Camp language reveals the gray-zone partaking binding victims and perpetrators

Evidence

But the language of the Lager, as an instance of LTI, also articulates another “gray zone,” the area of camp life-that peculiar “life in death” that camp life was-in which both oppressor and victim were partaking. Indeed, one of the troubling and peculiar aspects of camp life has to do with this partaking-not a sharing, but a cooperation that incomparably implicated, although obviously not entirely, the victims in their oppression and extermination. This “gray zone” has left traces in the complex phenomena that have maintained the psychic investment that still binds Nazi and Jew together in many cultural and political sites, rendering the question of comparison particularly thorny, as well as less pertinent. But to return to the language of the Lager and the cooperation it sustained: There were words-there is at least one-in this language that mark the disturbing porosity, the contamination, between victim and perpetrator, between Nazi and Jew, but also between camp life and “normal” life. — Gil Anidjar, The Jew, the Arab, 679

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Primo Levi’s ‘gray zone’ concept from The Drowned and the Saved.