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Article Excerpt
This essay explores Levinas's understanding of memory as it is connected to the Holocaust in the dedications to Otherwise than Being. Post-Holocaust memory is dependent upon writing oriented toward a future, not an irrecuperable, immemorial event. It is from this theory of "forgetful memory" that there emerges a post-Holocaust ethics.
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Names [...] seem remainders, each one, of another language, both disappeared and never yet pronounced, a language we cannot even attempt to restore without reintroducing these names back into the world, or exalting them to some higher world of which in their external, clandestine solitude, they could only be the irregular interruption, the invisible retreat. --Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster
In the front matter of Emmanuel Levinas's most mature philosophical work, Otherwise than Being, the reader will find a dedication to the memory of the six million victims of the Holocaust, and to the six members of his family who remained in Lithuania during the war and were killed either by the Nazi Einsatzgruppen who followed the Wehrmacht during the invasion of the Soviet Union, or by pro-Nazi Lithuanian anti-Semites. This should not be surprising, since Levinas refers to the Holocaust in his writing fairly frequently, at times obliquely and at other times--particularly in his essays on Judaism and on history (the work collected in Difficult Freedom and the book In the Time of the Nations)--more explicitly. In all his work, the Holocaust seems to press on Levinas as a memory, as a trace of what has receded irrecuperably into the past. In "Signature," the essay that closes Difficult Freedom, he writes that his biography "is dominated by the presentiment and the memory of the Nazi horror" (291). To cite just two examples, the essay that concludes Proper Names functions as an extended metaphor of the conditions that led to the annihilation of European Jews in the name of Volksgemeinschaft; and "The Name of a Dog; or, Natural Rights" (in Difficult Freedom) is a recollection of Levinas's internment in camp 1492, in which his nameless condition--in which he was "stripped [...] of [his] human skin" (153)--was paradigmatic of the anonymity of the subject. The connection between the ethics established in Levinas's writing and the Holocaust has been well established by writers such as Colin Davis, Jacob Meskin, and Robert Eaglestone, among others.
My point in this essay, however, is not to join those who wish to connect Levinas's philosophy to the Holocaust. Instead, it is to make clear how Levinas's notion of ethics is inextricably linked to a notion of the memory--or perhaps more specifically, of the tension between memory and forgetting--tied to the disaster of the Holocaust. I will argue that Levinas establishes a theory of post-Holocaust memory, though it is a forgetful memory, that works through writing oriented toward a future, rather than toward the irrecuperable, immemorial event. Levinas juxtaposes memory as mneme and memory as anamnesis--memory as a fullness of time and memory as a rupture of time--and the result is that mneme and anamnesis fall "out of phase with one another," yielding a trace or an excess of memory. At the moment in which memory and the event are dissociated, the witness is forced into language, to speak a memory that is not a memory at all. The witness produces not so much an account of events (a testimony) as an account of the rupture of language and the void of memory.
Memory after Auschwitz weighs heavily on Levinas in the dedication page of Otherwise than Being (see, for three examples, Trezise 358; Eaglestone, Holocaust 254; Herzog 342-43). The two dedications that appear there, related in their scope but very different in their language and their willingness to name individuals, indicate two memories, two ways of remembering. Between these two dedications is a trace of memory, a notion that is integral to the task of living--and of bearing witness--after the Holocaust. I want to spend some time with these dedications, because it seems to me they mark, in palimpsest, the relation between naming, post-Holocaust memory, and ethics that is foundational to Levinas.
The first dedication, which appears at the top of the page in French (and is translated into English in the book's American edition), reads as follows: "To the memory of those who were closest among the six million assassinated by the National Socialists, and of the millions on millions of all confessions and all nations, victims of the same hatred of the other man, the same antisemitism" (v). The second, which appears at the bottom of the page, is in Hebrew, and is untranslated. It begins with the word for the imperative to remember, l'zachor, reads in part, "To the memory of the spirit of my father, Yehiel, son of Avraham Halevi, my mother Devorah, daughter of Moshe," goes on to name his two brothers and his wife's mother and father, and ends with the abbreviation--found on many tombstones in Jewish cemeteries--that stands for the imprecation, "May their souls be bound up in the bond of eternal life." Those closest to Levinas, members of his family, are named only in the second dedication, and then, only in Hebrew. And the two dedications also reflect distinct traditions--one European and secular, one Jewish and religious--and, thus, two distinct manners of saying: one that is comfortable with the well-worn terms "six million," "hatred," "National Socialists," and "anti-semitism," and another that refuses the political in favour of the heimish, a manner of speaking that is as intimate as a blessing in a synagogue. In these two dedications reside two distinct memories, two attempts to remember and to speak memory. Yet in neither one of them can the reader see or recall those individuals invoked by Levinas. In speaking their names in a manner that disrupts the act of naming by forcing together two languages and two traditions that do not fit neatly together, the dedications indicate a site of the immemorial.
In these dedications, Levinas gives a palpable presence both to the names that are substituted for the events of history and the effect of the events themselves; to what has been written and what is "antecedent to the verbal signs it conjugates, to the linguistic systems and the semantic glimmerings," a "foreword preceding languages" (5). The antecedent or foreword of history--as in the case of the foreword whose language precedes the text--is made present for the witness or reader, but not as knowledge. Events occur in the presence of the witness, the witness sees the events, but what happens precedes the witness's ability to say what happened, to transform the event into experience, and to provide a means...
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