Auschwitz forced a total resemanticization of ordinary language that must nevertheless fail.
Evidence
Moni, the boy whose perspective is followed in third-person narration, figures a challenge of language: He must fit the image of the Piepel, the sexual slave of “Prominents,” block chiefs and kapos. He also figures a challenge to the reader, who must read words such as “life” and “love” and translate them into “Auschwitz life” and “Auschwitz love.” Bread, in Auschwitz, is “Auschwitz bread,” and sky is ”Auschwitz sky,” and the days and the nights mark ”Auschwitz weeks” while one breathes, perhaps, ”Auschwitz air.” Yet this constant and necessary translation is predicated on a reinscription of a familiar meaning, to the point of a rupture that must, however, fail, reinscribing therefore an understanding that is as unavoidable as it is unbearable. — Gil Anidjar, The Jew, the Arab, 726
Categorization
Category: Definitional Content
- DEEPTHINKING: The paradox that ordinary words must be retranslated into ‘Auschwitz’ meanings yet this translation must fail, reinscribing the unbearable familiar, is a genuinely dense formulation worth sitting with.