The name ‘Auschwitz’ stands for what was without question one of the most traumatic events of the century. Equally, it names an event which emphatically dissolves moral scepticism; we feel morally certain that there evil of an unspeakable kind occurred. Perhaps, then, it is the utter proximity of these two thoughts, the traumatic insistenceof the event of the Holocaust and our moral certaintyabout its evil character, that lies behind and is the genealogical origin of recent attempts to identify trauma with ethicality as such. For example, in Emmanuel Levinas’ Otherwise than Beingwe read:

This passage is exemplary since its shows how trauma is being used in order to think an irrevocable passivity which will thus serve as the ethical binding of one to another. The insistence of traumatic experience, its unavoidability and its laceration of subjectivity, and the way that non-representable experience creates an ethical bond to the other, offers a model or paradigm of ethical experience. Arguably, it is the traumatic modelling of ethicality, as a reinscription of the Holocaust, that is the source of the continuing claim of Levinas’ thought. Jean- François Lyotard takes up the thesis explicitly in Heidegger and ‘the jews’. After arguing for there being a traumatic origin of the self or subject, a moment which accounts for ‘the constitutive infirmity of the soul, its infancy and its misery’, he goes on to interpret Judaism as a collective embodiment of this traumatic formation. The relation between ‘the Jews’ and their God is best understood on the model of a traumatic relation; and when it is so understood, Western antisemitism, including the Holocaust, can then be interpreted as the attempt of the West to free itself from this torturous ethical burden.