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This paper discusses the challenges posed by the Holocaust and its representations to the practices of the Humanities. The nature of these challenges is brought through an examination of the German Historikerstreit and the French controversies surrounding Heidegger’s relation to the Nazis. The nature of historical representation and its relation to affect are examined in works by Jacques Derrida, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, and Jean-Francois Lyotard. The Humanities cannot appropriate the Holocaust but they cannot ignore it either. They face the daunting task of learning how to remember it.
January 2009: Wlad Godzich is Professor of General and Comparative Literature, and Critical Studies in the Department of Literature at the University of California at Santa Cruz. He has taught at Columbia, Yale, the University of Minnesota, l’Université de Montréal, the University of Toronto, and l’Université de Genève. He has written extensively on the theory of literature and on emergent literature. He is currently exploring the significance of the rise of a knowledge driven society. His books include The Culture of Literacy (1994).
