Abstract
La Concurrence des victimes was published in 1997. Its reception was very mixed, prompting more or less sincere cries of outrage. Since then, the use of the expression has become commonplace, and the book has been widely cited in academic literature. However, at least two notable developments have taken place since then. On the one hand, the rehabilitation of Shoah victims, long associated with cowardly passivity in the face of their executioners, has continued, culminating in the sanctification of the most pestiferous of them all, the members of the Sonderkommandos. Closely associated with the rise of an ethic of survival, this evolution has paradoxically eclipsed the figure of the victim, replacing it with that of the "survivor" or "resilient". On the other hand, many new actors, spokespersons for other victims, are now fuelling polemics with other agendas. The claim to the uniqueness of the Holocaust, and the stodgy arguments that underpinned it, have all but disappeared from the scene, while others are arguing for the uniqueness of the slave trade or colonization. The conference will analyze these two developments.
