| Abstract | In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: Toward the end of her recent book on individual and collective memory of World War II and the Holocaust, Crises of Memory and the Second World War, Susan Rubin Suleiman writes: "I think we need a moratorium, or even a downright taboo, on the use of the word 'unspeakable' in connection with the Holocaust. If a thing is spoken about, however obliquely, then it is not unspeakable—on the contrary, it may be the object about and around which one can never stop speaking" (188). With this emphatic assertion that borders on the polemical, Suleiman challenges a certain thread of postwar cultural discourse that characterizes the Holocaust, in the words of the survivor-writer Elie Wiesel, as "a universe outside the universe, a creation that exists parallel to creation" (165), a realm that lies beyond the ethical or even possible reach of human language. In her adamant rejection of such a position, Suleiman aligns herself with a particular perspective on Holocaust representation that, increasingly and ever more intensively over the last twenty years, has come to question the notion of the Holocaust as an incomprehensible, ineffable, sacred event whose alleged unspeakability, as Thomas Trezise argues, has been constructed discursively as both an ontological condition and a normative moral precept (39–40). With her book, Suleiman self-consciously positions herself within this critical discourse and argues that recent critiques of memory are "salutary" as "a corrective to the 'sacralization' of memory, the 'duty to remember' that can all too quickly degenerate into kitsch, the very opposite of critical self-reflection" (7). At the same time, however, with its call for a "taboo" on using the word "unspeakable" with regard to the Holocaust, Suleiman's statement employs the rhetoric of the very discourse it criticizes. Going at least as far back as Adorno's claim that to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric (a statement that continues to be obsessively quoted in Holocaust Studies as a binding dictum), discourse on the Holocaust has been governed by a series of taboos, dicta, prohibitions, interdictions and bans proclaimed by various writers, cultural critics and theologians. Suleiman's statement seems to add one more injunction to the pile, but in this case, her ban constitutes a double negative: it is a taboo on the taboo of speaking about the Holocaust. A widely-published scholar of Holocaust Studies who is also a perceptive critic of language, Suleiman is well aware of this history of discursive proscription and sensitive to its rhetorical implications. As I read it, her employment of the word "taboo" in this context is neither unreflective nor unwitting, but rather functions as a self-conscious, ironic intervention in this discourse. In her playful declaration of a taboo on a taboo, Suleiman highlights the vagaries of cultural discourse. Rather than progressing teleologically toward an ever more transparent and self-aware understanding of the effects that mass trauma has on both humans and their self-representations, public discourse on the Holocaust (and, as Suleiman argues, on World War II as well), oblivious to its own historical blind spots, has tended to ping-pong between extreme positions in an often bewildered attempt to grapple with an event whose past continues to be felt as present. This discursive oscillation, as it pertains to the intersection between personal memory and cultural memory of World War II and the Holocaust, is the subject of Suleiman's book. She diagnoses what she terms "crises of memory" in postwar and contemporary literature, film and discourse, particularly as they play out in France and Central Europe (although, as she stresses, "the memory of World War II, while nationally specific, transcends national boundaries" and contributes to "the emergence of a new, global, cosmopolitan memory" [2] ). She focuses in particular on the widely-discussed historical transition from the "repression" of wartime crimes and trauma during the 1950s and 1960s (which, as Suleiman makes clear, was ubiquitous in Western and Eastern Europe, although its specific features were unique to each national context) to the veritable "obsession with memory" (8) that continues up to the present moment. However, rather than constructing a story of a linear, progressive development from amnesia to anamnesis that culminates in a transparent...
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