This article is a contribution to the contemporary genealogy of what has become known as dirty work. More specifically it is a commentary on the notion of 'evil work' developed conjointly by Christophe Dejours and Joseph Torrente through a historical view of the Holocaust based on the discovery of the collective experience of 'atrocious work' as a key to explaining the destruction of the Jews in Europe. In sum, the revelation of how the horror of the Third Reich derives from the imposition of genocide as mass work undertaken by a legion of zealous collaborators. A hypothesis until then dormant in even the best historiography that needed to wait for the intensification of social suffering through the dirty work of today's neoliberalism for it to awaken finally and suggest this explosive short-circuit in a true diagnosis of an era.
Christophe Dejours; Joseph Torrente; Dirty Work; Atrocious Work; Zeal; Holocaust