ABSTRACT
As a totality and as a concept, the Shoah is incomprehensible, we cannot claim to understand it. Before the task of explanation, the disciplines of history, the social sciences, and psychoanalysis must throw up their hands in despair. The Shoah forces historians to confront the limits of representation. As Saul Friedlander put it, “Even the most precise historical renditions of the Shoah contain an opaqueness at the core which confronts traditional historical narrative”. 1 Dominic LaCapra writes: “I do not think that conventional techniques, which in certain respects are necessary, are ever sufficient, and to some extent the study of the Holocaust may help us to reconsider the requirements of historiography in general”. 2 Conceptualization, if not representation, is necessary and possible. It is so within the classic armamentarium of Western humane letters, psychoanalysis, and social science theory.
