¹This paper is part of a larger research project concerning the emblematic status of the phrase and metaphor “After Auschwitz” as it has been used by Theodor Adorno and Jean‐François Lyotard to stand for the “end” of modernity, or at least, the radical questioning of the “project of modernity” (Habermas). My paper “'After Auschwitz’: Adorno, Lyotard and Modernity” was presented as part of the Postgraduate Seminar Programme (Policy Studies Group, Education Department) at the University of Auckland on June 22, 1993. It comprised four sections: a commemoration of Auschwitz, presented largely through photographic archives to the music of Henri Gorecki's Symphony No 3 (2nd Movement); a discussion of the New Zealand Solicitor‐General's report on the investigation of alleged Nazi war criminals living in New Zealand, released in December 1992; a contextualisation of the report in terms of the historical revival of public interest in the Holocaust and the so‐called “historian's debate” which took place in the Federal Republic in 1986; and finally an introduction to Adorno's and Lyotard's discussion of “Auschwitz”. (Gorecki's composition is based, in part, upon a prayer inscribed on a wall of cell number 3 in the basement of the Gestapo's headquarters in Zakopane by an eighteen year old, Helena Wanda Blazusiakówna, who was imprisoned on the 26 September 1944.) I have drawn on aspects of the third and final sections of that paper for my present purposes. A version of this paper was presented to the Philosophy of Education Society of Australasia's Annual Conference 1993, “Ethics, Knowledge and Public Policy”, October 1 ‐4, University of Sydney. I would like to thank the editors and anonymous reviewers of Discourse and the Journal of Educational Thought for constructive comments on an earlier version of this paper. A version of this paper is to appear in my forthcoming book, Poststructuralism, Politics and Education, New York, Bergin and Garvey, 1995.