“Working through” may ultimately signify, in Maurice Blanchot’s words, “to keep watch over absent meaning.” - Saul Friedlander, “Trauma, Memory and Transference”

“What is not confronted critically does not disappear; it tends to return as the repressed.” - Dominick LaCapra, Representing the Holocaust

“The silence,” writes Lyotard, “that surrounds the phrase ‘Auschwitz was the extermination camp,’ is not a state of mind (état d’âne), it is a sign that something remains to be phrased which is not, which is not determined." - Saul Friedlander, “Trauma, Memory and Transference”

“How language is used is a crucial consideration in working through problems, and the historiographical use of language confronts specific difficulties and challenges in the face of limit cases that may reduce one to silence. Auschwitz as reality and as metonym is the extreme limit case that threatens classifications, categories, and comparisons. It may reduce one to silence. Silence that is not a sign of utter defeat, is, however, itself a potentially ritual attitude, but in this sense it is a silence survenu intricately bound with certain uses of language.” - Dominick LaCapra, Representing the Holocaust