What is real in a historical event?

This is a slightly edited transcription of a talk I delivered on April 5, 2014, at the “Workshop in preparation of the WAP Congress” of the London Society of the NLS. The theme of the congress is "A Real for the 21st Century". The Workshop, organised by Janet Haney, was structured around four entries from the upcoming English version of Scilicet. Each was presented by a member or friend of the London Society who participated in the process of translation and editing. My talk was in connection to “Shoah”, a paper by French psychoanalyst Philippe Benichou.

Dear friends and colleagues,

Thank you for giving me the opportunity to speak today here about some of the questions I found myself struggling with, while reading and translating “Shoah” by Philippe Benichou.

Benichou’s paper talks about the Shoah. You cannot wonder, Benichou writes, what a "real for the twenty-first century" could be, without mentioning that event beyond meaning, real, all too real, the Shoah.

I was captivated but also puzzled by the power of this depiction of the Shoah as an “event beyond meaning, real, all too real”.

I asked myself, what could this mean?

Attempting to formulate an answer, I found myself faced with further questions:

What is an event? What is history? What is a historical event?

And then: What is real in a historical event?

This is how I will begin.

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