Conclusion

Abstract

In many ways, theories of traumatic Holocaust memory, in their claims to an ethics of otherness, can be characterised as Levinasian. They assume the ethical schema of Emmanuel Levinas’s conception of the ‘infinity’ and ‘face’ of the Other, which can be understood via a brief explication. For Levinas, a relation with alterity, with the Other, is structured into consciousness and language (or expression). The Other has an identity outside of the ‘accomplishments of history’, which does not mean it is ahistorical but that that identity can be expressed in terms other than those which history has dictated, ‘before the fullness of time, while there is still time’ (Levinas, 2005, p. 23). This does not mean that Otherness can be grasped in a totalising manner; rather, Levinas, raises the ‘possibility’ of its ‘signification without a context’, in its excess of context, in its infinitude (2005, p. 26). Infinity therefore cannot be grasped as such, because it cannot be contained by consciousness: ‘Infinity does not first exist, and then reveal itself. Its infinition is produced as revelation, as a positing of itself in me. It is produced in the improbable feat whereby a separated being fixed in its identity, the same, the I, nonetheless contains in itself what it can neither contain nor receive solely by virtue of its own identity. Subjectivity realises these impossible exigencies — the astonishing feat of containing more than it is possible to contain’ (Levinas, 2005, p. 27).