The Trouble with `Never Again!': Rereading Levinas for Genocide Prevention and Critical International Theory
| Published date | 01 April 2008 |
| Date | 01 April 2008 |
| Author | Jacob Schiff |
| DOI | 10.1177/03058298080360020301 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
The Trouble with ‘Never Again!’
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The Trouble with ‘Never Again!’:
Rereading Levinas for Genocide
Prevention and Critical International
Theory
Jacob Schiff*
After the Holocaust, the world said ‘Never again!’ That declaration
has since been repeated often, to no avail. The insufficiency of
this declaration is symptomatic of a problem with redemptive
politics: They might spur us into action to deliver the world from
violence, cruelty and injustice, but they might also overwhelm us
with paralysing responsibility and provoke a retreat into bad faith.
Emmanuel Levinas offers a more sober, but also more promising, view
of politics that resists redemptive aspirations. Critical international
theorists have explored the resources that Levinas offers for thinking
about world politics, but they have underestimated those resources
because they have attributed to him a redemptive account of politics.
From this perspective, they have criticised his infamous response to
the massacres at Sabra and Chatila during Israel’s war with Lebanon.
Reconsidering his comments about that event, I defend Levinas and
suggest that the charges against him stem from that misunderstanding
of his view of politics. Once reconstructed, these comments point
towards a challenging – but more productive – politics of disquietude
that might inform a more constructive approach to the prevention of
genocide.
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* Author ’s Note: This article was presented as a paper at the annual meeting
of the International Studies Association. In addition to all of the participants in
those workshops and panels, thanks are due to Yusuf Has, Patchen Markell, Chris
McIntosh, Stephanie Monroe, David Newstone, Bernard Schiff, Lisa Wedeen,
Alexander Wendt, and the late Iris Marion Young for very helpful conversations
about this article, as well as comments on earlier drafts. I am also indebted to the
Editorial Board of Millennium and to several anonymous reviewers for helpful
comments on an earlier draft. Thanks of an entirely different order are due to
Anna Coodin Schiff.
© Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 2007. ISSN 0305-8298. Vol.36 No.1, pp. 27-47
Millennium
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Introduction
During the Second World War, the Nazis conducted an exterminatory
campaign against Jews and other minorities in Germany and throughout
much of occupied Europe. Their aim – sometimes explicit, sometimes veiled
– was purification of land and people; their means included deportation,
concentration, forced labour, eugenics, massacres, gas chambers and
crematoria.1 In response to these events, a new international legal
apparatus was born: the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment
of the Crime of Genocide (1951).2 Genocide became ‘a crime under
international law, contrary to the spirit and aims of the United Nations and
condemned by the civilized world’, and signatories pledged to ‘liberate
mankind from such an odious scourge’. Beyond the criminalisation of
genocide, this pledge brought with it an awesome responsibility, both
infinite and absolute: to eradicate genocide forever. With the adoption
of the Convention in 1951, the parties declared ‘Never again!’3 And
yet, within the past decades genocides have ravaged Rwanda, Kosovo,
East Timor, and Darfur.4 There have also been campaigns to eradicate
the indigenous populations of the Amazon Basin. Samantha Power has
documented US inaction in apparent genocides dating back to the Khmer
Rouge revolution in Cambodia.5 ‘Never again!’ has become ‘again and
again’.
Millennium
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1. See, e.g., Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem (New York: Penguin Books,
1994); Martin
Gilbert, Never Again: A History of the Holocaust (New York: Universe, 2000);
Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews (Chicago: Quadrangle
Books, 1961); Hilberg (ed.), Documents of Destruction: Germany and Jewry
1933–45 (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1971); Raphael Lemkin, Axis Rule in
Occupied Europe: Laws of Occupation, Analysis of Government, Proposals for
Redress (Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1944);
and Robert J. Lifton, The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of
Genocide (New York: Basic Books, 1986).
2. The Convention was preceded by Resolution 96-I, adopted on 11 December
1946. See Leo Kuper, Genocide: Its Political Use in the Twentieth Century (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1981), 22–3. The adoption of the Convention itself
was hardly a smooth process. For some of the political background, see William
Schabas, Genocide in International Law: The Crime of Crimes (Cambridge and
New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
3. Abraham Foxman, Never Again? The Threat of the New Anti-Semitism (San
Francisco: Harper, 2003); Gilbert, Never Again; Helmut Schreier and Matthias Heyl
(eds), Never Again: The Holocaust’s Challenge for Educators (Hamburg: Krämer,
1997); Peter Ronayne, Never Again? The United States and the Prevention and
Punishment of Genocide since the Holocaust (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield,
2001). Stephen Samuel Wise (ed.), Never Again! Ten Years of Hitler, a Symposium
(New York: Jewish Opinion Publishing Corporation, 1943).
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