The Future of a Negation is a crucial statement on the Holocaust--and on Holocaust denial--from Alain Finkielkraut, one of the most acclaimed and influential intellectuals in contemporary Europe.

The book examines the Holocaust, its origins in modern European thought and politics, and recent "revisionist" attempts to deny its full dimensions and, in some cases, its very existence as historical fact. Finkielkraut's central topic is the impulse toward "negation" of the Nazi horrors: the arguments made by many people, of varying political orientations, that "the gas chambers...