ABSTRACT
To forestall misunderstanding: this essay does not contest the need for comparative research on totalitarianisms. Quite the contrary. Its author, who received his training in comparative literature, belongs to a research group whose efforts to pursue such work have in recent years met with considerable ostracism on the French intellectual scene.1 We have been accused of comparing the incomparable, of trivializing (banaliser), and thereby of denying, the Shoah – a charge which leaves itself open in turn to that of marginalizing other genocides.2 There is presumably no longer any need to rehearse that sterile debate, or to argue that the ‘uniqueness of the Shoah’, indisputable though it is, has also served as an untenable and intolerable ideology,3 or that ‘uniqueness’ and ‘comparison’, far from being mutually exclusive, presuppose one another. At this point in the ongoing discussion of the mass atrocities of the twentieth century, the necessity of making cognitive distinctions between totalitarianisms, and the accompanying unavoidability of making moral distinctions between them, can surely be taken for granted.
