ABSTRACT
This is an essay about two legacies, the legacy of Derrida’s thought and the legacy of the Holocaust. These two are interwoven and, I suggest, throw each other into relief. There are many ways in which the events of 1933-45 are passed down to the present. Indeed, the memory of the Holocaust has gone deeper than can easily be traced. Philipe Lacoue-Labarthe writes that it ‘never ceases to haunt modern consciousness as a sort of endlessly latent “potentiality”, both stored away and yet constantly at hand within our societies’.1 Its legacy is present in the lives of the dwindling numbers of survivors and their families. It is there in forms of historical cultural production including archives, works by historians, museums and memorial days. It is present in the written or filmed testimonies of survivors, texts that we are still learning how to read, which ‘make us encounter … strangeness’ and that show us that ‘we do not even know what testimony is and that, in any case, it is not simply what we thought we knew it was’.2 It also has a presence in the wider public sphere, in global juridical traditions, in the United Nations definition of genocide, and in the tradition of international courts of human rights and of war crimes. More than this, debates over ‘ethnic cleansing’, human rights and the treatment of refugees and asylum-seekers are all shaped by the memory of the Holocaust. Becoming more diffuse still, debates over genetics, too, and much of the interpretation of Darwin’s legacy take place under the shadow of the Holocaust. Indeed, all the discourses that already presuppose ideas of who we take ourselves to be, questions of representation and of ethics, are interwoven with the Holocaust. This legacy has become very wide indeed.
