parallax
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parallax Issue 30 January–March 2004 witnessing theory Introductions: A parallax with a View Nicholas ChareRowan BaileyPeter Kilroy
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Bare Life, Bearing Witness: Auschwitz and the Pornography of Horror J.M.Bernstein
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Testimony and the Real: Testimony between the Impossibility and Obligation Jelica Sumic-Riha
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The Picture of Abjection: Thomas Vinterberg’s ‘The Celebration’ Tina Chanter
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Aglossostomography Daniel Heller-Roazen
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Satan and Golem, inc. Laurence Rickels
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Koan Practice or Taking Down the Test Avital Ronell
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The Struggle Against the Inauthentic: An Interview by Nicholas Chare Geoffrey Hartman
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Witnessing and Testimony Kelly Oliver
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‘Laboratories’ Against Holocaust Denial—Or, the Limits of Postmodern Theory Elizabeth Jane Bellamy
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Mary Kelly’s Ballad of Kastriot Rexhepi: Virtual Trauma and Indexical Witness in the Age of Mediatic Spectacle Griselda Pollock
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Figural Realism in Witness Literature Hayden White
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Introductions: A parallax with a View
We have limited ink to begin with. parallax needs no introduction. Do you? For what is (in) an introduction? Always an afterword, the introduction is part of a process of witnessing that must be given its due. This introduction opens up the issue, but (where) does it lead? ‘At Theory’s Limits’, was our working title (a title which some of the essays that follow are inspired by), connoting Jean Améry’s essay on the intellectual in Auschwitz. We subsequently changed our mind’s, the issue is now Witnessing Theory. Those words seem to evince better the broad makeup of the papers that comprise this project. But what’s in a word? Each word written here is one less word to write. All the words written here lead someone/somewhere. We must choose our words carefully. Even if they are but poor characters upon the page, acting apart to tell us something, words will have to be counted (on). We call our first word. Theoria. It is sometimes theory. Words bear their past in part in their arrangement. They have to find their bearings. Theoria is carried within theory and witnessing although theoria is not them—it is not just spelt differently—it comes from a foreign language, a language where things mean differently. It is different but related. Theoria borders and burdens what follows. The words in this issue are all border-crossings, meeting up to produce the testimonies that constitute those very encounters. The words come from many languages—parallax is polymorphously theoretical—but there is common parlance. These papers are all saying something, and something of what they are saying is always about what can and cannot be said, and why. As such this first number of the tenth volume of parallax seems to testify to what parallax has always been about, reading theory, testing it, attesting to it, and adding to it. Witnessing Theory (30) is the start of a remarkable series of issues which we detail briefly here, as we measure out our lives in publications. Auditing Culture (31) lends an ear to the culture of auditing which is now prevalent in the Academy and beyond whilst Conceptual (Dis)Orders (32) casts an eye at the unacknowledged touchstones of ‘art’ in the orders of philosophy. We think Witnessing Theory constitutes a good start to a great sequence but what you read here is hearsay—don’t take our words for it—only at the end can you pronounce on this beginning.
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We conclude our introductions by thanking those who work behind the scenes to make parallax run smoothly, Stacey Gubb, Peter Nix, Josine Opmeer, Joel Phipps, Lynn Turner and Rebecca Vickerstaff. We are also deeply grateful to the artist On Kawara for granting us permission to reproduce one of his telegrams as our cover-image. Nicholas Chare, Rowan Bailey, Peter Kilroy parallax ISSN 1353–4645 print/ISSN 1460–700X online © 2004 Taylor & Francis Ltd http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals DOI: 10.1080/1353464032000171037
Bare Life, Bearing Witness: Auschwitz and the Pornography of Horror J.M.Bernstein
I The Saved and the Drowned I must repeat—we, the survivors, are not the true witnesses. This is an uncomfortable notion, of which I have become conscious little by little […] We survivors are not only an exiguous but also an anomalous minority: we are those who by their prevarications or abilities or good luck did not touch bottom. Those who did so, those who saw the Gorgon, have not returned to tell about it or have returned mute, but they are the ‘Muslims’, the submerged, the complete witnesses, the ones whose deposition would have a general significance. They are the rule, we are the exception […] We who were favored by fate tried, with more or less wisdom, to recount not only our fate, but also that of others, the submerged; but this was a discourse on ‘behalf of third parties’, the story of things seen from close by, not experienced personally. When the destruction was terminated, the work accomplished was not told by anyone, just as no one ever returned to recount his own death. Even if they had paper and pen, the submerged would not have testified because their death had begun before that of their body. Weeks and months before being snuffed out, they had already lost the ability to observe, to remember, compare and express themselves. We speak in their stead, by proxy.1 These terrible words of Primo Levi, from The Drowned and the Saved, express a piercing sense of survivor’s guilt: a shame at having survived, and with that shame the sense that one’s experience is thereby inauthentic, less true than the reality suffered by the many, as if only the extreme in suffering represented by the fate of the Muselmänner, the Muslims or mummy-men, the living dead, could provide the condition of truth for the words spoken in their stead. They alone are ‘the complete witnesses, the ones whose deposition would have general
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significance’; which is to say that there is no general significance, no true claiming, apart from their witnessing of their fate. But, of course, also in truth, they, the living dead, being dead, witnessed nothing. There is now an almost tropic fascination with the Muselmann as the exemplary instance of the meaning of the Shoah. We might reconstruct the underlying logic of this tropism this way: since the Muselmann represents both the furthest reach of the parallax ISSN 1353–4645 print/ISSN 1460–700X online © 2004 Taylor & Francis Ltd http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals DOI: 10.1080/1353464032000171046
practice of the camps in their systematic and administrative stripping away of the qualities of the human from their victims, and thus, simultaneously, the destruction of the human to its furthest reach, the Muselmann becoming the limit case of the human, then, somehow, what would be revealed if we could fully, truly and authentically witness this horrific remnant is the ethical claim of the dead, and only the ethical claim of these dead in its interlocking of the meaning of the camps and the limit case of the human can deliver to us what the Shoah signifies for our comprehension of human life generally. Only the speech of the living dead is true speech, only the speech of those who have been systematically deprived of the power of speech is true speech, and only in relation to this truth might any other truths have worth from henceforth. Giorgio Agamben’s Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive2 is the most philosophically elaborate working out of this thought to date. Indeed, his book may fairly be said to be a philosophical commentary on the passage from Levi. On my first encounter with Remnants I was tempted to the belief that it provided a significant fleshing out and/or thoughtful extension of the argumentation of the final section of Adorno’s Negative Dialectics, ‘Meditations on Metaphysics’.3 And while I still find Agamben’s analysis teasingly proximate to what needs to be said about Auschwitz, my continued reading has transformed my original sympathetic agreement first into repugnance, and then into frustrated anger and disappointment. There is, I will argue, a certain logic to my responses. Witnessing in Agamben becomes, finally, an aesthetic act; witnessing aestheticises the remnant, producing a pornographic scene, the pornography of horror. As if this were not troubling enough, the production of that pornographic scene appropriates and betrays one of the deepest strains in Agamben’s thought; in so doing it suppresses the very ethical space it means to elaborate.
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II The Sweetness of Life The deep strain of thought, which in fact provides the frame for Remnants, is Agamben’s historico-philosophical analysis of the relation between politics and life in Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life.4 Although the argument of this work is subtle and complex, the line of thought that we need to extricate from it is not unfamiliar. It begins with the Greek separation of zoe, which expressed the simple fact of living common to all living beings (animals, men, gods), and bios, which indicated the form or way of living proper to an individual or a group. While the stakes of Western ethics and politics have been about the good life, some notion of bios above and beyond the mere fact of living, this latter was recognized by Aristotle as having its own goodness: ‘This [life according to the good] is the greatest end both in common for all men and for each man separately. But men also come together and maintain the political community in view of simple living, because there is probably some kind of good in the mere fact of living itself. If there is no great difficulty as to the way of life, clearly most men will tolerate much suffering and hold on to life [zoe] as if it were a kind of happiness [euemeria, beautiful day] and a natural sweetness’ (Politics, 1278b, 23–31). From the beginnings of political thought a separation was drawn between the culturally elaborated normative authority of the good life for man and the mere fact of life, whose goodness appears not as an authoritative claim, but rather, like the weather or the charms of the palette, as a contingent occurrence beyond the governance of reason or the laws of society. From the moment in which men began to institute truly political forms of society, there arose the necessity to marginalize the claims of animal happiness. In considering the meaning of Plato’s ideal city in the light of the experience of Greek tragedy, Henry Harris encapsulates this marginalization in these words: ‘The City of Reason must “kill its father” by wiping out whatever constitution has been established by [mere] custom; and incest is inevitable if no citizen knows his or her natural siblings. But this only helps us to understand Hegel’s view that the Republic expresses Greek sittlichkeit. In Hegel’s reading parricide and incest are poetic metaphors for what human nature does to itself (logically) when it becomes political’.5 The emergence of the political requires the systematic severing of the authority of nature. Severing the authority of nature, however, could not succeed if the claims of bare life were simply left outside the political, passed over and ignored. Rather, the fate of bare life was to be included in the polis through its exclusion.6 In Hannah Arendt’s reconstruction of Greek political life this occurs via the separation of the private sphere dedicated the necessities of life, the minimum of bare life, which she calls labour, from the public, political world of action, a world held as a common space of appearances that emerges through words and deeds.7 For Agamben this structure of the inclusive exclusion of bare life is constitutive of not just the political, but of the sovereign political as the deepest expression of Western metaphysics. Identifying
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the inclusive exclusion of bare life with the severing of the claims of the authority of nature should provide the needed depth to Agamben’s thesis, allowing it to be separated from his more speculative claims about the notion of the homo sacer itself (the sacred man who may be killed [that’s his mode of inclusion] but not sacrificed [his mode of exclusion]). The second broad thesis orienting Homo Sacer elaborates and radicalizes a thought of Foucault’s: ‘For millennia man remained what he was for Aristotle: a living animal with the additional capacity for political existence. Modern man is an animal whose politics call his existence as a living being into question’.8 Foucault is here insinuating his conception of modernity as biopolitics, the transformation of the interests of the sovereign state from a power of deciding over the life or death of those within its borders to an intrinsic concern with human life as such. This administering and calculating of biological life occurs when the individual as a simple living body becomes what is at stake in a society’s political strategies. When the state cares about birth rates and the physical wellbeing or not of its citizens, when population shifts matter, when in general the nation’s health and biological life become a focus for sovereign power, then, at that juncture, however obliquely and indirectly, bare life is brought within the bounds of the interest and governance of the state: ‘The entry of zoe into the sphere of the polis—the politicization of bare life as such—constitutes the decisive event of modernity and signals a radical transformation of the politicalphilosophical categories of classical thought’.9 Now, as Andrew Norris rightly notes, the ‘bare life that politics sloughs off is never precisely defined by Agamben’;10 rather, and this forms the pivot which connects Homo Sacer with Remnants, the Muselmann is put forward as the exemplary case of bare life, the best example of the homo sacer. And this is not an accidental identification since Agamben equally believes that the Nazi death camps are the fundamental paradigm of biopolitical power rather than the state: we need to read the state through the lens of the camps rather than vice-versa. For Agamben this thesis is intimately connected with what is an implausible account of the meaning of sovereignty that he borrows from Carl Schmitt.11 But we need not follow Agamben’s analysis of sovereignty to come to think that there is something exemplary about the camps and hence about the instance of the Muselmann. If I was right in my contention above that, beginning with Greek democracy, modern moral-political thought is premised on the denial of the authority of nature, and that the notion of bare life as the rationalized remnant of the sweetness of life has been, always, included through exclusion, then we might equally come to think that this inclusive exclusion comes to its fullest expression in the camps. Whatever the relation between bare life and sovereignty has been, at least from the perspective of Adorno’s critical theory, enlightened reason has from the getgo equated the living with non-living, that it is just this that is involved in making reason, with its drive to lawlikeness, universality and abstraction, sovereign, and hence in being sovereign in this sense suppressing the claim of
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the sweetness of life in favour of the good life. The good life for man becomes, as enlightened reason develops and becomes hegemonic, one that, in its furthest reach, does not live, transforming the sweetness of life into bare life—a remnant. Even if it is true that from the perspective of political sovereignty the administration of living is a departure from pre-modern forms of sovereignty, as Foucault and Agamben suppose, this state of affairs is not a departure from but rather a natural continuation of the overall inner developmental trajectory of occidental reason and rationality; biopower is nothing but the political form of the suppression of animal life which enlightened reason has been aiming at all along; biopower is mythical fear radicalized.12 In this setting, it thus becomes deeply plausible to begin thinking of the living dead, the Muselmann, as the exemplary instance of life that does not live, of a living that has been usurped by the demands of instrumental reason or capital or bureaucratic rationality, and hence as the locus for the claim of bare life, against the good life. Some deep thoughtlessness, the thoughtlessness of reason itself, is thus staked in that interconnection of the irrational rationality of the camps and its most extreme product, the drowned. III Witnessing Bare Life Remnants, suppressing the issue of survivor’s guilt, takes it cue from the idea that Primo Levi’s survival is most properly construed as the pure desire to bear witness. Witnessing here is beyond judgement because the situation was one in which ‘victim and executioner are equally ignoble; the lesson of the camps is a brotherhood in abjection’13 —a scary phrase. Agamben is right in suggesting14 that we should not confuse the ethical with the legal, and that the great temptation of modern moral theory has been to conflate the two, reducing the ethical to the legal in order that we can make judgments; but judgments, in a legal setting, need not be either true or just. While the law needs to terminate in a judgment, that is what its procedures are for, the judgments that result, as recent worries about the death penalty in Illinois nicely demonstrate, can be remote from truth or justice. Similarly with responsibility, which is ‘irremediably contaminated by law’15: responsibility and guilt express simply two aspects of legal imputability. Levi, Agamben contends, discovered at Auschwitz an area ‘that is independent of every establishment of responsibility’, not because it is an area of impunity, but, on the contrary, because it is ‘a responsibility that is infinitely greater than any we could ever assume. At the most, we can be faithful to it, that is, assert its unassumability’.16 Agamben is here broaching the thought that the ethical, if it is to come to be, must distinguish itself from the moralizing of morality, the incessant desire to stand in the space of autonomous moral truth and render judgment. Surely, the sight of the Muselmann lodges an ethical claim, and surely that claim does not concern the rendering of a moral judgment as normally understood.
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The difficulties in thinking through what it is to acknowledge the Muselmann are severe. In contending that judgment, responsibility and guilt are idle here, Agamben is in effect putting out of play the most obvious and natural moral modes of attending to the Muselmann. Against Levi himself now, Agamben rightly urges that the idea of speaking in his stead, by proxy, ‘Makes no sense; the drowned have nothing to say, nor do they have instruction or memories to be transmitted. They have no “story”, no “face,” and even less do they have “thought”’.17 Hence emerges the idea of Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub that the Shoah is an event without witnesses ‘in the double sense that it is impossible to bear witness from the inside—since no one can bear witness from the inside of death, and there is no voice for the disappearance of voice —and from the outside —since the “outsider” is by definition excluded from the event’.18 The FelmanLaub construction of an event without witness shifts the demand for witnessing into an aporia: a demand to truly inhabit the devastation that is the Muselmann, which as such, as devastation is uninhabitable, but which, because of the demand for habitation, makes each external accounting a falsification. For Agamben the goal is not to dissolve the aporia of witnessing what cannot be witnessed, but to deepen it and make it more precise, to draw closer to the Muselmann, to makes visible the invisible being who has no story or face or thought to offer us. The Muselmänner were the living dead, those in whom ‘the divine spark [was] dead in them, already too empty to really suffer’19; hence they are the limit of the human, the ‘complete witness’ to the horror, which makes it forever impossible to distinguish ‘man and non-man’.20 Why should we think of the Muselmänner as this limit? Because, quite simply, they are the terminus, the quintessential result of the organization of the camps, namely, the stripping away from the human of any significant intentional relation to the world whilst nonetheless remaining alive: they are pure consequences of the ‘triumph’ of bureaucratic power over life, life becoming nothing other than what it is made by the eclipse of the human subject as possessing a normatively constituted intentional comportment to the world, just again the transition from bios to zoe, from a form of life to bare life, inclusion by exlcusion. Sofsky says this well: ‘[Power] erects a third realm, a limbo between life and death. Like the pile of corpses, the Muselmänner document the total triumph of power over the human being. Although nominally alive, they are nameless hulks. In the configuration of their infirmity, as in organized mass murder, the regime realizes its quintessential self’.21 Hence what is figured in the Muselmann is that limit as itself a practice, as itself a form of life, indeed the very paradigm of daily life.22 This is underlined by the way in which other prisoners attempted to hide their sickness and exhaustion; in so doing they were covering over the Muselmann ‘who at every moment was emerging in him’; true self-recognition in absolute otherness: the Muselmann ‘is everywhere avoided because everyone in the camp recognizes himself in his disfigured face’.23 It is the Muselmann who is thus the paradigm and exemplary figure of the meaning of the extermination camps, and who we must rest our gaze upon, impossibly: ‘That at the “bottom” of the human
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being there is nothing other than an impossibility of seeing—this is the Gorgon, whose vision transforms the human being into a non-human. That precisely this inhuman possibility of seeing is what calls and addresses the human, the apostrophe from which human beings cannot turn away—this and nothing else is testimony’.24 The thought that what is offered is an apostrophe, an address to us who are not there, is a lovely thought, but perplexing since the question is whether the Muselmann is indeed addressing us? What would it be for such a being to address us, and in what sense can we not turn away? What is this insistent demand of the inhuman on the human? And in what sense, exactly, is the perception of him impossible? It is at this juncture that rather than ethical concern or engagement, I began having a feeling of repugnance and revulsion at what Agamben was presenting: at no point does his account veer off from the space of impossible sight to the wider terrain: from the victim to the executioners, to the nature of the camps, to the ethical dispositions of those set upon reducing the human to the inhuman. Just the inhuman itself fills Agamben’s gaze, and hence ours; such is the pure desire to bear witness. To claim that what is occurring is an address feels both right, there is something horrific before our eyes, and untoward, what could such a being ask of us that has nothing to do with judgment or responsibility or guilt? If there is to be such a thing as testimony, we still are not closer to what that could amount to; on the contrary, the anxiety must be that by apparently denying all mediations we will be struck as dumb as the victims, becoming what we behold. What Agamben now wants to say, in partial response to queries like mine, is that ethics is possible only if we can recognize the inhuman in the human that Muselmann represents; and we must recognize this waste or garbage of the human because it is in each of us. What is to be so acknowledged or recognized or witnessed is not quite like recognizing someone’s dignity since it is precisely the dignity of the human that disappears in the extreme figure of Muselmann: ‘The Muselmann has […] moved into a zone of the human where not only help but also dignity and self-respect have become useless. But if there is a zone of the human in which these concepts make no sense, then they are not genuine ethical concepts, for no ethics can claim to exclude a part of humanity, no matter how unpleasant or difficult that humanity is to see’.25 If even dignity and selfrespect lose their grip here, then ethical recognition cannot be bound to them. In order for this thought to succeed Agamben must say that dignity is in principle separable from the biological being. Dignity, he claims, is a normative model of how we ought to comport ourselves at all costs, and hence, as a transcendent ‘ought’ is external to the life of its bearer. But in an extreme situation ‘it is not possible to maintain even the slightest distance between the real person and model, between life and norm […] they are inseparable at every point’.26 At least part of what Agamben is here pressing is the Nietzschean complaint that the Christian disposition of moral discourse, our idea of morality and normativity, derives from the imposition of a model of the human whose authority depends upon its separation from, and hence ultimate indifference to
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the claim of life itself, that the concept of bios is the operation of this separation. And this fact becomes both palpable and intolerable when what is before us are not moral agents but, as they must be designated from the perspective of moral autonomy, moral patients: those who have lost or never possessed the independence of reason and will that constitute the true domain of the moral: animals, children, the aged, the Muselmann. If moral patients are conceived as only deficient modes of moral agency, as remnants, remainders when the source of the moral is removed, then the life of the moral patient cannot be recognized and acknowledged as lodging a claim. And while this seems to me just, when Agamben finally presses his thought to its natural conclusion he says something that I find all but unintelligible: ‘The bare life to which human beings were reduced neither demands nor conforms to anything. It itself is the only norm; it is absolutely immanent. And “the ultimate sentiment of belonging to the species” cannot in any sense be a kind of dignity […] that there is still life in the most extreme degradation. And this new knowledge becomes the touchstone by which to judge and measure all morality and all dignity’.27 This is grotesque. IV The Ethical Claim of the Pornographic I want to say that there is something pornographic in Agamben’s philosophic portrait of the Muselmann, the pure desire to bear witness. That something in the territory of pornography might be at issue here is indirectly hinted at by Agamben when he plausibly contends that ‘in certain places and situations, dignity is out of place. The lover, for example, can be anything except “dignified,” just as it is impossible to make love while keeping one’s dignity’.28 When this is coupled with the pure desire to bear witness, to just witness the way a photograph just witnesses, then witnessing begins to sound like an aestheticized looking, and what is looked upon is the body without dignity. Does not that place us in the region of pornography? If Agamben’s portrayal is pornographic, this may be because pornography contains within itself both ethical blindness and ethical insight, say an insight about the impossibility of uniting dignity with making love. By this I mean to say that perhaps something in the region of pornography is ethically ambiguous, and we need to be able to distinguish between pornography’s work of comprehension and its form of abuse. Something of the incommensurability between love-making and the dignity of the upright subject is worked through in pornography, which is to say that pornography itself contains cognitive and critical potentials, an invitation and a claim, that its social circulation aestheticizes and mystifies. This should not be news. In its culture industry use pornography operates as an objectification of, dominantly, the female body as a space in which fantasies of sexual gratification through subjugation are played out as stimulants for the male gaze. In order for the predominately female body to function in this way it must be aestheticized, sex and violence idealized: this aestheticization and idealization is what is
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involved in constituting the female body through the male gaze. That work of aestheticizing, cleansing and purifying of sex and sexuality is continuous with culture’s more routine de-naturalization of sex (the joyless Joy of Sex). However, pornography in modernity has always been, also, a reminder of a set of uncomfortable grammatical facts; these grammatical facts, as I wish to call them, are needed if we are to make sense of why human beings so utterly and uncontrollably care about sex, invest in it, make its often predictable, routine even boring pleasures and pains something for which all else (marriages, careers, reputations, security, etc.) might be sacrificed. At least part of what makes sex matter, something we invest in well beyond hormonal and chemical imperatives, beyond the pleasures and enjoyments it confers, is that all human sexual practices worthy of the name are transgressive, broaching or breaking the boundaries of culture (bios) and performatively revealing the interchange between culture and nature (zoe), between our animal embodiment and its thorough-going cultural articulation; all human sexual practices worthy of the name contain moments of objectification, aggression, dismemberment and animal solitariness, and it is now via those moments alone that our animal bodies can routinely receive an emphatic moment of independence from cultural norms, or, what is the same, is it now only through those moments, through the elliptical practices of dismemberment that we call ‘making love’ with its caressing and biting, its focus on now this or that body part, it wild abandon and ecstatic jouissance, that embodiment itself can be nontransitively experienced as the source of a claim. But to be in the position of experiencing embodiment, the emotions proper to our suppressed beliefs about it, only through its quasi-literal fracture, fragmentation and ruin, is to claim that what we experience there is a certain absence of experience, namely, of our normatively whole bodies: the little death of orgasm the site of the incessant claim of living. We only experience the claim of our living body on the cusp of its mortal dismemberment. Like tragedy, the sublime and horror, pornography brings us to the limit of culture where our undignified animality, the natural beneath the cultural, is isolated, displayed and remembered. Placing sex and its pornographic elaboration in this series (as if sex were to pornography as sublimity is to horror) enables a clearer comprehension of the claim of sex. Sexual acts, hence sexual practices, are the routine and everyday ways in which human being have experienced nature as condition and limit, as animating and violating, and in that doubleness a condition for culture in general. Grant for the sake of argument that at a certain moment, perhaps with the Jewish invocation of an invisible god and the consequent ban on images, perhaps with the emergence of the self-authorizing polity depicted in Greek tragedy, that cultural belonging came to authenticate itself through repudiation of the authority of nature and what is natural. Arguably, from this moment, sex becomes the original site of our self-comprehension of ourselves as cultural creatures for whom cultural belonging can always become a threat to our natural or vital or animal bodies that are (normally, normatively) to be realized through
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culture. Call that cultural norm, its promise and bindingness, the pursuit of happiness. Sex as happiness and as the promise of happiness has its functional and normative role through the way in which it binds culture to natural embodiment, self-realization to vitality. Is not sex the place in our everyday lives where the sweetness of life, Aristotle’s serenity, euemeria, the beautiful day, receives acknowledgment and confirmation? But the depth of that vitality is inseparable from our vital bodies being, emphatically, mortal bodies, suffering bodies, bodies whose pains and pleasures are both things suffered, undergone. But this is to say that the affirmative moment of sex is integrally bound to its dissolving moment, memberment bound to dismemberment, memberment and dismemberment in their mutuality the work of sex. The repudiation of the living-and-dying body, a repudiation that is always lurking so long as culture authenticates itself through the depredation of animal nature, as long as the good life for man is built upon the inclusive exclusion of life, is the repudiation of our being natural creatures in general, hence the repudiation of the pursuit of happiness, which promise culture cannot forfeit without dissolving its own claim to authority. But, if it is right to argue that acknowledgement of nature/embodiment/sex requires acknowledgement of the moment of dismemberment, then there really is in sex something that is difficult, awkward, uncomfortable; and too, inevitably, a persistent reminder of the terrifying nature we thought we had left behind permanently in the attainment of autonomous culture. But because that terrifying moment is just the inverse of the animating one, then sex becomes a scene of urgent desire and equally urgent revulsion, fascination and disgust. Sexual disgust, which is intimately connected to sexual shame, is the affective acknowledgment that work of sex is the practical exposition of our undignified animal bodies. But this work, again, cannot be accomplished without the acknowledgment of the moment of dismemberment. But the moment of dismemberment presents us not with what cannot be seen, what is beyond literal perception, but with what normatively ought never to be seen. That is, the moment of dismemberment transgresses the normative claim of embodiment itself: the claim to wholeness and the sweetness of life. Entangled in the pornographic depiction of the objectification and degradation of women is that aestheticisation of the sexual in which reverberates, through that very aestheticization, the claim of the sweetness of life which is but the reverse side of the suffering and fragmented body.29 V The Pornography of Horror The pornographic in both its affirmative and negative sense is fully on view in this central passage of Agamben’s: ‘This is also why Auschwitz marks the end and the ruin of every ethics of dignity and conformity to a norm. The bare life to which human beings were reduced neither demands nor conforms to anything. It
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is itself the only norm; it is absolutely immanent. And “ultimate sentiment of belonging to the species” cannot in any sense be a kind of dignity’.30 In order to get at the difficulty in this passage, let me approach the matter indirectly. To say that the depiction of horror can be pornographic is not a novel claim; the problem has been that this criticism has been employed without attempting to distinguish what in the pornographic requires acknowledgement and what denunciation. Help in making the relevant distinctions can be found by comparing Agamben with a case in which the charge that a depiction of horror is pornographic has its natural home, namely, the photographic documentation of atrocity. A telling and equally disturbing approximation to the philosophical work that Agamben is undertaking can be found in the extraordinary and excruciating atrocity photographs of James Nachtwey, now collected in a volume appropriately entitled Inferno.31 Inferno is a lacerating and relentness photographic survey of the horrors of the present: each image a precise, unblinking record of the worst humans have perpetrated upon one another beyond all imagining—in Romania, Somalia, Sudan, Rwanda, Bosnia, Kosovo, Zaire, Chechnya, India. The ‘beyond all imagining’ of these nonetheless exquisite images is their special province: each a piercing record of things broken and ruined, dismembered and dead, of what has all but lost a recognizable human shape or place. As with the pornographic, we are simultaneously fascinated and repulsed, we cannot bear to look and we cannot stop looking. The horror is that we cannot not recognize what perceive as human, although it is what ought never to be seen. Without question, the territory of hell that Nachtwey surveys either directly overlaps with or is directly adjacent to the habitat of the Muselmann: the institutionalized orphans of Romania; the desperations of the war-driven famine in Somalia; the politically engineered famine in Sudan; the genocidal frenzy of Rwanda. There are less directly grotesque photographs (indeed, some quite beautiful), and worse ones. In all, something approximating 400 images interspersed with 200–400 words of text ‘introducing’ each section. Nachtwey’s photographic ethic would appear to obey a version of the same pure desire to bare witness that Agamben appropriates from Levi’s survivor’s guilt. The ethic is apparently governed by two principles. First, we must not avert our look from the face of extreme human suffering, at least when that extreme of suffering was perhaps preventable, that is, a suffering we have sufficient reason to believe was the product, finally, of conscious choices and actions. The recording, documenting, and accurately portraying the extent and character of these atrocities is itself a moral work, a form of moral precision: ‘This was done here’. Second, the photography of atrocity transforms each remnant, living or dead, into a ‘mute witness’, almost a moral conscience. They become a touchstone of wrongness, of where the ethical begins. The issues surrounding the photography of atrocity are immensely complex across a number of registers; my critique here violently abbreviated.32 There is something pornographic in the pejorative sense in Nachtwey’s work. The
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negatively pornographic quality of these photographs derives not from what they depict, but from how that depiction occurs. If the negative aspect of the sexually pornographic derives from its framing of its recruitment of the female body for the delectation of the male gaze, the satisfaction of male desire through domination of the female, the negative aspect of the pornography of horror turns on something analogous—let’s say it involves the framing of devastation for the sake of the moral satisfaction of the liberal gaze: the affirmation that for we liberals cruelty is the worst thing we can do, and that hence human solidarity is achieved ‘by imagination, the imaginative ability to see strange people as fellow suffers. Solidarity is not discovered by reflection but created. It is created by increasing our sensitivity to the particular details of the pain and humiliation of other, unfamiliar sorts of people’.33 I do not think these sentences, from Richard Rorty, are exactly wrong, but that rather, just here, in Nachtwey’s pictures, neither reflection nor imagination can find purchase for themselves: the relentless detailing and precision of these photographs makes the moral work they mean to do impossible. There are two aspects to Nachtwey’s liberal aestheticization of horror. First, and most obviously, automatically in photography there is a structural orientation toward the abstraction, isolation and hence de-contextualization of the photographic object: ‘[…] every photograph snatches a moment out of time— which is to say out of context, out of history, out of lived experience—thereby creating a shocked, and shocking discontinuity that is itself a form of violence’.34 The very immediacy of the photograph, which is its claim to authority, is achieved through the detemporalization of experience. And whilst this detemporalization might be utterly anodyne in a wide range of circumstances— there is nothing untoward in the snapshot of my children on holiday (in part because my full knowledge of the circumstances means the photograph is a spur to my sentimental imagination and not an inhibition to its operation)—the violence of discontinuity cannot but matter in the context of the documentation of complex political events about which we have little or no knowledge. In the case of Nachtwey’s pictures, what we see over and over again is only and solely the result of some barbarity without the barbarity itself. By so relentlessly and unblinkingly focusing in on these remnants of devastation, our imagination is left nowhere to go but to feed our revulsion and pity. But because the pity is abstract, a pity at the awfulness of ‘this’, then what is fed is our moral sensibility, our sentimental attachment to our own moral sensitivity. With a twist, this feature of the photography of atrocity can come to stand in a one-to-one correlation with the pure desire to bear witness. Or rather, the pure desire to bear witness, to let the apostrophe of the Muselmann, past or present, occur is most perfectly realized by the documentary photograph. We might say that the violence of photographic immediacy constitutes the aestheticization of representation that is the fulfillment of witnessing. It is for this reason that there is something photographic about Agamben’s practice of one by one removing from consideration the historical, the political and above all the moral frames
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through reference to which some understanding of the meaning of the Muselmann might be achieved. It is not understanding of that sort that Agamben seeks: his practice of negating all framing considerations in order to bear witness leaves just and only the remnant. The second difficulty with Nachtwey’s practice is a consequence not of his photographic practice as such, but rather of his placing all his atrocity photographs in a single volume in which not only are the photographs segregated from the supporting text, but, in providing only minimal and even perfunctory textual elaboration. On the basis of the text provided, we can construct only the barest outline of the connection between the political events that brought these atrocities into being and the atrocities themselves. But, what is worse, given the barrage of these mostly imposing (13 ×9 ) images, the idea that they might serve the purpose of understanding or political orientation is completely undermined. And while it may have been Nachtwey’s intention to construct a truly modern inferno—the volume opens with an inscription from Dante: ‘Their sighs, lamentations and loud wailings/resounded through the starless air/so that from the beginning it made me weep’ —what we finally get is nothing but the sighs, lamentations and wailings without anything even approximate to Dante’s careful moral ordering of hell. If one supposed that my contention that Nachtwey’s work is subtended by a self-congratulatory moralized liberal gaze in virtue of his detachment of results from the events bringing them into being was extreme, the book-form of his inferno leaves no other interpretive route open. The book is in this case the truth of his documentary ethic, the truth of witnessing. As Susie Linfield pointedly remarks in her review of Inferno, ‘[…] he makes it far too possible for the information-deprived viewer to fall into an anguished yet impotent hopelessness: in the absence of knowledge, all starving people, all massacred people, all degraded, defeated, abject people begin to look sort of the same; even worse, there seems neither rhyme nor reason for their predicament and therefore, surely, no solutions to it’.35 Isn’t the position that Nachtwey constructs for his viewers precisely an aesthetic one? And is there, finally, any significant gap between Nachtwey’s witnessing and Agamben’s? VI Recovering the Ethical In acknowledging that the sexually pornographic contains a suppressed ethical content, I was of course anticipating that the pornography of horror does so as well. In my judgment, it is the same suppressed ethical content as possessed by the sexually pornographic, viz. that in the image of dismembered life there reverberates a claim for the sweetness of life. And this too has consequences. First, bare life is not itself ‘the only norm’.36 On the contrary, bare life implicates the norm of the whole body, the claim of the good of life itself. When the sweetness of life is detached from the impulse toward the good life, then the result, bare life, can appear as neither sweet nor particularly moral in itself; indeed, the
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being reduced to bare life takes on the brutality and moral indifference of nature red in tooth and claw. But this reduction of the sweetness of life into devastation is, again, precisely, what occurs when bare life and the good life are detached. Because, for reasons we shall come to, Agamben in fact wants to side-step the claim of the sweetness of life and remain within the immanence of bare life, he thinks of the devastation in aesthetically abstract terms: ‘This means that humans bear within themselves the mark of the inhuman, that their spirit contains at its very center the wound of non-spirit, non-human chaos atrociously consigned to its own being capable of everything’.37 This is exactly the moment of dismemberment separated from the claim of memberment, which, on the face of it, cannot be ethical at all. However, as Agamben restates his thought he silently slips into his account the repressed claim of the whole body: ‘It is the capacity, this almost infinite potentiality to suffer that is inhuman—not the facts, actions, or omission. And it is precisely this capacity that is denied by the SS’.38 It is the ‘potentiality to suffer’ that raises, through its denial, the normative claim of the whole body, and it is that claim, surely, that the SS denied, and not the fact that there was an almost limitless potential to fragment the self—that fact they knew perfectly well, their moral sadism thrived on it. But, secondly then, the claim of life is a wholly immanent norm. It is not imposed by reason or derived from reflection; it is not an external model to which we must adjust ourselves or strive after. Rather, it forms the condition and intelligibility of the fact that we might have an ethical life at all. What is shocking about Auschwitz —or Rwanda or Somalia or Sudan or Kosovo—is that this claim can assert itself, become palpable at just the moment when the authority reason and all its claims for normativity collapse or seem most hopeless. We can make no sense of the awfulness of suffering until we acknowledge that that awfulness is not something we bring to our evaluation of the living world, but is a constraint that being alive imposes on those with the capacity to recognize and heed normative claims. Rorty is thus incorrect: this claim is discovered, not invented, created, or posited; suffering thereby becomes the condition of truth. I shall return to that capacity for heeding normative claims momentarily. But first we need to ponder the puzzle as to why Agamben of all thinkers, who has been so resolute in framing the problem of the metaphysical construction of the politics of modernity on the basis of the separation between zoe and bios, should, finally, ignore the claim of zoe? For lack of space, I shall have to be brutally brief. Throughout I have presented the suffering of the Muselmann as the moment of dismemberment which is the potentiality of all membered, living beings. But this is not how Agamben considers the issue. For Agamben, finally, it is not dismemberment that is at issue, although he routinely writes as if this were indeed what he was depicting, but a desubjectification that is a consequence of or consubstantial with the loss of language: ‘It is necessary that this senseless sound [that the Muselmann in his dying makes] be, in turn, the voice of something or someone that, for entirely other reasons, can not bear witness. It is
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thus necessary that the impossibility of bearing witness, the “lacuna” that constitutes human language, collapses, giving way to a different impossibility of bearing witness— that which does not have language’.39 So rather than saying that the good life depends upon its excluded other, the sweetness of life (with its infinite potential for suffering, for becoming bare life), Agamben says the issue is the subject’s ability to have or not have language: ‘The subject is thus the possibility that language does not exist, does not take place—or, better, that it takes place only through its possibility of not being there, its contingency’.40 It is surely right to say that the extremity of human suffering involves a systematic undoing of a subject’s linguistically realized intentional relation to the world; our own experiences of extreme pain could have informed us of as much. And thus it must be equally right to say that, even as speaking animals, we belong to a world whose emphatic presence would vitiate our relation to it. From this, it equally follows that the biopolitical world of the camps operates through the disarticulation of subjectification (our speaking being) from desubjectification (the contingency of life). But none of this directly or meaningfully seems to be an ethical response to the fate of the Muselmann. At most, it is an aestheticization of his fate for the sake of a metaphysics of language (‘the taking place of a language as the event of a subjectivity’).41 And while that metaphysics of language may or may not be more ethically capacious than the enlightened rationality it means to displace, nothing in Remnants speaks to what that metaphysics concretely requires. Like Nachtwey, what Agamben wants, apparently, is the absoluteness of witnessing: ‘In the Muselmann, the impossibility of bearing witness is no longer a mere privation. Instead, it has become real; it exists as such. If the survivor bears witness not to the gas chambers or to Auschwitz but to the Muselmann, if he speaks only on the basis of the impossibility of speaking, then his testimony cannot be denied. Auschwitz—that to which it is not possible to bear witness—is absolutely and irrefutably proven’.42 Not the chambers or Auschwitz, not a place or set of practices, not the apotheosis of a complex historical trajectory, just the result of it all. With this we can hear the shutter of Agamben’s philosophic camera snap open and closed. Click. Although there must indeed be an ethic of witnessing, witnessing is not ground of the ethical. It is only after over three-hundred pages of relentlessly critiquing that form of reason, rationality, and conceptuality that would seek to drive a wedge between the sensible and the intelligible, the transitory and the immutable, that Adorno permits himself mention of Auschwitz, only now Auschwitz enters as the exemplary instance of the form of reasoning that, precisely, operates in accordance with that wedge, the gap, finally, between zoe and bios. Agamben is correct to critique the atemporal model of dignity with respect to the living, suffering being, but the initial weight of that is to allow a response to horror to becoming orientational for ethical reflection. So Adorno opens the second section of ‘Meditations and Metaphysics’ with his declaration: ‘A new categorical imperative has been imposed by Hitler upon unfree mankind:
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to arrange their thoughts and actions so that Auschwitz will not repeat itself, so that nothing similar will happen’.43 Two aspects of this are relevant here. First, although he has not been offering concrete policy proposals or action-oriented political recommendations, Adorno has been, throughout Negative Dialectics, been building a reflective critique of atemporal reason, and hence he has been providing immanently good reasons for us to transform our usual habits of thought and action. Hence, the demand to arrange our thoughts and actions so that Auschwitz will not repeat itself, in this context, already includes a highly elaborated specification of the form of reasoning that Adorno thinks is capable of responding to the exigencies of an event like Auschwitz. And part of this specification involves both a re-arrangement of the relation between universal and particular whereby the particular can become orientational for rationality generally; and, what goes along with that, a contention that, specifically, the suffering of others are amongst those particulars that have remained unacknowledged by universalistic reason, and which thus deserves to become orientational for ethical reflection. Second, since the argument for a transformation of reason had been up to the moment where Auschwitz entered into the account fully reflective, reason immanently criticizing itself, the fact of Auschwitz demands a shift in rational register: the rational demand for transformation becomes both bodily and ethical, which is exactly what Adorno goes on to state: ‘Dealing discursively with it would be an outrange, for the new imperative gives us a bodily sensation of the moral addendum—bodily, because it is now the practical abhorrence of the unbearable physical agony to which individuals are exposed even with individuality about to vanish as a form of mental reflection. It is in the unvarnished materialistic motive only that morality survives’.44 Appropriately contextualized within the history of reason, our horror at the suffering of the drowned and the saved is itself the moral addendum implied by the new imperative. Hence, the rational force of the imperative is just the acknowledgment of the suffering itself. What the new imperative thus calls for is a new conception of culture which would entail a singular and massive transformation in the structures of authority governing everyday life, and hence a new self-understanding of how culture can be formative for us. Thus the central practical consequence of the Shoah should be a reconfiguration of culture and the structures of authority governing the everyday is just what is required if the sweetness of life and the good life for man are to be united into a living whole. Notes 1 Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, trans. Raymond Rosenthal (London: Abacus, 1989), pp. 63–4. 2 Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (New York: Zone Books, 1999).
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3 Theodor W.Adorno, Negative Dialectics., trans. E.B.Ashton (London: Routledge, 1973). For my commentary on the closing sections see Adorno: Disenchantment and Ethics (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), Chapters 8–9. I note the convergence between Agamben and Adorno in a long footnote on pp. 387–9. This essay is intended as a fuller elaboration of the claims of that note together with my now severe reservations about Agamben’s argument. 4 Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998). 5 H.S.Harris, Hegel’s Ladder II: The Odyssey of Spirit (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1997). 6 Agamben, Homo Sacer, p. 7. 7 Labour and action are mediated, so to speak, in Arendt’s scheme by work: the fabrication of things in accordance with ideas. 8 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume I, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978), p. 143. 9 Agamben, Homo Sacer, p. 4. 10 Andrew Norris, ‘The Exemplary Exception: Philosophical and Political Decisions in Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer’, in Radical Philosophy 119 (May/June 2003), p. 11. 11 Norris, in The Exemplary Exception, does an excellent job of showing just how curious and wrongheaded is Agamben’s attachment to Schmitt. 12 Axel Honneth, The Critique of Power: Reflective Stages in a Critical Theory, trans. Kenneth Baynes (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991) forcefully argues for the convergence of Foucault’s theory of society, especially as displayed in Discipline and Punish, with the core theses of Dialectic of Enlightenment. Honneth does not, however, acknowledge the convergence between Adorno and Horkheimer’s text and Foucault’s development of the notion of biopower in his later writings—a convergence that significiantly deepens the affinity between the two theories. 13 This is Primo Levi quoting Rousset. 14 Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz, pp. 18–19. 15 Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz, p. 20. 16 Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz, p. 21. 17 Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz, p. 34. 18 Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz, p. 35. 19 Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz, p. 44. 20 Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz, p. 47. 21 Wolgang Sofsky, The Order of Terror: The Concentration Camp, trans. William Templer (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), p. 294. Quoted in Remnants, p. 48. 22 Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz, p. 49. 23 Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz, p. 52. 24 Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz, p. 54. 25 Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz, pp. 63–64. 26 Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz, p. 69. 27 Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz, p. 69. 28 Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz, p. 68. 29 This run of argument concerning the claim of pornography is lifted from my ‘The Horror of Nonidentity: Cindy Sherman’s Tragic Modernism’, which will appear as
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30 31 32
33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44
Chapter 10 of my Against Voluptuous Bodies: Adorno’s Late Modernism and the Idea of Painting (Stanford: Stanford University Press, forthcoming). Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz, p. 69. James Nachtwey, Inferno, (London: Phaidon Press, 1999). For useful beginnings to the needed work of reflection see Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (New York: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 2003), and David Levi Strauss, Between the Eyes: Essays on Photography and Politics (New York: Aperture, 2003). For an insightful review of these works see Jeremy Harding, ‘Humanitarian Art’, London Review of Books 25/16 (August 2003), pp. 22–3. Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989). Susie Linfield, ‘Beyond the Sorrow and the Pity’, Dissent (Winter 2001), p. 104. Linfield, ‘Beyond the Sorrow and the Pity’, p. 103. My understanding and evaluation of Nachtwey’s project is indebted to Linfield’s probing review. Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz, p. 69. Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz, p. 77. Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz, p. 77. Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz, p. 39. Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz, p. 146. Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz, p. 164. Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz, p. 164. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, p. 365. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, p. 365.
J.M.Bernstein is Chair and University Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the New School for Social Research. His most recent works are Adorno: Disenchantment and Ethics (Cambridge University Press, 2001); edited and Introduction to Classic and Romantic German Aesthetics (Cambridge University Press, 2003); and Against Voluptuous Bodies: Adorno’s Late Modernism and the Idea of Painting, forthcoming.
Testimony and the Real: Testimony between the Impossibility and Obligation Jelica Sumic-Riha
In his informative and intelligent analysis of testimony Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive, Giorgio Agamben has judiciously introduced three Latin terms that characterize the status of the witness.1 Testis is a witness as a third party in a trial between two parties; superstes is someone who has experienced something and who can tell others about it; auctor is a witness whose testimony refers to a pre-existing matter (a thing, a fact or a word) whose reality must be confirmed or guaranteed. In this third meaning, the testimony thus implies a duality that brings out its structural inadequacy, the existence of an internal gap, a lacuna. In limit-experiences, such as witnessing the horrors of Auschwitz, this gap is incarnated by the paradoxical figure of a mute witness. The aporia of testifying to Auschwitz is, according to Agamben, reflected in the constitutive division of the subject of the testimony. Primo Levi, himself interned at Auschwitz, divides those who went through this torment into two categories: those who are silent and those who speak.2 The former are the ‘true’ witnesses because they have ‘touched the bottom’ and ‘seen the Gorgon’, as Primo Levi puts it, but they have returned mute. The latter, the survivors, on the other hand, are the ‘pseudowitnesses’ who, like Primo Levi himself, assume the charge of bearing witness in the name of the ‘true’ witness. There is then not one witness to the Shoah, but two: the one that knows but cannot tell, the true witness, and the witness who speaks in stead of the mute witness. But this witnessing ‘by proxy’, Agamben argues, can only be attained at the cost of a desubjectivization or, in Lacan’s terms, a subjective destitution of the auctor. The legacy of Auschwitz would then be a new ethics of testimony which requires that the testimony, confronted with the-impossible-to-say from inside, as the true witness is either dead or mute, assume the necessity of ‘saying the inside from the outside’.3 At the same time, this imperative necessity of lending one’s voice to a dead or a mute witness, obliges the auctor to take on his or her subjective destitution as a witness. It is no coincidence that, of all contemporary philosophers it was JeanFrançois Lyotard, namely the philosopher who is reputed to have radically brought into question the very possibility of communication between heterogeneous idioms by claiming that ‘a universal rule of judgement between heterogeneous genres is lacking in general’,4 who theorized the testimony in
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terms of an inherent impossibility. Testimony, in his view, is characterized by a constitutive impasse because the parallax ISSN 1353–4645 print/ISSN 1460–700X online © 2004 Taylor & Francis Ltd http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals DOI: 10.1080/1353464032000171055
ethical obligation of bearing witness to inflicted wrongs stumbles on the ontological impossibility of phrasing that wrong in the accepted idioms. Lyotard’s insistence on the task of having to give voice to an inexpressible wrong may appear surprising at first sight since the obligation of testifying, as has already been observed by a number of his critics, is by no means compatible with his ontology of phrases.5 Resuming the gist of this critique, it could be argued that no ethical obligation to bearing witness to conflicts is entailed by Lyotard’s ontological thesis of the incommensurability of idioms that inevitably leads to the emergence of conflicts between them. While completely disregarding this critique, Lyotard nonetheless concedes that there is something inevitably problematic about testifying insofar as, for him, the ethical task of bearing witness emerges precisely at the point of the unsayable. On the one hand, Lyotard, just like Adorno, stubbornly argues against Wittgenstein that one must try, indeed, never stop trying, to say what cannot be said, on the other hand, however, witnessing, for him, remains an enterprise always on the verge of falsifying that upon which it bears witness which prompts him to proclaim, in his characteristically provocative style, that ‘the witness is a traitor’.6 But what does it mean for a witness to follow the maxim ‘Continue!’, ‘Do not stop bearing witness!’, one might ask, if the witness is not only ‘a traitor’, but is furthermore compelled to testify in a situation ‘when there is and can be no witness’?7 Under what conditions would it be possible to bear witness nonetheless, i.e. to avoid the threat of silence that is, according to Lyotard, fatally linked to the testimony? Eloquent silence The beginning of The Differend provides a compellingly profound insight into the double-bind of the revisionist thesis which renders the victim mute: You are informed that human beings endowed with language were placed in a situation such that none of them is now able to tell about it. Most of them disappeared then, and the survivors rarely speak about it. When they do speak about it, their testimony bears only upon a minute part of this situation. How can you know that the situation itself existed? That it is not the fruit of your informant’s imagination? Either the situation did not exist
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as such. Or else it did exist, in which case your informant’s testimony is false, either because he or she should have disappeared, or else because he or she should remain silent […] To have ‘really seen with his own eyes’ a gas chamber would be the condition which gives one the authority to say that it exists and to persuade the unbeliever. Yet it is still necessary to prove that the gas chamber was used to kill at the time it was seen. The only acceptable proof that it was used to kill is that one died from it. But if one is dead, one cannot testify that it is on account of the gas chamber8. The impossibility of telling that is at stake here cannot be taken literally, say, in the sense that the ‘dead cannot testify’. Rather, what is at issue here is a different kind of impossibility which reduces to silence even those who are willing to testify, moreover, those who have survived ‘Auschwitz’ in order to be able to testify,9 in short, those, whose only reason to live is to testify.10 The decisive point here is that bearing witness to some traumatic experiences is doomed to failure not only because one cannot find words to convey to others what is unbearable for him or her. Rather, it is condemned to fail because that to which one is summoned to bear witness resists all attempts at symbolization. Experienced as ‘the only true thing and, as such, absolutely unforgettable’, so real that, ‘by comparison, nothing is truer’,11 this indelible real exceeds what is normally experienced as reality and, ultimately brings about the shattering of the latter. It is then this exposure of the gap between the real and the reality that is normally hidden which thwarts the enterprise of testimony, say, by rendering the testimony literally unbelievable.12 Among the many ways in which testifying can be made impossible, Lyotard privileges those that undermine the reliability of witnessing by destroying the very function of the witness and, consequently, cause the splitting of the subject. What is fundamentally at stake in testifying to the impossible-real is, according to Lyotard, the destruction of the ‘ability to speak or to keep quiet’13, which threatens to undermine both relations that are constitutive of the witness as a speaking being: the relation to language and the relation to the Other. The silence of a wrong inexpressible in the accepted idioms signals not only the failure of the witness to find the ‘right’ word, but also the deficiency of language which, by failing to provide the appropriate idiom, appears not-all, to be lacking. But the muteness of the witness can also be provoked by the interruption of the relation to the Other. The Other of address proves to be lacking, either because he or she cannot believe what he or she hears or, simply, because he or she refuses to listen. What is crucial to be noted here is that this lack in the Other, far from reflecting the good or the bad will of the Other, is due to the impossibility of establishing the fact that is at issue in the testimony. According to Lacan, something is established as a fact only once it is said.14 In the case of bearing witness to Auschwitz, however, the constitution of the fact cannot take place at all because the witness is from the start deprived of his—or her ‘authority’, and therefore reduced to silence. The fact that ‘the testifying
24 PARALLAX, 2004, VOL. 10, NO. 1, 30–39
phrase is itself deprived of authority’ is, for Lyotard, a differentia specifica of the wrong, namely that damage which is in a radical sense irreparable insofar as it is ‘accompanied by the loss of the means to prove [it]’.15 The crucial question here is, of course: what status should be assigned to this silence imposed on the witness, in particular because the witness, albeit deprived of language, remains a speaking being? More generally, what is the status of silence in language? Lyotard certainly knows that silence is not exempted from language, since he tirelessly repeats that also silence is a phrase, a ‘negative phrase’, a phrase that calls for new, possible phrases, which would make the wrong heard. Thus the feeling of pain which accompanies silence, according to Lyotard, is a signal by which language itself alerts victims ‘that what remains to be phrased exceeds what they can presently phrase’.16 Hence, strictly speaking, that which ‘cries out for vengeance’17, Lyotard argues, are not the victims themselves, but the forbidden phrases that would voice the inflicted harm. But the muteness of the witness has yet another facet to be explored, namely the fear of injuring, not so much the silence of the dead witness as Lyotard seems to suggest, in the sense, that ‘after Auschwitz’ there is nothing to say because all that could be said after that falls short of that which happened, but rather the fear of injuring language. This horror of inflicting wrong on language is to be taken as a sign that the witness can trust language no more, that talking as such has become uncertain. For someone to become speechless, says Lacan, it is necessary that ‘the weight of words becomes something very serious’.18 In order to protect language, such a subject refuses to talk. In this sense, it would be misleading to use the term the unsayable to designate that something cannot be said. The distinction between ‘the saying and that which can be said’19 introduced by Lacan can be of help here, in particular as Lyotard himself seems to be pointing to a similar differentiation: To be able not to speak is not the same as not to be able to speak. The latter is a deprivation, the former a negation […] If the survivors do not speak, is it because they cannot speak, or because they avail themselves of the possibility of not speaking that is given them by the ability to speak? Do they keep quiet out of necessity, or freely, as it is said?20 In order to understand Lyotard’s opposition between ‘not to be able to speak’ and ‘to be able not to speak’, a distinction between two, usually confounded modes of subjects keeping quiet: a passive and an active silence, must be admitted. This duality, this splitting of silence—far from depending upon the subject’s free will announces rather an encounter with a radical impossibility, an inexpressible real. It is this encounter with the impossible real that threatens with destruction, not the witness as an identifiable individual, but his or her ability to speak or to keep quiet.21 Silence is certainly an interruption—but an interruption against the background of speech. In keeping quiet, the subject remains a speaking being.
25
Confronted with the unsayable, the subject might respond by remaining silent, for instance. Far from being unequivocal, silence could be understood as an address destined to the Other, as a demand for a response, for interpretation, for meaning which has been unsettled by this lacuna of the unsayable, this lack of the signifier. It is necessary hence to separate the silence as an acting out, for instance, i.e. the silence of the address, which is essentially showing, from a silence that calls for an interpretation. And this silence which is not self-sufficient should not be confused with a silence as a symptom which ‘does not need you, it is self-sufficient, it is enjoyment (jouissance) rather than an appeal to the Other’.22 To better characterize the splitting of silence, the opposition between being or remaining silent, and ‘falling silent’, Lacan introduces two Latin verbs in his seminar The Logic of Fantasy: silere which designates the passive state of being silent, être silencieux, and another verb, tacere, which designates an active silence—the subject passes over something in silence—which is why the subject falling silent can be considered as an act: By writing in the upper right corner of the graph of desire the formula of the drive as $<>D, I wanted to show that the moment the drive manifests itself, the demand falls silent (se tait). But if I did not speak of silence, this is precisely because sileo is not taceo. The act of falling silent does not liberate the subject although the essence of the subject culminates in this act.23 From this perspective, it could be said that the silence of the witness also ‘talks’— but how? Does it ‘talk’ in the sense of sileo or taceo? When the survivors keep quiet, is it because they cannot speak or because they refuse to speak? When the testifying is interrupted, is this because the witness fails to find the ‘right’ word or because there is no trustworthy word? Does the silence of a witness signify that he or she is ‘able not to speak’, i.e. a silence of resistance, or, on the contrary, that he or she is ‘not able to speak’, a silence which signals the failure of the signifier, the failure of language? Who or what keeps quiet? The subject or language? And if the latter is the case, is it a’provisional’ silence as a merely ‘negative phrase’24 always in the process of entailing another phrase or, on the contrary, that of another silence, that which surrounds Auschwitz and which threatens the very ‘ability to speak or to keep quiet’? The Differend challenges this distinction or, rather, this undecidability of silences, incessantly since Lyotard recognizes not only ‘silence as a phrase in abeyance’, but also silence as a radical suspension of linking which is announced by ‘the feeling that […] linkage must be made, but that there wouldn’t be anything upon which to link’.25 This ‘silence as a nonphrase’ can only be expressed, Lyotard argues, by a mute, anonymous affect.
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With respect to Auschwitz, Lyotard may well insist that ‘one must, certainly inscribe in words, in images. One cannot escape the necessity of representing’. Nevertheless he goes on to say: [Auschwitz] cannot be represented without being missed, being forgotten anew, since it defies images and words. […] Claude Lanzmann’s film Shoah is an exception, maybe the only one. Not only because it rejects representation in images and music but because it scarcely offers a testimony where the unpresentable of the Holocaust is not indicated, be it but for a moment, by the alteration in the tone of a voice, a knotted throat, sobbing, tears, a witness fleeing off-camera, a disturbance in the tone of the narrative, an uncontrolled gesture. So that one knows that the impassible witnesses, whoever they might be, are certainly lying, ‘playacting,’ hiding something.26 A witness that lies, ‘play-acts’, hides something, a witness who is a traitor even against his or her will, a witness who doesn’t know what s/he is saying, nor whether s/he is telling the truth, indeed, who does not know that s/he is talking even when s/he is remaining silent, is replaced by an affect which does not lie, or it would be more appropriate to say that it cannot lie as it is nothing but a nameless presence, its being-there-now: ‘This constitutes, at the same time, both its irrefutability and its insufficiency as witness. The affect only “says” one thing— that it is there—but is witness neither for nor of what is there. Neither when nor where’.27 At once the witness and the thing of which it is the witness, the affect, announces nothing, it is in itself the annunciation. Or, rather, the annunciation is the presentation itself, the presentation of the pure presence of a ‘There is’ (Il y a). For what is at stake here is not an affect that could be attributed to the subject but, on the contrary, the subject is theorized as a ‘feeling subject’, a ‘subject in statu nascendi’.28 The theorization of the testimony in terms of the affect thus entails what could be called an affective destitution of the subject. And it is exactly at that point where the subject is introduced from the angle of his/her aphanisis, his/her fading, that Lyotard, unexpectedly and against his will, as it were, encounters Wittgenstein. Affective destitution of the subject The notorious proposition 7 from the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, which reads in German: ‘Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muss man schweigen’29, is not simply a prescription of silence since, for Wittgenstein, silence as such signals that language is traversed by a real, insuperable barrier between that which can be (meaningfully) said and that which cannot be said without falling into nonsense. And since for Wittgenstein there is no meaningful word capable of filling in the lacuna of the unsayable, the abyss opened up by the unsayable, can only be bridged over by showing. It is true though that Lyotard
27
keeps his distance from Wittgenstein’s ‘muss man schweigen’, since, for him, it is not in the power of speaking beings ‘to pass over in silence what they cannot speak about’.30 Yet this apparent distance disappears since Lyotard proclaims: ‘Insofar as it is unable to be phrased in the common idioms, [a wrong] is already phrased, as feeling’.31 Hence, it could be said that, in both cases —regardless of the fact that, in the first case, the function of that index which signals the unsayable is attributed to showing (Wittgenstein) and in the second case to feeling (Lyotard)—we are confronted with the neutralization of the question of: ‘Who talks and/or remains silent?’ Just like showing, feeling cannot be assigned to any subject since, as Lyotard explicitly states, this ‘feeling does not arise from an experience felt by a subject’.32 Put bluntly, in both cases silence is situated as a place-holder of a constitutively absent witness that would be capable of testifying to the unsayable. It may appear at first blush that the Wittgensteinian injunction of keeping quiet, that Lyotard, despite all reticence, respects, constitutes a point at which the Lyotardian problematic of the affect as a solution to the impossibility of bearing witness to the unsayable and the Lacanian problematic of the impossible telling of the whole truth converge. Silence and the raised finger of Leonardo’s St. John, evoked by Lacan in his instructions regarding the analyst’s interpretation, seem to be guiding the analysis towards an ‘ethics of silence’: ‘What silence must the analyst now impose upon himself if he is to make out, rising above this bog, the raised finger of Leonardo’s St. John, if interpretation is to rediscover the disinhabited horizon of being in which its allusive virtue must be deployed?’33 Yet despite this apparent convergence, the role of silence in the analysis is not to be confused with Wittgenstein’s wall of language that the subject comes up against, since, as we have seen, silence, for Lacan, is a specific modality of the act. As an act, silence makes it possible for us to realize that ‘being may emerge from any act whatsoever. It is a being without the essence—just like all objets a. And this is precisely what characterizes them’.34 Bluntly put, the analyst must know when to keep quiet, he must choose the appropriate moment to fall silent in order to make space for the lack of being. But to what instance must, then, silence make space for in the testimony? The obvious answer, namely, that silence must open up a space for truth, is, as we shall see, misleading. Lacan, just like Lyotard, points out that the truth at stake in the testimony is a juridical term: Even in our times, a witness is asked to tell the truth, nothing but the truth, and, what’s more, the whole truth, if he can—but how, alas, could he? We demand of him the whole truth about what he knows. But, in fact, what is sought—especially in legal testimony—is that on the basis of which one can judge his jouissance. The goal is that jouissance be avowed, precisely insofar as it may be unavowable. The truth sought is the one that is unavowable with respect to the law that regulates jouissance.35
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Hence, it would be a mistake to believe that the analysis and the legal discourse pursue the same goal: the truth of the testimony. In contrast to legal discourse or a confession that aim at extorting the truth, the confession of the whole truth, which is, according to Lacan, the ‘worst’ solution since it requires that enjoyment be avowed, and that ‘precisely insofar as it may be unavowable’, the function assigned to silence in the analysis is to open a space where the truth can be voiced, not, of course, the whole truth because ‘saying it all is literally impossible: words fail’,36 but the truth which can only be ‘half-told’, the truth of ‘half-telling’ (mi-dire). Although animated by the same desire: to write ‘what cannot be spoken about’, to write the phrase of silence, as it were, Lyotard and Lacan employ different if not mutually exclusive strategies to achieve this goal. Lacan—far from trying to favour silence as a privileged access to the real—is rather concerned with reducing it to a semblance. In the analysis, silence is instrumentalized because the analyst must fall silent in order to make it possible for the analysand to hear that ‘it talks even when it remains silent’. For what does not stop not being silent, ‘what speaks without knowing it’, Lacan argues, ‘makes me “I,” subject of the verb. That doesn’t suffice to bring me into being. […] There is some relationship of being that cannot be known. […] [T]hat impossible knowledge is censored or forbidden, but it isn’t if you write ‘interdit’ appropriately—it is said between the words, between the lines. We have to expose the kind of real to which it grants us access’.37 The half-telling, the saying between the lines, leads, no doubt, to the conclusion that, for Lacan, the encounter with the real can take place neither in the register of showing —Wittgenstein’s solution—nor in that of the affect—a solution proposed by Lyotard —but in the register of saying. Contrary to the muteness of showing and of the feeling, the analysis sets as its goal ‘wellsaying’, (bien dire) of that which ‘speaks without knowing it’ and which ‘makes me “I”’. Thus, it could be said that, in the analysis, we are dealing with the overlapping of two silences: the analysand’s, which is an eloquent silence, a silence that ‘talks’ without knowing it, and the analyst’s silence, which is an act that makes it possible for the analysand to hear the ‘voice’ of silence, that silence of the unconscious desire and/or drives of whose ‘talking’ he or she is unaware and which nevertheless agitate him or her. It is in this sense that it could be said that the analysis becomes the place where the impossible-real can be exposed. Lyotard, on the other hand, considers himself to be a ‘guardian’ of silence, since, for him, the representation of silence is inseparable from the silence of representation. This can also explain the privileged role assigned by Lyotard to the arts, especially to painting. Art, for Lyotard, is namely a testimony: ‘[…] the most proper function of art is that of testifying to the appearing against the appearance (témoigner de l’apparition contre l’apparence)’.38 By quoting Gérard Wajcman, it could be said that what animates art, according to Lyotard, is an impossible desire: ‘to show and to say what cannot be
29
seen or said—to aim at the impossible as impossible’.39 This formulation may still appear ambiguous to a certain extent as it suggests an equivalence of saying and showing once the task attributed to art is to make the access to the real. Wajcman avoids the eventuality of such a confusion by drawing on Wittgenstein’s proposition40 according to which the inexpressible shows itself: […] [T]hat which cannot be said re-emerges somewhere else […]: that which cannot be resorbed in language returns in the visible as sort of an approximation of the visible (which is not to say visual) hallucination […] Suddenly two things need to be distinguished: 1. that the ‘unsayable’ of the Shoah is inevitably destined to return in the visible, to ‘haunt’ this visible with a ghostly presence, but also that 2. this very impossibility assigns to art an imperative task: to be the place where that which could neither be said nor seen shows itself. In this sense, it would be necessary from now on, instead of questioning the possibility of art after Auschwitz, as Adorno once did […], to take the dimension of something as a necessity of art after Auschwitz, not as a place for consolation, oblivion or betrayal, but, on the contrary, as that place where the unrepresentable would come to show itself.41 Hence, a twofold task is imposed on art: to make us see and to aim at the real. This is only possible through the paradoxical operation of making-to-be-seen what cannot be said, the unsayable, since to make the impossible be seen precisely as impossible, Wajcman argues, is the way in which art makes the real be seen.42 Among contemporary thinkers, Lyotard deserves all the credit for having opened both of these options in his book The Differend—to say and to show that which cannot be said nor seen—leaving the choice between the two, for the time being, in abeyance. That Lyotard later unambiguously privileged the second option, is hardly surprising as, for him, the choice of showing is a forced choice, imposed on him by his privileging Auschwitz as a sign of history. By postulating Auschwitz as the point of a radical break-up of history, Lyotard namely decrees a universal prescription: to examine history in the light of that radical caesura. At the same time, as a constitutively ‘unwitnessed’ event which compellingly urges thought to a fidelity to the unpresentable, to the unsayable, Auschwitz appears to have no other role in the economy of Lyotard’s argument than to terrify thought, to reduce it to silence in order to install in its place a mute, nameless witness: the affect. Here we can join Agamben’s critique of the ‘guardians’ of the silence that surrounds Auschwitz. According to Agamben, to say that Auschwitz is ‘unsayable’ is equivalent to adoring it in silence as one does with a god and, consequently, to confer on extermination the prestige of the mystical.43 Of course, the primacy of showing over saying, is not specific only to Lyotard’s thought. Rather, a whole series of recently published theorizations which are concerned with the problematic status of the testimony about traumatic events or experiences that exceeds the human’s capacity of talking, representing
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or thinking, and who, consequently confer on art the task of showing that which cannot be voiced. It is precisely this coupling of the primacy of showing over saying and the task assigned to the arts of being the only witness worth the name of a traumatic event, which is the target of Jacques Rancière’s powerful and polemical commentary on contemporary theorization of the unpresentable.44 At stake in Rancière’s critique is the very concept of the unrepresentability applied to some traumatic events or experiences. An event or experience that is capable of defying representation, thought and language is supposed to be an exception. But in recent theorizations of unpresentability, a whole series of events and experiences is alleged to be unpresentable: they range from the Jewish law banning images or the interdiction of representing the Shoah to the Kantian sublime, the Freudian original scene or Malevich’s White Square on White Field. What, then, are the conditions for the construction of the concept of unpresentability, asks Rancière, if it could be applied to manifold events and to various, if not all domains of experience? But even more questionable than the inflationary use of that concept is, according to Rancière, an ‘ethical demand that there should exist an art proper to such an exceptional experience’.45 This thesis which is, as we have seen, one of Lyotard’s key theses, is questionable insofar as it considers the relationship between art and the traumatic event in two exclusive ways. On the one hand, the theorists of the unpresentable argue that certain beings, events, experiences and situations are unsuitable for any artistic presentation whatsoever because there is no form of the sensuous presentation that could capture the essence of such an event, being or experience. In this view, the artistic presentation is in itself inadequate for the presentation of a traumatic event or experience as such a presentation which is characterized by the excess or surplus of presence, can only ‘derealize’ a traumatic event or experience, deprive it of its existence and falsify its specificity which consists precisely of its capacity to resist all sensuous presentation. On the other hand, however, these theorists who criticize art for its inability to present the unpresentable, at the same time call on art to assume the role of witness to the fundamental discord between the unpresentable ‘Thing’ and the artistic presentation. Lyotard in particular is reputed to have established the link between the existence of the events that exceed the thinkable and the art whose task is ‘to be the witness to the fact that there is the indeterminacy’46 by testifying to the breakdown of the harmonious relation between the sensible and the intelligible. But this valorization of testimony as a new form of art is, according to Rancière, only possible because Lyotard ‘plays’, so to speak, on two registers: 1. there are events that annihilate the representation since they dissolve the relation between presence and absence, between the sensible and the intelligible; 2. these unrepresentable events require therefore a different kind of art, an art of the sublime which ‘(bears) pictorial or otherwise expressive witness to the inexpressible’.47 The art of the sublime is thus capable of inscribing the trace of
31
the unpresentable by showing the incommensurability between that which affects us and that which thought can make intelligible. It is, then, by enacting the breakdown of the artistic presentation that art would be capable of testifying to the unpresentable. Contrary to Lyotard’s intention, as Rancière rightly points out, the breakdown of the stable relation between the sensible and the intelligible, can be understood perfectly in terms of the ‘illimitation’ of the power of representation rather than in terms of its limitation. Paradoxically, it is the affirmation of an original discord between showing and meaning which makes it possible for these two registers to accord in infinity. Lyotard’s solution to the problem of the presentation of the unrepresentable is, hence, not less representation but more. From Rancière’s perspective, Lanzmann’s film Shoah, instead of corroborating Lyotard’s thesis, refutes it. One of the greatest merits of Lanzmann’s Shoah, according to Rancière, is that it demonstrates that the question of the representable/unrepresentable relationship is primarily a question of the usage of means. In other words, there is no language proper to the testimony because, as Rancière rightly points out, ‘the unrepresentable is not a property of an event. […] An event in itself neither imposes nor prohibits any specific artistic means. And neither does it impose any duty on art to represent or not to represent it in this or that way’.48 Nonetheless, presenting the unpresentable, i.e. writing silence, remains a source of fascination for philosophy, psychoanalysis as well as art, whether it be poetry, music, painting or film. Yet these attempts at writing silence are by no means unambiguous. On the one hand, silence no doubt fascinates because, as the failure of these attempts to write it down clearly show, there is, at the very heart of silence, an impossible point of the real. On the other hand, however, the very desire of writing silence, i.e. of representing the real, suggests that silence is nothing but a lure which, instead of unmistakably pointing to the real, dissimulates the latter. With Lyotard’s displacement of the issue of testimony from the domain of ethics and politics to that of aesthetics, the ‘ethics of silence’, already announced in The Differend, only gains in presence. Alain Badiou is among the few thinkers who have warned against the temptations of an ethics which proclaims to be the guardian of silence. An ethics of silence faces, according to Badiou, a symmetrically inverted danger to that of ‘terrorism’. While the operation of ‘terrorism’ consists essentially of forcing the name of truth, of extorting the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth— regardless of the cost, the ethics of the unsayable, unpresentable succumbs to the temptation of turning the subtraction itself into the truth. Against this temptation the ethics that Badiou himself defines as an ethics of truths, can defend itself only by following the maxim: ‘do not subtract the ultimate subtraction’.49 The danger in handling silence resides then in the temptation of assigning to silence some fullness of being, of succumbing to the ontology of presence. Contrary to Lyotard who succumbs to that temptation by situating silence in the
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beyond-the-universe, in the beyond-the-all, Lacan aims at inscribing silence in the not-all. He succeeds in achieving that by conceiving silence, not in terms of a substance, a support or an ontological void, but as a semblance. Lacan thus avoids the danger that is inherent in the signifier ‘silence’. Lacan therefore succeeded precisely there where the theoreticians of the unpresentable had to admit failure: to write silence. Reduced to a semblance, a trash and designated as a small ‘a’, silence is situated as the agent in the analytic discourse. In so doing, Lacan succeeded in writing silence, not, of course, as a sign for the impossibility of saying, but, on the contrary, as a mere semblant-instrument whose function is precisely to make it possible for the analysand to take it as the cause of his or her desire and to come to terms with his or her desire. While Lacan handles silence as a remnant, but a remnant which can be written down, rather than being concerned with the divine silence of the pure presence, the later Lyotard seems to be orienting his thought, precisely to the experience of this primordial silence, in particular as he introduces a new figure of the Other: the matter [matière]. One is tempted to say that the matter such as Lyotard conceives it, is the Other par excellence—precisely to the extent that it is inhuman. Insofar as matter is something which is simply there and which is not addressed to us, it cannot hold us as can the Other of obligation. Indeed, the presence of the matter, strictly speaking, needs no witness. All that is required is some kind of a proto-experience ‘without spirit’, what Lyotard calls anima minima. The anima is an ideal witness insofar as ‘the soul only exists as affected’.50 It does not affect itself but is affected from outside by an other. That is to say, it remains dead, inanimate, impassive, unresponsive, unless affected by a sound, a colour, a fragrance, etc. To exist in this sense is ‘to be awakened from the nothingness of disaffection by a sensible “something there” (un là-bas sensible)’.51 In this view, far from being autonomous and free, as the traditional concept of subjectivity would have it, Lyotard’s witness is constitutively chained to the real and remains trapped in the relationship of indebtedness, the obligation to the real that affects it. This makes it clear why the muteness, instead of being a handicap, is rather an advantage with reference to bearing witness. A Lyotardian witness is, by definition, a mute witness, as his/her function is precisely to provide the presence, his/her body, to be an instrument for signalling the presence, not a presence of something, but a presence as such, which is, by definition, ‘inhuman’, just like the matter which does not address itself to the subject, it expects or demands nothing from him—or her, it remains indifferent: ‘Matter asks no questions, expects no answers of us. It ignores us’.52 Notes 1 Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (New York: Zone Books, 2002), p. 148–150. 2 Primo Levi, Les naufragés et les rescapés, (Paris: Gallimard, 1989).
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3 Shoshana Felman, ‘The Return of the Voice: Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah’ in Shoshana Felmann and Dori Laub [eds], Testimony: Crisis of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History, (New York and London: Routledge: 1992), p. 249. Agamben is thus right in pointing out that these witnesses ‘by proxy’ are not to be understood in the sense that they testify instead of those who could not bear witness, but rather in the sense of bearing witness ‘to a missing testimony,’ i.e. ‘in the name of the impossibility of bearing witness’. Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz, p. 34. 4 Jean-François Lyotard, The Differend: Phrases in Dispute, trans. George Van Den Abbeele (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988), p. xi. 5 See in particular Alain Badiou, ‘Le gardiennage du matin’ and Jean-Claude Milner, ‘Jean-François Lyotard, du diagnostic à l’intervention’, in Dolorès Lyotard, JeanClaude Milner, Gerald Sfez [eds], L’exercice du différend: Jean-François Lyotard (Paris: PUF, 2001). 6 Jean-François Lyotard, The Inhuman: Reflections on time, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby, (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991), p. 204. 7 Jean-François Lyotard, La Confession d’Augustin, (Paris: Galilée, 1998), p. 24. 8 Lyotard, The Differend, §1, 2. 9 Giorgio Agamben goes as far as to claim that ‘in the camp, one of the reasons that can drive a prisoner to survive is the idea of becoming a witness’. See Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz, p. 15. 10 Primo Levi whom Agamben described as the ‘witness par excellence’ and whose impressive work is a continuous, obsessional testimony to the torment and horrors he suffered at the camp of extermination, took his life more than forty years after the events in question the moment he regarded that which he had made his aim in life since Auschwitz as having failed: to bear witness to Auschwitz. 11 Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz, p. 12. 12 Primo Levi reports, for instance, that the Nazis cynically announced to the prisoners that people would not believe them because what the survivors would have to tell would seem incredible. See Levi, Les naufragés et les rescapés, p. 11. 13 Lyotard, The Differend, §16. 14 ‘A fact is that which is constituted by being said’. Jacques Lacan, Le séminaire. Livre XVII. L’Envers de la psychanalyse, (Paris: Seuil, 1991), p. 68. 15 Lyotard, The Differend, §7. 16 Lyotard, The Differend, §23. 17 Lyotard, The Differend, §43. 18 Jacques Lacan, ‘Conférence sur le symptôme’, Scilicet, n° 6/7, (Paris: Seuil, 1976), p. 45. 19 Jacques Lacan, Identification, unpublished seminar of the 9 of May 1962. 20 Lyotard, The Differend, §14. 21 Thus when Primo Levi writes: ‘I am writing what I could not tell anyone’, he signifies not only that he risked his life writing his testimony while actually still at Auschwitz, but also that the event upon which he bears witness is such that it reduces him to silence. See Primo Levi, Si c’est un homme, (Paris: Julliard, 1987), p. 169. 22 Jacques Lacan, Angoisse, unpublished seminar of the 23 of January 1963. 23 Jacques Lacan, la Logique du fantasme, unpublished seminar of the 12 of April 1967.
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24 Lyotard, The Differend, §22. 25 Lyotard, The Differend, p. 75. 26 Jean-François Lyotard, Heidegger and ‘the Jews’ trans. Andreas Michel and Mark Roberts, (Minneapolis, London: University of Minnesota Press, 1990), p. 26. 27 Jean-François Lyotard, ‘Emma’ in Misère de la philosophie, (Paris: Galilée, 2000), p. 73f. 28 Jean-François Lyotard, ‘Sensus communis’, in Andrew Benjamin [ed], Judging Lyotard, (London: Routledge, 1992). 29 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. G.K.Ogden, (New York. London: Routledge, 1981), 6.522. 30 Lyotard, The Differend, §135. 31 Lyotard, The Differend, §135. 32 Lyotard, The Differend, §93. 33 Jacques Lacan, ‘The direction of the treatment and the principles of its power’, in Écrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan, (London: Routledge 1989), p. 276. 34 Jacques Lacan, L’acte psychanalytique, unpublished seminar of the 10 of January 1968. 35 Jacques Lacan, Encore: The seminars of Jacques Lacan. Book XX, trans. Bruce Fink, (New York, London: W.W.Norton & Company, 1998), p. 92. 36 Jacques Lacan, Television, trans. Denis Hollier, Rosalind Krauss, and Annette Michelson, (New York, London: W.W.Norton & Company: 1990), p. 3. 37 Lacan, Encore, p. 119. 38 See Jean-François Lyotard, ‘Des traches diffractées’, in Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger, Halala-Autiswork, (Jerusalem: The Israel Museum, 1995), p. 13. 39 See Gérard Wajcman, ‘L’art, la psychanalyse, le siècle’, in Lacan: L’écrit, l’image, (Paris: Frammarion, 2000), p. 35. 40 Wittgenstein, Tractatus, 6.522. 41 Gérard Wajcman, ‘L’art, la psychanalyse, le siècle’, p. 47. 42 See Gérard Wajcman, L’objet du siècle, (Paris: Verdier 1998), p. 211 and Rado Riha, ‘Vouloir, alors même qu’on ne veut pas autre chose’, in Jelica Sumic [ed], Désir et Volonté (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2004). 43 Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz, p. 31. 44 Jacques Rancière, ‘S’il y a de l’irreprésentable’, in Jean-Luc Nancy [ed.] L’art et la mémoire des camps: Représenter exterminer, (Paris: Seuil, 2001). 45 Rancière, ‘S’il y a de l’irreprésentable’, p. 102. 46 Jean-François Lyotard, ‘The Sublime and the Avant-Garde,’ p. 101. 47 Lyotard, The Inhuman, p. 93. 48 Rancière, ‘S’il y a de l’irreprésentable’, p. 96. 49 Alain Badiou, ‘Conference sur la soustraction’, in Conditions, (Paris: Seuil, 1992), p. 195. 50 Jean-François Lyotard, Moralités postmodernes (Paris: Galilée, 1993), p. 205. 51 Lyotard, Moralités postmodernes, p. 205. 52 Lyotard, The Inhuman, p. 11.
Jelica Sumic-Riha is Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Philosophy at the Centre for Scientific Research, Ljubljana and Professor in Philosophy at the University of Ljubljana. She has conducted a seminar (with Rado Riha) at the
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Collège International de Philosophie (Paris) and has been a visiting professor at the University of Paris VIII. The books she has authored include: The Real of the Performative (1988); The Foundations of the Legal Discourse (1993); Authority and Argumentation (1995); Totemic Masks of Democracy (1996) and Mutations of Ethics (2002).
The Picture of Abjection: Thomas Vinterberg’s ‘The Celebration’ Tina Chanter
Abjection […] is merely the inability to assume with sufficient strength the imperative act of excluding abject things (and that act establishes the foundations of collective existence). Georges Bataille Does cinema render evil banal? Does it authorize perversion? In its exhibition of evil does it participate in the mystification of evil? Or is it rather the demystification of evil? Julia Kristeva poses these questions in her recent work.1 What happens when the abject is represented or depicted? What is the aim of such representation? Is it, as Hal Foster says about some contemporary art, intended to ‘provoke its operation, to catch abjection in the act, to make it reflexive, in its own right’? Foster goes on, ‘The danger, of course, is that mimesis may confirm a given abjection’.2 Kristeva has investigated the signifying function of abjection in relation to literature, and in doing so she has raised decisive questions about the mechanism of mimesis and about the cathartic potential literature has as a signifier of abjection. She has also opened up a space for rethinking the maternal and feminine associations of abjection. Even as Kristeva is to be credited with putting abjection on the agenda in provocative and inspiring ways, I want to note a certain ambivalence her writing exhibits when it comes to addressing the relation between philosophy and psychoanalysis, between politics and the individual, between the collective and the singular. This ambivalence spirals into an anxiety that might be an expression of what she must set aside in order to be able to sustain her theses about abjection. I am concerned, then, to acknowledge what could be said to operate as a remainder of Kristeva’s discourse. The gestures of exclusion that Kristeva makes in the name of exploring the strange, disturbing, but also necessary, process of abjection, have the effect, I claim, of bracketing precisely the political and ethical implications of her work with which the abject confront us. The residue, or remainder, is, as Kristeva acknowledges, ambivalent. And while I agree that such ambivalence must be maintained, rather than rendered decidable in its meaning, I am also convinced that abjection offers us a way of analyzing a tension that Kristeva systematically
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puts aside, evades, or remainders. This evasion, this exclusion (this—I’ll say it— abjection) that might be said to operate parallax ISSN 1353–4645 print/ISSN 1460–700X online © 2004 Taylor & Francis Ltd http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals DOI: 10.1080/1353464032000171064
from the very centre of her discourse about abjection is what interests me. In particular, I am interested in the ways in which abjection gets transmitted from one individual to another, due to certain entrenched lines along which sanctioned forms of discrimination are sedimented. Kristeva evinces a certain anxiety about the relation of cause and effect between the speaking subject and the symbolic order, insisting that they both ‘follow the same logic’.3 That logic has as its goal ‘survival’. And herein lies the problem. There is, I think, a reluctance to take on questions about the political possibilities of transgression, for how can historical and social mores come to be judged inappropriate, without some acknowledgment of a gap, or fissure, or lack of fit between the symbolic order and the speaking subject? Symptoms can be read as indicative of social forces, but there is a range of questions that are surely worth asking that exceed that reading. To interpret the subject’s symptom as illustrative of his or her culture leaves no room for any critical distance of the assumptions informing that culture. Such critical distance does not have to retreat into the naiveté of assuming transformation can be thorough, completely revolutionary, or unambiguously liberating. Another way of putting the problem is to couch it in terms of Kristeva’s categorical acceptance of Freud’s Oedipal myth as founding the social/symbolic contract. To simply say, as she does, that she takes this myth as ‘logically established’4 is to sidestep, to remainder, an array of important questions which perhaps allow her to say what she says, and to do what she does, with such brilliance, but which also sidelines questions about the political effects of a symbolic system that authorizes some subjects to abject others with apparent impunity. Among these questions are how and why the Oedipal model of triangulation might be inapplicable both to non-western cultures that do not display in any straightforward way, the norms imposed, enforced and authorized by what has come to be recognized as signifying the values of western capitalized culture. Perhaps there is a need to confront the possibility of subjects being put, or putting themselves, in disjunctive relationships to the societies in which they live. Once abjection is used as a lever to open up Freud’s texts, and the assumptions of the cultural imaginary in which they are embedded, we can begin to map out the ways in which various terms—race, sex, class, sexuality—function in place of, or in tandem with the name of the father. That is, they produce symbolic systems that operate, as often as not, at the level of the imaginary, they allow us to make
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distinctions that function as mechanisms of exclusion. I am suggesting that the role of the third— typically usurped by Freud and Lacan by the symbolic position of the patriarchal father—needs to be seen as circulating between the discourses of racism, sexism, heterosexism and classism, to mention only a few of the more salient discourses of oppression. The dichotomous and vastly oversimplified oppositions between black and white, female and male, homosexual and heterosexual, and upper or middle class and working class, produce a symbolic and imaginary scene that comes to inform our social and political landscape in ways that often function invisibly. These oppositions are naturalized and reified, and rendered inaccessible to interrogation. Subjects can be abjected through the abuse of other subjects. They can also use abjection as a way of protecting themselves from abuse. Abjection can occur when a social group unites against a particular subject or subjects, consolidating its boundaries by excluding those it designates as other. Because it is essentially ambiguous, abjection cannot be said to be inherently transgressive. But we can attempt to map the effects of abjection in particular instances and to ask about the political landscape that informs the abject, and how its contours both shape, and are shaped by, abjection. Foster expresses a similar concern to Kristeva’s in terms that allow him to consider more directly the social/political implications of abjection, when he asks: Is the abject, then, disruptive of subjective and social orders or foundational of them, a crisis in these orders or a confirmation of them? If subjectivity and society abject the alien within, is abjection not a regulatory operation? That is, is abjection to regulation what transgression is to taboo? …[A]s left and right may agree on the social representation of the abject, they may shore each other up in a public exchange of disgust, and this spectacle may inadvertently support the normativizing of image-screen and symbolic order alike. Is nihility a place from which power emanates in a strange new form? Is abjection a refusal of power or its reinvention in a strange new guise? Or is it somehow both at once?5 Foster is right to cite a shift ‘in contemporary art and theory, let alone contemporary fiction and film from the real understood as an effect of representation to the real understood as an event of “trauma”’.6 He is also right to note that strictly speaking in trauma discourse, at least in a psychoanalytic register, there is no subject of trauma— the position is evacuated7 and yet in therapy culture trauma is also treated as an event that guarantees the subject after the fact. The subject ‘however disturbed, rushes back as survivor, witness, testifier’.8 ‘In trauma discourse, then, the subject is evacuated and elevated at once’.9 He is even right to say that ‘there are dangers of citing the truth of witnessings and testimonials, such as the restriction of our political imagination to two camps, the abjector and the abjected, and the assumption that in order not
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to be counted among sexists and racists one must become the phobic object of such subjects’.10 But if Bataille is also correct when he suggests that ‘the imperative act of exclusion of abject things is the the fate of all men but its efficacity and its rigour varies according to social conditions’ then the issue is not so much how to avoid the danger, as how to use it productively.11 The poles of abjector and abjected will inevitably reassert themselves, but they will not do so in a fixed or determinate way. It is, then, not a matter of hoping to eliminate abjection altogether, but rather a matter of tracing its effects, taking seriously its affect, and thinking about how it might be refigured or reshaped. Bataille says that ‘it is impossible to give a positive definition, at once general and explicit, of the nature of abject things’.12 If this is so, Foster may be misled when he tries to locate a privileged site of abjection. He suggests that ‘if there is a subject of history for the culture of abjection at all, it is not the Worker, the Woman, or the Person of Color, but the Corpse’.13 One can see why Foster might say this, given Kristeva’s account of abjection in a 1995 interview with Charles Penwarden as a ‘soliciting by the other in such a way that I collapse. This solicitation can be the result of fascination, but also suffering: the other disgusts me, I abhor it, it is-we are-waste, excrement, a corpse: it threatens me’.14 If Kristeva points to the corpse as a possible site of abjection (one thinks perhaps of Antigone’s burial of Polynices—an attempt to keep at bay the degeneration of the body by natural forces), in the same moment she underlines the ineliminable ambiguity of abjection. She says ‘I abhor it, it is—we are—waste, excrement, a corpse,’ underlining the way abjection is not easily containable within secure boundaries. The ‘it is-we are’ signals the fluidity and contamination of abjection. I expel, reject or exclude the abject, but I also become it. I am it. ‘When one is in a state of abjection,’ says Kristeva ‘the borders between the object and the subject cannot be maintained’.15 It is, says Kristeva, ‘not only murder, excrement, menstrual blood that are dirty, but anything which endangers a structure. When you have a coherent system, an element which escapes from this system is dirty. It begins with something fairly anodyne. Tears, for example, are considered dirty because they escape the limit of the body’.16 If abjection contests the exclusive identities of self/other, subject/object, I/you, it also resists the consistent or systematic association with a privileged site. I want to think abjection as a process that is inherently mobile, which has no intrinsic object, but which circulates, and attaches to specific sites, objects, and persons, only to be re-engaged, and re-deployed, through projection. Sometimes those who are abjected, turn abjection back on itself, so that it is thrown back to those who abject. Sometimes abjection is projected somewhere else entirely, on to some foreign object. These processes do not form a closed circuit, since abjection cannot be appropriated without loss, and perhaps it cannot be signified without creating, often unwittingly, new sites of abjection. Bataille points to the failure to assume with sufficient force the imperative act of exclusion of abject objects (which constitute the basis of collective existence). If the subject suffers an inability to sustain and maintain itself through the act of abjecting objects, it will
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abject others. Or rather, abjection will occur, since it is less an act, than it is a process, an operation, a dynamic, which takes on specific contours in different moments. To regard it as an act is to situate it squarely in the domain of the subject, which implies intentionality and wilfullness, conscious control, deliberate construction. Abjection occurs rather at the level of release, and sometimes constitutes an abjection of oneself. In Powers of Horror Kristeva returns to the notion of chora, which she explored in Revolution of Poetic Language, under the heading ‘The “Chora”, Receptacle of Narcissism’. Here she invites us to enter ‘that Freudian aporia called primal repression’.17 What is aporetic about primal repression is that it shares the same paradoxical structure Kristeva has already elaborated in terms of chora. Just as chora cannot but be articulated in symbolic terms, yet the very terms of its articulation tend towards its destruction, so primal repression rests on what is secondary to it, which tends, therefore, to bring into question what sense or primacy can be retained by primal repression.18 Kristeva emphasizes the instability of the abject by referring the Platonic chora to the maternal body, and in doing so she underlines the impossibility of thinking chora without also thinking the drives. Here, however, it is autoerotic drives and taboo to which she specifically directs our attention. More specifically, there are two levels of prohibition or taboo set in play. There is, first, the ‘prohibition placed on the maternal body’, a prohibition which also expresses ‘the symbolic function in its most significant aspect’ —for, according to the Freudian/Lacanian model that informs Kristeva, the prohibition both derives from, and establishes, the authority of the father figure, and this prohibition therefore both founds paternal authority, while at the same time admitting the instability of that authority. The very gesture that establishes the law of the father also witnesses the potential of the mother to undermine it, since the authority is invoked after the fact—precisely as a prohibition. The prohibition, that is, only functions by acknowledging the desire it nevertheless wants to outlaw. In this sense, the law is called into being by the desire it sets out to tame. Yet in another sense, the desire that is thus outlawed was never innocent of the law that prohibits it. Drives are at stake from the beginning, after all. Drives are constitutive of chora, they are what hold sway. Drives exist in a world that is peopled by subjects already immersed in a language, already shaped according to various sets of socially condoned practices, and in this sense, can never be pure of symbolic formations. In fact, then, drives are not only hemmed in, held back, checked, by prohibitions—they are also precisely called forth by them. So, not only does desire call law into being, but law also calls desire into being. There is a second level of prohibition: the ‘prohibition placed on the maternal body’ arises as ‘a defense against autoeroticism and incest taboo’ —the mother is outlawed only because of another taboo that is already in place. Desire and prohibition are already hopelessly inseparable, constitutive of one another. The drives of autoeroticism do not presuppose an established ego, although they ‘serve to correlate’ the ‘not yet’ ego with an ‘object’.19 At the point where this
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‘centripetal’ movement, wherein the ego is aimed at ‘as center of a solar system of objects’,20 becomes ‘centrifugal,’ ‘fasten[s] on the Other,’ or ‘come[s] into being as sign’, Kristeva says, ‘another economy is instituted’.21 The mirror image gives way to symbols, appearances give way to words, and my image is recognized as a sign. And with the advent of the sign, the chora is repressed. Not only is the chora repressed, but narcissism can now only appear as regressive. In Tales of Love, Kristeva provides us with one of her clearest programmatic statements, one in which she specifies why and how she finds it necessary to distance herself from the prominence Lacan attaches to language.22 What Kristeva is doing, she tells us here, is assuming the pre-existence of language, but also maintaining an ‘evolutionary postulate’, about the existence of ‘various dispositions’, which correspond to ‘various psychic structures’.23 Rather than adhere to the idea that narcissism is an ‘unanalyzable screen’, or a relatively unproblematic ‘origin’, she introduces what she calls ‘narcissistic structuration’.24 Clearly targeting Lacan, she shifts the emphasis from the ‘requirement of a stern father’ who ‘brings about separation, judgment, and identity, not by questioning its necessity, but by transforming its register, finding its echoes in an ‘archaic, imaginary paternity’.25 This is what Freud call the ‘father of individual prehistory’.26 What is crucial about this ‘strange father,’ this ‘imaginary [as opposed to symbolic] father’, is that it represents ‘both parents’ because there is not yet any ‘awareness of sexual difference’.27 The trauma of abuse organizes the narrative of The Celebration. Directed by Thomas Vinterberg, also a member of Dogme 95, it documents an aristocratic patriarch’s sixtieth birthday party at which one of his son’s reveals himself as the victim of his father’s childhood sexual abuse. As this revelation unfolds the various degrees of complicity of other family members with this ‘secret’ become apparent. Vinterberg explores the dynamic of race and class in the context of a family drama that evokes Bergmanesque scenes, only to undercut the tranquil order that appears to reign in this privileged familial setting, by exposing its underside. A film in which a patriarchal father’s incest, rape and child abuse is brought to light, The Celebration is replete with the denial, horror, and violence that such revelations are liable to elicit. The film concerns itself unremittingly with the idea of outsiders, a status that rotates between a number of key characters, absent and present. A daughter has committed suicide and her twin takes it upon himself to unburden himself of their shared abuse in a series of speech acts that pass the burden of abjection on to the other members of his family, who, until his revelation, remain blissfully (or willfully) ignorant. The black skin of Gbatokai (Gbatokai Dakinah), the partner of their sister, Helene, serves as the occasion to refuse him entry to the gathering. The kitchen staff, in their subordinate position, form an alliance with Gbatakai and Christian, helping him to reveal his secret. The patriarch himself might be ultimately dethroned, but only to be replaced, true to the Oedipal narrative, by his elder son, Michael (Thomas Bo Larsen), who is ‘as sick as’ his father. Weaving and unweaving the fabric of decency that knits
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this extended family together, but which rests on a betrayal hitherto unspoken, the film explores the ties and deceit that holds this family together, and which break it apart. It is my contention that the film can be read in terms of abjection, and that such a reading will illuminate the notion of abjection. The title of The Celebration works symbolically to misname the semiotic energies that drive the film, energies which explode the formalities of the party, undermining both the procedural structure and the father in the name of whom the party has been arranged. The Celebration confronts the viewer with a character whose reality, at first, fails to conform to the reality of the general consensus. The claims made at the expense of the father seem, at first, to come out of nowhere, to disrupt the genteel atmosphere of what is supposed to be an occasion to honour the father. As the film progresses, evidence accumulates to indicate that it is, in fact, the father, Helge (Henning Montzen), rather than the son, Christian (Ulrich Thomsen), whose reality needs to be brought into question. Helge has managed to rearrange the borders of his self-image so as to expel everything that is disturbing about his conduct from his mind, cleansing and purifying himself through denial. Christian therefore becomes the receptacle of abjection: he is dirty and disgusting, and his words are impure. The denial finds explicit shape when Helge finally admits that what his son claims is true, but that it was all he was good for. Rape is what Christian deserved. Instead of a victim of the crime he committed, Helge’s son becomes a terrain onto which everything base and impure can be projected, while Helge retains his purity. After all, Christian is not worth anything. Kim (Bjarne Henriksen), boyhood friend of Christian and longtime chef, organizes Michelle (Therese Glahn) and Pia (Trine Dyrholm), two of the younger members of his staff (because, as he says, the older ones need their pensions), in a rebellious move. He orders Michelle and Pia to steal the keys of all the guests, so that they cannot drive home. As he says, ‘it’s Christian’s turn tonight’. Without their car keys, the group that is gathered in Helge’s house is forced to remain there, and the events set in motion by Christian’s declaration are allowed to unfold. When Helene’s boyfriend arrives, Michael assumes, because of the colour of his skin, that Helene’s partner has come to the wrong place, thinks he is a musician, tells him to leave, and calls him a monkey. He thereby falls into the stereotypical imaginary that has been pointed out by Michael Omi and Howard Winant, and by Richard Dyer, among others, of assuming that nonwhites must be in service, that their skin colour automatically marks them—in the contours of a move that Fanon had already mapped out in terms of the corporeal, the racial-historical, and epidermal schema—as inferior.28 Given that he too is made to feel his status as outsider, it is significant that a black man, who, precisely because of his status as one who is outside this white, privileged family, shows solidarity with Christian. Michael leads the guests in a raucous racist song—in which once again semiotic energies come to the fore—in the presence of ‘Gonzales’ (as Christian’s mother, Birthe Neumann, insists on
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calling him, despite the fact that it is not his name)—in a deliberate attempt to humiliate him. The song, which begins with the words, ‘I’ve seen a real Black Sambo/His face was black as pitch/He spoke all funny/And he had a ring in his nose,’ provokes Helene, who has up until this point denounced her apparently renegade brother, to show solidarity towards him. Thus, child abuse and racism are aligned with one another as capable of marking certain others as victims who must be represented as savages, and excluded from the realm of humanity which their perpetrators are perversely represented as constituting. Rather than continuing the chain of abjection, Gbatakai presents a front of solidarity with Christian, taking action to transform their shared status as outsiders. The fact that the drama of the film is orchestrated from the kitchen below the main floors of the house (the symbolism of which need hardly be remarked) is congruent with the fact that it also falls to Michelle to speak the truth to Michael, when she tells him that he is ‘as sick as his father’. Michael has had an affair with her in previous years, and as a result she got pregnant, and had an abortion. When she tells him this, he tries to pay her off in order to get her to leave the house. Michael, with the help of others, takes Christian into the forest, expelling him from the civilized, domestic setting that he is disrupting, and returning him to the natural world, with which, presumably, his animal behaviour makes him fit—as if he were a savage. Michael wants to ‘get rid of him,’ to get him and his unsavoury news out of sight, and out of mind. Back at the dinner table, the irony of the song sung by the patriarch’s mother, and interspersed with shots of Christian being banished from the house, comes into its own, as we see him dragged into the woods, beaten up, and tied to a tree. Helge’s mother, at Helge’s behest, continues to sing that ‘There is such idyll, peace and calm in the sylvan solitude that sorrows are stilled where peace and rest do reign’. By the end of the film it is Helge who is dragged outside and beaten by Michael. Disillusioned with the symbolic collapse of the father, Michael comes to blows with his father, in a classic scenario of Oedipal rivalry, telling him that he will never see his grandchildren again. Prior to this denouement, and as a harbinger to it, Michael comes to blows with his sister’s black partner, acting at that time in line with the strict, but severely compromised, boundaries imposed by the father. The maternal figure (Birthe Neumann) in this film hovers in the background, and goes with the flow of events, striving to maintain a calm and dignified atmosphere at all costs, it would seem, only acknowledging the cataclysmic events that have unfolded in her passive response, in order to defend her husband, attempting to elicit an apology from Christian, and to restore the paternal order. By the end of the film, when the father appears for breakfast, he makes a speech in which he says he now understands that what he did to his children was ‘unforgivable,’ that they will ‘hate’ him, but that they will always be his children, and that he will always love them. Michael asks him to leave so that they can have their breakfast, and Helge asks his wife whether she will accompany him, but she refuses. Some measure of peace has been restored, but not without a
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revolutionary shift of power in the household away from the father figure, and toward the sons. It is worthy of note that while Christian, who has been presented as a trouble-maker throughout the film, is exonerated, the axis of power shifts to Michael, who is very much his father’s son. The Oedipal scenario plays itself out, as Christian’s mother, apparently unproblematically, shifts her allegiance from her husband to elder son. She thereby submits to the symbolic order without issuing a challenge to it. As for Linda, the only way out she can find is suicide. Mother and daughter thus submit to the system—either by transferring allegiance from the father to the son, through whom the paternal name can continue to be guarded, or through the capitulation of self-inflicted death. That Christian takes on the task of putting into words the trauma suffered by both he and his twin is representative of the privileged masculine relationship to the symbolic. There is a reorganization of the chora, the maternal space that provides a certain order, one that is sanctioned by the paternal law. I want to underline, however, that the paternal authority has not been sundered, even if it is reestablished to a certain extent under another guise. The symbolic turning of the tables depicted in the film remains powerful because it only takes place after numerous attempts to deny, silence, and avoid the truth, by abjecting those who have already suffered abjection. This film depicts how those victimized by the abusive power of a patriarch can successfully, albeit through a painful process, challenge the terms of power. A victim of abuse, himself, Christian can no longer play the role of acquiescent mediator after the suicide of his beloved and abused sister, with whom it was too hard for him to be in close contact while she was alive. He interrupts the civil proceedings of a formal dinner in order to make his story known, but were it not for the support of the staff, his attempt to make the truth known might well have failed. With their support, he continues to force his family not only to hear, but also to confront, the truth. One might say that he visits abjection on them, making them confront the horror of his own history, the abjection of his childhood sexual abuse, and the hypocrisy of his parents. Despite both his parents’ attempts to silence him through humiliation and manipulation, Christian is able to make the truth visible to others. He is able to interrupt the myth of the family produced by his parents, and to reorient himself in relation to it, but how far his interruption will produce any definitive change in the family symbolic remains in question. In Michelle’s words, Michael is ‘as sick as’ his father, and it is his authority that is asserted at the end of the film. The marginalized position of Michelle, a woman and a social subordinate, combined with her affection for Christian, gives her potential purchase on the truth. While her indictment of the family dynamic stands, it remains unclear whether it will have any impact on the societal structures that inform and sustain this dynamic. When Christian asks Pia to go and live with him in Paris, and she agrees, he is at the same time challenging his father’s taunt that he cannot seem to make a go of relationships with women, and taking the initiative in a way that establishes him as active and Pia as compliant. While the film shores up the masculine status of the symbolic,
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it also presents us with openings in which to challenge its hegemonic status. In this sense it can be read as a challenge to the phallic, fetishistic logic of the Oedipal myth. I want to suggest that the imaginary, cultural scripts, which privilege whiteness, heterosexuality, maleness, and middle or upper class existence, and thus help to produce raced, sexed, gendered or classed narrative scenarios, function as the third. That is, they perform a mediating discourse, that which Lacan restricts to the function of the father, who governs over the symbolic in a way that forecloses any meaningful challenge to the Oedipal scenario, which is itself a legacy of patriarchy. In different moments, a racialized or sexualized imaginary informs events, such that the imaginary performs the function of the third—that which allows us to exchange signs among ourselves and in doing so to rely on and constitute and recreate a system whereby certain others are marginalized on the basis of what we take to be their racial otherness, or sexual deviance, or class inappropriateness. Freud develops in effect a fetishistic attitude to women that he then reifies, conceptualizing it into his discovery of the phallus. But if the reign of the phallus is in fact underwritten, at least in part, by its affective connotation—that is by a culturally specific masculinized aggression of the death drive—its ideological weight rests upon a repudiation of other affects, not the least of which are those associated with maternal care, and idealized as love. What interests me in returning to abjection as an affective site of maternal identification is not only the possibility it offers of rethinking of the maternal figure as such—though I think that this is one thing that must be done. Just as pressing, in my view, is the need to think about how certain others, other than the mother, racialized and classed figures, for example, have been pushed into positions of maternal care.29 Notes 1 Kristeva, Intimate Revolt: The Powers and Limits of Psychoanalysis, vol. 2, tr. Jeanine Herman (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002). In the chapter on fantasy and cinema Kristeva develops some ideas she had already introduced in an earlier essay, ‘Ellipses on Dread and the Specular Seduction’ in Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology: A Film Theory Reader, ed. Philip Rosen, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986). 2 Hal Foster, The Return of the Real, (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press., 1996). See also Foster ‘Obscene, Abject, Traumatic’, October 78: Fall 1996: pp. 107–24; 3 Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, tr. Leon S.Roudiez, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982). 4 Kristeva, Powers of Horror, p. 57. 5 Foster, The Return of the Real, pp. 114–123. 6 Foster, The Return of the Real, p. 107. 7 Foster, The Return of the Real, p. 123. 8 Foster, The Return of the Real, p. 124.
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9 Foster, The Return of the Real, p. 124. 10 Foster, The Return of the Real, p. 123. 11 Bataille, Georges, ‘L’abjection et les formes miserables,’ Oeuvres completes, (Paris: Gallimard 1970), p. 219. 12 Bataille, ‘L’abjection et les formes miserables’, p. 220. 13 Foster, The Return of the Real, p. 122. 14 Kristeva, ‘Of Word and Flesh,’ An Interview by Charles Penwarden in Rites of Passage: Art for the End of the Century, ed. Stuart Morgan, Frances Morris (Tate Gallery Productions, London, 1995), p. 22. 15 Kristeva, Powers of Horror, p. 22. 16 Kristeva, Powers of Horror, p. 24. 17 Kristeva, Powers of Horror, p. 13. 18 Kristeva, Powers of Horror, pp. 13–14. 19 Kristeva, Powers of Horror, p. 14. 20 Kristeva, Powers of Horror, p. 14. 21 Kristeva, Powers of Horror, p. 14. 22 Kristeva, Tales of Love, tr. Leon S.Roudiez, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988). Kristeva also explains her reluctance to embrace what she sees as Lacan’s overbearing emphasis on the symbolic aspect of language in Powers of Horror. Underlining that the subject’s ‘active use of the signifier’ is born with the setting up of the triangular Oedipal relation (PH 62), Kristeva wants to differentiate her position from Lacan’s. We can see this when she says, ‘By stressing the inherence of language in the human state, by overestimating the subject’s having been the salve of language since before his birth, one avoids the two moods, active and passive, according to which the subject is constituted in the signifier; by the same token one neglects the economy of narcissism in the elaboration and practice of the symbolic function’ (Powers of Horror, pp. 62–63). The effect of this implicit critique is to emphasize passivity on the one hand and narcissism on the other hand, and the implication is that these are unduly neglected by Lacan. 23 Kristeva, Tales of Love, p. 44. 24 Kristeva, Tales of Love, p. 44. 25 Kristeva, Tales of Love, p. 46. 26 Kristeva, Tales of Love, p. 40. 27 Kristeva, Tales of Love, p. 26. 28 Richard Dyer, ‘The Matter of Whiteness,’ Theories of Race and Racism, ed. Les Back and John Solomos, (New York: Routledge, 2000), pp. 539–548. Michael Omi and Howard Winant. ‘Racial Formation in the United States,’ The Idea of Race, ed. Robert Bernasconi and Tommy Lott, (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2000), pp. 181–212. 29 I develop this argument in Abjection: Film and the Constitutive Nature of Difference, Indiana University Press, forthcoming.
Tina Chanter is Professor of Philosophy at DePaul University. She is author of Ethics of Eros: Irigaray’s Rereading of the Philosophers (Routledge, 1995), and Time, Death and the Feminine: Lévinas with Heidegger, (Stanford University Press, 2001), and editor of Feminist Interpretations of Emmanuel Lévinas (Penn State Press, 2001). She has also published articles on figures such as Beauvoir, Derrida, Kofman, Kristeva, Hegel, Heidegger, Irigaray, Lacan, Lévinas, and
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Merleau-Ponty, and topics such as psychoanalysis, theory and tragedy, sex and gender, time and temporality, and film theory. Abjection: Film and the Constitutive Nature of Difference is forthcoming with Indiana University Press.
Aglossostomography Daniel Heller-Roazen
The year 1630 saw the publication of a slim volume bearing the striking title Aglossostomography, or Description of a Mouth without a Tongue, which Speaks and Naturally Performs all Other Functions.1 The frontispiece of the book identified its author as one ‘Monsieur Jacques Roland, Sire of Belebat, Surgeon of Monsignor the Prince, Lieutenant of the First Surgeon Barber of the King, and Assistant of His Primary Physician’, who prefaced the medical treatise with a series of compositions in verse that left little doubt as to his estimation of the significance of the scientific phenomenon it described as well as the analysis he had dedicated to it. ‘This case is marvellous’, one reads in the first quatrain of a sonnet placed before the inception of the essay proper, ‘this miracle is very great,/But it is surpassed still by the writing of Roland,/Which will live forever on earth and in art’. The ‘case’ in question was that of ‘Pierre Durard, son of André Durard and Marguerite Salé, Labourers in the Village of la Rangezière, Parish near Monsaigne in Lower Poitou’, who, stricken with smallpox in his sixth or seventh year, contracted a particularly violent infection of the mouth. When the tongue began to decay and decompose, the child naturally sought to remove the gangrenous organ from his mouth; and so he began to ‘spit it out, piece by piece’. According to the physician’s account, the boy’s assiduous efforts to rid himself of his tongue were soon successful: before long, the physician reports, ‘absolutely nothing of it remained’ in the mouth that once housed it. The ‘miracle’ announced by the author of the book, however, did not concern the loss of the tongue, which, albeit doubtless a drastic occurrence for the ‘young Boy of Poitou’ himself, could hardly have struck the physician as remarkable on its own. The startling phenomenon arose, by contrast, after the loss of the organ was quite complete. It consisted in the unexpected fact that all the capacities generally thought to belong to the tongue now seemed to survive the organ with which they had been associated. ‘Today’, Roland wrote, the boy ‘barely encounters any difficulties at all in performing the five functions which are attributed to this part that he thus lost, namely […] Speaking, Tasting, Spitting, Gathering in the mouth, and Swallowing’.2 In the end, the ‘alingual mouth’ thus proved every bit as serviceable as a regular one, and, according to the doctor, it was in this case a good deal more able than many: ‘a tongueless mouth’, Roland
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commented in deliberately provocative terms, ‘can, without artifice, do everything that the tongue does in the mouth, and it can do so with so little discomfort that stutterers have a harder time making themselves understood [with their tongues] […] than this child, who has none at all’.3 As the parallax ISSN 1353–4645 print/ISSN 1460–700X online © 2004 Taylor & Francis Ltd http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals DOI: 10.1080/1353464032000171073
author presented it, Pierre was lucky, so to speak, that the infection was as grave as it was, and that it brought about the disappearance of all and not only a part of his tongue. According to the physician, had the child lost only the tip of the tongue and retained the rest, like many before him, he would have had to go to the greatest of lengths to make an intelligible sound; left with the unwieldy bulk of the remaining organ, the boy, like all those in such a sad state, would have had to take recourse to all sorts of artificial devices to communicate at all.4 In this case, the child’s gums, palate, throat, and teeth could adjust themselves to the clear absence of the organ, compensating for its functions accordingly. The tongue of the child thus profited, as it were, from the rigour with which it vanished: his mouth fully freed of the organ of speech and as well as whatever cumbersome morsels it might have left behind it, Pierre Durard could finally talk with ease. January 15, 1718, less than a century after the publication of Aglossostomography, there appeared in the Mémoires de l’Académie Royale des Sciences a brief medical and linguistic study that, recalling the case of the ‘young Boy of Poitou’, adduced further evidence for the veracity of Roland’s claims. This time the child in question was a girl, not a boy, and not of Poitou but Portugal; but the tongue was still missing and, once again, speech persisted, apparently undaunted by the seeming absence of any organ of its own. The modest but pointed essay bore the title ‘On the Manner in which a Girl without a Tongue Acquits Herself of the Functions that Depend upon this Organ’, and from its opening pages its author drew the startling conclusion that the phenomenon clearly implied. ‘This singularity of a Mouth that speaks without a Tongue’, the eighteenth-century scholar wrote, in no uncertain terms, ‘must be enough to persuade us that one may not conclude that the Tongue is an organ essential to speech; for there are others in the Mouth that compete for this title, and others that make up for its absence’.5 The author, de Jussieu, had encountered the subject of his study while on a trip to Lisbon, at a time at which the ‘Girl without a Tongue’ was fifteen years old. ‘The daughter of poor parents in a village of Allenteïo’, the child had been ‘presented at the approximate age of nine to his Eminence the Count of Ericeira, a Lord as distinguished by his nobility as by his
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Letters’, who in turn sent her to the capital, where she was later to encounter the French physician.6 The girl, Jussieu was informed, had been born with no tongue. But she was nonetheless able to speak for herself, and in her first meeting with the doctor, she effortlessly answered all the questions put to her about ‘her state and the manner with which she made up for the absence of this part’. De Jussieu, a man of no excessive credulity, then resolved to meet the patient ‘during the light of day’, and the second and last time he saw her, he made sure, as he recalls, ‘to have the Mouth opened’. ‘In the place that the tongue usually occupies’, he reported, I noted only a small elevation in the shape of a nipple, which rose, in the middle of the Mouth, to a height of about three or four lines. This elevation would have been almost imperceptible had I not assured myself by touching that which barely made itself visible to the eye. By means of the pressure of my finger, I felt a kind of movement of contraction and dilatation, which informed me that, although the organ of the Tongue could be lacking, the muscles that shape it and that are meant for its movement were nevertheless present, since I saw no emptiness underneath her chin, and I could only attribute the alternating movement of this elevation to muscles.7 The discovery of the ‘small elevation in the shape of a nipple’ seems to have been something of a consolation to the doctor, since it furnished him with evidence of the absence he could not otherwise have perceived: the vanished organ had left a miniscule mound, which, if entirely inaudible and effectively invisible, could still be reached by the prodding physician’s finger. Without it, the ‘aglossostomography’ might have remained too incredible; for as De Jussieu comments, with some astonishment, ‘one could easily think the organ of speech was not lacking, were one not warned in advance’.8 The French physicians were perhaps the first to take note of the survival of speech in the loss of the tongue, but they were hardly the last. Referring in passing to the seventeenth and the eighteenth-century works in the Six Lectures on Sound and Sense he held at the Ecole Libre des Hautes Etudes in New York between 1942 and 1943, Roman Jakobson went so far as to comment that the ‘curious facts’ the treatises made known ‘have since been confirmed many times’.9 In a pioneering study of the development of language published in Leipzig in 1894, The Child’s Speech and Speech Defects (Des Kindes Sprache und Sprachfehler) Hermann Gutzmann, for instance, observed, in Jakobson’s words, that ‘although one uses the same term, tongue, to designate a part of the mouth and the linguistic phenomenon, the second meaning can do without the first, and almost all the sounds that we emit could in principle be produced in an entirely different manner, without any modification of acoustic facts’.10 The German child psychologist, for his part, believed there were exceptions to the rule, and that, in particular, fricatives (such as [z], [s], and the corresponding affricates)
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could not be properly produced without teeth; but in this he seems to have been mistaken. ‘Further research’, Jakobson wrote, ‘has conclusively demonstrated that even these exceptions are imaginary. The director of the Viennese clinic for speech disturbances, Godfrey E.Arnold, showed in the Archiv für gesamte Phonetik III (1939) that even after the loss of incisives, the proper pronunciation of sibilants remains intact, as long as the subject’s hearing is normal’.11 Jakobson observed that the question admitted of several possible formulations, and that the issue broached by the early modern physicians and linguists in truth far exceeded the terrain circumscribed by the specialists of the scientific study of the human phonetic apparatus. In the preface to his De formatione loquelae of 1781, Christoph Hellwag, the inventor of the vocalic triangle, presented the problem in theological form: if human speech were truly dependent on the human tongue, Hellwag reflected, how could the serpent of Eden ever have conversed with Eve? ‘This curious question’, Jakobson commented, ‘can be replaced by another, which is fundamentally equivalent to it, but empirical. Phonetics wishes to deduce the sounds of our language [or ‘tongue:’ the linguist’s term here is langue] from the diverse forms of contact with the palate, the teeth, lips, etc. But if these diverse points of articulation were in themselves so essential and decisive, how could the parrot succeed in reproducing so many sounds of our language [or ‘tongue’] so effectively, despite the fact that it has a vocal apparatus that so little resembles ours?’12 The representation of the production of human speech seems, in each case, to conceal an unstated and unsolved difficulty, one inscribed in the very form of the term language’, which, like all the corresponding terms of the other Indo-European idioms, recalls the organ of the mouth, lingua, with whose movements speech cannot simply be identified. It is as if the very word ‘tongue’ were in truth a catachresis: a name for something unnamable, an improper figure for a being that could not be assigned any proper place and that could not, for this reason, ever fully be represented. One of Edgar Allan Poe’s last short stories, ‘The Facts in the Case of M.Valdemar’, presents the problem in exemplary, if chilling, terms, which are not easy to forget. The nineteenth-century text can be read as a precise pendant to the earlier medical treatises; for it tells the tale not of a ‘Mouth without a Tongue, which Speaks’ but of a tongue, as it were, without a mouth, which, beyond the end of the living body, continues to talk in the absence of the being to whom it once seemed to belong. The narrator of the tale, a certain ‘P-’, identifies himself as a physician whose ‘attention’, for the three years preceding the events related in the tale, ‘had been repeatedly drawn to the subject of Mesmerism’, and who became captivated, more recently still, by a single thought: ‘that, in the series of experiments made hitherto, there had been a very remarkable and most unaccountable omission: —no person had as yet been mesmerized in articulo mortis’.13 ‘It remained to be seen’, the narrator explains, in programmatic terms, ‘first, whether, in such condition, there existed in the patient any susceptibility to the magnetic influence; secondly, whether, if any existed, it was impaired or
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increased by the condition; thirdly, to what extent, or for how long a period, the encroachment of Death might be arrested by the process’.14 P- then found a suitable subject for his experiment in the form of ‘M.Ernest Valdemar, the wellknown compiler of the “Biblioteca Forensica,” and author (under the nom de plume of Issachar Marx) of the Polish versions of “Wallenstein” and “Gargantua”’.15 Declared ‘in a confirmed phthisis’ by his physicians, M.Valdemar willing turned to P- in his final hours, expressly stating his wish to be mesmerized; and, a little more than twenty-four hours before the time of decease announced by the patient’s regular physicians, the narrator thus arrived at his bedside. P- encountered little difficulty in mesmerizing M.Valdemar; the moribund patient, we read, quickly entered into ‘an unusually perfect mesmeric trance’.16 Several hours later, P- relates, the state of the patient seemed unchanged. Determining ‘to hazard a few words of conversation’, the Mesmerist thus asked M.Valdemar if he slept. At first the bed-stricken man said nothing; and when the physician repeated his query, the patient still did not answer. Uttered a third time, however, the question provoked a response: ‘the lips moved sluggishly, and from between them, in a barely audible whisper, issued the words: “Yes; — asleep now. Do not wake me! —let me die so!”’.17 So those present waited, certain of M.Valdemar’s imminent death. But the narrator, aware that the death of the patient ‘must now take place within a few minutes’, still wished to learn more while time permitted; and so he once again posed his previous question. The long awaited decease seemed to occur at the moment of the doctor’s speech. ‘While I spoke’, the narrator recounts, there came a marked change over the countenance of the sleep-walker. The eyes rolled themselves slowly open, the pupils disappearing upwardly; the skin generally assumed a cadaverous hue, resembling not so much parchment as white paper; and the circular hectic spots which, hitherto, had been strongly defined in the centre of each check, went out at once. I use this expression, because the suddenness of their departure put me in mind of nothing so much as the extinguishment of a candle by a puff of the breath. The upper lip, at the same time, writhed itself away from the teeth, which it had previously covered completely; while the lower jaw fell with an audible jerk, leaving the mouth widely extended, and disclosing in full view the swollen and blackened tongue.18 The occurrence, P-comments, was without doubt a ‘death-bed horror’, and those present at this point retreated, startled and not a little disgusted, from ‘the region of the bed’. The most startling of the ‘facts in the case of M.Valdemar’, however, took place later, in the moments following the apparent death of the patient. ‘There was no longer the faintest sign of vitality in M.Valdemar’, P-recalls,
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and concluding him to be dead, we were consigning him to the charge of the nurses, when a strong vibratory motion was observable in the tongue. This continued for perhaps a minute. At the expiration of this period, there issued from the distended and motionless jaws a voice— such as it would be madness in me to attempt describing. There are, indeed, two or three epithets which might be considered as applicable to it in part; I might say, for example, that the sound was harsh, and broken and hollow; but the hideous whole is indescribable, for the simple reason that no similar sounds have ever jarred upon the ear of humanity. There were two particulars, nevertheless, which I thought then, and still think, might fairly be stated as characteristic of the intonation—as well adapted to convey some idea of its unearthly peculiarity. In the first place, the voice seemed to reach our ears—at least mine—from a vast distance, or from some deep cavern within the earth. In the second place, it impressed me (I fear, indeed, that it will be impossible to make myself comprehended) as gelatinous or glutinous matters impress the sense of touch. I have spoken both of ‘sound’ and of ‘voice.’ I mean to say that the sound was one of distinct—of even wonderfully, thrillingly distinct— syllabification. M.Valdemar spoke—obviously in reply to the question I had propounded to him a few minutes before. I had asked him, it will be remembered, if he still slept. He now said: ‘Yes; —no; —I have been sleeping—and now—now—I am dead’.19 Here it is not the speaking body that survives the demise of the tongue, as in the work of the physicians; precisely to the contrary, the tongue now lives on after the decease of the body of which it would have seemed to be a part. Sounding as if ‘from a vast distance’, beneath the ‘distended and motionless jaws’ and beyond the individual to which they once belonged, the organ now moves—itself—with consummate artistry, producing a noise for which the physician can find only the most metrical of terms: ‘a sound […] of distinct—of even wonderfully, thrillingly distinct—syllabification’. M.Valdemar’s last words recall those he uttered shortly before the time of his apparent ‘death’, but it is obvious that his final sentence is a good deal more perplexing than the one he had earlier uttered ‘in a barely audible whisper’. Before, the patient had certainly assented to a question to which it is not obvious one may assent, affirming that he was indeed ‘asleep now’. On the surface, the statement is not easy to comprehend: the transparency of its form seems to belie its content, since to be true, the claim would have to be formulated by a subject lost in unconscious slumber. But the complexity of the final utterance reported in the tale is of different order; for to be true, the words ‘Yes; —no; —I have been sleeping—and now—now—I am dead’ would have to be spoken by a subject who, stricto sensu, is none at all. Who or what, if not a tongue without a body, could formulate such a phrase? As Roland Barthes has noted in a close reading of the tale, ‘we have here a veritable hapax of narrative grammar, staged by an
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utterance that is impossible insofar as it is an utterance: I am dead’.20 Barthes showed that the phrase that issues from the ‘strong vibratory motion in the tongue’ is remarkable for a number of reasons, which may be enumerated as follows: first, the sentence speaks solely of the origin of its own utterance, which remains curiously resistant to analysis; second, although unprecedented and unutterable in discourse, the phrase is in fact simply the simple literalization of a common metaphor employed by a great many speakers (‘I am dead’); third, in the set of all possible utterances, ‘the composition of the first person (I) and the attribute “dead” is precisely what is radically impossible: the empty point, the blind spot of language’; and, finally, on the semantic level, the sentence ‘simultaneously asserts two contraries (‘Life, Death’) and thus gives shape to a unique enantioseme, neither an affirmation (‘I am dead’) nor a negation (‘I am not dead’) but an ‘affirmation-negation: ‘I am dead and not dead’, which marks the emergence of a linguistic form in which ‘the true-false, yes-no, and death-life are conceived as an indivisible whole’.21 The final phrase of the unruly tongue, therefore, seems not only an ‘incredible’ statement, as the narrator of the tale himself repeatedly insists, but even an inconceivable one. And it is clearly for this reason that the critic characterizes it as nothing less than a ‘radically impossible utterance’ as such: a statement which, by definition, cannot be strictly true at the time of its perception.22 But the limits of speech are not those of language, and, in this case, the sentence that cannot truthfully be proffered can still be formulated, albeit in a domain of expression that is not that of the utterance: writing. The literary text itself suggests as much, for in it the moment of decease sets the stage for the entrance into the story of the unmistakable elements of graphic composition. Here the moment of death is the one in which the skin of the body assumes ‘a cadaverous hue, resembling not so much parchment as white paper’, and in which the tongue, in turn, steps forward, on its own, ‘blackened’ as never before: decease, as it is described at this point, turns the body to paper and pen. The unutterable phrase, ‘I am dead’, is the product of this transformation of life into writing. Rising out of the disappearance of the animate word, it is the sole text and testimony of the death of the Polish patient: a funerary inscription made audible, so to speak, by the erstwhile organ of the body that no longer lives. It is all the more significant, from this perspective, that the tongue that recalls the death of the body speaks in the tale for itself. The ‘strong vibratory motion’ could clearly also have resulted in a statement in the voice of a third person, of the kind the narrator might have offered the reader: ‘He is dead’. M.Valdemar’s tongue, however, has an ‘I’, which lends it its unspeakable sense, and which places it in a singular and unexamined relation with the history of the forms of writing. It has not been noted that the curious declaration of decease (‘I am dead’), although unprecedented in narrative, is in itself not unique in the literary tradition. It constitutes, on the contrary, a precise repetition of the oldest documents of the Western tradition, with which it is not impossible that Poe himself was familiar: the funeral inscriptions of archaic Greece. It is well known
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that the earliest surviving alphabetic texts of classical antiquity consist not of literary works or economic inscriptions in the strict sense (such as inventories, records of transactions, and so forth) but graffiti and funeral inscriptions commemorating and recalling the dead.23 It is perhaps less well known that the original form of these commemorative texts is quite unlike that of their modern equivalents. For, as a rule, the ancient objects bearing commemorative texts speak, exactly like the tongue of the dead M.Valdemar, for themselves, making use of a first person singular pronoun. On a Theban object from the eighth century B.C., for instance, one finds an inscription that reads, ‘I am the kylix of Korakos’;24 and on memorials from the same period, one encounters such phrases as ‘Eumares built me as a monument’, or, more strikingly still, ‘I am the commemoration [mnema] of Glaukos’.25 It is worth pausing to consider the precise form of these inscriptions, which bears more than a superficial resemblance to the words formed by the tongue of the defunct M.Valdemar. In an important study of the uses of writing in ancient Greece, Jesper Svenbro considered these archaic texts at length, offering an illuminating account of the first person formula they regularly employed. ‘These inscriptions’, Svenbro commented in Phrasikleia, ‘are not transcriptions of something that could have been said in an oral situation and subsequently transcribed upon the object [….] Quite to the contrary: these statements are in some sense characteristic of writing, which allows written objects to designate themselves by the first person pronoun, despite the fact that they are objects and not living, thinking beings gifted with speech’.26 The first person of the memorial object, from this perspective, appears as a purely written phenomenon; it constitutes the sign not of a living being but of its absence, and only as such can it mark the decease of the one it commemorates. Svenbro recalled, in this context, the etymological account of the first person pronoun once proposed by Karl Brugmann, according to which the Greek term ego, as well as its IndoEuropean relations, derives from a neuter noun (*eg[h]om), meaning simply ‘here-ness’ (Hierheit):27 originally, ‘I’ would signify the insubstantial being of whatever can be indicated as ‘here’, be it animate or inanimate, human or inhuman, its expression spoken or written. So, too, the ‘I’ of the funeral object, Svenbro argued, is to be understood as the cipher of the substanceless presence of writing: ‘as long as the one can read the inscription’, the classicist wrote, ‘the object will be there. No one can better lay claim to the “here-ness” of written enunciation than the object’.28 For the commemorated human being, by definition, is absent; and the engraver vanishes with the completion of his work, becoming ‘a third person by the fact of writing’.29 The inscribed ‘I’ alone remains. The bodiless tongue of the mesmerized translator is a being of this funerary and graphic order. Its ‘strong vibratory motion’ announces, for those who can hear it, the most astounding of the ‘facts in the case of M.Valdemar’: that language persists in the disappearance of its speaker, that the tongue remains, like the ‘blackened’ surface of ‘white paper’, to bear witness to the vanishing of that which it would seem to represent. ‘Aglossostomography’, in the literary
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work, thus turns to ‘asomastomography’: in the place of the medical account of a ‘Mouth, without a Tongue, which Speaks’, the tale offers us the sketch of what one might call a ‘Tongue, without a Body, which Writes’. The two ‘stomographies’, however, coincide in telling the tale of a single noncoincidence: whether the speaking mouth outlives the tongue or, by contrast, the tongue survives the speaking body, language, loosened from that to which it would seem to belong, lives on, sounding ‘from a vast distance, or from some deep cavern within the earth’ that cannot easily be identified. More or less than one, the ‘tongue’, in this way, passes away and still persists; it stretches, in each case, beyond the body and the speaker, surviving in the oblivion of that from which it appeared to come and that for which it seemed to live. What we call a ‘language’, one might conclude, is nothing other than this: a being that outlasts itself. Notes 1 Alogssomographie ou Description d’une bouche sans langue, Laquelle parle et faict naturellement toutes les autres fonctions, par Monsieur Jacques Roland, Sire de Belabat, Chirurgien de Monseignor le Prince, Lieutenant du premier Barbier Chirurgien du Roy, Commis de son premier Medecin (Saumur: n.p., 1630). 2 Alogssomographie, pp. 3–4. 3 Alogssomographie, pp. 33–34. 4 For the full account of the dangers of the partial loss of the tongue, see Chapter Five of Alogssomographie, ‘Why Those Who Have Lost a Noteworthy Part of the Tip of the Tongue Do Not Speak without Artifice’. 5 M. de Jussieu, ‘Sur la manière dont une Fille sans Langue s’acquitte des fonctions qui dependent de cet organe’, in Mémoires de l’Académie Royale des Sciences, (Paris, 15 janvier 1718), pp. 6–14. 6 M. de Jussieu, ‘Sur la manière dont une Fille sans Langue s’acquitte des fonctions qui dependent de cet organe’, p. 10. 7 M. de Jussieu, ‘Sur la manière dont une Fille sans Langue s’acquitte des fonctions qui dépendent de cet organe’, p. 7. 8 In ‘Sur la manière dont une Fille sans Langue s’acquitte des fonctions qui dépendent de cet organe’, De Jussieu notes, however, that, when asked to name the letters of the alphabet, the girl did pronounce some better than others: the physician remarks that she was least impressive in her rendition of C, F, G, L, N, R, S, T, X, and Z. 9 Roman Jakobson, Six Leçons sur le son et le sens, preface by Claude Lévi-Strauss (Paris, Éditions de Minuit, 1976), p. 31. 10 Jakobson, Six Leçons sur le son et le sens. 11 Jakobson, Six Leçons sur le son et le sens, pp. 31–32. 12 Jakobson, Six Leçons sur le son et le sens, p. 32. 13 Edgar Allan Poe, The Fall of the House of Usher and Other Writings, ed. David Galloway (London, Penguin Books, 1986), p. 350. 14 Poe, The Fall of the House of Usher. 15 Poe, The Fall of the House of Usher. 16 Poe, The Fall of the House of Usher, p. 354.
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17 18 19 20 21 22 23
24
25 26 27
28 29
Poe, The Fall of the House of Usher, p. 355. Poe, The Fall of the House of Usher, p. 356, italics in original. Poe, The Fall of the House of Usher, pp. 356–357. Roland Barthes, ‘Analyse textuelle d’un conte d’Edgar Poe’, in Claude Chabrol, ed., Sémiotique narrative et textuelle (Paris, Larousse, 1973), pp. 29–54, p. 47. Barthes, ‘Analyse textuelle d’un conte d’Edgar Poe’, pp. 47–49. Barthes, ‘Analyse textuelle d’un conte d’Edgar Poe’, p. 49. See Jesper Svenbro, Phrasikleia, Anthropologie de la lecture en Grèce ancienne (Paris, Éditions de la Découverte, 1988), pp. 13–32; G.Pfohl, ‘Die ältesten Inschriften der Griechen’, Quaderni Urbinati di Cultura classica 7 (1969): pp. 7– 25; L.H.Jeffrey, The Local Scripts of Archaic Greece (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1961); Margherita Cuarducci, Epigrafia greca, 2 vols. (Rome: 1967–70); G.Pfohl, Greek Poems on Stones, vol. I: Epitaphs: From the Seventh to the Fifth Centuries B.C. (Leiden, 1967). M.Lazzarini, Le formule delle dediche votive nella Grecia arcaia, Atti della Accademia nazionale dei Lincei, Memorie: Classe di scienze morali, storiche e filogiche, ser. 8, 19:2, no. 7985. Pfohl, Greek Poems on Stones, no.158 and no.15. Svenbro, Phrasikleia, pp. 37–38. Svenbro, Phrasikleia, p. 51; the work in question is Karl Brugmann, Die Demonstrativpronomina der Indogermanischen Sprachen (Leipzig, Teubner, 1904), p. 71. Svenbro, Phrasikleia, p. 51. Svenbro, Phrasikleia.
Daniel Heller-Roazen is Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature at Princeton University. He is the author of Fortune’s Faces: The Roman de la Rose and the Poetics of Contingency (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003). He has edited Giorgio Agamben’s Potentialites: Collected Essays in Philosophy (Stanford University Press, 1999) and published articles on classical, medieval and modern literature and philosophy. ‘Aglossostomography’ is drawn from his next book, Echolalia: On the Forgetting of Language (forthcoming from Zone Books).
Satan and Golem, inc. Laurence Rickels
In the twentieth century the Golem legend in its Prague setting made it big: in 1915 in Germany it hit the big screen same time—double feature—that it went public, published in a blockbuster novel by Prague author Gustav Meyrinck. This book, which included among its plot points how-to instructions for simulation of the symptoms of epilepsy, also made the best sell-out list according to medical officers faced with soldiers who preferred to malinger on rather than rush into the world war effort. The scholarship or intellectual history of the idea of the Golem—as set up between the bookends supplied by Gershom Scholem and Moshe Idel—overlooks these screen or scream memories while styling with the cipher and letter magic or mysticism based on Kabbalah and Sefer Yezirah, among many other texts and traditions.1 But thanks to the memories, the Golem security screening device comes out in the watch of these scholarly materials as missing, pressing, marked. Even though Idel too neglects admitting the pop reception into his expanded and corrective history of the Golem as Jewish mystical idea, he delineates a timing of Scholem’s Golem studies that, even or especially without comment, turns up the volume on the excluded and implied screen texts. It was in 1933 that Scholem found himself all of a sudden taking a controlling research interest in the Golem. Then in 1963 Norbert Wiener’s monograph God and Golem, inc. sparked Scholem’s new reading of the legend to the map of the cipher magic of relations between man and machine.2 Kept on titular terms as passing acquaintance with the exploration of artificial intelligence and ethics in Wiener’s study, the direct connection with the Golem, the point of the title, was then driven home in Scholem’s reading. One year later Scholem revisited the Golem idea in a lecture he delivered on the occasion of the arrival of the first computer in Israel. In God and Golem, inc. Wiener proposes a division of labour between man and machine given the state of mechanical intelligence at that time: machines can do the math simply because they are faster and more reliable; humans for their part can wrap their minds around vague ideas, in other words the component parts of literature and art, which the machines reject outright as formless. ‘In dealing with these [as yet imperfectly defined ideas], mechanical computers of the present day are very nearly incapable of programming themselves’.3 Otherwise, however, machines can learn, can improve and program themselves.
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But even if there were nothing left for the machines to learn, as long as they can’t generate themselves out of themselves humans still count at least as the reproductive part of cybernetic society. But replication also already parallax ISSN 1353–4645 print/ISSN 1460–700X online © 2004 Taylor & Francis Ltd http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals DOI: 10.1080/1353464032000171082
mediates the gap between us and our future generation—a mediation that is already along for the ride the first time technology sends us. It is ‘conceptually possible’ Wiener states, although he must admit that it is not yet practicable in 1963, ‘for a human being to be sent over a telephone line’.4 But even if in theory we could be transmitted in this way, in other words from point A to point B, would we indwell this transmission at once as technology and as thought, vague ideas and all. Would our being also be in the transmission? Would we be technological? Because there are machines that can in fact replicate themselves in 1963, Wiener argues along these lines of questioning that technology already and irreversibly stands in relations with us of competition or cohabitation. Like evolution’s claim of our ape descent, so with the claim that machines can reproduce ‘there attaches something of the reprobation that attached in earlier ages to the sin of sorcery’.5 It was not so very long ago that someone advancing the claims of cybernetics would have been off to the Inquisition rapid fire for Devil dealing. Here Wiener inserts his one main-text reference to the Golem legend, specifically the Prague variant, namely the media version, as saving exception to someone’s condemnation back then: ‘unless he could convince some great patron that he could transmute the base metals into gold, as Rabbi Low of Prague, who claimed that his incantations blew breath of life into the Golem of clay, had persuaded the Emperor Rudolf’.6 Otherwise Wiener counts the contest between God and Satan as still current context for man and machine relations. Machines began to learn by playing games. No accident. The game plays as basic structure of thinking that can, in exceeding itself, learn—ultimately to program itself. Thus the ‘subject of learning, and in particular of machines that learn to play games’ is still relevant to the age-old religious ‘problem of the game between the Creator and a creation’.7 ‘If we do not lose ourselves in the dogmas of omnipotence and omniscience, the conflict between God and the Devil is a real conflict, and God […] is actively engaged in a conflict with his creature, in which he may very well lose the game […] Can any creator, even a limited one, play a significant game with his own creature?’.8 While the popular turn to the Golem legend puts protection of the Jews up in lights, the motor of a swing into anti-Semitism is also discernibly running this protection as projection. The problem here is not the ambivalence with regard to
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assimilation, to becoming ‘like’, to becoming image, nor the transference transgressions against the father that Golem-making requires in exchange for its rescue service. All of that is compatibly or quintessentially Jewish. It is rather the resetting of the legend in its mass media career on compact relations with the Devil—in other words, on the mass of murder—that is a problem, the so-called Jewish problem. Historically the Rabbi Löw chapter of the Golem legend was contemporaneous with the historical background and literary legendary elaboration of Dr. Faust. The one venue for the automatization of human thought that Wiener singles out as marking at least conceivable future progress is mechanical translation. Thus he inserts the opening merger of man and machine in a scene of translation, the scene that in Goethe’s Faust forces the Devil to show his and—his complicity with Faustian techno striving. Wiener in turn is tempted to depart from the Old Testament understanding or setting of the Devil’s game and conjure current examples of cybernetic sinning, such as in cases of socalled gadget worship. Just as the black mass draws on belief in the very powers that good Christians attribute to the host in order to manipulate those powers for self gain or to inflict harm, so it is still the same sin that gadget worshippers commit ‘which consists of using the magic of modern automatization to further personal profit or let loose the apocalyptic terrors of nuclear warfare. If this sin is to have a name, let that name be […] sorcery’.9 But sorcery or magic in Wiener’s estimation always causes technical difficulties because of the literal-mindedness with which our wishes or desires are administered, represented and repressed. Wiener’s identification of this blindspot in magic doubles as a reading of Faust’s relations with Mephistopheles in Goethe’s coupling. ‘The operation of magic is singularly literal-minded, and […] if it grants you anything at all it grants what you ask for, not what you should have asked for or what you intend’.10 Wiener gives the magic update and techno forecast in regarding attempts to conjure automatic safety measures, socalled failsafe devices, for example: ‘While it is always possible to ask for something other than we really want, this possibility is most serious when the process by which we are to obtain our wish is indirect, and the degree to which we have obtained our wish is not clear until the very end. Usually we realize our wishes, insofar as we do actually realize them, by a feedback process, in which we compare the degree of attainment of intermediate goals with our anticipation of them. In this process, the feedback goes through us, and we can turn back before it is too late. If the feedback is built into a machine that cannot be inspected until the final goal is attained, the possibilities for catastrophe are greatly increased’.11 In short: ‘The penalties for errors of foresight, great as they are now, will be enormously increased as automatization comes into its full use’.12 Failsafe devices work to direct the mode of failure in a harmless way only if the danger is known. However ‘against a danger whose nature has not been already recognized’ they are of little value.13 Wiener would rather not ride in the completely automatic automobile he imagines coming out of the assembly lines of failsafe technology. Indeed, the automatic car sounds like the rocket that one
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would rather aim than ride. What begins to open wide is a World War II context that in 1963 makes ghost appearances in the Cold War setting. Consider as model for this rewiring or reclaiming of past projections in the early 1960s the case of Specter, the underworld organization that was introduced in the first film versions of Ian Fleming’s James Bond adventures as third party to and parasite of the Cold War oppositions. Although the future, as the uncontrollable time to come coming toward us, would appear withdrawn inside the openendedness or vagueness of human thought, this vague of the future precisely must compute. Therefore, Wiener advises, ‘engineering technique […] must become more and more accustomed to formulate human purposes’.14 ‘The world of the future will be an ever more demanding struggle against the limitations of our intelligence’ —also in the sense of forecast or projection, for example in espionage settings.15 Wiener’s bottom-line definition of cybernetics, the new field he founded or co-founded, as ‘the study of control and communication in machines and living beings’, skips the third C, command, that otherwise completes the trinity of modern military organization, which in World War II was indeed the lab setting not only for Wiener’s enabling contacts with artificial intelligence. Now that Alan Turing’s precursor role in the invention of computing during World War II is even getting into Hollywood pictures I don’t need to break into and remake the complete scene of his invention of computing out of the race to crack the Nazi German Enigma code. I will instead pick up where I left off in Nazi Psychoanalysis— where my focus was fixed on the Nazi German occupation or cathexis of this invention, but with the genealogy of rocket flight, negative feedback, and encoding (and decoding) wrapped around its context to include discussion of the role played in Turing’s research by a certain gendering of components of the code to crack—and catch him, in a Cold War setting, in the act of cloning around. We tend to identify the whole modern genre of science fiction (in which, bottom line, replication challenges reproduction) with the Cold nuclear War. But the Cold War more often than not proved to be—like Specter in the movies Dr. No and From Russia With Love—just a screen memory away from the hot World War that it was either still working on or through or just covering up. In 1950 Turing wrote an essay that was at the same time a science fiction. In his ‘Computing Machinery and Intelligence’, Turing introduces the rules for a game of imitation by way of answering the question, Can machines think.16 First he imagines the game played by a man, a woman, and the interrogator who, based on their answers to his questions, answers that need not be truthful, must decide who is which gender. Turing then asks: “‘What will happen when a machine takes the part of A in this game?”’ A, by the way, according to the original example, was the man in the experimental game, which means the new game of decidability or undecidability is played out between doubles, machine and woman. Turing continues raising questions: ‘Will the interrogator decide wrongly as often when the game is played like this as he does when the game is
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played between a man and a woman? These questions replace our original, “Can machines think?”’ Given the third degree, it is conceivable that a form of artificial intelligence could be indistinguishable for human intelligence from human intelligence. Turing furthermore stresses that this form of artificial intelligence will be technological, in other words, mediated and produced. For example, Turing dismisses outright the derivation of a direct transmission from electric or electronic overlaps between technological circuitry and the human nervous system. All along, however, there is one exception to this game of finding artificial intelligence and human intelligence indistinguishable that Turing just cannot get around. It’s the phenomenon of telepathy. ‘If telepathy is admitted it will be necessary to tighten our test up’. Earlier he admitted that ‘unfortunately the statistical evidence, at least for telepathy, is overwhelming’. With the admission of telepathy, then, ‘the situation could be regarded as analogous to that which would occur if the interrogator were talking to himself and one of the competitors was listening with his ear to the wall. To put the competitors into a “telepathy-proof room” would satisfy all requirements’. In his test setting any telepathy connections presumably would be live. But as he mentions earlier in regard to the overwhelming evidence of telepathy, ‘It is very difficult to rearrange one’s ideas so as to fit these new facts in. Once one has accepted them it does not seem a very big step to believe in ghosts’.17 In 1953, in Arthur Clarke’s Childhood’s End, telepathy is doubly marked as the exception making a separation between humans and the alien Overlords who otherwise rule or guide them.18 The aliens, who are Devil lookalikes or were once upon a time taken by us for Devils, represent the highest development of consciousness, ego, reason. The future that comes toward the human species is an evolutionary version of union or reunion with God. It is a future that the alien Devil egos, however, will never encounter. The Devils are ordered by the Godlike Overmind to protect the human species from its innate mass suicide drive. The alien Devils come to earth as a way more advanced techno culture that can dictate its terms of peace on earth. But it turns out that all this protection was paid to maintain the conditions for the mutation that will end the human species but send its dematerialized sequel into the Overmind. Even though humankind appears, on the scale of its self-entitlement to intellectual and scientific penetration, evolutionarily inferior to the Devil aliens, there is something else in the human makeup that exceeds the understanding that came from outer space. This excess can be found on the margins of our own rational culture in the form of occult inquiry, in particular as evident in the study of telepathy. But this excess or access was the threat the Devil aliens were ultimately sent by the Overmind to contain, as their commander, Karellen, explains to the last couple of parents. ‘All down the ages there have been countless reports of strange phenomena—poltergeists, telepathy, precognition—which you had named but never explained. […] During the first half of the twentieth century, a few of your scientists began to investigate these matters. […] The forces they might have unleashed transcended any perils that the atom could have brought. For the
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physicists could only have ruined the earth: the paraphysicists could have spread havoc to the stars. […] Let us say that you might have become a telepathic cancer, a malignant mentality’.19 The evolutionary mutation of the children on the way to the disappearing act of merger with the Overmind passes through an increasing immediacy of direct, telepathic communication or communion (not only in words but in actions too). Thus telepathy is what tags humankind for this extinction, I mean distinction, but only after the morbid human propensity for spookulation, for telecommunications with the long distant, the deceased, has been excised from the telepathy sets of (or: on the way to) the future. All over the place, Clarke argued that new and higher forms of intelligence, whether from outer space or in our own future as we evolve in sync (or swim) with the scientific developments getting us into outer space, will be technological. Biology has concluded its evolutionary program. Technology will take over where biology leaves off. This leave taking is what is consummated during merger with the Overmind. What must be conveyed as going on is intelligence, intelligent life, thought without a body. This technological phase of evolution need not be stuck on machines: it could be the paraphysical invisible wave force of the Overmind. In his 1950 story ‘The Sentinel’,20 Clarke evokes a highly evolved technology that ‘lies far beyond our horizon, perhaps, namely the technology of paraphysical forces’.21 Clarke also sets up in this story his recurrent definition of what space exploration would represent in a vaster scheme of life forms. In the story an obelisk, a so-called sentinel, was left behind by a more highly evolved species from outer space. Aliens, like the Devil, like to watch, observe and intervene when all systems are go, going their way anyway. ‘They would be interested in our civilization only if we proved our fitness to survive—by crossing space and so escaping from the Earth our cradle. That is the challenge that all intelligent races must meet, sooner or later’. During World War II Clarke made scientific advances that led, after the war, to the launching of the first satellite, to which he later attributed the ‘considerable impact’22 of already degeocentrizing our view of the universe before— and as precondition for—interplanetary travel. But the challenge issued to mankind from outer space in ‘The Sentinel’ also admits a down or dead beat: ‘The challenge that all intelligent races must meet […] is a double challenge, for it depends in turn upon the conquest of atomic energy and the last choice between life and death’.23 The last choice is made for mankind in Childhood’s End, and which choice was made remains undecidable. Karellen says that the parents that would bear testimony to the change even in the absence of a future coming toward them ‘are searching for something that is no longer there’. And in their search they find faces emptier than those of the dead, ‘for even a corpse has some record carved by time’s chisel upon its features, to speak when the lips themselves are dumb’.24 Clarke resettled the Devil within a science fiction about the proper timing of evolution beyond all links with the missing. In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud addressed the Demonic in the context or contest of life and death drives.25
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But in the stop and start of his speculations, Freud describes a series of Devil fictions or scenarios, but does so, as he says, only as Devil’s advocate, not as client or worshipper. One of Freud’s un-cosigned scenarios in Beyond the Pleasure Principle throws a perfect fit with Childhood’s End. Freud jumps the gun, deathdrive style, and formulates a tentative conclusion: the goal of life is death. How then do the self-preservative instincts fit in? They can now be seen as insurance that the organism will follow its own path to its proper death. The organism wishes to die only in its own fashion. But then Freud drops his role as Devil’s advocate and, picking up the ambivalent track of the other, begins again: ‘But let us pause for a moment and reflect. It cannot be so. The sexual instincts […] appear under a very different aspect’. In The Confessions of Aleister Crowley: An Autohagiography, the ancestor of modern polymorphous paganism, in particular the Luciferian direction in this mass or mess, motivates the upsurge of his own rule-busting life, and the concomitant switch in his memoirs from third to first person narration, through his relationship to his father’s death.26 It was the synchronization of his dream of his father’s death with his father’s actual dying that gave him a rules-and-inhibitionsbusting ego. His mother kept hanging around as static on this line of Dad certainty. After years of dreaming of her death one of his dreams did finally coincide with her passing. Crowley suggests, however, that this dream did have the same affective charge as the one (only one was required) that was joined to the father’s certain death. To serve the Devil, you must be without inhibitions on a scale of supernormal to psychopathic. Belief in God or in the alternative occult afterlife styles of vampires or werewolves, for instance, is compatible with an inhibited sensibility, one stuck on loss or still working on it. What the Devil requires is the uninhibited capacity for compensating for a lack through a successful operation of substitution without complications—to the full extent that the lack or loss is even seen as having been required or desired in exchange for the Devil’s offer of Dad certainty. The relationship the Devil pitches to prospective clients consists in the deferral of suicide for the quality time it takes before the deadline, one’s proper and certain death, along which you sign when you sign with the Devil. With Dad certainty (in other words with life versus death drives and the Demonic as principle) Freud could pass as philosopher. Devil reference is a passing mention in Freud because the death of the other or the dead other is, like primal repression, one of the nonnegotiable facts of psychic life, based on the inconceivability of one’s own death and, hence, of Death. It is this inside view that throws self for a loop through other and keeps us in the vicinity of mourning and unmourning, while also giving us the techno high of egoic immortality or, in the felt absence of replication, mass suicide. The Devil was the password that allowed Freud to join the big boys, the philosophers and journalists, and address Death, even one’s own death (or is it father’s?). In so many Faustian fictions and science fictions we see the Devil give time, in exchange for soul, specifically more time, more-of-the-same time but at the same
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time more focused time, quality time. But the Devil cannot reverse time. The paraphysics of relative time—like the fantastic combos of dead or alive family identifications— remain accessible only to the human psyche or soul. Owing perhaps to the novel’s Jungian background and the opening shutting of its recent past, all that is relative or relational in Childhood’s End is annihilated or reborn as evolutionary progress marching as to God. One flashback comes up only to be dismissed as false analogy: ‘Somewhere long ago, he had seen a century-old newsreel of such an exodus. It must have been at the beginning of the First World War—or the Second. There had been long lines of trains, crowded with children, pulling slowly out of the threatened cities’. But: ‘these who were leaving now were no longer children, whatever they might be. And this time, there would be no reunion’.27 The striving for union with God or Overmind, which leaves life as we know it behind, no longer misses the link that makes evolutionary change, a change that comes across like a break or leap because the continuity shot with the stage of development that came right before is a lost loss in generation. But what’s the big difference between this break on the upbeat, this Overmind Nirvana, and the mass suicidal embrace of nothingness on death drive. The duo dynamic of life and death belonged to the diplomatic service of Freud’s science. But on the inside track sexual difference or self difference was at the same time guaranteed through psychic excess, for example the excess of the unconscious. Contrary to Jung’s understanding and critique, Freud’s notion of the unconscious cannot be reduced to the sum total of one’s repressions. Nor can it therefore be reduced to lifetime. This being in excess of lifetime does not lead Freud to believe in the immortality of the soul or to sign up with the Devil in order to get back the redemption value on this deposit of excess, the value of a wholeness that would be greater than and would encompass all your partings. In 1986 Jean-Francois Lyotard positioned between theoretical inquiry into artificial intelligence and science fiction a dialogue in which ‘he’ and ‘she’ take a turn reflecting on the question the essay bears as title ‘Can Thought Go On Without a Body?’.28 One of Turing’s references in his 1950 essay, Samuel Butler’s Erewhon, proves an accurate forecast according to Lyotard’s thought experiment: we are the genitals of our machines that are doing the evolving for us. But that in several billion years the solar system will certainly cease to exist already changes everything, in particular the private parts we play in the sum or sun total of man and machine relations. That takes care of taking it all so interpersonally. ‘He’ offers up these calculations that the conditions of inevitable exile from the solar system will mean that our terrestrial and corporeal selves will not be along for the ride into the future. The reserve of infinitude that gave humanity the power to defer ultimate answers and sustain thought as interminably searching, striving, will come to an end with the last sunset. Materiality (as we know it) will cease to exist. ‘No one will ring or hear a funeral bell. Then it will be too late to comprehend that your passionate uncompletable questioning always already depended on a life of the spirit that secretly was also
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always a form of earthly life’.29 The end of the solar system amounts, then, to the death of death. ‘The death of the sun introduces an irreducible division between death and thought: if death, then no thought. Negation without remainder. No negation that would be a negation of itself so that thought games could be constructed on its basis. Sheer event, catastrophe’.30 Because this catastrophe concerns a change in the conditions of matter, the question that can still be raised (like a ghost) is how thought in a concrete sense can remain possible. Technological and scientific research already accepted the wager and must continue to run the race. But, ‘he’ says, technology predates and produces humanity. More than or before machines technology is in effect the system that identifies, stores, and processes data important for survival in order to derive from regularly recurring patterns certain forms of behavior that protect and sustain life. While the body can be seen as the hardware of our solar-era technology called human thought, language can be seen as the software in search now of new hardware to which to adapt itself. Only after this adaptation or mutation has taken place could the death of the sun mean death as usual. Thinking without a body is the condition for thinking the end of the body, the sun, earth, and that thought that cannot be separated from the body. But, ‘he’ says, the software transportability of language is still (in 1986) too caught up in binary logic—as demonstrated, among several examples, by the Turing machine and Wiener and Neumann’s cybernetics. Human thought doesn’t operate with bits but rather admits ‘imprecise, ambivalent data’. ‘She’: some artificial but analogical body must be granted artificial thought so that it can be taken away from the earth before its destruction. What we call the body is the site or placeholder of a certain inseparability of thinking and suffering. This suffering is not a symptom written into the spirit; it does not happen or impose itself from without. The pain is itself thinking—pain conceived, that is, as inclusive of the boring probing that gets written off as boredom. To think is to remain open to an imperative that is not yet known. And that is a pain. Why, it’s even really boring. ‘She’ asks, Will your imagining and thinking machines suffer too? What can the future mean to them, since they consist only of memory. ‘She’ continues. That’s not the point you might counter—as long as the machines can realize the paradoxical relationship to the so-called data which are not given but which can only be given. The opening, the empty place or clearing that is there in the midst of the completed inscriptions must be created, over and over again. This hurts because the not yet thought carves its opening where it was already secretly etched between or behind inscribed lines that harbour and attend what is in effect the reopening of a wound. The memories of the machines should be able to feel this pain of the not-thought, the not-inscribed that still remains to be inscribed. Their rewinding must be a rewounding, too. How else could these machines otherwise begin to think? We need machines that suffer from. the being-stored, the storedom, of their many memories. Suffer not the little children to come unto this future. Forget reproduction. Remember or reconstitute instead inside our technofuture the sexual difference
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that cuts across suffering thinking, and that proves inseparable from it. ‘She’ concludes: this other sexual difference, not the one that is measured on one’s own person or released but contained in couple formation, must be programmed inside the separation from body and earth that takes off with the merger with technology. If we are to survive body and earth via technology, then sexual difference or self difference would have to get into our programs. The wound of take-off cannot be left behind in our wondrous flight into tech-no-body futures. Otherwise only our fantasies about and projections of ourselves as units and selfunities would be along for the ride, for the suicide. Notes 1 Moshe Idel, Golem: Jewish Magical and Mystical Traditions on the Artificial Anthropoid, (Albany: SUNY Press, 1990); Gershom Scholem, On the Kabbalah and Its Symbolism., trans. Ralph Manheim (New York: Schocken Books, 1997 [1960]). 2 Norbert Wiener, God and Golem, Inc. —A Comment on Certain Points Where Cybernetics Impinges on Religion, (Cambridge, MA: M.I.T. Press, 1964). 3 Wiener, God and Golem, Inc., p. 73. 4 Wiener, God and Golem, Inc., p. 36. 5 Wiener, God and Golem, Inc., p. 47. 6 Wiener, God and Golem, Inc., pp. 49–50. 7 Wiener, God and Golem, Inc., p. 15. 8 Wiener, God and Golem, Inc., p. 17. 9 Wiener, God and Golem, Inc., p. 52. 10 Wiener, God and Golem, Inc., p. 59. 11 Wiener, God and Golem, Inc., p. 62. 12 Wiener, God and Golem, Inc., p. 63. 13 Wiener, God and Golem, Inc., p. 63. 14 Wiener, God and Golem, Inc., p. 64. 15 Wiener, God and Golem, Inc., p. 69. 16 Alan Turing, ‘Computing Machinery and Intelligence’, in Mind. A Quarterly Review of Psychology and Philosophy, 59, 236 (October 1950), pp. 433–460. 17 Turing, ‘Computing Machinery and Intelligence’, p. 453. 18 Arthur C.Clarke, Childhood’s End, (New York: Ballantine Books, 1990 [1953]). 19 Clarke, Childhood’s End, p. 182. 20 Arthur C.Clarke, ‘The Sentinel’, in [Series Ed] Martin Scorcese, The Making of ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’, (New York: The Modern Library, 2000) pp. 17–26. 21 Clarke, ‘The Sentinel’, p. 24. 22 Gene Youngblood, ‘Free Press Interview: Arthur C.Clarke’, in [Series Ed] Martin Scorcese, The Making of ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’, (New York: The Modern Library, 2000), pp. 258–269, p. 261. 23 Clarke, ‘The Sentinel’, pp. 25–26. 24 Clarke, Childhood’s End, pp. 202–203.
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25 Sigmund Freud, ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’, in [Ed] James Strachey, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. XVIII, (London: The Hogarth Press, 1953–1974). 26 Aleister Crowley, The Confessions of Aleister Crowley. An Autohagiography, [Eds] John Symonds and Kenneth Grant, (London: Penguin Arkana, 1989). 27 Clarke, Childhood’s End, p. 186. 28 Jean-François Lyotard, ‘Can Thought Go On without a Body?’ in The Inhuman: Reflections on Time, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby, (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991). 29 Lyotard, ‘Can Thought Go On without a Body?’, p. 9. (translation amended). 30 Lyotard, ‘Can Thought Go On without a Body?’, p. 11. (translation amended).
Laurence A.Rickels, at once recognized theorist and certified therapist, is the author of Aberrations of Mourning (Wayne State University Press, 1988), The Case of California (University of Minnesota Press, 1991), The Vampire Lectures (University of Minnesota Press, 1999) and Nazi Psychoanalysis (University of Minnesota Press, 2002), and editor of Looking After Nietzsche (SUNY, 1990) and Acting Out in Groups (University of Minnesota Press, 1999).
Koan Practice or Taking Down the Test Avital Ronell
I stand on light feet now, Catching breath before I speak For there are songs in every style, But to put a new one to the touchstone [basanôi] For testing [es elegkhon] is all danger. Pindar, Nemean 8 (19–20)1 For once In visible form the Sphinx Came on him and all of us Saw his wisdom and in that test [basanôi] He saved the city. Sophokles, Oedipus Rex (498–510)2 Prototype 1.0 Testing the limit. In the interview accorded to Salomon Malka, Lévinas announces, ‘I prefer the word épreuve to expérience because in the word expérience a knowing of which the self is master is always said. In the word épreuve there is at once the idea of life and of a critical ‘verification’ which overflows the self of which it is only the ‘scene.”3 When Lévinas overhauls experience or experiment with the type of endurance implied by épreuve, he opts for a kind of trial: a test site in which the self is placed at absolute risk. The call for ‘verification’ —the quotation marks indicate the provisional character of verification—announces a life submitted to incessant probes, unfaltering revision, what in Nietzsche is governed by the principle of rescindability. In The Gay Science every proposition, every subproposition, and life find themselves subjected to the rigours of the épreuve. *** ‘Knowing is not the way.’4
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The exquisite discipline and daring askesis of certain types of non-Western practice challenge the limits of what we understand by testing. By slackening the finish line parallax ISSN 1353–4645 print/ISSN 1460–700X online © 2004 Taylor & Francis Ltd http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals DOI: 10.1080/1353464032000171091
and undermining the ideology of sanctioned results in favor of another logic of rigour, a number of Zen and yogic teachings at once suspend and resurrect the constitution of the test. Zen does not merely erase testing but holds it in reserve, situating it otherwise. Vast and imposing, Eastern relations to something like testing reconfigure yet steadfastly enforce the warrior poses that pervade Western registers of testing. The value of contest also shifts. In Tai Chi one learns to step aside when a hostile energy is on the loose: one is taught to let the menacing lunge collapse against the stubborn velocities of its own intentions. The engagement with opposing forces (which can no longer be conceived as opposing since, by a slight shift in energy and position, the commensurate reach is broken, the flow diverted)—indeed, the very concept of testing limits, undergoes fateful innovation. All the same, Eastern practices, including those associated with the martial arts, hold back from completely writing off the test; they do not simply oppose the West-test. In a sense, the test becomes even more pervasive because it can at no point be satisfied by a conclusive answer or a definitive response to the probe that has been put out. The difficult boundaries of the Zen trial, the characteristics of which can be at once asserted and equally disputed, are especially evident in the case of koans—the problems or inner challenges with which Zen masters traditionally have confronted their pupils. The Occident has put up other fronts, obeying quickening velocities: If such acts as going after the grail or attempting to reach a metaphysically-laden Castle can be viewed as exemplifying narratives of the Western test drive, then the Eastern ‘test’ (this quality has not yet been established) is, by comparison, shatterably slowgoing. The grail, there is no doubt about it, must be found, if only to mark out the end of a narrative journey. The Castle, at least in Kafka’s takeover narrative, cannot be properly located or possessed, though it remains the sign toward which K. strives, hoping to conclude his trial. The scenography of the Eastern counterpart tends to be characterized by that which is immobile, though pupils and monks travel to sit with one another, and there is the phenomenon of the Zen warrior to contend with as well or, in yet another tradition, one encounters the implacability of the boldspirited Samurai. No one ranks as a weakling in these traditions, even though a place of honour is accorded in Eastern practices to the inaction hero; the koan recipient may sit for years, meditating on a word or puzzle, weighing a
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persistent enigma posed by the master. In view of these descriptive attributes, K. may be looked upon as a high-strung Zen pupil (not in itself a contradiction), for his journey is abbreviated by sittings in which he tries earnestly to study and solve unyielding narrative puzzles. Nonetheless, the Kafkan warrior remains an effect of the West, even if his territory is at one point evoked as ‘Westwest,’ suggesting the overcoming and acknowledged excess of westerliness. He is going nowhere fast. And while it would be foolish to talk too readily about interiority for this lettered being, his goal is posited outside (this gets complicated) and goes under the name of ‘Castle’ or homes in on the boss man, Klamm. K. cannot look inside for the answer, in part because Kafka has evacuated internal metaphors. The Zen pupil looks inwardly, but this is not the same as a subjectivity: the pupil is led to an inner experience without interiority, to understanding without cognition, without a history. K. had a history prior to entering the Castle territory, which does not serve him in his search; the Zen pupil enters the space of distilled performativity for which there is no outside. Reference has become immaterial, though effects of reference may occur indifferently, almost by accident. There is nothing to look for outside an always emptying self. This becoming-empty is what K.undergoes as he searches for a reference that could be tied to the empty signifier of the Castle. He scales the walls of recalcitrant signification but clings to the territorialization of a promised outside, a space occupied by the sacred signifier. Just as Parsifal goes out to a site where the allegory of his search would be collapsed into a figure. Meanwhile, the Zen pupil, often a wanderer, listens differently, stilling herself to consider the sonic eventfulness of growing grass. Responding to the demand of the koan prompts a colossal if barely traceable event. This means, among other things, that understanding no longer crowns the end of a laboured process of appropriation. In fact, the Eastern concern for the koan tradition lies with enlightenment, which may or may not be closely tied to sudden understanding or to the arduous example of trial by error and the lessons of incessant failure. When one considers Zen practice seriously, it is another seriousness that appears. Yet once we begin thinking and figuring this other seriousness, this other rigour, Western narratives of testing themselves begin to incorporate the Orient. The story of the grail turns out to be even more intricate, more self-doubting, than that of a search conducted under the authority of the commanding signifier. Thus Parsifal’s journey already marks the aftermath of the true test he failed to pass. The quest for the grail comes about as a pressing retest, something on the order of a punishingly sustained make-up quiz. The true test, which was never given out or formulated as such, required that an innocent simpleton produce a question motivated by compassion. Parsifal, for his part, was too dumb to fill the role of the innocent simpleton, having frozen at the sight of the ailing king. The test required him — innocently, without knowing he was being tested—to ask why the king was suffering. Instead, Parsifal gawked, unable to utter a word of compassion. In this case, the unspoken test was not asking for an answer but for a question. What does this have to do with us?
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The failure to ask the compassionate question has brought about the test as we know it—formulated, set, a delimited field governed by a figure of the final limit: the grail. The paradoxical structure of this test should not be overlooked. Parsifal is made to undergo the experience of many trials in order to gain… innocence. This process resembles anything but the trajectory of the Bildungsroman. (It already engages the Kafkan impossibility of producing, through experiential motions, the effects of innocence). Experience is not meant to lead to maturity or ethical comprehension but to a kind of aporetic term, eliciting a dispossession of self linked to absolute innocence. Bildung, by contrast, climbs different rungs of self-dispossession as it takes on ethicity and the state. Parsifal’s process or trial falls back to an originary acquiescence, to a disposition that precedes even the possibility of saying ‘yes.’ Something has to be returned to what never happened, prior to happening or to the early grammars of affirmingly absorbing the other. The hero chases down a first place that hasn’t yet taken place. As a notion, experience is shown to fold in on itself: destroying its inherited concept, it rolls persistently backwards. Even at the start, as early as the sagas associated with the name Parsifal. It is a stripping down, and in this sense it begins to seem Eastern. Yet, while Parsifal’s quest after the holy grail is intended to achieve nothing if not non-knowledge, it takes another turn in the nineteenth century by offering a share of redemptive bonuses. The promise of redemption underscored by Wagner’s resumption of the medieval tale has made Nietzsche wretch. Innocence was sidetracked by priestliness. The saving Elsewhere, another time zone—that of transcendence—will have been the goal, dissipating the here and now, bound to an increasingly spirtualized altar. The elusive materiality of the grail, reduced to symbolic qualities, henceforth belongs to the Christianization of world. Still, the force that is gathered under the name of Parsifal—or, in Chestian de Troyes, Perceval, in Wolfram von Eschenbach Parsifal, in Richard Wagner Parzifal—establishes an entire paradigm for Western self-testing, for the administration of a test with no preexisting conditions. Prototype 1.1
‘Soen-sa said, ‘Where does that question come from?’ The student was silent.’5 The thousand and ten doubts. We might have become accustomed to viewing the test as a way of mobilizing courage, revving our engines, gaining on a problem, or increasing speed as a technological limit is tried. Designed to provoke doubt and shake attachments, the koan slows things down—as if psychic layering had kicked everything into reverse warp speed. The slow motion of a barely codifiable procedure, the koan instigates the other logic of testing, or testing’s other logic, to which it at once remains similar as well as unassimilable. If it could be made to represent anything at all—a distinctly
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Western problem, the drive toward representation—the koan ‘represents’ the emptiness of Zen practice where it cuts across the edges of testing. Koan practice explicitly engages the limits of psychic endurance, providing testing grounds upon which mind and body (there are different mind domains and several bodies to account for, but this is another story) are said to wrestle for a solution. Yet, wrestling does not offer a match for what we are seeking: any effort must be superseded by exorbitant exercises of patience, colossal restraint. Extreme surrender and relentless focus must somehow meet in koan practice. Koan provokes an unceasing assault on the fortress of human reason. Western forms of testing have some of that too, the mind/body collaborations, I mean, as when Oedipus was questioned by the Sphinx. The Sphinx marks the porous boundary between Western and Eastern domains of questioning and tells of bodies menaced by pulverization: should the riddle not be solved, either the questioner or the questioned must go. Passing the test is a matter of survival of the species for Oedipus, as it is for the interspecial dominatrix of the riddle: la Sphinx dissolves when the young man offers the correct answer. In the case of the koan a body must offer itself up for any possible inscription of a response; pressed into service when a question is issued, a body belongs to the writing of an answer. It is as though the very possibility of response required a permanent yet decelerated Olympiad of the various flexes of mind and bodies. Still, in preparation for receiving the koan, the all too ready contenders must be wrestled down, disqualified in the preliminaries: rational and discursive thought must be vanquished if the incommensurate, which koan demands upon receipt, is to be discovered. Another site of thinking beyond thinking is being sought, where operations of sublation and annulment coexist, calling for the different experiences of Saying. A site of thinking beyond thinking, testing is not eliminated but takes place beyond the parameters of a test subsumed under codifiable attributes. The largely internal contest of koan is intended to secure an experience of extreme dispossession. But the themes and topoi of inside and outside, of internally and externally determined categories, do not mean much here except for the dependence that koan practice implies on concepts of opening. A draft for scheming radical exposure, the koan, offered by the teacher—the ‘master’ —is meant to ‘open’ the pupil to the possibility of Saying. The master is responsible for initiating the call of such an opening. Often this opening, which in no tradition escapes the suspicion of violence, is attained by the administration of a shock. Thus the master, in texts devoted to the koan, is frequently figured as beating, hitting, or slugging the pupil. The hit seals a sort of ‘compliment’ conferred by the attentive master, who prods the physical body for the purpose of uninhibiting a scene of contemplation, new and unanticipated. The shock is crucial to the experience of the koan: it stages the opening of thought exceeding itself in the jolt. Although the temptation may exist to read such protocols of Saying in a mood of estrangement, one would be wrong to envision the choreography of violence as something foreign to Western forms of thinking
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about thinking. There is the Heideggerian Stoss (jolt) in Being and Time that, awakening to its own beat, still needs to be contended with; nor should one overlook the destructive passivities of Blanchot puzzling out Lévinas. Some passages of the Infinite Conversation or The Writing of Disaster stunningly converge with the sense of abandonment to which the koan consigns passive bodies, particularly where the koan burdens the student with the strictures of responsible Saying: Where passivity unworks and destroys me, I am at the same time pressed into a responsibility which not only exceeds me, but which I cannot exercise, since I do nothing and no longer exist as myself. It is that responsible passivity that is Saying. For, before anything said, and outside being […] Saying gives and gives response, responding to the impossible, for the impossible.6 The exposure that occurs in and with language does not abandon the body (there are often up to ten bodies to count, to honour, to nurture, including the subtle, back and energetic bodies) or its psychic traces. Perhaps such a thinking of exposure approaches in several ways a kind of Blanchotian destruction. Though the vocabulary of his insight cannot easily be made to pull together other spaces, Blanchot, situated between literary and philosophical thought, offers us a bridge, a passageway, when he writes of tremendous passivity in conjunction with exposure.7 The ‘passivity beyond passivity’ that Blanchot shares with or retrieves from Lévinas may not entirely communicate with the Zen centre of articulation that it nonetheless remasters; still, the themes of persecuted exposure, of the other (autrui) who ‘weighs upon me to the point of opening me to the radical passivity of the self,’8 of the pursuit of an enigma that troubles all sense of order, cutting into and interruptive of being, appear to converge with the eccentricities of the koan. And where Heidegger’s famous description of the ‘pure night of anxiety’ in What is Metaphysics? resonates lexically with the writings of the great Zen master, Ta-hui, there is still a deeper cut of askesis, a different eloquence of piety—an altogether other ex-stasis—and still yet another mortal exposure of vulnerability to be dealt with here. What these names and texts share is the sense that the awakening, regardless of an increasingly imposing degree of intensity, is never quite sufficient to itself —not for Blanchot, not for Kao-feng Yüan-Miao, Heidegger, or Lévinas. The passivity is never passive enough. Or in Derrida’s terms, the responsibility for bearing the enigma is never responsible enough. But if ever the limits of such disclosive insufficiency had been put to the test, it was surely in the koan tradition which, though recorded abundantly, resists the more familiar protocols of discursivity. A teaching without pedagogy, it is a practice; a rapport to thoughtfulness, its practice is dedicated to the obliteration of thought. Calling for the dissolution of time, it takes time. It beats the clock while slowing down the minutes. This teaching takes more time than Heidegger, when after going
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through the sections on Nietzsche in What is Called Thinking?, clocks in and tells his students that they must now turn back and spend the next ten years studying Aristotle. Passive and constricted, one is responsible for one’s koan, which is always related to a public space of notice or inscription. Koan, which comes from ko, ‘public,’ ‘public announcement’ and an, ‘matter,’ ‘material for thought,’ involves extreme manipulations of exposure. Tremendous feats of rigorous nothingness are accomplished with intractable discretion. Koan is a matter of responding thoughtfully beyond thinking to the call of a master’s question—the logically insoluble riddle—in a manner which, becoming public, exposes the student to the outer limits of (not-) knowing.9 Neither students nor master can be said to possess knowledge. Having no interior, the master is not predicable. This condition in no way demobilizes the effect the master produces on the restricted theatre of the koan. Unleashing the question, the master may strike the student, regulate the degree of psychic tension, functionally subsidize great doubt, and withhold or cede acknowledgement in a series of discrete interviews. The shock that accompanies the field of knowing beyond knowledge, startling the student into different rosters of articulation, has become condensed and displaced onto the figure of the koan itself. The OED cites fairly recent usages that assimilate the koan’s shock effect to the semantic quality of the term, rendering the nature of the problem the cause of shock: ‘A less physical shock technique is the koan, a problem designed to shock the mind beyond mere thinking.’ A letter written by Aldous Huxley on 11 January 1969 observes: ‘They might act as Zen koans and cause sudden openings into hitherto unglimpsed regions.’10 Ruth Benedict avers: ‘The significance of the koan does not lie in the truths these seekers after truth discover.’11 The sudden openings to which Huxley’s letter alludes, and which the major part of texts devoted to koan interviews confirm, indicate that something like a direct transmission of the Zen hermeneutic can occur outside the sutra. The experience of ‘getting it’ described by the Zen tradition comes closest in recent Western articulations to Heidegger’s Ereignis, perhaps, in the sense that something occurs, bursts forth at a given moment; it is marked as pure eruption without a lead in or back up. What occurs is an a-temporal interruption or a ‘fold’ in time, something that Heidegger draws from the archaic German word, Eräugnis, which establishes a link between Being and light. Christopher Fynsk calls this accession to language a blinding of sorts, referring to the opening, in relation to the sudden fulguration of what Hölderlin (and some traditions of Zen Buddhism) designated as a ‘third eye.’ It points to an awakening, to a watch that will never be watchful enough.12 After years of incessantly working the blindspot, there is still some place where one fails to see, a limit in perception. The koan does not quarrel with its own stain of blindness. It stays with the question, suffers blindness. With time, it becomes evident that the awaited answers are not about their discursive content or levels of perception but about the ever-harassing experience of answering.
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Answering to the call of the koan, you discover that you are not judged for the quality of the rightness or wrongness of your answer but are turned back upon the ungraspable experience of seeking to answer. Floundering has its own life. At the same time, as the sutras show, one is not given an automatic pass to the failing regions of trying to answer; there exists a hierarchy of flunking out: pupils proffer so many incomplete or wrongheaded answers, to which the master replies with a whacking. The event of being slugged in the stories and histories that narrate them functions to evoke an equivalency to enlightenment. The hit—no doubt severe and to a more Western sensibility, humiliating (yet unflinchingly offered as compliment and gift)— has to be worked between the literal and figurative points of occurrence in the stories that field them. The teaching words, ‘I hit you,’ are punctually invoked by the Zen master. These blows are delivered as semiotic units that are meant to inflict a wound or run interference from a domain that exceeds the experience of reading—if such an untroped domain can be understood to take hold. The body that has submitted itself to the task of answering gets hit. When one is hit by the master’s rod linguistically, psychically, or referentially, the terms of relatedness to the question and quest switch. Engaged in dharma combat, you are being reminded by this exercise of scarring that there is something possibly other than reading the sutras, another reading, a different experience of writing that is calling you to answer. The switch: it stings, bringing you back to the question without consolation—no safety net or protective gauze, no institutional binding to hold or heal you. The switch or slug, the cutting that occurs as one gets comfortable with the question and takes on the koan, belongs in fact to a long history of conflict between traditions of the north and south, wealthy and poor practitioners, the readers and nonreaders: each time it revives the problem, debated over the centuries, of whether enlightenment can be attained solely by reading, of whether studying the sutras can of itself bring about enlightenment. It may depend on how you read. The scene of the proto-pedagogy involves only two persons. The master and pupil together produce an allegory of being struck, enlightened. Though the journey is solitary, one cannot arrive at a solution by oneself: there has to be another, someone who functions as limit in a persistent sting operation. The experience of enlightenment has little (nothing) to do with self, with triumphal narratives of self-gathering, or with the bloated accomplishments of successive sieges of alien territory. (It is difficult by contrast to imagine a Western hero, even one that goes under the name Weltgeist, who, when facing the master, would go away so empty handed, without succeeding—that is, without stealing that place for himself according to the precepts of a familiar parricidal manoeuvre). The master stands, or rather, sits, as a reminder that there has to be something there to read, something outside a self, a being, a registrar of expectant saying—something from the get go of trying to get it already emptied, depropriated, even if it occurs in the switch of a whiplash.
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What of the master? This word weighs heavily on Western vocabularies. The philosophical, teaching master, often appears as an impoverished cipher. The withdrawal of the exaltation of the master may recall but bears only a vague relation to the Socratic counterpart, the cruiser and prodder, who could give us traction here, as a Western complement to the minimalist figure of mastery. The experience of enlightenment will have nothing to do with what the master has to tell you. The locution, ‘the master knows’ amounts to an absurdity. Without interior or predication, the figure for mastering as such—or rather, in the absence of suchness—the bareness of figure cannot warrant the solidity of hierarchy or the permanence of a superior claim on knowledge. From the texts that treat these relations, we discover that dharma combat equalizes everyone: whoever wins it, has won. The master in any case cannot confer, or confers only the occasional ‘compliment;’ he (sometimes she: there are such stories) repeats, punctuates, helps constitute the experience of enlightenment as he (sometimes she) accompanies the collection of thought (sesshin). The koan, a kind of contemplative story, a riddle or question, might take anywhere from three to fifteen years to answer. One is called upon steadily to go on with the koan every moment of one’s life. The problem, at a first level, is how to live with one’s question. Some efforts to live with the question are seen as dead in the water, or in any case, as being part of a bad passivity. Against Hungchih’s ‘silent illumination Zen,’ Ta-hui offers criticism of what he sees as the extreme passivity of false practice. The root emptiness of Zen practice should not be taken for a dead, lifeless emptiness; nor should practitioners pass their time lifelessly liked ‘cold ashes or a withered tree.’13 Ta-hui is among those Zen masters who vigorously promoted the use of koan. His teaching was patterned after the koan. Koan practice, the most assured path to the attainment of enlightenment, was required of every Zen student. Once the question had been posed, the puzzle formulated, the student was expected to hold fast to it. However, the koan resisted such a hold. It was meant to summon up terrific doubt, and brought practitioners to the edge of endurance. A number of masters, not to say students, suffered appalling breakdowns, some of whom recorded their shattering experiences. The koan ‘makes its central point through doubt. Doubt bores into the mind of the practitioner and leads to enlightenment.’14 For Ta-Hui, the koan elicits doubt but doubt must function neither as a stimulant nor should it undergird drivenness. It belongs to the region of nonnegative negations, a patient abiding with the existential of withoutness. Your attention should be fixed on the koan without yielding to the sense of enchantment that accompanies a discovery, without fascination for the multiplicities of possibilities it may imply, without the thrill of infinite interpretability and, on the other hand, without the guilt of nontotalization. Nor must material indices from a world putatively outside the dilemma of the koan intrude upon the contemplating mind. In other words, all traces of striving must be stilled, although the striving nature of the quest remains largely intact. This structure is in communication with the Faustian valuation of streben, the
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redemptive human quality inscribed in the West-test, though the effort takes on a decidedly different amplitude, insinuating a different measure of achievement. The hold of the koan is barely comprehensible in terms of Western techniques of endurance testing. There is for instance the story of the monk who failed successively to respond to his koan; bringing an answer to the master, he was several times rebuffed. He left the monastery, travelled far until he found a huge wall before which he stood for nine years straight, contemplating the question. After nine years, enlightenment struck, he returned to the monastery where the master was able to acknowledge the response. A second koan sent him out for another fifteen years. Besides laying claim to incalculable stores of patience, the koan regulates and meticulously increases the dosage of anxiety by which it prods the student toward enlightenment. Kao-feng Yüan-miao (1238–1295), a highly respected master from the Yang-chi lineage of the Rinzai School, emphasized the necessity of inducing anxiety and doubt in his magesterial work, The Essentials of Zen. The three crucial traits that inform the practice are ‘a great root of faith’ (Jpn., daishinkan), ‘a great tenacity of purpose’ (Jpn., daifunshi), and ‘a great feeling of doubt’ (Jpn., daigijo).15 In order to convey its principal cast, he illustrates the feeling of doubt by summoning forth a criminal’s anxiety. A cousin to Nietzsche’s pale criminal, this character is caught in the moment of greatest anxiety: gripped by suspense, thoroughly terrified, he wonders whether the heinous crime committed earlier will be found out or not. The lapse between the abomination and its discovery pinpoints the feeling for which the master seeks duration. Trekking alongside faith and purpose, then, there is the excessive anxiety of being caught out, hunted, humiliated. The necessary hinge with the questioning of the question involves the extreme persecution of the respondent, who is held by the master over the edge of pained endurance, a criminal’s suspense. (To make a Western or at least a Freudian intervention here, such a criminal houses a super-ego: the master has already broken in and entered the psyche, bitten by remorse. As Dostoevsky and current psycho upgrades have decisively demonstrated, not all criminals shiver with terror or avoid discovery). Ta-hui’s teaching of doubt as an essential characteristic of koan practice remained the norm throughout Chinese Zen from the end of the Sung period. Doubt must have its long day without the stabilizers provided by longing or goal. Ta-hui repeatedly warns against the intrusion of a conscious desire for enlightenment and so presses for the removal of all imaginative and discursive thought. To underscore the pungency of Zen practice, Ta-hui evokes Wu-Tsu Fayen, the teacher of his own master, Yüan-wu K’o-ch’in. Ta-hui returns to the ‘grandfatherly’ teacher, an innovator of rigorous koan practice, after having burned and incinerated the Hekiganroki, the work of his own master. The only explanation to help us grasp the reportedly pious act of destruction runs as follows: ‘Most likely he destroyed the text because he found that its literary beauty was preventing students from the painful struggle with the koan on nothingness, which for him was the only true koan.’16 The self-annulling relation to text in
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koan history creates significant tensions that parallel metaphysical attacks on writing in the West. Rhetoricity and literary excess are suspected of distracting the contemplator from the objectless object of a prior speech. An allegory of nothingness, the koan cannot at times tolerate the very materiality of its transmission, the linguistic intrusion on which it nonetheless depends. The famous koan on nothingness, which assumes an important place in Zen history and which Wu-men Hui-K’ai set as the opening of the Mumomkan, concerns the absolute nothingness of the Buddha nature that transcends being and nonbeing.17 The opening koan, which carries as title, ‘Choa-chou’s Dog,’ counts among the few koan to which he attached a long commentary. Here, too, Wu-men locates the essence of the koan in its ability to stir up doubt. The character, mu is, he explains, ‘the gateless barrier of the Zen school.’ He asks,’ Do you not wish to pass through this barrier?’18 The other barrier, that of text, must continually be erased so that doubt can be positioned as the sole partition put up before the ever faltering reader. ‘Do you not wish to pass through this barrier?’ If so, Then concentrate yourself into this ‘Mu,’ with your 360 bones and 84,00 pores, making your whole body one great inquiry. Day and night work intently at it. Do not attempt nihilistic or dualistic interpretations. It is like having bolted a red hot iron ball. You try to vomit it but cannot… Now, how should one strive? With might and main work at this ‘Mu,’ and be ‘Mu.’ If you do not stop or waver in your striving, then behold, when the Dharma candle is lighted, darkness is at once enlightened.19 Swallowing the unreleasable red hot iron ball, one strives to become one’s ‘Mu;’ one yields to the searing implosion of the incorporated question. Much as in Plato, the case against writing (and reading) was organized around the theme of passivity. But even writing (and reading) were displaced as acts on to a notion of ‘gazing,’ so much are these acts abjected. The Rinzai school, which dominated Chinese Zen during the Sung period, gradually absorbed all other houses and fringe movements with the exception of the Soto school, where the influence of Hung-chih survived. Historians of Zen Buddhism tend to underscore the schism between Hung-chih’s ‘silent-illumination Zen’ and Tahui’s ‘koan-gazing Zen,’ an apparent extension of the conflict between the Northern and Southern schools, particularly since Ta-hui’s ‘abusive attacks against the quiet sitting practices by the disciples of silent illumination are reminiscent of Shen-hui’s assaults on the ‘quietism’ of the Northern School.’20 At the same time, it would be wrong to sum up the history of Zen from the time of Bodhidharma to the present in terms of only two opposing operations. Nonetheless, the divide between the Rinzai and Soto schools continues to dominate the issues under discussion, and it is continually reasserted in the controversy between Hung-chih and Ta-hui as well as in subsequent disputes. Let us briefly consider their main features. Those in support of Rinzai reproach the Soto school for tending excessively toward passivity: ‘Only to sit in
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meditation, they say, dulls the mind into inactivity and engulfs it in a sleepy twilight.’21 While Soto adherents do not deny the dangers of a bad passivity, they counter that their purpose lies elsewhere: ‘Authentic Soto teachers cultivate an extremely alert and objectless form of meditation. Moreover, koan are used in the Soto school, albeit not in the same dynamic style as in the Rinzai school. The manner of meditation in the Soto school is more calm, but it certainly does not exclude the experience of enlightenment.’22 Another significant criticism that Ta-hui directed against Hung-chih concerns the experience itself of enlightenment (Jpn., satori). The Rinzai school watches for a flash experience, an abrupt opening that suddenly sparks a profoundly reorienting conversion. ‘The quickest and surest way to this kind of experience is through the extreme tension-in-doubt produced by the Koan exercise. Both koan and satori, say the Rinzai followers, are neglected by the Soto school.’23 The criticism seems hyperbolic, for Soto also recognizes sudden enlightenment, ‘for which koan practice can be extremely helpful; not a few of its masters underwent powerful, shattering experiences.’24 The value of such explosive experiences and the difficulty of determining their difference from enlightenment, requires some further commentary. For the breakthrough is always shadowed by a breakdown; the ascension can also be a fall, though the discipline requires for its legitimate practice the affirmation of a mark of harmony—a palpable measure of control and another conception of clarity that flows gently from serenity. It may appear to duplicate what we might ‘recognize’ as a manic crisis; still, the breakthrough is constituted otherwise, and has a different temporal run. Wait. In fact it does not run. There is something like a passive shattering that seems to be at the root of the debate, reminiscent of Blanchot’s discussion of destructive passivities.25 There may be a restraining order put on running or on any fast-paced discursive activity; yet, to the extent that it implies tremendous discipline, the restraint itself disrupts the orders of passivity and activity that have seemed opposable to one another. Once again we see that the athletics implicit in koan practice are not entirely dissimilar from the wrestling matches in Plato or the strained leaps that Heidegger coaches; nor even do they outrun the parameters set by the decathalon that Rousseau charts in the Promenades of a Solitary Walker. The athletic contest, no matter how masked or disseminated, has always been lodged in the Western thinking of thought, in what Robert Musil consistently calls our ‘thought sports.’ Metaphysics and athleticism often work out on the same track, sharing a field house of language, play and determination. Even as Heidegger negotiates at the limits of metaphysics, he measures jumps and prescribes unprecedented leaps. The leap is favored by Heidegger for nearly two, arguably Zen, reasons: a phenomenal exertion, it goes essentially nowhere. The jump is a movement of departure and return, moving often to the same place, which no longer claims to be the same. Something will have happened in the interval. Something passed from one place to the same place, which leaves the very notion of place in suspense. The leaps and bounds, the breakthroughs and light converge on a barely measurable marker.
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Whether rooted in Rinzai or Soto, the discipline behind the practice is incontestable. Whether we can call the pursuit of enlightenment (‘pursuit’ is too strong a word—too weak in some ways, as well) a contest remains an open question, for the terms are perpetually contested as they arise. The koan in any case entreats athletic resolve. The body and mind train on the possibility of answering to the task of thinking beyond thinking. The master gives the student a koan to think about, resolve, and report back on. The procedure, simple yet incalculable, implodes the concentrated student body. During the time devoted to the uncodified test, concentration intensifies to a breaking point. It is however said that only when the mind is relaxed, free from ego and purpose, fully devoted to the question at hand, can it open itself up, pressing beyond the boundaries of prescribed thinking, stretching beyond the temptation of reason. In his early works, Suzuki subsumes the process under three terms: those of accumulation, saturation, and explosion. These terms are law; they cannot be evaded but serve to indicate an ever present scale of danger. Accumulation and saturation, when feeding a state of high tension, often lead to serious harm. A sense of danger in fact accompanies the whole ordeal, particularly since it is harried by the delicate timing of explosion. In some instances, the explosion, intended in the best of cases to abide by the rules of organic becoming, does not always follow the model of the opening of the skin of a ripe fruit. ‘There are plentiful examples from the past and present showing how the practice of the koan can lead to a bad end. It is not without good reason that Zen masters sound their warnings. The suppression of reason can throw one’s psychic life out of balance.’26 Language falters, the student body cracks. A way to catch the fall, in some histories of its recounted occurrence, is to throw down a distinctly Western alibi and brace it with the grid of psychotherapy. ‘In the Zen practice called ‘private interview’ (dekusan), in which a student makes a progress report to a master, situations may arise that are like those that can take place in the psychotherapist’s office. The student utters broken, incoherent words and gives expression to other spontaneous reactions.’27 The student, battling with narrative, is down for the count. Body-broken, martyred to an overstretched capacity so as to engage the quest, the practitioner of the koan negotiates with absolute risk, testing and erasing limits that inevitably grind down the prospects of a thinking beyond thinking. Even where the raw nerve of exertion is subdued or denied, the strained condition of a testing without predictable end asserts itself. The intrusion of the test obtains as well in the relation to the master, where the koan figures as the thirdness that emerges between them, as that which cleaves the Conversation, in and beside language. The significance of the trial of the koan was not lost on some Western philosophers or analysts. Martin Buber became fascinated by the master-disciple relationship in Zen, and focused part of his work on those koan that explicitly thematized this couple. He also compared the koan to the ‘legendary anecdotes’ of Hasidism.28 Jung was led to identify the ‘great liberation’ in Zen with the
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emancipation of the unconscious.29 The psychological structure of koan practice is seen by Jung to open a primordial (if still undeconstructed) space, prior to difference and division. ‘Under the enormous psychological strain of trying to force a solution for the insoluble koan, enlightenment is experienced as the dawn of a new reality in which the boundaries between the conscious and unconscious disappears, so that conscious and unconscious alike are laid open.’30 The passive construction (‘enlightenment is experienced’) attests to the abiding contest between the possibility of a passive overture and the strain of ‘trying’ —another way of relating the sheer openness of the unconscious to that which enables it: the experience of the test, the trial. It is important to note that, when he enters the zone of the unconscious, Jung emphasizes the strenuous efforts of trying, forcing and experience. He is cornered by that aspect of the koan that clings to the subjection of tested being. In the end, though the end is not in sight, submission to the koan describes a critical syntax of our being, whether mapped according to Eastern or Western indicators. Something has forced one’s hand. Prior even to the question, the posture of submissive assent to the koan, as a kind of primordial acquiescence, a form of consent, welcomes the advent of the question ahead of any determinability, before any dubitative or skeptical interjection, opening the field of a closely held language to what remains to be thought. This openness, it is sustained by the tremors of doubt. As for the adjustment of mind to this persistent downshift in the disposition of a test drive: ‘Make sure that you do not allow your mind to run off, like an old mouse that ran into the horn of an ox.’31 Notes 1 Pindar’s Victory Songs trans. Frank J.Nisetich (Baltimore, London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980), p. 218. On the Pindaric tradition and the significance of this poem see William Fitzgerald, Agonistic Poetry, The Pindaric Mode in Pindar, Horace, Hölderlin and the English Ode (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 55ff. 2 Cited in Page du Bois, Torture and Truth (New York: Routledge, 1991), p. 16. 3 John Llewelyn, “Amen,” in Ethics as first Philosophy: The Significance of Emmanuel Lévinas for Philosophy, Literature and Religion, Adrian T.Peperzak (ed), (New York: Routledge, 1995), Interview in Salomon Malka, Lire Lévinas (Paris: Cerf, 1984), p. 108. 4 ‘The Mahayana Sutras,’ in Heinrich Demoulin, Zen Buddhism: A History (New York: MacMillan, 1974). 5 Dropping Ashes on the Buddha: The Teaching of Zen Master Seung Sahn, (ed) Stephen Mitchell (New York: Grove Press, 1976), p. 134. 6 Maurice Blanchot, Ecriture du Désastre (Paris: Gallimard, 1980); The Writing of the Disaster, trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986), 37/ 20. See also Christopher Fynsk’s discussion of this passage in terms of the Heideggerian ‘es gibt’ of Being.
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7 See in particular Christopher Fynsk’s treatment of these questions in Infant Figures: the Death of the Infans and Other Scenes of Origin (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000). 8 Blanchot, Désastre, p. 43. Disaster, p. 24. 9 For a discussion of related forms of non-knowledge in Eastern and Western thought, see Keiji Nishitani, Religion and Nothingness, trans. Jan van Bragt (Berkeley: California University Press, 1982), 162ff. 10 Oxford English Dictionary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). 11 See Ruth Benedict, The Chrysanthemum and the Sword (Boston, Houghton Mifflin Company, 1946) p. xi. p. 246. 12 Benedict, The Chrysanthemum and the Sword, p. 19. 13 Benedict, The Chrysanthemum and the Sword, p. 258. See also the introduction to Hsing-hsiu, Book of Serenity, trans. and introduction Thomas Cleary (New York: Lindisfarne Press, 1990), pp. ix–xli and Koun Yamada, Gateless Gate (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1979), pp. 93–169. 14 Benedict, Chrysanthemum and the Sword, p. 258. Heinrich Dumoulin, Zen Buddhism, A History: India and China With a New Supplement on the Northern School of Chinese Zen, trans. James W. Heisig and Paul Knitter (New York: Macmillan, 1994). 15 Benedict, Chrysanthemum and the Sword, p. 382. 16 Benedict, Chrysanthemum and the Sword, p. 382. 17 Benedict, Chrysanthemum and the Sword, p. 382. 18 Benedict, Chrysanthemum and the Sword, p. 259. 19 Benedict, Chrysanthemum and the Sword, p. 259. 20 Benedict, Chrysanthemum and the Sword, p. 259. 21 Benedict, Chrysanthemum and the Sword, p. 260. 22 Benedict, Chrysanthemum and the Sword, p. 260. 23 Benedict, Chrysanthemum and the Sword, p. 260. 24 Benedict, Chrysanthemum and the Sword, p. 260. 25 While the contradictions and disputes between the two principal schools appear to be bound by a differend—the irreconcilable differences between ‘silentillumination Zen’ (mokusho-zen) and ‘koan-gazing zen’ (kanna-zen) cannot be resolved—it is perhaps of some consequence that each school also regarded the other as a genuine form of Zen Buddhism. Zen histories refer to documents which reveal the consistently friendly, cordial relations enjoyed by Hung-chi and Ta-hui. ‘When Hung-chih died in the monastery of Mount T’ien-t’ung, which through his persevering efforts had become one of the important centres of Zen Buddhist monasticism, Ta-hui hastened to attend the funeral rites of his deserving colleague, and we can be certain that Hung-chih would not have hesitated to show the same respects to Ta-hui.’ Benedict, Chrysanthemum and the Sword, p. 260. 26 Benedict, Chrysanthemum and the Sword, p. 262. 27 Benedict, Chtysanthemum and the Sword, p. 262. 28 Martin Buber, Werke III, Schriften zum Chassidismus (Munich, Heidelberg: KöselLambert Schneider, 1963), Vol. 3 of the collected works, 993ff., also pp. 883–894. 29 See his introduction to Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki’s Introduction to Zen Buddhism (New York, Philosophical Library, 1949), also included in G.G.Jung, Collected Works, Vol. II (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, Ltd., 1969), pp. 538–557.
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30 Zen Master Torei Enji, The Discourse on the Inexhaustible Lamp of the Zen School with commentary by Master Daibi of Unkan, trans. Yoko Okuda, (Boston: C.E.Tuttle Co., 1996), p. 254. 31 The advice comes from Chinese Zen Master Ta-hui: ‘The thousand and ten thousand doubts that well up in your breast are really only one doubt, all of them burst open when doubt is resolved in the koan. As long as the koan is not resolved, you must occupy yourself with it to the utmost. If you give up on your koan and stir up another doubt about a word of scripture or about a sutra teaching or about a koan of the ancients, or if you allow a doubt about worldly matters to come up—all this means to be joined to the evil spirit. You should not too easily agree with a koan solution that you have discovered, nor should you think about it further and make distinctions. Fasten your attention to where discursive thinking cannot reach.’ Zen Master Torei Enji, The Discourse on the Inexhaustible Lamp of the Zen School, pp. 257–258.
Avital Ronell is Professor of German, English and Comparative Literature and is chair of the Department of German at New York University. She teaches a course annually with Jacques Derrida at NYU. Her most recent book is Stupidity, she also has a book forthcoming called The Test Drive. She has appeared in a number of videos and has commented on art and photography for ARTFORUM (New York) and VACARME (Paris).
The Struggle Against the Inauthentic: An Interview by Nicholas Chare Geoffrey Hartman
What follows is a transcript of an interview conducted by e-mail between Geoffrey Hartman and Nicholas Chare. Nicholas Chare: In The Longest Shadow you recognize that the proliferation of monuments commemorating past events is concomitant with a possible disburdening of memory. It might be said that the monument remembers for us and relieves us of our responsibility to remember. An example of this could be the memorial dedicated to Willy Brandt in Warsaw, which commemorates Brandt’s own historic gesture in front of the Warsaw Ghetto memorial Brandt accepted the burden of memory but we might read this brass relief, which was unveiled in 2000 in the presence of the current German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, as consigning the weight of history to the past. Do you feel we have entered an age of monumental amnesia or is there a future for public commemoration? Geoffrey Hartman: Monuments can foster forgetfulness in the way they select what is to be remembered. They are highly visible metonymic markers that can be politically exploited. At best, they recall a collective tragedy or triumph. Even so, constructing memorials disburdens conscience in addition to providing a shelter for contemplation in the midst of life’s indifferent traffic. Monuments, moreover, have recently proliferated. They cement the competition between ethnic/ideological factions, each of which promotes a special version of the past. There may also be mixed motives for this proliferation, partly remorseful, partly economic. As in Poland, where memorials are often encouraged because they attract Jewish tourists. But whatever the incentive, monuments help to preserve certain sites, turning them into lieux de mémoire. Because, like a work of art, a monument draws attention to itself—and should do so, if the creativity behind it offsets to any degree the loss expressed, —there is bound to be a displacement from the specificity of the event commemorated. Niobe, mourning her children and changed into a rock-like fountain, undergoes through the sculptor a different kind of metamorphosis: she forgets herself to marble, according to a striking expression in Renaissance poetry. Marble sublimates, as it were, a lasting and self-consuming grief, turns it into something precious as well as permanent.
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Extremes meet in monumania: on the one hand, the need to inscribe lastingly, conspicuously, a collective act of mourning; on the other, to discharge something that preys on conscience and emotion. After a while, though, all those monuments, parallax ISSN 1353–4645 print/ISSN 1460–700X online © 2004 Geoffrey Hartman http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals DOI: 10.1080/1353464032000171109
however heroic, become forlorn pointers and each person a tourist-historian of her own grievous loss, which now includes moments of forgetting. That too is mourned. Once caught up in this secondary sadness we may even resent the inability to keep mourning, the lapse of all grief into mementos of itself. Because monuments, moreover, have so strong an iconic and external presence, it is easy to overlook how anchored memorialization is in a daily, not only historic, consciousness of mutability and loss. Can we take hold of experiences without a temporal inscription, a marking or mapping that is always more than an aide-mémoire? Consider the rhetoric of dates. What does it mean to establish and memorize dates that divide time into segments? Such dating is the unobtrusive background to more dramatic, ‘monumental’, markers such as the B.C./A.D. divide. Or the Before Auschwitz/After Auschwitz mode of considering history. It posits, in Dan Diner’s phrase, a Zivilisationsbruch, a previously unimaginable breach of civilized life. NC: In The Fateful Question of Culture you discuss the importance of dates at some length and suggest that ‘to say ‘1997 is 52 years after Auschwitz’ creates a stigmatic history.’ Are we in danger of the date 9/11 becoming a stigma given that we have already marked the second anniversary of that event? Is it possible that the United States is in some sense experiencing a feeling of ‘shame’ for having been singled out for this attack, a shame which needs to be attested to? GH: 9/11 has become a decisive temporal marker. Yet the calendar is full of red-letter days of that kind: leaving aside the subjacent names of the gods, it notes festivals, fasts, and other sacred or quasi-sacred events that belie the mechanical round of time. No wonder our calendar gets to be crowded: a single date, like November 9th, anchors several momentous happenings. The routine telling of time turns, at any instant, into an anniversary, or memory palimpsest. A wonderfully clear and beautiful September morning in the North Eastern United States now evokes a catastrophe, a collective trauma. The very minute the first plane struck, 8:46 am, registers as a heart-and-time stopper. September 11, 2001 is a day of infamy, not unlike December 7, 1941. Yet our historical frame of mind wishes to redeem it without assimilation to that other date. Viewing the crisis as unique enables us not only to focus on it but to use it as the basis for a
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resolute and distinctive response individualizing ille dies rather than merging it with another, comparable day. It is granted its own commemorative space. Until 9/11, America’s mainland, or more precisely its urban and commercial centre, had never suffered such a stroke. Suddenly the terror and loss experienced in two world wars by England and other countries of Europe was brought home to America’s largest metropolis. Trauma, before 9/11, and talk about it, tended to designate a personal impact that victimized primarily private lives, and whose malignancy in that regard might be skeptically regarded. The Holocaust and other genocides, the carpet bombing of cities, the Middle Passage, and similar massive traumas, remained cordoned off, however documented and acknowledged, as if they had happened—like legendary events—once upon a time and somewhere else. Now post traumatic stress and memory studies gain a new relevance. By calling dates potentially ‘stigmatic’ I did not mean to imply, in The Fateful Question of Culture, a shameful (‘stigmatizing’) mark. The word pointed to a neglected characteristic of dates: they furnish an inconspicuous grid that facilitates utilitarian counting but they also display a branding whereby secular history imitates a feature of sacred time and consciousness. We single out an event (or it singles us out); an entire realm of experience is magnified, creating an enclosure within which everything, however profane, is examined as potentially significant. Self-accusation, the thought of why this and why us certainly arises; natural enough, it should even be encouraged; but I doubt that its emotional reach, in the case of 9/11, comes anywhere near what is imputed by Job’s so-called friends who assume the victim’s hidden guilt. Something hidden does emerge, nevertheless. The adversarial character of a large segment of the Muslim world now confronts us: it is another world, we had been blind to it, blind to its Scripture, its customs, its feelings of humiliation and resentment, blind and deaf also to the hatred preached there and inculcated in many mosques and madrasas. NC: The video-testimony project is of great importance to you. I would like to ask you several questions about this important undertaking. Firstly, there seems to be something important occurring at the level of the relationship between the indexical and the virtual in video-testimony. The face-to-face encounter that occasions the testimony is transformed into the virtual through the video-taping which preserves it. It is normal to think that there is no indexical link between the object and its representation. This way of theorizing representation seems, to me, to be troubled by these testimonials. The recognition that the survivor was there seems to place a powerful ethical responsibility on the viewer, a responsibility to somehow resist the endless relay of meaning, to face the meaning of what the survivor is saying. Do you think there is a sense in which video-testimony is somehow ‘saving the index’? GH: The Yale Video Testimony Project tries to capture, as you suggest, the face-to-face, as well as voice-oriented aspect of witnessing. Not, of course, as a ‘high noon’ confrontation. The interviewer, when it comes to eliciting difficult
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memories, acts as helpmate rather than challenger; nor is the interview setting comparable to that of an interrogation or court of law, with prosecutor and defender and strict rules on what counts as evidence. Most Holocaust interviews have taken place a generation (some twenty-five years or more) after the events, so that recollection struggles against both obliviousness and an internal, selfmodifying narrative tendency, a rewriting as common and half-unconscious as dreaming. Yet there are moments in the interviews when memory is released and springs from the survivor as if newborn, with startling immediacy. I am suggesting that the indexical moment is always, even here, mediated by time and place, by the memory-milieu or frame-conditions in which testimonies are recorded. The person to person aspect of this kind of testimony-giving remains crucial, however: it points to an ethical as well as civic dimension, a strong wish to address and transmit. Testimony has a community building (rebuilding) function, at once admonitory and healing. It is true that video interviews, insofar as they are electronically called up and reproduced, fade back into the miscellaneous plenum of cyberspace. There is a reality-loss through voyeuristic surfing, and non-witnesses could learn to fake the vivid, dramatic effect of returns of memory that make the interviews so valuable. Unless we declare the testimonies to be a sacred deposit, shielded and accessible only under restrictive conditions, their use (misuse) remains a matter for the individual conscience. Thus the genre or paradigm of testimony participates in the struggle against simulacra, and for authenticity. A child’s entire vocation, Wordsworth wrote, is endless imitation; and mimetic desire does not cease with childhood (does childhood itself ever end?). There is bound to be a tension, then, between the survivors’ attempt to tell their story as if for the first time (or to recover that capability), and on-demand video’s push-button resurrections. At this point in time the survivor interview—which, in Yale’s way of doing things, is ascetic, minimally interventionist, a talking head format, and as open as possible (without an agenda, or trying for that withholding)—helps the cause of realism and preserves the ‘aura’ of the witness. In the future, however, the interview could succumb to stylization and a Wilkomirski kind of memory-envy. While the indexical effect remains strong today, there is a growing concern that mediatization through visual or verbal simulacra will fray the boundary between history and fiction and weaken the reality reference. Such an erosion could add itself to complexities of reception that are always there, to the diffusive dynamism of research and judgment that results in an apparently ‘endless relay of meaning’. Yet a conscientious, sustained, even iconoclastic analysis can also offset that media influence, especially images that tend to be at once overpowering and desensitizing So yes, ‘saving the index’ in the matter of video is like ‘saving the text’ in the literary sphere. Except that visual culture, despite sophisticated work in semiotics, enters the current educational curriculum too late; besides, considerable finesse is required to value the visual without verbalizing it out of
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existence. If art presently aspires to the condition of testimony, rather than, as Walter Pater declared, of music, it may be because music is too close to the virtual, to a world in which digital magic can mimic any scene. The struggle against the inauthentic becomes a struggle against the virtual. NC: Why is the quantity of video testimony that has been accumulated so often stressed? You have suggested that this plurality prevents memory from becoming politicized or sacralized, but is there not also the danger of producing a surfeit of memory? As you know, in Borges’s story The Rigor of Science a kingdom’s cartographers create a map which entirely covers the land it seeks to represent. It seems to me that the horror of the Holocaust is limitless, that nobody could see everything, that no such map could ever be drawn. There are however now over 4000 video-testimonies in the archives at Yale and the institutions affiliated to it, do you think it is possible that the desire to be comprehensive threatens to overwhelm the need to communicate experience? Can an argument be made that less is more, that there are always gaps in any archive and that with this particular archive the gap should itself be recognized as an integral part of remembering? GH: When the Yale testimony project was approaching a thousand witness accounts, I already heard, ‘Isn’t it enough?’ But the issue of quantity, that number game, is only significant if there is a sampling technique, or correlatively, as you mention, an ambition to cover the events of the Holocaust in their totality. Any such totalizing aim, however, runs up against the fact that the Holocaust had sequelae. It did not end in 1944/1945 with the liberation of the camps, unless we impose an amnesty on the workings of memory. The passion of remembrance is part of the event, not a mere and fading supplement. Quantity, moreover, could never make up for quality; and in oral testimony the quality of an interview is hard to guarantee. Whatever interviewer training is given, accidents of place and date, as well as the personal chemistry between interviewer and interviewee, make for an unstable outcome. The premise of Yale’s testimony archive, then, is not the accumulation of a finite totality, nor is a sampling technique applicable when the guiding principle, as in our case, is that every survivor who wishes to tell his or her story should be given that chance. The project, in brief, looks to the well-being of the survivors and their descendants as well as to an improving knowledge of what happened and an increased awareness on the part of the public. NC: Finally, you wrote in The Longest Shadow that the video-testimonies accept ‘the presence of memory’, which is a thought-provoking idea. Where is the memory in video-testimony? You have stressed the importance of giving survivors their voice and of allowing the viewer to see a voice. Primo Levi described a recurring dream involving the memory of a voice, the voice each morning in the Camp that said ‘Wstawac.’ What do you think the relationship is between voice and memory, can memory be heard? If memory is thought, does the voice that is speaking coincide with what is called thinking, or do we experience the translation of thought in video-testimony?
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GH: When Charlotte Delbo has one of her narrators say, ‘I died in Auschwitz and no one notices it’, she expresses a permanent paradox that besets traumatic memory. The person that survived is a dead person, a radically changed person: two persons, in a way, one who remains ‘over there’, trapped in the eternal misery of the camp, and one who has separated from the living dead and moulted —is still moulting, even in the act of writing and remembering—her Auschwitz skin. The psychoanalyst Dori Laub tells of a patient who was haunted by the sense of an ‘empty circle’. Laub interprets this forbidding emptiness as an area in consciousness that must be cordoned off. Not, however, as might be expected, by repressing terrible memories but by recalling some of them. The recollections themselves act like threshold demons: to venture beyond them into that other, ‘objectless’ region, whose devastation can be felt but not represented, is to approach too closely the death-drive and suicide. Even those who wish to avoid metapsychological speculation and its metaphors realize that it is not enough to try and map the neurophysical topography of memory, or its different kinds. By accepting ‘the presence of memory’ I mean refusing, like Delbo and other great writers, the dogma of the non-representability of what happened, and mystifications that follow from that position. The core of emptiness, the ‘empty circle’ characterizing traumatic memory does not indicate the impossibility of recall or representation. It signals an anxiety: that of disappearing once more into a region of unlikeness, into an invasive and absolutely self-estranging experience that cannot be reconciled with our species image, with humane, civilized life. The utter negativity of that ‘empty circle’ may indeed lead to a flight from reality, but this evasion, in art, is linked to the artist’s judgment of what can be endured, what an audience is able to receive, or what can be effectively represented without damaging the psyche, without turning toward death rather than affirming sight and insight, Delbo’s ‘donner a voir’. The video testimony, as an expressive genre, has to be understood in that light. It is characterized by directness of voice and image, by an unusual immediacy. But also by indirectness, since these narratives do not artificially recreate or photographically index the original events. What is restituted is the survivor’s voice and body-image, both of which had been dehumanized or utterly denied. NC: In your recent book Scars of the Spirit you address the question of authenticity in testimony, and the problem inherent in any theorization of witnessing which seeks to found authentic testimony on the silence of the dead because this allows us to avoid asking difficult questions about the status of the testimony of the living. I would however like to ask you about the set of photographs which have survived that were taken by a member of the Sonderkommando at Auschwitz for the use of the Polish resistance. Two of these photographs seem to have been taken from within the gas chamber and look out
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upon other members of the unit at ‘work’. In any struggle against inauthenticity would you agree that these photographs have a special importance as testimony? GH: The Sonderkommando photos you mention, which I have not seen, if taken from within the gas-chambers, would have evidential value, yet they cannot make the dead testify more forcefully by that kind of visibility than the thousands whose witness, instead of assaulting the viewer with brutal, mechanically frozen images, opens onto a potentially non-traumatizing reception. Your question about atrocity photos also opens onto a moral issue. Given the tremendously expanded modern capacity for mimetic reproduction, even for creating simulacra, representability as such is no longer a technical problem but remains, all the more, of moral concern. A letter by Robert Antelme written to his friend Dyonis Mascolo, little more than a month after being freed, close to death, from Buchenwald, is remarkable for raising what he himself calls a moral issue. The letter confesses discomfort at the fact that he, Antelme, poured out words to his friend almost nonstop for five weeks. Why the discomfort? Paradoxically because of this very fluency: for Antelme, after the death-in-life of the camp, those words were like breathing, and a happiness so strong that it wounded him. He was ill, he had not fully recovered from his imprisonment, yet he has no fear of dying except of that happiness. But the moral issue raised turns on what he calls his ‘shamelessness’ (impudeur). Talking this way, without restraint, was totally out of character for him. What one says (to extend it to the photos, what one shows) and to whom involves the morality of an act of choice. Thus, even as everyone was congratulating him on his recovery, claiming he was already resembling his prior self, Antelme still felt very different. He no longer knew what one should say or not say. ‘In hell one says everything in the normal world, on the contrary, it is our habit to choose, and I think I no longer know how to choose. Saying everything, which in others represented hell for me, that became my paradise.’ Geoffrey Hartman is Sterling Professor Emeritus of English and Comparative Literature at Yale and Project Director of the university’s Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies. His latest books are The Longest Shadow: In the Aftermath of the Holocaust (Palgrave, 1996), The Fateful Question of Culture (Columbia University Press, 1997), A Critic’s Journey: Literary Essays 1958– 1998 (Yale University Press, 1999), and Scars of the Spirit: The Struggle Against Inauthenticity (Palgrave, 2002). A Reader of his work will be published by Edinburgh University Press in 2004.
Witnessing and Testimony Kelly Oliver
Contemporary debates in social theory around issues of multiculturalism have focused on the demand or struggle for recognition by marginalized or oppressed people, groups and cultures. The work of Charles Taylor and Axel Honneth, in particular, have crystallized issues of multiculturalism and justice around the notion of recognition.1 In Witnessing: Beyond Recognition, I challenge what has become a fundamental tenet of this trend in debates over multiculturalism, namely, that the social struggles manifest in critical race theory, queer theory, feminist theory and various social movements are struggles for recognition.2 Testimonies from the aftermath of the Holocaust and slavery do not merely articulate a demand to be recognized or to be seen. Rather, they witness to pathos beyond recognition. The victims of oppression, slavery and torture are not merely seeking visibility and recognition, but they are also seeking witnesses to horrors beyond recognition. The demand for recognition manifest in testimonies from those othered by dominant culture is transformed by the accompanying demands for retribution and compassion. If, as I suggest, those othered by dominant culture are seeking not only, or even primarily, recognition but also witnessing to something beyond recognition, then our notions of recognition must be reevaluated. Certainly notions of recognition that throw us back into a Hegelian master-slave relationship do not help us to overcome domination. If recognition is conceived of as being conferred on others by the dominant group, then it merely repeats the dynamic of hierarchies, privilege and domination. Even if oppressed people are making demands for recognition, insofar as those who are dominant are empowered to confer it, we are thrown back into the hierarchy of domination. This is to say that if the operations of recognition require a recognizer and a recognizee then we have done no more than replicate the master-slave, subject-other/object hierarchy in this new form. Additionally, the need to demand recognition from the dominant culture or group is a symptom of the pathology of oppression. Oppression creates the need and demand for recognition. It is not just that the injustices of oppression create the need for justice. More than this, the pathology of oppression creates the need in the oppressed to be recognized by their oppressor, the very people most likely not to recognize them. The internalization of stereotypes of inferiority and
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contemporary theoretical contexts is, then, a symptom of the pathology of oppression itself. Implied in this diagnosis is the conclusion that struggles for recognition and theories that embrace those struggles may indeed presuppose and thereby perpetuate the very hierarchies, domination, and injustice that they attempt to overcome. The notion of recognition becomes more problematic in models where what is recognized is always only something familiar to the subject.3 In this case, the subject and what is known to him and his experience are once again privileged. Any real contact with difference or otherness becomes impossible because recognition requires the assimilation of difference into something familiar. When recognition repeats the master-slave or subject-object hierarchy, then it is also bound to assimilate difference back into sameness. The subject recognizes the other only when he can see something familiar in that other; for example, when he can see that the other is a person too. Only when we begin to imagine a recognition that there is ‘something’ beyond recognition can we begin to think of the recognition of difference. Some contemporary theorists seem to think that we can begin to move beyond recognition by focusing on misrecognition. But, it makes sense to talk about misrecognition only if recognition is still the ideal.4 Misrecognition or the misfire of recognition presuppose an idea of successful recognition. While theories of misrecognition have the advantage of challenging us to be vigilant in exposing the illusion of familiarity or sameness, most of them also propose an antagonistic subject-object/other relationship. Influenced by Lacan’s account of misrecognition in the mirror stage, theorists like Julia Kristeva and Judith Butler propose that identity and one’s sense of oneself as a subject come from abjecting or excluding otherness.5 Otherness and difference are abjected in order to secure the subject’s always precarious boundaries against the threat of fragmentation. In this type of scenario, we fortify ourselves on the level of individual subjective identity as well as group and national identity by drawing artificial but strict boundaries between ourselves and others. Whatever characteristics we prefer not to associate with ourselves—those characteristics we deem unacceptable, dirty, or improper—we project onto the others. Others and otherness become threats to our very sense of ourselves as subjects. While this neo-Hegelian model is very effective in explaining the existence of war and oppression, if normalized it
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makes it impossible to imagine peaceful compassionate relations with others across or through differences. In Witnessing: Beyond Recognition, I associate the pathos beyond recognition inherent in struggles for recognition and in testimonies to atrocity with witnessing in its full and double sense. Rather than extolling the virtues of testimony per se, I am developing a theory of subjectivity modeled on witnessing in its double senses of eye-witness and bearing witness to what cannot be seen. Although I use examples of testimony in order to show how the structure of witnessing operates in all subjectivity, I do not reduce subjectivity to testimony. Rather, I develop a model of subjectivity based on the address-response structure of witnessing in its double sense. Moreover, the purpose of my discussion of the therapeutic or transformative effects of witnessing is not to promote public testimonies or the practice of psychoanalysis but rather to demonstrate on the one hand how oppression and victimization undermine subjectivity by attacking the ability for address and response, and on the other hand, how the structure of address and response is the lynch-pin of subjectivity. There is a tension inherent in the notion of witnessing in the sense of eyewitness to historical facts or accuracy and witnessing in the sense of bearing witness to a truth about humanity and suffering that transcends those facts. It is important to note that witnessing has both the juridical connotations of seeing with one’s own eyes and the religious or now political or ethical connotations of testifying to that which cannot be seen, or bearing witness. It is this double meaning that makes the concept of witnessing such a powerful alternative to recognition in reconceiving subjectivity and thereby ethical relations. The tension between eyewitness testimony and bearing witness, between historical facts and what we might call psychoanalytic and phenomenological truths, between subject position and subjectivity, is the dynamic operator that moves us beyond the melancholic choice between either dead historical facts or traumatic repetition of violence. Using this double-sided witnessing as a model, I propose that the subject is constituted by virtue of a tension between finite historical contexts that constitute subject position on the one hand and the structure of infinite addressability and response-ability of subjectivity on the other. The tendency on the part of my critics, and perhaps on my own part, to read my notion of subjectivity and identity as reduced to one pole or the other is a symptom of the difficulty in thinking the heterogeneity and otherness inherent in identity and subjectivity. More specifically, the difficulty is how to articulate fluid and mobile relationships within and between subjects and identities in a theoretical language where grammar requires fixing both sameness and difference into discrete units of meaning whose relationships are limited by logical connections ‘and’, ‘or’, ‘not’, etc…The central question is: How can we conceive of the tension between social and historical context with its differential power relations on the one hand and what makes us beings who mean on the other? In Witnessing I addressed this question by negotiating between philosophies of liberation—feminism, race
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theory, holocaust studies—and phenomenologies of subjectivity.6 Here, I would like to take up this question by focusing on the pivotal distinction between the two senses of witnessing that I develop and the concomitant distinction between subject position and subjectivity. It will be necessary to further delineate the differences between testimony and witnessing and the differences between the phenomenological subject and the psychoanalytic subject. Whereas testimony is usually a spoken or written account of something seen or experienced, here witnessing refers to the structure of subjectivity itself, the very structure that makes testimony possible. Whereas the phenomenological subject can become conscious of its self-consciousness and its motives, desires and fears, which it owns (as Husserl might say, are its own), the psychoanalytic subject is continually an encounter with the otherness of the unconscious, which cannot completely come to consciousness or be owned up to, let alone owned. These differences bear on the history of subject position and the historicity of subjectivity or the distinction between beings and meaning. Invoking the double meaning of witnessing, I try to develop a theory of the subject that connects the historically localizable subject position of particular subjects with the infinite response-ability that makes subjectivity possible. By bringing together subject position and the structure of subjectivity as witnessing, I attempt to navigate between the extremes of conceiving of the subject either as the foundation for action apart from social circumstance on the one hand, or as the simple effect of social context on the other. The notion of witnessing brings together the historical context with the witnessing structure that makes subjectivity an infinite open system of response. As we will see, by so doing, it both politicizes the subject a la subject position and insists on a fundamental ethical obligation at the heart of subjectivity itself thereby bringing together the political and ethical dimensions of subjectivity. Any theory of subjectivity must also consider subject position. Subjects, subjectivity and agency always exist only in a political and social context that affects them at the foundation of their constitution. One’s social position and history profoundly influence one’s very sense of oneself as an active agent in the world. Yet, the contradictions and inconsistencies in historical and social circumstances guarantee that we are never completely determined by our subject position. It is possible to develop a sense of agency in spite of, or in resistance to, an oppressive social situation. Subject positions, although mobile, are constituted in our social interactions and our positions within our culture and context. They are governed, but not determined, by history and circumstance. Subject positions are our relations to the finite world of human history —what we might call politics. Subjectivity, on the other hand, is experienced as the sense of agency and response-ability that are constituted in the infinite encounter with otherness, which is fundamentally ethical. And, although subjectivity is logically prior to any possible subject position, in our experience, they are always profoundly interconnected. This is why our experience of our own
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subjectivity is the result of the productive tension between finite subject position and infinite response-ability of the structure of subjectivity itself. By subjectivity I mean one’s sense of oneself as an ‘I’, as an agent. By subject position I mean one’s position in society and history as developed through various social relationships. The structure of subjectivity is the structure that makes taking oneself as an agent or a self possible. The structure of subjectivity is what I am calling a witnessing structure that is founded on the possibility of address and response; it is a fundamentally dialogic structure. Subject position, on the other hand, is not the very possibility of one’s sense of oneself as an agent or an ‘I’ per se, but the particular sense of one’s kind of agency, so to speak, that comes through one’s social position and historical context. While distinct, subject position and subjectivity are also intimately related. For example, if you are a black woman within a racist and sexist culture, then your subject position as oppressed could undermine your subjectivity, and your sense of yourself as an agent. If you are a white man within a racist and sexist culture, then your subject position as privileged could shore up your subjectivity and promote your sense of yourself as an agent. The subject is a dynamic yet stable structure that results from the interaction between two forces, finitude, being and history (which I identify with subject position) at the one pole and infinity, meaning and historicity (which I identify with subjectivity) at the other. And, the tension between these two poles is what makes us beings who mean, social and human. As an analogy, consider that Architects and engineers have worked with the principle of tension loaded structures that use the tension as support. A classic example is the Brooklyn bridge. We could say that the subject is a tension loaded structure, but its flexibility makes it more like what architects call a tensile structure. Architect Frei Otto’s description of the difference between the two structures is suggestive: He says, ‘the capacity to transmit forces and moments by tensionloaded materials is found in animate and inanimate nature’ while tensile structures ‘are found more frequently in animate nature […] Flexible tensionresisting skins and sinews are necessary whenever the supporting system is movable’.7 The stability of tensile structures is the result of opposing forces pulling in two directions, through which a membrane’s double curvature receives its structure and resistance. Subjectivity is analogous to the structure and resistance that result from a membrane or skin being stretched in two directions and held together by tension. Like Frei Otto’s famous architectural design using the tension of two opposing axis of force to support a fabric (which architects refer to as a membrane or a ‘flexible stretched skin’)8 the subject too is a kind of tensile structure. The two axis of force whose tension supports the subject are subject position and subjectivity. An example recounted in Dori Laub’s Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis and History illustrates the productive tension between subject position and subjectivity, between eye-witness and historical accuracy and another level of truth, a truth beyond recognition, the truth of witnessing to
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what cannot be seen.9 Laub, a psychoanalyst interviewing survivors as part of the Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies at Yale, remarks on a tension between historians and psychoanalysts involved in the project. He describes a lively debate that began after the group watched the taped testimony of a woman who was an eyewitness to the Auschwitz uprising in which prisoners set fire to the camp. The woman reported four chimneys going up in flames and exploding, but historians insisted that since there was only one chimney blown up, her testimony was incorrect and should be discredited in its entirety because she proved herself an unreliable witness. One historian suggested that her testimony should be discounted because she ‘ascribes importance to an attempt that, historically, made no difference’.10 The psychoanalysts responded that the woman was not testifying to the number of chimneys blown up but to something more ‘radical’ and more ‘crucial’, namely, the seemingly unimaginable occurrence of Jewish resistance at Auschwitz, that is to say, the historical truth of Jewish resistance at Auschwitz. Laub concludes that what the historians could not hear, listening for empirical facts, was the ‘very secret of survival and of resistance to extermination’.11 The Auschwitz survivor saw something unfamiliar, Jewish resistance, which gave her the courage to resist. She saw something that in one sense did not happen—four chimneys blowing up—but in another made all the difference to what happened. Seeing the impossible—what did not happen—gave her the strength to make what seemed impossible possible, surviving the Holocaust. From his work with Holocaust survivors, and being a survivor himself, Dori Laub concludes that psychic survival depends on an addressable other, what he calls an ‘inner witness’. The inner witness is produced and sustained by dialogic (and I would add nonlinguistic forms of communicative) interaction with other people. In order to think, talk, act as an agent, the inner witness must be in place. This is to say that we learn to ‘talk to ourselves’ —to think—by talking to others. Our experience is meaningful for us only if we can imagine that it is meaningful for others. And, our sense of what is meaningful, our sense of meaning itself, comes through our relationships with others. Creating or finding meaning for oneself is possible only through the internalization of meaning for others.12 Over simplifying somewhat, we can say that address and response are possible because the interpersonal dialogue is interiorized. On my account, subjectivity is the ability to address oneself to others combined with the ability to respond to others. One can only address oneself to oneself, or respond to oneself, if one has first addressed or been addressed by and responded to others. At its core, subjectivity is relational and formed and sustained by addressability (the ability to address others and be addressed by them) and response-ability (the ability to respond to others and oneself). It is the possibility of address that sustains psychic life and the sense of subjective agency. If the possibility of address is undermined or annihilated, then subjectivity is also undermined or annihilated. To conceive of oneself as a subject is to have the ability to address oneself to another, real or imaginary, actual or
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potential. This address and response structure develops in infancy from birth and sustains psychic and social life. I call this address-response structure witnessing and argue that oppression, domination, enslavement and torture work to undermine and destroy the ability to respond and thereby undermine and destroy subjectivity. Part of the psychoanalyst’s task in treating survivors is reconstructing the addressability that makes witnessing subjectivity possible. If one’s subject position is the socio-historical position in which one finds oneself, and one’s subjectivity is the structure of witnessing as infinite responseability, then the inner witness is where subject position and subjectivity meet. If the inner witness is the ability to address oneself or to be self-reflective that is ‘learned’ through addressing and being addressed by others, and it is also ‘learned’ in a particular historical and social situation, then it is going to be both a prerequisite for a sense of agency per se and a governing factor in the particularities of and restrictions on that sense of agency. We internalize our relationships with others, which empowers us with a sense of our own agency but can also leave us with a sense of the limitations of our own agency if we are in marginal or oppressed social positions or power relations. As Laub’s example points up, psychoanalysis attends to the address-ability and response-ability pole of witnessing, while history attends to the pole of the eye-witness. The double meaning of witness can help to theorize the Holocaust survivor’s testimony and witnessing to the Jewish uprising at Auschwitz. As an eyewitness, she testifies (incorrectly) to the events of that particular day when prisoners blew up a chimney. In addition, however, she bears witness to something that in itself cannot be seen, the conditions of possibility of Jewish resistance and survival. As an eyewitness she occupies a particular historical position in a concrete context that constitutes her actuality as well as her possibilities. She was a Jew in the midst of deadly anti-Semitism. She was a prisoner in a concentration camp. She was a woman in the mid-Twentieth Century. Her position as a subject is related to the particularities of her historical and social circumstance. In order to evaluate her testimony as an eyewitness, it is crucial to consider her socio-historical subject-position and not just the ‘accuracy’ of her testimony. Indeed, the ‘accuracy’ of her testimony has everything to do with her subject position. It is, in fact, her subject position that makes historians particularly interested in her testimony as a Holocaust survivor. Her testimony is unique because she was an eyewitness; she was there. But, it is not just because she was there, but why and how she was there that makes her testimony unique. The testimony of another eye-witness to the same event—a Nazi guard at the camp, or a someone outside the camp who noticed flames in the air—would have a very different meaning even if he also claimed to see four chimneys blowing up. Perhaps within the context of the Holocaust Testimonies at Yale, surrounded by mostly male professors, the fact that this witness was a woman makes a difference to how she speaks and how she is heard. Only by considering her subject-position can we learn something about the ‘truth’ of history even from the ‘inaccuracies’ of her testimony. In this regard, the facts of
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history cannot disclose the significance or meaning of historical context. Moreover, insofar as she is also bearing witness to what cannot be seen—agency and resistance—she testifies to the process of witnessing itself. Consider the recent controversy over the accuracy of Rigoberta Menchu’s testimony to the atrocities of the Guatemalan army’s cruelty, which also points to the distinction between historical accuracy and another level of meaning and truth, the truth of suffering that cannot be reduced to historical facts. Although undeniably powerful in their impact, the empirical facts of the Holocaust, or of the atrocities of the civil war in Guatemala, are dead not only to the truth of suffering but also to the response-ability that the process of witnessing presupposes. The process of witnessing, always in tension with eyewitness testimony, complicates the notion of historical truth and moves us beyond any easy dichotomy between history and psychoanalysis between conscious life and unconscious life. This is not to say that we can or should discount historical accuracy or historical truth, on the contrary. We need both poles of witnessing. But, we need to critically analyze the meaning of history and context. Our inaccuracies and false beliefs also have meaning that can reveal something true about our desires and fears. This truth is not always liberatory, it is not always the truth of suffering, but may be the truth of hatred and discrimination or even what I call in Witnessing false witnessing. We need to investigate the conditions of possibility of meaning, whether it is the meaning of historical facts or of subjective testimony, with its inaccuracies and falsehoods. My insistence on considering subject position and socio-historical context in any discussion of subjectivity is meant as a corrective to both phenomenological and psychoanalytic theories of subjectivity that do not attend to history. While phenomenology and psychoanalytic theory have been instructive in formulating a theory of subjectivity as intersubjectivity, traditionally they have neglected subject position and thereby sacrificed not only social, political and historical relevance but also its truth, not to mention its accuracy. My insistence on subjectivity as response-ability, on the other hand, is meant as a corrective to political theories that begin with a subject essentially either isolated from, or opposed to, objects including other people. My engagement with psychoanalysis in particular is meant to move behind the scenes of the subject-object relation to what makes it possible, which I elaborate as the structure of address and response through which subjectivity and objectivity emerge. In a primary sense, the address-response structure must be formed or at least figured before the subjectobject distinction is possible. Subjects distinguish themselves from the world and others by virtue of responsive relations with other people. Recognition too depends on responsivity between infants and their environments and care-takers. For example, recent studies in psychology by Nicholas Meltzoff and Keith Moore show that infants are responsive to facial and manual gestures from birth, prior to recognition of objects.13 Following this work, Shaun Gallagher and Meltzoff conclude that ‘recent studies of newborn imitation suggest that an experiential connection between self and others exists right from birth’ that ‘is
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already an experience of pre-verbal communication in the language of gesture and action’.14 At the most fundamental level, this relationality or responsivity is neither intellectual nor perceptual but operates through unconscious processes of transference. This means that in a strict sense, our primary relations are neither subjective nor intersubjective but prior to, and prerequisites for, either. This brings us to an ontological level on which subjectivity is essentially relational and dependent, always formed through a primordial ‘we’. From this primordial we, follows an ethics of response-ability that entails an ethical obligation to our founding possibility, which is responsivity. Reformulating Eva Kittay’s analysis of relations of dependency, we could say that a subject who ‘refuses to support this bond absolves itself from its most fundamental obligation—its obligation to its founding possibility’.15 In terms of my analysis, this fundamental obligation is to respond to others in ways that open up rather than close off their response. This Lévinasian move gives us an ethics even more radical than Sartre’s insistence on our responsibility for our emotions. We are not only responsible for our own feelings and actions but also for others’ responses to them. As Lévinas says ‘communication would be impossible if it should have to begin in the ego, a free subject, to whom every other would be only a limitation that invited war, domination, precaution and information. To communicate is indeed to open oneself, but the openness is not complete if it is on the watch for recognition. It is complete not in the opening to the spectacle of or the recognition of the other, but in becoming a responsibility for him’.16 With Lévinas, we are also responsible for the other’s response; which entails at least taking responsibility for the effects of our actions and emotions on others as indicated in their responses. This principle couldn’t be more relevant today as we try to understand anti-American sentiment throughout much of the world. Of course this does not mean that others are not or should not be held responsible for their own actions. Rather, this hyperbolic ethics, as we might call it following Derrida, puts the burden of responsibility primarily on the subject, who is by virtue of her relations to others. And, it is this indebtedness to others and otherness that grounds a hyperbolic ethics of difference. As I argue elsewhere, however, this Lévinasian or Derridian hyperbolic ethics is not radical enough without accounting for the unconscious.17 We can articulate an ethics and/or a politics of otherness or difference only by accounting for the unconscious. In order to make responsibility radical enough, which is to say ethical enough, we need a notion of the unconscious, which makes us responsible even for motives, desires and fears unknown to us. The fundamental imperative of hyperbolic ethics is that we should never be content with ourselves. It is an imperative to be self-critical especially with our responses to others, most especially because there are those others whom we may not even recognize. We can never stop interrogating our notions of justice, democracy and freedom, which means that we can never stop asking ourselves why we do what we do, why we value what we value, why we desire what we desire, why we fear what
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we fear. Yet, without engaging the unconscious our self-interrogation will never be vigilant enough. Only by postulating the existence of the unconscious will we be humble enough to continue to question our own motives, fears and desires. Only the notion of the unconscious gives us an ethics of responsibility without sovereignty and ownership. We are responsible for what we cannot and do not control, for our unconscious fears and desires and their affective representations. In addition, we are responsible for the effects of those fears, desires and affects on others. As Lévinas says, we are responsible for the other’s response. This hyperbolic responsibility entails the imperative to question ourselves and constantly engage in self-critical hermeneutics. And, it is this critical interpretation that also gives meaning to our lives.18 Responsible ethics and politics requires that we account for the unconscious. Without doing so we risk self-righteously adhering to deadly principles in the name of freedom and justice. We risk taking the defensive posture of isolationism and individualism that protects itself by attacking others, becoming absolutely unforgiving in its attempts to silence others and cut off their ability to respond. Individualism is based on the denial of the fundamental ethical relationality and response-ability that is subjectivity. It adopts a defensive, unforgiving, unresponsive posture that denies, even fears the singularity that is the unconscious. It maintains control by denying the existence of the unconscious or unconscious motives, desires and fears. Yet, only by acknowledging our unconscious fears, phobias and desires, can we hope to be self-reflective enough to contemplate an ethical response to others. Perhaps by acknowledging the death drive within ourselves, we can begin to prevent killing and avoid the tragic choice between murder or suicide. Notes 1 See Axel Honneth, The Struggle for Recognition, trans. Joel Anderson. (Boston, MIT Press, 1996) and Charles Taylor, ‘The Politics of Recognition’ in Amy Gutman [ed], Multiculturalism (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994). 2 These insights about the discourse of multiculturalism are indebted to comments by Cynthia Willett. 3 In Witnessing: Beyond Recognition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001) I argue that Charles Taylor and Maria Lugones present such models. 4 Some examples of theorists of misrecognition with whom I engage in Witnessing are Judith Butler, Julia Kristeva, and Jacques Lacan. 5 For example, see Juila Kristeva, Powers of Horror, trans. Leon Roudiez. (New York, Columbia University Press, 1982) and Judith Butler, The Psychic Life of Power (Stanford, Stanford University Press, 1997). 6 Witnessing: Beyond Recognition. 7 Frei Otto, ‘Basic Concepts and Survey of Tensile Structures’ in Frei Otto [ed], Tensile Structures Volume 2, trans. D.Ben-Yaakov and T.Pelz (Cambridge MA, MIT Press, 1969), p. 15.
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8 Otto, ‘Basic Concepts and Survey of Tensile Structures’, p. 12. 9 See Shoshana Felman & Dori Laub, Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History (New York, Routledge, 1992). 10 Felman & Laub, Testimony, p. 61. 11 Felman & Laub, Testimony, p. 62. 12 In my forthcoming book, The Colonization of Psychic Space (2004), I identify this internalization of meaning as a form of sublimation. 13 Andrew Meltzoff and Keith Moore, ‘Imitation of facial and Manual Gestures by Human Neonates’, Science 198 (1977), pp. 75–78, see also ‘Newborn Infants Imitate Adult Facial Gestures’, Child Development 54 (1983), pp. 702–709. 14 Shaun Gallagher and Andrew Meltzoff, ‘The Earliest Sense of Self and Others: Merleau-Ponty and Recent Developmental Studies’, Philosophical Psychology 9: 211–36 (1996), p. 212 and p. 227. 15 Eva Kittay, ‘Welfare, Dependency, And a Public Ethic of Care’, in Social Justice, 25:1, Issue 71, (Spring 1998), p. 131. 16 Emmanuel Lévinas, Otherwise Than Being, trans. Alphonso Lingis, (Boston, Nijoff, 1991), p. 119. 17 See my forthcoming book The Colonization of Psychic Space (2004). 18 For an elaboration of this thesis, see my forthcoming book, The Colonization of Psychic Space, (2004).
Kelly Oliver is Professor of Philosophy and Women’s Studies at Stony Brook University. She has written six books and edited eight books, including Reading Kristeva (Indiana University Press, 1993), Witnessing: Beyond Recognition (University of Minnesota Press, 2001), Noir Anxiety (University of Minnesota Press, 2002), and Between the Social and the Psyche: Psychoanalytic Social Theory (Rowman & Littlefield, 2002). She is the author of over fifty articles on Phenomenology, Contemporary French Philosophy, and Feminism. Currently she is finishing a book entitled The Colonization of Psychic Space: A Psychoanalytic Social Theory of Oppression, forthcoming from University of Minnesota Press.
‘Laboratories’ Against Holocaust Denial—Or, the Limits of Postmodern Theory Elizabeth Jane Bellamy
Pierre Vidal-Naquet, a French historian of antiquity and also a highly influential voice against Holocaust denial, takes French historiography to task for its ‘protracted silence’ both on the Holocaust and on Holocaust ‘revisionist’ history. Concerning its silence on the latter, he writes: Must one exclude […] the question of ‘revisionism’? Such a pushing aside would seem to me both legitimate and regrettable. It is legitimate in the sense that ‘revisionism’ embodies neither a historical school nor a type of historical discourse, but instead the pure and simple suppression of what constitutes an object of history. Some have even spoken of ‘revisionist’ writings as ‘intellectual excrement’ I accept this expression, but laboratories do exist in which analysis of excrement is performed. Since when are lies, falsehoods, myths, and the imaginary no longer objects of historical study?1 Vidal-Naquet boldly calls for integrating contemporary ‘revisionism’ into historical analysis as the most effective strategy for countering its lies, falsehoods and myths. Openly historicizing and exposing the lies of ‘revisionism’, far from undermining, actually preserves the hard work and integrity of Holocaust historiography. All too often, intellectuals have chosen silence as the only appropriate response to the outrages of Holocaust denial.2 Thus, one cannot fail to be impressed by the courage of Vidal-Naquet’s call for more historical ‘laboratories’ to analyze the excrement of ‘revisionism’ —his call for a new directness in confronting Holocaust denial as the suppression of history.3 My essay offers scattered speculations on postmodern theory’s at best limited potential for serving as such a laboratory. I devote a section each to selected passages in Lyotard’s The Differend and Dori Laub’s summary of an interview he conducted at Yale’s Fortunoff Archive for Holocaust Testimonies in Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History. Though written from within different disciplines (postmodern philosophy and psychiatry, respectively), and with widely divergent investments in postmodern theory, what Lyotard’s book and Laub’s case history have in common is that
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they intersect—however marginally—with the phenomenon of Holocaust denial. To read these two examples against the grain of Vidal-Naquet’s call parallax ISSN 1353–4645 print/ISSN 1460–700X online © 2004 Taylor & Francis Ltd http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals DOI: 10.1080/1353464032000171127
for more laboratories to analyze ‘revisionism’ is to bring into sharper focus, first, just how intractable the differend is between postmodern theory and Holocaust historiography—and, second, how predictably (not to mention regrettably) postmodern theory reaches its limit in confronting Holocaust denial. i. Vidal-Naquet’s laboratory, Lyotard’s differend, and melancholia Much current postmodern discourse—including the burgeoning field of what has come to be known as trauma studies—should heed Vidal-Naquet’s urgent appeal to take Holocaust deniers more seriously, i.e. to confront Holocaust denial with more programmatic determination and anticipatory frequency as part of its ongoing engagements with trauma ‘after Auschwitz’. To be sure, one cannot speak of postmodern theory as having any kind of unified ‘sensibility’. But one shared sensibility has been its oft-noted discontents with the discipline of history —discontents that render it an unpromising laboratory for confronting Holocaust denial.4 This is as ironic as it is regrettable. Although, as Vidal-Naquet argues, contemporary French historiography has sustained a ‘protracted silence’ on the subject of the Holocaust, the same cannot be said for much current postmodern theory— particularly in France. For well over a decade now a highly influential strand of postmodern discourse has preoccupied itself with such key concepts as memory, forgetting, disavowal, impossible mourning, the inarticulable, etc., in its efforts to trace the contours of trauma ‘after Auschwitz’ —efforts that often engage with the historical event of the Holocaust.5 In its most rigorous form, postmodern theory constitutes an ethical avoidance of premature argumentative closure—what Christopher Norris usefully summarizes as ‘a form of extreme epistemological scepticism’.6 But this same rigorous refusal of closure has also had the effect of postponing the entry of certain crucial historical facts into its discourse. The consequence of postmodern theory’s rigorous postponement of facts—its tendency to devalue historical positivism as naïve —is particularly embarrassing and disturbing when the facts placed under discursive erasure are the same well-established facts about the Holocaust that ‘revisionists’ have attempted to deny.
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On this point I will have more to say later. But, returning momentarily to the discipline of history, I wish to focus on Vidal-Naquet’s Assassins of Memory (cited in my third footnote), a landmark countering of French Holocaust révisionnisme first published in France in 1987, as an excellent blueprint for when and how to confront Holocaust denial. The book consists of five essays written between 1980–87 as a response to French ‘revisions’ of Holocaust history, specifically the work of Paul Rassinier and Robert Faurisson. In 1977, Rassinier’s Debunking the Genocide Myth dismissed survivor testimony as untrustworthy gossip. 7 But it was Faurisson’s 1978 Le Monde essay, ‘The Problem of the Cas Chambers or the Rumor of Auschwitz’, that took Holocaust denial to an insidiously sophisticated new level when he argued that the installations described by witnesses would have been technologically incapable of mass gassings.8 In his preface, Vidal-Naquet scrupulously establishes the boundaries of his essays against Holocaust denial in ways that can be highly instructive for anyone uncertain under what circumstances to counter the ‘revisionists’: ‘I have thus imposed on myself the following rule: one can and should enter into discussion concerning the “revisionists” […]. But one should not enter into debate with the “revisionists” […]. I have nothing to reply to them and will not do so. Such is the price to be paid for intellectual coherence’.9 In other words, to enter into dialogue with the revisionists is to be sucked into a rhetorical game of proving what one already knows to be true.10 But Vidal-Naquet asserts that to enter into debate concerning the ‘revisionists’ is a different matter altogether. It is to maintain a protective vigilance over the facts of the Nazi genocide: to counter Holocaust denial, ‘[w]hat is needed is ceaseless work, the establishment of facts’.11 The task of, in effect, directing a laboratory to deal with the excrement of Holocaust denial is grim and mentally draining, prompting Vidal-Naquet to describe his book as ‘melancholic’.12 I foreground this description because although much theoretical/analytical attention has been paid to the melancholia of survivors bearing witness to Holocaust trauma—and although, in the case of the work of Dominick LaCapra, valuable and overdue attention has been given to the melancholic ‘acting out’ of historians working on Holocaust trauma13 —little attention is paid to the melancholia of those, like Vidal-Naquet, who do the dirtywork of confronting the loathsomeness of Holocaust denial and its own ‘acting out’ in the face of long-established historical fact. For Vidal-Naquet, not entering into direct dialogue with the ‘revisionists’ is the price of intellectual coherence. But melancholia is the price to be paid for doing what must be done—i.e. necessarily entering into discussion concerning the ‘revisionists’ as the best means of silencing them. Because of its uneasy relationship with history, much postmodern theory ‘after Auschwitz’, as I argued earlier, is not well-positioned for entering into discussion concerning the ‘revisionists’. Again, the work of Vidal-Naquet is a useful reference point for understanding just how disappointingly positioned it is. In his Assassins of Memory, he cogently warns of the dangers associated with
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using ‘Auschwitz’ as a synecdoche for all the death camps, claiming that carelessly conceived invocations of Auschwitz (such as one often encounters in postmodern theory) can only play into the hands of ‘revisionists’ like Faurisson, who identify Auschwitz not as a site of mass gassings but solely as ‘a great industrial center, specializing in the production of synthetic rubber’.14 In response to Adorno’s oft-cited appropriation of ‘Auschwitz’ as an instance of ‘negative dialectics’, Vidal-Naquet argues: ‘Absolute negativity? Does such a concept have any meaning for a historian? […] Auschwitz juxtaposed an extermination camp (Birkenau), a work camp (Auschwitz I) and a factory-camp for the production of synthetic rubber (Auschwitz III Monowitz). The site of absolute negativity would rather be Treblinka or Belzec’.15 In other words, the gassings that took place at Auschwitz-Birkenau are so readily denied by the revisionists’ insistence on Auschwitz III Monowitz as the ‘real’ Auschwitz that Vidal-Naquet wonders if the killing centres of Treblinka or Belzec, sites of total, exclusive annihilation, might not be more appropriate ‘synecdoches’ for Nazi atrocities. Vidal-Naquet’s warnings about deploying Auschwitz as a synecdoche for the Holocaust are intended, among other things, to protect the goals of positivist historiography—a discipline, ‘after Auschwitz’, from which postmodernism has increasingly become alienated. A notable, problematic postmodern focus on the Holocaust is Jean-François Lyotard’s depiction of Auschwitz as a ‘paraexperience’, a (non)Hegelian ‘non-negatable negative’.16 At its best, Lyotard’s postmodern designation of Auschwitz as a ‘non-negatable negative’ is a rigorous attempt to preserve the paradoxical space of an historical event so traumatic that, for many, it eludes articulation: for Lyotard, the circumlocutions of postmodern discourse are the only means of communicating the impossibility of bearing witness ‘after Auschwitz’. But at its worst, Lyotard’s designation of Auschwitz as a ‘non-negatable negative’, his rigorous insistence on Auschwitz as inarticulable, is the interstice where history is evacuated and Holocaust denial can flourish. We should be wary of the ease with which the sophistication of Lyotard’s conception of Auschwitz as a ‘non-negatable negative’ is easily exploitable by the Holocaust deniers’s crude claim that Auschwitz is indeed a ‘negative’, i.e. an event which never took place. The situation is rendered even more problematic when we linger over the fact that much of Lyotard’s signature postmodern discourse, including his wellknown concept of ‘the differend’ as ‘the unstable state and instant of language wherein something which must be able to be put into phrases cannot yet be’,17 takes specific shape around the claims of the French Holocaust ‘revisionist’ Faurisson. Lyotard particularly seizes on Faurisson’s notorious claim that he has never found a single former deportee capable of proving that he/she had really seen a gas chamber. The starting point for Lyotard’s ethical postmodernism is to leave everything open to question—including, unfortunately, the revisionist ‘question’ of the existence of gas chambers as a primary illustration of ‘the differend’ that occurs
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between survivors testifying to mass gassings and those who want to deny that such gassings took place. Lyotard paraphrases Faurisson’s claim that he has never found anyone who could prove the existence of a gas chamber thus: ‘The only acceptable proof that it [a gas chamber] was used to kill is that one died from it. But if one is dead, one cannot testify that it is on account of the gas chamber’.18 Lyotard is no ‘revisionist’: he pointedly accuses Faurisson of ‘“playing” another genre of discourse, one in which conviction, or, the obtainment of a consensus over a defined reality, is not at stake’ —as it is, say, for Holocaust historiography.19 But it requires so much patience and philosophical persistence to separate the layers of Lyotard’s argument (particularly in those eerie instances when his summary of Faurisson’s position seems to merge with his own voice) that careless readers, or readers with an obvious agenda like Holocaust denial, might read The Differend as a prestigious philosophical purveyor of the ‘myth’ of the gas chambers. The ‘revisionists’, always looking for a debate, need go no further than The Differend to find what they could view as French philosophy’s endorsement of Faurisson. I agree with the observation of Geoffrey Hartman (much of whose recent work falls under the general rubric of Holocaust studies) that postmodern discourse cannot be held accountable when its rigorous efforts to avoid premature argumentative closure are either misinterpreted or misappropriated: ‘Quite mistakenly, the vicious ideological turn that is taken by Holocaust deniers is sometimes associated with deconstruction’s care in avoiding premature or forced closure, a care which has no ideological motive but is directed against an anxiety that produces shortcuts to meaning’.20 But, Hartman’s observation notwithstanding, what postmodern theory can be held accountable for are the eerie, uncanny ways in which its consortings with trauma ‘after Auschwitz’ sometimes have the effect of colluding with Holocaust denial. In light of Vidal-Naquet’s Assassins of Memory, Lyotard has committed two faults. Not only has his definition of the differend weirdly allowed him to be sucked into debate with the ‘revisionists’, he has also failed to provide any necessary commentary concerning the ‘revisionists’ —commentary that could convince his readers that he too experiences the requisite melancholia that VidalNaquet feels when he confronts Holocaust denial. To echo Hartman, postmodern theory seeks to postpone the affect of ‘anxiety’ —the anxiety, that is, that results in premature argumentative closure. But for Holocaust historians, it is not a matter of the postponement of affect, but rather the willingness to experience another affect, i.e. the affect of melancholia—particularly as an emotional aid for keeping watch over established historical facts. Lyotard’s The Differend may have no ideological motive. But, in its fixation on the revisionist debate, it does have an obligation to make it clear that mass gassing has long been the carefully documented starting point for much Holocaust historiography. In his foreword to his English translation of Assassins of Memory, Jeffrey Mehlman shrewdly observes: ‘If it was surely an exaggeration to pretend with the revisionists that the gas chamber “question” had become a “touchstone” of
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French culture, it was nonetheless a telling sign of the times that a philosopher as attuned to the winds of change as Jean-François Lyotard could fix on the revisionist debate as the prime example of the language game he began thematizing as Le Différend’.21 Mehlman’s observation gets to the heart of the uncanny collusions between postmodern theory and certain discourses of ‘revisionism’. I conclude this section with a brief glance at Giorgio Agamben’s Remnants of Auschwitz, one chapter of which could be construed as postmodern theory’s most recent attempt to compensate for The Differend’s unfortunate paraphrase of Faurisson’s claim that he has never found anyone who could prove the existence of a gas chamber (i.e. ‘If one is dead, one cannot testify that it is on account of the gas chamber’). Reaching into the jargon of the death camps, Agamben devotes a chapter to the Muselmann, the living dead of the camps, the staggering corpses ‘mark[ing] the threshold between the human and the inhuman’.22 In defiance of Faurisson, the Muselmann is one who really has seen the gas chamber. As Agamben writes, ‘[T]he one who cannot bear witness is the true witness […]’.23 He is the one who can testify that he is dead on account of the gas chamber. Though Agamben repairs some of the damage done by Lyotard’s paraphrase of Faurisson, his Muselmann never seems to be more than a postmodern trope, defined within a discursive space that evacuates history. Thus, we should not be all that surprised by Agamben’s announcement in his preface that ‘the problem of the historical, material, technical, bureaucratic, and legal circumstances in which the extermination of the Jews took place has been sufficiently clarified’.24 At its best, Agamben’s statement reveals his implicit contempt for Holocaust denial and its suppression of history. But at its worst, in a world where Holocaust denial remains all too persistent, this sweeping gesture of argumentative space-clearing is irresponsible. Historians of the Holocaust have indeed clarified the circumstances in which the extermination of the Jews occurred. But as Holocaust denial persists in its suppression of history, what is also needed is, to echo Vidal-Naquet, more ‘ceaseless work’, the relentless verification of even more facts. In short, what is needed to establish a laboratory to counter Holocaust denial are fewer postmodern bracketings of history and more ceaseless work on the history of the Holocaust. ii. A tale of four chimneys In 1992, Shoshana Felman, a Yale professor of comparative literature, and Dori Laub, M.D., a Yale professor of psychiatry, co-authored a highly influential volume, Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History. This book, praised on its jacket cover as presenting the first ‘theory of testimony’, is a highly ambitious, interdisciplinary merging of literary criticism, the visual arts, psychiatry and history. Enjoying a wide readership within academic circles over the last decade, Testimony has, among other things, played a key role
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in bringing Holocaust studies into dynamic proximity with recent trends in postmodernism concerned with theorizing trauma ‘after Auschwitz’. In this section, I focus on an anecdote from Dori Laub’s chapter, ‘Bearing Witness, or the Vicissitudes of Listening’. As an interviewer of survivors who give testimony to the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies at Yale, Laub summarizes the remarkable videotaped testimony of an Auschwitz survivor: She was relating her memories as an eyewitness of the Auschwitz uprising; a sudden intensity, passion and color were infused into the narrative. She was fully there. ‘All of a sudden,’ she said, ‘we saw four chimneys going up in flames, exploding. The flames shot into the sky, people were running. It was unbelievable.’ There was a silence in the room, a fixed silence against which the woman’s words reverberated loudly, as though carrying along an echo of the jubilant sounds exploding from behind barbed wires […].25 Laub also relates that months later, at a conference of historians, psychoanalysts and artists to whom the videotaped testimony of the woman was replayed, the historians objected to inaccuracies in her narrative of the Auschwitz uprising. The historical fact is that only one chimney was blown up, not four. Also, the historians pointed out that absent from the witness’s narrative was the fact that the revolt was easily put down: the Jewish underground was betrayed by the Polish resistance, which had promised aid in the rebellion, but ultimately failed to do so. Laub briefly acknowledges the historians’ concern that the facts were either wrong or crucially absent in the survivor’s testimony: from their point of view, ‘[i]t was utterly important to remain accurate, lest the revisionists in history discredit everything’.26 Laub drops the spectre of revisionism as quickly as he identifies it as the reason for the historians’ objections, but I will return to this critical moment in Laub’s narrative later in my essay. For now, I will demonstrate how Laub’s bracketing of the spectre of revisionism clears the space for him to expand on his therapeutic handling of trauma —a gesture of space-clearing also in accordance with recent trends in postmodernism to trope away from history. The remainder of Laub’s chapter sub-section, ‘Testimony and Historical Truth’, consists of his eloquent and moving defence of the validity of the woman’s testimony as it stands. As one of the woman’s interviewers, Laub counters the historians’ concern for inaccuracy by arguing for a subjective, psychoanalytic ‘truth’ that is just as meaningful as historical fact: ‘The woman was testifying not to the number of the chimneys blown up, but to something else, more radical, more crucial: the reality of an unimaginable occurrence. One chimney blown up in Auschwitz was as incredible as four. The number mattered less than the fact of the occurrence [of Jewish armed revolt against overwhelming odds]’.27
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Laub also counters the historians by arguing that the witness’s silences are just as meaningful as her spoken words—and not just the ‘fixed silence’ occurring after the woman relates her memory of the flaming chimneys. During their interview, Laub had pieced together that the survivor, without her awareness, had most likely been a member of ‘the Canada commando’, inmates chosen by the Nazis to sort out the belongings of those who had been gassed. When pressed about the nature of her work, she became silent, and Laub did not pursue the topic further, concluding that he had reached the limits of her knowledge, the intractable moment of the return of the repressed: My attempt as interviewer and as listener was precisely to respect—not to upset, not to trespass—the subtle balance between what the woman knew and what she did not, or could not, know. It was only at the price of this respect, I felt, this respect of the constraints and of the boundaries of silence, that what the woman did know in a way that none of us did […] could come forth and could receive, indeed, a hearing [original emphasis].28 In an oft-cited passage in The Differend that provides useful commentary from within postmodern theory on Laub’s respect for the woman’s silence, Lyotard foregrounds the importance of silence as relates to the horrors of Auschwitz: ‘The silence that surrounds the phrase Auschwitz was the extermination camp is not a state of mind, it is a sign that something remains to be phrased which is not, something which is not determined […]. Its name marks the confines wherein historical knowledge sees its competence impugned’ [original emphasis].29 For Lyotard, there are no facts—only ‘signs’ as ‘[t]he silence that surrounds the phrase Auschwitz was the extermination camp’, i.e. the silence of the indeterminate boundary between, to quote Laub again, ‘what the woman knew and what she did not, or could not, know’. What she both knew and did not know was that the belongings she sorted out were all that was left of the thousands who were gassed. What she both knew and did not know was, to echo Lyotard, ‘Auschwitz was the extermination camp’. Laub, aware that he is not just an interviewer but also a listener, was determined not to trespass on the woman’s silence: ‘She was testifying not simply to historical facts, but to the very secret of survival and of resistance to extermination. The historians could not hear, I thought, the way in which her silence was itself part of her testimony […]’.30 Within trauma studies, it has become virtually axiomatic that any survivor’s bearing witness to a trauma requires an empathic listener as the survivor struggles to come to terms with the past. At these junctures, of far less usefulness is the historian-as-narcissist who, failing to heed Lyotard’s cautionary words that Auschwitz ‘marks the confines wherein historical knowledge sees its competence impugned’, seeks to expunge the trauma by speaking too authoritatively for the victim, filling in the gaps with historical explanation. Laub insists that one should not interfere with the process
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of bearing witness: ‘[…] it might be useful, sometimes, not to know too much […]. [K]nowledge should not hinder or obstruct the listening with foregone conclusions and preconceived dismissals […]’.31 In such a scheme, the witness’s trauma is itself part of Holocaust history. A burgeoning trend within postmodernism ‘after Auschwitz’ is a theorizing of the traumatic ‘limit-event’, calling for an attentiveness to the belatedness of memory (in many cases, a return to Freud’s Nachfräglichkeit), and a listening to the disarticulated, the unsaid, the unimaginable that haunts any attempt to work through trauma. Laub’s emphasis on the urgent need to listen empathically to the truth-value of the Auschwitz survivor’s silences is, among other things, a vivid example of Lyotard’s postmodern theorizing of Auschwitz as ‘a sign that something remains to be phrased which is not’ —or of Maurice Blanchot’s imperative to ‘keep watch over absent meaning’ after Auschwitz.32 Laub’s case history can also usefully be read in conjunction with Lawrence Langer’s recent studies of oral survivor testimony as possessing its own kind of truth-value—as, in effect, comprising its own discursive genre of even greater authenticity than written memoirs.33 When Laub alludes paradoxically to ‘what the woman knew and what she did not, or could not, know’, we can think of Langer’s ‘ruins of memory’, defined not as a cathartic but an unresolved, irreparable, inconsolable memory. Langer’s ‘ruins of memory’, mnemic fragments that fail to coalesce, signal a traumatic knowledge as the impossibility of bearing witness, a pain endured that cannot be shared. Laub’s attentiveness to his interviewee’s ‘ruins of memory’ is a practical performance of Langer’s claim that within the genre of survivor testimony, the interviewer/analyst should become a secondary witness through the labour of listening that exposes the self to empathic understanding. In this context, I would like to unpack some of the implications of Laub’s claim that the historians watching the woman’s videotaped testimony ‘could not hear, I thought, the way in which her silence was itself part of her testimony’. An imperative gaining considerable cachet in postmodern theory in general, and trauma studies in particular, within the last decade has been the call for an ‘ethical’ listening to the other, a vigilant listening as the only means to an empathic understanding that does not trespass on traumatic suffering—a listening that allows traumatic silences to ‘speak’.34 Amid these postmodern calls for an ‘ethical’ listening, the discipline of history has more often than not been excluded from this ethical register. Throughout his Preempting the Holocaust, Langer continually calls for an awareness of the limitations of fact, evidence, and referent.35 Even more emphatically, the disciplines of literary studies, cultural studies and critical theory have tended to move in the direction of an outright displacement of historical and factual specificity in order to clear space for other levels of analysis, such as the effacement of subjectivity, discourses of the ‘impossible’, etc. —levels of analysis that, to quote again from Lyotard, ‘mark the confines wherein historical knowledge sees its competence impugned’. Within
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postmodern discourse, Holocaust historians determined to pinpoint the precise number of those who died in the Nazi genocide (or historians, observing Laub’s interview of the woman who survived Auschwitz and insisting on the fact that not four but one chimney blew up during the Auschwitz uprising) are vulnerable to parody. For Lyotard, what can be inscribed in memory—the number of the dead and similar historical ‘facts’ —can all too readily be obscured by the forgetting that is loss and effacement. Hence, in much postmodern discourse, a troping away from the historical is itself an ethical move. I now wish to return to my earlier discussion of Dori Laub’s countering of the historians’ objections to the inaccuracies of his interviewee’s survivor testimony for the Fortunoff Archive. Having read Laub’s narrative along with the grain of certain trends within postmodern discourse, I now propose to read Laub’s countering of the historians against the grain of Vidal-Naquet’s work—his refusal to bracket Holocaust ‘revisionism’, and his call for more laboratories for openly historicizing and exposing ‘revisionist’ lies. Laub’s therapeutic goal involves not factfinding but rather a refusal to interfere with the process of the testimony: ‘In this respect, it might be useful, sometimes, not to know too much’.36 In other words, to have inserted historical and factual correctives (i.e. the actual number of chimneys that blew up, or the fact that the rebellion was quickly put down) into the woman’s testimony would have been an act of interference with psychoanalytic ‘truth’. Laub further claims that had he known more historical details of the Auschwitz uprising, and had he then further questioned the woman, ‘I might have had an agenda of my own that might have interfered with my ability to listen, and to hear […]. The listener must be quite well informed if he is to be able to hear—to be able to pick up the cues. Yet knowledge should not hinder or obstruct the listening with foregone conclusions […]’.37 Here, Laub justifies the ‘ethical’ listening that, as I have earlier discussed, is so privileged within theorizings of trauma and testimony. Although Laub contends that ‘[t]he listener must be quite well informed if he is to be able to hear […]’, he also reserves the right to alternate between, on the one hand, ‘picking up the cues’ and, on the other, preserving the inaccuracies and silences in the testimony as they stand in order to maintain the integrity of the dialogic, therapeutic space between analyst and interviewer. Laub insists that he is without ‘an agenda of my own’. But it should be pointed out that he does reserve the right to slide in and out of history, deciding when to leave the historical register and shift to the therapeutic. (At one point, he actively inserts historical fact into the survivor’s testimony, asking her: ‘Does the term ‘Canada commando’ mean anything to [you]?’38) Put another way, his ‘ethical’ listening gives him the luxury of selective ignorance: when it comes to respecting the trauma of bearing witness, to echo Laub, it ‘might be useful, sometimes, not to know too much’ [emphasis added]. In such a scheme, it is the historians who fail as ‘ethical’ listeners: ‘The historians could not hear, I thought, the way in which her silence was itself part of her testimony’.39
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The point I wish to emphasize is that what gets crowded out of Laub’s emphasis on ‘ethical’ listening is another ethical imperative, namely Vidal-Naquet’s urging that ‘one can and should enter into discussion concerning the “revisionists’” whenever the topic arises—an imperative that psychiatry need not exempt itself from. The historians in Laub’s narrative were concerned that the ‘revisionists’ can all too readily exploit the inaccuracies of the woman’s testimony as part of their strategy to discredit all survivor testimony. I would argue that Laub, evidently concluding that the historians were taking the threat of ‘revisionist’ slander too seriously, prematurely forecloses on their concerns in favour of an argument—admittedly compelling within a psychoanalytic context—that historical accuracy must occasionally cede place to the therapeutic requirements for an ‘ethical’ listening to the trauma of bearing witness. At this juncture, we should not allow ourselves to be easily distracted by setting up a battle of the disciplines between history and psychiatry. Rather, I want to linger over the differend arising between Laub’s axiom that, in a therapeutic context at least, ‘it might be useful, sometimes, not to know too much’, and Vidal-Naquet’s axiom that what is needed to counter the revisionists is ‘ceaseless work, the establishment of facts’. This differend could have at least been partially dissolved had Laub resisted the impulse that so frequently arises among intellectuals when the subject of ‘revisionism’ rears its ugly head—i.e. the impulse, as has been discussed, to quickly reject Holocaust denial as so distasteful, so outrageous, so anti-intellectual that it scarcely deserves mention. Laub’s ultimate disinvestment in the historians’ concern about ‘revisionism’ is understandable given his priority to enlighten readers about the difficulties of bearing witness to a trauma. But it should be pointed out that although psychiatrists of survivors have the luxury of allowing factual inaccuracies to stand, historians of the Holocaust do not. In his haste to move past the historians’ objections to the survivor’s factual inaccuracies, Laub may have missed an opportunity to respond to Vidal-Naquet’s call for more laboratories for exposing the lies of ‘revisionism’. Holocaust historians, unlike the psychiatrists of survivors whose testimony does not accord with established facts about the Holocaust, have no choice but to attend to the outrageous slander of the revisionists. Even as Laub listens ‘ethically’ to survivor testimony, Holocaust historians must keep an eye on a key principle of ‘revisionist’ method, which, in Vidal-Naquet’s words, is to argue that ‘[a]ny direct testimony contributed by a Jew is either a lie or a fantasy’.40 Or, the historians must force themselves to ‘hear’ Faurisson’s call for an end to the ‘myth of the gas chambers’. In the context of l’affaire Faurisson, it is no mere pedantry—no mere naïve, fetishistic positivism—for historians to be concerned over the damage that could be done if the woman’s video-testimony were to be viewed by ‘revisionists’, who are all too happy to see documented confusion about how many chimneys were blown up during the Auschwitz uprising: for them, such confusion is just one step away from pronouncing the very existence of the gas chambers and the crematoria as ‘myths.’
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As Vidal-Naquet writes, the likes of Faurisson rely on the argumentative concept of ‘nonontological proof. For the ‘revisionists’, there was no genocide. In Vidal-Naquet’s paraphrase of their circular reasoning, ‘[T]he gas chambers did not exist because nonexistence was one of their attributes’.41 The only way to counteract the absurdities this ‘nonontological proof’ is, to echo Vidal-Naquet, ‘ceaseless work, the establishment of facts’. In such a scheme, the historians watching the survivor’s testimony are disturbed by her claim that four chimneys exploded because this inaccuracy plays into ‘revisionist’ assertions that survivor testimony always exaggerates—and indeed fabricates—lies about installations for gassing and cremation. The revisionists have contributed nothing to the important distinction in kind between Nazi camps. Vidal-Naquet movingly observes, ‘It was not the revisionists who taught historians that there were no gas chambers at Buchenwald […]’.42 That gassing did not take place at Buchenwald or at Dachau is the work of Holocaust historians. That gassing did take place at Auschwitz, Belzec, and Treblinka is also the work of Holocaust historians. As historians seek to ward off the distortions of revisionism, postmodern theory has very little to contribute— particularly those strands of postmodern theory that persist in weirdly echoing certain revisionist claims ‘after Auschwitz’. Notes 1 Pierre Vidal-Naquet, ‘The Holocaust’s Challenge to History’, trans. Roger ButlerBorruat, in Lawrence D.Kritzman [ed] Auschwitz and After: Race, Culture, and ‘the Jewish Question’ in France (New York: Routledge, 1995), pp. 28–29. VidalNaquet argues that French historiography has been silent on the Holocaust because it suffers from what Henry Rousso has aptly termed ‘the Vichy Syndrome’. 2 The reason behind this strategy of non-response is neatly summarized by Eric Zorn of The Chicago Tribune: ‘Respond to their allegations one by one and you appear to dignify the arguments, perhaps making it seem to the uninformed as though the existence of the Holocaust is a question serious people consider seriously, when, in fact, the revisionists have failed to make their case with virtually every active scholar in the field’ (quoted in Kenneth S.Stern, Holocaust Denial [New York: The American Jewish Committee, 1993], p. 60.). I refer the reader also to Deborah E.Lipstadt’s valuable study, Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory (New York: Free Press, 1993). 3 Vidal-Naquet does not elaborate on his intriguing metaphor of the ‘laboratory’. But it is safe to say that one such example of a laboratory for analyzing the outrages of Holocaust denial would be his own earlier essay, ‘A Paper Eichmann’, specifying eight ‘theses of revisionism’ that alert readers to some of the predictable argumentative moves of revisionist method. This useful chapter is precisely the kind of laboratory for analyzing revisionism as the necessary first step in exposing its lies (in his Assassins of Memory: Essays on the Denial of the Holocaust, trans., foreword by Jeffrey Mehlman [New York: Columbia University Press, 1992], pp. 21–25).
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4 A useful overview of postmodernism’s unease with history is Derek Attridge, Geoff Bennington, and Robert Young [eds], Post-Structuralism and the Question of History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). 5 A brief, working list of such theorists would include Agamben, Baudrillard, Blanchot, Derrida, Kofman, Kristeva, Lacoue-Labarthe, Lévinas, Lyotard and Nancy. 6 Christopher Norris, What’s Wrong With Postmodernism: Critical Theory and the Ends of Philosophy (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), p. 4. 7 Paul Rassinier, Debunking the Genocide Myth: A Study of the Nazi Concentration Camps and the Alleged Extermination of European Jewry (Torrance, CA: Noontide Press, 1977). 8 Reproduced in Faurisson’s Mémoire en defense: contre ceux qui m’accusent de falsifier l’histoire (Paris: La Vieille Taupe, 1980), pp. 73–5. 9 Preface to Assassins of Memory, pp. xxiv–xxv [original emphasis]. 10 Vidal-Naquet laments that the ‘revisionists’ attempt to force Holocaust historians into a rhetorical game—‘to enter into the world of what the Greeks called Peithô, persuasion […]’, p. 20. 11 Vidal-Naquet, Assassins of Memory, p. 137. 12 Vidal-Naquet, Assassins of Memory, p. 140. 13 See, for example, LaCapra’s Representing the Holocaust: History, Theory, Trauma (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994). 14 Vidal-Naquet, Assassins of Memory, p. 43. 15 Vidal-Naquet, Assassins of Memory, p. 97. 16 Jean-François Lyotard, The Differend: Phrases in Dispute, trans. Georges Van Den Abbeele (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), p. 88. 17 Lyotard, The Differend, p. 13. 18 Lyotard, The Differend, p. 3. 19 Lyotard, The Differend, p. 19. 20 Geoffrey Hartman, The Longest Shadow: In the Aftermath of the Holocaust (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1966), p. 8. Most likely, here Hartman may be thinking of the controversy over the young Paul de Man’s wartime journalism. 21 Vidal-Naquet, Assassins of Memory, p. xiv. 22 Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Zone Books: New York, 1999), p. 55. Among other descriptions of the Muselmann, Agamben quotes from Primo Levi’s Survival in Auschwitz and The Reawakening: ‘All the Muselmanner who finished in the gas chambers have the same story, or more exactly, have no story’, p. 44. 23 Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz, p. 150. 24 Agamben, Remnants of ‘Auschwitz, p. 11. 25 Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, M.D., Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History (New York: Routledge, 1992), p. 59. 26 Felman and Laub, Testimony, p. 60. 27 Felman and Laub, Testimony, p. 60. 28 Felman and Laub, Testimony, p. 61. 29 Lyotard, The Differend, p. 57. 30 Felman and Laub, Testimony, p. 62. 31 Felman and Laub, Testimony, p. 61.
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32 Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995), p. 40. 33 Lawrence Langer, Holocaust Testimonies: The Ruins of Memory (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991). 34 In a footnote, LaCapra takes Laub to task when he claims that the therapist must bond with the listener: ‘This statement is dubious even for the interviewer, indeed for the interviewer-cum-therapist, whose presence, however intimate, is never total […]. In any event, it is implausible for the historian or other commentator’ (LaCapra, Writing History, Writing Trauma [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001], p. 97n.10). 35 Lawrence Langer, Preempting the Holocaust (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998). 36 Felman and Laub, Testimony, p. 61. 37 Felman and Laub, Testimony, p. 61. 38 Felman and Laub, Testimony, p. 60. 39 Laub’s interview can be contextualized within ongoing controversies over the validity of survivor testimonies as reliable sources of history. In his Destruction of the European Jews (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961) historian Raul Hilburg, for example, was inclined not to use survivor testimonies. But the literary critic Langer has argued, ‘Though we have the option of rejecting such testimony as a form of history, we also face the challenge of enlarging our notion of what history may be, what the Holocaust has made of it, and how it urges us to reconsider the relation of past to present […]’ (Langer, Holocaust Testimonies, p. 109). And Hartman, also a literary critic, has written that survivor testimonies recorded long after the event ‘do not excel in providing vérités de fait or positivist history. They can be a source for historical information or confirmation, yet their real strength lies in recording the psychological and emotional milieu of the struggle for survival, not only then but also now’ (Hartman, The Longest Shadow, p. 142 [original emphasis]). For years to come, Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah (1974– 85), a documentary film made up exclusively of Holocaust testimony, is destined to occasion much debate over the usefulness of film testimony for Holocaust historians. 40 Vidal-Naquet, Assassins of Memory, p. 21. 41 Vidal-Naquet, Assassins of Memory, p. 23. 42 Vidal-Naquet, ‘The Holocaust’s Challenge to History’, p. 29.
Elizabeth Jane Bellamy is Professor of English at the University of New Hampshire, where she teaches critical theory and Early Modern British Literature. She is the author of Affective Genealogies: Psychoanalysis, Postmodernism, and the ‘Jewish Question’ After Auschwitz (University of Nebraska Press, 1997).
Mary Kelly’s Ballad of Kastriot Rexhepi: Virtual Trauma and Indexical Witness in the Age of Mediatic Spectacle Griselda Pollock
On 11 December 2001, the Santa Monica Museum of Art, Los Angeles, opened an exhibition that included a chamber orchestra and singer. The American artist Mary Kelly (1941–) created the dual event under the title: The Ballad of Kastriot Rexhepi.1 Kelly’s artwork was snaked, about head height, around the vast chamber of this cavernous gallery in an almost continuous movement of 206 feet of black-edged, Perspex-framed, grey lint. The lint—the fluff that comes off clothes and is caught in a filter in a domestic tumble dryer whose simple industrial shape became the formal unit for this work—was mounted in alternating curvilinear sections. This pattern of repeat and inversion evokes both a visual register of sound waves and images of pulse and flow as well as recalling the structure of biological life, the helix. These associations work to generate in the viewer, at the level of already abstracted systems of representation, a sense of sound and movement while none is directly part of the work’s effect. A running thread of black text—what one critic called her ‘rhythmic prose’ —holds a constant line either just below or just above the median point of the curved sections created by the exact shape of a large domestic tumble dryer in which, by the washing and drying of 4000 lbs. of specially selected black and white clothing, Kelly created the material that is the evocative medium for this work: compressed lint, the blown residual tissue or the waste and relic of daily domestic rituals, whose complex imbrication with social and psychic life have been the substance of her whole career’s faithful investigation. Thus between the given or ready-madeness of the conceptualist’s favoured choice of industrial form: the filter’s shape and screen, and the registering from domestic labour of a fragile substance that has a tenuous link with the human body which these textile fibres once touched and yet is colourless, shapeless and discarded (fig.2), Mary Kelly has created a material as medium that is both virtual and indexical, both matter and nothing, onto which to impress in painstaking manufacture with a simple printing process the blown words of historical tragedy that she wants to embed in the moving track of cultural memory and personal affect. Finally, lint’s curious variations of tone with its prevailing greyness gives a photographic effect from a distance—the photograph
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being both substitute for direct witness and index, as Barthes declared, of trauma in photography: parallax ISSN 1353–4645 print/ISSN 1460–700X online © 2004 Taylor & Francis Ltd http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals DOI: 10.1080/1353464032000171136
Truly traumatic photographs are rare, for in photography the trauma is wholly dependent on the certainty that the scene ‘really’ happened: the photographer has to be there […] Assuming this (which is, in fact already a connotation) the traumatic photograph ([…] all captured from ‘life as lived’) is the photograph about which there is nothing to say; the shock photograph is by structure insignificant: no value, no knowledge, at the limit no verbal categorization can have a hold on instituting the signification. One could imagine a kind of law: the more direct the trauma, the more difficult is the connotation; or again, the mythological effect of a photograph is inversely proportional to its traumatic effect.2 By this same token, the photograph’s impossible relation to the trauma that founds it becomes virtualized in transmission, becomes for everyone else a kind of spectacle since that guarantee of the indexical witness, the photographer was there, cannot be repeated and raised to the level of signification. Thus Mary Kelly’s production of a substance that in its minimal materiality evokes the photographic visual effect while yet bearing no image, and staging no sight again performs a constant Kelly move: to stage in a created art work a commentary on the modes of seeing and knowledge typical of our cultures and media, one face of our creation through the interface with these signifying systems as social subjects. From the an-iconic materiality freighted so economically with the traverse of public and private, labour and spectacle, the work once again probes who we are when we look, hear and see our world. A small orchestra briefly occupied the centre of the large exhibition space at the opening event, that performed a score specially created for this work by Michael Nyman. Words that were intaglio-printed onto the wave-forms of domestic lint which circled the musical ensemble were sung by Sarah Leonard, whose earlier performance of Nyman’s composition for Peter Greenaway’s Prospero’s Books (1991) with Nyman’s setting of the poetry of Paul Celan, Six Celan Songs for Low Female Voice, had led Mary Kelly to invite the composer to participate with her on this new project ‘by writing a score for an exhibition, rather like music for a silent movie’.3
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In his 2002 review of this installation/event, Ernest Larsen astutely suggests that all Kelly’s major artistic projects ‘in one way or another investigate the processes by which the subject intersects with a wider history’.4 Maurice Berger’s essay in the 2001 catalogue phrases this slightly differently. ‘The Ballad […] is the latest installment in her thirty-year aesthetic inquiry into the question of subjectivity and historical memory’.5 This work, however, takes on the current understanding of the subject’s encounter with history as ‘traumatic’. Through the distilled economy of a still profoundly reasoned conceptual aesthetic (if such can be said as not a contradiction in terms) that secretes the depth of its theoretical insight that trauma is a transmitted effect in its minimal gesture, Kelly’s work catches us in unexpected encounter not with the real, but with an ethical art making and viewing that reframes us as witnesses. Art here reworks the current theorizing of trauma, delay and belated witness, shaping it through an aesthetic economy that is simultaneously a site of art-thought: theoria. Since her arrival in London in the early 1970s after several years’ teaching in Beirut during a particularly intense period of Middle-eastern history in the later 1960s, Mary Kelly has made major cycles of artwork that have consistently pushed at the limits of Lacanian accounts of the subject to accommodate both feminist and Marxist concepts of sociality and history. At the point of intersection between the social determinations of the subject within terms of class, gender or race, there is what psychoanalysis uniquely introduces into cultural theory: both a theory of the mechanisms and processes of subjectivity itself, and a theorization of the recalcitrance of what is, psychically, irreducible to social determination of the subject precisely because there could be no subjective impact of social determination without the processes and mechanisms of subjectivity that are partially autonomous of and excessive to the social.6 The subject is logically always-already historical, situated, generationally and geographically located and overdetermined, pre-disposed as it were through its arrival in the cultural framings that anticipate its becoming and accessing to a symbolic order. Yet elements of subjectivity are always in excess of these socioeconomic and linguistic dispositions by virtue of what has to be incited in the human person to become a subject: lack, fantasy, desire, sexuality, the unconscious, and what remains from these processes, death drive, abjection, affect, melancholia and so forth. As Jacqueline Rose wrote many years ago: Like Marxism, psychoanalysis sees the mechanisms which produce those transformations [of ideological processes into human actions and beliefs] as determinant, but also as leaving something in excess. If psychoanalysis is to give an account of how women experience their path to femininity, it also insists, through the concept of the unconscious, that femininity is neither simply achieved nor is it ever complete. The political case for psychoanalysis rests on these two insights together—otherwise it would be indistinguishable from a functionalist account of the internalization of norms […] The difficulty is to pull psychoanalysis in the direction of both
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insights—towards a recognition of the fully social constitution of identity and norms, and then back again to that point of tension between ego and unconscious where they are endlessly remodelled and endlessly break.7 What is of interest in Kelly’s The Ballad, however, is not the processes of subjectivization ‘as usual’. It is those moments of exceptional encounter not between the subject and its histories, but between the subject and history, that marks the current intellectual interest in trauma which has formed the focus of Mary Kelly’s work since Mea Culpa (1999) which itself followed on from work on masculinity and war during the first Gulf War, Pro Gloria Patri (1993). The event that triggered the making of the large work, the Ballad, was an article with photograph in the Los Angeles Times on 31 July 1999. Under the banner headline War Orphan regains Name and Family, the article reported the reuniting with his parents of a twenty-two year old Albanian child, who, at eighteen months, had been left as dead when his parents escaped a Serbian attack during the Kosovan war of 1999 (fig. 1). Kelly’s oral/textual Ballad starts Unnatural spring; Metal seedpods germinating bloody flora, Anticipating the ‘expulsions’ Men in uniforms of blue and green Faces masked, And having described the terrors of hiding, starving, watching their child grow weak, stop breathing, lie still, it continues: She lays his body on the disbelieving ground; Does not scream, does not look back, but vows ‘Always, always I will think of him.’ His downy crop, his coral mien Found on the battlefield and given a Serbian name, Zoran, the child was again abandoned as the Serbians retreated. Kelly’s version: Kastriot is found sitting in a field, Battle in full thrall, a body sprawled nearby, Severed head at its side. He speaks not a word. Reclaimed by Albanians, he was renamed Lirim, before he was finally reunited with his grieving parents for whom he was their lost son ‘Kastriot’. The report of this extraordinary story with its ‘happy (?) ending’ amidst the traumatic devastation of ‘a nation razor-wired to loss’ (Kelly) was accompanied by a
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staged photograph of the tiny blonde child being kissed on both cheeks simultaneously by his parents—‘pater, mater, familia’ whose large adult heads create a dark frame around his smiling but bemused face in one of those classic images that in capturing the most banal of new photographers’ clichés unwittingly stages/images the clamp of the symbolic that this child had almost missed: his first and Kelly’s work’s final word is ‘Bab’/Dad. Kastriot Rexhepi endured a trauma to which perhaps he will never be able to give testimony. The event of almost-death, resurrection, claiming and naming, loss and abandonment, reclaiming and renaming, and finally ‘coming home’ as another reinsertion into name and family marked by the first word he spoke ‘Bab’ —Albanian for ‘Dad’ —all these highly significant and decisive moments occurred between eighteen and twenty-two months. The artist who had made Post Partum Document (1976–1982) as a study of the mutual subjectivization/ socialization of maternal and infant pair could not but notice the psychosymbolic significance of this time scale which raises the child’s story from within the events of the Kosovan war and the scourge of ethnic cleansing to a mythic status without losing its historically specific clothing. It is the artist’s work to hold the double frame of psycho-symbolic and historical time before us, the space of the social subject and the psychic space of the subject: […] I looked at the story closely: Kastriot was only eighteen months old when he was left for dead, then found and renamed by the Serbs. So he was literally learning to speak at that moment, entering into the order of language and culture, you could say, taking on a sexual identity, and in this case, a very confused ethnic identity. When he was reunited with his Albanian parents, Kastriot was twenty-two months old, usually the age when a child can put words together in an elementary syntax, and, psychologically, can project an image of himself as ‘I’. Significantly the first word Kastriot said, according to the reporter anyway, was ‘Dad’.8 It was Kelly’s politically acute and theoretically informed ‘reading’ of the everyday news report of fin-de-siècle near-catastrophe and good news in the Balkans that revealed the deep structure of myth at work in the story: ‘For me the story became less literal and more generic as I got into it. It has the structure of myth—can be told many ways without altering the underlying themes—and I wanted to reflect this in my writing’.9 Pared down to phrasings that poetically expose the mythic armature within this single story of political barbarism and genocidal atrocity, the work makes us hear the rhythm of, or register acoustically, the affect that is trauma in contemporary history which disseminates to other bodies and other homes via the immediacy and inscription of the media. In one sense, the newspaper or news programmes make us all witnesses to catastrophic events. The instantaneous beaming back of onsite footage and reportage brings the traumatic event directly into homes and countries far distant from the actual occurrence. Transmission occurs at several levels. Unlike the shock
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of discovery that attended the American and Allied troops as they entered concentration camps in 1945 and began to send home first verbal and then photographic reports that seared the viewers—remember Susan Sontag’s powerful witness to the impact of seeing these images as dividing her life into a before and an after—we have no delay in the age of satellite and digital communications.10 Embedded journalists at the centre of war as it unfolds makes everyday’s news bulletins as potentially traumatizing as that first time in 1945— yet the constant stream renders even outrageous atrocity just another news item. Sontag has long since argued that shock wears off, that ‘images anaesthetize’ and ‘repeated exposure only makes the event less real’.11 Even with these apparently unmediated, immediate floods of digitized information to which we have access, the mythic structuring of the material into narratives and stories that service deep, ideologically and culturally charged interests is inescapable. Thus the potential witness created by the image is subtly, or grossly, supplanted by a fabricated consumer patterned to receive the mythically familiar. The Barthesian analysis of myth as ‘depoliticized speech’, as the naturalization of the historical through the process of ideological reinhabiting of the borrowed and denuded signifiers of historical events raises important questions for theories of witness which are addressed in significant ways by the theorization offered through artistic translation.12 As with all Mary Kelly’s work over the last thirty years, the Ballad triangulates the question of aesthetic form, the traumatic/subjectivizing event, and the mode of subjectivizing encounter that addresses the many dimensions of theoria proposed for this volume: Theoria—to look at, to view, to travel to see, to be sent visit an oracle, to judge one thing by another, to contemplate, consider, theorize—is a seer. Hence theory is itself a kind of witnessing, a mode of seeing, considering, thinking that involves the real or metaphorical experience of sight/insight and, of course, its opposite, blindness. In the Ballad, Mary Kelly seems to offer nothing to see—in the form of image or representation. What she offers is not the story but an architecture for the transmission of the affective residue of trauma precisely in order to create an order of theoretical seeing, insight, into that which we are called to witness, but which the mythic translation by our media and cultural apparatuses of daily exposure render so already known that it ceases to instigate reflection or affective response. The family under stress in the crisis of war is the very symbol of destruction as Picasso suggested in his response to the sight of the first photographic images of the German death camps. His painting Charnel House, (1946, Chicago Art Institute) deployed the artistic handwriting created for his visual scream, Guernica, (1937), monochrome Cubist faceting, to depict the father, mother and child of a shattered family home: recuperatively centring the entire Nazi project to destroy all humanizing structures and particularly the affective bonds of family precisely on its most sentimental antithesis. In the newspaper photograph that serves visually to anchor the sentimental resolution of the fairy tale of a lost child returned to its proper parents, country, name,
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identity, Mary Kelly catches a more troubling ambivalence. She registers another resonance or tone that can be aesthetically explored, as she has so often done, by abandoning the iconic site of mythification—the mother/child (Post Partum Document), the older woman (Interim), the hero (Pro Gloria Patri) for the registers of sound and substance that work together between abstraction, formality and conceptualism to hold both affect and understanding. The signifying economy created by the now embedded legacies of Minimalism and Conceptualism exceed the museal narratives of a succession of styles to register the battle with, and distance from, the dominant registers of visual representation and popular narrative that enclose us in the mediatic spectacle of global information and entertainment. These show us things before which we are made spectators or worse, consumers but never witnesses. To wrench the encounter —the traumatic event—into a relation of humanizing knowledge—what Bracha Ettinger might call co-affection— requires a calculated impoverishment at the level of spectacle and a displacement of the mythic to other registers of acoustic and visual memory that can use affective response to generate understanding. In a work of 1999 that initiated the use of printed pressed lint, Mea Culpa, Mary Kelly showed four works comprising 16–20 units combined to form one panel assembled from four to five sections 17×190×2 inches (4 sections), 17×235×2 inches (5 sections). The process is printmaking (monotype) using the filter screen of a domestic dryer on which in low relief intaglio print a line of words is placed so as to be impressed onto the lint as its accumulates in a drying cycle. The four sections deal with four major traumatic events: 1. Khmer Rouge massacres in Phnom Penh 1975; 2. The bombing of the refugee camps Shatila and Sabra in Beirut by Israeli air force in 1982; 3. The massacre of Muslim refugees in Sarajewo by Bosnian Serbs in 1996; 4. The Truth and Reconciliation commission in post-apartheid South Africa in 1997. Each historical trauma or event is marked by a cryptic line of words that run just below centre of repeating curved shapes created by the filter’s ready-made form —that are grouped in what the artist names a musical form of four-four time: ‘a beat which holds back on both the speed and lyricism of the piece. You might have noticed that a work always ends on four, event if the narrative stops before then. The rhythm determines how the spectator walks through it […]’. To which the interviewer adds ‘Four-four being a march time as well’.13 Each of the narratives printed onto the compressed lint, apart from the confessional South African report, focalizes through the use of a third person pronoun: ‘she’. In each case this ‘she’ sees or hears something. In Phnom Penh 1975, ‘She watched the soldiers in a rice paddy beat her daughter with the butts of their rifles until she was dead. Then she had headaches and trouble with her eyes. To distract herself, she worked at the bridge of her nose with a knife. When
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the pain subsided, she could no longer see’. Sarajewo 1992 reads: ‘A few bathroom tiles and the smell of burning: nothing else left. Probing the ashes she retrieved a family photograph. Their faces scratched out with a drill bit. She rocked back and forth on her heels. What shall we do? Slit their throats said her four yearold son’.14 These abbreviated narratives carry the mark of their origin in newspaper or television reports stripped of all sensationalism and sentimentalization with an analyst’s understanding of the psychological import of casual utterance. Mary Kelly tells interviewer Juli Carson that her work often begins with a photographic and verbal archive, a kind of cultural ethnography in which both what is said around her is listened to as an analyst might for the core elements, the trigger phrases, the deep psychic valences. But she is also ‘on the couch’ responding to the noise of her archive with the selective attention that marks it with her own desire and psychic urgencies. In this case, Kelly collected material on war-related atrocities, which themselves lured the artist’s personal rather than dispassionate interest, and activated her memory perhaps of time in Beirut and growing up through the Vietnam War, the first war that was so daily brought home to American televisions.15 But also her attention was drawn to aspects of intense experience: fear of losing one’s child. The mutilated family photograph came this way from an accumulated archive, but the South African episode was prompted by a report from the Truth and Reconciliation commission overheard on the television but from another room. It is this relation of chance encounter—overhearing—with the trace of the traumatic events occurring somewhere else and to someone else that marks the distance between the failure of witnessing that is reportage and the new creation of the conditions of witnessing that is the art work in order to refute the current overemphasis on authenticity and testimony. Reflecting on the theoretical underpinnings of this position, Juli Carson pointed out that Mary Kelly is not intending to present the ‘reality’ of war atrocities and thus fall prey to the ethical dangers of representation. Mary Kelly tells her: I think there is a mistaken idea that trauma has to do with an immediate experience—when something happens to you. We usually attribute a certain authenticity to the account of survivors, although the ‘accident’ is shaped in tandem with a person’s particular sexual disposition or phantasy life. Following Freud’s contention that it isn’t the real event, but the psychic effect that produces trauma, I started to think about the impact that atrocities have even when they are received second hand through the media. The way they seem to induce different forms of identification with the victim, whether they are hysterical or megalomaniacal, I’m not sure, but I couldn’t deny the traumatic effects of these representations and how they filter into the everyday.
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Mary Kelly describes how as part of the long gestation of the work Mea Culpa, she herself staged a photograph of her own body as if dead, shrouded in sheets: ‘I needed to act out this tendency to experience the unimaginable vicariously in order to get some distance from it’. Juli Carson glosses this: That’s exactly how Lacan describes trauma, as a missed encounter with the Real. To actually have that encounter would, of course, be the death of the subject. What I means, is, to look beyond the spectacle of representation, of language, behind that screen upon which we project everyone of our lifesustaining (traumatic) phantasies, is to encounter that, in fact, there is ‘nothing’ there. Contrary to claims made in some recent cultural theorizations of the Lacanian Real, that’s an ‘encounter’ from which you do not walk away.16 Mary Kelly speaks of the displacement from the body in the image, the identification with the image of the victim which renders death a mere performance rather than this brush with ‘nothing’, the annihilation of the subject, and talks about wanting to find a means to ‘translate’ the material onto which the issue is displaced into a process of making the non-iconic image. I cannot stress enough the import of this attention to the relations between coming to terms with the process of making and its materiality which forms a typical part of any engagement with conceptual post-minimalist art practice and the ethical dimension of her practice in its social and historical engagement. It is here that the possibility of an indexical relation to historical real that bypasses all ‘realism’, authenticity and immediacy which have been virtualized to such a degree that what we might in old fashioned terms call an ethical rather than a social realism is transferred in potential at least to the most conceptual and depleted modalities that can still promise but never guarantee the necessary affectivity, or co-affectivity, that marks the transmission of the traumatic effect sufficient to create a work of political witness. Kelly’s process produces something anamorphic: for the viewing subject in the exhibition hall cannot master or grasp the whole work from any single position, but becomes a subject in and of the space whose rhythmic prose ‘narrativizes’ events for that decentred subject. The complex aesthetics of making use of a domestic industrial machine associated with cleansing to stage affective encounters with the atrocities of war and ethnic violence functions at yet another level of challenge to and interruption of the mediatic which as I am suggesting virtualizes the event. Mary Kelly says: I think human rights legislation—which was actually launched by Eleanor Roosevelt in 1948—will become the major issues of ‘democracies’ in the twenty-first century. More specifically I am interested in the ways artists like Shirin Neshat and William Kentridge import cinematic devices into the gallery space without the aspect of spectacle. But I wanted to go in a
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very different direction: to explore the possibilities of material indexicality as a kind of visual experience, pleasure really, which is compatible with the archaic nature of the gallery space. I mean ‘archaic’ in relation to the dominant cultural forms like film, television and technology- driven entertainment thing. That’s why it seemed somehow appropriate to invent an ‘outmoded’ medium—washers and dryers after all belong to the industrial rather than the information era. I find Walter Benjamin’s suggestion that there is a redemptive aspect to the outmoded more and more meaningful […] I do think it is important not to forget the kinds of social relations embedded in past events—simple ones like reading a book, as well as complex and traumatic ones like war.17 Drawing on these terms, I propose that beyond the problematic of representation, which is so complexly virtual and virtualizing, the now archaic forms of modernist made art, historically freighted with its own social relations and memories, perform the indexical relation not via the icon but the material as a transport medium capable of inciting a trans-subjectivity that is not voyeuristic or identificatory. To bring this finally back to the theory of witness, I want to introduce one of founder thinkers of witness: Dori Laub. In his study of Holocaust testimony, ‘Bearing Witness’ —which involves both the survivor giving testimony and the witness who was missing at the time of the event, absence compounding the traumatically dehumanizing event— Laub typifies the dangers of witnessing, as the receiver defends him or herself from the invasion of the other’s trauma. He notes a range of defensive responses: a sense of total paralysis or fear, fear of merger with atrocities being recounted; a sense of outrage or anger directed at the narrator; a sense of withdrawal and numbing; a flood of awe and fear leading to a fake sanctification of the victim; obsessive interest in facts to foreclose the affective charge; hyperemotionality that looks like compassion but floods out the testifier with the listener’s defensive affectivity.18 Held by the fineness of calculated aesthetic forms addressing the rhythms of seeing and hearing in narrativized space inviting the viewer’s work upon its materials and forms, Mary Kelly’s recent work since 1999 brings a still deeply feminist perspective to bear on the question of history as trauma. Deeply feminist in its fidelity to the exploration of the complex hinge between subjectivity and the social and historical, this work swings round from the original refocusing of attention onto the domestic site of labour as one key locale of socialization and subjectivization within class and gender relations back onto the public space of war and violence. Yet, in its relay of current events to the intimacies of our homes, the media itself corrupts such distinctions, investing our homes and domestic spaces with the social and historical. When, as at the end of the last century, the fiftieth anniversary of the full exposure of the Nazi genocide found Europe riven once again by ethnic violence and atrocity, traumatic delay retriggered by traumatic repeat raised the theorization of history as trauma to the
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headline of theoretical research. The enormous volume of work on the Holocaust as the traumatic shadow-stain on twentieth century Europe opens out to events which find traumatic resonance in almost every post-war society from Taiwan, to Korea, almost all of Africa, throughout South America and then the Balkans. Our relation to the scale and depth of human suffering must be one of the critical questions of our time, when the exhaustion of older frames of political formulation have been smashed and globalization—the latest and most spectacular of the phases of capitalism— unravel most of our existing structures for the management of its terrifying forces of transformation. The Ballad of Kastriot Rexhepi becomes an interesting theoretical event, creating a space in which to reflect upon who we are summonsed to be in relation to another not in the age of mechanical reproduction but of digitized virtuality which screens (in both senses of the world) the nature of brutal and violent physical reality for most of the world’s populations whom development, neocolonialism and greed have reduced to levels of such atrocious and traumatic suffering that the whole of modernity’s dream lies indicted. The arcane and esoteric exercise of conceptual art making in an advanced western nation whose conditions of existence involve galleries and orchestras and art magazines seems utterly irrelevant to the scale of trauma that we now witness world-wide. But that is not so. For embedded in this archaic practice of made and viewed art is the complement to the necessity for synthetic, sociological knowledge of globalization and violence, namely aesthetic knowledge, knowing for yourself, knowing in yourself, knowing at the level of human witness. For many years the focus of one area of my teaching and research has been the passage from trauma to cultural memory. In the time scale of that work (1990–), these terms have become major areas of investigation in cultural theory, acquiring an awesome bibliography that does some justice to the significance that each term, trauma and cultural memory, hold for a world repeatedly traumatized and increasingly seeking to hold onto/create meaning in events that traumatically knock it out. At the intersection with work that has largely focussed on the trauma and cultural inscription of the memory of the Shoah/Holocaust, I have continued my other intellectual project as a feminist art historian and cultural analyst, working on interventions in art’s histories from theoretically informed feminist analysis, the latter term invoking, hopefully, both a legacy of critical thought and psychoanalysis itself. Central to both projects has been the aesthetic: not as the beautiful or the best, but rather as a practice that articulates thought and affect through material and semiotic processes. I ask myself: What can art historical work contribute to the philosophical, literary and psychological/psychoanalytical literature on trauma and cultural memory: what is the role of art? In introducing the course on trauma and cultural memory in relation to the Shoah, I ask my students: Who/what we shall be when we look back at this historical moment, that, in the character of trauma, happened in historically determinable dates within which its effects are not confined and thus returns with the force of the repressed out of time and out of place. I have written elsewhere of the danger of
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what I call the Orphic gaze, the second look that kills again.19 The danger of voyeurism, abjecting the other, recoiling from their dehumanization in horror, and many other inappropriate but inevitable responses need to be considered before we even begin. So I propose the now well-known suggestion of Dori Laub that we are called to become the belated witnesses eradicated from the genocidal process which Laub characterizes as an event-without-a witness.20 Thus we restore to the testifying victim/survivor the human ear and subjective affirmation destroyed as part of the calculated violence of the planned destruction of entire peoples. But this is based on the model of testimonial exchange that forms its own new models of literature and historical writing. It is a difficult proposition that bends time and place and raises difficult questions. Laub’s concept of the event without a witness has been taken up by Bracha Ettinger and transformed into a general proposition about the belatedness inherent in trauma in which the impact of the traumatic effect may be deferred or even transmitted across generations and beyond the boundaries of the discrete subject. Ettinger also pushes this implicatedness to include the viewer of the artwork, who is, by definition, also a witness without an event. That is to say, the event, the experiential or other cause of the art work and its making is not the experience of the viewer. Yet the viewer is called upon to participate affectively in confirming the human significance of the trace of that now missing event: the making or even the maker, to raise the objective materials to the level of signification, communication, subject-subject relay. We respond with our own emotions or thoughts to what is not ours while we are in turn transformed by the affect of the other within us. Thus witness ceases to be a mere legal or even a psychotherapeutic condition; it is an ethical relation to the suffering of what is no longer the other, but a co-affecting trans-subjective dimension of subjectivity that is particularly operative in certain moments of engaged aesthetic practice. But Bracha Ettinger will take this one stage further and exposes that what had seemed at first in the idea of witness an ethical and affirming point of meeting, of mutual confirmation as something that still leaves a gap. Thus, to define the specific moments or elements of non-psychotic transitivity that may be incited in the aesthetic experience (of making as well as of viewing) she alters the word witness visually to create ‘wit(h)nessing’. Introducing the letter ‘h’ from the word ‘with’ breaches the dominant formulations of the conditions of subjectivity in which the subject only emerges when it ceases to be with an other, separates itself, defines its boundaried ego through a scarifying gap through which hole will whistle the subjective engine of desire. To be too much with, to overidentify, to fail to maintain clear boundaries between self and other is to fall prey to a host of psychological problems verging ultimately on a psychotic disintegration of the self, an alienation so profound that intersubjective exchange becomes impossible. Thus the moment of balancing the varying potentials of subjectivity for its contact or collapse must be negotiated and staged. While there is a gulf of considerable theoretical significance between the Lacanian underpinnings of Mary Kelly’s work and the post-Lacanian feminist matrixial
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theory formulated by Bracha Ettinger, it is possible to allow the latter to reflect upon the contribution to the relations of aesthetics, trauma and witness because the work of Mary Kelly must itself be in excess at the affective level of its own self-understanding that generated the practice. The combination of the visuality of rhythm and the collaboration between Kelly’s word poems and Nyman’s music staged at the opening of each of the three venues for the Ballad suggested to me a third part to this exchange in the form of this theoretical statement: A rhythm of swerving in rapport of transmission and transference, conducting toward an unforeseen home while creating it, by/passes the on/ off beat. This rhythm never arches total ‘on’ or total ‘off’ […] Co-inhabit (u)ation is primarily affective, not visual and it destabilizes visuality by transgression of affect that causes infiltration of invisible trauma into appearance.21 Suspended between the inherent virtuality of subjective processes (fantasy and the unconscious) and their indexical trauma that founds the subject who never knows it, and the virtuality of the socio-economically conditioned media/ information systems and the historical trauma they report but mythify, art making and its specific aesthetic processes and practices (in a Kristevan not a Kantian sense22) may create both witness and wit(h)ness that ‘cause infiltration of invisible trauma into appearance’ and audibility to create witness—subjects which is not only an ethical but a deeply political effect. Note 1 The work was subsequently exhibited at Cooper’s Union Houghton Gallery, New York 21 November–21 December 2002 and at the Museo Universitario de Ciencias y Arte, Mexico City, 18 October–12 December 2003. 2 Roland Barthes, ‘The Photographic Message’, in S.Heath [ed], Image-Music-Text (London Fontana: Collins, 1977), p. 30.
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3 Mary Kelly in ‘A Conversation with Mary Kelly and Elsa Longhauser’, in Mary Kelly: The Ballad of Kastriot Rexhepi (Los Angeles: Santa Monica Museum of Art, 2001), p. 6. 4 Ernest Larsen, ‘About a Boy’, Art in America, (December 2002), p. 101. 5 Maurice Berger, ‘Mea Culpa: The Art of Mary Kelly’, in Mary Kelly: The Ballad of Kastriot Rexhepi, (Los Angeles: Santa Monica Museum of Art, 2001), p. 9. 6 This is the crucial point argued for by Jacqueline Rose in her response to a wave of feminist critique of the asocial character of psychoanalysis, see J. Rose, ‘Feminism and the Psychic’, and ‘Femininity and its Discontents’ both in Sexuality in the Field of Vision (London: Verso Books, 1986), pp. 1–24, pp. 83–103. 7 Jacqueline Rose, ‘Feminism and the Psychic’, p. 7. 8 Jacqueline Rose, ‘Feminism and the Psychic’, p. 7. 9 Jacqueline Rose, ‘Feminism and the Psychic’, p. 7. 10 For an excellent historical analysis of the exact impact of the photographs versus the prose press reports see Barbie Zelizer, Remembering to Forget: Holocaust Memory through the Camera’s Eye (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998). Susan Sontag, On Photography, (London: Picador, 1977), p. 19. ‘For me it was the photographs of Bergen-Belsen and Dachau which I came across by chance in a bookstore in Santa Monica in July 1945. Nothing I have seen—in photographs or real life—ever cut me as sharply, deeply, as instantaneously. Indeed it seems plausible to divide my life into two parts, before I saw those photographs (I was twelve) and after’. pp. 19–20. 11 Susan Sontag, On Photography, p. 20. 12 Roland Barthes, ‘Myth Today’, Mythologies (London: Paladin, 1972), pp. 109– 158. 13 Juli Carson, ‘Mea Culpa: A conversation between Mary Kelly’, Art Journal 59 (Winter, 1999), pp. 74–80:77. 14 In conversation about this discovered episode: the ready-made of a war experience, Mary Kelly has remarked on the significance of these words of cold blooded enmity emerging full formed from the mouth of a child: already inducted into the terms of ethnic violence. The child repeats what he has heard as the normal response, his own imaginary already inhabited by the given terms of ethnic conflict. 15 Martha Rosler made a series of major photomontage works on this moment titled Bring the War Back Home, see Catherine de Zegher, Bringing Life Worlds: Martha Rosler (Vienna: Generali, 2000). 16 Juli Carson, ‘Mea Culpa: A conversation between Mary Kelly’, p. 76. 17 Juli Carson, ‘Mea Culpa: A conversation between Mary Kelly’, p. 79. 18 Dori Laub, ‘Bearing Witness’, in Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, [eds], Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis and History (Routledge, 1992), pp. 72–73. 19 Griselda Pollock ‘Painting as a Backward Glance That Does not Kill: Fascism and Aesthetics’, Renaissance and Modern Studies, 2001, vol. 43 special issue on Fascism and Aesthetics, pp. 116–144 and ‘Abandoned at the Mouth of Hell or A Second Look that Does not Kill…’ in Looking Back to the Future: Essays by Griselda Pollock from the 1990s (New York, G&B New Arts, 2000) introduced by Penny Florence, pp. 113–177.
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20 Dori Laub, ‘An event without a witness: Truth, Testimony and Survival’ in Felman and Laub, Testimony, pp. 75–92. 21 Bracha Ettinger, ‘Traumatic Wit(h)ness-Thing and Matrixial Co/in-habit(u)ating’, parallax, no 10, (1999), p. 93. 22 I am thinking here of Julia Kristeva’s definition of aesthetic practices as ‘signifiance’—that which transforms and renovates the unities of the symbolic order. See Julia Kristeva, ‘The Subject and the Signifying System’, in Toril Moi [ed], The Kristeva Reader (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986).
Griselda Pollock is Professor of Social and Critical Histories of Art and Director of the transdisciplinary AHRB Centre for Cultural Analysis, Theory and History at the University of Leeds where she teaches feminist histories of art and cultural studies. Her current research is on trauma and cultural memory with special reference to the Holocaust. She is currently writing a book on the theatre of memory in the work of Charlotte Salomon. Recent publications include Looking Back to the Future: Essays on Art, Life and Death (Routledge, 2000) and articles in Art History, Theory, Culture and Society, and Oxford Art Journal.
Figural Realism in Witness Literature Hayden White
The definitions of theory given by our editors in their call for contributions to this issue of parallax would hardly justify the kind of hostility to theory currently abroad in the cultural sciences. Nor even the kind of questions put to theory by our editors. For in their definition, theory is a viewing, a travelling to see, a spectating, a going to consult an oracle, a judging of one thing by another, a contemplation, a consideration, a—well, a looking at something. Of course, these definitions of theory are anachronistic, consisting as they do of the connotations associated with the ancient Greek noun theoria and the verb form theorizein, which do have all of the meanings indicated by our editors, but hardly conform to the modern notion of theory against which so much objection is currently being raised.1 In most of the human and cultural sciences, theory is regarded as tyrannous, reductive, mechanistic. Indeed, it is a commonplace of ideology critique and the study of totalitarian systems that theory and unthinking commitment to it were what created modern totalitarianism in the first place. Theory, it is held, is opposed to ‘practice’—in the way that abstract speculation is opposed to what is called ‘hands-on’ problem-solving and empirical observation. Theory is airy and insubstantial: it floats above the real, tending to become an end in itself. Instead of illuminating reality, it turns us away from it and directs us to a shadow world of concepts and figures. It has even been suggested that ‘theory’ as such is an ideology, providing a kind of philosophy on the cheap, a surrogate for rigorous thinking, and an excuse for avoiding the kind of ‘hard’ research that history requires.2 So, one answer to our editors’ question of how ‘theory envisions itself in a time of crisis,’ might be that an interest in theorizing is precisely an indication of the onset of a crisis in a given domain of investigation. And as for the question of ‘what ways of seeing does theory have,’ it might be observed that theory ‘sees’ seeing itself as a problem, postulates that there are as many different ‘ways of seeing’ (to cite John Berger’s popular book and television series) as there are perspectives on the world, and that in order to mediate among different ways of seeing, we need to think theoretically about seeing, which means, above all, that we must not take the naturalness of seeing for granted.
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An interest in theory arises when established disciplines are forced to confront phenomena that do not conform to the generic categories ordinarily used to identify parallax ISSN 1353–4645 print/ISSN 1460–700X online © 2004 Taylor & Francis Ltd http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals DOI: 10.1080/1353464032000171145
and classify the matters with which they usually deal. A case in point is the kind of witness literature generated by those experiences of ‘extreme situations’ peculiar to our time, of which the Holocaust (or, in order to focus attention on the perversity of the perpetrators, the Final Solution) is of course emblematic. I believe that events like the Final Solution had been ‘unimaginable’ as late as the nineteenth century, when different social arrangements and cultural expectations prevailed. To be sure, cases of genocide were known in the nineteenth century, in the Belgian Congo and in German West Africa, but were not registered in public consciousness with the same degree of shock as the Holocaust. The Holocaust is a different matter. This is why not only witness literature but other kinds of documentation of its occurrence raise so many theoretical as well as practical questions. There is a sense in which the Final Solution is undeniably ‘unique’ or at least historically ‘novel’: not so much in its aim or purpose as in the modernity of the means which the Germans employed to carry it out and the trauma to the social and cultural presuppositions of the West that revelation of it, when it finally came, effected. The genocides of the Belgian Congo and German West Africa were shocking but not ‘unbelievable,’ ‘incredible,’ ‘unspeakable’ —terms commonly used to describe the Holocaust by its victims, historians, and even some of its perpetrators. The question of the uniqueness of the Holocaust is a theoretical question because it implies revision of the kinds of methods and modes of analysis conventionally used to explain or provide comprehension of extreme events. Indeed, the Final Solution implies revision of the very notion of ‘historical event’ and therewith a revision of the ways we classify and assess the evidence we have for assimilating such kinds of events to ‘historical memory’. Witness literature regarding the Holocaust typically offers itself as a contribution to our knowledge of that event, which means it would normally be thought of as belonging to what is called ‘the literature of fact’ and be valued for the kind of factual information it provides of that event.3 But witnesses to the Holocaust have typically testified under the fear that they had to relate facts that were intrinsically ‘unbelievable,’ that the events which they had endured were so bizarre, so ‘unspeakable,’ that many despaired of ever finding a voice or manner of writing that could compel belief in the veracity of what they had to say. And indeed so fraught with emotion, suffering, and pain has been the greater part of
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survivor testimony that some have recommended classifying it as ‘traumatic’ in nature and consigning it to psychoanalytical and/or anthropological techniques of analysis for its proper understanding. Thus, Holocaust testimony is at once confirmed as an index of the events about which it speaks (like a scar or a bruise) and pathologized as a product of a wounded consciousness which requires not so much understanding as, rather, treatment of a medical or psychological kind. The Nazis tried to cover up their crime by anonymizing, burying and cremating their victims and where possible burning records and destroying physical evidence of their crimes. Consequently, a great deal of witness testimony has been offered less in the interest of documenting ‘what happened’ in the death camps than in simply asserting, against both common sense and revisionist lie, the occurrence of this unthinkable event. It is under such pressures as these that we can see labouring one of the truly great writers of Holocaust testimony, Primo Levi (1919–1987), whose desire to maintain a power of objective observation, a rationality of judgement, and clarity of expression amounted to a kind of obsession—and drove him to engage in the kind of ‘theoretical’ disputes that have wracked history, philosophy, and literary criticism in an age in which totalitarian regimes not only wish to ‘make’ history but determine in advance how history will be construed, studied and written. In his most important works, such as Se questo è un uomo (1947) and I sommersi è i salvati (1986), Levi foregoes any claim to the status of historian. He was not, he says, attempting a historical reconstruction of the camps, based on a reading of the sources and consideration of professional historical accounts of the Nazi period. Nor does he lay claim to writing ‘literature.’ He does lay claim, however, to be writing in something like a ‘scientific’ style or mode and he addresses the question—theoretical in nature—of the proper way for anyone, survivor or interested observer, to write about the Holocaust event. In these remarks, Levi turns the matter of style into an ethical issue. He condemns any writing about the Holocaust marked by ‘obscurity’ or any kind of ‘rhetorical’ excess and indeed views such writing as both evidence of mental illness and morally offensive. The theoretical disputes that engaged Levi came to centre on the question of the proper style of writing for relating the experiences of the death camps in a clear and objective manner. In his discussion of this problem, Levi revisits the timeworn distinctions that have plagued discourse theory since Plato: such distinctions as those between prose and poetic utterance, literal(ist) and figurative language, real and imaginary events, fact and fiction, conscious beliefs or convictions and unconscious impulses and drives, etc. Levi addresses these issues in terms provided by an older, pre-modernist suspicion of poetic speech, figurative language and ‘rhetorical’ writing. He believed that the kinds of scientific procedures he learned as a student of chemistry (weighing, measuring, breaking compounds down into basic elements and then reassembling them into different combinations) could serve him adequately for observing the events of the camps as they really were and not as either desire or prejudice would wish them to be. And in his writing, Levi tried to develop a mode of exposition
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equivalent to the kind of quantitative idiom chemists used to record changes and stabilities in chemical compounds. I find it remarkable and, in the present context, of distinct theoretical interest that Levi’s characterization of the style of writing he wished to cultivate for giving a responsible and rational account of the camp experience—all focused on the ideals of clarity, measure, and exactitude—has been so uncritically accepted by commentators on his work. Much of this commentary presumes that these ideals can be achieved only by cleaving to an impossibly rigorous ideal of literalist expression, a speech voided of figurative usage and a language utterly purged of ‘rhetorical’ tropes. In this wish or desire for what Locke called a ‘historical, plain’ style, Levi puts himself within a philosophical tradition of antifiguralism that extends from Hobbes, through Locke, Descartes, Kant and Comte, to Russell and early Wittgenstein. This tradition takes the form of an attack upon figurative language as being inherently obfuscating of both meaning and reference, upon rhetoric as the antithesis of philosophy and reason, and of poetic utterance as the stuff of myth and wish-fulfilling delusion. Now, as far as I am concerned, it can be shown, on the basis of contemporary discourse theory, that Levi’s own writing practices run directly counter to his stated aim as a stylist. His writing is consistently (and brilliantly) figurative throughout and, far from being void of rhetorical flourishes and adornments, constitutes a model of how a specifically literary mode of writing can heighten both the referential and the semantic valences of a discourse of fact. In what follows I will try to suggest how this is so for Levi’s first book, Se questo è un uomo.4 Here is how Levi captures or grasps in (as against concepts) the experience of the intensely numbing experience of cold in the Polish winter; it opens the chapter entitled ‘Ottobre 1944’: With all our strength we struggled so that winter might not come (non venisse). We clung to all the warm hours, at every dusk we labored to keep the sun in the sky for a little longer, but it was useless. Yesterday evening the sun went down irrevocably in a confusion of dirty fog, chimney stacks and wires, and this morning it is winter.5 Note that although the time spoken about is in the historic past, the passage is put in the present tense, and thus situates the reader in the time of the text. Secondly, note that the subject of the passage is not the individual ‘I’ but the collective ‘we’. Here Levi tropologically shifts the point of view from himself to the generality of the prisoners. Third, the passage presents a surreal effect of men already rendered helpless by the treatment they have endured at the hands of other men, trying to halt the sun in its course by a sheer effort of will—and of course failing in that effort. The diction is poetic and so is the syntax. We could, in fact, by a typographical revision reveal the poeticity of these lines thus:
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Con tutte le nostre forze Abbiamo lottato Perchè l’inverno non venisse. Ci siamo aggrappati a tutte le I’ore tepide, A ogni tramonto abbiamo cercato Di trattenere il sole in cielo ancora un poco, Ma tutto è stato inutile. Ieri sera il sole si è coricato irrevocabilmente In un intrico di nebbia sporca, Di ciminiere e di fili, E stamattina è inverno. The entire passage is a tissue of rhetorical figures, conceits and tropes in which nature is anthropomorphized, the human subject diminished and the atmosphere (both physical and spiritual) charged with a malign intention. None of this means that this passage is to be read as fiction or apprehended as an ‘imaginary’ invention. The passage refers to a real situation which is grasped through images of bodily exertion at grips with an indifferent nature. And this image of a sun indifferent to the pain its winter weakness causes proleptically anticipates what Levi calls the ‘meaning’ of this particular winter. This winter ‘means yet something more’ than merely the coming of the cold. Everyone knew that this winter ‘means’ a massive Selekcja (the Polish word for the ‘selection’ of those prisoners to be sent to the gas chambers and the crematoria) intended to thin out the overcrowding of the barracks caused by the summer’s unplanned-for arrivals. The ‘dirty’ psychological atmosphere caused by the impending ‘selection’ fulfills the figure of the ‘confusion of dirty fog, chimney stacks and wires’ into which the sun had disappeared in the first paragraph of the chapter. The selection itself is presented as being as unavoidable (‘irrevocabile’) as the weather. The Germans, who, we are told, take the selection ‘very seriously’, are as unfeeling and as disinterested in the prisoners as the winter sun is in them. Levi has nothing but contempt for the naïve new arrivals who have no idea what they have been ‘selected’ for or the pious who look to God for solace and salvation. ‘Kuhn thanks God that he was not chosen. Kuhn is stupid Doesn’t Kuhn know that next time it will be his turn?… Kuhn does not understand that what happened today is an abomination that no propitiatory prayer, no pardon, no expiation by the guilty, nothing at all in the power of man can ever erase? If I were God, I would spit on the ground at Kuhn’s prayer.’6 Needless to say, this kind of language would not be admitted as testimony in a court of law, to be sure, but without the figures, Levi’s presentation of the world of the camps would have none of the concreteness, none of the precision and pointedness for which he is rightly celebrated.
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It is often noted that Levi likens his journey to Auschwitz to Dante’s journey into Hell, that his description of the prisoners and guards he meets there mimics Dante’s passage through Inferno (just as his story of his journey back from Poland, by way of Russia and through Central Europe to Italy, recounted in La tregua (The Truce), resembles Dante’s journey through Purgatorio). And no doubt Levi draws upon Dante’s epic as a model for his plot as any number of poets and novelists have done since the appearance of the original. But Levi’s use of Dante as a model for emplotting his story raises an interesting theoretical issue having to do with the extent to which a literary treatment of a real event can lay any claim to realism or historical verisimilitude. The theoretical question has to do with the truth-value of a text which promises in its preface that ‘none of the facts has been invented’ but whose meaning resides in large measure in the extent to which it copies the plot-structure of a poetic fiction.7 Contemporary theorists of history debate the semantic function of the plot-structures used by historians to give to an account of real events of the past the form of a story. What is the status of real events presented as describing the plots of the kinds of stories found in folklore, myth, and literature? In fictional writing the use of the plot-structures of tragedy or comedy poses no problem for the claims to realism made for the events and characters depicted in the story. After all, one of the meanings of a story is the plot-structure that gradually becomes discernable over the course of the story’s unfolding. But that a sequence of real events might have or manifest a tragic or comic meaning, this is a mythical way of thinking. For it is arguable that there is no such thing as either tragedy or a comedy in real life, even in things historical—disasters, yes, catastrophes, absolutely, destructions, beyond doubt; but these figures can be used without imputing a moral significance to the events they describe. It is arguable that tragedy and comedy exist only in discourse, literature and myth, and that insofar as a historian casts his account of a given set of events in the form or a tragedy or comedy, he has abandoned the ground of fact and gone over to mythification. It has even been suggested that narrative discourse is less a container or carrier of ideology than the very paradigm of all ideology, a discursive instrument for transforming real events into consolatory dreams and illusions. If Levi’s journey into and out of Auschwitz is modelled on the Divine Comedy, there is nothing ‘comic’ about Levi’s version of what happened, saw and remembered of his experience there. As in Dante, in Levi the term ‘comedy’ can only refer to the bare bones structure of a story which starts out badly and ends happily. But there is nothing ‘tragic’ about it either. One of the theses of Levi’s argument about the camps is that the Germans had succeeded in destroying any remnants of aspiration or idealism that might have inspired the prisoners to any kind of ‘heroic’ action. Nonetheless, Levi’s memoir is an allegory, and insofar as it is modelled on Dante’s Commedia, it is doubly allegorical, an allegory of allegory itself—what deconstructionists might call a self-consuming artifact insofar as it shows how even the most rigourously objective and determinedly
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‘clear’ and literal language cannot do justice to the Holocaust without recourse to myth, poetry, and ‘literary’ writing. In putting to the forefront the relation of his book to Dante’s classic text, Levi, whether he willed it consciously or not, succeeds in bringing the entire edifice of Christian providentialism and myths of divine justice under question. Levi gives us a ‘Divine Comedy’ with the Paradiso left out; it is all Hell and, in a perverse way, a kind of monument to German efficiency and singleness of purpose. One of the most often commented chapters of Se questo è un uomo is entitled ‘Il canto d’Ulisse’ (The Ulysses Canto). It is made up of a brilliant and utterly compelling account of an effort on Levi’s part to recall a passage in Canto 26 of Dante’s Commedia for the edification of a French friend with whom he is paired for a day of particularly gruelling work cleaning the inside of an underground petrol tank. The tank and the work being done to clean it were no doubt real enough, but the textual function of the image of the tank is to remove us in imagination to the entrance to Hell: ‘…it was cold and damp. The powder of the rust burnt our eyelids and coated our throats and mouths with a taste almost like blood.’8 The poetic fiction of the chapter takes the form of an account of Levi’s effort one day to teach a French friend not only the lines of Dante’s treatment of the fate of Ulysses, but also how, when correlated allegorically with their experience of the camp, a specific phrase, ‘come altrui piacque’ (which Stuart Woolf translates ‘as pleased Another’), seemed to have revealed the reason for the cruel fate (‘destino’) that had been dealt them. In contemplating the passage from Dante that he is trying to recall, Levi suddenly sees a possible answer to ‘the why…of our being here today….’9 Levi does not spell out what he purports to have glimpsed in the phrase ‘come altrui piacque’ nor indeed who or what this ‘another’ might be. He ends the paragraph with a rhetorical figure, an ellipsis, an empty space which draws the reader into the text and invites her to fill out the phrase from the resources of her own imagination. Moreover, the paragraph which follows and ends the chapter heightens the mystery of meaning by radical shifting mood from the sublime to the banality of the soup line. Suddenly: We are now in the soup line, in the midst of the sordid, ragged crowd of soup—carriers from other Kommandos. Those just arrived press against our backs. —Kraut und Rüben? —Kraut und Rüben—. It is announced officially that today the soup is of cavoli e rape: —Choux et navets. — Káposzta és répak. And then a reversion to a fragment of Dante’s rendition of Ulysses’s last words, figuring the descent into the Hell of ordinary camp life suggested by the repetition of the soup of the day in four languages: “Káposzta és répak. …Infin che ‘l mar fu sopra noi rinchiuso.10
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The change of register, mood, and tone is not called for by any rule of realistic representation of a literalist or objective kind. The change is in the interest of effects precisely more ‘literary’ or ‘poetic’, rather than stenographic or photorealistic. And yet this change has the effect of actually producing the referent rather than merely pointing to it—and much more vividly than any kind of impersonal registration of the ‘facts’ could ever have done. I have argued elsewhere that literary writing has its place in historical and other kinds of scientific writing by virtue of its power of figuration. And, following Erich Auerbach, I have called this power ‘figural realism’. The most vivid scenes of the horrors of life in the camps produced by Levi consist less of the delineation of ‘facts’ as conventionally conceived than of the sequences of figures he creates by which to endow the facts with passion, his own feelings about and the value he therefore attaches to them. The other passage which I would cite—and if I had time, analyze more fully from a stylistic standpoint—is the chapter entitled The Drowned and the Saved, a phrase Levi will use as the title of his last book. In this chapter Levi uses what he obviously thought of as his scientifically trained eye to describe and characterize (or classify) four types of camp prisoners who seemed to him to have had no inborn talent for survival but managed with only animal cunning and/or a diabolical wit still to survive. These descriptions of the four types of survivor are presented as being purely disinterested and rigorously empirical. Indeed, Levi purports in this chapter to consider the Lager as ‘a giant biological and social experiment’ operating according to the (Darwinian?) principle of natural selection and adaptation and/or extinction.11 This chapter of Levi’s book worth raises the theoretical question of the proper way to read witness texts. Since they present themselves as bearing witness to ‘what actually happened’ in the camps, such texts typically offer themselves as belonging to the discourse of truth and of fact, and therefore as possible contributions to the historical record. Does this mean that they are to be read only literally—for the information they give us about life in the camps? This is a theoretical question because the answer to it must be responsible to various theories of reading which, not accidentally, I would argue, have sprung up in the wake of modernism and the difficulty of representing and interpreting events of the order of novelty of the Holocaust. In the chapter entitled ‘The Drowned and the Saved,’ readers are witnesses to an act of witnessing unfolded under the aegis of an objectivity purportedly scientific in kind or at least an objectivity of the kind that historians as a matter of course wish to attain to. But the work of typification, classification, or categorization in which Levi indulges himself in this chapter cries out for a decodation more figurative than literalist in kind. In other words, it calls out for a reading of the text’s latent content, the kind and depth of feeling which the figurative language of the text reveals. Although Levi purports to be simply giving us to a list of the attributes of four kinds of individuals who managed to survive Auschwitz, it is easily seen that he is engaging in an activity which art
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and literary critics call ekphrasis (this term, Greek for ‘description,’ has a technical meaning in poetics and stylistics—it designates the description of a work of art or a natural scene by poetic or figurative statement). ‘We will show in how many ways it was possible to achieve salvation…by telling the stories (raccontando le storie) of Schepschel, Alfred L., Elias, and Henri.’12 The four persons named will stand as ‘types’ of survivor, which means that they are to be taken as representative of a certain practice rather than as individuals. It is interesting to observe that in one of the characterizations, that of Henri, the notion of the ‘type’ is explicitly used to indicate a certain technique of seduction or subversion. Henri survives due to his talent for recognizing people as ‘types.’ In the passage in question, Levi shows an equally sharp talent for thinking typologically. The theory of typology presumes that a type of person, place, event, etc. can be represented in a single example (as against a class of things, which may be thought as an array of a number of individuals sharing what Wittgenstein called ‘family resemblances’).13 And indeed in the passage under consideration individuals are presented as types rather than as representatives of classes of phenomena. This means that Levi will be committed to a kind of ‘thinking in figures’ rather than to the kind of conceptual thinking that he believes to be proper to the scientist’s mode of proceeding.14 But thinking in figures always reveals as much about the writer as it does about a referent. Indeed, a cluster of figures such as they one we will briefly consider here constitutes a stress-point of a text, where the conflicting emotions of the writer come to surface and reveal much more than they were consciously intended to do. Of the four types of survivor sketched by Levi, that of ‘Henri’ is the most emotionally laden. Henri is an attractive, intelligent, and seemingly gregarious and civilized young man (Levi thinks he is twenty-two, but he was actually only eighteen), possessed of an ‘excellent scientific and classical culture.’ But this is all surface show; Henri is presented as being deeply evil, not only cold and even vicious in manner but doubly corrupt in the way he hides his evil nature behind a façade of seeming goodwill and affection. Henri, as described or rather figured by Levi, is revealed as the consummate ‘seducer’ of both the guards and his fellow prisoners. Henri, indeed, ‘possesses a complete and organic theory of the ways to survive in the Lager.’ It is this theory that allows Henri to ‘penetrate’ the defenses of those whose ‘protection’ he desires.15 In fact, Henri is something of the Don Juan of the camp—the consummate ‘seducer’ who, in his way, differs not at all from the Serpent in the Garden of Eden. Not surprisingly, Levi’s figurative description of Henri reveals that not least among Henri’s conquests was Primo Levi himself. First, Henri is said to possess ‘the delicate and subtly perverse body and face of Sodoma’s San Sebastian’ which, to Levi, means that ‘his eyes are black and deep, he does not yet have a beard, moves with a natural languid elegance (yet when needed, he can run and leap like a cat, and has a stomach the capacity of which might not be inferior to that of Elias [famous in the camp for his voracity]).’16
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But at the same time, according to Primo Levi, Henri bears a horrifying resemblance to a wasp-like insect, the ‘ichneumon’ which ‘paralyzes the great hairy caterpillar, wounding it [by a sting] in its only vulnerable ganglion,…’ Not only wounding it, but also, as my encyclopedia informs me, by planting its eggs in its host, condemns it to death as its larvae eats their way out of the host’s body. It is the precision of the figure that gives its force as a description: Henri is not likened to a bug of just any kind, but to a specific kind an insect which kills its prey by rape. And like the ichneumon, Henri is apt at identifying who is vulnerable and who is not. Thus, when Henri is on the hunt, Levi says, he ‘at a glance sizes up the subject, son type, speaks to them briefly, to each with the appropriate language, and the ‘type’ is conquered….’ Levi suggests that he himself has been seduced by Henri, for he asserts that he finds it ‘very pleasant to talk to Henri in moments of rest’ Indeed, Levi tells us: To speak with Henri is useful and pleasant: one sometimes also feels him warm and near; communication, even affection seems possible. One seems to glimpse, behind his uncommon personality, a human soul, sorrowful and aware of itself. But the next moment his sad smile freezes into a cold grimace which seems studied at the mirror; Henri politely excuses himself, …and here he is again, enclosed in armour, the enemy of all, inhumanly cunning and incomprehensible like the Serpent in Genesis. And then, in a turn away from the ‘objective’ (scientific) and impersonal (‘one sometimes…one seems to glimpse’) to a confessional mode of address: I always came away from all my talks with Henri, even the most cordial, with a slight feeling of defeat; with the confused suspicion of having been, I myself, in some inadvertent way, not a man to him, but only an instrument in his hands. I know that Henri is living today. I would give much to know his life as a free man, but I do not want to see him again.17 The description moves from one figure taken from the domain of art to another taken from nature to yet another taken from Scripture. There is no ‘theory’ or ‘logic’ governing transitions from one of these figures to another. But in the process, Henri is successively ‘reduced,’ first, by being likened to the painting of (the homosexually encoded) ‘San Sebastiano’ by the (notoriously homosexual) sixteenth-century painter ‘Sodoma’ (Giovanni Antonio Bazzi, d.1549); and then figurated as a rapist-insect which kills its prey by ‘penetrating’ and planting its eggs inside them; and then, finally, defined as the kind of diabolical seducer represented by the snake in the Garden of Eden. One could hardly imagine a passage more rhetorical in its structure. The figurative nature of the passage is confirmed by the allusion to Sodoma’s painting of San Sebastian—an image few readers would be likely to have in memory, but the purpose of which is intended less to provide an iconic image of
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Henri than to summon up the figure of the homosexual as the substance of his person.18 Is this description to be read as a literal characterization of the person ‘Henri’ or is it to be read figuratively—that is, as telling us as much about the writer of it as it does about the person it purports merely to describe? I know of two commentaries on this scene of description which opt for a literalist reading of the text and an assessment of its truthfulness and accuracy as a description in factual terms. And both spend some time analyzing ‘Henri’s’ response to Levi’s characterization of him in his own memoir of Auschwitz, published in 1996 under the title Chroniques d’ailleurs by Paul Steinberg.19 They want to know whether Levi was accurate and fair in his characterization of Henri as a cold manipulator of others for purposes of survival, whether Henri is supposed to be considered as having used his youth and beauty to gain favour in the camps, whether he was ‘really’ a homosexual, as the passage on the most literal reading suggests, and so on and so forth. But while these characterizations may be more or less true in a factual sense, surely it is less their factuality than their function in revealing something about their author, whose emotional investment in his subject is manifested in the excessiveness of the imagery he uses to depict him. As far as I am concerned, this passage by Levi tells us less about survival in the camp than about the irrepressible desire that the writer felt for the object of his desire. On one level, it could be said that of course it stands to reason that young, attractive men and women were objects of sexual interest of both a hetero- and a homo-sexual kind. And that, as the testimony of many women survivors confirms, the use of sex for protekcja in the camps was common. But Levi does not say directly that Henri used his youth and beauty to sexually seduce potential protectors. He merely suggests that Henri was a homosexual by his allusions to the painting of San Sebastian by Sodoma, the habits of the ichneumon, and the use of the image of the Serpent in Genesis to characterize him. The first figure captures Levi’s impression of Henri’s physical and sexual aspect; the second characterizes his habits and practices; and the third endows the whole with a moral or (to use the language of allegory) anagogical weight. This is not to say that this description of a real person whom Levi knew at a specific time and place in the past is to be written off as a subjective and imprecise characterization. On the contrary, this sequence of figurations is fully and explicitly referential; it is a means of referring to a real person at a real time and place. Moreover, in the extent to which it expresses the moral charge which inspires its form, it can be said to be even more “objective” than any attempt at a literal description would be. Why did Levi never want to see Henri again? Levi does not tell us. He leaves us, rather, with an ellipsis, an uncompleted thought, which is all the more eloquent for not having been uttered. The ideology of modern realism has it that an artistic, poetic, or literary treatment of real events constitutes a kind of category mistake. Real events of the past are properly treated by history, which eschews any interest in the imaginary, invented, or fantastical events of literature. The artistic treatment of the events of
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the Holocaust is supposed to ‘aestheticize’ them or intrude the techniques of the poet or artist between the witness and the things about which she speaks. Poetic language itself is seen as inherently obfuscating. Primo Levi vehemently criticized Paul Celan for writing ‘obscure’ and therefore obscurantist poetry about the Holocaust experience. Levi thought that modernist literature was ‘surrealistic,’ the product of the kind of fuzzy thinking that had led to the Holocaust in the first place; and he actually thought that the suicides of writers like Trakl and Celan confirmed the sickness of the way they wrote. Adorno’s famous remark about the impossibility of writing poetry ‘after Auschwitz’ was directed of course against a certain kind of romantic, sentimental and schmaltzy kind of lyricism that used horrified comment on horrifying events as proof of the sensitivity of the commentator. (Adorno subsequently emended and qualified his statement, in part as a result of a reading of Celan’s work.) It is a matter of theoretical interest that when Levi speaks as a theorist of Holocaust literature, he comes through as a victim of a banal conception of poetry which his own practice as a writer belies. For Levi’s Se questo è un uomo, generally recognized as a classic of Holocaust testimony, derives its power as testimony, less from the scientific and positivistic registration of the ‘facts’ of Auschwitz, than from its enactment in poetic utterance of what it felt like to have had to endure such ‘facts.’ Levi believed that his was a style more scientific than artistic, and indeed he encouraged the idea that the famous ‘clarity’ and ‘perspicuity’ of his prose had been a result of his training as a chemist. In a number of places, he suggests that his testimony is marked by a ‘scientific’ attention to the facts and a rigorous attention to conceptual clarity that he finds absent in the work of many other witnesses. It is evident, however, that this attention to the facts and to conceptual clarity are presented in figures and tropes which give them their concreteness and their power to convince us of the sincerity of the author. Notes 1 As Wlad Godzich points out in his Introduction to Paul de Man’s Resistance to Theory, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), in ancient times, theoria was contrasted, not so much with praxis as, rather, with aesthesis or feeling (especially, a feeling of pleasantness). Thus, theoria was a kind of practice of ‘consideration,’ an arduous or at least difficult practice, occasioned by a sense of crisis of the kind indicated by our editors when they suggest that ‘to theorize’ meant, among other things, going to consult an oracle or judging one thing in terms of another. 2 See Fredric Jameson, Ideologies of Theory, 2 vols. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981). 3 Thomas Vogler remarks that witness literature is ‘of all literary kinds most bound up with notions of authenticity and referentiality, a poetry that puts us in touch with raw facts of existence rather than effects produced by rhetorical technique.’ In Ana
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Douglass and Thomas A.Vogler, eds., Witness and Memory: The Discourse of Trauma (New York: Routledge, 2003), p. 174. Primo Levi, Se questo è un uomo, (Turin: De Silva, 1947), trans. Stuart Woolf, Survival in Auschwitz, (Orion Press, 1960). Levi, Se questo è un uomo, p. 110., Woolf, Survival in Auschwitz, p. 123. I have altered Stuart Woolf’s excellent translation a bit in order to capture the ‘mood’ of Levi’s original. In the first sentence, Levi uses the subjunctive mood in the phrase ‘perché l’inverno non venisse.’ Woolf ignores the subjunctivity of the phrase and puts the first sentence in the declarative mood: ‘We fought with all our strength to prevent the arrival of winter.’ This phrasing suggests an activity that is not suggested in the subjunctive, which refers us to the desire informing the action reported, its imaginary aspect. The result is that an important referent is missed, in this case the ‘feeling’ of this effort to keep winter from coming on. It is a small point and has to do with theory of translation, which we are not considering here, but it is important for grasping what is original and perspicuous in the way that Levi renders his memory of events in the camps. Levi, Se questo è un uomo, p. 116., Woolf, Survival in Auschwitz, p. 130. In the Preface to Se questo è un uomo, Levi states ‘It seems superfluous to add that none of the facts is invented’ (Mi pare superfluo aggiungere che nessuno dei fatti è inventato). Levi, Se questo è un uomo, p. 98., Woolf, Survival in Auschwitz, p. 109. Levi, Se questo è un uomo, p. 103., Woolf, Survival in Auschwitz, p. 119. In this quotation from Levi’s text, I have changed Woolf’s translation by adhering to the punctuation marks in the original and leaving the last line, from Dante, in the original Italian. I make these changes in order to make a point about the rhetoric of the original. Woolf captures the literal meaning of the original but not the rhetorical grace notes with their semantic connotations signalled by the punctuation. Without criticizing Woolf, I would say that these changes mark the difference between a historian’s reading of a text and a literary scholar’s reading of it. The point is that the style, which extends to matters of punctuation (as Coleridge is fond of reminding his readers), has a semantic dimension quite as pertinent and specifiable as the diction and grammar of a text. Moreover, Woolf’s rendering of the line from Dante makes no sense. He has it as: ‘And over our heads the hollow seas closed up.’ (Woolf, Survival in Auschwitz, p. 115) The Sinclair version of the Commedia gives: ‘until the seas closed over us again.’ Sinclair’s rendering allows the repetition of the name of the soup of the day to be assimilated to the figure of drowning that is one of the dominant metaphors of Levi’s book. Cfr. Levi, Se questo è un uomo, p. 79., Woolf, Survival in Auschwitz, p. 87. I find especially interesting that here Levi specifically eschews moral and other honorific categories (‘the good and the bad, the smart and the stupid, the cowardly and the courageous, the fortunate and unfortunate’) in favour of a purely pragmatic and seemingly ‘objective’ categorization: the survivor and the casualties. ‘Here,’ he says, ‘the law of survival is without remission,’ but he immediately supplements this law with another, taken from the Gospels, specifically the Gospel according to St. Matthew, which states: ‘To he who has it shall be given, and to he who has not, it shall be taken away even that which he has.’ Levi, Se questo è un uomo, p. 80., Woolf, Survival in Auschwitz, p. 88. Levi, Se questo è un uomo, p. 84.
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13 Cf. Alistair Fowler, Kinds of Literature: An Introduction to the Theory of Genres and Modes (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982), pp. 37–38. 14 See Franco Rella, Pensare per figure: Freud, Platone, Kafka (Bologna: Pendragon, 1999), which is a history of the conflict between logic and poetic (or figural) speech. 15 Levi, Se questo è un uomo, p. 99. 16 Levi, Se questo è un uomo, p. 89., Woolf, Survival in Auschwitz, p. 99. 17 Levi, Se questo è un uomo, p. 90., Woolf, Survival in Auschwitz, p. 100. 18 Sodoma’s pederasty was legendary, as the nickname itself indicates, while his painting of San Sebastiano has been characterized as the very type of homoerotic male beauty since the time of its appearance. Also, San Sebastiano is legendarily characterized as the saint of homosexuals. 19 Steinberg’s memoir was published in English translation under the title: Speak You Also: A Survivor’s Reckoning, trans, by Linda Coverdale (New York: Metropolitan, 2000). The English version carries on its cover a photograph of Paul Steinberg at the age of 17, the year he was picked up and transported to Auschwitz. When Levi knew him, he was 18 (not 22, as Levi says), so it would be legitimate, if one wished to take Levi literally, to compare the photo of Steinberg at seventeen with the Sodoma picture of San Sebastiano which Levi invokes as a ‘figure’ of Henri. I compared the two and, in my estimation, the only thing that Henri and Sodoma’s San Sebastiano have in common is the fact that they are both manifestly young and beardless. I suppose that one could see a certain resemblance in the eyes, ‘deep and dark,’ as Levi has it. But obviously this characterization of Henri tells us more about Levi than it does about the young man Steinberg. In his own memoir, Steinberg professes to having no memory Levi at the time they supposedly worked together in the Buna chemical labs. Nor does he pick up on the suggestion by Levi that he, Steinberg, was a homosexual or used his boyish charms to ‘seduce’ his guards and other prisoners. The two students of Levi who spent their time trying to decide if what Levi had literally said about Henri could be established as fact or not utterly overlook the manifest significance of the passage, which is given in its figurative not its literal level of articulation.
Hayden White is Professor of Comparative Literature and German Studies at Stanford University, and Professor of History of Consciousness, Emeritus, University of California, Santa Cruz. He works in the history of historical thought, discourse theory, and philosophy of history.
