Trevor,
It seems as if we have a bit of a thread going here. I'm too busy to do any reading so some questions.

First, if culture is inextricably bound up with guilt (Auschwitz as Holocaust?) and with Auschwitz as administratively-organised mass murder, torture, humiliation, degradation, then what do we do, living the lives that we lead?

From what I can see it involves leading a lonely life as a radical academic, or being an ex-academic on the fringes of academic culture, engaged in the politics of culture in which reason is critically turned in on itself. It involves a retreat in scholarship in European philosophy shared with a few students and staff.

If that is so, then do we cultivate a culture of remembrance of the loss from the historical shudder?

Second question.

How does that compare to Heidegger's dwelling ethics? It strikes me that Heidegger's dwelling ethics is a good response to the dialectic of Enlightenment.

I understand that text--the Dialectic of Enlightenment--- in the following way. On this interpretation this text:

"...proposes an overarching philosophy of history based on the notion of the domination of nature, arguing that the Western world, impelled by the instinct of self-preservation, once overcame the terrors of nature through magic, myth, and finally the Enlightenment but that this cognitive and technological Enlightenment then reverted to myth and barbarism (the historical reference point is German fascism). Reason became instrumental and technocratic, and humans forgot their imbrication with the natural environment. The theme of the domination of nature, with nature conceived (as in Karl Marx) as both outer and "inner" nature, is thus combined with the Weberian motif of rationalization and "disenchantment" of the world to produce a "concept of Enlightenment" (the title of the first, programmatic chapter) that betrays its own original liberating impulse. The equivocation in this account, never explicit in the book, is its reliance on an emphatic or even utopian concept of "good" reason as the basis for its criticism of the insufficient, truncated reason of the Enlightenment."

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