The Historiography of the Holocaust

484 Josh Cohen
religion must perpetually ‘sober itself up’, with a sobriety ‘always yet to be
further sobered’. 25
Levinas’s expansive body of writings on Judaism subjects all of its key terms
to this sobering up, divesting them of every association with eschatological
finality or resolution. Nowhere is this dissociation more striking than in his
scattered writings on the question of the messianic. Levinas offers a clear
summation of his thought on this question in an interview with Richard Kearney:
‘I could not accept a messianism that would terminate the need for discussion,
that would end our watchfulness.’ 26 The messianic, far from signifying a
substantive empirical being or event, would be the principle which prevents
moral responsibility from coming to an end. ‘Messianism,’ he writes, ‘is...not
the certainty of the coming of a man who stops History. It is my power to bear
the suffering of all.’ 27 This power is the condition for what Levinas will later
call a religion that ‘does not begin in promise’, a religion ‘impossible to
preach’, in which we may recognize ‘the difficult piety – all the certainties and
personal risks – of the twentieth century, after the horrors of its genocides and
its Holocaust.’ 28
The Holocaust, in other words, is what prevents the construal of the Messiah
as the ultimate redeemer of History, a figure who would impose a final resolution
on the question of morality. It demands instead a vision of the messianic
as that which perpetuates and keeps open this question.
Such a messianism is found above all in the interpretative practices of rabbinism.
The Talmudic hermeneutic, at least as Levinas reads it, is an awakening
of language to what perpetually exceeds its reach, drawing reading and writing
into a mode of ‘infinition’, of constitutive incompletion.
Adornian art and Levinasian religion have thus revealed a possibility for the
future of philosophy after Auschwitz which escapes the temptation to redeem
the horror of the camps without lapsing into nihilistic despair. Where, as we have
seen, the major North American Jewish philosophers have tended to draw the
Holocaust into one or other narrative of redemption, European philosophers
have rather unsparingly fractured all such narratives. Philosophy after Auschwitz
continues to be faced with the dilemma we have sought to explore in this
chapter: how to continue thinking without yielding to the temptations of false
consolation.
Notes
1 J. Bernstein, The Fate of Art: Aesthetic Alienation from Kant to Derrida (Oxford: Blackwell,
1992), pp. 6–8.
2 Other significant thinkers in this tradition include Ignaz Maybaum and Arthur
A. Cohen. The former, a German-born British Reform rabbi, articulates perhaps the
most extreme version of the second position, seeing the Holocaust as a sacrifice
through which God brings His people to spiritual and historical maturity. The latter,