HOLOCAUST TOPOLOGIES - SINGULARITY, POLITICS, SPACE

This paper explores the Holocaust through three figures of singularity : exception (the Holocaust as a unique event in world history); extrem ity (the Holocaust as a limit case that discloses what only remains la tent in other instances): and serial erasure (the Holocaust as a trans pearing trace of the attempt to terminate the interminable). Whilst th ese figures have been respectively associated with debates in History, Sociology and Continental Philosophy, they have almost invariably bee n divorced from considerations of physical and social space. This lacu na is particularly disappointing, however, in so far as our understand ing of the Holocaust is seriously impoverished by such a failure to ma p the geopolitics, geohistories and geophilosophies that were its cond itions of possibility. Likewise, geographical knowledge is itself impo verished by its widespread and continuing failure to engage in any con certed and significant way with the Holocaust. Accordingly, our presen tation explores the conceptualization of singularity as a potential me ans of theoretically informing debate on the spaces of the Holocaust. The paper situates the Holocaust in relation to the Nazis' attempt to produce Lebensraum (living-space for the Aryan race) through Entfernun g (removal of the Jews from the German lifeworld). This not only clari fies many of the difficulties encountered in the existing Holocaust li terature, but also specifies the extent to which the Auschwitz univers e of gas chambers and crematoria, in which millions of human beings we re systematically killed, was employed by the Nazis to produce the spa ce of the Third Reich. Copyright (C) 1996 Elsevier Science Ltd