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Law Text Culture
Article Title
Abstract
The essential question about the Holocaust "How could this happen?... retains... all its weight, all its stark nakedness, all its horror" (Scholem, in Markle 1995: 149). It is essential because it gathers together all those events that are collectively known as the Holocaust. It expresses both disbelief and a secret hope that if only the horror could be understood it would be less terrifying. The failure to comprehend the organised extermination of a whole people has created a void in History, a hole in the meaningful narratives of History. Such a monstrous event recalls Kant's phrase in Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone (1960: 28): "There is evil". Kant was asserting the existence of substantive, positive evil against the dominant view that 'evil' is no more than a lack: either ignorance or psychological deficiency. Today, even more than in Kant's time, talk of evil may sound naive and as old-fashioned as talking about the sacred. In fact, both are often associated, for example, when talking about violence practised by fundamentalist movements or about Nazi "holy wildness" (Zimermann 1996: 252). One could speak of a 'perverted sacred' akin to that spiritual evil which Schelling called "a pale, bloodless, fanatical spiritualism that despises sensuality and is bent on violently dominating and exploiting it... a perversion of true spirituality" (Zizek 1996: 8).
Recommended Citation
Gaete, R., Desecration, Law and Evil, Law Text Culture, 5, 2000.Available at:https://ro.uow.edu.au/ltc/vol5/iss1/20