3. The Holocaust Sublime: Singularity, Representation, and the Violence of Everyday Life

The world of the concentration camps . . . was not an exceptionally monstrous society. What we saw there was the image, and in a sense the quintessence, of the infernal society in which we are plunged every day. —Ionesco1 Abstract It has become common to view mass historical traumas like the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki or the Holocaust as singularities—in other words, events of such transcendent, almost metaphysical significance that they exceed intelligibility. Siding with “realist” intellectuals who instead emphasize the rootedness of genocide in the structures of modernity and everyday life, I argue that the discourse of singularity aestheticizes historical trauma in problematic ways. Drawing on Kant's analytic of the sublime, in which the subject, in confronting an awesome or terrifying phenomenon from a position of safety, comes to realize his or her own powers of transcendence and moral superiority, I argue that the holocaust sublime encourages the viewing subject to “face” overwhelming horrors of the past, but without having to confront the subject's actual responsibility for the atrocities of the present. By pitting the extraordinary or “singular” against the banal and everyday, the holocaust sublime thus obscures, rather than reveals, the habits of thought and social structures that make genocidal practices inevitable.