CRITICAL RESPONSE: II

Spring 2002
Volume 28, Number 3

Excerpt from
Response to Marianna Torgovnick
by Shoshana Felman

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"Concerning our collective memories, and in other aspects of collective consciousness, most of us are pretty conformist and take our cues from others," writes historian Peter Novick.1 Thus Marianna Torgovnick takes her cues from Peter Novick in identifying in my essay "what Novick calls 'the sacralization of the Holocaust' as the central point of modern Jewish identity". But this is a misreading. My article, entitled "Theaters of Justice: Arendt in Jerusalem, the Eichmann Trial, and the Redefinition of Legal Meaning in the Wake of the Holocaust" (Critical Inquiry 27 [Winter 2001]: 201-38), is not primarily about Jewish identity: the question of identity is incidental to the larger question of the trial's philosophical displacement of the victim's role in history and in the world. What is at stake is an emerging, new twentieth-century relationship between trauma and justice. My study is concerned with this redefinition of the meaning of the law in the wake of the Second World War. This central philosophical concern is of universalist (not of particularist) dimensions.

The trouble with current debates about the Holocaust is that they attach themselves to code words, to ready-made patterns of thought dependant on stereotypical clichés. Thus Marianna Torgovnick, citing my words in isolation from their context and in extrapolation from pseudo-recognizable, stereotypically encoded meanings, blames me for my less-than-vigilant "vocabulary," for my disturbing "use of terms" such as "myths," "folktale" and "sacred". Let me address these point by point.

[...]

I agree with Novick and Torgovnick that it is dangerous and undesirable to sanctify the Holocaust. I have myself written about the film Shoah by Claude Lanzamnn that it is one of the greatest works of art of our time and one of the most powerful works about the Holocaust precisely because it "is the story of the liberation of the testimony through its desacralization; the story of the decanonization of the Holocaust for the sake of its previously impossible historicization.?"3 I do not consider Auschwitz holy. I object to the politicizing of the Holocaust and do not view the Jewish State as set apart from criticism. I do not hold a cult of suffering or "the cult of the survivor as secular saint" (H, p. 11).

But I will also not taboo the term "sacred" in order to appear "politically correct" or absolutely fit into the Dictionary of Received Ideas.

I have borrowed the notion of the tension between the legal and the sacred (and the dialectic between them) from the brilliant legal philosopher Robert Cover. For Cover, the sacred is related to the capacity of law to create a tradition and be bound by (an ethical) tradition, while fulfilling yet also transcending the mere bureaucratic, positivist imperative of adherence to legal procedures and rules. Integrity in judges, Cover writes, "is the act of maintaining the vision that it is only that which redeems which is law."

In this theory [Cover explains], law is neither to be wholly identified with the understanding of the present state of affairs nor the imagined alternatives. It is the bridge. . . .
I have argued [insists Cover] not only that the nature of law is a bridge to the future, but also that each community builds its bridges with the materials of sacred narrative that take as their subject much more than what is commonly conceived of as the 'legal.' The only way to segregate the legally relevant narrative from the general domain of sacred texts would be to trivialize the 'legal' into a specialized subset of business or bureaucratic transactions.4

In this spirit, I have written that "the Eichmann trial . . . was a singular event of law that, . . . through its monumental legal chorus of the testimonies of the persecuted, unwittingly became creative of a canonical or sacred narrative" (p. 236). As in Cover, the sacred points to the place in which the law receives an additional dimension which transcends mere legal positivism and which is bound up with something like the soul of culture, even while it projects a new legal meaning into the future.

Marianna Torgovnick equates my saying that the Eichmann trial has "unwittingly created a canonical or sacred narrative" with my saying that the Holocaust is sacred and that it should be canonized, but I have said nothing of the sort: canonization of the Holocaust and my interpretation of the trial's creation of a canonical narrative are two very different things.

Canonical here means nothing else than that this narrative--the victims' narrative-- was suddenly received, had an effect upon the world, got registered, became part of a new oral tradition.

Examining the trial's transformation of victims into prosecution witnesses and the conceptual revolution in the victim that the trial has thereby embodied and effected, I analyzed the victim-oriented focus of the trial as a legal process of translation of private traumas into public ones, and as a revolutionary public scene of the recovery of language and of the recovery of legal subjecthood, by victims who were formerly defined by the oppressor's language and who were, therefore, not just injured, but essentially robbed of a language in which to articulate their injury and name their own victimization. I argued that the Eichmann trial expanded the space available for moral deliberation in creating a new legal language: the trial was the victims' trial only insofar as it was now the victims who, against all odds, were precisely (through the trial) writing their own history.

The victim's role by definition had been silenced and erased by history. As a revolutionary theater of justice, the Eichmann trial, in contrast, has dramatically created the newborn capacity of victims to recover language. It is in this sense that the trial has become canonical: as a creator of the victim's speech against the victim's silence and against the victim's history as silencing.

This does not mean that the Holocaust is canonized or sacralized. What becomes canonical and what can be said to be "sacred" is the victim's right to (a recovered) subjecthood and speech, and the newly gained historical authority of the victim's speech.

This does not render the victim sacred. It renders sacred our own obligation to listen to the victim, to strive to take cognizance of victimization wherever it might be and to help redeem it from its silence.

What is sacred, finally, is not the Holocaust but the assertion and the reassertion of the value of a single human life, the commandment against murder of which the ritual of the trial is the cultural reconsecration.

As I have written in a footnote quoting Derrida on Benjamin, "what makes for the worth of man [what makes for man's sacrality]. . . is that he contains [precisely] the potential, the possibility of justice" (p. 236 n. 59).

1. Peter Novick, The Holocaust in American Life (Boston, 2000), pp. 5-6; hereafter abbreviated H.

3. Shoshana Felman, "The Return of the Voice: Claude Lanzmann's Shoah," in Felman and Dori Laub, Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis and History (New York, 1992), p. 219; italics added.

4. Robert Cover, "The Folktales of Justice: Tales of Jurisdiction," Narrative, Violence, and the Law: The Essays of Robert Cover, ed. Martha Minow, Michael Ryan, and Austin Sarat (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1992), pp. 201, 176-77.