Interview with Professor Dominick LaCapra, Cornell University

Cornell University
June 9, 1998, Jerusalem
 

“Acting-out" and "Working-through" Trauma

In all your writings on the Holocaust, you distinguish between two forms of remembering trauma (and historical writings on it). The first, which you consider the desirable one, results in the process of “working-through”; the other is based on denial and results in “acting-out.” Can you characterize these two different kinds of memory?

I'm obviously trying to take the concepts of “acting-out” and “workingthrough” from Freud and from psychoanalysis, and then developing them in a way that makes them especially interesting for use in historical studies. This means that I don't try to be orthodox as a psychoanalyst, but really aim to develop the concepts in a manner that engages significant historical problems – and for me, the Holocaust is one of the most important of these problems.

This kind of approach has applications elsewhere, but it's especially important with respect to events (or a series of events), that are heavily charged with emotion and value, and that always bring out an implication of the observer in the observed. This is what I start talking about as transference – trying to understand it in a very broad sense, but in a way that is also faithful to Freud. The basic sense of transference in Freud is a process of repetition: literally, the repetition of the Oedipal scene in later life, the relationship between parent and child in situations such as that of teacher/student, or analyst/patient, in ways that may seem inappropriate.

So for me, transference means a form of repetition, both in relations among researchers (for example, graduate students/instructors) ,and perhaps more interestingly – because less developed – in the relationship to the object of study. When you study something, at some level you always have a tendency to repeat the problems you were studying. This is related to your implication in the research. Something like transference (or one's implication in the material and tendency to repeat) always occurs.

There are two very broad ways of coming to terms with transference, or with one's transferential implication in the object of study: acting-out; and workingthrough. Acting-out is related to repetition, and even the repetition-compulsion – the tendency to repeat something compulsively. This is very clear in the case of people who undergo a trauma. They have a tendency to relive the past, to exist in the present as if they were still fully in the past, with no distance from it. They tend to relive occurrences, or at least find that those occurrences intrude on their present existence, for example, in flashbacks; or in nightmares; or in words that are compulsively repeated, and that don't seem to have their ordinary meaning, because they're taking on different connotations from another situation, in another place.

I think that in Freud, if there's any broad meaning of the death drive that is not mystifying, it's the death drive as the tendency to repeat traumatic scenes in a way that is somehow destructive and self-destructive. Yet, I also believe that for people who have been severely traumatized, it may be impossible to fully transcend acting-out the past. In any case, acting-out should not be seen as a different kind of memory from working-through – they are intimately related parts of a process. Acting-out, on some level, may very well be necessary, even for secondary witnesses or historians. On a certain level, there's that tendency to repeat.

I see working-through as a kind of countervailing force (not a totally different process, not even something leading to a cure), because I tend to disavow, or take my distance from, therapeutic conceptions of psychoanalysis, and try to take psychoanalysis in more ethical and political directions. In the workingthrough, the person tries to gain critical distance on a problem, to be able to distinguish between past, present and future. For the victim, this means his ability to say to himself, “Yes, that happened to me back then. It was distressing, overwhelming, perhaps I can't entirely disengage myself from it, but I'm existing here and now, and this is different from back then.” There may be other possibilities, but it's via the working-through that one acquires the possibility of being an ethical agent.

The other general thing I would add is this: It's interesting that the actingout/working-through distinction – and it's a distinction, not a separation into different kinds or totally different categories, but a distinction between interacting processes – is one way of trying to get back to the problem of the relationship between theory and practice. This, I think, we have almost tended to leave behind, or leave in abeyance. And this is perhaps something we can get back to.

In recent criticism (with which I agree), there has perhaps been too much of a tendency to become fixated on acting-out, on the repetition-compulsion, to see it as a way of preventing closure, harmonization, any facile notion of cure. But also, by the same token, to eliminate any other possibility of workingthrough, or simply to identify all working-through as closure, totalization, full cure, full mastery, so that there's a kind of all-or-nothing logic in which one is in a double bind: either the totalization or the closure you resist; or acting-out the repetition-compulsion, with almost no other possibilities. And often politics, being a question of a kind of blank hope in the future, a blank utopia about which you can say nothing. And this very often links up with a kind of apocalyptic politics.

Where does it affect the historian?

It affects the historian in secondary ways: As the historian studies certain processes, there are tendencies towards identification, towards negative identification, total denial. In a sense, there are two extreme possibilities for the historian: the first is the extreme of full identification with participants. In a case such as that of the Holocaust, the figures with whom the historian has identified have generally been bystanders, because the identification with the bystander is closest to the other possibility for the historian – that is, the idea of full objectivity, neutrality, not being a player, not being a participant. But there's also the possibility that the historian (or any other observer), might go to the extreme of full identification, that there is something in the experience of the victim that has almost a compulsive power and should elicit our empathy. This empathy may go to the point of a kind of extreme identification, wherein one becomes a kind of surrogate victim oneself.

I've written that I think this happens to some extent to Claude Lanzmann in his film Shoah: There is almost the desire to identify with the experience of the victim because he himself has not been a victim, yet somehow feels that he should have been a victim, that he should have been part of this process. On one level, this is very moving, but it can also lead to a very intrusive kind of questioning in the actual encounter with the victim. So the way that it applies to the historian is in terms of this process of, at some level, transferentially being implicated in the problems you study, and having to have some kind of response to them.

I agree with a very important dimension of historical research – gathering information, and making sure that it is accurate as possible; checking facts; and trying to arrive at a reconstruction of the past that is as validated and as substantiated as possible. This is absolutely necessary to historical understanding, but it's not all of it. There are other dimensions, including one's implication in the object of study, effective or emotional response, and how one comes to terms with that response. Again, the two extremes in trying to come to terms with emotional response are this: full identification, whereby you try to relive the experience of the other, or find yourself unintentionally reliving it; and pure objectification, which is the denial of transference, the blockage of affect as it influences research, and simply trying to be as objectifying and neutral an observer as possible.

The alternative to this is trying to work out some very delicate relationship between empathy and critical distance. This is very much the problem of trying to relate acting-out to working-through itself: In acting-out, one relives as if one were the other, including oneself as another in the past; and in working-through, one tries to acquire some critical distance that allows one to engage in life in the present, to assume responsibility – but that doesn't mean that you utterly transcend the past.

You said that acting-out and working-through are not opposites, but a distinction. But you also stress the process. Now, isn't the word “process” already taken from the sphere of working-through, and not from that of actingout? That means that you actually see acting-out through the eyes of workingthrough, and they're not balanced in your theory?

Acting-out is a process, but a repetitive one. It's a process whereby the past, or the experience of the other, is repeated as if it were fully enacted, fully literalized.

Correct me if I'm mistaken, but that's not the original, or the accepted, meaning of the word “process” – to proceed from one place to another.

Though I think that binary oppositions are very important in thinking, one of the fruitful contributions of deconstruction (the work of Jacques Derrida, for example), has been to show the instability of binary oppositions and the way in which binary oppositions may be dubious. I think the binary opposition is very closely related to the scapegoat mechanism, and that part of the process of scapegoating is trying to generate pure binary oppositions between self and other, so that the other (let's say in the context of the Holocaust, the Jew, or the other victim of Nazi oppression), becomes totally different from the Nazi, and everything that causes anxiety in the Nazi is projected onto the other, so you have a pure divide: Aryan/Jew – absolutely nothing in common. And then you can show that this extreme binarization is actually a way of concealing anxiety, and the ways in which the seemingly pure opposites also share certain things.

A distinction, I would argue, is different. It is not a pure binary opposition, but rather involves a notion of difference, but a difference that's not a pure difference. The problem that deconstruction leaves us with is in the wake of the deconstruction of pure binaries, which I agree with fully: How do we then elaborate desirable distinctions? From my point of view, deconstruction does not blur or undermine all distinctions; it leaves you with a problem of distinctions that are, if anything, more difficult and more necessary to elaborate, given the fact that you cannot rely on simple binaries. Acting-out and working-through, in this sense, are a distinction, in that one may never be totally separate from the other, and the two may always be implicated in each other. But it's very important to see them as countervailing forces, and to recognize that there are possibilities of working-through that do not go to the extreme of total transcendence of acting-out, or total transcendence of the past.

One of the important tendencies in recent thinking has been to eliminate other possibilities of working-through, or at least not to provide any insight into them. And rather to remain within a notion of acting-out, and almost to collapse the distinction between acting-out and working-through, or to blur it entirely. When one comes to certain problems, such as that of mourning – which can be seen in Freud as one important mode of working-through – one may never entirely transcend an attachment to a lost other, or even some kind of identification with a lost other, but one may generate countervailing forces so that the person can reengage an interest in life. One sign of this in the process of mourning is the ability to find a new partner, to marry, to have children; and not to be so enmeshed in the grieving that the present doesn't seem to exist for you, and there is no future.

In certain forms of contemporary theorizing, whereby working-through is simply seen in this kind of extreme Pollyana redemptive mode, mourning itself may always seem to come back to an endless melancholy. There may be very little, if any, distinction between mourning and melancholy: The mourning that is criticized is that which utterly transcends the past, and the mourning that's affirmed is virtually indistinguishable from endless melancholy and a kind of repetition-compulsion.

At times, I wonder whether in someone like Derrida the notion of impossible mourning, as endless grieving, is virtually indistinguishable from endless melancholy. The reason that may arise is that mourning itself seems to become an almost metaphysical process, and the distinction between the metaphysical and the historical may itself be evanescent or very difficult to perceive.

In the case of someone like Walter Benjamin (at least in the early Benjamin), in the origin of German tragic drama, what you seem to have is the notion of the mourning play as a play of endless melancholy. Melancholy cannot be transcended, and Benjamin himself is in some sense against a redemptive notion of mourning. Now again, what I want to argue is this: that I, too, would want to criticize any kind of fully redemptive notion of mourning; and that, especially for the victim, it may be impossible to fully transcend acting-out.

In respect to an event of such incredible dimensions as the Holocaust, it may also be impossible for those born later ever to fully transcend this event and to put it in the past, simply as the past. But it may be possible, and in some sense it has to be possible, if you believe in anything like a viable democratic politics, to enable and further processes of working-through that are not simply therapeutic for the individual, but have political and ethical implications.

The one thing that's a mystery to me is this: If you have an analysis in which mourning is always impossible, mourning, that is, in the very closest proximity to melancholy, if not identical with interminable melancholy, how then do you affirm a democratic politics? What are the mechanisms for bringing about agency that would enable people to engage in civil society, in political activity?

Doesn't that always remain somehow beneath one's dignity, or beneath one's level of metaphysical interest?

This is why I think that what very often happens in Walter Benjamin, and in Derrida's rather sympathetic analysis of Benjamin (when he discusses the critique of violence with some caveats), or in someone like Fredric Jameson, or in Hayden White, is that you have an analysis that doesn't seem to enable other forms of working-through; that somehow wants to affirm the necessity of being implicated in trauma, and yet wants the politics. But the politics that comes out is often a blind messianism, apocalyptic politics or what I call the “hope in a blank utopia” – a utopia which is utterly blank because you can say nothing about it and it has virtually nothing to do with your processes in the present.

This is a kind of paradox: How do you affirm a democratic politics if you don't have some notion of working-through that is not identical to full transcendence, and yet is distinguishable from, and acts as a countervailing force to, endless repetition of the past or being implicated in the trauma, or continually validating the trauma?

Redemptive narratives

What do you really mean by redemptive narrative, and why do you criticize it so much? Can you give examples from the United States, from Germany or from Israel?

I agree with something like the necessity for what Benjamin calls “weak messianic values,” and I would see them in terms of ethics and the need to develop a notion of ethics, both in the broader sense and in more specific senses. One of the crucial problems of ethics is the relationship of normative limits and that which transgresses the limits. And then you have to try to see the ways in which that really can be worked out in different areas of life: the relationship between normative limits that you want to affirm and the possibility of transgressing those limits, which is the only way in which you get a newer normativity. So there are some forms of normativity you might want to place in question, some you may want to reform, and others you may want to validate. But the relationship between limits and excess is a crucial problem. Again, one of the difficulties in certain forms of contemporary, postmodern, post-structural thinking is the affirmation of the excess.

Even someone like Saul Friedlander, in his partial affinity with postmodernism, would accept the idea that in the Holocaust there is some excess, which is unrepresentable and difficult to conceptualize. On a certain level, I agree, but one of the techniques of certain forms of post-structural thinking has been to try to counteract excess through excess. This is, in a way, a homeopathic response: You take the “illness” and you counteract it through a proper dosage of the illness itself. I think that that may be necessary. The modern context is, in some sense, a post-Holocaust context, and this has had, usually in subterranean ways, until the present, an effect on thinking, to destabilize thinking, and to render less feasible certain kinds of redemptive thinking, for example.

This is one reason why traditional religions, Hegelianism, seen in stereotypical ways, and any form of thinking that seems to redeem the past and make it wholly meaningful through present uses, no longer seems plausible. The extent of the crisis, the extent of the unsettlement, were simply too great to make that feasible to people; it just doesn't seem to hang together. It's what Jean-Francois Lyotard calls the incredulity or the disbelief about grand narratives: We no longer seem to take seriously these grand narratives that make sense of everything in the past, which at certain points seem to appeal to people very much.

If you believe in the Biblical story, you do, in a sense, believe in a grand narrative of history, so that everything, even the most disastrous catastrophes, will ultimately make sense to you – maybe not now, but at some point of illumination in the future. This no longer seems to be feasible to many – or at least a significant number of – people.

So I agree that there is something like an excess with which one has to come to terms. And that at certain levels one has to realize that one, oneself, participates in this excess; that there may be certain excessive hyperbolic features of oneself; and that one has to undergo the temptation of excess. Then, though, the question is how one comes to terms with it? One of the things I've written is that in certain thinkers there is, at times, the tendency to overdose on the antidote. This is to say, to participate too fully in the excess and to affirm the excess, with almost an oblivion of the problem of how to relate excess to legitimate limits, which is the ethical problem. If you affirm excess only, I think that's a transcendence or an undercutting of ethics towards, often, an aesthetic of the sublime.

There's a relationship between excess and the sublime: The sublime is, in some sense, an excess, an excess that overwhelms the self, almost brings it to the point of death, but then leads to elation when the self escapes the threat of death. In recent thinking, there's an incredible fascination with an aesthetic of the sublime. Again, this is in some sense necessary, but one should also try to situate it. The one way in which one tries to situate it, is to try to distinguish among possibilities of the sublime, not simply, for example, to see the Holocaust as sublime in its excess. There is a tendency at times to envision the Holocaust homogeneously as some overwhelming, sublime event. This can perhaps be found at times in Lyotard, in Hayden White, and it’s somewhat questionable. There you really need to have a much more modulated self-critical response. But what this emphasis on the excess of the Holocaust does, is to insist upon a certain unsettlement in its aftermath, and to place in radical jeopardy any facile notion of redemption or harmonization – and I agree with this.

On the question of examples of redemptive narratives, if you take the conventional narrative structure itself – with a beginning, a middle and an end, whereby the end recapitulates the beginning after the trials of the middle, and gives you (at least on the level of insight), some realization of what it was all about – there's a sense in which the conventional narrative is redemptive. Various people, including Northrop Frye and M.H. Abrams, have argued that conventional narratives are displacements of the Biblical structure of Paradise, Fall, History – as a period of trial and tribulation, and then redemption. So that in the conventional narrative itself, there is a kind of displacement of a Biblical structure, which is a redemptive structure.

Frank Kermode is another who has also written about this in his book The Sense of an Ending. He calls the conventional narrative “apocalyptic,” in that the end resonates with the beginning on a higher level of meaning and significance. He has a rather amusing example of the way we listen to, and perceive the ticking of, a clock: “tick-tock, tick-tock.” He sees the “tick” as a humble genesis, and the “tock” as a feeble apocalypse, so that all of time is coded in terms of “tick-tock,” that's developmental and progressive.

A specific example is Schindler's List. This is a very interesting movie for the first three-quarters or so (at least as a film), where you have the ambiguities of the Schindler character brought out. The fact that he is a Nazi trying to help Jews is retained in its tension, for you have a Nazi who is also an impresario, self-interested, self-indulgent, but nonetheless trying to help other people – in that, you have a certain interesting tension. Towards the end, you have the resolution of all the tensions as Schindler emerges as a martyr and a hero. His associate becomes a sort of Gandhi figure, leading the people across the horizon towards some unimaginable new beginning – you don't know where they're going; you think they may be going to a land of redemption. And then there is also the final ritual, which is really a kind of redemptive ritual, rather than a form of mourning that is tensely bound up with the problems of the past. Instead you almost have a “Yellow Brick Road” along which the survivors come, and in some sense redeem their past.

Another example of redemptive narrative is a certain kind of Zionist narrative. Here it's rather curious that a certain kind of Zionist narrative has almost a Biblical model of some past Eden, when there was a state and a people, Diaspora related to a fall. The Holocaust is in some sense the necessary culmination of Diaspora, showing the error of the ways of erring, during the Diaspora, and then the foundation of the State of Israel as the redemptive moment. This is a very simplistic Zionist narrative, and not all people who call themselves Zionists have this narrative. But it had a certain force in Israeli history – related to why, for such a long time, survivors were not understood in terms of their experiences, might not even be listened to, and that the point of the survivor was to undergo transformation into a new Israeli citizen, and that has problematic implications for people in the way they relate to one another. In Israel itself, it is only in the last 10 years or so that people have been willing to listen to survivors.

There are many reasons for survivor videos: first, the obvious sense that soon people will no longer be alive and they'll no longer be available to listen to; second, an audience. As many people have pointed out, right after the events there was a rush of memoirs and diaries, and then it all sort of died down for a fairly long period of time. One of the reasons is that survivors found – in different countries, for different reasons – that they didn't have an audience, they didn't have people who to listen to them.

In Israel, they didn't want to listen to them basically because they were trying, for understandable reasons, to construct a different kind of state with a different kind of political agent. So, in a way, the aim was to go from victim to agent, without passing through working-through. It was like a desire to jump from victim to agent without having that intervening process, just sort of transcending it. This just doesn't work; it can only create difficulties, at least in human relations, and often politically.

In the United States, the survivors didn't have an audience in the general public either. It was almost like going from Auschwitz to Disney World – and in Disney World, people don't want to hear about Auschwitz. It's a very different context.

Different things can also be said about different countries. In France, for example, why was there the notion of the de'porte' that was used as a kind of homogenizing device to amalgamate victims, Jews, who were deported, and political prisoners? It's rather amazing that, for a rather long time, the prototypical survivor account was that of Robert Antelme – very interesting, very important, but a political prisoner. This is the figure about whom Maurice Blanchot and others wrote, and took as the prototypical survivor. Again, this tended to mask certain things, such as the specific problems of Jews as survivors, and as victims under Vichy and under the Nazis. There are many, many redemptive forms of narrative.

The uniqueness of the Holocaust and the Proper Name

Regarding your answer about excess and the sublime, I have a question about the uniqueness of the Holocaust and the proper name for it. Should it be called this, or perhaps the “Judean genocide” or something else?

The problem of uniqueness has been a cause of concern to many people, and it bears on the question of what happens when you call the Holocaust unique. There's an obvious sense in which everything is unique, and everything is comparable, but this is not really the sense in which people are trying to address the Holocaust. My feeling is that it's probably best to talk about the distinctiveness of the Holocaust, rather than its absolute uniqueness, and my perspective on the notion of uniqueness is really rather multiple.

There is a contextual justification for arguing the uniqueness of the Holocaust, when there are very strong tendencies towards revisionism, denial, and normalization. For this reason, let's say in the context of the German historians' debate, there may have been good reasons for someone like Eberhard Jaeckel to insist upon the uniqueness of the Holocaust and then even try to define how, historically, it was unique to that point in time. And American historian Charles Maier has argued that it's even more forceful and more cogent when a German in that context argues for uniqueness than for a Jew to do it. The German in such a case is not deriving the same kind of benefit, but even doing something that may not entirely be in accord with selfinterest. The difficulty with the concept of uniqueness is that it can easily serve identity politics and a certain kind of self-interest, and it can also become involved in what I've termed, and could be termed, a “grim competition for first place in victimhood.” Whose experience was it that was really unique? I think that approach is unfortunate. You should try to understand various phenomena, both in their own specificity and in ways whose conceptualization may enable you better to understand, and to come to terms with constructively, other phenomena.

There's another sense of uniqueness, which Saul Friedlander touches upon in one of his essays: that something is unique when it passes a certain limit, when it becomes a limit experience. This is a really interesting notion of uniqueness, a non-numerical notion of uniqueness. It doesn't mean this happened only once, and in all probability can happen only once, but that something happened here that was so outrageous, so unheard-of, that it is unique. And in that way you can have something unique that is indeed repeated in history, but repeated in uniqueness, in a kind of paradoxical way. This is also a valid notion of uniqueness: that something is so excessive in its transgressiveness that it somehow is unique.

The danger of becoming fixated on the concept of uniqueness is that it necessarily has ideological functions, and the question is if you really want it to have those functions. It may also lead to research about similarities and differences, which after a certain point becomes rather pointless as research. It may divulge very interesting historical information (as it has in the work of Steven Katz), but you really wonder, in spite of denials, if there is a very strong ideological motivation when you're directing all of your research around this question of uniqueness.

So, again, my perspective on uniqueness is a kind of problematic one. And the same sorts of considerations are at play in the use of a term. This, for me, brings out the significance of what I mentioned before – the importance of one's implication in the research – and some kind of transferential process that goes on, and that, with respect to enormously significant events, this process starts on the level of naming: How do you name the event? There is not a single name you might invoke that is entirely devoid of connotations or entirely innocent. In some way, that problem of implication, your own implication, your own response, begins on the level of naming. Whether you call it the Holocaust with a capital “H,” the holocaust with a small “h,” the Shoah, the Nazi genocide, and so forth – all of these exist in different semantic spaces.

For an American to use the term “Shoah” may have a slightly exoticising potential. And it also owes a great deal to Lanzmann's film. I don't think anywhere in the world was it called Shoah in a frequent public way before that film, and it's a kind of evidence of the power of the film in our culture that this term has been taken up. “Holocaust” apparently came into prominence in the 50s in the United States in the discourse of survivors, and it has raised objections because it exists in a sacrificial context: It means a “burnt sacrificial offering,” but most people who today use this term have no idea of this. It's the term they use because it's the one that's in currency in the culture.

There's even a way in which the common use of the term has a perhaps beneficial, banalizing effect, because it counteracts the sacrificial dimensions. Again, my feeling is that the problems of implication (ideological implication, emotional implication), begin with naming, and certainly with the question of whether or not the event is unique. Whether the name should be unique is closely related to whether the event is unique, and all of these questions of uniqueness and naming necessarily get pulled up into a kind of theological matrix, because it's a question of a kind of negative sacralization. And the problem of uniqueness is related to the extent to which the Holocaust has become part of a civil religion of sorts, and has at least a kind of negative sacrality, the way in which it becomes what I've recently been calling a “founding trauma” – a trauma that should, and (in the best of all circumstances) does, raise the question of identity as a very difficult question but that, as a founding trauma itself, becomes the basis of an identity.

This is an extreme and interesting paradox – how something traumatic, disruptive, disorienting in the life of a people can become the basis of identityformation. If you think about it, this probably happens in the lives of all peoples, to a greater or lesser extent. All myths of origin have something like a founding trauma, through which the people pass and emerge strengthened; at least they have stood the test of this founding trauma. The Civil War in the United States, the French Revolution in France, and certainly the Holocaust in Israel (and for worldwide Jewry, and perhaps even more broadly at the present time) can be seen as working-through a trauma one finds an identity which is both personal and collective at the same time. Again, this is understandable, but also should be questioned; the trauma should be seen as raising the question of identity, rather than simply founding an identity. So this is a complex of problems: the uniqueness of the Holocaust; how you name the Holocaust; and how the Holocaust is functioning ideologically and politically.

The “Negative Myth of Origin”

Can you be more specific about the dangers of the “negative myth of origin”?

This, again, relates to the notion of the redemptive narrative, and the ways in which certain events, which should really pose ethical and political problems as serious problems, are assimilated in a way which is too easily redemptive. There are at least two ways in which the Holocaust, as a founding trauma, becomes somewhat questionable. The first is in providing people with too facile an identification, which is not earned and which becomes a basis of identification that is too readily available. For example, it has often been said, on the part of American Jewry, that identification of oneself through the Holocaust becomes a way of constructing an identity that one is not able to elaborate otherwise, and that's somewhat questionable.

The more specific political uses have been documented to some extent by someone like Tom Segev, where you have the argument that at least during significant portions of Israeli history, the Holocaust could be invoked as a way of justifying policies that it would be hard to justify fully on other grounds. This is understandable in certain ways: It is true that people who have personally been through a certain experience (or at least have that experience as part of their cultural heritage), are sensitized to specific things, and may react to experiences in a way in which someone who has not shared in that past will not even initially understand. But, in addition, becoming more aware of the way in which a phenomenon can serve as a founding trauma and can have political functions may enable one to take a certain distance from those functions, and say, “Wait a minute. Am I doing things here that are not entirely justified by the situation, but are being stimulated by a past that is still very active in the present, and that I have not worked through as the past?”

Functionalism, Intentionalism, and the Concept of Scapegoating

There are two large schools of thought in the historiography of the Holocaust and of Nazism: the functionalist versus the intentionalist approach. Can you explain your critique of both of these schools? What is your suggestion concerning the scapegoating, and why is it different in essence (if you can say that), from the above-mentioned two approaches?

One would have to argue that there is no singular key to the explanation of the Holocaust. There are a number of factors, and often it's very difficult to give the appropriate weight to the different factors. Most people at the present time (for example, Christopher Browning or Friedlander) are neither functionalist nor intentionalist. They see a limited value to both approaches: that there are some elements that were planned, at least on some level, even if you cannot go back to 1923 and see an entire schema of the Holocaust laid out. There are those would also argue that the dynamic of institutions, the functioning of institutions, the activity of bureaucrats on the middle and lower levels were significant phenomena – these are the things that are generally focused on by functionalists. So most people now would argue that there is not really a debate, and that the quotification of something as a debate between two schools is a sign of its professionalization within a discipline. This is something that's understandable, and also something one might want to counteract.

One way of counteracting it is by seeing what the combatants actually share, and what is invisible to them. I'll deal with the functionalist / intentionalist controversy indirectly, in two stages: first in terms of the contemporary debate (about which I've learned while I'm here) – the Zionist/post-Zionist debate in Israeli historiography. This certainly is very important. The post-Zionists are arguing that the very Zionist redemptive narrative blinded people to certain aspects of the Israeli past, including the ways in which relations between Israelis and Palestinians were much more complicated than would be implied by the “David and Goliath” narrative. And that the entire question of relationship to the Palestinians has to be rethought.

One of the great moves in this enterprise was Benny Morris's book on the 1948 war. What is very interesting from the outside, however, is the way in which both the Zionists and the post-Zionists share a great deal. They share a focus, if not a fixation, on Israel, often in non-comparative ways. Their interest in the Holocaust is pretty much limited to the reactions of Zionist leaders to the Holocaust. What is not renewed in the entire debate is, for example, the question of world Jewry, including German Jewry, Yiddishkeit, the significance of the reconstruction of Yiddishkeit, and the importance of the Diaspora. You might say that within the Zionist narrative, the Diaspora was an erring that somehow showed the necessity of the State of Israel. This is not the message of the post-Zionist narrative, but still the Diaspora is marginalized in the postZionist narrative. You don't have a new reading of the Diaspora. From the outside, you can see what these contending schools tend to share, which is extremely important, but not very visible to them, because they're so caught up in the debate that its terms pretty much define the parameters of the argument.

Something similar happens with the intentionalists versus the functionalists. There, too, you might say that they share a great deal, and also don't look carefully enough at certain dimensions of the Shoah. What I've been trying to insist upon is that the dimension they don't look carefully at is a certain aspect of Nazi ideology in practice. This I tend to see in terms of a somewhat crazed sacrificialism and scapegoating, which seems especially uncanny and out of place because it happens within a modernized context, where indeed you do have phenomena such as extensive bureaucratization, industrialization of mass murder, functional imperatives, and so forth. One can see these dimensions and how important they are. For me, they involve scapegoating in a specific sense, scapegoating related to a horror, an almost ritual and phobic horror over contamination by “the other.” And that within a certain Nazi framework, the Jew was a pollutant or a contaminant within the Volksgemeinschaft that had to be eliminated for the Aryan people to reachieve its purity.

I made a comment like that at a conference here. The person sitting next to me was Gabriel Bach, a prosecutor at the Eichmann Trial, who said this brought to mind many documents that had crossed his desk. He mentioned one document, which is really rather incredible. (There was a practice at the time of taking milk from mothers who didn't need it for their own children – either because the child had died, or because they had excessive milk – and using the mother's milk for other babies.) Bach referred to a really vitriolic, angry letter from a German, complaining that milk taken from a woman who was one-quarter Jewish might contaminate the German babies to whom it was fed. That's very much a case of a fear of pollution through a kind of crazy, misplaced ritual anxiety. So that's one component; and part of the regenerative, or what Friedlander calls redemptive, violence of the Holocaust was directed at trying to eradicate that fear of contamination.

The way in which it was done is related to another dimension of sacrificialism, which in a secular context is very close to the sublime, and is a displacement of the sacred. It's a sort of secular sacred, related to something that goes beyond ordinary experience, and is almost, if not altogether, transcendent. Within the Nazi phenomenon you something like a fascination with unheard-of transgression, bound up with this fear of ritual contamination that led to behavior that is otherwise unintelligible: extremely cruel, at times gleeful, pleasure in the suffering of others; and scenes that are almost like those out of a carnival – scenes of bloody massacre, where people are elated at what is happening, and in ways that may be incomprehensible to them, themselves, if you start asking them about it, and that they may very well repress in later life.

So the intentionalists stress conscious policy, and there are aspects of ideology that may not be altogether conscious to the person, at least in terms of the way they operate. People may know what they're doing, in the sense that they're doing it. But what they're doing they may not entirely know, or why it's captivating for them. Again, one of the things that I evoke as a kind of proof text of this is Himmler's 1943 Posen speech. This is a speech that should be read very, very carefully as a document of Nazi ideology, which can be taken rather seriously because it wasn't meant simply as propaganda. It was addressed to upper-level SS people by someone in the know, to people in the know, in terms of an intimacy. At the beginning of the speech, Himmler actually says that on this occasion alone, the Nazi taboo on silence about what they're doing can be broken, and something can be told that otherwise will always be kept in secret. Then he goes on to explain what it is that they're involved in. Here, too, what the nature of scapegoating is, and how something is intelligible in scapegoating that may not be from another perspective, for example, the movement from expulsion to extermination.

Many historians have spent years on research trying to trace exactly when was the move from expulsion of the Jews to extermination of the Jews. That is an important problem, and in many ways, the movement from expulsion to extermination is a drastic difference, certainly for the people involved. But within the scapegoat mechanism, it can be a minute step, and a step quickly taken, because the basic problem within this frame of reference, where there is a certain horror at contamination by “the other,” is getting rid of “the other” – entfernen, in German. How this is done is more a secondary issue: It can be expulsion, it can be extermination, but the problem is the getting rid of. This is very much at play within Himmler's speech, where the expulsion and the extermination are separated only by a comma in the speech itself. Then Himmler goes on to give his understanding of what it is to be hard within Nazi ideology, what Nazi hardness is. In his own terms, it is a combination of two things that seem to be antithetical, bringing together the extremes of what would seem to be a binary opposition: remaining decent – anstaendig geblieben zu sein – morally beautiful, upright, while at the same time engaging in unheard-of transgression.

The way in which he expresses that is in terms of seeing 100, 500, 1,000 corpses lying side by side. He says that most of you [the SS officers] will understand what that means. This kind of endless expanse of corpses in a repetitive process of killing, repeating traumatic scenes of killing, is, in its own distorted way, the Kantian mathematical sublime, which increases geometrically. So you have the combination of these two seemingly antithetical things: the morally beautiful, remaining decent – and the typical cases given by other people are the German who loves his wife and family, goes home, is a wonderful family man, feeds his canary, loves his dog, and so forth, remaining morally upright. Being Biedermeier in your private life, and at the same time engaging in these incredibly unheard-of scenes of mass devastation, which is a kind of negative sublime, something that goes beyond ordinary experience and that most people would find utterly unbelievable.

That is the dimension of Nazi ideology in practice. It is significant, again, not to become fixated on, but to introduce, because it's probably the most difficult thing to understand. It's not difficult to understand how a person has a plan of extermination and tries to carry it out. It's not difficult to understand how bureaucracies function and have certain consequences, and how people try to do their job, and how you have little functionally rational technocrats who are trying to arrange demographic schemes. What's difficult to understand is that combined with other things that really seem out of place.

Most people who've discussed Daniel Goldhagen's book have not seen that as something he touches upon himself, but doesn't know how to explain. Goldhagen, in his book, gives many examples of almost carnivalesque glee in doing things that were not required by the situation, that were not functional. He, himself, cannot really explain this, and simply invokes, time and time again, the phrase“ eliminationist antisemitism.” This phrase becomes a kind of mantra that's never fully explicated, and it's also involved in a very rash generalization concerning all the German people for generations back, which is almost a stereotype of national character.

But what's significant in Goldhagen's enterprise is that there is a small, good book struggling to get out of the very big, dubious book. And that very small, good book provides documentation for an involvement in outlandish transgression and even taking a carnivalesque glee in the suffering of others that doesn't seem to be intelligible from any rational point of view. One has to try to approximate, at least, an understanding of why this was happening, because I don't think this was unique to the Germans, but was something that had happened elsewhere. What was distinctive to the Germans was the extent to which it went, and the way in which it was bound up with other things, such as more “rational” dimensions of behavior. But that's a possibility for virtually anyone, and one has to recognize that as a possibility for oneself. It's only with that that one has some chance of resisting even reduced analogues of certain kinds of behavior, including victimization in one's own experience.

But what's significant in Goldhagen's enterprise is that there is a small, good book struggling to get out of the very big, dubious book. And that very small, good book provides documentation for an involvement in outlandish transgression and even taking a carnivalesque glee in the suffering of others that doesn't seem to be intelligible from any rational point of view. One has to try to approximate, at least, an understanding of why this was happening, because I don't think this was unique to the Germans, but was something that had happened elsewhere. What was distinctive to the Germans was the extent to which it went, and the way in which it was bound up with other things, such as more “rational” dimensions of behavior. But that's a possibility for virtually anyone, and one has to recognize that as a possibility for oneself. It's only with that that one has some chance of resisting even reduced analogues of certain kinds of behavior, including victimization in one's own experience.

You mentioned that scapegoating is ubiquitous and not unique to the Holocaust. One still has to question, though, how a total mass murder such as the Shoah could take place.

That's right. What's different about the Nazis is the extent to which they went in their attempt to eliminate difference – that extent is paradoxically what made them different. And how can you possibly explain it? One can agree that that is distinctive, that with respect to the Jews (in contradistinction to the other groups of victims), the goal was the elimination, down to the last child, of this people anywhere in the world. That you would persecute them anywhere in the world, you would follow them anywhere in the world. This is obviously where Nazi policy became irrational with respect to its own goals: the extermination of the Jews might preempt economic or military considerations, so that when either a bureaucrat or a military leader in a certain area said, “Look, you want us to kill these people, these are skilled craftspeople, we absolutely need them for the war effort,” the answer they received was, “Look, you don't understand what's going on, you have to do this, even if it counters economic or military policy .”

How do you understand, or try to understand, that? I try to do so in terms of this problem of enemy brothers – there were so many ways in which German Jewry, and Germans, were extremely close culturally, in a lot of different ways. German Jews did not believe that their German culture, their German quality, could be denied them. The unpreparedness of German Jews was very much linked up with the extent to which they felt German, culturally. They could not believe what was happening to them.

One recent, and almost fantastic, example of this is the diaries of Victor Klemperer, who managed to survive the war, and who always believed that he was a good German. He even believed that the Germans were a chosen people, and that the Nazis were un-German; that he, himself, as a German Jew was German, and even part of the chosen people, whereas the Nazis were the un-Germans. And that's sort of the extreme limit of the sense of German Jewry, especially more assimilated German Jewry: that German Bildung was their Bildung. The apprehension on the part of the Nazis, including Hitler, was that indeed this was true. That's why it was so hard to bring about not only a distinction, but this utter and total difference between the German and the Jew, because that difference was so unbelievably implausible, given the cultural formation of the peoples, that they did indeed owe so much to each other, and were utterly hybridized as a people. The need to extirpate from oneself what is indeed a very intimate part of oneself leads to incredibly rash behavior. This is one aspect of it. This is, in a sense, the problem of enemy brothers, where the animosity came from the Germans (not initially from the Jews, obviously), but was flowing overwhelmingly in one direction, and the hostility – that kind of crazy desire to get rid of something that is very much part of yourself is like ripping organs from yourself.

Most of the Holocaust took place in Eastern Europe, where Jews were very removed from German culture. What is your explanation?

We'll come to this in a second. The big problem, from the Nazi point of view, was that of the Jew who could pass, and who in that sense was a kind of invisible presence that was presumably totally different, but whose difference could not be perceived. In the case of Eastern European Jewry, the differences could be perceived, and there you could have the stereotype acting as a kind of sledgehammer. How do you explain this? What happens in certain forms of extremist ideology based on scapegoating and a kind of sacrificialism is that you oppose “the other” for contradictory reasons, and that there can be no counter-evidence to the ideology. So the Jews were to be eliminated, both because they could pass, and because they were so utterly different that they could be immediately identified, just as they should be eliminated because they were both the bearers of capitalism and communism simultaneously; both the bearers of modernity (just like the Germans), and the bearers of anti-modernity and reaction, which the Germans wanted to overcome in themselves as well. There were elements of German society that were not altogether modern as well, that somehow had to be reconstructed in the German image.

The Holocaust as a Denial of Other Traumas

Don't you think that the over-emphasis on the Holocaust in the popular culture, the politics and the economics of America is some kind of denial of the traumas with which America is directly involved? These traumas (such as that of the African-Americans and the Native-Americans), are still relevant there, and America may be blinded to its present by emphasizing the traumas of others in the past.

I think that that's altogether possible. We can come back to America, but it's not altogether unique to Americans. I think that generally what happens (both in personal life and in collective life), is that one comes to focus on a given trauma when there may be other traumas that are more pressing. This often happens: that you look at an earlier trauma as a way of not looking too closely on contemporary traumas, or it could be other past traumas that are just coming to a full articulate voice at the present.

This happens in France. The French concern with Vichy is a way of displacing anxiety about Algeria and its aftermath. In Israel, how can the problem with the Palestinians, and Israeli / Palestinian relations, be displaced by a focus on the Holocaust? And in the United States, the way in which the heritage of slavery and of American Indians can also be obscured by a focus on the Holocaust. Someone has raised the question, somewhat rhetorically, of why, on the Mall in Washington, we have a Holocaust museum, but no museum dedicated to slavery or to the American Indians. After all, they were our victims and we were part of the forces that tried to combat the victimization of the Jews in Europe. So why are we commemorating that, rather than something that points more directly at our own involvement in dubious processes? This is a very good question. The answer is that people do indeed attempt to obscure or displace certain problems by focusing on other problems. This can happen; the point is to recognize it and try to resist it. But it doesn't mean that the Holocaust is not a significant problem, even in the United States.

It is interesting that throughout the world, with various timing, the direct interest in the Holocaust has been somewhat belated. Again, there was that initial rush of memoirs and diaries right after the war, and then, for varying periods of time, a great deal of repression, avoidance, and denial. And even today, what is also surprising to me in the United States is the number of historians of Germany (even of modern Germany, 20th-century Germany) who don't focus on the Holocaust, who don't work on the Holocaust as, at least, one of their research areas or teaching areas. I think there's pressure on people to do that now. One can say that what has happened to the Holocaust as a problem is that it has emerged from being ghettoized within Jewish history, and perhaps a subsection of German history, to become not only an important component of German history, but of European and world history.

At the present time, I think that people (certainly historians and other commentators) have recognized that, if you are trying to understand the 20th century and Western history in general, the Holocaust is a problem with which you, to some extent, have to be concerned in an informed way. This is why things like the Paul de Man and the Heidegger incidents were significant, in that they functioned almost as classical cases of psychoanalytic displacement. In terms of the history of the Holocaust, the de Man incident is worth a footnote – if that. The Heidegger case, if you're interested in philosophy, is important, but in the general history of the Holocaust, Heidegger is one figure – a somewhat significant figure that you might mention in a sentence, but that's about it. What is important is that many commentators (including very important figures, such as Derrida) started to address the Holocaust more directly in the aftermath of these incidents, so that it was these relatively small incidents that brought the larger problems into clearer focus.

When you re-read the early Derrida, you can argue (as has been done), that it often reads like an allusive, indirect survivor discourse, where the source of the problem is never mentioned. But somehow you have the inscription of the post-traumatic effects in the writing. You can read him in many other ways, but this is one interesting way. Even in the case of other people, earlier in their work there were allusions, analogies, but not sustained interest, and perhaps other smaller things triggered their interest. In my own case, it was not so much the de Man and Heidegger affairs – although they were significant – but the fact that Friedlander invited me to this conference that brought to my attention (not really as a cause, but an occasion), the necessity for greater reflection on something I had mentioned, that had been part of my awareness, but never a focus of attention.

I believe my case is rather typical, but what is important at the present time is that the problem itself has become an important one. And if you are studying the 20th century, or even Western history and its broader implications, it would be difficult to justify not discussing the Holocaust. The necessity is to discuss it in ways that don't allow it to serve diversionary functions, so that you can actually study the Holocaust. What I'll be doing a good deal of in the future is studying the origins of anthropology in the United States through a focus on the southwest, and the relationship between anthropologists and the American Indians in the southwest.

This is a problem that brings up question transference. Observer-participation is a question of transference, whether the anthropologist remains a scientist or goes native, or tries to work out some approach that is neither remaining a purely objective scientist, nor going native. That's a question of how you work through something like an implication in the object of study, or a transferential relation, and I think that the question of the anthropologist, the non-native anthropologist, in relation to the native population problem, also brings up all of these issues.

I tend to believe that, at the present time, the level of theoretical reflection is highest in Holocaust studies, because of both the intensity of the thought devoted to it and the array of figures who've taken it as an object of concern. There's a great deal there that is significant for research into other areas, including other genocides, or even policies that are in some sense like slavery. If slavery constitutes a genocide, it's a genocide over an extremely long period of time, with relations between masters and slaves not altogether the same as those between Nazis and victims. Slavery nonetheless presents, for a people, problems of oppression, a heritage, the question of a founding trauma, how they're forging identities in the present, and so forth.

The other thing is that one has to be able to study certain problems, even if one is a member of the population (either oppressed, or oppressing) that isn't totally within identity politics, but that tries to achieve some perspective on identity politics. One way (that I've come to see recently) in which you can define identity politics, is a form of thinking wherein research simply validates your beginning subject position. Through identity politics, your initial subject position remains firm, and if anything, through research is further strengthened. Yet the challenge of research is somehow to try to transform one's subject position, so that one doesn't end up where one began. If anything, I think that one of the great problems in research is that there is a grid of subject positions, and through processes of identification or distancing, one remains within that grid.

The grid of the Holocaust is one that you also see elsewhere. It involves the victim, the perpetrator, the bystander, the collaborator, the resister, and one born later – a bit of an elaboration on Hilberg's grid. This grid is an immensely strong one. It's very hard to try to elaborate a position whereby you don't simply find yourself identifying with one of those positions or simply combining certain positions. The challenge of research that is also an ethical and a philosophical challenge is trying to elaborate subject positions that don't simply fall within that grid, but that allow relations between people that are not beholden to victimization and the consequences of victimization. The question is whether there are possibilities that don't fall within a broadly conceived sacrificial mechanism that involves victimization of the other to achieve one's own identity.

Modernism, Post-modernism, and Rationality After the Holocaust

I want to ask you about rationality after Auschwitz. Why is it that the Holocaust has gained such prominence, such a centrality, in Western consciousness? What does it seem to be saying to us, and what lessons can we possibly learn from it?

The centrality of the Holocaust in Western consciousness is related to the kind of challenge it poses to certain forms of Western self-understanding. If we really believe that the West is the high point of civilization, and that there has been some development over time in the direction of increased sensitivity to suffering and injustice, and if we really do see the story of the West as that of enlightenment, then it's very difficult to come to terms with the Holocaust within that frame of reference.

Charles Taylor's book Sources of the Self has received a great deal of praise from people (including historians), and he does try to integrate the Holocaust into a kind of new Hegelian developmental account of the West, wherein the West is exceptional in its degree of enactment of justice, and in the prevalence of a concern about suffering. In certain ways, you can see that; but in other ways, it's a story that doesn't have full credibility.

I think that the shock of the Holocaust is its shock to an enlightened selfconsciousness. I tend to believe that there are two forms of rationality, as scholars from the Frankfurt School tried to argue. One is a form of instrumental rationality in the adaptation of means to ends. This is a kind of narrow, technical rationality. The other kind of rationality is a more substantive form, which is harder to define, and may even include emotional response or affect. Karl Mannheim is someone who is trying to struggle with this problem. In his case, in his own way, with his limitations, he tried to affirm a substantive rationality in a critique of a limited technical rationality. One of the dangers in Western self-consciousness has been to think that a technical rationality can solve all problems. We try to define things in terms of a technical solution, and often that simply doesn't work.

I also feel that if one is going to talk about enlightenment, one should include both forms of rationality. And that the critique of instrumental rationality (especially an instrumental rationality that becomes dominant, which is the kind of critique that Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer try to make, as well as Martin Heidegger, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and many others), which is important, should not be made to exclude the significance of a more substantive rationality that allows for emotional response as well. And one can affirm enlightenment as substantive rationality, and see that as one of the best ways to criticize a limited technical rationality. I also feel, however, that one doesn't simply begin with that. One cannot assume enlightenment as a presupposition, or as a basis for all forms of analysis. So there is something very limited when you start understanding the Holocaust only in terms of human dignity, and problems of human dignity, as if human dignity were simply there as a constant, and then you had to understand deviations from it. Perhaps one of the lessons of the Holocaust is that you cannot assume a respect for human dignity as something characteristic of human beings, but that within the Holocaust there was such an attempt to deprive victims of human dignity that it shatters the assumption that there's something like a common humanity binding people together.

This is something that Juergen Habermas said: that there was something that happened in the Holocaust that seemed to change the face of humanity; that something emerged that we didn't conceive of before, or that we were not able to expect. On the basis of that, I would tend to conclude that there is an argument to be made for enlightenment, not as an assumption but as something you strive for. And that you strive for in a way which understands it in terms of its complexity – as a kind of substantive rationality that you cannot simply define in a neat way. You can define technical rationality in a very neat way, in terms of the adjustment of means to ends, cost-benefit analysis and so forth, and this has become very prevalent, and it still is. The form of substantive rationality also has to be affirmed, not simply as an assumption, but as a goal.

I would also say that part of history and historical understanding that includes research, but is not restricted to it, is related to problems of enlightenment or substantive rationality. And that one of the goals of historiography (including historiography as working-through, and understanding working-through in the broadest way possible), is an attempt to restore to victims, insofar as possible, the dignity of which they were deprived by their oppressors. This is a very important component of historical understanding: to try, symbolically, to compensate for certain things that can never be fully compensated. One should see historical understanding as involving processes of workingthrough, in the broadest sense (that is to say, engaging in a discourse that is also a discourse of mourning, and that also involves critique – critique is also another form of working-through). The attempt to elaborate narratives that are not simply redemptive narratives, but more experimental, self-questioning narratives is also a form of working-through.

I tend to think that the essay, as an exploratory form of writing, is related to processes of working-through that are not simply coded in an entirely predictable way. If you understand this as a dimension of historiography, enlightenment in the broader sense, and working-through itself as part of the enlightenment process, the attempt to work through the past without denying our implication in it, and without denying the after-effects of trauma, is part of a broadly conceived enlightenment project. But an enlightenment project that understands the way in which it has been shattered on the level of taken-forgranted assumptions by recent events, and that can still postulate certain goals as desirable goals, and then see ways in which research can be related to these goals without undermining the nature of research itself.

This is one dimension of the study of the Holocaust that perhaps involves not only the greatest challenges to the enlightenment project, but also poses the question of how to reconstitute this project when it can no longer simply be taken as an assumption.

To what extent would you consider the Holocaust as the turning point between modernism and post-modernism?

For some people, the Holocaust can be seen as a kind of divider between modernism and post-modernism. And post-modernism can also be defined as post-Holocaust; there's a kind of intricate relationship between the two. On one level, this makes sense. It certainly is a fruitful way of trying to reread certain figures in the light of problems that have not been as foregrounded in our attempts to understand them. So within limits, this is interesting.

The other way you could formulate it is to see the post-Holocaust in terms of the post-traumatic, and how many forms of activity – such as writing, but also painting and even dance, or everything on a level of signification – have, in the postwar context, a kind of a post-traumatic dimension. Many forms of writing seem to be post-traumatic forms, which are coming to terms with the trauma that called them into existence in different ways.

But let's get back to the problem of narrative and redemption. Redemptive narrative is a narrative that denies the trauma that brought it into existence. And more experimental, non-redemptive narratives are narratives that are trying to come to terms with the trauma in a post-traumatic context, in ways that involve both acting-out and working-through. This is a way in which you can read a great deal of modern literature and art, as a kind of relatively safe haven in which to explore post-traumatic effects.

Once you come to that understanding of figures such as Samuel Beckett and Paul Celan (and, to some extent, Derrida and Lyotard on a more theoretical level), then you can go back to so-called modernist writers and also see the extent to which, in modernism itself, you can find these elements. Take Virginia Wolfe, for example. There's a sense in which Virginia Wolfe's writings – perhaps more in terms of personal crisis, but then also felt as a cultural crisis, both in terms of her own abuse as a child, and in terms of her sensitivity to the problematic nature of existence in post-WWI Europe – are also posttraumatic writings. And that what she writes is in no sense a conventional narrative, but one that both traces the effects of trauma and somehow, at least linguistically, tries to come to terms with those effects, so that they will not be entirely disabling. It is very interesting to read a novel such as To the Lighthouse within this frame of reference.

Thank you very much.

Source: The Multimedia CD 'Eclipse Of Humanity', Yad Vashem, Jerusalem 2000.