Unspeakable pasts as limit events: The Holocaust, genocide, and the stolen generations

This article examines the role of testimony in the production of the memory of the Holocaust and the practice of forcible removals in Australia as 'limit events'. A 'limit event' is an event or practice of such magnitude and profound violence that its effects rupture the otherwise normative foundations of legitimacy and so-called civilising tendencies that underlie the constitution of political and moral community. The references are the stories of removal collated in Bringing Them Home, and eyewitness testimonies from the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem in 1961. By situating the stolen generations and the Eichmann trial as limit events, I argue that the effects of witnessing and story-telling exposed a cultural semantics of what was speakable and unspeakable in the narratives of judging historical injustice and remembering past traumas.