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Foucault and the Holocaust: Epistemic Shift, Liminality and the Death Camps

Michel Foucault, in his historical and theoretical works, often analyzed the Holocaust by applying his theories of carceral technology and biopower to the German system of concentration camps. This is similarly the case with scholars who write about Foucault as well as those who use his theories in critical application. However, consideration of or allusion to the German-operated death camps of occupied Eastern Europe is surprisingly rare in Foucault's writings. Attempting to explain this silence about the death camps specifically (as opposed to Foucault's more numerous references to the German system of concentration camps generally) in both Foucault's own thought and writings and those of Foucauldian scholars, this article suggest that the death camps occur as something liminal within Foucauldian theory. It argues that, though many of the techniques employed by the Germans in their carceral systems during the 1930s and 1940s were traced by Foucault and his exegetes back to the eighteenth century, looked at differently, the German death camps of Eastern Europe in the 1940s represent (within the framework of Foucault's existing theory) a dramatic and unique departure from earlier instantiations of state violence and biological control. Outlining and examining Foucault's philosophy of history, this article links Foucault's silence on the Holocaust death camps to other silences in his historical writings, arguing that the death camps represent a physical instantiation of a transition point in Foucault's idea of historical epistemes. Such an argument seeks to re-frame Foucault's silence on the death camps as one that reveals an overlooked (but structurally essential) component within his philosophical theorization of history.