Hijacking Holocaust Memory as a Dehumanizing Practice

Friday, June 10 2022 at Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin
With Lewis R. Gordon
The right is marked by a tendency to cherry-pick the past in a project of avowed order and security, which belies truth. This often includes rewriting locations of harm to rally resources of supposed “protection.” The result is an investment in pleasing falsehoods that eliminate distinctions and difference. This, thus, elides the nuance, precision, and uncomfortable truths of Holocaust memory in directions of either extreme particularity (which absolutizes it) or exaggerated metonymy and metaphor (which trivializes it). Both are dehumanizing. Further, they lead to constructions of innocence under liberal, neoliberal, and neoconservative models of political membership premised on a duality of victimizers and victims, in which there is little room for being neither and only room for innocence among those who are harmed.