The word “No”. Color, absence and law in Kaddish for an unborn child, by Imre Kertész

Abstract

This paper analyzes the novel by Imre Kertész Kaddish for an unborn child, focusing on the relations between memory, absence and law. Some of the perspectives that the Theories of the Color of Newton and Goethe offer to trace symmetries with a possible Human Rights Color Theory and define, within this theory, white as a color associated with absence, mourning, the impossibility of the emergence of law, a color that is neither illuminated nor transformable in others. The Holocaust is associated with absolute black – not illuminated by law –, which produces the impossibility of memory, the denial of the continuation of the personal stories. The eventual new legal compact that is built after the Holocaust should offer an additional clause: the need to continue with the Law as if. The continuity in the Law now requires including the obligation not to forget the consequences and to contemplate the language of the stories and of the Law itself as an expelled language, which even served to generate a perverted justifiable discourse, and which we can now see as an exiled language which supports the burden of memory and those who can never have a voice.