The Holocaust stands as the ultimate limit experience in postmodernist thought. It is an event so traumatic, terrifying, and even sublime that it defies all attempts to figure it in language. From Theodor Adorno’s famous (and misunderstood) dictum about the barbarity of writing poetry after Auschwitz to Claude Lanzmann’s insistence on the “obscenity in the very project of understanding,” the event’s extreme violence seems to defy aesthetic figuration and requires strict ethical norms for artistic representation, often leading to abstraction and minimalism. The historian Saul Friedlander highlights a similar tension in relationship to historical evidence, arguing that the “monstrous manifestation of human ‘potentialities’” should “not be forgotten or repressed,” but equally “this record should not be distorted or banalized by grossly inadequate representations […] there are limits to representation which should not but can easily be transgressed.” Jean-François Lyotard, one of the most prominent thinkers of what some have called the “Holocaust sublime,” argues that representing “Auschwitz” is a form of forgetting: “it cannot be represented without being missed, being forgotten anew, since it defies images and words.” Art should only bear witness to the differend, “the unstable state and instant of language wherein something which must be able to be put into phrases cannot yet be.” Drawing on the differend as that which exceeds language, Michael Bernard-Donals and Richard Glejzer argue that “what is redemptive in representations of the Shoah – what one sees – is precisely the production of this sublime excess, which troubles testimony and narrative and forces the reader to confront the horror of the limit.”

This excess or absence also haunts the language of testimony by Holocaust survivors. Elie Wiesel suggests that “the word has deserted the meaning it was intended to convey – one can longer make them coincide.” Jean Améry writes about how difficult it was to learn “the ordinary language of freedom” after his liberation, a type of language that he continues to speak “with discomfort and without real trust in its validity.” Aharon Appelfeld categorizes the Holocaust as “the type of enormous experience which reduces one to silence.”Writing in The Drowned and the Saved (1986, I sommersi e i salvati), Primo Levi insists that “we, the survivors are not the true witnesses […] we are those who by their prevarications or abilities or good luck did not touch bottom.