ABSTRACT
The 30 anniversary of the publication of Modernity and the Holocaust is an opportunity to reacquaint ourselves with the radical nature of this book. By decontextualising the Holocaust from the prevailing scholarship (including the arguments of uniqueness, civilisation versus barbarity, the history of antisemitism, and so on) and recontextualising it within the bureaucratic and technocratic structures of modernity and their effects on our moral compass, Bauman set the path for the more recent discussions on ‘invisible’ systemic forms of racism, the tension between horror and the everyday, and the problematic nature of the binary oppositions between guilt and innocence, and perpetrators and victims. In this chapter, I will trace the links between Bauman’s argument and what Griselda Pollock and I have discussed through a series of four books on the concept of ‘the concentrationary’. As defined by returning French deportees to the camps David Rousset (the concentrationary universe) and Jean Cayrol (concentrationary or Lazarean art), ‘the concentrationary’ refers not only to the Nazi camps themselves but to a whole system of terror and systematic dehumanisation of which, as Hannah Arendt said, ‘the concentration camps are the most consequential institution’. Viewed in this way, the concentrationary did not disappear with the liberation of the camps and the defeat of Nazism but permeates post-war ‘normal’ life in invisible ways. It is in this sense of the continued but hidden presence of what Cayrol called ‘the concentrationary plague’ in everyday life and the need for constant vigilance of its ruses that, I believe, we can locate the real force of Bauman’s argument in Modernity and the Holocaust.
