetary technics. During the Shoah, the practice of mass-murder and genocide, which had previously occurred in history, should be linked to the very development of science and modern technology. One of the crucial distinctions between the hell created by the Nazis and orgies of mass-murder before and even after was the technical efficiency and the organisation of the former. The Shoah was made possible by the cruel application of the impressive inventions of twentieth-century science and technology. That is not just a matter of actual instruments of death, as Steven T. Katz has pointed out, “death by gas was not a major technological advance as compared with, say, the jet engine, radar, and sonar, the Nazis’ own V1 and V2 rockets, or above all else as a qualitative breakthrough, the atomic bomb.” (Katz 195) Nonetheless, Zyklon B and the crematoria, as the instruments of death, were far more technically sophisticated than the guns of the Einsatzgruppen, or the deliberate torture, starvation, or working to death of millions in the Gulag. Indeed, they had the same connections with technological and scientific productivity that resulted in the atomic bomb, and on which the world’s 21-century civilisation rests. More relevant perhaps, is the fact that the direct instruments of death were themselves inserted into the environment that was the quintessence of the West’s technological development——transport, record-keeping, surveillance, which made possible the industrialisation of mass-death, a unique characteristic of the Holocaust. However, the link between the application of technology and the actualisation of Extermination will be obscure if technology is solely conceived in instrumental terms——seen merely as a collection of machines, technical instruments, and procedures. Such a definition of technology leaves out the mentality on which technology as a tool is based. To avoid confusion, this paper will distinguish between “technology” in the instrumental sense, and “technics”, which is the basis of technology and constitutes the means by which humans relate to entities——other humans, their products, and nature. In the reign of planetary technics, as Heidegger had implied, all entities are conceived and treated as mere “standing reserve”, to be manipulated and utilised in order to serve an acquisitive will-to-power. It is this manner of disclosing entities, this reign of planetary technics that provided the particular system in which technology as instrument could be used in the mass production of death. If the Holocaust was, to use Blanchot’s words, “the absolute event of history” (Blanchot 47), then its uniqueness lies in its unprecedented combination of the utilisation of all the fruits of planetary technics, and its science and technology, in the service of the total elimination of the Other. It is precisely this singularity that endows the Holocaust with universality. The elements out of which the Holocaust emerged remain features integral to the world’s modernity. Planetary technics waits for a political movement which may recombine it with the lethality comparable to that of the Nazis. Hannah Arendt has recognised that potential power for a repetition of the horrors of the Extermination: It is in the very nature of things human that every act that has once made its appearance and has been recorded in the history of mankind stays with mankind as a potentiality long after its actuality has become a thing of the past… the particular reasons that speak for a possibility of repetition of the crime committed by the Nazis are even more plausible. The frightening coincidence of the modern population explosion with the discovery of technical devices that, through automation, will make large sections of the population “superfluous” even in terms of labour, and that, through nuclear energy, make it possible to deal with Hitler’s gassing installations look like an evil child’s fumbling toys should be enough to make us tremble. (Arendt 273) The universality of the Holocaust lies precisely in the fact that its composing elements which stamped it with its singularity are “ripe” in the techno-scientific civilisation. If we add to Arendt’s depressing scenario the existence of an Other within each society, scorned and hated, then the danger that people may again cross the line into a Holocaust world seems hard to avoid, and the cry that arose from the ashes at Auschwitz, “never again!”, may prove to have been futile.

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