Joel Schalit at Religion Dispatches reviews Violence by philosopher Slavoj Žižek:
In [Violence], he takes up the case of historian David Irving, who was sentenced to three years in prison in Austria for a 1989 interview doubting the existence of the Auschwitz gas chambers. Zizek attacks Irving’s imprisonment on the grounds that criminalizing his doubt of the Shoah is “the most refined and perverted version of Holocaust denial.”
Logic like this cannot fail to confound the uninitiated reader. What is “anti-anti-Semitism,” anyway? And how could the punishment of Holocaust deniers possibly be a form of denial? Rather than dismissing him outright, or submitting to the vague feeling that Zizek might be somehow kidding, the frustrated reader would do well to sit down and try to untangle the philosopher’s arguments.
For example, legislation that criminalizes Holocaust denial has the unintended consequence of rendering the tragedy, to use the author’s words, “untouchable.” It chills discussion. This makes it difficult to do such basic things as conceptualize the Shoah’s meaning and debate why genocide ought to be forbidden. Banishing deniers unfortunately buries the original event, leaving denial, sadly, the only way to talk about it.
That it would take a Holocaust denier’s denial to reveal to the world that, in typically psychoanalytic terms, the world itself was in denial, is classic Zizek. Unfortunately, it rings true. When genocide has become routinized (Cambodia, Bosnia, Rwanda, and now Darfur), it becomes necessary to find ways to criticize European “anti-anti-Semitism”—to point out that this posture actually ends up restraining debate about state-sanctioned discrimination, even mass murder.
Read the full review here.