Journal of Literature & Theology, vol. 6, No.

1, March 1992

THE SHIBBOLETH OF
MODERNITY: REFLECTIONS ON
THEOLOGICAL THINKING
AFTER THE SHOAH
David Moss

After Auschwitz there is no word tinged from on high, not even a theological
one, that has any right unless it underwent a transformation.1

Is then the inexplicable explained by saying that it has occurred only once in
the 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 the
most explicable events?2

PAUL CELAN'S gruesome odyssey into the 'nomansland between speech and
silence', and then, tragically, death by his own hand, can hardly but avoid
emblematic construal; or so it would seem. Thus: 'the legend of the Celan
of the ultimate expressivo stammer, the musician of the Holocaust struck
dumb by terror and anxiety, who ends by making a burnt offering of
language itself.'3 From the displaced, but still calculable references of the
cycle Sprachgitter to the semantically intractable surds of Zeitgehoft4, Celan's
poems, fuelled by enormous compression, appear to approach ever closer
to complete hermetic closure: a world in which light neither enters nor
escapes—I'univers concentrationnaire. Nevertheless, in a note to his English
translator, Michael Hamburger, Celan angrily protested that he was 'ganz
und gar nicht hermetisch'; and this, at least, should dissuade us from overhasty
myth-making. Thus, we may suggest, Hans-Georg Gadamer's claim that a
millenium may have to pass before we are granted entry into the most
inaccessible parts of Celan's work, would seem, unwittingly, to participate
in a far grander and more bizarre myth. The thousand year Reich yielded
up its terrible and dark secret within only a fraction of that time. The
labour of revelation, it would seem, cannot be postponed: it is a vital
endeavour.
Although this essay is not about Paul Celan, to begin with him is, I
Oxford University Press 1992
58 T H E S H I B B O L E T H OF M O D E R N I T Y

believe, emblematic—although for reasons other than those already sug-

gested. George Steiner has commented of Celan's poetry that it 'has taken
us 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), however
impoverished or residual in such extremity, will be the concern of this
essay. And although this will involve a change of register from the poetic
to the philosophical, I would suggest that this is what must be involved in
any confrontation with an event—the Shoah—which threatens the aboli-
tion of our own most immediate and felt confidence in the explicative
power of reason. To move from the realm of poiesis to that of techne—the
ordering of the most profound metaphor—is, I would suggest, the unavoid-
able hermeneutic labour involved in securing any authentic theological
response to this monstrous event.6 It may also intimate something of the
fate of all our ways of religious saying and doing in this age post holocaustum
natus.
After Auschwitz, no more poetry, wrote T. W. Adorno; the sense of
which Steiner locates in the demand that eloquence after Auschwitz 'would
be a kind of obscenity'. Thus, in our efforts to exorcise this rational fluency,
this unstinting appeal to the norms and ideals of humane arbitration, we
must dig deep; deep into the obscure constituents of our psyche and world.
Traditionally, this has been construed as the task and vocation of the
metaphysician; and, in somewhat surprising fashion, it is evidenced in the
career of Paul Celan. Towards the end of his life, Celan addressed a poem
to Martin Heidegger containing these words: 'a hope, today, of a thinking
man's coming word'. 7 A word of recognition, remorse, repentance?—it
never came. The reasons for 'Heidegger's silence' remain obscure8; however,
the significance of Celan's request, I believe, does not. Both poet and
philosopher (and not necessarily Heidegger and Celan) participate in the
life-giving mystery of meaning; and as patient fashioning of symbol
(Dichten), or probative 'exercise of the concept' (Denken), this activity, in
the Judaeo-Christian 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 epiphanies
of 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 radical
counter-testimony of the Shoah.
The following essay is offered as only the barest of outlines of what this
may mean, and it proceeds by way of a pattern of argument suggested by
the Jewish theologian Emil Fackenheim.9 It is in this way that I will
endeavour to indicate the sense of any construal of the Shoah as 'unique',
 DAVID MOSS 59
'ultimate' or 'final'—beyond, that is, a rhetoric of visceral horror and moral
outrage. Nevertheless, this task, by its very nature, is an invitation to severe
criticism, even opprobrium; this cannot be avoided. To treat this one
genocide as unique, it is objected, is to continue to sanction that claim of
historical 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 in
favour of a 'catastrophic-mystical' vision of history; and finally, to hold
onto all this, and yet go on, arguing—perhaps even living?—is simply
absurd. These charges cannot be ignored. However, it is still the case that
they avoid the one reality that seems to me to be unavoidable: the extermina-
tion of the Jews is a phenomenon that bears no other logic, in essence, than
a spiritual one—it 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 exhume
the most stubbornly resistant constituents of our confidence and hope—
metaphor 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 take
us to the edge, and, in some minimal sense—as I shall argue—beyond the
very edge of this abyss. Thus, after a substantial detour, constituting the
body of this essay, it is to Celan that we will return in our conclusion.

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

It is safer to understand the low in the light of the high than the high in the
light of the low. In doing the latter one necessarily distorts the high, whereas
in doing the former one does not deprive the low of the freedom to reveal
itself fully for what it is.10

In the following two sections of this essay I wish to examine more deeply
two fundamental modes of understanding which, for theology and ontology
alike, have traditionally secured this possibility of reading 'the low in the
light of the high'. These two logics will in turn be exposed to dimensions
of the Shoah which, following Fackenheim, I will claim to be indisputable
facts of the event. Finally, and in response to their manifest incapacity to
'give interpretation to the abyss of 1938—45', I wish to turn to a reflection
60 THE S H I B B O L E T H OF M O D E R N I T Y
upon the relationship between the Shoah and the tragic as a mode of
theological understanding. However, in order to appreciate the significance
of this argument, we must first make a brief philosophical excursus; an
excursus intended, in very general terms, to outline the lineaments of what
Jacques 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 notion
of historical continuity guarantees the minimal condition for inferred mean-
ing—both epistemological and ontological alike. Or, in other words, the
notion of continuity provides the ineluctable bond between the two poles
which demarcate the field of referral we call the western philosophical
tradition: History and Being. To illustrate this we may begin with the
Platonist, for whom Being exists beyond the flux of historical change—
indeed, maybe even beyond the realm of the safe and secure order of the
Forms. The relation between Being and change then is secured by the
continuous illumination afforded by the former shining, as it were, in the
heavens. This static relation is brought into restless vibration in the Hegelian
hermeneutic by way of the constituting, and constituted conception of
Absolute Spirit. The movement of history is proleptic, and Being is envis-
aged as that final stage in which all history is incorporated into a final
transparent discourse. For Hegel, continuity is secured by the fact that there
can be no intractable surd resisting incorporation into the dialectic of
freedom. Finally, for the radical historicist, history—as for the Hegelian—
constitutes the universe of meaning; however, it is a meaning given, not in
expectation of eschatological completion, but rather in immanent cultural
formation. Human creativity always acts in the context of a given past; but
it is a creativity committed to continuous effort. Now it is the case that in
confrontation with the Shoah, otherwise diverse disciplinary accounts of
this event have often coalesced around one central order of questioning: the
ontological formulation of reason. And, in particular, one aspect of this
formulation, with regard to the logic of presence, is crucial to our task: for,
both Hegelianism and historicism remain rooted in Platonism to the extent
that they assume, as axiomatic, that no intelligible account of Being can be
given that does not solve the problem of evil. Evil may be construed as
privation, alienation or even reification, but never as interruptive event in
the continuum of 'presence': the kingdom of meaning. To suggest this,
would be to suggest the co-existence of two incommensurate orders of time
and place in one monstrous absurdum. Thus the logic of Presence can no more
tolerate the notion of different orders of reality, coeval and yet possessing
no effective analogy or communication, than can orthodox Christianity
 DAVID MOSS 61
endorse gnostic speculation. We may suggest then that the pulse of onto-
theology dissipates dark thoughts of the tragic by theodictic 'solutions'.
in
During the trial of Adolf Eichmann, Gideon Hausner began his evidence
to the Jerusalem court with the following statement:

What I record is the chronicle of the planet Auschwitz. I was there for about
two years. But time, there, is not as it is here on planet earth. There every
fraction of a second moves on different temporal wheels. And the denizens of
this planet had no names, no parents, no children . . . They breathed according
to different laws. They did not live according to the rules of this world, nor
did they die.12

Hauser's experience—corroborated a thousand times over—was of a

world both complete and self-consistent, suffering no deprivation of effici-
ency or purpose by way of a cancelled mythos of human flourishing, but
rather sustaining and expanding its province in collusion with the achieve-
ments of modernity itself. What we have to reckon with here is an event
that can no longer be accounted for by reference to 'the high' for it is
parasitic upon nothing other than its own law of annihilation. It is an
instance of transcendent evil. Emil Fackenheim has listed five 'basic facts' that
'are so plain as to be altogether beyond legitimate dispute', and which, he
believes, constitute a claim to 'the uniqueness of the Holocaust'.13 By
substantiating these facts—largely by reference to Zygmunt Baumann's
recent and important study, Modernity and the Holocaust—and then by
intimating their philosophical and spiritual significance, I wish to indicate
the character of an event that brings us to the boundary of thought with a
malign reality.
Facts four and five, as listed by Fackenheim in his latest publication To
Mend 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 as
political power or economic greed. Nor was it the negative side of a positive
religious or political fanaticism. It was an end in itself. And, at least in the final
stage of the dominion of the Third Reich (when Eichmann diverted trains to
Auschwitz 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 most
part 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 destruction
of European Jewry; a conception that should warn us against any aetiology
62 T H E S H I B B O L E T H OF M O D E R N I T Y
of the Shoah that is grounded, singularly and without supplement, in
individual pathology. From the aborted Madagascar project to the Wannsee
Conference and beyond, an expanding empire calculated the terms for
establishing a Judenfreies Reich; a calculation that concluded in physical
extermination.14 An examination of the dimensions—indeed, very possibil-
ity—of this 'calculation' is central to Bauman's study: it marks the exact
point at which a chiliastically charged ideology of the kingdom of the
liberated German Spirit fuses with modernity's instrumental capacity for
radical societal reorganisation. Thus, to consider the 'Final Solution' an 'end
in itself involves attending as much to the telos of the bureaucratically
ordered state machinery of destruction as it does to the racist ideology of
Stocker, Strasser and Goebbels et al. Bauman is clear: 'The "Final Solution"
did not clash at any stage with the rational pursuit of efficient, optimal goal
implementation. On the contrary, it arose out of a genuinely rational concern,
and it was generated by bureaucracy true to its form and purpose.>15 In this respect
we may regard the Shoah as a 'legitimate resident in the house of modernity'.
Nevertheless, questions of intentionality and of final purpose do impinge
and indeed must impinge, once the efficacy of an all-embracing instrumental
calculus has been granted. Sure enough in the case of the Shoah the design
was of a projected thousand-year Reich; however, as Arthur A. Cohen has
argued: 'The project of killing all Jews—-the Holocaust—was an absurdum
precisely because even if all Jews 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 final
this side of complete and utter annihilation. An Ideal beyond—maybe
before?—all sense. The Reich was sustained only by the fuelling of destruc-
tion at its very heart; and as the Russian armies closed in on Berlin, the sole
and absolute article of Nazi faith—expressed in the burning of Jewish
children—began to spill over from the camps themselves. From the doomed
Berlin bunker Hitler ordered the flooding of the Berlin underground system,
the hiding place of men, women and children. This would not stop the
Russian armies; it would, however, drown German children. From its very
beginning, the arteries of the thousand-year Reich led not to the envisioned
Kuppelberg, but to the gates of hell—Auschwitz itself.17
Bauman devotes a considerable section of his enquiry to that feature of
the 'uniqueness of the Holocaust' that Fackenheim lists as his fifth point.
Bauman asks, how is it that 'these ordinary Germans [were] transformed
into the German perpetrators of mass crime?' His explanation, or rather
suggestions—based in part upon a reading of Stanley Milgram's famous
psychological tests at Yale University in the early 1970's—provide a sociolo-
gical explication of Simone Weil's oft-quoted comment that the seed of
every crime lies within each and every one of us. Once again he directs his
 DAVID MOSS 63
attention to the culture of bureaucracy—this most modern invention—and
examines its internal dynamics and, critically, its mediating function with
regard to the effect that its actions may have upon its own functionaries.
Bauman concludes: 'The most poignant point, it seems, is the easiness with
which most people slip into the role requiring cruelty or at least moral
blindness—if only the role has been fortified and legitimized by superior
authority.' 18 In other words, by means of the authorization and routinization
of violence, the Nazi state immured its labour force (lawyers, civil servants,
doctors, accountants) from any suspicion, indeed, even mild incredulity,
concerning its real End. This ability, intimating an extreme ethical malleabil-
ity, is perhaps handeable—although no doubt disturbing—in conditions of
'disruptive' psychological testing. However, in recounting the history of
1938—45 what we have to deal with is not only the behaviour of an entire
nation—and one cannot avoid stating the fact that those who resisted were
pitifully few in number; but also a 'moral blindness' commensurate with
complicity in genocide. One is forced to conclude that in postulating this
explanation of an entire history of actions taken and deeds done (the
evidence is clear in a mountain of bureaucratic memoranda whose notation
is seemingly that of industrial productivity19) we have reached a point of
divesting the individual of any discriminating ethical stature. Can one do
otherwise? And if we cannot, then no more can we shrink from this one
harrowing, and ultimately theological, question: are we any less the people
we could or should be after Auschwitz? John R. Roth rejoins: 'Had Nazi
power prevailed, authority to determine what ought to be would have
found that no natural laws were broken and no crimes against God and
humanity were committed in the Holocaust.'20 One hesitates to pronounce
the suggestion: a post-human world?
As we have seen, for the Platonist meaning is secured by approximation
to the Forms, themselves illumined by the Good. The trajectory of certitude
from eikasia to episteme correlates to the progress of a soul freed from the
transience of temporality. It is in this way that Plato seeks to ward off the
prevenient threat of nihilism: by neither looking forward nor backwards
in history, but only upwards to the unchanging Ideal, the Good. Thus,
Stanley Rosen concludes: 'The least, and perhaps the most, one can say of
the Socratic good is that it preserves the sense of the world as the permanent
intelligibility of the being of the world.' 21 But to say this, we must now
assert, is to say that which can no longer be said of the Shoah world. The
Nazis employed neither a perverted conception of the Good, nor a misplaced
assessment of the means by which to effect this Ideal. Rather, at the epicentre
of the Nazi empire the camps displayed and continue to display the cancella-
tion of any reference to the explicative power of the Good. The Shoah
was a self-subsistent maelstrom of evil in whose aura people—'ordinary
64 THE SHIBBOLETH OF MODERNITY
Germans'—enacted its annihilating principle. The analysis however has to
be taken still further in careful attendance to the accounts of concentration
camp existence. Claude Lanzman records the testimony of Motke Zaidl
who, 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 evidence
of genocide. He recalls: 'The Germans even forbade us to use the word
'corpse' or 'victim'. The dead were blocks of wood, shit with absolutely
no importance.' 22 Primo Levi indicates the consequences of this:

We say 'hunger', we say 'tiredness,' 'fear,' 'pain,' we say 'winter' and they are
different things. They are free words, created and used by free men who live
in 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 born—can we even envisage such a language?—

but its possibility was experienced as the contraction of reference, a gap in
linguistic possibility, the very cancellation of the 'surplus of meaning'. The
old language, learnt from childhood, persisted; but it was made to stand
for the primordial addition to all experience in the camps: death. It is a
basic insight of the phenomenology of language that in the world of
ordinary experience, the signified always transcends the signifier.24 But in
the Shoah world, a new and complex relationship governed language
behaviour. On the one hand inherited patterns of speech and usage ten-
aciously, almost miraculously, persist. But at the same time the signified
was 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 new
signified: death. For dried crusts and gruel were the remuneration for labour
in an industry whose product was the ash of incinerated bodies.
This condition, recorded although barely comprehended, is ruinous for
Platonic pragmatics whose first premise is the nobility of the just man: the
man who can give an account of his deeds by divine measure. Man achieves
this measurement—'the music of the polis'—only in and through the iconic
nature of speech; in other words, the self-transcending dimension of words.
Jean Amery, provoked—'for-God-knows what reason'—into recalling a
stanza 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 response
that for years this Holderlin poem had awakened in me would emerge. But
nothing happened. The poem no longer transcended reality. There it was and
 DAVID MOSS 65
all that remained was objective statement: such and such, and the Kapo roars
'left', and the soup was watery. 2 5

T h a t speech should b e purified of its iconic or h u m a n content is obviously

necessary in the realm o f the physical sciences; the result of w h i c h is
mathematics. B u t w h e n m a t h e m a t i c s becomes a p a r a d i g m for all speech,
the result is d e s t r u c t i v e — a silent annihilation. T h e p u r e speech of n o n -
iconic eikasia—'a harsh n e w l a n g u a g e ' ? — i s silent because it has altogether
forgotten about its origin in the h u m a n (read: h u m a n e ) psyche. In the
Shoah w o r l d , language stalled and the m o t h e r and the sisters that Zai'dl d u g
u p he was forced to call 'Figuren, that is . . . puppets, or dolls'. T h e resources
of language for measuring the deeds o f m e n , g o o d from bad, its p o w e r in
re-collecting the story that w e call self-identity, its fecundity in i m a g i n g a
w o r l d other than o u r o w n : all this was eroded t o w a r d s s i l e n c e — t h e silence
n o t of ecstatic illumination, b u t of annihliation. It is a h a u n t -
ing reflection that the only i d i o m b y w h i c h some have found it at all
possible to m a k e allusion to this most m o n s t r o u s event, is mathematical.
It is the depth o f their reflections that has led t h e m to a conviction of the
appropriateness of the i d i o m of surd and singularity.

IV
'There is need for a new encounter with Hegel in what is rightly described
as the age post Hegel mortuum.'26 This comment, coming as it does in the
introduction to To Mend the World, provides the leitmotiv for Fackenheim's
most searching examination of the psyche of modernity. It is an examination
that 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 proper
provenance for any contemporary understanding of transcendence; which is
to 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', Zeitgeist—to list but a few)
we may recognise the boldest and most troubling claim of modernity: the
claim to create its own normativity out of itself. As Hans Blumenberg has
argued, foundational legitimation for the 'modern age' is not to be disco-
vered in any exemplary past, but in the social and reflective revolution that
turned nostrum aevum, our own age, into nova aetas, the new age.27 This is
what Hegel recognised, and in so doing was the first to grasp the Janus-
like configuration at modernity's core. However, what we must remind
ourselves of are bonds of kinship too often forgotten. For the metaphors
listed above are just as much our conceptual-historical keys as they were
Hegel's; and this is crucial to our task in exposing the Hegelian hermeneutic
to the Shoah. The point requires a further elaboration.
66 THE SHIBBOLETH OF MODERNITY
For Hegel, Kant's three critiques—which he believed to be the supreme
meditation upon modernity's meaning—had established, irrevocably, and
in reflective expression, the epochal detachment of modernity from the
previous age. Nevertheless, Hegel argued, if Kant had established this
severance once and for all, he had done so at an intolerable cost: the
construction of an architectonic of reason riven by formal differentiations.
And for Hegel, such differentiations, bearing their correlative divisions in
culture, were, in truth, nothing other than expressions of diremptions in
life itself. Thus emerged for Hegel the true character of modernity: the
pursuit of self-assurance [Selbstvergewisserung]; which is to say, the attempt
of modernity to stabilise itself—in the absence of any exemplary historical
model—upon the very diremptions that had brought it into being. This
attempt, according to Hegel, is the task and destiny of philosophy in our
'modern age'. That we cannot doubt Hegel on this will inform our first
analysis of his thought (our thought?) in confrontation with the Shoah.
That we can no longer stay with his conclusions, his own asseveration of
confidence in the 'modern age'—and this is surely the double-bind—will
concern our second analysis. And so, if we have thus far sketched out
Hegel's characterization of modernity as the pursuit of self-assurance, we
must now briefly indicate his own supremely self-confident response to this
situation.
Hegel's response to the anxiety of the 'modern age' is the 'Idea of
Overcoming'; labelled by Fackenheim, 'the most courageous and character-
istic claim of modernity'. Thus, for Hegel, while our perspective may
change, as indeed may the object of our enquiry—theodicy or revelation;
technology or aesthetics—it nevertheless remains the case that, through a
multiplicity of mediations, the spheres of science, morality and art are all
transformed into just so many embodiments of the principle of subjectiv-
ity.28 In Hegel's philosophy it is the 'Idea of Overcoming', a figure
originally taken from the philosophy of the subject (establishing the unity
of 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 an
Idea can, in any way, be related to the fabric of existence, then we may
hear in his response the most 'supremely humble' and yet at the same time
the most 'supremely presumptuous' claim of modern critical philosophy:
philosophical thought can transcend all experience only because there is
already a transcending dimension within experience itself.29 Transcendence is
secured within the movement of history, and we would have to be very
deaf indeed not to hear this conviction re-echo in the profoundly political
discourse of modernity. This, Fackenheim asserts, should not surprise us for
Hegelianism stripped down to its core comprises this decisive theo-political
 DAVID MOSS 67
bonding: the fusing of 'a religious aspect, the world-already-overcome
(John 16:33), with a secular aspect, the-world-ever-yet-to-be-overcome
through human self activity'. This is the Hegelian charter of self-confidence
for modern man, and to the extent that we remain convicted by the anxiety
of our modern condition, so also do we remain summoned to a self-
confidence in the power of universal human reason, the reason known and
available to everyone. We do not have to look far for the evidence of this
fact; 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, we
must address Fackenheim's second and third basic facts listed as substantiating
the 'uniqueness of the Holocaust':

2.This murder was quite literally 'extermination'; not a single Jewish man,
woman or child was to survive, or—except for a few that were well hidden
or overlooked—would 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 of
them, with the possible exception of the Gypsies, only the Jews had committed
the crime of existing at all.

In the following, I wish to outline a provisional 'ontology' of the Shoah

which intimates a 'whole of horror' existing both spatially and temporally
within the heart of modernity, although, horrifyingly, beyond its own most
fecund ontological dialectic.30 This, I suggest, is what must be involved in
any 'new encounter with Hegel'. Two aspects, I will argue (as suggested
above) are involved.
First: Popular resentment against the Jews is not, nor could it be, a
satisfactory explanation for the Nazi decision to judge guilty and open to
extermination millions of human beings defined by the sole fact of their
feeing Jewish. Thus, George L. Mosse is led to comment: 'Christian theology
has never advocated extermination of the Jews, but rather their exclusion
from society as living witnesses to deicide. The pogroms were secondary
to 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 Jew
from Europe, were planks in the construction of European arteries whose
rail heads bore the names of Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen. However,
popular antisemitism, feeding from the wells of flagrant caricature and
diabolical myth, cannot account for death camps: Kristallnacht was the only
episode of mass anti-Jewish violence in Germany and this was pogrom not
genocide.32 Moreover, weighing against such old-style barbarity was, what
Arendt has termed, 'the animal pity by which all normal men are affected
in the presence of physical suffering.' A thesis given harrowing confirmation
68 THE SHIBBOLETH OF MODERNITY
in the address Heinrich H i m m l e r gave to his 'idealistic' subordinates in
October, 1943:

'The Jewish people is going to be annihilated,' says every party member. 'Sure,
it's in the programme, elimination of the Jews, annihilation—we'll take care
of it.' And then they all come trudging, eighty million worthy Germans, and
each has one decent Jew. Sure, the others are swine, but this one is an A-i
Jew. 3 3

Something more, something other than 'mere' antisemitism, and the

bearing of the charge of deicide, was involved in the Shoah; it was something
that dulled, even defused, 'animal pity'. Its dimensions constitute w h a t
B a u m a n calls the 'modernity of racism'.
'An important thing happened to the Jews on the road to modernity',
remarks B a u m a n : they were emancipated. The effect, although distinguished
by locality and context, was that what had previously been accepted and
effected b y caste separation—the 'otherness' of the Jewish p e o p l e — n o w
became a truth that had to b e demonstrated and 'laboriously constructed'.
Thus, following emancipation, the J e w of the ghetto became the J e w - i n -
o u r - m i d s t — w h a t B a u m a n terms the 'conceptual J e w ' — a n d in this mani-
festation bore an archetypal 'viscosity', a plundering of identity, that
'infected' the very heart of modernity's pursuit of order and clarity. 3 4 In
the intermeshing structures of administrative bureaucracy and industrial
technology, the m o d e r n nation state discovered a m e a n s — i n the medical-
therapeutic idiom of social e n g i n e e r i n g 3 5 — o f expunging identities deemed
to be 'cancerous'. Centuries-old antisemitism was an element in the m u r d e r -
ous c o m p o u n d of genocide n o doubt, but its fuel was the typically m o d e r n
ambition of social design and engineering, striving to effect a h o m e for
'authentic' habitation in this time and place. In other words, in the ideology
of modernity:

Jews were to die not because they were resented (or at least not primarily for
that reason); they were seen as deserving death (and resented for that reason)
because they stood between this one imperfect and tension ridden reality and
the hoped-for world of tranquil happiness. 36

D o w e catch an echo of that particular theo-political bonding, the Hegel-

ian Idea, in this conclusion? I reiterate, I can be no m o r e than suggestive
and, no doubt, inexcusably general in m y comments; nevertheless, this issue
must bear a deeper and more searching examination: h o w deep does Western
man's conviction run that the fulfilment of his o w n truth, the reconciliation
of heaven and earth, is postponed only by a sapping from within: the-Jew-
in-our-midst? A n d if Hegel is our guide in locating this dark presence at
 DAVID MOSS 69
the heart of the anxiety of our modern age, then how much more are we
constrained 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 remain
beyond the scope, although not the direction, of this essay. However, this
much is clear. The creation of the 'Jewish question' in modern Europe is
irrevocably bound to the fulfilment of the Western ideological project: the
stabilisation of modernity on the foundation of technology. This Hegel
recognised; and early Marx, in debate with Bruno Bauer, provides us with
incomparable evidence.38 We must admit, on this score, Hegel is unim-
peachable. And, moreover, it is in this sense that we might suggest that
modernity, as theorised by Hegel, concluded at least one argument of
history—whether the Jews were a chosen race: they are, irrevocably, utterly
and finally. But chosen for what?
Joseph Goebbels, in a moment of private reflection, registered, with
brutal precision, this modern logic: 'There is no hope of leading the Jews
back into the fold of civilized humanity by exceptional punishments. They
will forever remain Jews, just as we are forever members of the Aryan
race.'39 And what must now become clear is that on modernity's own terms
the consequence of this—mass extermination—was not a species of aberrant
or chthonic logic; it was rather a moment of self-assertion true to its own
nature. And Hegel, as I have argued, is our primary witness. This comprises
the first aspect of our encounter with Hegel: the 'crime' of Jewish existence.
We now come to Fackenheim's second 'basic fact': a murder that 'was quite
literally "extermination."'
In the Shoah the Jew, each and every Jew, was chosen not merely for
physical destruction, but—and here, surely, words give out, exhausted of
their last vestiges of meaning—metaphysical annihilation. Primo Levi's
harrowing account of the Muselmdnner constitutes 'an ultimate' for human
thought: 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 adapt
themselves; they are beaten by time, they do not begin to learn German, to
disentangle the infernal knot of laws and prohibitions until their body is already
in decay, and nothing can save them from selection or death by exhaustion.
Their life is short but their number is endless: they, the Muselmdnner, the
drowned, form the backbone of the camp, an anonymous mass, continuously
renewed and always identical, of non-men who march and labour in silence,
the divine spark dead within them, already too empty really to suffer. One
hesitates to call them living; one hesitates to call their death death.40

Fackenheim asserts that the Muselmann is the Nazi state's most character-
70 T H E SHIBBOLETH OF M O D E R N I T Y
istic 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 immolation-of-
self, were. 41 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, were
directed towards one end: the demonic elimination of humanity. We recoil
with a hardened incredulity at such a presence; but where does the source
of this incredulity really lie? That man can torture man (and woman and
child)? I do not believe so, for we have long known that Western man is
a killer. The source of our dis-ease must be sought elsewhere. It is intimated
in 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 before
the prisoner monstrously and indomitably, a reality that could not be
escaped and that therefore finally seemed reasonable.'42 Bauman enquires:
how it was that, excepting individual cases of disobedience, the Nazis could
count on Jewish co-operation in their own annihilation? How was it that
they could co-operate in their own transformation into Muselm'dnnerl His
investigation 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 the
telos of Reason is physical and spiritual annihilation. The evidence he gathers
defies any adequate paraphrase; the logic of this destruction, manifest in the
creation of each and every new circle of hell, can only be displayed.
Nevertheless, Bauman's conclusion is unavoidable: the calculus which in a
previous existence had ordered and patterned life in ways both ethical and
rational, collapsed; but more than this, and here the register is ineluctably
ontological, the minimal condition for even the possibility of such an
ordering—the will to life itself—became both a necessary and sufficient
condition in the enactment of genocide. 'The train called 'self-preservation'
stopped only at Treblinka railway station.' In this terrible fact, manifest in
the creation of the Muselmdnner, what we catch a sight of, is not merely
men and women encased in an autism of brutality, but an ontological zero,
'the death of man as a rational, "forward-dreaming" speech organism (the
zoon phonanta of Greek philosophy).' This is no putative metaphor, or
rhetoric of horrified astonishment, Fackenheim argues, but the telos, final
and ultimate, of I'univers concentrationnaire. This insight, Fackenheim
demands, must not be compromised. Therefore, all thought seeking to
explain 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
 DAVID MOSS 71
human history. With the appearance of a thesis whose very essence is
extermination, 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, to

transcend it, and, from a higher standpoint, perceive the meaning of the whole
by placing it into a perspective. On our part, in contrast, we confront in the
Holocaust world a whole of horror. We cannot comprehend it but only compre-
hend its incomprehensibility. We cannot transcend it but only be struck by
the brutal truth that it cannot be transcended.43

Hegelian dialectics, in however a disguised form, echoes in the manifold

logics of modernity; however, as I have argued, it is as a charter for modern
secular self-confidence, immanent in the infinite aspirations of modernity,
that it exercises its most profound influence. Is this then what it means to
live in an age post Hegel mortuum: to maintain one's self-confidence even in
the age of Auschwitz? But as we recall, Fackenheim demands a new
encounter with Hegel; what does this mean? It means, I believe, an encounter
with our own self-confidence; for either modernity is 'self-confidence,
qualified as confidence in God, confidence in God given concrete form as
self confidence,' or it is nothing. Thus, with dire brevity we could suggest
this final form for the Hegelian endeavour: dependence on God, on the
part of man, must be overcome. With Kant, Hegel could affirm that the
'mightiest revolution coming from inside of man is his departure from his
self-incurred tutelage'. Man must prove himself as nondependent, and he
must work this nondependency out to the extreme of no longer needing
God; indeed, recognising the death of God. But in attaining this extreme, he
will, in effect, show himself to be more in need of God when he is not
dependent upon Him than when he was dependent on Him. Could Hegel
have foreseen the extreme man of a rebelhous age who has travelled to the
limits of his nature and has shown the world how first creation could be
maimed in the murder of the Jewish People, and in times to come in the
annihilation of the entire human species? Is this the prescribed enactment
of self-confidence, the demanded proof of autonomy? In the sober terms
of empirical verification Bauman comments, 'I propose to treat the Holo-
caust as a rare, yet significant and reliable, test of the hidden possibilities of
modern society.'; but if this is so, then it is a test that cannot be ventured
upon by the most courageous claim of modernity itself. For Hegel, it is
thought that gives man immortality; man is the being who thinks, who
can thus become a being for-itself. Our analysis of the Shoah-world however
has revealed, within modernity's very midst, an enclave in which men and
women and children were systematically divested of the symbolic and
72 THE SHIBBOLETH OF MODERNITY
spiritual structures of their lives in an attempt to reduce them to animal
status, before destruction. Disturbingly, Jean Amery entitled his reflections
on his experience in Auschwitz: 'Attempts at Overcoming by One Who Is
Overcome.' It is thought that is overcome by the Shoah in testimony to
all 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 the
real; or, as the philosopher Hans Jonas has commented 'much more is real
than is possible.' We need add only one more consideration. The 'Final
Solution' was engineered by the Nazi State; in other words, that form of
polity which for Hegel was destined to become the expression of freedom
and rationality by way of its self-grounding actualization. However, the
grounding that modernity discovered in the Nazi State was not the kingdom
of freedom, but rather an artificially contrived state of nature 'producing
no ethical works'. 44 And this is critical, for Western Man in extremis, in this
modern consummating orgy of destruction, discovered not his dependency
upon God, but a means of purging (an utter catharsis), the presence of the
infinite, invisible, and ethically imperative God as witnessed to in the
existence 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 am
God, 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 characteristic

claim of modernity'; we conclude by pointing towards its cancellation. My
claim is this: to the extent that we remain committed to the project of
modernity, to its attempt to create its own historical normativity out of
itself—construed as the transcending act—we are indicted by its own most
characteristic product: the Shoah, the shibboleth of modernity. But more
than this, we must be clear about the nature of this indictment, and it is at
this 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, and

one 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 is
precisely the massacre of the Jews.46

Thus, it is to this irreducible reality that we must attend in all our

repeated attempts to emplot 'the divine gestalt, which lures, empowers, and
shapes human activity in the direction of a transfigurative praxis.'47 For if
it is the case that the Shoah is a phenomenon that can bear no other logic—
in essence—than a spiritual one, then to chart the above path from Platonic
 DAVID MOSS 73
pragmatics to Hegelian Idealism is to do no more than describe a way that
is now irrevocably closed and boarded off. The fecund relationship of
theological thinking with history as the arena for the activity of self-
transcendence, stalls in confrontation with the Shoah. But to speak in this
way is to speak of a caesura within history which, as it interrupts, closes
off; and closes off for good. We are, in other words, speaking of caesura as
concept; perhaps the concept for future theological thinking.

Our discussion in this essay has been wide-ranging and, at times, no doubt
imprecise. This, I believe, reflects George Steiner's important insight that
in order to avoid a normalisation of the Shoah (under a specific logic of
historical explanation), we will, of necessity, become involved in the 'inter-
mingling of different, perhaps irreconcilable levels of analysis and of
method.' This has proved to be the case in the above; nevertheless, it is
with the specifically theological implications of our discussion that I now
wish 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 perplexing
suggestion. Nonetheless, the logic of this contention is, I believe, still
traceable; 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 of'concepts'
involves not 'a recognitional capacity of an exceptional degree of refinement
and resulting width of application', but, 'the way in which in exercise of
our understanding, we entertain the relevance of determining what is the
case in respect of one state of affairs to determining what is the case in
respect of another.' If this is so then we are bound to ask: what is the
purpose of invoking the concept of caesura in our accounting of the Shoah?
The exercise would appear to be nonsensical, for either the death-camps
are amenable to conceptual clarification by way of historical analogues—
in which case the idiom of caesura would be straight misapplication; or else
the 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 to
argue that this characterization bears a more significant interpretation than
so far suggested. However, in order to track the logic of this suggestion
we must be prepared to entertain, in some form, a sort of negative ontology
critically informed by the mode of tragic witness and inquiry. And this, in
short, will stand in utter contradistinction to the hermeneutic of idealism
that we have thus far been concerned with in this essay.
For Kant the manipulation of the conceptual order was but a response
to, or initiated fashioning of, the donation of reality an sich. As such, it
follows that the synthesis envisaged by Kant—of reason with understand-
ing—involves us in standing at the very boundary of the world as we
74 THE SHIBBOLETH OF MODERNITY
perceive it, with the world as it is. But more than this—and this is the real
crux—in order to grasp the bar that this places upon the legitimate exercise
of reason we must in some way stand outside this boundary. For Kant, this
standing outside can be only minimal; nevertheless, it is critical standing
outside, and, as John Milbank has argued recently, it is for precisely this
reason that we may regard 'Kant's entire philosophy [as] in a sense an
aesthetic of the classical sublime.'48 The point at which we arrived at the
end 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 in
history is to register a boundary point of reason with the datum for
interpretation, although in this instance the encountered phenomenon of
cognitive resistance arises from a world in which ultimate reality becomes
incommensurate with human well-being. Arthur A. Cohen has commented:
'There is something in the nature of thought—its patient deliberateness and
care for logical order—that is alien to the enormity of the death camps . .
. Thinking and the death camps are incommensurable.'49 Nevertheless, if
we are to invoke this epithet—the Shoah as caesura—as a warrant for
disclosing, or rather negating the potentialities of philosophical and theolo-
gical thought after Auschwitz, then we must be prepared to consider further
the ontological implication of what it could mean to stand, if only in a
minimal way, outside of this boundary or incommensurability. For, to
reiterate, it has been the argument of this essay that thought in confrontation
with the death camps is not involved in some sort of asymptotic relation
towards 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 refused
any dissipation. In what follows, the complex and often convoluted question
concerning what tragedy is will not be our concern; our question is not
one of category commensurability—i.e., is the Shoah an event that we may
correctly construe as tragic. This would be an exercise in facile domestica-
tion. Rather, our question concerns what the tragic method does and in
particular: what is the ontological standing of the tragic as a mode of
thought 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, the
impulse behind this question is clear: tragedy manifests the theodicies of life
and history that theology has traditionally sought to comprehend. However,
in turning to tragedy in this instance our concern is rather with the ontological
status of any theological vision that has listened well to the lessons of tragedy
as a disruptive negative dialectic upon culture—in our case modernity.
Arthur A. Cohen indicates one possible way of construing this in his
description of the Holocaust as tremendum. The description recalls Rudolf
Otto's phenomenological description of the terror-mystery of God's pres-
 DAVID MOSS 75
ence; Cohen however employs the phrase to invoke not the divine, but
rather the malign possibility of a radical freedom released from all transcend-
ental controls. However, it is the ontological status of this description that
must attract our attention. As Cohen writes:

The tremendum is ultimate; its symbolic resonance permanent; its repetition is

the continuous assurance of its potency; its very ultimacy is prefiguration. But
it is not, for all its being ultimate, final. It is ultimate because it comprehends
and articulates all negativity, but it is not final. Finality and ultimacy differ
crucially. Ultimacy entails the formal and configurational character of the real
event, whereas finality describes its intention and its goal. It is one thing to
speak 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, if
not by blind caprice, then most surely by a malign divinity.50

Thus, Cohen seeks to avoid the intrusion of the most fundamental feature
of the tragic vision: the 'unspeakable' theology of malevolent transcend-
ence—a 'wicked God.' That he has attended, with an unmistakeable
anguish, to the horror of this particular event is clear enough; but what is
just as clear is that his final word on the matter rests with the construction
of a tragic anthropology at whose centre lies the human sin of hubris. Cohen,
we may suggest, has delineated with painstaking exactness the character of
the Shoah as the exercise of an unlimited freedom: a prefiguration that is
indeed ultimate. Nevertheless, in the terms of our discussion of Hegel, and
in terms of the sharper Kantian focus that we have brought to our findings
by way of the concept of the Shoah as caesura, we must conclude that
Cohen's appropriation of the tragic, as a mode of thought, refuses to warrant
any reflection upon the ontological boundary between ultimacy and finality
as boundary and as not limit. But, we must surely wonder, can anything
more conceivably be said?
It is at this precise juncture that I wish to return to the point at which
our argument began: with the poetry of Paul Celan, and in particular with
his 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 direct
readers to Steiner's own profound reflections upon it. 51 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
76 THE SHIBBOLETH OF MODERNITY
we bloom.
Towards I against
You.

A nothing
were we, are we, will
we remain, blooming:
No-one's-rose.

With
the stylus soul-bright
the dust-thread sky-waste,
the crown reddened
by the purple word, which we sang
above, o above
the thorn.

In what follows, the exegesis is Steiner's; my own suggestion is only that

in this poem we may recognise (as in so much of Celan's poetry) a symbolic
intimation offinality. In other words, in so far as the ontological status of
the tragic is inseparable from its interpretative constitution, then it is pre-
cisely in and through the fragmentary and dark epiphanies of Celan's poems
that we may broach the difference between ultimacy and finality that rears
before us in the systematic destruction of six million Jews. 'Psalm' by way
of its unerring theological tenor—in style and reference—plots the bound-
ary between thought and death camps, ultimacy and finality, while at the
same moment—and in order to do this—intimates a minimal passage over
that boundary. Steiner writes:

The 'nothingness' of the Jew at Auschwitz is, in a sense, the nothingness of

man before God created him; it is the nothingness which constitutes every
individual extinction; it is the nothingness, the zero-point of history for the
Jewish people in the hand of its killers. Yet it is a nothingness 'in bloom', a
terrible flowering towards and against the 'No-oneness' of God's absence.'52

What is this boundary that Celan has crossed? Or again, in what sense
has his art transgressed the prohibition of Arthur A. Cohen that we should
not 'ask of [God] more than we can bear him to be.' It is this: No-one
bespeaks our dust. For, 'The absence of God from the Shoah is also his silence
in the face of the unremembered dead, an unremembrance which makes of
their death a double annihilation.' We cannot conceive of this silence, for
this would most assuredly be self-mutilation; however, if we are to stand
by the body of the argument of this essay nor can we withdraw, with a
certain composure, into past verities—however these are to be revivified.53
 DAVID MOSS 77

After Auschwitz, to speak of the Shoah as caesura is no doubt to issue a

prescriptive judgement of sorts—perhaps it is even to suggest an a priori of
tragic experience. However, more profoundly, its purpose is this: to suggest
an orientation towards the finality of this particular historical experience.
To intimate more than this, in other words to discover the boundary already
drawn between thought and the death camps, involves our listening to the
witness of those who have been there. In 'Psalm' we do not discover the
malevolence of a wicked god, but a disclosure—albeit fragmentary—of
the very meaning of the Shoah experience for us. We are brought to the
very boundary between the Shoah as ultimate—and thus in some minimal
way a still conceivable event—and the Shoah as final reality: reality no
longer gracious for us.
And where is theological thinking to go after this event? An answer to
this question will, I believe, involve colossal effort; nevertheless, unless this
activity is undertaken, our inherited habits of mind and experience will set
about evacuating this so-called 'Jewish Tragedy' of its awesome and scandal-
ous particularity. And this, I hazard, is no way 'to slay the beast, or at least
to render it harmless for all future time.'

REFERENCES

1
Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics
(Routledge: London, 1990) p. 367.
2
Seren Kierkegaard, Either/Or, Pt.II, (Prin-
ceton: New Jersey, 1987) p. 343.
3
Katharine Washburn, 'Introduction' in
Paul Celan: Last Poems (North Point Press:
San Francisco, 1986) p. x.
4
Celan's published work is collected in Ges-
7
ammelte Werke [5 vols] (Suhrkamp Verlag:
Frankfurt am Main, 1983). For a selection
8
of English translations see Paul Celan:
Selected Poems trans. Michael Hamburger
(Penguin Books: London, 1990), and also
Paul Celan: Last Poems.
5
'The Long Life of Metaphor—An
Approach to "the Shoah'". Encounter
LXVIII, 2 (1987) 60. The present essay
owes much, both by way of inception and
understanding, to Steiner's restless and
profound meditations upon the Shoah.
6
Emil Fackenheim writes:
A previously inconceivable dimension
9
of evil has been made conceivable, made
part of our human world. A beast of
unprecedented monstrosity slumbers
underground. No response to the Holo-
caust can be authentic without first
recognizing this fact and then asking,
with desperate seriousness, what can be
done to slay the beast, or at least to
render it harmless for all future time,
(my italics) 'Responses To The Holo-
caust' in Holocaust and Genocide Studies
I, 1 (1986) 106.
See the poem 'Todtnauberg' in Selected
Poems, p. 292-3.
This disturbing and seemingly incompre-
hensible stance on Heidegger's part is
tackled by Steiner in his Heidegger (Fon-
tana Press: London, 1978) pp. ill—21.
More generally, Heidegger's relationship
to Nazism (the so-called I'affaire Heid-
egger), is an issue that continues to generate
much heat. See, for example, Thomas
Sheehan's balanced review of the debate—
'Heidegger and the Nazis'—in The New
York Review of Books XXXV, 10 (1988)
38-47-
See, To Mend the World: Foundations of
Future Jewish Thought (Schocken Books:
New York, 1982). In a footnote to page
182, Fackenheim explains the pattern of
 THE SHIBBOLETH O F M O D E R N I T Y
his argument to consist in three 'explora-
tions'; or, in other words, a series of con-
frontations with the Holocaust of three
types of philosophical logic: the first 'in
which thought rises above history'; the
second 'in which thought moves through
history in an attempt to overcome it'; and
the third in which 'thought is and remains
situated in history'. In this essay I will be
concerned with the first two: namely the
Platonic and Hegelian logics.
10
To Mend the World, p. 262.
11
According to Derrida the logic signifies a
'universal form of transcendental life'
established by the structure of con-
sciousness and preserved by the capacity
of language to fix concepts. In the most
general terms, it denotes the central con-
viction of Western metaphysics that
'before my birth and after my death . . .
the present is'. Cf. Speech and Phenomenon
(Northwestern University Press: Evan-
ston, III, 1973) pp. I34ff. In this section I
have drawn on Kenneth C. Blanchard's
very helpful commentary, 'Philosophy in
the Age of Auschwitz: Emil Fackenheim
and Leo Strauss' in Remembering For the
Future, Volume II: The Impact of the Holo-
caust on the Contemporary World (Pergamon
Press: Oxford, 1989) pp. 1815-29.
12
See Moshe Pearlman, The Capture and
Trial of Adolf Eichmann (Lowet Brydone
Ltd.: London, 1963) p. 396.
13
To Mend the World, p. 12.
14
For an account of the crucial Wannsee
Conference on 20 January 1942, see Mar-
tin Gilbert's The Holocaust: The Jewish
Tragedy (Fontana: Glasgow, 1987)
pp. 280-93.
15
Z y g m u n t Bauman, Modernity and the
Holocaust (Polity Press: Cambridge, 1989)
p. 17.
16
' O n Emil Fackenheim's To Mend the
World: A Review Essay'. In Modern Juda-
ism Vol. 3 N o . 2, p. 228.
17
See Elias Canetti's remarkable essay 'The
Arch of T r i u m p h ' in The Conscience of
Words (Andre Deutsch: London, 1986).
18
Modernity and the Holocaust, p. 168.
19
See Raul Hilberg's comments—perhaps
the historian of the Holocaust—in Shoah:
An Oral History of the Holocaust (Pantheon
Books: N e w York, 1985) pp. 7 0 - 3 . Also
his massive: The Destruction of the European
Jews, 3 Vols. (Holmes and Meier: London,
1985).
20
Quoted in Modernity and the Holocaust,
p. 7.
21
Nihilism (Yale University Press: N e w
Haven, 1969) p. 184.
22
Shoah: An Oral History of the Holocaust,
p. 13.
23
Survival in Auschwitz (Collier Books: N e w
York, 1961) p. 112.
24
For example, see Paul Ricoeur's Interpreta-
tion Theory: Discourse and the Surplus of
Meaning (Texas Christian University
Press: Fort Worth, 1976) pp. 54ff.
25
At the Mind's Limits: Contemplations by a
Survivor on Auschwitz and its Realities
(Schocken Books: N e w York, 1986) p. 7.
26
To Mend the World, p. 8.
27
See Blumenberg's magisterial, The Legit-
imacy of the Modern Age (MIT Press: C a m -
bridge, MA, 1983), in which, through a
wealth of historical evidence, he endeav-
ours to demonstrate the distinctive charac-
ter of modern thought and its qualitative
break with Christian theology.
28
For a clear and concise explanation of this,
see Charles Taylor's Hegel and Modern Soci-
ety ( C U P : Cambridge, 1979) pp. 23ff.
29
To Mend the World, p. 158.
30
See G. Steiner's ' O n Lewis Feuer's "Sto-
icism"' in Encounter LXXI, 2 (1988) 78.
31
Modernity and the Holocaust, p. 72.
32
Ibid., p. 75.
33
In A Holocaust Reader, Ed. Lucy S. D a w -
idowicz (Behrman House: N e w York,
1976) p. 133.
34
Modernity and the Holocaust, p. 53.
35
See Robert Jay Lifton's important study
The Nazi Doctors: A Study in the Psychology
of Evil (Macmillan: London, 1986) p. I4f.
36
Modernity and the Holocaust, p. 76.
37
For an account of Hegel's preoccupation
with the figure of Abraham and the rami-
fications for his later philosophy, see H. S.
Harris, Hegel's Development Toward the
Sunlight, 1770-1801 (Clarendon Press:
Oxford, 1972).
38
' O n the Jewish Question' (1843) in The
Marx-Engels Reader, Ed. Robert C. Tucker
 DAVID
(W. W. Norton & Comp: New York,
1978).
39
Modernity and the Holocaust, p. 72.
40
Survival in Auschwitz, p. 82.
41
See Terence des Pres' important study,
The Survivor: An Anatomy of Life in the
Death Camps ( O U P : N e w York, 1976).
42
At the Mind's Limits, p . 12.
43
To Mend the World, p. 238.
44
See Hegel's Lectures on the Philosophy of
World History: Introduction ( C U P : C a m -
bridge, 1980) p . 145. T h e collaboration of
the state in the creation of the 'rule of
Chronos', an age of 'no enduring achieve-
ment' excepting ruin and destruction,
would have been for Hegel unthinkable.
45
Q u o t e d in To Mend the World, p. 331.
46
Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Heidegger, Art
and Potties (Basil Blackwell: Oxford, 1990)
p. 48.
MOSS 79
47
Peter C. Hodgson, God in History: Shapes
of Freedom (Abingdon Press: Nashville,
1989) p. 49.
48
'"Between purgation and illumination": a
critique of the theology of right' in Ken-
neth Surin, ed. Christ, Ethics and Tragedy
( C U P : Cambridge, 1989) p. 164.
49
The Tremendum (Crossroads: N e w York,
1981) p. 1.
50
Ibid., 49.
51
' T h e Long Life of Metaphor', p. 60.
52
Ibid.
53
In his 'Memorial Address' reprinted in
Discourse on Thinking (Harper and R o w :
N e w York, 1966), Heidegger describes his
stance towards our age of technology—
and thereby, as w e have argued, our age
of Auschwitz—as a Gelassenheit: a c o m -
posure which 'lets things be.' O n e is
bound to ask: is this really an option left
open to us any more?