the writing of the holocaust: claude lanzmann's shoah

The Writing of the Holocaust: Claude Lanzmann's ShoahAuthor(s): JILL ROBBINSSource: Prooftexts, Vol. 7, No. 3 (SEPTEMBER 1987), pp. 249-258Published by: Indiana University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20689189 .

Accessed: 18/06/2014 13:13

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

.

Indiana University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Prooftexts.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 195.78.108.20 on Wed, 18 Jun 2014 13:13:52 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=iupress

http://www.jstor.org/stable/20689189?origin=JSTOR-pdf

http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp


JILL ROBBINS

The Writing of the Holocaust: Claude Lanzmann's Shoah

IN SHOAH, the nine-and-one-half-hour oral history of the Holocaust, Claude Lanzmann uses the representational medium of film to resist

the reduction of the Holocaust to mere representation. The voices and

faces of survivors as they testify on screen are the means by which Lanzmann establishes the centrality of reading and writing to the

approach to the Holocaust. It is precisely in the interplay between

representation and writing that the ethical significance of Shoah

emerges, and it is there that the film most closely resembles the work

of the contemporary French philosopher Emmanuel L?vinas. Lanzmann's film begins with the following written text:

The story begins in the present at Chelmno, on the Narew River, in Poland. Fifty miles northwest of Lodz, in the heart of a region that once had a large Jewish population, Chelmno was the place in Poland where

Jews were first exterminated by gas. Extermination began on December 7, 1941. At Chelmno four hundred thousand Jews were murdered in two

separate periods: December 1941 to Spring 1943 and June 1944 to January 1945. But the way in which death was administered remained the same

throughout: the gas vans. Of the four hundred thousand men, women and children who went there, only two came out alive: Mordechai Podchlebnik and Simon Srebnik.1

The film begins with our reading of one kind of written text of history, one that in all likelihood we have encountered or read before. We read a

number?400,000?with its statistical anonymity and distancing effect; we read the word "murdered"; we read of two survivors and perhaps make mental note of the statistical improbability of survival; we read

PROOFTEXTS 7 (1987): 249-258 ? 1987 by The Johns Hopkins University Press



250 JILL ROBBINS

the dates of the past. But what is different in this text is: "The story

begins in the present." With that difference, an immense rereading of the already known or already read text of history begins. It is the merit

of Lanzmann's film to focus attention on the way in which the

Holocaust is written and read and to render imperative such an

attention. As we go to the voice and face of Simon Srebnik, one of the two survivors of Chelmno, as we go to the place of the Chelmno camp, levelled by the Nazis and now a lush and grassy field, the film begins its

relentless repetition of the past. But the film takes place in the present. Because the film situates (and de-situates) itself so insistently in the

present, it poses with some urgency the hermeneutical question of access: how to gain access to a text or event of the past? Composed exclusively of "present" narrations of the past by Jews, Germans, and

Poles, and of the "present" places of Chelmno, Treblinka, Auschwitz, the film thematizes the task of historical understanding as an exchange between past and present which does not close itself off. For the access

to a text or event of the past is not unmediated; it is determined by the

historical situatedness of the interpreter. The film avoids using the archival footage that might reductively imply a single reconstruction of the past in its own terms, a mastery or totalization of it.2 Instead, the

film, which is built on a multiplicity of interpretive accounts, demon strates an awareness of the historicality of each account: if there is no

interpretation of the text of the past without the present vantage

point's intervening, this is precisely the significance of the historical

inquiry. In fact, in such an inquiry, we find out as much about the

person doing the asking as about the object of that inquiry. The film's

inquiry into the past initiates at once an inquiry into the present, an

interplay between past and present. Its subject is the present?the traces of the event today, contemporary Poland, and the ways of

commemorating and remembering this event, talking about it, reading it, and writing it. The interplay between past and present in the film is so sustained that at times we cannot tell if we are in the past or present. Some examples are (and perhaps these are different for different

viewers): the villagers at Grabow (near Chelmno) who are filmed

looking out of curtained windows, the outburst of Christian anti

semitism by the Polish peasants in front of the church at Chelmno, and

prominently, the use of place, the place of the camps. "Yes, this is the place" (]a, das ist das Platz), says Simon Srebnik at the

beginning of the film. In an article on Shoah in the Cahiers du Cinema, Marc Chevrie glosses this declaration: "There is nothing: a verdant and

tranquil field, absolutely empty. . . . This nothing is at once the

expression of their [the murdered Jews'] presence and the tangible sign of their annihilation." This nothing is death, is the place which is not a

place, the non-place of which the film speaks. Chevrie also cites



Claude Lanzmann's Shoah 251

Abraham Bomba [the barber]: "There was a sign, a small sign, at the station of Treblinka. . . . The first time in my life I heard that name

'Treblinka'. Nobody knew. It was not a place. There was not a city. There is not even a small village" (pp. 23-24).3 Lanzmann further

engages the viewer in the d?calage between place and non-place, pres ence and absence with the repeated image of travelling by train. The

travelling by train (often a travelling or tracking shot, that is, a shot made while the camera is moving) is filmed from multiple perspectives: the perspective of Jews being transported, the perspective of unload

ing?the Sonderkommando on the ramp, the perspective of the conduc tor looking back at the cars, and so on. One of the many functions of this image in the film is to figure Lanzmann's making of the film, the

travelling he had to do. (It is a film obsessed with transportation?by train, car, van, boat?with transport.) This obsessive image also figures in an urgent way our (impossible) access, because the topic of the film and the destination of the trains is death, a non-place, and because we travel through time toward an event of the past now remote, as

anything removed from us in time is. We take this journey innumerable times, 400,000 times, 6 million times. (How many times? We repeat the

journey.) According to Chevrie, the confusion expressed by Frau Michelsohn [the "pioneer" in Wartheland] about the numbers of Jews murdered can be referred to the statistical infinity of zeros (Lanzmann: "Do you know how many Jews were exterminated there?" Frau

Michelsohn: "Four something. Four hundred thousand, forty thou sand." Lanzmann: "Four hundred thousand." Frau Michelsohn: "Four hundred thousand, yes. I knew it had a four in it. Sad, sad, sad." [p. 94]). Frau Michelsohn's confusion about the numbers can be read beyond her indifference to the fact of extermination and her evident desire in

any case to be correct, to know something: this confusion in the face of statistics is ours. The repetition of travelling to the camps by train is a

rereading, and an "incarnation"4 of these statistics. With this image, the filmmaker gets us there. We get there, and we don't get there. (Where, there?) The remoteness of the event is not merely temporal. It goes

beyond the difficulty of fully recovering an event separated from us in time and thus goes beyond a hermeneutic interplay between past and

present. It is due to the magnitude of the horror, its inexpressibility: the event was always already remote and inaccessible. Srebnik says: "No one can describe it. No one can recreate what happened here.

Impossible. And no one can understand it. Even I, here, now" (p. 6).

Rudolph Vrba [survivor of Auschwitz] says: "Somehow in my thinking it was difficult for me to comprehend that people can disappear in this

way. Nothing is going to happen, and then there comes the next

transport, and they don't know anything about what happened to the

previous transport, and this is going on for months, on and on" (p. 41).



252 JILL ROBBINS

Language is incommensurate with this event, and so is the understand

ing. Finally, the remoteness and inaccessibility of the event are also due to its effacement: only traces of the event remain. For this reason, the

film, as Lanzmann has explained in interviews, is built on its own

impossibility. He had to work with "the disappearance of traces," "with traces of traces of traces." For there is not only "the impossibility of

speaking" and the secrecy of Nazi records that do not even mention the word "secret": "there is nothing more."5

How is this "nothing" to be understood? Maurice Blanchot has remarked apropos of Shoah that the genocide of the Jews was not just an

annihilation, but an annihilation of their annihilation.6 This concise remark deserves explication, because a primary emphasis of the film and ultimately its ethical significance is here. This double annihilation, this annihilation of annihilation means first of all that the crime includes the attempt to cover up the crime, to, in an iterated phrase, "leave no

traces." The film shows the pine trees the Germans planted over the mass graves at Sobibor to "camouflage the traces," the camp at

Chelmno that the Germans levelled, the Narew river, in which the ashes of 400,000 Jews burned at Chelmno were dumped. It recounts the digging up and burning of the bodies of 90,000 Vilna Jews. The

Germans, in other words, sought to destroy all traces of the camps, including the surviving witnesses, the Sonderkommando (who were

made to do the work of this effacement). Richard Glazer [Switzerland, Treblinka survivor] says: "It was normal that for everyone behind whom the gate of Treblinka closed, there was death, had to be death, for no one was supposed to be left to bear witness" (p. 50). The Germans sought to destroy all surviving witnesses, and all possibility of survivor testimonies. We might recall Lanzmann's interview with Franz Grassier [deputy to Auerswald, Nazi commissioner of the War saw ghetto], in which the two are speaking of Adam Cherniakov's

diary. Grassier asks, with some uneasiness, it seems to me, "It's been

printed, it exists?" (p. 176). Thus, the annihilation of annihilation also means, and the point Jias to be made carefully, that the genocide was aimed not just at persons, but at their possible testimonies, at their

possibility of language. The genocide was also aimed at language, at survivor testimonies, which are the language-trace of the event. The

genocide of the Jews is caught up with language here. This annihilation

of annihilation is not just a matter of "the perfect crime" that would leave no traces, but a violence directed at persons and their language. Language is that which in the other person one tries to murder.

Language is the genuine alterity or otherness of the other.

Here, a turn to Emmanuel L?vinas' description of the encounter with the face of the other will help us to indicate the ethical significance of the film and the nature of its ethical "imperative." L?vinas' work is a




reinscription of this banal word?ethics. Indeed, the banality and the

inadequacy of our language of "ethics" is made especially evident in

talking about the Holocaust.7 Some of these humanistic platitudes are

inscribed in Lanzmann's film. For example, Walter Stier, former head of Reich Railways Department, says: "What was done was an outrage, to

put it bluntly." "What?" asks Lanzmann. "The extermination. Everyone condemns it. Every decent person" (p. 138). Or, one of the Polish

villagers says that he "can't understand how a man can do that to

another human being" (p. 30). We no doubt share this last sentiment, but we also notice the impoverishment of the formulation, of the word "human being." L?vinas reinscribes and renews the language of ethics in the following manner: perhaps the human being "is" not first of all a

being.8 Perhaps the banal words "ethics," "responsibility," can be given another sense. For L?vinas, ethics is not a moralistic set of prescrip tions. Ethics means a respect for the alterity of the other, an upsurge of

responsibility that is born(e) in the encounter with the face of the other. For L?vinas, the face of the other is his otherness, his alterity. But there is a fundamental ambiguity about the face, because it

presents itself at once as a representation, that is, as pure visual surface, as an object to be grasped, thematized, appropriated, and as beyond representation. Something in the face escapes this reduction to the

visual plane, escapes, or, breaks out of representation. For L?vinas, that

"something," that residue of representation, is language, discourse, voice. That is the otherness of the other. Murder, says L?vinas, intends a representation. No doubt it effects an annihilation of the other person in his being. But in murdering the other, one misses him; one misses his

genuine alterity, that which in him escaped representation. Murder wants to kill the other, who is beyond representation, but can only aim at a representation. Murder is aimed at the face, or language-trace, and

misses it.9

L?vinas' thoughts of face, language-trace, and the other can be

articulated with Lanzmann's film, a film that is dominated by faces and voices. In survivor testmonies, the film gives us that which cannot be killed or annihilated. It brings us face to face with the irreducibility of these witness accounts as language-trace of the Holocaust. In this

sense, the film is about, and brings us face to face with the writing of

the Holocaust?brings us to interrogate not just how it is written, but

to interrogate it as writing (in what is not necessarily a new language, but another language, the other [language]). The film renders us

responsible. Having said this, we must remark the following. Faces and

voices "in the film" denote, following L?vinas, that which in the other

overflows representation. The film's faces and voices "speak" to us

prior to the idea of "the human being." However, there are also some

(German and Polish) faces in the film which seem indeed "reduced" to



254 JILL ROBBINS

the visual plane of representation?in other words, they have "lost face" because they have ignored or "reduced" the face of the other. This difference within the film speaks precisely to the way in which the ethical responsibility that the other's face produces is not, in L?vinas'

description, a universal response to otherness. Responsibility is a singular response indeed, because it goes against the habitual exchanges that

make up the self's concrete relationship with the world, an economy of the self which is always a suppression of the ethical. Representing the other is one instance of this economy. In short, the "imperative" of

responsibility to the other to which the film "subjects" us in its other

language is extremely tenuous. The ethical becomes visible through the violation of the ethical. It is in this difficult sense that the survivors in the film (and the murdered Jews that the film commemorates) are

marked with the absolute alterity that is "paradigmatic" of the ethical.10

How, then, does the film let us know about the Holocaust in a way that is consonant with this singular demand of responsibility? The film has two primary ways of "letting us know" about the Holocaust.

The first way is irony, in the sense of saying one thing and meaning another. We, the audience, get to participate in the making of the film when we know something that certain of the Polish and German interviewees do not know. To be precise, either they do not know by "knowing" ("Everybody knew," say the Polish villagers at the beginning of the film), or they do not know by a purported "not knowing" ("We didn't know," says Grassier, deputy to Auerswald, Nazi commissioner of the Warsaw ghetto). Knowing in this case means knowing how to

assign blame, to give a verdict, and knowing that the fact happened, not

denying it. What lets us know in this sense is irony, a substitutive structure that operates throughout the film, often in the film's atten tion to semantic nuances and to utterances that say too much or too little. Some examples are: Lanzmann's question to Joseph Oberhauser in a Munich beer hall?"how many liters of beer a day do you sell?"? and Oberhauser's refusal to answer (p. 63). At a conference on Shoah, Raul Hillberg interpreted this as a question that asks, simply, "how

many?"11 Similarly, Frau Michelsohn's exclamations about the condi tions at Wartheland, "primitiv, katastrophal" (p. 81), seem to be about

more than the lack of sanitary facilities there. The substitutive struc ture of irony permits our reading of the barely concealed antisemitism of such substitutions and misnomers as the following. The Jews rounded up in the church at Chelmno are said to have "called on Jesus and Mary and God, sometimes in German" (p. 98). (For "German" read Yiddish? For "Jesus, Mary, and God" read the Shema prayer, which Jews have said for two millennia when they were about to be martyred?) Czeslaw Borowi, an inhabitant of present-day Treblinka, identifies the

language that the Jews spoke as "la-la-la-la-la" (ra-ra-ra-ra-ra) (p. 30),




for Yiddish.12 Finally, there is the account given by the villagers in front of the Chelmno church in answer to Lanzmann's question, "why do they think all this happened to the Jews?":

Mr. Kantarowski will tell us what a friend told him. It happened in

Myndjewyce, near Warsaw. . . . The Jews there were gathered in a square. The rabbi asked an SS man: "Can I talk to them?" The SS man said yes. So the rabbi said that around two thousand years ago the Jews condemned the innocent Christ to death. And when they did that, they cried out: "Let his blood fall on our heads and on our sons' heads." Then the rabbi told them:

"Perhaps the time has come for that, so let us do nothing. . . ." (pp. 99-100)

The substitutions operating within this account and within this polem ical, historically contested, and complex Gospel passage (Matthew 27:25) are extensive. We will note only a few of them. There is a

substitution of speakers of the account (Mr. Kantarowski for "a

friend"), which marks a citational structure that is sustained and

reduplicated. Within the account, a rabbi (in the place of a priest?) cites the New Testament (in the place of the "Old Testament"?). In the New

Testament passage that the rabbi is said to cite, the Jews are cited to assert their collective guilt for deicide. The Jews are cited to confirm what Rosemary Reuther calls "the New Testament's christological midrash on the Old," namely the New Testament's interpretation of itself as a fulfillment of what was "foretold," "the killing of the

Prophet-Messiah by apostate Israel."13 The Jews are thus cited (both in the sense of summoned and quoted as an authority) to confirm the substitution of the New Testament's interpretation of the Hebrew

Bible?namely, as "Old Testament"?for the Hebrew Bible's self

interpretation. In summary, the entire analysis of Lanzmann's film in terms of irony can be called "hermeneutic" not just because of the conflict of scriptural interpretations potentially at issue, but precisely to the extent that this analysis concerns what we understand, what the film "lets us know."

For the second way in which the film "lets us know" is not

hermeneutic, because it is precisely in not letting us know. We may remember that when the Poles say that they knew, and the Germans

say that they did not know, both say that the Jews knew. Mr. Filipowicz from Wlodawa (near Chelmno) is translated as saying: "Even before the

war when you talked to the Jews they foresaw their doom, he doesn't know how. Even before the war they had a premonition" (p. 21). Lanzmann asks Grassier, "Why did Czerniakow commit suicide?":

Because he realized there was no future for the ghetto. He probably saw before I did that the Jews would be killed. I suppose the Jews already had their excellent secret services. They were too well informed, better than

we were. (p. 187)

The first remark can be referred to the rabbi's lack of surprise that the

gospel prediction "Let his blood be upon our heads . . ." is coming to



256 JILL ROBBINS

pass. The second remark, besides being blatant denial, can be referred to a "Jewish conspiracy." In either case, we note the responsibility and the blame that is attached to knowing, and displaced onto the Jews. If

we place this responsibility and blame back into the context of the Poles' "knowing" (but not really knowing) and the Germans' "not

knowing" (but really knowing), the complicity that belongs to this kind of knowing and its opposite, not-knowing, is clear. Said otherwise:

merely to know about the Holocaust is not enough. In The Writing of the

Disaster, Blanchot writes: "Knowledge which goes so far as to accept horror in order to know it, reveals the horror of knowledge, its squalor, the discrete complicity which maintains it in a relation with the most

insupportable aspects of power."14 Mere knowledge, a theoretical relation to the Holocaust is an alibi (from the Latin alius, other, + ubi,

where), a being elsewhere (when the crime in question is committed). And it is not just any alibi but our alibi, an alibi of knowledge that we must to a certain extent borrow to write about the Holocaust at all. "To a certain extent" only, because there is also the way in which survivor testimonies do not let us know, i.e., as Blanchot says (and as Elie Wiesel has said many times): "Know what has happened, do not forget, and at the same time you will never know."15

Thus, Lanzmann's film does not let us know, i.e., does not permit us

merely to know. Its writing goes against the alibi of a theoretical

knowledge which would absorb the event as a representation. The film's way of "letting us know" is to render us responsible. The

responsibility proper to this kind of knowing (without knowing) cannot be understood as part of the initiative of a subject. As response to the face of the other, responsibility is not a response-ability, for such ability

would leave the subject's mastery intact. Rather, it is a displacement from the site of the alibi and from representation, a self-dispossession, a substitution.16 Lanzmann's film demands "our" responsibility to and for the writing of the Holocaust.

Department of English State University of New York at Buffalo

NOTES

1. Shoah: An Oral History of the Holocaust. The Complete Text of the Film by Claude Lanzmann

(New York, 1985), p. 3. All subsequent references will be given in the text. 2. In fact, as Lanzmann points out in an interview with Cahiers du Cinema, there is

very little archival footage of the camps, and virtually no archival footage of the

extermination proper that is the film's focus. "Le lieu et la parole: entretien avec Claude

Lanzmann," Cahiers du Cin?ma 374 (July-August 1985): 19-20. 3. Marc Chevrie, "Das ist das Platz," ibid., p. 16.




4. Idem, p. 15.

5. Lanzmann, ''Le lieu et la parole/' p. 19; Lanzmann, "'Shoah7: la m?moire infini/' interview with L'Express 1766 (10 May 1985); Chevrie, p. 15.

6. "Le g?nocide juif a ?t? cela: non seulement tous les Juifs an?antis, mais leur

an?antissement m?me an?anti." Maurice Blanchot, "N'oubliez pas!" La Quinzaine litt?raire

459 (16-31 March 1986): 12.

7. Sidra Ezrahi writes: "Even the rubric under which the horrors of those years are

subsumed?the Holocaust?may be regarded as something of an evasion through verbal

encapsulation. It is derived from the Greek word for whole-burnt and is meant,

presumably, to suggest the extent and even the 'manner' of the death of the Jews of

Europe. Yet the word holokautoma, which refers in the Septuagint to the 'burnt offering' in

the Temple of Solomon, raises problems through the sacrificial connotation that it

attaches to the death of the Jews of Europe and which is, unfortunately, consistent with a

prevailing Christian reading of Jewish history. (The nomenclature that has been adopted in the Jewish world does not carry the same affirmative theological overtones but, rather,

signifies the enormity of the rift in Jewish history and culture brought about by the

destruction of the European Jewish community.)" She continues in a footnote: "The

Yiddish word that has come to designate the Nazi genocide, hurbn, resonates ety

mologically with memories of the destruction of the two Temples in Jerusalem, carrying with it no sacral associations but rather connoting the violation of the continuity of

sanctified life within the community. The Hebrew word shoah is a biblical synonym for

widespread, even cosmic disaster, again, with no necessary association of the victims with

ritual sacrifice: 'they are gaunt with want and famine; they gnaw the dry ground, in the

gloom of wasteness (shoah) and desolation' (Job 30:3)." By Words Alone: The Holocaust in

Literature (Chicago, 1980), pp. 2; 221 n.

8. This assertion is part of L?vinas' argument with Heidegger. It requires an

explanation too complex and lengthy for this essay. Briefly stated, L?vinas criticizes

Heidegger's description of Dasein?man insofar as he is the being who asks the question of

the meaning of Being?to the extent that it determines the relationship with the other as

Mitsein, "being-with." To have to do with the other, L?vinas argues, is not to comprehend him in his being, it is to speak to him ("L'ontologie est-elle fondamentale?" Revue de

M?taphysique et de Morale (January 1951): pp. 88-98). Thus, "perhaps the human being 'is'

not first of all a being" means that perhaps there "is" a description of the "human being" more fundamental than that of Heidegger's fundamental ontology. The "perhaps" of this

assertion is strategic. It marks both the difficulty of making such a claim in a language that is ontological and also a departure from the ontological, whose rigor is precisely in

this tentativeness. See Jacques Derrida's 1980 essay on L?vinas, "En ce moment m?rne

dans cet ouvrage me voici," in Textes pour Emmanuel Uvinas, ed. Fran?ois Laruelle (Paris,

1980), p. 35.

9. See Emmanuel L?vinas, Totality and Infinity, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh,

1969), especially pp. 197-201.

10. See the pertinent remarks by Jean-Fran?ois Lyotard in "Discussions, ou phraser

'apr?s Auschwitz'", in Us fins de l'homme (Paris, 1981), p. 299. The film's epigraph from

Isaiah 56:5 indicates its commemoration of the murdered Jews, its project "to give them

an everlasting name."

11. Conference at Yale University, May 4-5,1986. The syntactical subtraction that

here characterizes Hillberg's interpretive technique also appears in the film in his

discussion of the "final solution": "Even here I would suggest a logical progression, one

that came to fruition in what might be called closure, because from the earliest days, from

the fourth century, the sixth century, the missionaries of Christianity had said in effect

to the Jews: 'You may not live among us as Jews.' The secular rulers who followed them

from the late Middle Ages then decided: 'You may not live among us/ and the Nazis

finally decreed: 'You may not live'" (p. 72).



258 JILL ROBBINS

12. This substitution is reminiscient of the medieval conception of the "secret

language of the Jews," discussed by Sander L. Gilman in Jewish Self-Hatred: Anti-Semitism and

the Hidden Language of the Jews, (Baltimore, 1986). 13. Rosemary Reuther, Faith and Fratricide; The Theological Roots of Anti-Semitism (New

York, 1974), pp. 94-5.

14. Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln, 1986),

p. 82.

15. Ibid. One of the many places in which Elie Wiesel figures this constitutive

double task of survivor testimonies is with the madness of "the messenger unable to

deliver his message." One Generation After (New York, 1965), p. 16.

16. For a discussion of the inability in responsibility, see Ann Smock, "Disastrous

Responsibility," L'Esprit Cr?ateur 24 (1984): 5-20. For the notion of substitution, see

Emmanuel L?vinas, Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence, trans. Alphonso Lingis (The

Hague, 1981), chap. 4. See also L?vinas' Ethics and Infinity, trans. Richard A. Cohen

(Pittsburgh, 1985).



the writing of the holocaust: claude lanzmann's shoah

Documents