Language:
English
Year of publication:
1998
Titel der Quelle:
Postmodernism and the Holocaust
Angaben zur Quelle:
(1998) 265-286
Keywords:
Derrida, Jacques
;
Holocaust (Jewish theology)
;
Good and evil Religious aspects
;
Judaism
;
Good and evil Philosophy
Abstract:
Demonstrates the peculiar configurations of presence and absence through which the Jewish experience of the Holocaust haunts the writings of Jacques Derrida, even though he does not generally address the Holocaust directly. Refers to subjects found in his works such as exile, deportation, displacement, dispersal, a history of racism, essentialism, cultural purity, violence, and the obligation to engage hermeneutics and undertake deconstruction of seemingly settled meaning by opening thought to the unthinkable. Queries why Derrida has relied on cinders, traces, and shadows as a way to remember the Holocaust, replying that for him there can be no adequate representation of the meaning of the Holocaust: its all-burning nihilism creates an emptiness, a silence, a space of horror so dead, so inimical to life that not even allegory can reach and retrieve it.
Note:
Appeared also in the "International Philosophical Quarterly" 43,3 (2003).
URL:
Locate this publication in Israeli libraries
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