Word: holocaust
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LEONARD JEFFRIES WILL come to Harvard on Wednesday fresh from a conference this past weekend on Holocaust "revisionism...
...dead burned in the Nazi ovens with a force competing for the soul of Germany. Derrida talks of wanting the only phrase worth publishing, "an 'up to date' phrase" (recalling the dates of "Shibboleth"). He wants a phrase that "would tell of the all-burning, otherwise called holocaust, and the crematory oven, in German in all the Jewish languages of the world...
When Theodor Adorno read Celan's poem, he proclaimed that "After Auschwitz, poetry is barbaric." The problem, he felt, was that it was impossible to talk about the Holocaust without depriving it of its meaning, its force, its incomprehensibility. But he also knew it was impossible not to talk about the Holocaust and that doing so was to side with those who did nothing to stop it, with the people who claimed to have no idea of the camps just over the hill...
Derrida's Cinders is an answer to Adorno's problem, and, to may mind, a better one. Adorno himself never came to a firm conclusion about what to do, about how to speak properly for these dead, but, in effect, he did. By summarizing the Holocaust as "Auschwitz," Adorno was able to reduce the ethics of surviving to an aphorism--neat and tidy and quotable...
...second answer is that there is no proper name for "the all-burning, otherwise called holocaust," there are only cinderwords. And those words, if they could be found, make it impossible to appropriate synecdochically the Holocaust so as to deny it to a poet who drank the black milk of his own family...