The Holocaust And "The Human"

It may or may not be the case, as an eminent literary critic wants us to believe, that Shakespeare is to be credited with inventing our notion of "the human."2 It is, however, apparently clear who destroyed it. "It seems," Jacob Talmon wrote forty years ago, "that nazism achieved considerable success in stifl ing in many of its adherents the sense of the unity of the human species."3 On the one hand, then, we should not be surprised to find critics such as Aimé Césaire talking of "pseudohumanism" in the wake of colonialism and the Holocaust. Césaire says of humanism that "for too long it has diminished the rights of man," and is thus tempted to dismiss any notion of "the human" as "sordidly racist."