Social Theory After the Holocaust

obert fine
The human condition is not the same as human nature and the sum total of
human activities and capabilities which correspond to the human condition
does not constitute anything like human nature… The problem of human
nature…seems unanswerable… It is highly unlikely that we who can know,
determine and define the natural essences of all things surrounding us…
should ever be able to do the same for ourselves – this would be like jumping
over our own shadows.… Nothing entitles us to assume that man has a nature
or essence in the same sense as other things. 84
Bernstein argues that behind these words we may see Arendt’s abandonment of
the consolation that there is ‘something deep down in human beings that will
resist the totalitarian impulse to prove that “everything is possible”’. 85 The
spectre that the organised attempt to ‘eradicate the concept of the human being’
might succeed haunted Arendt, but her work also expresses the conviction that
in the modern age the idea of humanity has a persistence and a power that was
in this instance able to stand up to the supreme example of destructive will. The
endless activity of understanding which her work both defends and exemplifies
is one crucial aspect of this resistance.
Notes
1 Hannah Arendt, Essays in Understanding 1930–1954, New York: Harcourt Brace,
1994, p.302.
2 See also the important paper in this volume on the neglected works of H.G. Adler
by Jeremy Adler.
3 Gillian Rose, ‘Beginning of the Day: Fascism and Representation’, in Mourning
Becomes the Law: Philosophy and Representation, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1996, p.43. She was thinking of Adorno’s ‘after Auschwitz’, Holocaust theology, and
Jean-François Lyotard’s reading of ‘Auschwitz’ as the ‘differend’.
4 Ibid., p.43.
5 Arendt, Essays…, pp.307–27.
6 Quoted in J. Roth and M. Berenbaum, Holocaust: Religious and Philosophical
Implications, New York: Paragon House, 1989, p.2.
7 Jean-François Lyotard, The Differend: Phrases in Dispute, Manchester: Manchester
University Press, 1988, p.56.
8 See also Hayden White, ‘The Politics of Interpretation: Discipline and De-
Sublimation’, Critical Inquiry Vol.9, No.1, Sept 1982.
9 Arendt, Essays…, p.316.
10 Ibid., p.233.
11 Ibid., p.234.
12 Ibid., p.236.
13 Ibid., p.308.
14 Primo Levi, If this is a Man, London: Abacus, 1995 and The Drowned and the Saved,
London: Abacus, 1988; Tadeusz Borowski, This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen,
New York: Penguin, 1976.
15 Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, New York: Harvest, 1976, p.442.
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