‘The history of an incorrect term’: Agamben, etymology and the medieval history of the holocaust

Abstract

In his discussion of the word 'holocaust' in Remnants of Auschwitz, Giorgio Agamben identifies the twelfth-century English historian Richard of Devizes as the first to connect the term 'holocaust' to the murder of Jews, concluding with an indictment of its use: 'it … contains a heredity that is from its inception anti-Semitic.' This essay will take as its starting point twelfth-century usage of the term 'holocaust,' alongside the two key Latin terms flagged up by Agamben -immolare ['to burn'] and sanguisuga ['bloodsucker']. Ultimately, the essay will suggest that, contrary to Agamben's understanding of this moment, Richard of Devizes was not intending to portray the death of Jews as a sacrifice pleasing to God, but rather that he was demonstrating an alert awareness of the extent to which Christian culture and Jewish culture are deeply imbricated. The essay concludes by considering the implications of its own methodology.postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies (2014) 5, 336-345.

On Guilt and Ghosts

“…17 The term "holocaust," according to Agamben, contains a "heredity that is from its inception anti-semitic." 18 Mostly, the term "holocaust" does not denote the notion of catastrophe, unlike the Hebrew term "Shoah," designating the destruction of over a thousand years of Jewish Polish life and culture. 19 In his focus on the Polish theater of the Shoah, the author misrepresents the thousand-year history of Polish Jewish culture, including the prolific Jewish theater scene that existed before the war.…”

Arthur, roi méhaignié. Une lecture de la première branche du Haut Livre du Graal

“…The implicit answer to this rhetorical question is that, in contemporary philosophy, it should not. » 15 C'est cette même propension à chercher, dans « l'origine » prétendue des vocables ou des figures, leur réalité dernière, comme si les siècles et les modes de production qui se sont succédés depuis n'avaient eu sur eux qu'une influence superficielle, que nous retrouvons dans son traitement de la figure du roi Méhaignié. À ces critiques, nous tenterons d'ajouter celle d'avoir négligé, dans une généalogie de l'économie et du gouvernement en Occident, l'apport des textes fictifs en langue vernaculaire et ce, tout en ayant voulu les assimiler à son étude pour créer un effet d'ancrage culturel artificiellement vaste.…”