Social Theory After the Holocaust

zygmunt bauman
What the latter failed to accomplish when alive, they may yet hope to achieve
from the grave. They did not manage to turn the world against the Jews, but in
their graves they can still dream of turning the Jews against the world, and thus
– one way or another – to make the Jewish reconciliation with the world, their
peaceful cohabitation with the world, all the more difficult, if not downright
impossible. The prophecies of the Holocaust are not quite self-fulfilling, but they
do fulfil – render plausible – the prospect of a world in which the Holocaust may
never stop being prophesied, with all the deleterious and disastrous psychic,
cultural and political consequences which such prophecy is bound to bring forth
and propagate.
Can one exorcise the ghost of the Holocaust? A big question and a daunting
task no doubt. And a different one from making the world Holocaust-proof, although
the state of being possessed makes that other task yet more daunting. It is not
easy to write out a foolproof recipe for exorcism, and even if a medicine were
available, there would be no guarantee that the patient would swallow the
prescribed pills. Being possessed means seeing the world as one-dimensional.
The only dimension which the ghost of the Holocaust renders visible to the eyes
of the possessed (while effacing or removing from sight all other dimensions) is
that measured by the degree of Jew-resentment. The world, though, is multidimensional.
Jean-Paul Sartre proposed that the Jew is a person whom others define as a
Jew. What Sartre must have meant was that the act of such defining is also the
act of reductive selectiveness: one of the manifold traits of the irretrievably multifaceted
person is hereby given prominence, rendering all other traits irrelevant.
In the practice of the possessed, the Sartrean procedure is conducted once more,
though in the opposite direction. The others, the non-Jews, emerge as onedimensional
just as the Jews appear in the vision of their haters. For the
possessed, the others are not benign or cruel patri familiae, caring or selfish
husbands, benevolent or malicious bosses, good or bad citizens, peaceful or
pugnacious neighbours, oppressors or oppressed, pained or pain-inflicting,
privileged or dispossessed, threatening or threatened. More precisely, they may
be any or all of that, but the fact that they are all that and more is but of secondary
and minor importance and does not count for much. What truly counts –
perhaps the only thing that counts – is their attitude towards the Jews (and let
us recall that the stance taken towards every person who happens to be also a
Jew is read by the possessed as but a manifestation of the attitude taken towards
the Jews as such).
This is why it is so tremendously important to accept and remember that
many declared anti-semites stoutly refused to co-operate with the perpetrators
of the Holocaust, while the ranks of the executors were full of law-abiding
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