| Abstract | What has Holocaust Studies brought to the study of memory, and, conversely, how has theoretical work on the Holocaust been inflected by Memory Studies? Focusing on witness testimony, we argue that the theoretical and philosophical efforts to grasp and define its contours have provoked a radical rethinking of the workings of memory and transmission: in particular, a foregrounding of embodiment, affect and silence. Yet we caution against a hyperbolic emphasis on trauma and the breakdown of speech. We find that the very aporias that have made the Holocaust a touchstone for the study of twentieth-century memory have engendered two distinctive interpretive uses of witness testimony — one linked to a troubling idiom of uniqueness and exceptionalism, potentially supporting nationalist and identity politics, the other, to cosmopolitan or transnational memory cultures able to sustain efforts towards the global attainment of human rights.
|
