THE ANTI-ARCHIVE?

CLAUDE LANZMANN'S SHOAH

AND THE DILEMMAS OF
HOLOCAUST REPRESENTATION
ELISABETH R. FRIEDMAN
"However the war may end, we have won the war against you; none of you
will be left to bear witness . . .There will perhaps be suspicions, discussions,
research by historians, but there will be no certainties, because we will destroy
the evidence together with you. And even if some proof should remain and
some of you survive, people will say the events you describe are too mon-
strous to be believed . . . We will be the ones to dictate the history of the
Lagers."
SS Guard's warning to inhabitants of Auschwitz,
transcribed by Primo Levi in The Drowned and the Saved'
W
hile most historical periods have been encountered primarily through their
archival incarnations, the question of constituting an archive of the Holocaust
remains at issue.This uncertainty stems in part from the nature of the event, as
well as from the fact that the perpetrators went to great effort to erase the evidence of their
crimes, while at the same time instrumentalizing existing archival records for the purpose
of extermination. Despite Lyotard's comparison of the Holocaust to "an earthquake so pow-
erful that it destroys all the instruments used for measuring [it],"2 there exist numerous tra-
ditional archives devoted to preserving the material and documentary traces of the Nazi
genocide.The contents of these archives include the copious records kept by the Nazis, jour-
nalistic accounts and photographs from witnesses, documents produced by relief agencies
assisting "displaced persons" after the war and the videotaped testimonies of Holocaust
survivors.3
Remarkably, those who did not survive produced some of the most heartbreaking archives
of the Holocaust, smuggling cameras into the ghettos to document the brutal realities of
daily life there. These photographs, along with other artifacts of daily life, were hidden in
milk cans, which were buried and recovered after the events. (Ironically, milk cans were
readily available for this purpose due to the Nazi prohibition on Jews in the ghettos pur-
chasing milk, meat, or other staples.jThese buried archives bear witness to the events from
the "inside," although they also function, paradoxically, to support Lyotard's claim about the
destruction of recording instruments, as their creators largely perished in the death camps.*
English Language Notes 45.1 Spring / Summer 2007
1 12 ENGLI SH LANGUAGE NOTES 45.1 SPRI NG / SUMMER 2007
Although the boundaries of the historical and the imaginative have long been subject to
critical interrogation by historiographers and discourse theorists alike, the field of Holocaust
Studies remains preoccupied with establishing a firm distinction between the two realms.
Genres that seem to offer direct access to the reality of the event, such as archival materi-
als, documentary photographs, survivor testimonies and historical narratives, have been
accorded a high degree of evidentiary credibility, whereas art and literature have been con-
sidered riskier ventures. In an essay on Holocaust novels, Cynthia Ozick writes, "the aims of
the imagination are not the aims of history.''^ She contends that the incorporation of histor-
ical specificity into imaginative reconstructions of the Holocaust is oxymoronic, since the
imagination "owes nothing to what we call reality," while history "is rooted in document and
archive."^ Ozick's radical separation of these two realms reflects a continuing anxiety that
the historical specificity of the Holocaust will be subverted when the events of the past are
reconstructed in an imaginative medium.
Recent discussions of Holocaust representation in both historiography and in literary
theory suggest that the unprecedented nature of the event exceeds the limits of traditional
frames of reference.'They argue that along with the need to transmit the facts of the event,
representations must situate themselves in relation to the "the limits of representation,"
marking their own inadequacy and leaving a space for what remains unrepresentable. In
the introduction to a collection of essays from a 1992 conference titled Probing the Limits
of Representation: Nazism and the "Final Solution," historian Saul Friedlander explains the
central dilemma as that of "confronting the issues raised by historical relativism and aes-
thetic experimentation in the face of two possibly contrary constraints: a need for "truth"
and the problems raised by the opaqueness of the event and the opaqueness of language
as such."8 These "contrary constraints" become expressed in theoretical discourse as con-
troversies of representation, such as the relation of the historical to the imaginative, of intel-
lectual understanding to affective response, and of acting out to working through.
My argument begins from the premise that the status of the archive is implicitly at stake in
contemporary debates of Holocaust representation.These debates are concerned with dis-
tinguishing between representations that may be seen as in some way "repeating the trau-
ma of the event," and those that can productively engage the difficulties of "working
through" in order to theorize the conditions of an ethical encounter with the Holocaust.^
They offer distinct articulations of the role of the historian and the artist in establishing a
boundary between the past and the present, and between the event and its contemporary
reception and interpretation. At issue is not so much the efficacy of the genres of history or
art per se, but rather how these approaches conceptualize the boundaries of temporality
and subjectivity as the condition of knowledge (and thus of the representation) of historical
trauma. As we shall see, the problem of these boundaries also informs contemporary the-
orizing on the archive.
In the writing of history, knowledge is made through the discipline's construction of bound-
aries, a move that seeks to oppose the structure of trauma and to convert memory into his-
ELISABETH R. FRIEDMAN 1 13
tory, containing the affective force of the past and making it available for knowledge and
representation. In this project, the archive serves its traditional function as a repository of
documents and evidence. For the literary theorists (and those advocating the aesthetic as
the key to working through), knowledge is created through the performative reenactment
of the breakdown of such boundaries, mimicking the structure of trauma itself These
debates raise the question of the status of the archive in relation to representation, specifi-
cally how to reference the affective dimension that exceeds those limits and thus cannot be
found in the historical archive.
If the memory of the Holocaust is to hold meaning for future generations, and if this mem-
ory will necessarily be formed through encounters with textual and visual representations
(and thus dependent on the archive), the capacity of the archive to hold both the evidence
of the event and its expressive responses becomes central to the task of working through
its traumatic history. I suggest that it is not simply a matter of validating art as a vehicle of
history, but of understanding how imaginative representations function in the constitution
of an archive of the Holocaust, an archive that holds multiple registers of knowledge and
meaning. Therefore the archive will consist not just of the raw materialdocuments and
other evidentiary traces of the pastbut of the reception and transmission of this material,
in other words, its mediation and re-presentation through art, history, and literature.
Shoah: the anti-archive?
In recent decades, major efforts have been made to record and preserve the testimonies of
Holocaust survivors.10 But despite the traditional documentary role of eyewitness testi-
monies, such stories do not rest easily in the archive.Testimony, which is necessarily medi-
ated by both memory itself and by the affective force of its transmission, contains an excess
that haunts the historical archive.
In this regard, Claude Lanzmann's nine-plus-hour film Shoah (1985), which is comprised
exclusively of the testimony of survivors and perpetrators, offers a site for rethinking the
concept of the archive in relation to the destructions of the twentieth century. Indeed, Shoah
figures significantly in the contemporary debates of Holocaust representation, for it raises
not only questions of testimony and witnessing, but also of the status of the archive in his-
torical representations." Lanzmann's film provides an instructive contrast to the traditional
sense of the archive, for it is striking in its absence of documentary photographs or archival
images from the period; to some degree, Shoah was created as an anti-archive. Lanzmann
relies on contemporary testimonies by victims and perpetrators, in particular those who
occupied the "gray zone" and were thus closest to death. Lanzmann's refusal of archival
images and his reliance on testimony offer him a way to reject traditional historical meth-
ods of "understanding." He writes, "I have precisely begun with the impossibility of telling
this story. I have made this very impossibility my point of departure."^^ Yet Shoah does not
simply reject the archive, but offers a different sort of archive, functioning to record the past
through referencing its un-representability.
1 14
ENGLISH LANGUAGE NOTES 45. 1 SPRING / SUMMER 2 0 0 7
Part of the reason that Shoahhas remained an object of contention is because it transgress-
es genres: part documentary, part work of art, in which Lanzmann the fiimmai<er becomes
a character in the film and perhaps even stages some of the "traumatic reenactments."
Lanzmann sets out to intentionally push boundaries, to question the distinction between the
"inside" and the "outside" of the experience of the Holocaust, between history and its rep-
resentation. This indistinction foregrounds the question of where the archive ends and the
work of representation, or art, begins.
Lanzmann rejects the rules of historical knowledge, seeking instead to blur the boundary
between history and art, and between the past and the present, in his desire to bear witness
to what has been repressed in history. This rejection takes the form of a prohibition on
understanding why the Holocaust happened, and on asking why the Jews were killed. He
elaborates on this prohibition in a manifesto, "Hieristkein warum" ("Here there is no why")
and refers to it as a guiding principle in the making of Shoah.The source of Lanzmann's pro-
hibition is Primo Levi's account of life in the concentration camp. Levi conveys the break-
down of meaning and the irrelevance of explication from "inside the event." In the story,
Levi attempts to break off an icicle to quench his thirst, only to have it taken from him by a
Nazi guard. When he asks why he may not have it, the guard responds: "Here there is no
why." From the guard's utterance, Lanzmann makes a general law governing efforts to
understand the world of the concentration camps and the Holocaust in general, asserting,
"this law is also valid for whoever assumes the charge of such a transmission."i3
Interpretive practices from the "outside" must be subject to the same rules of inquiry at
work on the "inside." Because no historical explication can be commensurate with the act
of genocide, no explanatory link made between cause and effect, Lanzmann considers
efforts to intellectualize and to historicize to be "obscene."
This is most emphatically depicted in the one scene in the film where Lanzmann does ask
why the Jews were killed. Lanzmann returns to the Polish village adjacent to the death camp
Chelmno, with Srebnik, a child survivor of the camp. He stages an encounter between
Srebnik and the Polish inhabitants of the village, some of whom recognize the former child
prisoner. When Lanzmann asks the peasants why the Jews were killed, they respond that
the Jews brought the disaster upon themselves for the sin of killing Christ. History becomes
a vehicle for silence and denial, reducing "a threatening and incomprehensible event to a
reassuring mythic, totalizing unity of explanation."i''This mythic use of history provides the
explanatory structure that operates independently of those who actually fulfilled its destiny,
places the blame on the victims, and absolves the villagers of complicity in the events.
Whereas historiography is considered "obscene," a means of bearing false witness,
Lanzmann seeks to repair these historical silences and denials through art. Shoshana
Felman considers Shoah Xo effectively bear witness by restoring what was lost in the event:
"loss of voice, of life, of knowledge, of awareness, of truth, of the capacity to feel, of the
capacity to speak."i5 Through his roles as interviewer, inquirer, and narrator, Lanzmann
ELISABETH R. FRIEDMAN 1 15
compels his witnesses to tell more than they knowto perform the traumatic dimension of
the event that has been repressed in history.
In Felman's interpretation, the achievement of Lanzmann's role as a filmmaker lies in his
ability to transgress the boundary that separates the past from the present, the inside from
the outside: "Lanzmann hopes, by means of the resources of his art, to have an impact on
the outside from the inside, to literally move the viewers and to actually reach the
addressees: to make historically and ethicallya difference."!^ By transgressing these
boundaries of temporality and subjectivity, the film highlights the transferential relation of
the secondary witness to the testimony, and the obligations that issue from this awareness.
Here, the archive is figured as a (belated) relationship to a missed encounter. As Margaret
Olin remarks, "[t]he traces are the story, or rather, the story is the fact that there are t races-
traces of the circumstances that caused the Shoah in Germany and Poland."" Indeed,
Lanzmann uses these fragments and traces not to construct a story of the past but rather to
re-construct the story of the traces themselves.
Felman and Lanzmann's approach to referencing and translating historical trauma suggest
that trauma preserves history "only within the gap or aporia produced by words (or images)
that do not simply refer [to the traumatic event] . . . but performatively convey it as some-
thing that cannot be grasped or represented."i8 Here the true archive of the event is created
through the structure of trauma itself, contained in its gaps and aporias, and the moment at
which the viewer or reader grasps this incommensurability is the archival moment of imag-
inative representations.
In Dominick LaCapra's response to Felman, he challenges Shoah's iconic status with an
emphatic critique of both Lanzmann's self-understanding and Felman's celebratory reading
of the film. LaCapra's critique turns on the distinction between the "truncated understand-
i ng" of performativity that he attributes to Lanzmann and Felman, and his own position,
which calls for "the conjunction of necessary acting out in the face of trauma with attempts
to work through problems in a desirable mannerattempts that engage social and political
problems and provide a measure of responsible control in action."!^ LaCapra suggests that
Lanzmann exploits the role of the artist to act out his own uncontrolled transferential rela-
tions, and that the emphasis on gaps and aporias repeats and reinscribes the event as
unspeakable and unknowable. In his view, Lanzmann uses the film to enact his own "obses-
sions, affects and phantasms" and to pursue an "uncontrolled transferential relationship"
with only those witnesses whom he considers to be absolutely innocent victims. LaCapra
contends that a broader historical understanding (one that referred to the historical archive)
would complicate Lanzmann's narratives of absolute guilt and innocence, and necessitate
self-reflection on how his own practices are complicit in the dynamics of forgetting and
denial. In other words, he calls for a discourse that disrupts its own authority and suggests
an awareness of the conditions of its production. For LaCapra, this would involve the trans-
mittal of a "muted trauma," or offering an index of trauma, as opposed to a repetition. But
in offering an index, LaCapra accepts the idea that knowledge of trauma is also traumatic.
1 16 ENGLISH LANGUAGE NOTES 45. 1 SPRING / SUMMER 2OO7
As Olin observes, Shoah offers us a different notion of what constitutes a document, and
thus an archive: "While an iconic representation is not valid for Shoah. a written document
is, as is an index, an image caused like a footprint by the thing it represents. Archival
footage is only an iconic, that is, metaphoric picture of reality, not a part of it. But the index
is metonymic, it is a piece of what happened."2o LaCapra argues that such an approach is
not truly historical, criticizing the absence of archival images of the extermination camps in
Shoah on the grounds that the cinematic beauty of the present-day sites of extermination
that Lanzmann dwells on is much more significant to viewers who are familiar with the his-
torical images. This invocation of presence through absence implies a virtuality to
Lanzmann's sense of the archive, in that the sites are only meaningful to the extent one has
seen the very archival images that Lanzmann refuses to show. Shoah archives the indexes
of the Holocaust, rather than its icons.
Articulations of the archive
The debate between Felman and LaCapra exemplifies contrasting approaches to referenc-
ing and representing trauma, which for my purposes I will term the "historical mode" and
the "imaginative mode."Their divergent readings of Shoah suggest distinct understandings
of the nature of the archive, and of the relationship between the processes of archivization
and representation. In the "imaginative" mode, the moment of grasping the incommensu-
rability between the representation and the event is the moment of archivization. However,
the historians would argue that these moments are in fact obstacles to knowledge, which
lead to the repetition of the past rather than the memory of history. By contrast, the "histor-
ical" archive is created as trauma is converted into memory, thus establishing a boundary
between the past and the present, between the event and its reception.
In order to understand why the archive may be considered the site of an ongoing negotia-
tion between "imaginative" and "historical" discourses, it is helpful to look at how the
archive has been rearticulated in contemporary theory. Recent theorizations of the archive
use the concept of the archive (albeit quite distinctly) to discuss the relation of the bound-
aries of temporality and subjectivity to knowledge and historical representation. These dis-
tinct theorizations share a notion that "the archive" describes some type of boundary, a
relationship between what may be said and what remains unsaid, between the practice of
interpretation and its "remainder." Derrida observes that this boundary is the defining ques-
tion of the archive, and of representation: "But where does the outside commence? This
question is the question of the archive. There are undoubtedly no others."2i It is this ques-
tion of the outside that grounds the debates of Holocaust representation, and that also
informs the archival and anti-archival processes at work in Shoah.
There are several distinct notions of the archive at work in contemporary cultural theory,
each of which raises questions of the status of representation in understanding and captur-
ing an historical event.Traditionally, the archive has been thought of as a literal storehouse
designed to collect, classify, and preserve those material fragments of the past considered
to hold significance, in the present, for the future. Recent conceptions of the archive emerge
ELISABETH R. FRIEDMAN 1 17
from discourse theory in which "the archive" operates as a trope, or a figure, for thinking
through the structures that inform and direct the production of knowledge.They suggest a
tension between the archive as an institution or structure, and the archive as a practice of
reading, an articulation. More recently, discussions of the archive have entered the bur-
geoning literature on the dynamics of history and memory. Ann Laura Stoler notes this
emergence of the figurative status of "the Archive" in cultural theory, in which the archive
"has become a powerful metaphor for the processes of collecting traces of the past, and for
the forgetting of them."22
Contemporary theorizing on the discursive figure of the archive may be read in terms of an
ongoing conversation between Michel Foucault (who first touched on the concept in the
1960s) and Jacques Derrida, regarding the nature and function of discourse. In theoretical
writings by Foucault and Derrida, the emphasis shifts away from the traditional humanist
account of the archive as a unifying structure, promising direct access to the past.23 Instead,
the archive becomes an unstable and decentered structure comprised of multiple discours-
es and fluid archival traces, which only allows for a textual refiguring of the past.JiThis
reconceptualization of the archive emerges from Foucault's analysis of historiography, in
which he introduces discontinuity as a central element of his archeological method.
Traditional historiography works to exclude discontinuity in order to provide a coherent nar-
rative of the past, rather than taking it as an object of study. Here difference marks the lim-
its of knowledgean epistemic break; in Foucault's intervention, difference is resituated as
an analytical tool, a critical term present within every episteme.The archive is the site of this
difference, or discontinuity.25
The archive may be read, with Foucault, as a system of discourse that constitutes both the
subject and the object of study and determines what may be said. On another level, the
archive may be viewed as an expression of an ambivalent desire to remember that is also
an urge to forget, what Derrida calls "archive fever": the desire to find the "moment of ori-
gin," to locate a beginning. Derrida's extended meditation in Arciiive Fevershifts the empha-
sis from Foucault's production of the subject to the psychoanalytic terrain of subjectivity. His
rereading of the Freudian archive situates memory as the psychic structure that reads and
records experience to render subjectivity intelligible to itself. In this view, the archive figures
as a metaphor for memory itself, occupying a tension between the said and the unsaid,
between the presentable and the unpresentable. For Derrida, interpretation establishes its
object through participation in the archive, rather than the other way around.This participa-
tion, or implication, means that there can be no complete separation between the subject
and the object of interpretation. The writer or historian cannot occupy a position of pure
exteriority in relation to the events of past; interpretation always produces a remainder.The
remainder is what is excluded from the traditional archive, and from the rules of historical
knowledge. Yet this remainder constitutes the archive's virtual dimension, which consists of
the documents and symptoms of repression and trauma that inform psychoanalytic prac-
tices of reading.
1 18 ENGLISH LANGUAGE NOTES 45.1 SPRING / SUMMER 2007
Archive Fever, initially delivered as a lecture titled Mai d'Archive at the Freud House in
London in 1994, sparked predictions of an impending "archival turn," along the lines of the
"visual turn" and the "linguistic turn" that have been theorized in recent decades. Carolyn
Steedman's insightful study Dust: The Archive and Cultural History, which examines the
relationship between the actual practice of archival research and the use of the archive as a
metaphor or a theoretical trope, takes off from precisely this question.26 Examining the
practice of historiography from its modern inception in the nineteenth century to the pres-
ent, Steedman contends that the "archival turn" failed to materialize, much as the past itself
fails to materialize out of the archive. Her very title. Dust, comments on this realization: that
much of what exists in an archive is dust, or is at least rather ordinary, so that the histori-
an's encounter with the past is defined primarily by what is not contained in the archive.
What the historian discovers in the archive has nothing to do with beginnings, but is sim-
ply evidence of discontinuities and interruptions: random stories, lives cut off in the middle,
that happen to end up there. In these reconceptualizations, the archive becomes the site of
an encounter with traces, absences, and aporias. In this sense, every reading of the archive
may be considered a reading of "vi rt ual i t y"-a reading of and through the traces of the past
contained within the archive. It is this virtuality that Lanzmann archives in Shoah.
Testimony vs. "The Archive"
In Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive. Giorgio Agamben extends the prob-
lem of the archive by exploring the lacunae in the structure of testimony. Where the archive
is figured as a boundary in Foucault, a discursive space separating the "speakable" from
the "unspeakable," Agamben investigates the structure of testimony to explore how it is that
subjects manage to bear witness to the unspeakable. For Foucault, the archive, situated
between langue and parole, marks the threshold between the inside and the outside of dis-
course and is constituted on the disappearance of the subject. By contrast, Giorgio
Agamben, in opposing testimony to the archive, seeks to establish how the subject may
give an account of its own ruin. Agamben distinguishes between Foucault's view of the
archive, which is situated at the margin of discourse (the relationship between the said and
the unsaid), and testimony, which he construes as a relationship between the inside and
outside of /angue.Thus Agamben intervenes in Foucault's analysis of the archive at the point
where the subject disappears in discourse, and turns to testimony as the place of the speak-
ing subject.
The "remnants" of Auschwitz are not the material traces of the past, as in the traditional
archive, but the possibility of speaking for those who cannot speak. Agamben draws on
Primo Levi's figure of the muselman. whom Levi refers to as the "complete witness." In
Auschwitz, the Muselmannerwere those camp inmates who were seen to have given up
the will to live, and were reduced to the condition of the "living dead."27 Camp inmates and
guards alike disparaged these figures, who existed between life and death, between the
human and the non-human.The Muselmanner ar\6 the dead, are incapable of offering tes-
ELISABETH R. FRIEDMAN 1 19
timony, but for Levi, paradoxically, theirs is the only testimony that would matter.This view
is mirrored in Lanzmann's choice of subjects in Shoah, those victims and perpetrators who
were closest to death in the camps.
In making the shift from the realm of discourse to that of language, Agamben situates tes-
timony as a system of relations between the inside and the outside of language, between
the possibility and the impossibility of speaking. Agamben views Shoah as a work of art that
exemplifies his theory of testimony, in that it succeeds through its representation of an
indistinction between the "inside" and "outside." The witness, whose testimony is contin-
gent, thus occupies a position outside the traditional archive.Testimony here does not con-
firm a pre-given meaning, but rather bears witness to a truth that exceeds the realm of the
factual and the evidentiary. What remains, Agamben's "remnant," is this relationship
between the testimony and the witness, between the impossibility of language and the fact
of its enunciation. The remnants of Auschwitz, the witnesses, are neither the dead nor the
survivors but what remains between them. Agamben concludes his study with the seem-
ingly impossible testimonies of former Muselmanner, which were published in 1987, and
which represent this unarchivable remnant. Ironically, this publication of testimony by for-
mer Muselmanner, which verifies Levi's paradox for Agamben, constitutes an archive in the
most traditional sense. But Agamben's analysis begs the question of whether testimony
becomes part of the archive once it is articulated, as well as the role of the archive itself in
the transmission of testimony.
The idea that one could establish a boundary through oneself and the object of study (as in
the historiographical operation) is challenged by the contemporary rearticulations of the
archive, in which interpretation, or participation in discourse, implicates the subject in the
object of study. Both Foucault's and Derrida's reconceptualizations suggest that there can be
no pure exteriority to the archive. In Foucault's analysis, this is because we never approach
the archive from the outside, we are always inside, unable to grasp the extent to which we
are surrounded and constituted by the archive, and by the discontinuity that it marks. For
Derrida, interpretive practices also participate in the archive, thus creating more archive;
there is no interpretation without the excess of meaning that he terms the "remainder."This
implies that the desire of the historians to historicize the event will always be incomplete,
as their interpretive practices do not stabilize the archive but rather expand it. Likewise, aes-
thetic representations, in seeking to reference the gaps in meaning produced by interpreta-
tion, also constitute an archive.
In contrast to Agamben's insistence that testimony and the archive are mutually exclusive,
I suggest that in Shoah the two are inextricably linked. Lanzmann's representational strate-
gies in Shoah reconceptualize the archive as a relationship between the traces of the past
and their encounter in the present. Here the archive consists neither of documents or the
institution that houses them, but rather is refigured as the space of an encounter between
the "inside" and the "outside." Although Lanzmann created Shoah as a corrective to the tra-
120 ENGLISH LANGUAGE NOTES 45. 1 SPRING / SUMMER 2 0 0 7
ditional archive and the "obscene" writings of history that emerge from it, his film functions
both historically and imaginatively, comprising an archive of virtuality that records the frag-
ile links between testimony and silence, between language and its absence.
Elisabeth R. Friedman
York University
NOTES
1 Primo Levi, 7/7e Drowned and the Saved (New York: Vintage, 1989) 11-12.
2 Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Differend: Phrases in Dispute, trans. Georges Van Den Abbeele (Minnea-
polis: U of Minnesota P, 1988) 56.
3 Institutions such asYad Vashem in Jerusalem and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in
Washington, D.C, hold vast archives that contain all of these types of materials.These institutions and
their archives occupy a tension between two sometimes conflicting goals: education and memorializa-
tion.This tension also structures the contemporary debates of Holocaust representation.
" In light of the characterization of the Holocaust as an "event without a witness," Shoshana Felman rais-
es the question of what it might mean to speak, or testify, from inside the Holocaust. See her chapter
"The Return of the Voice," in Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, eds.. Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in
Literature, Psychoanalysis, and H/sto/y (NewYork: Routledge, 1992).
5 Ozick makes this distinction in an essay critiquing the use of historical events in fictional representa-
tions. For a complete discussion of the stakes as Ozick articulates them, see Cynthia Ozick, "The Rights
of History and the Rights of Imagination." Commenfar/Vol. 107, No. 3 (March 1999).
6 Ozick, "The Rights of History and the Rights of Imagination," 23.
7 For a fuller discussion of these debates, see Sidra Dekoven Ezrahi, "The Holocaust and the Shifting
Boundaries of Art and History," History and MemoryVoi. 1, No. 2 (1989) 77-98.The historians' perspec-
tive is elaborated in Saul Friedlander, ed. Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the Final
So/uf/on (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UR 1992); Dominick LaCapra, History and Memory After Auschwitz
(Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1988); Inga Clendinnen, Reading the Holocaust (Cambridge, UK, Cambridge UP,
1999). For the literary/aesthetic views, see Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, eds.. Testimony: Crises of
Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History (NewYork: Routledge, 1992); Andrea Liss, Tres-
passing through Shadows: Memory, Photography and the Holocaust (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota R
1998); Ernst van Alphen, Caught by History: Holocaust Effects in History. Literature and Art (Stanford:
Stanford UP, 1997).
8 Saul Friedlander, ed. Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the Finai Solution (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard UR 1992) 4.
9 For a range of views on the structure of historical trauma and its relationship to representation, see
Cathy Caruth, ed. Trauma: Explorations in Memory [Ba\t\more\ Johns Hopkins UP, 1995); Sigmund Freud,
"Remembering, Repeating and WorkingThrough," The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological
Works of Sigmund Freud, trans, and ed. James Strachey, 24 vols. (London, 1953-74), 12:145-56; Ruth
Leys Trauma: A Genealogy (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2000).
loThe two major archival collections of Holocaust testimonies in North America are the Fortunoff Video
Archive for Holocaust Testimonies at Yale University and Steven Spielberg's Survivors of the Shoah
Visual History Foundation, whose recordings are available at a number of institutions around the United
States.
" Shoah was the subject of an extended debate between Shoshana Felman and Dominick LaCapra that
appeared in Criticai Inquiry 23 (Winter 1997).
ELISABETH R. FRIEDMAN 121
12 cited in Andrea Liss, Trespassing through Shadows: Memory, Photography and the Holocaust (Minn-
eapolis: U of Minnesota F; 1998) 117.
'3 Claude Lanzmann, Au Sujet de Shoah; le film de Claude Lanzmann (Editions Belin: Paris, 1990) 279.
" Shoshana Felman, Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History, 266.
'5 Felman, 231.
16 Felman, 239.
" Margaret Olin, "Lanzmann's Shoah and the Topography of Holocaust Film," Representations, No. 57
(Winter, 1997) 13.
18 Ruth Leys, Trauma: A Genealogy (Chicago: U of Chicago R 2000) 288.
19 Dominick LaCapra, "Lanzmann's Shoah. 'HereThere Is No Why,'" Critical Inquiry 23 (Winter 1997) 245.
20 Margaret Olin, "Lanzmann's Shoah and theTopography of Holocaust Film," 18.
21 Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, trans. Eric Prenowitz (Chicago: U of Chicago
P, 1996) 26.
22 Laura Ann Stoler "Colonial Archives and the Arts of Governance" (conference paper). Additional dis-
cussions on the figure of the archive in discourse of memory and history may be found in Carolyn
Steedman, DustThe Archive and Cultural History {P\scataway. Rutgers UP, 2002); Antoinette Burton, ed.
Archive Stories: Facts, Fictions and the Writing of History (Durham: Duke UP 2005).
23 In particular, see Michel Foucault, The Archeology of Knowledge, trans. A.M. Sheridan Smith (New
York: Pantheon, 1972) and Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, trans. Eric Prenowitz
(Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1996).
2'' Mike Featherstone, "Archive," Theory, Culture & Society 23, 596.
25 Foucault writes "The archive . . . deprives us of our continuities; it dissipates that temporal identity in
which we are pleased to look at ourselves when we wish to exorcise the discontinuities of history; it
breaks the thread of transcendental teleologies; and where anthropological thought once questioned
man's being or subjectivity, it now bursts open the other, and the outside." Michel Foucault, The
Archeology of Knowledge, 131.
26 Carolyn Steedman, Dust: The Archive and Cultural H/sfory (Piscataway: Rutgers UP, 2002).
27 "The so-called Muselman, as the camp language termed the prisoner who was giving up and was
given up by his comrades, no longer had room in his consciousness for the contrasts good or bad, noble
or base, intellectual or unintellectual. He was a staggering corpse, a bundle of physical functions in its
last convulsions. As hard as it may be for us to do so, we must exclude him from our considerations."
Jean Amery, cited in Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive, 41.