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JUDITH BUTLER. TRAUMA AND THE HOLOCAUST.

Judith Butler."Trauma and the Holocaust." in: European Graduate School

Lecture.2006. Transcribed by Deneige Nadeau, (English).

Which is why waking from trauma is the only way to forestall its endless reiteration.

Indeed in this way, we might say that trauma presents us with a specific responsibility precisely

because it threatens to render us ceaselessly as pure victims who can not take responsibility for

the conditions that we impose upon others. And, although trauma can not be willed away, I think it

can to certain extent be worked with, to the extent that we can become mindful of the way which it

threatens to absorb the present into the past while reenact the past as the present and so,

bypasses the presence of a historical distance the interval that we needed to reflect and consider

the best way in which we can create history now in light of such a past.

If we can we return to the scene in Gaza for a moment, I think we can discern something

of the difficulties of this task. Some Israeli Jews compelled to evacuate their homes insisted upon

constructing memorials of their lives in Gaza modeled on holocaust memorials. This is in Certeau's

view, a sanctification of the holocaust that evades its reality and produces it as a political clich.

Yet other Jews in Israel and the diaspora clearly understand that the holocaust taught them to care

about social justice and disenfranchisement of people and the violence and the danger of

unchecked militarization. The difference between such groups is also mistakes of nationhood and

nationalism. Since for some, like ... in Israel and ... Palestinian human rights activist, the only way

to a just peace is for both sides to live to their side of their nationalisms resisting the pathos of thenationalism itself.

Interestingly it was Edward Said who claims that in the diasporic idea of Judaism in his

book Freud and the Non European", that in this idea of a diasporic Judaism one can find

reference to a Judaism that makes alliance with, that seeks and supports solidarity with, those in

our age who suffer vast population transfers, with refugees, exiles, ex-patriots, and immigrants.

And he further characterizes this diasporic Judaism as the diasporic wandering, unresolved

cosmopolitan consciousness of someone who is both inside and outside his or her community.

Said finds there, at the origin of Judaism which of course he elaborates upon in the book, very

interestingly as being inaugurated by Moses, an Egyptian, a non European, and how important it is

that Judaism is founded by an Egyptian. And, in understanding this he suggests that at the origin of

Judaism there is a mixing with otherness, a question of ethical contact, a question of living in

proximity with a non Jew, since not all Egyptians will be Jews, not all Jews will be Egyptians. So

there is the chiasmic link there to the figure of Moses. And, he even goes so far as to tell us that

living in proximity with a non Jew is constitutive of what it means to be a Jew, so here is Said telling

us what Judaism is. The strength of this thought, the non Jew as it were founding us once again,

the strength of this thought he tells us is that it can be articulated in and speak to other beseeched

identities as well as a troubling disabling destabilizing secular wound.

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formulation from La Repubblica that interviewer asked are Palestinians in the same position that

Jews under the Nazis. He replied that he didnt accept such simplistic analogies and there was no

policy that he knew of to exterminate the Palestinians. When, after Sabra and Shatilla he joined

with other Jewish intellectuals to ask both Begin and Sharon to resign. He was also horrified by the

anti Semitic slogans that suddenly appeared on the walls of his town Turin equating Jews with

Nazis. These words came back to him on the walls of the town and he was I daresay flooded with

remorse.

This was, for him, a radically untenable situation and it produced for him a conflict, could

he continue to elaborate those principles as he understood them derived from his experience of

Auschwitz to condemn state violence without contributing to an anti semitic seizure of the event.

This was the issue he had to negotiate within a few months of these anti semitic slogans appearing

on the walls of his town Levi fell silent on the issue and even fell into a serious depression one that

doubtless had several causes but could not have been helped by the impasse that was before him.