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7 Soc. & Legal Stud. 586 (1998)
Wofgang Sofsky, the Order of Terror: The Concentration Camp

handle is hein.journals/solestu7 and id is 582 raw text is: 586 BOOK REVIEWS be that it continues to devote much of its energies to opposing gay rights, as a national organization it has deliberately downplayed the issue. Why? Finally, while Herman rejects the equation of the Christian Right with the extreme right, she does suggest that its anti-gay 'themes of disease and seduction are strongly reminiscent of older, anti-Semitic discourses' (p. 79) and that the claim that on average gay men have a high income 'plays to preexisting anti-Semitic ideologies' (p. 125). This is a complex ques- tion (one writer, for instance, has even argued that anti-fascist language is saturated with notions of fascists as germs or vermin) but all I would want to argue here is that just as populist attacks on groups as privileged or conspiratorial are common on the extreme right but not only located there, so constructions of gays that, in some ways, resemble those of Jews need not have a root in anti-semitism. The rise of an anti-gay agenda has proved to be a significant part of American poli- tics in recent years. In examining how it has been constructed, Herman has produced an excellent study. That it should provoke argument as well as admiration is a measure of its achievement. MARTIN DURHAM Department of Politics and American Studies, University of Wolverhampton, UK WOLFGANG SOFSKY, The Order of Terror: The Concentration Camp (William Templer trans.). Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997, 356 pp., $29.95. Conflicting images seem to haunt our historical understanding of the Holocaust. On the one hand, the destruction of European Jewry by the Nazis and their allies is incomprehensible. On the other, many of the institutional and epistemological struc- tures which made the Holocaust happen fit easily into the structural and ideological continuities of modernity. Wolfgang Sofsky's The Order of Terror The Concentration Camp fits uncomfort- ably astride both sides of our collective imaginary of the Shoah. The author describes in often minute detail the structure, organization and daily operational routine of the Nazi concentration camp which he clearly and explicitly places into the dominant sociology of modernity, with its emphasis on the state monopoly of violence, the bureaucratization and rationalization of existence and a Foucauldian dispersion of sites of surveillance, discipline and control. He then proceeds to the second, perhaps more vital, ideological point which underpins the historical reimagining of the Holo- caust necessary for us to continue to live 'after Auschwitz', or in Sofsky's case, 'after Dachau'. In the concentration camp, Sofsky finds a point of rupture with modern organiz- ational and penological theory and practice. While modern systems of control and surveillance of the deviant are informed by a symbiotic relationship between power and resistance, the concentration camp operates beyond this modernist dynamic of power. For Sofsky, 'the caesura in the history of power is unmistakable' (p. 279). In the Nazi concentration camp, there operated a system of absolute power. Here resist- ance was both unnecessary and impossible. In a sense, then, Dachau becomes almost 'post' modern, throwing off the organizational and structural constraints imposed by definition on modern penal institutions. In the concentration camp, the social struc- tures and hierarchies which flow downward from the SS personnel to be replicated in the ordering of the relationships among prisoners, from the kapos to the walking dead, create a new form of power, absolute power, to which resistance is irrelevant: 'Absol- ute power does not obey the pattern of purposeful, result-oriented action. It is pur- poseless; not poesis, but negative praxis' (p. 21).

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