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PARTISAN REVIEW
ing, unless we differentiate between history as a particular mode of
understanding time and time itself. Time does not stop.
What does it mean, then, to take the Shoah into consciousness? The
temptation is to claim it periodizes the flow of time by marking off an
exceptional phase, and so dividing before and after. Think of how many
"posts" have recently sprung up: post-Holocaust, postwar, post-struc–
turalism, postmodern, post-philosophy, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.
(Now, perhaps, post-91r
1.)
Blanchot does not doubt that such a trick of
thought helps to focus the traumatic or unintelligible. But the next step,
according to him, should be to guard the space or absence created by that
sudden incursion of the unintelligible. Guard it, that is, from explana–
tions or consolations seeking to fill a void, from anything that pretends
the factors contributing to that moment are over, like a freak storm.
His subtlest point, however, is that responding with a vehement tem–
poral demarcation is part of the disaster. Instead of yielding to "every–
thing is different now," to an epochal before-and-after distinction, this
habit of the mind should be challenged . Blanchot's own response is to turn
from death, as a final date, toward dying; that is, to contemplate an intol–
erable un-power or passivity. This goes against our mental nerves which
are trained to be activist. They react to events by working them through
or extracting a meaning. Though it may be that a
saeculum
or era is over,
this era, like previous ones, was defined by the deceptive notion of an end–
ing. What has come to an end is the notion itself of an end-time.
Blanchot's insight does not remain at the level of methodology or
epistemology. The consequences he draws are, instead, insistently
moral. For without an end-time, suffering is cut loose from any value
system that comforts itself with the thought of a sublime reversal. Cat–
astrophe-creation becomes an obsolete hope and suffering is no longer
a condition of redemption.
It
is the sufferance, perhaps forever, of suf–
fering, whether we experience it directly or cannot avoid watching the
suffering of others. As Blanchot writes, "It is the horror of a suffering
without end, a suffering that time can no longer redeem, that has
escaped time and for which there is no longer recourse; it is irremedia–
ble." The Holocaust, then-and with it the haunting imagery of both
utopia and apocalypse-continues beyond 1945 as a possibility too fun–
damental to be foreclosed by a period term.
Moreover, from Blanchot's quarrel with Hegel throughout
The Writ–
ing of the Disaster,
we infer that the important word in "the movement
of meaning was swallowed up" is "movement." History may catch fire,
but it is not burnt up; history's movement is what has been fatally injured.
The divisions of time discerned by Hegel, the progressive movement of
