Abstract

The Holocaust was a transformational event, a caesura in our history. The Nazi genocide opened a breach through which the death-world has become a feature of the social landscape of modernity. Moreover, the Holocaust has a futural dimension, whereby mass murder has become a specter that haunts our society today, as the horrific events in Yugoslavia and the ex-Soviet Union reveal. The Holocaust, too long ignored by philosophy, is an urgent summons to grapple with the impact of the death-world on our experience, our being. There is a need for philosophy to confront the Holocaust as a transformational event. The thinking of a number of philosophers, from John Dewey and Martin Heidegger to Hannah Arendt and Theodor W. Adorno, have provided us with vital elements needed for the task of thinking Auschwitz.