doi:10.1093/alh/ajj018 Advance Access publication March 10, 2006 © The Author 2006. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org Against Zero-Sum Logic: A Response to Walter Benn Michaels Michael Rothberg In “Plots Against America: Neo-Liberalism and Anti-Racism,” Walter Benn Michaels brings together three significant problematics that converge with my own concerns: namely, the Holocaust and Holocaust memory; comparative accounts of social difference and identity; and the critique of capitalism. About these issues, Michaels makes three central claims. First, he suggests that discussion of the Holocaust and anti-Semitism occupies a disproportionate place in the landscape of American culture. Second, he argues that class should be thought of as fundamentally different from social identi- ties such as racial and gendered identity. And third, he renders the accusation that in abandoning class analysis for cultural analysis, contemporary criticism and theory are complicit with a neoliberal logic in which “we are allowed to do what we can afford to do.” There are important aspects of this discussion with which I agree, but I will also articulate some strong disagreements with the logic that unites Michaels’s claims. In presenting my response in terms of disagreements, readers will recognize that I agree with the claim in Michaels’s recent book The Shape of the Signifier (2004) that one of the most dismal effects of postmodernism—which he calls posthis- toricism—is the replacement of ideological disagreement with iden- titarian differences, that is, the replacement of what we believe by who we are. In the name of politicizing identity, posthistoricism actually depoliticizes difference. Michaels’s recent work has the great virtue of forcing us to think harder about questions of identity under global capitalism. This response aims to repoliticize questions of difference from a perspective that is indebted neither to “posthis- toricism” nor to Michaels’s version of class analysis. Let me first take up the question of the Holocaust through a response to Michaels’s mobilization of Roth and Spiegelman in this article. I refer to Michaels’s mobilization rather than his reading or interpretation because I’m not sure that the genre of this essay is best