Many of those who know little of Theodor Adorno's philosophy know his remark that to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric. It is a puzzling remark in many respects, not least because of its (largely unstated) assumptions about the effects produced by poetic renderings of unspeakable events. Even if there are events legitimately describable as unspeakable, it is hard to see why poetry deserves more opprobrium than any other way of framing them. Social theory and sociology, for instance, appear prime candidates for the same charge. Indeed, perhaps the only reason that Adorno would not have mentioned them in the same breath was that sociology was already a lost cause. Unlike poetry or fiction, it would not attempt to speak of the event at all, but would rather do what sociology has always done: exhibit the barbarism of reason involved in transforming the event into processes, conditions, social systems, classificatory schemes or statistical tables.

Anyone who has offered courses entitled ‘Sociology of the Holocaust’ knows of the difficulties this transformation causes. One begins in the hope of grasping the Holocaust, if not as a unique event then as a set of bounded events, only to find oneself talking about the conditions of possibility of totalitarianism, fascism, bureaucracy, or evil, and mobilising a series of familiar and trusted ideal types in order to do so. Frequently enough, in order to grasp the ‘event’ itself one resorts to literature or survivor testimony in an effort to generate the kind of shocking immediacy worthy of the subject. When sociologists do seek to isolate and then explain the event in its uniqueness, they frequently fall back on debates between ‘structuralist’ and ‘intentionalist’ historians. Even there, the emphasis on both sides is largely on conditions, parameters, on what was already in place when the event tookplace. The philosopher Hans Blumenberg expressed this problem with incomparable force: