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Notes
P. Levi, Survival in Auschwitz (New York: Touchstone, 1996), p. 60.
C. Delbo, Auschwitz and After, trans. R. C. Lamont (New Haven and London: Yale, 1995), p. x, and Days and Memory, trans. R. Lamont (Evanston, Il: Northwestern, 1990), p. vii. Strictly translated as ‘It must be given to see,’ I will follow Lawrence Langer in translating ‘Il faut donner à voir’ as ‘They must be made to see’ [L. Langer, “Introduction” in C. Delbo, Auschwitz and After, trans. R. C. Lamont (New Haven and London: Yale, 1995), p. x]. Both the strict and the interpretative translations are consistent with how Delbo herself used the phrase, and both capture important aspects of her apparent meaning.
L. Langer, Preempting the Holocaust (New Haven and London: Yale, 1998), p. 78. The Holocaust is not the only such event, of course, though it is perhaps the paradigmatic instance. One finds similar tensions in the testimony of soldiers returning home from war, and among survivors of sexual assault and domestic violence.
J. L. Herman, Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence from Domestic Abuse to Political Terror (New York: Basic, 1992), p. 92.
As Delbo herself once wrote: “You who are passing by | well dressed in your muscles | clothing that suits you so well | … how can we forgive you for being alive?” [C. Delbo, Auschwitz and After, trans. R. C. Lamont (New Haven and London: Yale, 1995), p. 229.].
L. Langer, Preempting the Holocaust (New Haven and London: Yale, 1998), p. 64, my emphasis.
D. Magurshak, “The Incomprehensibility of the Holocaust: Tightening Up Some Loose Usage,” Judaism 29/2 (1980), p. 234.
Ibid., p. 234.
Ibid., p. 235.
L. Langer, Preempting the Holocaust (New Haven and London: Yale, 1998), p. 65.
A. C. McFarlane; B. A. van der Kolk, “Trauma and Its Challenge to Society” in B. A. van der Kolk; A. C. McFarlane; L. Weisaeth, Traumatic Stress: The Effects of Overwhelming Experience on Mind, Body, and Society (New York and London: Guilford, 1996), p. 35, my emphasis.
R. Janoff-Bulman, Shattered Assumptions: Toward a New Psychology of Trauma (New York: Free Press, 1992), pp. 3–25.
There are, of course, exceptions to this claim. For example, individuals meeting the diagnostic criteria of certain psychiatric disorders do appear to genuinely see their day-to-day world as a fundamentally malevolent and inhospitable place.
A. C. McFarlane; B. A. van der Kolk, “Trauma and Its Challenge to Society” in B. A. van der Kolk; A. C. McFarlane; L. Weisaeth, Traumatic Stress: The Effects of Overwhelming Experience on Mind, Body, and Society (New York and London: Guilford, 1996), p. 28.
We take ourselves to act, in other words, under ‘the guise of the good’ [See R. J. Velleman, “The Guise of the Good,” Nous 26 (1992), pp. 3–26.].
See J. P. Sartre, Being and Nothingness, trans. H. E. Barnes (New York: Washington Square Press, 1992), pp. 86–116.
H. Lindemann Nelson, Damaged Identities, Narrative Repair (Ithaca and London: Cornell, 2001), p. 147.
Ibid., p. 148.
R. Janoff-Bulman, Shattered Assumptions: Toward a New Psychology of Trauma (New York: Free Press, 1992), pp. 5 and 147 respectively.
As both Janoff-Bulman and McFarlane & van der Kolk point out, the just world theory needs to be assessed in terms of social and cultural location. Citing Buddhism, with its stark assessment of life as suffering, both observe that it will be important to assess the impact that a different, fundamentally less optimistic cultural and religious worldview might have on the phenomena encountered. Some social and cultural locations appearing to be more deeply vested in or resistant to “the facts” than others, it seems reasonable to expect that factors like class, gender, race, and religion can at a minimum mitigate how the just world theory and related phenomena manifest and are expressed. There are many questions here that will need to be addressed.
J. Shay, Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character (New York: Atheneum, 1994), p. 194.
See S. Friedländer, Nazi Germany and the Jews, Vol.1: The Years of Persecution, 1933–1939 (New York: Harper Collins, 1997), p. 33, 342n114.
Ibid., pp. 9–27.
Ibid., p. 9.
In fact, there is considerable evidence to support the conclusion that not even the architects of the Holocaust themselves had consciously arrived at their “final solution” beforehand. See, e.g., C. R. Browning, The Origins of the Final Solution: The Evolution of Nazi Jewish Policy September 1939–March 1942 (Lincoln: Nebraska and Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2004).
W. Laqueur, The Terrible Secret: Suppression of the Truth about Hitler’s Final Solution (Boston and Toronto: Little, Brown & Co, 1980), p. 7.
J. Katz, “Was the Holocaust Predictable?” Commentary (May 1975), p. 42.
V. J. Barnett, Bystanders: Conscience and Complicity During the Holocaust (Westport, CT and London, Greenwood, 1999), p. 51.
Ibid., p. 51.
Ibid., p. 52.
P. Hallie, Lest Innocent Blood Be Shed (New York: Harper & Row, 1979).
J. Kekes, Facing Evil (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton, 1993), pp. 106–123.
P. Levi, Survival in Auschwitz (New York: Touchstone, 1996), p. 60.
See e.g., P. Levi, “The Memory of the Offense” in The Drowned and the Saved (New York: Vintage, 1988), pp. 23–35.
J. L. Herman, Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence from Domestic Abuse to Political Terror (New York: Basic, 1992), p. 8.
L. Eitringer, “The Concentration Camp Syndrome and Its Late Sequelae,” in Survivors, Victims and Perpetrators: Essays on the Nazi Holocaust, ed. J. E. Dimdale (New York: Hemisphere, 1980), p. 159.
Ibid., p. 159.
S. J. Brison, Aftermath: Violence and the Remaking of a Self (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton, 2002), p. 62.
J. Williams; K. Holmes, The Second Assault: Rape and Public Attitudes (Westport, CT and London: Greenwood, 1981), p. 18.
This claim gives rise to an important question seldom explored in the literature thus far: To what extent is the suffering and impoverishment that victims characteristically endure a direct result of the traumatic events themselves, and to what extent are they the result of real failures on the part of the community as a whole to share in, and thereby substantially mitigate, what is an otherwise overwhelming burden? Put another way, in the aftermath—insofar as real acknowledgment, communalization, and concerted effort to rectify the situation are absent—to what extent are the pervasive anger and mistrust [what Jean Améry once unapologetically called “resentment”] that often characterize the victim’s response to those around them both justified and proportionally appropriate? See J. Améry, At the Mind’s Limits: Contemplations by a Survivor on Auschwitz and Its Realities, trans. S. Rosenfeld; S. P. Rosenfeld (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana, 1980), pp. 62–81.
L. Langer, Admitting the Holocaust: Collected Essays (New York and Oxford: Oxford, 1995), p. 8.
Jennifer Geddes is optimistic this can be done: “By acknowledging the limitations to our knowledge of suffering due to the fact that we are outsiders, by recognizing our temptations to “redeem” suffering—to try to find some good that can come out of it—and by listening to those who have suffered evil in a way that reshapes our preconceptions, we can begin to “see” in the ways Delbo strove to make us see” [J. L. Geddes, “Banal Evil and Useless Knowledge: Hannah Arendt and Charlotte Delbo on Evil after the Holocaust.” Hypatia 18/1 (2003), p. 113.]. As I have tried to show here, consciousness of evil is a more tenuous enterprise than Geddes appears to allow.
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Acknowledgments to Linda Martín Alcoff, Michael Stocker, Margaret Urban Walker, and an anonymous reviewer for The Journal of Value Inquiry for helpful comments on previous drafts of this paper.
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Prescott, P. Unthinkable ≠ Unknowable: On Charlotte Delbo’s ‘II Faut Donner à Voir’. J Value Inquiry 48, 457–468 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10790-014-9431-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10790-014-9431-3