What Kinds of Narratives Can Present the Unpresentable?

Abstract

Testifying to extreme experience (experience of the extremum) as a form of cultural self-expression became vital in post-war European culture with its traumatic experience of Holocaust, genocide, and two world wars. With the consistency of the traumatism and the huge number of people affected by it, the experience of the mid-twentieth century, the climax of the “epoch of catastrophes,” exceeds that of all previous epochs. At the same time, how to integrate Holocaust experience into culture, how to make sense of it through representation, remain fundamental problems of the modern human sciences. In the discussion of these issues initiated in the 1990s, some scholars involved in the study of the traumatic experience (e.g. Saul Friedländer, Berel Lang, Martin Jay) raised the question of how the experience of the past as the experience of the extremum could be adequately perceived and appropriately transmitted (and without reducing it to the level of classical narration). The traditional means of representation, the categories of thinking typical of modernity were subject to total review owing to the exclusive nature of Holocaust experience and to postmodern theory and aesthetics as a whole.