 Lyotard offers a number of examples of differends: the relation of colonizer and the colonized or between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, but he opens The Differend with the case of the French Holocaust denier Robert Faurisson, who claimed that the only testimony that he would accept would be that of someone who had actually been through the gas chambers. This, of course, sets off a differend since to have seen the gas chambers in operation would be to have been its victim, and thus silences all other genres, the various linkages of communication within the genre of history, for example, that would testify to the Shoah. One set of phrases is absolutely incommunicable with the other. But this does not mean that there is an “equivalence” between the discourse of the denier and the discourses of historians and survivors alike. Lyotard’s response to this problem is complicated. He argues, not always persuasively, that the Nazis were in many ways successful in destroying the means by which historians adduce historical events: they not only killed their victims and destroyed their bodies, but also the paperwork and buildings that would be evidence of their crimes. “The result”, he writes, “is that one cannot adduce numerical proof of the massacre and that a historian pleading for the trial’s revision will be able to object at great length that the crime has not been established in its quantity” (Differend, 56). But the task of justice, he claims, is not to let the Nazis or their modern apologists claim a relativism of different discourses. Lyotard argues that Auschwitz offers something that is unpresentable in the presentation of history itself: an inverted sublime, a horror so infinite that a “silence” is “imposed on knowledge”, though it does “not impose the silence of forgetting” (Differend, 56). Indeed, he says, it imposes a sentiment, if not an obligation: 