Making Sense of the Senseless

Hannah Arendt described the Holocaust as a ‘rupture with civilisation’ that shattered all existing ideas of progress, all feelings of optimism, all previously engraved images of Europe as a civilised community, all notions of the innocence of modern political thought. In ‘Mankind and Terror’, for example, she writes: ‘Not only are all our political concepts and definitions insufficient for an understanding of totalitarian phenomena but also all our categories of thought and standards of judgement seem to explode in our hands the instant we try to apply them.’ Arendt was one of the first to argue that the attempted extermination of Jews – only later to be called the Holocaust or the Shoah – was an event that marked, or should mark, a caesura in modern social and political thought.

The concern of this paper is with this notion of a ‘gap’ between past and future – of a ‘fracture’ in the continuity of political thought and moral judgement – which is provoked by the thought of the Holocaust. From the point of view of social theory, this question may be seen as a particular case study of the impact of historical events on social theorising and presupposes that social theory does not develop in isolation from the political world of which it is part. The focus on the writings of Hannah Arendt is chosen not only because she took seriously this question, the question of social theory after the Holocaust, soon after she learnt about the Holocaust itself, and not only because she was an extraordinarily gifted and radical political thinker; it is chosen also because she offered a ‘worldly’ perspective on this rupture with civilisation which was rather lost in the later reflections on the Holocaust which stressed the uniqueness, singularity, non-representability and ineffability of the Holocaust and which treated ‘Auschwitz’ as an emblem for the breakdown of human history and the limits of human understanding. I am thinking here of a diverse tradition of thought, which Gillian Rose dubs ‘Holocaust piety’ because of its insistence on ‘silence, prayer, the banishment equally of poetry and knowledge, in short, the witness of ineffability’ at the expense of both understanding and politics.